Sorry to hear you lost your job, guess there's going to be a lot of people loosing their employment over the next few years with how things are going. In the UK was reported today our economy is at 0% growth, first time since 1992! With how prices have gone up recently I'm not surprised, I reckon the shops etc... are profiteering (if we were at war that's what it would be called). I look forward to the reaction if I'm right when they announce their annual reports. It's one thing making a more than fair profit from people when times are good, but pushing up prices just because they can get away with it at a time like this is not only unethical, it's dumb. They make more money this year, but they are going to push so many people beyond their means that sometime in the future they won't be able to afford to buy what they can afford today. Makes me sick! Anyway, rant over I wrote a post for here, but got long so turned it into a post on one of my sites http://www.45-year-old-millionaire.co.uk/how-to-make-money-online.html Good luck with finding a new job or making money in other ways. David Law
Thank you for the post SEO-Expert (even though I read it that very day). I am posting in this thread after almost a month. I thought I will give a little update. UPDATE First off, as a reminder, last month, I expanded the project from one blog to a total of 5 blogs. The main blog was sandboxed and so I had almost stopped working on it. Secondly, I had hardly built any links at all to any of the blogs. Link building was part of the plan, but it never materialized because I never wanted it to.Beginning of this month, I submitted 2 articles to one of the mass distribution services, and yesterday it was sent out to a 1000+ article directories. Backlinks are starting to trickle in, as each directory has their own approval time. Between the 2 articles, I added backlinks for 4 of the blogs. I added one more article yesterday for the 5th blog. What happened to the first blog? It came out of sandbox 3 days back. The traffic jumped from 5 visitors a day to nearly 80 visitors a day, and 70% from Google. It took almost 2 months for the blog to get out of sandbox. My patience paid off. What I learnt in the process - 1. The blog went into sandbox due to it getting 700 backlinks from an authority blog overnight, where I was commenting and unknowingly entered the top commentator list. I contacted them and they removed it after 15 days. 2. The blog came out of sandbox naturally, without me doing any sort of link building or other optimization. People believe if you get authority links, you will get out of sandbox. Well, I did not do anything at all. I even stopped posting regularly to the blog. 3. In my opinion, Sandbox was a positive thing to happen to my blog. Once I got out, I had the strong feeling that Google had begun to trust my blog once again. For nearly 2 months, I was getting only 5-10 visitors and suddenly, one morning it jumped to 70-80 visitors, with 70% from Google; how else would you explain this? What else - My adsense that was stinking suddenly shot up and 2 days back, I made another $100 milestone. I am due for a check the coming month. I will post it here when I get it. If there was one thing that I learnt guys, it is patience. You need patience and lots of it to make it in this industry. I am nowhere near, but I do feel, I have crossed a small barrier, making success one step closer. I wanted to post the visitor details, but it is pretty meager. In stead, I will post some other details - The bounce rate was 80.06% because the visitors in the last month were really un-targeted and as good as useless. The average time on the blog was 44 seconds. I am actually surprised. I was expecting 10 seconds or so. Pages/Visit was 1.38. 96.4% were new visitors. Only 3% were return visitors. In the last 3 days, I have had 200 visitors and 162 from search engines and 153 specifically were from Google. That should give you the picture. What am I going to do next? The blog now has about 170 posts. It should have hit 250 long back, but since I wasn't posting, it hardly made any progress. I am going to start posting 2-3 articles everyday. Once I make it to 200 posts, I am gonna stop for sometime and focus on quality link building. I will post about the other 4 blogs a little later. Thanks All Al
Here are a few SEO methods I have followed all through during the project - 1. Internal Link building - I have 2 links in every article that links to the homepage and the next article in the same category. 2. Virtual Silo - I follow Virtual silo structure for my blog to strengthen the theme and keyword focus. 3. Latent Semantic Index - In every article, I only use the main keyword once and thereafter it is a variation or related phrases. I don't do keyword density. 4. XML Sitemap - Always keep my Google XML sitemap and Yahoo explorer updated. 5. Every article has an external link from a blog or a niche social media site in order to build inner page authority. Hope that helps.
wow, interesting concepts. i'm learning a lot here. especially those terms i've never heard of like "Virtual Silo" and "Latent Semantic Index."
Hi marketsnipers, First of all, I'm happy that the blog escaped the sandbox. So one morning traffic from Google search just started coming in? Awesome. Was it for your main keyword or long tail searches only? Thanks and best of luck!
I never had/have any main keyword at all. It was long tail keywords, but with good competition, not low hanging fruits.
HI, I saw several times that you waited to put up the adsense because you felt it was to early. While you had 25-50 posts on that site. My advice...next time don't wait that long. You can put up adsense when you have more then 5 posts at a blog. Every day that you leave a site without any moneymaking opportunity is a lose and there is no rule that you have to wait 3 months before you can place adsense. btw hope all is ok now you lost your job. In your part of the country can you live of $100 a month?
I had taken off adsense because the blog was sandboxed. There was no point placing them when the visitors were next to zero. I agree with you though, there is no any such rule. It was just a personal preference. I don't have a job and I really don't plan to get one anymore. I am planning to get into freelancing from here on till my blogs pay the big bucks. Where I come from, I need $800/month at least to pay the bills and put food on the table.
Great job for following through. Now a days not many people starts a project and finish it. Please keep us up with your updates.
Hi All, An Update after a long time. I had a lot of things to share, and most importantly, I wanted to show you the network I have developed after starting the project. But just 5 minutes back, I had to change my mind, because of a threatening negative rep point I received saying - "What a big liar you are stop lying with so much bs in these threads or i will report all your copied content/network of sites to google.". First off, I never shared any URLs in my threads at all. I wonder who this guy is. I wish you had atleast PMd me, so I would know your identity. Anyways, guys, I cannot share the URL of my network. I apologize for that, as I do not want to ruin the hard work I have put in. I have spent nearly $5k building the network and content, and the last thing I want is to see a moron disturb my sleep. I will send another update lil later.
That's a wise decision. There are many helpful guys here, but also many negative minded creeps. A lot of folks will pester you for the URLs. Dont get tempted.
I am back. The project practically started on the 3rd of August, as I ditched the previous blogs (2 blogs) I was developing. It wasn't due to any mistakes, but I experimented a lot of SEO concepts on them and was not confident about continuing the project on those domains. I learnt a lot of SEO concepts, methodologies and cleared a lot of link building myths. So, August 3rd was my first blog and I moved on from them in a very meticulous and well planned manner. Every month, I launched 2-3 blogs and posted some excellent content and did social submission on a few posts (didn't have time to social bookmark all posts, coz I was building a business). As of today, my network has 12 content rich blogs. The total network has nearly 500 articles now and another 250 articles are in the works. So, it has been an average of 100 articles per month. What has been my approach to S.E.O? It has primarily been on-page optimization, coupled with deep linking to every single post from any good social bookmarking site, and letting the blogs age. I have totally removed the ads from the entire network, as they have been the biggest distraction for me. The last they were making was about $3-$4/day when I had about 180 articles in the network; and I decided to remove them. I will start active off-page SEO beginning of 2009. My strategy is to build in-links as natural looking as possible. I may do a bit of articles marketing, but I am not counting on it much. Sandbox - Among the 12 blogs, there is only one blog that is still in sandbox. Not sure how it went there, but I am least bothered at this time. My core focus is on content development and maintaining the on-page factors. I am very particular about site structure and so far have maintained it well. My goal - My goal of course is to grow the blogs to a large content network that people can reliably refer to. I plan to monetize the network in the later part of 2009 or maybe towards the end. Money is not at all in my mind at the moment. I am giving this network a long shot till 2010. That is 2 years from now. Lets hope it works the way I want it to.
I love the way the whole project has evolved. My initial goal was to have 10 sites with 10 articles each. Then I moved on to build 1 good site with 100 articles in it. and then the ambitions expanded to building a network of 10 sites with 50 articles each. I used to be excited thinking of a content network with 250 articles in them. When I reached 250 articles, I realised it was nothing at all. From there, I just continued building content and today the network stands at 500 articles and still growing. Today, I have no set number to stop at except that I would be a very very happy person if each of the blog in the network will have 1000 articles. I am far away from that, in terms of content as well as finance, but I have learnt in the last 4 months that anything is possible if you dream, and dream it right. I lost my job right after I started the project. Life really got difficult, where my friends had to pitch in to feed my wife and kids. I was nearly forced to leave the rented house we were staying in. The only thing I did not lose fully was hope. Today things are better, and my lower spine treatment has also started. My family is good, and we are moving towards prosperity. I am positive there is a lot more in store for us. The biggest lessons I have learnt - 1. Never lose trust in God 2. Never lose your self confidence. 3. Never doubt yourself. 4. Never dwell on your problems. Focus on solution. 5. Think laterally (this one helped big) 6. Be patient (can't stress on this enough) 7. Help people (it comes back big. It did for me) 8. Never quit. Ever. I want to end this with an incident that happened with me 2 months back when I was at the peak of my financial problems. I had been to the bank to withdraw the last saving of $40 that was in my account. When I came out, I met a friend who told me about another friend of mine, from whom I had borrowed $20. He was in dire need of money. He did not have enough to feed himself and his wife, because a client of his had cheated him of about $10,000. Without thinking Guys, I gave the $20 to my friend and told him to give it to him(the second friend). I was left with only 10 bucks. I did not regret as my trust in God was hard as steel. I went home. At about 4 in the evening, an old friend of mine came home. He was there for 15 minutes. Before he left, he quickly dropped $30 in my pocket. I asked him what was it. He said "Just think God has given you". Simple. I was shocked. All I could do was thank God for it. So, people, I am not preaching religion here. It so happened that this guy who came home, I had once helped him with $80 or so when he was in need. I had even forgotten about it. That's why its important to help people in whatever way we can.