Niche Chick

Adjusting to Change

Niche Chick — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 20:24:42 +0000

Twenty years ago, most people had no more familiarity with the internet beyond some sci fi movies. Ten years ago, most people would not have thought they could make money online unless they were a tech head or an ebay seller.

Today, many people make money online and the technical aspects aren’t as formidable as they have been in the past.

But with that ease of entry comes a natural increase in competition.

More people trying to make money online = more competition.

The stakes are higher and because of that, things change faster than before. Just when you think you have your system figured out, something changes.

The launch of the new microdata format at schema.org where the search engines have decided how they want us to present the information is one change.

In just the past month, there has been several:

The latest reiteration of the Panda update giving a priority to the “freshness” of content
The loss of keyword data in Google Analytics made by searchers logged into their Google account.
The closing of Yahoo Site Explorer along with the loss of the free information on competitor backlinks.

All of these raise the bar in what is required to rank and stay ranked in Google. Are there other alternatives to Google Analytics and Yahoo Site Explorer? Yes there are, but they aren’t free, which makes it more challenging for someone just starting out in niche marketing and learning the ropes to gain momentum and more expensive to bootstrap there online marketing endeavors.

More Opportunity than Ever Before

As I’m writing this, the sales figures for the 2011 Cyber Monday have just been published. Even in a crappy economy, the sales for Cyber Monday were up 33 percent from 2010, the previous high. Online sales for Black Friday were up 24.6 percent as well.

What does this mean for the niche marketer? It means there is more opportunity, that is increasing, to be able to make money online in niche marketing.

Are you in or out?

However, while there is more opportunity and the technical barrier has lowered, because of the increasing rate at which search and traffic generation change, I don’t think it is for the casual online marketer/publisher anymore.

Anyone can build a web site. Anyone can sign up for Adsense or Amazon.

But the reality is for most people sitting on page 2, 3, or higher in the Google search results, they will never make any money.

Even on page one, if you aren’t in the top three you will only see a trickle of money.

In my opinion, you have to be totally in or totally out. If you aren’t going to treat it and work it like a business, you might as well not even try at all.

You need to keep up with new traffic generation methods, keep up on search changes, keep improving your web site, keep building content, and always analyze and always refine.

The online arena is always evolving. If you want to be successful, you need to be prepared to evolve with it.

Tips for Using SE Nuke X: Purging the Database

Niche Chick — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 21:27:48 +0000

If after deciding for yourself whether or not SENuke X is worth it or not, you decided to go ahead and take the plunge, next comes the fun of learning how to use it.

Actually, setting up a basic campaign is pretty easy. You just use the step by step wizard, choose one of the preconfigured campaigns in the link diagramer and away you go.

However, as you start using it more, it takes some time researching the advanced strategies. While there are video tutorials, a lot of the little details you just have to dig through the SENuke forum and user blog posts to figure out.

My SENuke X Tip: Purge Your Database

When I first subscribed to SE Nuke, I ran the program on my primary computer. I kept the SENX window minimized, disabled the popups, and I really didn’t have a problem.

But I recently decided to make the switch from Magic Article Submitter to Article Marketing Robot. MAS has served me well for a long time, but AMR allows you to add your own article directories as well as publish to self hosted WordPress blogs. The last is the primary reason I switched as I want to focus more on building up my own network.

I have heard again and again from various people that while Article Marketing Robot is awesome, it is a resource hog, especially when you want to use the scheduling (which I did,) and that it really should be run on a VPS.

So when I switched to AMR, I also signed up for a VPS and moved my SE Nuke X installation to it as well as my AMR install.

I went with WebsiteService Plus‘s Tier 5 plan, which includes 30 GB of storage (A lot of people use this to run Sick Submitter on and they have a discount code SICK10 to save 10%.)

All went pretty smoothly and I have just LOVED having these programs on a VPS. I wish I would have moved it to a VPS a long time ago. I don’t have to worry about my own internet connection (which sucks,) how many programs I have open (which is usually a lot,) or even having my computer on.

The Problem: Running Out Space

Yesterday I logged into my VPS to set up a new campaign and started running into all kinds of issues. There was a new update for SE Nuke and it kept failing to update and looping through the process.

I started seeing little popup windows saying that I was running out of storage with only 19 mb left. I thought, “What the heck?!?!?”

All I have on the VPS is:

Immunet: An antivirus program
SE Nuke X
Article Marketing Robot
Peazip: An Unzip utility
Irfanview (to edit screenshots or view images)
Dropbox: a file sharing utility. I save reports in this folder and then open the files on my computer.

And other than downloading some SE Nuke diagrams . . . that’s it.

I couldn’t figure out where all the memory was going.

Then I starting getting errors with SE Nuke that it couldn’t save my settings. After Googleing, I found a forum post saying to delete SENuke.Settings.xml in the install folder, exit out of SENX, and then the file would be rebuilt.

The other tricky thing about SENuke is that it doesn’t show up in your regular program folders. In order to find the location, I had to right click on the SENX desktop icon, and select “Open File Location” to find it.

Once there, in addition to the setting file, I also found a folder titled “Database Backups”

Lo and behold the folder contained 28 gb of backup files!

After searching in the forum, I found that this is a common problem. They recommend leaving the 5 most recent backups and deleting the rest.

There is an option in the SENuke settings (Options => Backups) where you can set the number of days for SE Nuke to save the backups. The issue with this is that a backup is generated every time, I am assuming, that a campaign is run, so you can have multiple backups per day.

After clearing out all of the backups other than the five most recent, my VPS and SENuke are running smoothly again.

I changed my options to delete backups older than two days and I’ll see if that keeps the backups from piling up.

If you haven’t taken the plunge yet for SENuke, but need an extra boost for your sites, I am offering some SENuke campaign packages.

Google Adsense and Smart Pricing

Niche Chick — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 21:00:54 +0000

Several of my little niche sites are structured somewhat along the lines of the xFactor Adsense model. I say “somewhat” because I absolutely refuse to put out anything that is as hideously ugly as those old original ones were and I don’t have anything that has such thin content.

If you’re not familiar with an xFactor site, it is named after a guy name John who goes by the handle “xFactor” on the Warrior Forum. In 2009, he posted an epic thread on his strategies for reaching $300 per day in Adsense (you can still read it here.)

That then spawned an Adsense Masters ebook, a membership site, and a recent updated version of new strategies.

The hallmarks of an xFactor site was the dearth of content and the ugly black and green template with yellow links. Of course, some people mix it up, but many people never did.

The one benefit of the Panda update is that a lot of these sites tanked in the SERP’s so a web browser is very rarely subjected to such ugliness anymore.

While some things he promoted either don’t work as well or don’t work at all anymore, the basic concept behind it is still sound.

Find keywords that advertisers are bidding on and create content around it.

Advertisers bid to place their ads in the Google Adwords program. Most people are familiar with the sponsored ads down the right hand side of Google’s search results. But advertisers also have the option to place their ads in the content network, and this is where Adsense publishers come in.

Let’s say Sara has an estore, or even just an Etsy account, selling baby blankets. She has awesome blankets, but she isn’t ranking organically in the search results.

And we all know that no traffic = no sales.

So she goes to Google Adwords and decides to place a campaign to try to drive traffic to her site. She decides to run her ads both on the search pages as well as the content network. She decides to try $1 maximum per click.

Tammy has a mommy blog on baby items, and she is wants to try to make a little money online with her blog. So she signs up for an Adsense account and ads the code to her pages. Ads that are created in an Adwords campaign that opt into the content network are then displayed on her site.

Adsense and Adwords are two sides of the same coin.

The cool thing about Adsense as a publisher is that you don’t have to track down advertisers or even try to determine the best ads for your posts and site as you would with a standard affiliate program. Google will send the ads that are most suited to your content.

So Sara’s baby blanket Adwords ads start showing up on Tammy’s baby blanket site. If someone clicks on the ad on Tammy’s site, Sara pays Google $1 and Google then pays Tammy $.50 (roughly, Google doesn’t say exactly what the split is.)

It’s pretty simple.

Personally, I think this is one of the easiest forms of web publishing to get started with. Google Keyword Tool or the free version of Market Samurai makes it really easy to analyze keywords, put up a site, write content, sign up for Adsense, and put a block of ads, and work on getting traffic.

Targeted Content + Targeted Traffic = Clicks => Cash

The Bane of Adsense Publishers: Smart Pricing

Beyond getting their account banned, getting “smart priced” is the most dreaded by Adsense publishers.

There are a lot of theories, but without getting all complicated, if over time your site doesn’t perform well for the advertisers, the amount you earn per click will be less.

For example, let’s say Sara is running her Adwords campaign and it is not only showing up on Tammy’s blog, but Cindy and Susan’s as well. Sara is bidding up to $1 per click for the campaign as a whole.

But over time, Google notices that the clicks coming through from Cindy’s site don’t seem to perform as well as those from the others. So they “smart price” Cindy’s Adsense account. Meaning Sara may still be paying $1 per click for those coming from the search pages as well as Tammy and Susan’s site, but if the clicks come from Cindy’s, Sara will only be charged $.60 because visitors from Cindy’s site are flakes.

. . . or something like that.

That’s a very simplistic explanation of smart pricing. Google doesn’t say specifically how it determines who to smart price and they don’t tell you when you are.

The only way you would know is if you have a history of traffic, clicks, and earnings, and you can see the change in your account.

The other thing to remember is that if your account gets smart priced, it affects your whole account, not just a particular channel on your account or the clicks coming from a particular site.

How to Tell if You’ve Been Smart Priced

Just because your earnings per click (EPC) has dropped, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your account has been smart priced. There are several other things that could be going on.

It could be that there just aren’t that many advertisers competing for those keywords at the moment. If your sites are focused in a specific niche, you will probably be able to see a pattern over time. On some of mine, I can tell that the advertisers all run their campaigns per calendar month because at the end of the month, the EPC tanks because they’ve run through their budget.

Conversely, on my community site, I can always tell when there is a new local business that is experimenting with Adwords. They don’t know what they are doing and end up paying way too much per click. Once they learn the ropes, the earnings drop back down to a more normal level.

It can also be that your content is SO niched that the advertisers are running very targeted campaigns for those keywords with a lower price per click.

More Adsense Resources

Adsense Publisher sign up page
Google Adsense FAQ
xFactor thread on the Warrior Forum
“Why You Suck at Adsense” – A great thread on Adsense strategies from Jacob (Initial Effort) on the Backlink Forum.

What is Google Authorship?

Niche Chick — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 04:55:01 +0000

So I’ll admit it. I don’t really follow Google news or Matt Cutt’s blog.

Ooooohhhhh!!!!!!!

Heresy, I know, for someone marketing online.

I just figure that if they do something really groundbreaking, like say . . . enable telepathic search or something . . . I’ll hear about it through the regular channels: forums, email lists, Skype, Facebook, etc.

(I know people complain about the amount of emails on IM lists, but that’s one good thing about it. You usually hear about major updates without having to keep tabs on it yourself)

So since I don’t wait with bated breath for every hint and pronouncement from Google, it took me about a month to learn about Google Authorship.

What is it? Well I’m sure the conspiracy theorists at places like InfoWars.com will say it’s just one more piece of Google’s role in the great Illuminati plan to line out every aspect of your life, but honestly, I think the motivation on Google’s part is more to keep up with Facebook. (In case you didn’t know, Facebook and Google actually battle it out for the bragging rights of most pageviews.)

Also, there has been a lot of criticism towards Google since the Panda update on a variety of fronts: crap content is floating to the top, major brands seem to trump the independent always, and people ripping off content have been outranking the original authors. Now of course these results change daily, sometimes hourly, but the last reason is one of the things that the Authorship program addresses.

What is Google Authorship

Basically, is a method of telling Google, “Hey, this is the stuff I wrote.” And if you do that in the correct format, anything that they ascribe to you as the original author and where you have their little system implemented, they will list a picture of you, along with a link to your profile in the search results.

Now, when I first found out about this a few weeks ago, I think they were tweaking it because none of the examples people were using in their posts were working for me.

However, I just noticed today that the author images are once again showing in the search results.

Here is an example of a search: google authorship

This is what that search shows for me today, August 27th, 2011, without being logged into my Google account

What’s the Big Deal with Google Authorship?

So are you asking “What’s the big deal?” or thinking it’s completely narcissistic to have your picture by every search result?

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind. Most of us in online marketing spend an awful lot of time an effort trying to improve our search rankings in Google striving for that coveted #1 spot.

Most of the time, the #1 spot gets approximately 42% of the search traffic to their site, while the #2 spot gets about 20%. These are rough figures that come up again and again. Talking to people that have gone from #2 to #1, I’ve repeatedly heard that #1 gets three times more traffic than #2. And you’re really not even in the game until you’re in the top three.

However, there are exceptions to this.

If you have a good headline and excerpt, you can pull more traffic from search results than you would normally expect. I have several sites with keywords that consistently outperform the statistical averages.

Up until about a year ago, Google used to have indented double listings. I can’t show you a screenshot because indented listings are gone (although I occasionally find them on mobile searches.) However, here is a video on Youtube that shows you an example. I don’t know what exactly he is talking about in the video and the reason all the crap is showing below the listings is that he has an SEO browser plugin turned on, this is just to show you what I’m talking about.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Several years back, when Andy Jenkins was still with Stompernet, he did a free video on how to get indented double listings. (If anyone knows where a copy of this video is, please let me know. The video is gone from all the posts I found referencing it.)

Anyway, they had a specific method for getting them, but the indented listings occurred if you had two results from your web site on page 1 of Google, the lower result would be pulled up and indented beneath your top ranking result.

According to their research, an indented double listing pulled more traffic that the cumulative total than the two positions would normally get individually. They had an indented listing at #2 and #3 that outperformed the #1 spot.

Their method and that video was awesome. I used it and got double listings for several of my sites over and over. I loved it.

But they are gone. And I mourned their loss.

Google replaced it with the “more results from” plus sign and they will pull up a lower result from your site and group it; however, in my personal experience the multiple results along with the more+ just don’t pull as well as the indented listings did.

But life goes on.

Personal Connection

So Google’s goal is to attribute the content to the original author, and as part of that, with the Google Authorship, they will list the author’s picture along the search result.

I really think another part of this is to encourage people to participate more in Google Plus versus Facebook, but we’ll see how it all works out.

Advertising 101

A basic advertising principle is that people are drawn to people. When you are design an ad layout, or any type of promotional or marketing piece, conventional advertising wisdom says that the eye is always drawn to a person first.

Keeping that in mind and looking at the Google Authorship program, what kind of advantage do you think it would be if you were maybe in the the #5 spot but had an image by your result?

Do you think you might pull over the #1 spot? Maybe. I definitely think you would pull more traffic than a standard #5 listing would.

Google Authorship and Niche Marketing

The downside to this is that if you publish in multiple niches, do you necessarily want all of your sites tied to one Google Profile? I certainly don’t.

Also, while this works with both Google Profiles and Google Plus Profiles, I’m a little leery of tying all my “stuff” to Google Plus period.

I’ve read a number of posts and threads about Google closing down accounts . . . . ENTIRE accounts, not just the Plus account (Gmail, Adsense, Docs, etc) . . . because people were using an online ID rather than their real names.

I’m just not that comfortable with that.

Build Automatic Backlinks with Announcer Blogs

Niche Chick — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 02:11:46 +0000

As part of the series on posting to multiple blogs, I’m going to share with you my strategy of using what I call “announcer blogs” to get both your posts indexed quickly as well as building optimized keyword backlinks to your site . . . on autopilot!

Yes, I know . . . it sounds like one of those hyped up WSO’s but

I promise it works.
I’m not charging you anything.

What Are Announcer Blogs?

Back when I first really started getting into affiliate marketing, I was reading a post on the Warrior Forum where someone was sharing their strategy for ranking for keywords.

Whenever they made a new post or article on their main site, they would then take the excerpt of that post and put it on a WordPress and Blogger blog with a link back to their main site using their keyword as anchor text.

Pretty simple, and it is the basic concept behind link wheels and link pushes. You want sites that talk about your keyword linking back to you on your keyword.

So I started doing that, but if there is any way to automate something versus doing it automatically, I want to find it.

Around that same time I was using Ping.FM along with Sean Donahoe’s Backlink Booster to index my links. If you haven’t used Ping.FM before, it’s a platform that allows you to publish content or a status update once and push it out to as many 2.0 platforms that you want (Blogger, WordPress, Posterous, Twitter, Facebook, etc. )

That got me thinking, “Hey, why not use this for automatically feeding posts to the announcer blogs?”

My strategy was that I would take my main site’s RSS feed and connect it to Ping.FM using Twitterfeed. There were a couple of issues I had to work out with this. First, I had to create an alternate RSS feed for my site that only published the excerpt and then ended the excerpt with “read more on post title and main keyword” with the post title linking back to that individual post and the main keyword anchor text linking back to the home page.

I’m not going to go into the details of how I did this because that whole method doesn’t work anymore.

Once I got it figured out, it was pretty simple to set up on new sites and worked really slick. As long as I was publishing content on my site on a consistent basis, I was also getting a steady drip of keyword backlinks to my site automatically as well as building up content on this ring of announcer blogs.

But of course, things change. Ping.FM changed their API so that you couldn’t make new Twitterfeed connections. Sites I had already set up still worked, but new ones wouldn’t. (This change also threw a wrench into my Backlink Booster indexing system, but more on that another day.)

So I had to start over and find another way to accomplish the same thing.

Before I explain how to do this, let me just say I am not a programmer. I can tweak PHP to get a theme to do what I want, troubleshoot installations, and do minor editing of plugins. But I don’t know enough to program a system from scratch, so I was trying to find either an existing WordPress plugin that did this or something close enough that I could tweak to make it work.

The Bootstrap Method

I spent HOURS looking for a replacement solution. I looked in the WordPress extension directory, searched for commercial plugins, looked in the WSO forum . . . nothing.

My Solution

What I ended up doing was installing the Post Notification plugin, which is designed to be a self hosted newsletter system. You can either set it up so that subscribers get notifications of new posts automatically, or you can send out an update. I used it for the automatic notification feature.

Once you install it, I would create a custom “newsletter” template to configure the update to include the post title, the excerpt, and then again at the end of the excerpt, the post name with a link back to that individual post and a link on the main keyword for my site back to the home page just as I had with the alternate RSS feed in the previous method. This takes a little HTML editing.

Then I had five 2.0 blogging platforms that allow posting by email. With most of them, they provide a secret email address to address the email to. Some of them also require you to configure the blog to automatically publish the post rather than requiring it to be approved.

That done, you take each of the email posting addresses and add them as a “subscriber” to in the Post Notification plugin on my main site.

Does it work? Yes it does. It isn’t quite as slick as my original method and sometimes the emails don’t automatically post, but for the most part it works.

The Easy Way – wp syndicator

About a month after I figured out a replacement solution using Post Notification, a plugin was released called WP Syndicator that does exactly what I was trying to do, but does it natively. I can’t even begin to tell you how irritated I was.

I spend so much time trying to figure it out, if they had just released it a few weeks earlier I could have bought it and been done with it.

WP Syndicator does exactly what I am describing above, but instead of having to mess around with finding the posting email and making the configuration for auto posting is correct, you just have to create the accounts on the 2.0 platforms, and then go back to your site, enter the login credentials, and you’re done.

If you’ve used Backlink Energizer, it is similar to that when you are entering your 2.0 details.

You can also specify the keyword for the anchor text on a per post basis. Pretty awesome right?

The plugin publishes to 15 different 2.0 platforms, so each individual post you make gets an automatic boost even before you go through any of your other backlinking methods.

Should You Use Announcer Blogs

Obviously, in my opinion yes you should. I saw the effectiveness of it with the first set of announcer blogs that I set up, so much so that I went to a lot of trouble to find a way to continue it after the first method I used stopped working.

Ranking sites on keywords with any level of competitiveness is about building layers of links. The announcer blogs are your first and most basic layers of links.

You can either use the bootstrap method I describe above, or you can go the easy and fast way with a broader distribution by using WP Syndicator.

The Truth About Duplicate Content

Niche Chick — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 06:26:25 +0000

There have been several questions about a recent post I wrote, “How to post to multiple blogs” using Windows Live Writer. There are a few issues that have come up that I want to address, but first I want to talk a little bit about site content and how to use it.

You may have read about something called the “duplicate content penalty.” Sounds pretty dire doesn’t it?

In order to understand what it is, you need to remember back to the early days of this millenium when Google was just beginning its journey towards digital world domination. Back then, the search engine algorithms weren’t nearly as sophisticated as they are now, but since there hasalways been money in ranking #1, there have always been those whose sole focus was gaming the algorithm to attain it.

In the early days of search, optimization consisted solely of cramming as many keywords in the meta tags as you could think of and doing reciprocal links.

Google responded by putting next to no weight on the meta tags and instead shifted its focus to the content on the page.

People soon caught on and started not only cramming keywords within the content on the page until it was almost unintelligible, but they also created duplicates of those crap pages creating mega sites with worthless junk.

Do you remember this?

So Google’s response to people slapping up a bunch of the same content all over their site was to implement what is called the

“duplicate content penalty“

The duplicate content penalty is one where you site is penalized if it has multiple pages with the exact same content on your own site.

Now I haven’t done rigid testing to see how much of the same content you can have before the penalty hits you. I actually think that this has been dialed down in the past couple of years as the content scoring algorithm has gotten more sophisticated.

So what follows is strictly my own opinion based on what I’ve seen with my own sites as well as client sites:

How to Avoid the Duplicate Content Penalty

Always write unique content for your money site or anything you are trying to rank

If you have a blog and you don’t nofollow your archive or tags pages, make sure that what displays on them is just the excerpt. Actually, category and tags pages are an awesome way to create tons of aggregated posts. Every word doesn’t have to be unique. What you are doing on a tags page is mix and matching chunks of content, so the aggregated page for a tags page ends up being mostly unique from anything else.

Again, a lot of people disagree with this strategy, but that’s what I do.

Duplicate Content, RSS and Syndication

So if you want the content on your site to be unique, what about RSS feeds and content syndication? Should you block it?

Here’s the thing, if someone is intent on stealing your content they are going to do it whether you publish an RSS feed or not. If you write good content, just expect that at some point or another someone is going to steal it. That’s just the way it is.

Don’t lose sleep over it, just make sure that your web site is the kid sitting in the front row of Google’s classroom. Make sure you get Google’s attention because if the content is index on your site first, your site will be getting the credit.

Submit your site maps to Google, Bing and Yahoo. Submit your RSS feeds to all the major directories. Set up a Feedburner feed (another Google company,) bulk out your ping list in your WordPress installation, post notifications of new posts on Twitter and Facebook with a link back.

Get the content noticed on your site first!

The only time I worry about someone scraping my sites is if they are racking up bandwidth . . . and then I just block their IP address in my .htaccess file. For me, it really hasn’t been a huge issue.

Duplicate Content and Posting to Multiple Blogs

So back to the question of posting the same content to multiple blogs. While I’ve read of many people that do well with autoblogging (posting content to your site that has already been published somewhere else,) it’s never worked well for me.

So what is the point of posting to multiple blogs?

Let’s compare your content to celebrities. There are the A list celebrities like Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Anniston, etc. These A listers are the equivalent of the content that you put on your own money sites. You research it, spend time on it, include supporting documentation, you give it the very best that you have and really spotlight it.

Then you have the B List, these celebrities are “what’s hot now.” There is a lot of buzz about them, but it is yet to be seen whether they are a flash in the pan or have staying power. B list celebrities don’t get the top choice of roles, but they typically get a steady stream of offers.

This is the equivalent of the content that you would put on your tier 1 sites, or the first level of sites linking directly back to your money site. This might include the better article directories like Ezinearticles or Articlebase, 2.0 sites like blogs on WordPress or Squidoo lenses, Youtube videos, document sharing sites, or many satellite domains you have purchased.

Just as directors and studios don’t put a ton of effort into courting B List celebrities, you don’t put nearly as much time into creating content for these sites as you would your own. It may be a synopsis of a more detailed article on your own site, or one that has been rewritten, and maybe even a well spun article.

This is where tools that will post to multiple blogs start to become useful. For example SEO Link Robot has an article posting feature that will post to the top 10 article directories. If you typically do this manually, this can safe a significant amount of time.

Kathy Griffin: Celebrating the D List

Next comes the D listers. These celebrities are the hangers on, the ones that will do almost anything for the limelight. They aren’t picky. Think of your second and third tier sites as D Listers. You put the content you have out there. Maybe it’s one of the articles from the B List that you’ve spun the crap out of, or perhaps even PLR. This is what you use on the bookmark descriptions, maybe some updates on second string social networks, and blasting the third string article directories.

Duplicate Content and Backlinks

So why would you use all of this?

Let’s say you have a web site about growing corn in your backyard (chickens are big right now, why not corn.)

So on your own web site, you create articles going in depth about the history of corn, the different varieties, the best fertilizer, etc. You include tons of pictures, create videos, source your articles, etc.

But then you need backlinks to your web site, so you write a brief article about the best corn varieties, not as good as the one on your site, but decent. You submit that to the main article directories.

That gives you some backlinks on pages about growing corn, with anchor text on your keywords back to your site about corn, establishing your site’s relevance and authority. Since those main article directories are heavy hitters, your article will probably be indexed on each, it might not rank, but it will be indexed.

What? Not rank you say? This is the thing to remember:

You don’t care whether or not your article ranks on someone else’s site.

Trust me, Chris Knight is doing okay as it is.

You want your own site to rank.

That is the goal.

But you still need more oomph, so you spin that second article and blast it through Article Marketing Robot and it gets published maybe 500 to 600 directories. Is Google going to index all those articles that are basically saying the same thing, spun or not? No, and again, you shouldn’t care.

What you are doing is getting a bunch of sites to point back to your own site saying, “Hey, this is a site that REALLY knows about corn.” And that is what you want. You want Google to know that you are THE place to go if someone is interested in corn.

To rank for anything even remotely competitive, you need a bunch of other sites linking back to you saying that your site is “IT” when it comes to your niche. And hopefully, those sites linking to you are also known for your niche.

Yes, I do think relevance matters when it comes to backlinks, and that is where using tools to post to multiple blogs to create a layered backlink profile comes in. But more on that in another post.

How NOT to Create an Outsource Job Posting

Niche Chick — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 20:49:59 +0000

I was looking through some job postings on oDesk to get an idea of the going rate for some link building projects I have coming up and I came across this gem.

15 PR4+ Permanent Backlinks

Job Description This job is about getting 15 – PR4+ PERMANENT backlinks for my project, SAT prep classes.

ALL of these PERMANENT links have to be placed at site’s MAIN PAGE PR4+ and NOT in any subdomain or subpage.

All links must be PERMANENT AND INDEXED guaranteed !! REQUIREMENTS: – Backlinks with 100% white hat techniques only!

- Links must be only from computer or related business or small business website

- Links must be strictly from Google PR4+ pages

- internal pages, iframe page with PR less than 4 not count.

- Links must be permanent.

- One link per domain.

- Links must be placed on proper PR4+ web pages, either on home page or internal pages. Page must be linked with Home page.

- We will provide anchor text for all the backlinks.

- Page must not be dis-allowed by robots.txt

- The linking page must have no more than 15 outbound links.

- All links must be static and standard href type links.

- Only links from relevant sites will be accepted.

- Links must be on a www, no sub domains.

- Domains must be from different IP addresses and different Class-C IP addresses.

- Links must be from English or German language websites only.

- Link pages and our text links must be visible, readable, indexable and do-follow.

- Link pages must be indexed and cached by Google, Yahoo and Bing within last 60 days.

- Backlinks must be search engine friendly, that is no redirects, cloaking and other practices

– Max 1 link per day.

NOT ALLOWED:

- 100% No black hat tactics

– 100% No links from rel=”nofollow” or “noindex” tag for pages themselves and for anchor text.

– No classifieds or mortgage, gaming, web directories, political.

- No article directories, forums, web rings, or link directories.

- No link farms, no link-exchange programs, no banned sites by Google, no illegal/scam/spam sites.

- No exchange programs, web rings, rented links, FFA sites.

– No gambling, adult & porn sites, pharmacy sites, illegal websites, hate-based websites, violent websites, cracking or hacking websites, no blacklisted or spam sites.

- No directory submissions, forum posts, article submissions, links from guest books, yahoo groups, CL sites.

– No use of automated software or bots.

- No links from under construction pages.

- No java links, jump scripts, framed pages, redirects, cloaking, CSS redirects, 301 redirects, dynamic links, flash sites/pages, hidden links, no string parameters, session ID’s, etc.

– No contextual ads sites, popups, intrusive advertising, etc.

- No blog comment spamming, no ping, no links within newsgroups.

- No link from: torrent sites, file sharing, articles.

FURTHER DETAILS:

- Make sure you offer permanent backlinks from PR4+ sites in sat prep or related websites. Don’t offer anything else. Anything else will be considered spam!

ACCEPTANCE OF DELIVERY:

NO upfront payment until we check all the profiles.

- Report must be sent to me, including the URLs of Home pages, dates when posted, where the links were posted.

- Please understand that we have much experience in SEO, and we will check the links before approving the payment.

Your weekly Report must include:

- Date link is placed on link page

- URL of link page

- IP of link page

- Google PR of link page

– Number of outbound links from the linked page

– Anchor Text used for the link

- Target URL of the link that has been placed on the page Please do not bid. If you can’t fulfill the requirements

Thanks and happy bidding.

And what are they offering for this?

Fixed-Price – Est. Budget: $40.00

Remember, this is for permanent backlinks on the home page of a web site.

If they knew other site owners, they *might* get lucky and be able to get 15 PR 4 home pages links for that price per month. But even then, most homepage backlink networks I’ve seen have a lot more than 15 outbound links on the home page.

And the whole “permanent” requirement just kills me. There is no such thing as “permanent” when it comes to the internet. PR changes, sites get indexed and deindexed, things change.

I’m wondering if they copied this requirement from some other idiot’s job posting, because first they say here:

Links must be only from computer or related business or small business website

But then later on this:

Make sure you offer permanent backlinks from PR4+ sites in sat prep or related websites. Don’t offer anything else. Anything else will be considered spam!

And then this:

- Domains must be from different IP addresses and different Class-C IP addresses.

Do they even understand what that means? If they are on different C Class IP addresses, then it would necessarily follow that they would be on different IP addresses.

And the funniest part of all:

- Please understand that we have much experience in SEO, and we will check the links before approving the payment.

Really? Why is that so hard for me to believe?

Anyone that would know how to do everything that they are asking and that has the access and capability of getting the types of links that they want would not be scrounging for crumbs on oDesk. They would be earning much more for their time and for their assets.

People that post things like that are the same people that then post on places like the Warrior Forum bitching about either 1. how stupid outsourcers are or 2. How they got screwed.

Let me explain something.

If you post a flaky job offer you are going to get flaky applicants!

What to Expect When Outsourcing

If you are expecting someone to do something that you really don’t know how to do, then really, what you are looking for is a consultant. If you want someone that *knows* what they are doing, then you have to expect to pay for experience.

If you want cheap, then be prepared to train. Be able to give very explicit instructions upfront, be prepared to answer questions, and develop and nurture those contractors that are most adept.

Finding Good Outsourcers

The first step to finding good outsourced contractors is first ensure that you are an employer that a good contractor would want to work for.

Do you clearly identify what the job entails?
Are your expectations reasonable?
Do you give clear instructions and adequate tools to complete the job?
Are you paying a reasonable amount for the project?
Do you show your appreciation for a job well done?

As for the compensation, in today’s global marketplace where you can hire a contractor half way around the world using sites like oDesk and Elance as easily as you can someone in your own town, I know that what is considered “adequate compensation” varies. However, some of the job listings I’ve seen on these site would be considered slave wages even in third world countries.

Don’t try to build your own prosperity by taking advantage of someone else.

I mean really . . . if you can’t afford to hire someone for what would be even a living wage in the Philippines, maybe you should rethink what you’re doing.

Have respect for the efforts of others and compensate them fairly.

SEO Link Robot Discount – Last Chance!

Niche Chick — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 19:06:06 +0000

I mentioned SEO Link Robot (SEOLR) several times in my post on SE Nuke X alternatives titled, “Is SE Nuke X Worth it?” At the time of writing, SEO Link Robot was a one time purchase, and really, the main difference is SE Nuke’s campaign creation and scheduling.

Several weeks ago, SEO Link Robot ended the one time purchase option and went to a monthly subscription price. During this interim change, there has been discount available reducing the monthly price to $40.

However, I just got an email from the developer this morning and that discount will only be available for the next 24 hours.

Learning to Be a Smart Buyer

As you progress in your online marketing journey, one of the things you have to learn how to do is how to discern value. Forget about the hyped sales pages and remember that there is no magic bullet. Look at what the product, service, or course is supposed to do and look at how it fits in your your overall strategy.

Does it make something that you are already doing more efficient?
Does it broaden your marketing efforts?

If you can’t tell how the product/service will do either of the two things above, it’s probably best to save your money.

For example, SE Nuke X is about building linkwheels, lots of them automatically. If you haven’t already been doing link wheels manually, how could you possibly decide if the service has value to you and what it is worth to you?

If you learn how to determine that, you will be much happier in your IM purchases and not constantly chasing the next great thing.

I’ve gotten some great deals that I’ve been very happy with.

I bought Scrapebox when it first came out for only $37. I bought a lifetime license to Blogsense before the price increases (I just got an email from the Blogsense developer that the lifetime license will no longer be offered.) One of the things I wish I would have jumped on is Article Marketing Robot when it came out at crazy low price . . . oh well.

But if you can’t decide on whether or not you should buy something unless everyone else says you should, you are always going to be paying a premium.

SEO Link Robot’s main function is also building link wheels. I had been creating them manually and had been following threads on the upcoming launch. Let me tell you, I bought the program as soon as he released the early bird discount prelaunch to his list. It was amazing what a difference it made.

While I do have SE Nuke now, I still use SEO Link Robot when I want to hand craft some of the link nets and still speed up the process. I also use the built in rapid indexer and RSS submitter all the time on pretty much everything, not just what I’m creating with the link wheeler.

So if you want to take advantage of the last chance at saving on the monthly subscription to SEO Link Robot, don’t delay.

Save on SEO Link Robot

EzineArticles Loses Its Mind Post Panda

Niche Chick — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 05:05:20 +0000

If you are involved in anything online, it is impossible that you haven’t heard about the Google’s Panda update in it’s algorithm.

Which, by the way, is an incredible stupid name. What exactly is it supposed to mean anyway? People in the search world labeled it the “Farmer” update as ostensibly it’s target was content farms. That would have made sense.

But some Google engineer had decided that they would call it Panda so that is the “official” name however stupid it may be. I have to wonder what he was thinking. Had he just taken his kid to the zoo? . . . Just watched Kung Foo Panda?

Whatever the source, my advice to the guy is to stay away from branding . . . you suck at it.

So there is this big upset post Panda. Major sites, particularly article directories, take a huge hit. This is after a first quarter of crazy updates.

And EA reacts. They start deleting crap articles out of their directory, raise the minimum word count to 400 words, and say they are tightening up their standards.

Whatever. To me, it’s not that big of a deal. It’s an article directory! If they become too big of a pain in the butt to submit to, I’ll just skip them.

Do I get traffic from the articles? Yes, but I get traffic from other places that I submit to as well. Actually, the traffic I get from EA doesn’t even come close to the traffic I get from blog commenting.

And ArticleBase beats EA for syndication.

Stupid EzineArticle Editors

So what’s my beef? I’ve had TWO recent submissions get kicked back because it said that the article “didn’t deliver on the promise in the headline.”

The first one was titled “5 Tips to XXX”

I had five bolded headings and everything. They declined it.

All I did was add numbers before the headings and they approved it.

Is that asinine or what?

This last one that was declined just today was on “How to Shop for XXX.”

Again, there are headings in bold that define each section. I added Factor 1, 2, etc. We’ll see if it goes through.

I swear they must have hired some idiot editors from Demand Studios that don’t have any common sense. You’d have to have an IQ below 40 not to understand how the premise is supported in the article.

Again . . . whatever. They can approve or deny whatever they want. But it would be wise to keep in mind that people are suppling free content that you make money off of with your copious Adsense ads. So if you think you can afford to play high and mighty over submissions, pretty soon you will only have the fools submitting that think they are hot stuff just because they have “Platinum” status.

No one is going to get nominated for a Pulitzer over anything published on EA.

[/rant]

How to Post to Multiple Blogs: Free Tool

Niche Chick — Thu, 26 May 2011 19:26:38 +0000

If you have been into niche marketing for awhile, you probably have several web sites up and running. Everyone has a different strategy for content for their sites.

Do it and be done: You can plan out content in advance: three months, six months, maybe even a year. You preload all the content into WordPress posts, schedule them to publish on a future day, set it and forget it. I do this for a number of my niche sites.

If you have a lot of content and a lot of sites, you may want to use a tool to speed this process up. While creating posts in WordPress is easy, it does take some time. There are several programs that will bulk import posts from Word or text files in a folder and automatically schedule them to publish at intervals that you specify.

One of those programs that I’ve used is Blogsense. It does a lot more than just that, but the “drop posting” is just one feature of of the program. This is a script that you install on your own hosting and it integrates with WordPress sites, both single domain installations as well as those using the WordPress Multi Site feature.

Posting to Multiple WordPress Blogs

But let’s say that the thought of creating content for a year is too overwhelming and you have several sites on WordPress and you want to be able to easily post to them rather than logging in online to the backend of each of them.

If you’ve dug around the backend of your WordPress site, you have very likely seen the option to post by email. That is one option, but there is also another way to post from a desktop program to multiple blogs and that is by using a program that utilizes XML-RPC.

What is XML-RPC?

The definition from XML-RPC.com is:

It’s a spec and a set of implementations that allow software running on disparate operating systems, running in different environments to make procedure calls over the Internet.
It’s remote procedure calling using HTTP as the transport and XML as the encoding. XML-RPC is designed to be as simple as possible, while allowing complex data structures to be transmitted, processed and returned.

The nontechy answer is that it lets you send information from one platform to another.

Have you ever wondered how services like Ping.FM, Amplify, Posterous, and plugins like wordpress syndicator and Backlink Energizer work their magic? It is by using the XML-RPC protocol.

Unless if you are planning on creating programs or plugins yourself, you don’t really need to know “how” it works. You just need to know how to enable the protocol on your web sites.

Enabling XML-RPC on WordPress

Enabling XML-RPC on WordPress to allow remote posting couldn’t be simpler.

Just log into your back end.
Go to Settings
Click on “Writing”
Under “Remote Publishing” on the Writing tag, check the boxes by “Atom Publishing” and “XML-RPC.”

You are all set for remote publishing on your site.

If you are using a different platform, such as Joomla, the procedure is a little different, and it depends on which version you are using: 1.0, 1.5 or 1.6. Installations using 1.0 or 1.5 will have to enable a plugin to use XML-RPC posting. According to the 1.6 documentation, XML-RPC is native if it is enabled for the individual components.

Free Tool for Posting to Multiple Blogs

Windows Live Writer is a free (yes, a free program from Microsoft . . . imagine that!) desktop application that allows you to write articles/posts in the program and post to a web site online that has the XML-RPC protocol enabled.

The program makes composing as easy as writing in MS Word, but unlike Word, it doesn’t insert miles of crap code in your HTML files.

TIP: *Never* paste something directly from Microsoft Word into anything that is going on the web.  The pseudo code and code bloat is horrendous.  It will override your site’s design styles and can even break the layout.

The other cool thing about the program is that once you set up the program to access your blog, it will pull your CSS and design files so that what you see while you are typing is the way it will actually look on your site. (See the screenshot below of this post as I wrote it in Live Writer.)

Now for a lot of my niche sites, I plan out a content strategy and how it is going to be themed, create the content in bulk, and then schedule out the posts. Most of the time I do this in the backend of the site, although I could do this with Live Writer as well as it will let you set the category, post date, tags, etc.

But I’m usually doing some other work in the back end at the same time, so I just add the posts while I’m there.

What I do use Live Writer a lot for are my sites that are more contemporaneous. For example, this site, my business and family blogs, and a couple of other sites I publish with friends. While I may have posts scheduled out, I also want to be able to easily publish posts on the fly, and Live Writer makes that really easy.

How easy you ask? Well, my third grader actually published a post on my business blog about our family Christmas . . . horrible pictures and all (you know the ones where you just woke up taken by an 8 year old.)

She told me she was writing a story about our family. (They do that at her school. They start them journaling the first day of kindergarten.)

I said, “Awesome!”

I thought she was just writing it in Word.

Oh no, somehow she opened Live Writer. The last post I had written was to my business blog. She finished and hit “publish” and off it went.

And since I have my sites set up to automatically push to a ton of other sites (RSS directories, blog directories, 2.0 and social media sites, Facebook, LinkedIn . . . ) it was off and spread to the four corners of the internet before I even realized it.

The two moral’s to this story are:

Yes, Live Writer really is so easy that even a third grader can use it.
I will never again leave a picture on my computer that I wouldn’t want slapped up on the internet equivalent of a billboard. If it’s unflattering . . . it gets deleted. Otherwise, you never know where it may end up.

Back to Using Live Writer

Enough of the story.

Configuring Live Writer to post to your blog is actually pretty straightforward.

First, you have to enable the XML-RPC protocol as explained previously in this post.

Next, you just need to configure the program to communicate with your blog. If you click on the little drop down next to the “publish” icon, you will see a option to “add blog account.”

Then it will ask you what type of platform your blog is on.

Then enter the url of your blog along with the user name and password for your WordPress user account.

Once you enter in the blog information, Life Writer will “talk” with your blog and get the information.

Once it has successfully connected to the blog, it will ask you if you want to publish a temporary post to the site so that it can download the theme information. If you want to be able to see how your post will look while you are writing, click yes.

Once that is completed, you have the option to save the information and switch to that blog.

Now the basic program right out of the box is pretty cool; however, there are a ton of plugins for the Live Writer program that can really extend the functionality. You can browse through the directory to get some ideas, but I did one to point out one that relates to this post topic.

How to Post to Multiple Blogs Simultaneously

One of the other questions that is frequently asked is “how to post to multiple blog simultaneously.”

Now there are a ton of ways to do this. Ping.FM, Hello.txt, Posterous, and Amplify are all designed to allow you to publish once and post across many accounts.

wp syndicator is a WordPress plugin that will auto post content from your site across multiple 2.0 accounts.

Sick Submitter and Article Marketing Robot both allow you to add multiple blog accounts to post to.

There is even a Facebook application called BlogIt that allows you to update multiple accounts like TypePad, Vox, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Blogger, Tumblr, WordPress.com or WordPress.org, Pounce, Twitter, et al from Facebook. (Why you would do something like this with Facebook, I have no idea . . . but whatever floats your boat.)

However, since this post is primarily about Live Writer, there is also a plugin called vCrossPost that will allow you to create your content in Live Writer and then post to multiple blogs via Ping.FM.

Now if you need to spin content or anchor text, it would probably be better to go with something like Sick Submitter or Article Marketing Robot. But if not and you are looking for something easy and free, Windows Live Writer might be your best bet.