Reading logs, search referrers, and page content

Posted by stuart as , , ,

I was just going through the logs for my “Adelaide Tropical Fish” experimental site, and noticed that I was getting a little search traffic for terms which I didn’t have on the page.

These are what’s called “broad match” search referrals. The actual term verbatim is not on the page, but all the words that make up the phrase are there in some form or another.  It can be a little harder to grab the number one spot for these terms if they aren’t actually on your page, and I was ranking generally anywhere between 5 - 20 for a few of these terms.

So what to do?

Go back, re-write the content to include the exact terms, and wait for the search engines to crawl the page again.  Then check the ranking.

This was a good reminder to me that your logs are your best friend when it comes to on page SEO.

Two and a half cents a day on your way to a profitable empire

Posted by stuart as , , , ,

I buy my domain names from mydomain.com, they cost me US$8.75 per year.

There are 365 days in a year. If a domain name makes 2.4 cents a day, it is profitable for me.

Looking at it another way, the sites need to make me 16.8 cents a week. Everything above this is profit. (I don’t count hosting, it’s so damned cheap as to virtually be free anyway, especially a decent reseller account where I have upward of 50 domains hosted for $12.95 a month (around 25 cents a month per site)).

Even if we want to include hosting at that 25 cents a month, I only need to makea bout $0.98 a month to be in the black.

I’m finding that looking at my empire in this way is a very effective way to break down my online business. As long as each domain turns a profit every year, and requires minimal input from me, I can just keep re-investing my profits back into more domain names, until at some point I decide to stop building more sites and start keeping the profits for myself.

So once again, my sites need to make $0.98 a month to be profitable (and this figure will become less and less as I add more domains onto my hosting account (I can host up to 125 domains with the provider I’m with).

So what does it take to make $0.98 a month from one of these domains? I’m going to tell you:

A page of content and some backlinks.

Here’s the process:

1. Scoot on over to my Niche Idea Generator, and just keep hitting the refresh button until you come across something that takes your fancy.
2. Click the link provided for that niche subject, and take a look at what products, and what price range there are available from Amazon for that niche.
3. Once you’ve selected a niche with a reasonable amount of products, hop on over to my Keyword Competition Analyser, and kick that keyword into the search box.
4. Check out the stats of some of the sites listed; we’re especially after niches where there are a few sites in the top 10 who don’t have the keyword in the page title or meta description, and they don’t have a ridiculously high number of backlinks to that specific page. You also want to take this opportunity to click the “More information for this keyword from WordTracker” link, to see what the search volume is for that specific keyword. You might also want to write down the first half-dozen or so suggested keywords that WordTracker throws back at you as well.
5. If you look at the sites for the niche you’ve chosen, and decide that the competition is too high or the search volume is too low, go back to the start and try again.
6. So we now have a niche chosen, we need to go find a domain name: Here we use a tip from Mark at 45N5: Head on over to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, and drop your niche keywords in the box. Export the resultant keyword list to a text file, open the text file and copy it to your clipboard. Now go to your domain registrar of choice, and paste that nice long list into their multiple domain search box. The domain registrar should then present you with a list of domains which are available for you to choose from. Make sure that the domain you choose contains your niche keyword.
7. Once you’ve set up your domain and hosting, we need to get a page up on that domain. That’s right, a single page. (If the site turns out to be particularly successful after a few months, you could build the site out into a complete multi-page site then.)
8. I find that using free templates for these pages works the best. They’re free, for a start, they usually look pretty decent, and they save me a lot of time in putting the page together. I find the free templates from Andreas Viklund to be particularly well suited to this purpose, as they look good, have good CSS, and are generally pretty well SEO’d. (SEO is an important part of this process.)
9. Once we have our template we need to write some content. Keep in mind here that we want the content to be human readable, whilst including our keywords. A little research wouldn’t go astray here - Wikipedia is generally a good source of information about a product, but remember, you need to write genuinely original content. I generally stick to the following principle:Make sure that your main keyword is in the page title (as close as possible to the start), in your meta description, in your H1 and H2 tags, and appearing at least once in your first paragraph.
10. As to the rest of the keywords you wrote down in step 4 from WordTracker, I find that a good way to get a list of keywords into a page without the page looking spammy is in a list. Try to work a list in after your first or second paragraph, but remember, make the paragraph text before the list introduce the list, don’t just drop a list of keywords in out of the blue.
11. Whilst creating the content for your page, it’s a good idea to link out at least once, maybe more, to authority sites in your chosen niche. (A good way to do this is to link to a Wikipedia article or an Amazon product page)
12. Now that we have our single page site set up, we need to go get some links. This is the hardest part of any SEO campaign. We need to try to get relevant backlinks to our site, without pissing anyone off.
13. The best way to get your links from relevant sites it to hit technorati, and do a search for your keywords. Once you’ve found a bunch of blog posts, go drop a useful, non-spammy comment on the post, using your new site’s URL as the link.
14. Now would also be a good time to drop a site-wide link on your own personal blog, using your keyword as your anchor text. I know that the link will be coming from an irrelevant site, but every bit helps, and it will help in getting your site crawled and indexed quicker.
15. I’d aim for a good 8 to 15 links initially, then maybe once a month go drop another handful of links until you start to see your site appear in the rankings for your keywords.

Now that we have our site up and running, let’s talk about monetisation. Remembering that we need to make something like a buck a month to be profitable, we could throw some prominent AdSense ads on the site, in the hope that we get something like 5 clicks a month, or hit the site with some Amazon links. If you’re an Amazon noob who’s not selling much, they’ll pay you 4% for each sale (6% if you sell more than 6 items in a month). So at 4%, we need to sell around $25 worth of stuff to make our one buck. This shouldn’t be too difficult once we start to see some search engine traffic.

So there you have it, the Pimp’s guide to a profitable domain in fifteen simple steps. Give it a try, I think you’ll find it quite successful!

Never be stuck for niche ideas again!

Posted by stuart as Uncategorized

Edit: I’ve updated the tool so now you can dig down into one of the niches presented to you, and see the top 100 products purchased in that category, then choose one of those products, and check out the Amazon inventory, so all you long tail search addicts - Go Nuts! 

================================

I’ve added another new tool to the tools section here at PimpMyPagerank, it’s a random niche idea generator.

So far there are nearly 10,000 niche ideas in the database, and it’s growing on an hourly basis. These are actual products that people are buying online, right now, so there’s an existing, hungry market for your niche site!

Go check it out, I’ve even included links to Amazon so you can see the range and prices of products in that niche to aid you in deciding whether a niche idea is worth pursuing!

Go get yerself some niches at the PimpMyPageRank Niche Idea Generator!

Win an already profitable niche site!

Posted by stuart as Uncategorized

Well it’s time for another giveaway, and this one’s a doozie!

I’m giving one lucky linker the opportunity to win a profitable niche site, absolutely free.

Simply link to the site (I’ll get to the URL in a minute…), and you’ll be in the draw.

“So what’s the site about Stu?” I hear you ask…

Well, after spending a couple of hours searching for niches with good search numbers and competition I thought we could beat with good SEO and a good amount of quality backlinks, I’ve come back to a niche which I’ve actually been reasonably successful with myself by chasing long tail keywords. But we’re not going after the long tail here, we’re shooting right between the eyes at a couple of big numbers keywords, and a few related brand specific key-phrases. (You can see the numbers on the website itself.)

The Niche is Pasta Makers and Pasta Machines.  These vary in price on Amazon for between $40 and quite a few hundred dollars, with the average sale I’m making through Amazon being around the $150 mark ($9 commission per sale) . There’s also good ad inventory with AdSense, paying in the range of $0.40 to $0.80 per click if that’s the direction the winner decides to take the site.

So on to how you enter. If you go to the site (My Pasta Maker), you’ll see the options for anchor text. You must use one of the anchor text options provided, or your entry will be regarded as invalid. You must also not nofollow your link.

Once you have added the link to your site, please click through it to the site. By doing this, your site will be registered on my referrer list.

Now on to how the winner will be chosen: On the 1st of August 2008, I will grab my referrer list, delete all duplicates so that every link to the site has an equal chance of winning, and randomly select a winner from the list.

That’s it, the winner will have been decided. I will then hand over the domain to the winner, with the option to continue hosting with me for free for six months, or they can move the site over to their own hosting, in which case I will hand all the files over to them to do with as they see fit.

Over the next few months, as the traffic to the site starts to build, I’ll start to monetise the site, and publish the figures on a regular basis, so that you can all see what you have a chance of winning. I’ll also regularly publish traffic details and search term referrers.

So good luck, and get linking!

Back in the bow and arrow days….

Posted by stuart as Uncategorized

It was my eldest son’s fifth birthday yesterday (yes, he was born on the day the US led coalition of the sycophantic invaded Iraq).

He was the fortunate recipient of a very cool Nintendo DS Lite, which he’d been asking for since Christmas when three of his older cousins were given the handheld consoles.

So he was sitting on the lounge playing Crash Bandicoot yesterday, and asked me the following question:

Dad, did you have a DS when you were a little boy?

“No mate”, I answered, “We didn’t even have a computer (remembering the fascination as a thirteen year old when my dad brought home our first computer - a Commodore 64)”

The (now) five year old is a keen web surfer, so he found all this a little difficult to understand.

The next question floored me:

So dad, what did you actually play when you were a kid?

Man, I feel old….