Entries Tagged 'SEO & Traffic Generation' ↓

Ok… here goes once again. It’s the monthly drill. Anyone read this stuff?

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 700,607 (down from 637,161)
Google PR: 2 (same as last month)
Technorati Authority: 14 (up from 12), Fans 1
RSS Subscribers: 10 (down from 12)

The Golden Rule
September 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 1115 (last month I had 1546)
Pageviews: 2085 (1.28 per visit, down from 1.35 per visit last month)

Inbound Links
Google: 24 (up from 7)
Yahoo: 351+20=371 (spread across www.jonathanboettcher.com and jonathanboettcher.com - search engines are slowly consolidating on the www).

Ok, so what’s happening here? Well I think the buzz on the Samsung Instinct is dying off, hence my overall lower numbers. The only real surprise here is that my Google links shot up quite a bit. I guess sometimes it takes a while for them to list things. 

The only thing I’ve really done differently this past month from an SEO perspective is that I signed up for Yahoo and MSN’s webmaster tools, and submitted site maps to both of those. Previously I had only used Google’s. Not sure how much that affects things, though I imagine it is a good thing for them to have the sitemap. I love the fact that Wordpress will submit it automatically for me though (XML-Sitemap plugin). Until next month…

During StomperNet’s last launch, when they re-opened StomperNet, I watched with great anticipation as it got closer to the opening hour, not sure what the price was, but reading and absorbing every scrap that was written about it. I’d never really heard of StomperNet until I started getting guru after guru emailing me for days on end, and then I figured out there must be something to it. I quickly found out it had a cult following. 

So I followed the launch, right up to the launch date. 

Only to realize it cost $800 PER MONTH to get in! Now, I’m doing fairly well online, but I don’t think I can chuck that kind of bling around at the drop of a hat. I know, there’s the big argument of “but what if it produces much more than that?” well, yeah. Sure. There’s always that. 

Anyways, I didn’t go for it, and they clsoed the doors. I was shutout forever once more. 

Until today. 

I started getting emails again about Stomping the Search Engines 2 (STSE2), and one of them had a price tag mentioned of $497. Delete.

Then one mentioned it was completely free. That kind of got my attention.

Anyways, I ended up checking out Brad and Andy’s sales page, and sure enough, it is pretty compelling. These guys don’t really miss when they aim for something. It seems like they always deliver, and it seems like have quite a loyal fan base as well. 67+ millionaires and counting from the first product? That is pretty impressive. 

Did I mention this was free? The trick here is that they are giving you a $497 product, a complete DVD tutorial on SEO from the top minds in the world, for free. All you need to do is pay for the shipping and handling, and sign up for their Net Effect Journal, which you can cancel at any time; even before you get the second copy if you wish. 

I currently subscribe to the DotComSecrets monthly magazine, and Dan Kennedy’s newsletter, and I recently tried Mike Filsaime’s Best Damn Newsletter as well (though I canceled it due to overlap). StomperNet is releasing a journal though! Notice my word choice… newsletter, magazine, journal. These are all quite unique, and that is what each one is. The Net Effect is a 45 page journal on very advanced SEO topics, written by the StomperNet team, which is of course, world class. It’s going to be the same price as the newsletter I get from Dan Kennedy. Seems like a pretty good deal. 

Anyways, I’m going to be slapping down my shipping and handling fee pretty quickly (they’ve delayed the launch until Sept 4th due to technical issues), and then I’ll be waiting anxiously to see what shows up in the mail. I hope it arrives before I head to Mexico next week so I have some reading material!

If you’ve followed this blog at all, you’ll know that I don’t mind giving crappy products a hard time. However, on the flip side I want to give kudos where it is due. That’s the purpose of a trusted recommendation, right?

TAKEAWAY: If you haven’t checked out Stomping the Search Engines 2, you really should. You can’t lose. It’s free!

Regardless of whether you’re an affiliate marketer or a product owner, you can benefit from forum posting. In fact, pretty much anybody who has a website of any variety would be well served to get involved in a few forums.

The great thing about forums is that they contain a lot of people who are looking for answers. What better place to get a link in front of a customer than right when they’re frustrated and looking for answers?

The way to go about this is first to identify which forums are talking about your area of interest. One tool I recently discovered that lets you do this is Omgili.com which basically functions as a multi-forum search engine. Type in your keyword and the only results that come up are forum postings.

Once you’ve found a few forums with recent activity on your keywords, go sign up and become a member.Take the time to fill out some profile details; people tend to distrust anonymity. Sometimes a profile picture or avatar can go a long way to creating trust in a subconscious way. You might even be able to use this as a way to stir interest in your product if you’re creative.

Now you need to make sure that you create a killer signature. Nearly all forums these days allow you to leave a signature after your post. Most will also allow HTML tags in them. Have a quick peek through some other threads on the forum to see if others have html tags on their signatures. If they do, then you’re good to go. If they don’t, you might want to check a bit closer as some forums disallow their use.

In your signature, you want to try to create a mini-ad for your product. If you offer something for free, this is the perfect place to let people know. For instance a tag line I’ve used for my digital frame store is “Don’t even think of buying a digital picture frame until you’ve read our “Savvy Buyer’s Guide to Digital Picture Frames.” You then link the keyword text you want to your landing page. Preview it to make sure it is both catchy and yet not too in your face.

Now you need to get involved with the forum. Find the thread talking about your niche and jump in. Be helpful, ask questions, but above all, don’t get salesy or spammy! If you do, you run the risk of getting banned, which really hurts the sales-pitch!

The benefits of this approach are that you’re slowly gaining keyword targeted link juice with the search engines, and, probably more importantly, you’re putting your offer in front of qualified potential buyers.

The great thing about forum threads is they hang around forever. I’ve often times searched google for something or other, and a forum thread comes up high in the rankings because it has so much content in it. When I look at the date of the last post, it is often a year or two old, though still relevant. So even two year old posts can provide traffic, as the original authors may be long gone, but as that thread gets hits, your offer will still be seen by the new eyeballs on a daily basis.

I just came across this list of killer domain words over at the Traffic Tactics blog. If you’re thinking of getting another domain for some project or other, I highly recommend having a quick look through the list that they’ve developed.

Many people when they’re trying to find a domain name either pick their company name, or something based on the keywords they’re selling. This isn’t always the best tactic. Sometimes a combination of those strategies, with something from this list might produce better results.

The idea is that certain words elicit a certain psychology in people. Words sell. So use them!

Well it’s time once more to do the old “chart the traffic” routine. Not a lot to say, but in the interests of continuity, here it is.

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 795,166 (up from 780,780)
Google PR: 2 (up from 0!) I just noticed this today!
Technorati Authority: 9 (up from 8), Fans 1
RSS Subscribers: 11 (up from 6)

The Golden Rule
July 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 835 (last month I had 876)
Pageviews: 1059 (1.27 per visit)

Inbound Links
I’m now using the tool found at MarketLeap.com which seems to give fairly reliable results.

Google: 3
Yahoo: 485 (spread across jonathanboettcher.com and www.jonathanboettcher.com)

Conclusions
Traffic dropped just slightly from last month, though it is fairly constant lately. I was pleased to see a jump from 0 to 2 on the PageRank - I’ve been waiting to see something happen on that front for quite a few months now, and it is nice to see a return. I’m still not sure exactly what that means in terms of rankings - is it something that helps, or is it just an indicator of where you’re already at?

In general I haven’t been putting much effort into this blog during the summer, with only the odd posts here and there. However, I am planning on attending the Affiliate Incubator seminar in September, so plan on reading lots about that on here. Hopefully I can start attracting more of the people interested in affiliate marketing instead of in my laptop ;). Hey, for now, its still traffic and I’ll take it. Every now and then I make 10 cents in advertising off it, so whatever.

Well I just realized it is halfway through July and I still haven’t written my little traffic charting post. I’ve been somewhat neglecting this blog lately, (this is the first time I’ve used that time-honored phrase on this blog) so I’m not sure what we’re going to learn from this post. Nevertheless, here goes.

Popularity Indicators
Alexa: 780,780 (up from 1,291,056)
Google PR: unranked (I heard somewhere PR gets updated quarterly????)
Technorati Authority: 8 (up from 6)
RSS Subscribers: 6 (down from

The Golden Rule
April 2008 Absolute Unique Visitors: 876 (last month I had 353)

Inbound Link
I’m now using the tool found at MarketLeap.com which seems to give fairly reliable results.

Google: 6
Yahoo: 372 (spread across jonathanboettcher.com and www.jonathanboettcher.com)

In a different post I talked about my difficulties with having some links coming in on www. and some without. I think I’ve straightened that one out, but it is taking a while for the search engines to correct. I also had about a million absolutely useless links showing in Yahoo, hundreds of them coming from the same two blogs, and I couldn’t even find my link on their page! Some wierd bug in their template I suspect.

Conclusions
Anyways, as you can see, my traffic is generally improving. However, if  you look at the webmaster tools and search results, you see a more full picture. Fact is, probably 90% of my traffic is coming for and leaving on a certain post I did about my Dell XPS 1530 laptop a while back. I had no idea it would be so popular, but it has been drawing a steady 20-30 visitors per day for a few months now. If only some of them would click on an ad or two then we’d be getting somewhere.

So where does that leave us? Well, I’m still going to keep on plugging away here. I think the trick to getting some good traffic is to get a few posts out there that are really hot. Once you start getting some traffic flowing you get a better opportunity to attract those regular readers.

Back when I originally read the 4 Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss I thought outsourcing was the coolest thing. Pay someone to do those things that you don’t really want to do - especially when you can get them done cheap! Well, that was months ago, and I never really did much with it, or really got a handle on how it could help me in my business.

I should mention that I keep a spreadsheet that tracks my affiliate activities, and I’ve updated it every day for the last few years. I’ve always wanted a program that would basically do that for me. So I thought, why not outsource the creation of such a thing, at least to see how much it would cost?

If you’ve followed this blog at all you’ll know I’ve dabbled in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. That was my first experience with outsourcing, and it went fairly well. It was also extremely cheap. So I thought I would take a step up, and try out another site, Scriptlance.com. Last week I posted this project on Scriptlance, to see what the cost would be. I’m currently a member of an online service which does something similar to what I wanted, and I’m paying $100 a month there. So I figured if I could get it done for a few hundred bucks, I’d be ahead, right? Well I ended up selecting a bid for $325. The guy has lots of great reviews, and many people have even paid him bonuses, so I figured he would be a good choice to build my software.

Anyways, we’re just now getting into the process of starting this, so I’ll keep you updated as we go along. However, the whole concept of outsourcing has seriously made a come back into my brain. Now I’m thinking of all kinds of things that I can outsource.

Link building, for instance. My web store needs some serious, dedicated link building and SEO work to attain a top position, and I’m no longer certain I want to be the one doing it. As I’ve written in previous posts, I want to learn how to do SEO, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it! I mean, link building is seriously boring work! Try it for a few hours and tell me otherwise!

So I came across this other site, called AgentsOfValue.com, and I’m considering now whether or not to hire a person through them. The idea goes beyond project based outsourcing; you’re actually hiring a full time employee! In the flimsy business development timeline I had in my head, I had never really considered hiring a full time employee, especially not so early in the game. I had an idea that hiring an employee would likely mean having someone working for me, possibly out of the basement in my house. It seemed like it represented a huge step in the evolution of my business… one that would likely take a few years to achieve.

And yet here I am, seriously considering taking on a full time employee, from the Philippines. I can get a full time (yes, we’re talking 40 hours a week) link builder for about $675 a month. Do the math. That is $5.63 an hour, for skilled labour. And for them, that’s higher than average pay, locally.

I sat back for a few minutes, thinking to myself: “Can I realistically keep such a person occupied on a full time basis?” ie - is it worth it?

So we get to the core of the question - what is YOUR time worth? In other words, presumably this work you’re thinking of outsourcing is worth doing, right? Well, how long would it take you to do it?

In my case, I probably can’t do the work a whole lot faster than someone else can, who is skilled and trained in link building and other SEO work. So you’re basically looking a the bulk of my time being used on this. And that is only for one web store, and I’ve got several other projects that I really want to start spending time on! So how much is my time worth? Well I won’t tell you what I’m making right now but let’s just use $20/hr as a nice round number. I think you can see where this is going…

If my time is worth $20 an hour, and their time is worth $5.63 an hour, then the choice is easy; pay them to do the work. This frees me up to start other projects and hopefully generate some new income streams.

You see, the whole question is about opportunity cost. Yes, I CAN do the work. But if I do, then I can’t do anything else while I’m doing it. What is the cost of that lost opportunity? Now, I’ll quit freely admit that I’m somewhat lazy and don’t exactly work like a mule at my business, but there again is a lifestyle choice that I value. I don’t want to be overworked, in fact I don’t even want to be working 40 hours a week, necessarily! So if I can outsource that work, why not?

As I’ve been writing this, more ideas have popped into my head. I might go so far as to outsource the entire creation of a new webstore, then the SEO after that. The part that I really don’t like - researching dropshippers… why not outsource the research? Pay someone by the hour to sit there and find every possible option, compile a list and essentially do the dirty work for me?

Product creation, customer support, graphic design, web design, writing, link building, programming; the list goes on and on as to what you can successfully outsource these days. The question is, are you ready for it? Can you make efficient use of someone else’s time?

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea. As my time is freed up, I will start new projects, which I have no doubt will create new tasks to throw at my personal link builder / SEO expert. I’m starting to think that it will be a leap of faith, but I can see it turning out to be an incredible step in my business development.

I’ll keep you posted =).

Do you use pay-per-click? Are you into search engine optimization? Either of these marketing disciplines hinge on proper keyword selection. You want to be in front of your customer when they’re in a buying mood, not a browsing mood, right?

I’ve always found that keyword research is one of the hardest things to when creating an ad campaign. How do you find out which keywords make money, and which ones burn money? Anyone can add all the suggestions from a keyword tool into their campaign - but I guarantee they will lose money unless they take that a step further. So how do we find profitable keywords? Here are three steps to help this process.

Step 1

The first thing to do is have a little brainstorm session. For whatever product you’re promoting, try to get inside your customer’s minds:

• What is causing them to be looking for your product?
• What pain (problem) are they feeling or dealing with?
• What questions do they have?
• What solution are they trying to find?

Once you’ve answered these things jot down the different phrases you think they would use to find you.

Step 2

The second step is to use a keyword tool such as the free keyword suggestion tool at wordtracker.com. See if the terms you thought of are showing up on their lists, and find out how many searches are done daily for each keyword. The higher the better, obviously, though the highest keywords might not be the most profitable.

Step 3

Up until now, the information here is probably old hat for most of you. Here’s the golden third step. Head over to MSN’s AdLabs Online Commericial Intention Detector. Click on query, and punch in one of the keywords you think has potential. The web form will then spew out a number between zero and one. Here’s the readout for “affiliate marketing”

Result: NonCommercial (Query)

Probability for Commercial Query:

0.33748

As you can see, MSN thinks this phrase is by and large, non-commercial in intent. Having less than a 0.50 indicates non-commercial; anything over .5 (50%) is commercial in intent. The stronger or higher the co-efficient, the more profitable this keyword is likely to be!

Go to the tool, and compare the output for “personal loan” and “personal loans” - you’d perhaps be surprised to see that the singular is scored at 0.67969, while the plural is scored at 0.89554. So although both look to be quite profitable, “personal loans” is the keyword with the highest commercial intent, of those two.

So now you run your list of keywords from steps one and two through this tool, to make sure that they are all above 50%. If you’ve got keywords that you think would be good, but they’re under 50%, ask yourself why, and see if there isn’t a small variation that can be made to boost the score. If you can improve on it, use the new keyword instead.

Now, I should clarify that although I’ve talked about this as being a way to find profitable keywords, I guess really it is just a method to find the keywords that people are using to buy stuff. This is great, if you are doing SEO. If however you are paying per click, profit takes on a new meaning, as you need to consider what your costs are for each keyword. Chances are strong that the highest rated keywords are also those with strong competition.

However, in all markets, the presence of sharks indicates there is prey in the waters; competition isn’t a bad thing, you just need to find a way to best them, and you’ll be laughing!