Transcript continued from the Episode 037 Show notes
Josh Spaulding’s Rapid Niche Profits Report
Another thing that I found in my inbox this week that I wanted to share with you, Josh Spaulding just released another report. This is kind of an interesting story. Josh is pretty famous for writing these really valuable, relatively short and to the point reports. Josh is sort of a straight and to the point guy, no fluff.
He writes 30 and 40 page reports and usually sells them for anywhere between $27 and $47 and I’ve bought many of them. In fact, one of the very first things that I bought on internet marketing in general was Josh’s Article Marketing Domination Report. That’s actually how I met Josh.
His new report is called Rapid Niche Profits and the cool thing is Josh decided to go ahead and give this thing away. He’s trading an opt-in for it, so if you go over to RapidNicheProfits.com (that’s not an affiliate link or anything, that’s just a straight link to the site) you can give Josh your email address and in exchange for your email address Josh will explain to you how his strategy of building small niche sites is still working.
Josh has been doing this famously for years and years; he had the $5.00 formula years ago. He goes through and shows you exactly what to do, how to pick the keywords. A lot of the things that he teaches in this report, and the reason I’m pointing it out to you, are 100% Late Night Internet Marketing certified, meaning I’ve done the stuff that Josh does, I still do it. All of his concepts that he presents in this report are very solid and it’s certainly worth the read. It’s about 35 pages, it will take you about 45 minutes to get through it in detail at most.
I highly recommend that you check that out and take advantage of Josh’s generous offer. He was originally planning to sell it, but he’s decided to give it away for free. What Josh gets out of it is your email address and a relationship with you, because he’s providing great value – that’s his strategy. His blog is over at EthicalIM.com. That’s the way he runs things, he’s a real straight up guy and I recommend him, and I recommend the report for you to check out.
Corn Sheller Niche Website Update
I wanted to give you one more update on the corn sheller site. Something interesting this week, I don’t know if I’ve talked about this before. I was trying to remember. I’ve been using a product called Hittail.com. What Hittail does is it analyzes your keywords and it analyzes the search traffic that’s coming to your blog, then it suggests to you based on its own analysis of those keywords whether or not you should target them more heavily. So every week you get this nice email from them that says, “We’ve analyzed your search engine traffic and we recommend that you go target these five to 10 keywords.”
One of the ways that the site is able to make money is with one click you can order an article on that topic, which is really convenient if you want to outsource some content, they’ll do it for you. It’s neat because it gives you ideas about what to write about if you’re one of these people who has trouble deciding what content to focus on.
I haven’t done a very careful study of whether or not this is actually effective. The way it gets it seed list of keywords to consider is someone has to find you once using that keyword to get your blog. Once they find you once, maybe it’s because you ranked 10th or ranked temporarily, or maybe someone was searching on page two, then it looks at the competition for that keyword and decides whether or not you could rank for it easily.
So it doesn’t help you find something, as far as I know, where no one has found you before. On the other hand, I don’t know about your websites, but my websites are full of thousands of long tail keywords that I never have a chance to look at and optimize. So this is a really good idea.
Pat Flynn has talked about this before in his site that he has on security guard training where he shows you that some ginormous percentage of his total traffic comes from long tail keywords that are not security guard training.
It seems like a reasonable idea and I need to do a more careful study, but this week I took seven keywords and created seven new pages from HitTail. If you want to check out Hittail you can go directly to HitTail.com. If you’re interested in going through my affiliate link you can go through MasonWorld.com/hittail. Check it out, it’s pretty cool and I think you might find it interesting. It might show you some keywords that you never really thought about looking at.
Niche Snoring Site Update
That brings us to one more website topic and that is of course the topic of the snoring site. I have been hard at work on the snoring site – actually that’s not true. We set up the site with the goal of trying to have a fully automated website that we didn’t spend much time on but were able to rank easily with.
We picked a keyword using a fancy keyword tool that I like a lot, Keyword Canine over at MasonWorld.com/kc. We filled it up with automated content, which is essentially some pretty high quality PLR type content, relatively unique, and we sent some links to it with some Fiverr gigs, and we sat back.
I’m here to tell you that this site has crossed the four visitors per week barrier. We are talking about some serious live action on that site. If we can find a way to convert those visitors at $1,000 per visitor we will have a serious money maker on our hands.
You know, you build these sites and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. One thing that I do notice about this site is that while I bought the domain from a domain name registrar, I do see that the domain was previously owned. I do know that there are certain conditions under which previous ownership of a domain name can have a negative impact on Google’s willingness to rank it.
This is a domain flipping kind of question and I’m not an expert in the purchasing of old domains, but there are things that you look at. What I’ll probably commit to doing here is I’ll do some research on that, I have some materials on it that have to do with how links have been built to the site in the past, how many times it has been flipped, who the owners have been, and so forth.
There is a checklist kind of thing that people who buy aged domains go by when they’re deciding what to buy. I wasn’t intentionally trying to buy an aged domain, sometimes you do that in order to get page rank. I bought a domain name from a domain name registrar, I just didn’t check. That could be one reason that I’m having trouble with this site.
Another reason is just the fact that if you build 10 of these kind of cheesy sites, like the corn sheller site or this snoring site, you will find that some percentage of them fail. Even in the report from Josh that I just mentioned earlier, I think he expects something on the order of only 60 to 70% of these sites to actually pan out. That’s something that you need be prepared for and you need to expect that you’re going to have some number of these micro niche sites actually fail. You just move on and don’t worry about it.
The faster you fail, the faster you can get on to something that works. That’s a general true thing about internet marketing; it doesn’t cost much to fail. What do we have invested in this site? A handful of dollars. And we invested more money than we had to with the buying Fiverr gigs. Maybe you could argue that we have $30 or $40 wrapped up in this site. If it fails, it fails.
I’m not willing to give up on it yet, I’m going to let it ride. But, I probably won’t talk about it for another month. We’ll see what happens. We’ll see if four visitors turns into eight, into 16, into 32. I’m not counting on it, but I have put a ton of links against this site through four or five Fiverr gigs, so we’ll see what we end up with as we roll along. Until sometime later in October we’ll just let it ride and see what happens.
Listener Q&A About Building Backlinks
On a related note, that gets me to one of my favorite things in the whole world to do, which is to take some feedback from a listener. There is another corn sheller related question, so I’ll work it in here since we’ve been talking about websites.
This question comes from Jeremy in Minnesota. I’ll just tell you, this is one of my favorite things to do. I love the feedback from listeners. Thank you so much to all of you that have sent feedback in. I’m working to get it all in the show, but I could use more. Pick up the phone and call me at 214-444-8655, or leave me some feedback using the Speak Pipe widget at MasonWorld.com. Either way, I want to hear your question and so does everybody else. Bring it on. For now, let’s hear from Jeremy in the cold throws of Minnesota.
Jeremy says:
Hello, Mark. I have two questions for you today.
Number one was my three niche websites are not getting as much traffic as I would like and I’ve had them up for a few months now. I wanted to get your opinion on some backlinking strategies and what’s working out there right now after Penguin.I heard about your corn shellers website and I know about Pat Flynn’s backlinking strategy that works, and I wanted to see what else people were using out there to get more traffic since Penguin does not like too many links at one time and things like that.
That was one thing. I also wanted to see what your opinion was on if a template could have an effect on your website, because I’m using the same template for those three niche websites that are not getting a lot of traffic.
If you could answer those I’d very much appreciate it. I appreciate everything you do, I really enjoy the show and I don’t miss an episode. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Jeremy. I really appreciate the two questions. Let me see what I can do with them.
I love Minnesota, but I’ve only been there in the summer. I’ve been to Wisconsin quite a bit more, which is next door. It’s an amazingly beautiful part of the country if you’ve never been there. I remember the first time I went there I was every bit of 18 years old and being from Texas I had never really seen anything like that. It’s truly God’s country, full of grass and rolling hills with cows, it’s just beautiful.
You can learn everything that you need to know about Minnesota by listening to Prairie Home Companion, which is Garrison Keillor’s NPR show. It’s a fantastic example of what can be accomplished with radio. If you want to hear more about Minnesota, I definitely encourage you to check that out.
Let’s get to Jeremy’s questions. Jeremy has a couple of questions. One about his templates and whether or not they’re okay. And another question about post-Panda post-Penguin and whether or not the backlinking strategy that works still works. This is the outstanding article on Pat Flynn’s site where he talks about how he built backlinks to his security guard training site to get started. Just what should we be doing about backlinks.
I want to address that question and I also want to address something that Jeremy says in the question. He talks about this Penguin era and says something like we know Penguin is not happy if you build backlinks too quickly, the link velocity, as we say, is too high.
One disclaimer here is that nobody actually knows exactly what is in these algorithms except for Google. I have an opinion and other people have opinions, but my observation is that a lot of people that are talking about Penguin and Panda on the internet are fear mongers and they don’t really know what they’re talking about in the sense that they don’t use data to support their positions. I’m an engineer by training, so my reaction to anything that comes out of anyone’s mouth is, “Okay, that’s a great opinion. Show me the data.”
The data is limited and it’s hard to take, but the data that I’ve seen suggests very strongly that one of the main things that Penguin pays attention to is the over optimization of the anchor text of your backlinks. We’ve talked about this a little bit in previous episodes and I’m not trying to split hairs or mince words here, I just want to make sure that everybody is clear that at least as far as I understand from the data that I’ve been able to see that others have published is that one of the things that Penguin really focuses on is if your backlinks all have exactly the same anchor text or that anchor text is over a certain percentage and it’s exactly the same over that percentage, then they will recognize that as some SEO going out and building backlinks, they’ll assume that’s what happened, and they will reduce the importance of those links accordingly. They’ll reduce the significance, the weight those links have, on your ranking. That’s the supposition.
Panda is a little different, as we’ve discussed before. That’s actually a person’s name in Google who came up with an algorithm to teach machines how to recognize crappy websites. So that’s a little separate thing.
Then there’s a third thing where Google apparently went around and targeted identification of blog networks. These are farms of phony blogs where people pay money to have websites in those farms link back to their website. A lot of times those are comprised of junk content, but you get backlinks out of it.
Those are the three things that have happened lately. In that latter case with the blog farms what Google did was they de-indexed those blog farm blogs and that meant that those links going to your site just simply disappeared. Now that makes it look like your site was penalized, but I personally think what really happens there is those links are no longer in your profile, they don’t count, and therefore your competition is outranking you because they have better links than you do, you have fewer than you had because some are gone, and so your site drops. It looks like a penalty, but actually it’s just a recalculation of your link juice that takes into consideration that you were using these crappy links that are now gone. So those are the three things.
What I would say is it’s my observation that with the exception of the use of blog networks which are being targeted and de-indexed, and the over optimization of anchor text, all the linking strategies that used to work, still work. I think that’s true without exception.
I think article marketing still works. It’s hard for me to understand exactly why that’s the case, but it looks to me like article marketing still works. It looks to me like link directories still work. It looks to me like all these things still work as long as you vary the anchor text. Even blog networks that have not been discovered still seem to be working.
SEO is not dead. Not to beat a horse to death, but Josh in his report comes to the same conclusion. He comes to exactly the same conclusion that all this stuff is still working. So it’s my contention that what Pat Flynn argues for in the backlinking strategy that still works, what I’ve been talking about, all that stuff still works in general and you can just keep doing that.
Now, nothing is better than writing killer content that people link to from all over the web and getting natural backlinks that way. That’s what Google intends. Nothing is better than that. But, if you’re going to build links, which you accept whatever risk is associated with that, all of the things that you used to do to build links that I’ve previously mentioned, plus guest blogging, and website commenting, they all have various degrees of effectiveness.
My personal opinion is still the best thing to do is to mix all that stuff together and build links at some kind of reasonable rate. What that rate is, that’s even harder to understand what the data says about that. I personally have never seen a site where I built links to it too fast. Sometimes I’ve seen it go down, but it always seems to come back. I don’t know exactly what that means and it’s certainly not definitive, I haven’t built millions of sites. Unless you’re going to put 100,000 links on a brand new blog I don’t really think that’s a first order of concern.
If you’re talking about hundreds or thousands of links, it takes so long to get those indexed and figured out, article directories need to get approved, they seem to arrive at a natural rate, I don’t think it’s a big deal. Just don’t go crazy. Build links over time and you’ll be fine. I think the answer to that is what used to work still works and just keep doing that and try to build as many real links as you can. If you’re going to use automated linking tools, diversify those as best you can and diversify the anchor text.
Then the other question that Jeremy asks, which is a really good one, is could it be the template? The answer is absolutely it could be. If you have a template that has poor SEO and you are personally doing a poor job of on page SEO for whatever reason, maybe you haven’t gotten around to it, maybe you need to study it some more, whatever the deal is, and if you’re not using some kind of plugin to fix your on page SEO (the one I recommend is the Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin which is free), then you could have bad on page SEO and that can definitely effect your rankings.
I recommend that you look at that. On page SEO, as we’ve talked about before, comes down to some very simple things. The Yoast plugin will solve a lot of these for you, but fundamentally what you need first is to make sure that your keyword appears in your title tag. You need to make sure that keyword and related words are in the article, in the H1 and H2 tags, the header tags that divide the sections of the blog post. You need to make sure that the keywords and related keywords are in the anchor text that are pointing back to the page.
If your blog is jacked up, if you have a free template from somewhere, I have seen cases reported where that can have an SEO impact because of the way the HTML is coded. There are a lot of details there about where you include the content in the template, is it the front of the template or the back of the template, how are the title tags defined, do you put the blog name in the title tag, all this kind of stuff. Yoast SEO sort of takes care of all of that and you don’t even really need to worry about it, so that’s what I recommend there.
As far as what I use, I use the Thesis theme, I have a developer’s license for Thesis, and I use the Yoast SEO plugin. What I’m going to turn on at LateNightIM.com when I get that up and running is the new Yoast video SEO plugin. Both of these two things, the Thesis theme and the Yoast video plugin are relatively expensive items. Thesis costs almost $100 for a single license and almost $200 for a developer’s license. The Yoast SEO plugin is free, but the video SEO plugin costs $80.
So these things aren’t cheap and you don’t have to have them. Thesis is great, but it’s not required. You can use the built-in themes or some reasonably priced options, some of the cheaper options from Woo Themes, for example. They have pretty good SEO and you can apply the Yoast SEO plugin and you’ll probably be just fine. Don’t run out saying, “Mark told me to go buy Thesis, it will solve all my SEO problems.” That’s not what I’m saying. It is constructed incredibly well for SEO, in my opinion, but you don’t have to have that. Just make sure you’re using the Yoast plugin and it’s fine.
Some of you will say, “I’m using the All in One SEO plugin. Is that okay?” Sure, that’s fine. As long as you’ve got these things configured properly it’s going to be fine. Again, I prefer Yoast for several reasons and that’s the one I recommend. If you want to use the All in One SEO plugin or if that’s what you’re using already, that’s great too, no issue there.
Jeremy, I hope that answers your questions. I really appreciate the call.
If you have an internet marketing question, I want to hear from you. Stop what you’re doing right now and call me at 214-444-8655. I will really appreciate and I will thank you publicly right here on the Mason World Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast.
That’s going to wrap it up today. I really appreciate it. We’ll be back on the air at our normal time next Thursday. Watch for my transition from MasonWorld.com to LateNightInternetMarketing.com or LateNightIM.com; both of those will work. Looking forward to seeing you.
Thanks.
