SeoBlackhat.co.uk

Article Marketing :: $4K Monthly :: EASY!

As mentioned in some of my previous posts, my main income is from PPV and Article Marketing. Now, the majority of my Article Marketing ventures have been done the usual way. Write or pay for articles, submit them to random sites, do some linking and hope for the best. It works, and Ive made a nice amount of money doing it. However, you can always improve something. And, thats what I did.

The top two goals of any marketer are more money and more time. At least they should be their two top goals. That being said, I wanted to integrate both of these things into my Article Marketing business. And, thats exactly what I accomplished.
I developed this method a little over a month ago. However, I wanted to actually test it for a month before I released it. Here are my final results:

$4,300 revenue (Roughly)
4 hours worked (Roughly, excluding time you wont have to spend)

Id say thats pretty damn good if you ask me. Would you work 4 hours (of easy work) for $4k? And, its passive residual. Meaning, it keeps flowing in (passive) and it grows (residual). I guarantee that from the work done in December, Ill keep seeing income from the articles submitted for probably over a year.

This method is going to be a bit detailed, as I dont want any people attempting it coming back and complaining it doesnt work. Even if you dont complain, I still would like it to work for whoever goes and does it. Its definitely worth it. If youre having problems funding PPC/PPV campaigns, this can be your funding money
In a nutshell, youll be getting free articles by splitting your commissions with freelance writers. If youre rich already, paying for articles may be worth it to you. However, most of us arent that rich. And even if I was, I dont know if Id want to buy 1,000 articles at $5 – $15 a piece.

Ive also tried Scamming people out of articles. That doesnt work that well, and is definitely NOT a long term solution. You risk the hot headed freelance writers getting too pissed off at you and reporting you. Trust me, not a smart thing to do for a long period of time.

So, splitting commissions is the best way to go. Everything is free, so this shouldnt be a problem. Youre doing very, very little work.
So, lets get started:

1. Youll obviously be getting freelance writers for classifieds sites. Craigslist is all that is needed, as its a little difficult to work with a large amount of people. I personally only worked with 2 people. However, Ill be developing my own personal system that will allow me to work with over 100 500 people, easily. So, what youre going to want to do is make a Craigslist ad (preferably in your own area if you live in the U.S.). Always, always keep your ad professional. Proper structure, grammar, use of words, etc. Nothings worse than a poorly written ad. Be honest and straightforward in your ad. Im not going to post the exact ad I used, but its fairly simple. Youre looking for a few article writers to write articles for you based on a revenue sharing commission structure. You can lie and tell them that previous writers earn roughly $2 – $5k a month. No cost to get started, and will be able to see their articles published on the web. Keep it short and simple.

2. After the posting, if youve done it right, youll get a few hundred emails. At least I did. Instead of having an auto-responder, I just copy/pasted a pre-written response. All I did was replace their name at the top and bottom. (Eg. Hey ____ and Talk again soon _____) Obviously, the email response will detail the project more and then ask if they have any questions.

3. After theyve responded to the first email response, I have a pre-written 2nd response to go with it. Along with that response, Ill read over their first email and answer any questions they may have. The 2nd response starts with questions they have, and then a Heres a little bit more detail about everything. And again, will ask them if they have any questions to get started.

I recently Got asked to do some seo work on a websites that has a great Niche and is #1 already on google. But they wanted more hits, and the site was a strong PR3 so I got my tools out and did a report. In Fact it was not the sites SEO it was the layout and design which was not user friendly and had text links, just plain ugly. So Now I do reports for people who want them for thier website’s and here is my suggestions.

#1 Get your Keywords and meta Tags sorted, make sure you check them in your Index and a good place to check keyword ranking I would try https://adwords.google.co.uk/select/KeywordToolExternal

#2 Make sure your Niche Is the best, Have unique content, the search engine algorythm loves unique content make sure you tag whe relevant information.

#3 Validate your HTML , search engines cannot crawl your site if your site is a bag of balls. Try to keep it like this:

#4 Get as Many Backlinks as possible, I personally do 1 to 1 hardlinks with simular sites, PRStorm and xrumer. Using tools like this I have managed with seo to gain 2600 backlinks on sexaddicts.us within 3 weeks.
Example: http://checkpagerank.net/index.php?name=sexaddicts.us&links=1&captcha_code=972p

#5 Overall Keep it Unique Content

Amit Singhal, from Google, did a 50 slide presentation back in 2004, regarding the Challenges in Running a Commercial Web Search Engine.

Why am I covering it now? First, a member sent this to me to comment on, and I think it is rather interesting to see where things were then compared to five years later. Heres a hint: Not much has changed.

Question: How many queries are unique?
Answer: Over half

At first glance, you would look at that and think I have to do a better job of getting more keywords since users search patterns are not consistent.

Wait. After looking at the data from about 60 sites, here is an example from one of my typical sites.

108k visits from 28k keyword queries. Looking at it this way, it looks quite diverse, however, looking at the Top 100 queries, 56,656 visits came through. Which means about 52,000 visits came through the remaining 27,900 queries.

Am I optimizing for 28,000 keywords? Not even close. So how do you improve your chances of coming up for many of the phrases which may never come up on an analytics report or during keyword research.

If I can quote Dan Thies, Use modifiers aggressively.

What are modifiers? You already know them, but probably by a different name.

Examples of common modifiers are:

• best
• buy
• cheap
• discount
• wholesale
• online
• accessories

Modifiers allow you to expand your keyword set. So instead of having just blue widgets, you would have discount blue widgets, blue widget accessories etc. Geo Targeted (San Francisco, bay area, Chicago, etc.) would also be classified as a modifier.

Q: Tell me more about Google SiteLinks. How do they determine which links are used?

A:

I have tested SiteLinks algo pretty hard and the one thing I have learned is that the algo is NOT easily influenced. In other words, attempts to “steer” Google to the links you want included doesn’t work on a consistent basis.

As far as getting certain keywords to appear as SiteLinks for your domain, it has mostly to do with your site being “the” landing spot for that search. It isn’t as easy as you might think. For example, I am getting a Mac this weekend. It is my ritual, a new laptop every Labor Day, and this year, I’m going Mac … let’s see if it sticks this time.

If I do a search for “Apple” … apple.com has SiteLinks. However, it does NOT have SiteLinks for the following phrases: iPhone, iTunes, iPod, Mac. The only phrase I could get to come up for Apple.com with SiteLinks was “macintosh”, and that was really one of my “last gasp” phrases to try.

So, as you can see, even the large companies have issues when it comes to getting the right keywords tagged with SiteLinks for their domains.

Q: Does the geographic location of the web host matter for search? Organic? Local?

A: I had a great discussion about this with three Google engineers. The actual location of the server does not matter. Even though there is some “chatter” that it does matter, the choice where to host is clearly yours as a business owner. However, where people tend to get into trouble is the TLD (Top Level Domain). For example, if you had a web business in Portland, Oregon, it wouldn’t make too much sense to have a co.uk domain would it? And the same is true the other way around. If you want localized traffic, and you’re in the UK, get both the .com and .co.uk domains. Build out the .co.uk and 301 redirect the .com to your localized domain. This way you keep your brand, but you are far more likely to get localized traffic with the proper TLD than without it.

Tip: If you are in the US, you don’t need a local host to rank well locally. Your “dot com” doesn’t need to be hosted in Portland if you are also in Portland. You can host in Miami and rank just as well in the local search.

Q: What changes is Google working on right now?

A: I was able to get some info when a group of Googlers thought I was an employee by accident. The biggest issues was a new filter they are working on which would “kill half the businesses here tonight.” The individual who said that was pretty young, and I have learned over the years in this industry that young people like to talk and say bold things in order to get attention and have a feeling of “betterment”.

I don’t believe that statement for many reasons, first, he has no clue about the level of people at the party … as SES attracts mainly newbies. And I followed this comment up with a few Google engineers that I am good friends with and they basically laughed it off. I was on the Organic SEO panel with Aaron (he’s on Matt Cutts’ team) and there are no big filters being worked on currently.

Search Engine Cheat Sheet Posted

The Search Engine Cheat Sheet which was originally posted in the On-Page Factors eBook is now posted in the Tutorial section and it has been updated.

There were a few updated changes, here they are:

The displayed characters each engine accepts changed:

Google increased one character from 65 to 66. Here is an example of the new longer Title tag:

Yahoo! is currently 71 characters as evidenced by this example:

Microsofts Live.com shows 70 characters:

What does this mean? Basically that you have one extra character to play with when creating your Title tags. I just posted the information from Live and Yahoo! to show how the other two engines are currently behaving, but Google is still your main focal point. Since they are the lowest, you target that number.

Why?

The testing numbers are stil accurate. Titles which have ellipses (the three dots at the end) have a lower click through rate than Titles which do not.

In 2009, Google announced they were going to integrate Local Search Results into the regular SERPs more frequently. And they werent kidding.

While it is far from perfect in serving true local results it is headed in the right direction. Here are some examples:

You can see the ZIP Code entry, however, if you input your ZIP code, the results will NOT all be local. This is something that they are still working on and clearing out the bugs in the system, however, it goes beyond because most of the AdWords ads displaying are from areas 200 miles away.

Thats hardly local.

Sure Google states that they will give you a broad geographical location based on your IP address and you can change your location by clicking on the Change Location link, but a 200 mile radius for local search is ridiculous.

Lets get more specific and search for just flowers:

Even though she only does wedding flowers, my wifes site is appearing #5 for the generic term flowers but more importantly, above her main competitor – which is always good.

If I search for shoes I dont get any local results, but I do for pizza, dentist, doctor, and even if I type in indian food.

What does this mean?

Well, if you are selling ANYTHING you can now get in the main search results with your local listing. In my view, this is going to be huge and makes my local blueprint even more valuable.