$10K by Christmas - Newbie Journal

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needthatscrilla

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Aug 16, 2010
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"Procrastination is like masturbation. In the end, you're only fucking yourself." I'm done fucking myself. It's time I take what I know from trolling these forums and put it to use.

This will be my newbie journal. I will track my progress and ask any questions I may have in here. The end goal is $10K by Christmas.

The main keyword I'm gunnin' for 1st page for is xxx xxx, which is a specific product. The secondary keyword I'll be gunnin' for 1st page for is cheap xxx xxx. The main keyword has 368,000 global searches a month. The secondary keyword has 6,600 global searches a month.

29208wl.jpg

(1st row: main keyword, 2nd row: secondary keyword)

I'm shooting to take over the #3 position for the main keyword. Why? Because in the #1 and #2 positions is the website for the products actual distributor.

SEOQuakes tells me #3 has 331 pages indexed on Google, 648 Yahoo links, 776 Yahoo linkdomains, and 141 pages indexed on Bing.

Looking over the backlinks for #3, it appears that they did quite a bit of blog commenting. Although, a lot of what I skimmed looked to be comments mediocre in content on sites whose content is not even relevant to the product. Moreover, it looked like they went for quantity, rather than quality backlinks. The majority of the sites they posted blog comments on do not have a page rank. So, it should be fairly easy for me to replicate the same backlink strategy, but 10-fold and of better quality.

Questions—

  • I'm having trouble picking a domain name. Should I just go for any .com that includes the main keyword? Do hyphens between words have any negative effect SEO-wise, i.e cheap-xxx-xxx.com?
  • Does anyone have a quick run down of how things I need to include in every blog post so that they are properly optimized? I remember seeing something like a cheat sheet that ran down a list of things like bold the keyword twice, use the keyword in the first 150 words of your blog, etc.
Goals (to be completed by 8/29)—

  • Set up Wordpress on Xampp to test/tweak Wordpress designs
  • Write 15 blog posts that employ proper SEO techniques to rank for main keyword that I will have drip feed 3 posts/week
  • Look into best way to monetize the site
Already completed—

  • 5 blog posts, but I will need to go over them to make sure they're properly optimized
I am a FT college student, so I will be working on this mostly at night, hence my long time frames to complete tasks that to many would be relatively easy to knock out. Let's do this!

Karatekid_vs_gangsta.gif

(I'm the karate kid. Dude in black is current #3)
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Exact and phrase search numbers are important, global doesnt really mean anything. Aim for at least 4-5k exact searches a month.

If you can get an exact k1k2 or k1-k2 domain people find they generally gain rankings faster.
 
research all related keywords to your main ones, and write blog posts for each keyword. Start from the bottom of your list, on the super low competition keywords, and systematically get each one ranked on the front page. In each blog post, link to your main domain/page you want to rank for your main keyword with your keyword as the anchor.

Build links to each of those low volume keywords until they rank. Work on maybe 5 blog posts at a time to keep yourself fresh.
 
SimonD said:
Exact and phrase search numbers are important, global doesnt really mean anything. Aim for at least 4-5k exact searches a month.

If you can get an exact k1k2 or k1-k2 domain people find they generally gain rankings faster.
Click to expand...

xc6mas.jpg

(Phrase)

288t8cg.jpg

(Exact)

Would it still be worthwhile to work on ranking for the secondary keyword, considering it falls short of that 4K - 5K in both phrase and exact?

And, with regards to the domain, I'm a bit eh. It just looks spammy to me to have a domain like k1k2 or k1-k2. For example, say the product was bird cages. Your main keyword is "bird cages" and your secondary is "cheap bird cages." It looks spammy to me for the domain to be birdcagescheapbirdcages.com or birdcage-cheapbirdcages.com. Should I not give a fuck and just do that anyway?
​
 
dchuk said:
research all related keywords to your main ones, and write blog posts for each keyword. Start from the bottom of your list, on the super low competition keywords, and systematically get each one ranked on the front page. In each blog post, link to your main domain/page you want to rank for your main keyword with your keyword as the anchor.

Build links to each of those low volume keywords until they rank. Work on maybe 5 blog posts at a time to keep yourself fresh.
Click to expand...

I used Google's Keyword Tool to find related keywords that have significant volume, but not as much as my main keyword. I have a list of 16 keywords that I can work on getting ranked for. I'm running them through Market Samurai to get a gauge on which keywords would be worth getting ranked for by looking at the search volume + SEOTCR. There are a few with a SEOTCR over 100%, which I'm taking to mean that the market for that particular keyword is pretty saturated. Should I cut those keywords out of my list?

I actually started the exact opposite of the way you suggested. I went ahead and made 5 blog posts with my main keyword, but I can easily work on getting blog posts up with those related keywords with lower search volumes.

EDIT: I cut out 3 keywords from my list, leaving me with 13 total. I will try to write 5 blog posts for each keyword, which should give me 65 total pages of content with 60 pages of content pointing towards my main domain for my main keyword. I'm assuming the point of that is that the first page rankings of those related, but lower search volume keywords linking to the main page will allow that main page to piggy back and climb up the Google ranks?
 
By kw1kw2 I meant if your phrase is bird cages you would ideally want birdcages.com. Seeing as you are using market samurai you really need to use the SEO Competition module that analyzes the top 10 for you. An SEOC of 200k is very high - it isnt the most exact indicator but I know that the market samurai educational material recommends starting with KWs that have less than 30k SEOC. Check out the top 10 though, that is your most important consideration - if it is a bunch of PR5 sites with 100s or 1000s of backlinks then move on.
 
I apologize for the crude diagram in advance. Just wanted to whip something up to see if I had the concept down correctly that dchuk was explaining to me.

21o2azs.jpg


The way I understand it is I will write 5 blog posts per each low volume keyword that is related to my main keyword. After I get all of those blog posts written, I will work on backlinks for each of those blog posts. Within those blog posts, I will link to the main domain/keyword (signified with the red lines) using my main keyword as the anchor text. The point being that as I rank higher and higher for those low volume keywords, the link juice (am I using that correctly?) will allow my main domain to climb as well. Is that correct?
​
 
SimonD said:
By kw1kw2 I meant if your phrase is bird cages you would ideally want birdcages.com. Seeing as you are using market samurai you really need to use the SEO Competition module that analyzes the top 10 for you. An SEOC of 200k is very high - it isnt the most exact indicator but I know that the market samurai educational material recommends starting with KWs that have less than 30k SEOC. Check out the top 10 though, that is your most important consideration - if it is a bunch of PR5 sites with 100s or 1000s of backlinks then move on.
Click to expand...

The highest PR in the top 10 for my keyword is 4. Only the site that is the actual distributor of the product has more than 1K backlinks and it is sitting at #1. I'm pretty confident that I can scale this niche and land front page for the main keyword as long as I put the necessary work in, which I'm hoping this journal will keep me motivated to do.
 
A couple of things...

1) In your diagram you have backlinks going to low-volume keywords. It should be low competition keywords.

The aim is to rank quickly for the low-cometition keywords to get some traffic while building relevance to your main target phrase

2) I know the Market Samurai training talks about using SEOTCR but it's only useful if you're comparing two sites with either the same SEOC or SEOT scores. I normally ignore this.

Consider my shitty example...

Keyword A has SEOC of 10,000,000 and SEOT of 1,000,000
Keyword B has SEOC of 100 and SEOT of 10

According to the Market Samurai, with an SEOTCR of 10%, they're equally as competitive keywords to target.... Bollocks!

Here's an actual example. Apparently dog training is considerably more competitive than insurance

20100824-bu2xcae355fyjmjdsyn9e95hf7.jpg


3) SEOC is also a load of rubbish. Who cares how many pages mention the words in your phrase somewhere on their page in any order.

SEOC may be useful if you have nothing better to work from, but you do... you have SEOT.

You also have the SEO competition which is the best thing to use and should always be what you use to determine whether a keyword is go or no-go.

Market Samurai is an awesome tool but you need to remember what each of the values in the boxes actually represents in reality and also where that data is being pulled from.
 
dchuk said:
research all related keywords to your main ones, and write blog posts for each keyword. Start from the bottom of your list, on the super low competition keywords, and systematically get each one ranked on the front page. In each blog post, link to your main domain/page you want to rank for your main keyword with your keyword as the anchor.

Build links to each of those low volume keywords until they rank. Work on maybe 5 blog posts at a time to keep yourself fresh.
Click to expand...

Yes! This is exactly how I approach it.

One thing to add is that I also do keyword research for the category names, and build backlinks to the categories as well. Especially when I'll have a ton of posts and won't have time to backlink to all of them.

Main kw: baby shoes

category 1: Brass baby shoes
post 1: cute brass baby shoes
post 2: how to make brass baby shoes
post 3: decorative brass baby shoes

category 2: name brand baby shoes
post 1: nike baby shoes
post 2: adidas baby shoes
post 3: converse baby shoes

category 3: leather baby shoes
post 1: brown leather baby shoes
post 2: black leather baby shoes
post 3...

etc. I just made all those kw's up as an example.

About your last post with the diagram (can't quote it cuz I just wrote the above shit), yeah that sounds pretty good. You can also include a link to the very same post you're writing, using its keyword as anchor text. If the post you're currently writing is about brown leather baby shoes, then in one of the occurrences of that keyword you can make it a hyperlink ... so the post links to itself. I assume it has nothing to dowith link juice, but helps your post become associated with that keyword so it ranks for it. In the same way that in the Shooting the shit section we often try to make a thread rank for someone's name by linking inside the thread itself, using the person's name as anchor text.
 
You also have the SEO competition which is the best thing to use and should always be what you use to determine whether a keyword is go or no-go.
Click to expand...
I didn't mean to completely contradict myself... By SEO competition, I mean the actual SEO competition module
 
iamjon said:
A couple of things...

1) In your diagram you have backlinks going to low-volume keywords. It should be low competition keywords.

The aim is to rank quickly for the low-cometition keywords to get some traffic while building relevance to your main target phrase

...

You also have the SEO competition which is the best thing to use and should always be what you use to determine whether a keyword is go or no-go.

Market Samurai is an awesome tool but you need to remember what each of the values in the boxes actually represents in reality and also where that data is being pulled from.
Click to expand...

Oops! I guess that makes more sense to rank quickly for low competition keywords, rather than low volume. That being said, how should I go about cutting out keywords? Or, should I just say fuck it and rank for all the related keywords I can? Or, is that just creating more unnecessary work for me?

Another thing, what's the best way to search for all related keywords? I've just been using the Google Keyword Tool which only suggested those original 16 keywords after I cut out keywords that didn't really seem relevant to what I will be selling.

Bombastic said:
Yes! This is exactly how I approach it.

One thing to add is that I also do keyword research for the category names, and build backlinks to the categories as well. Especially when I'll have a ton of posts and won't have time to backlink to all of them.

Main kw: baby shoes

category 1: Brass baby shoes
post 1: cute brass baby shoes
post 2: how to make brass baby shoes
post 3: decorative brass baby shoes

category 2: name brand baby shoes
post 1: nike baby shoes
post 2: adidas baby shoes
post 3: converse baby shoes

category 3: leather baby shoes
post 1: brown leather baby shoes
post 2: black leather baby shoes
post 3...

etc. I just made all those kw's up as an example.

About your last post with the diagram (can't quote it cuz I just wrote the above shit), yeah that sounds pretty good. You can also include a link to the very same post you're writing, using its keyword as anchor text. If the post you're currently writing is about brown leather baby shoes, then in one of the occurrences of that keyword you can make it a hyperlink ... so the post links to itself. I assume it has nothing to dowith link juice, but helps your post become associated with that keyword so it ranks for it. In the same way that in the Shooting the shit section we often try to make a thread rank for someone's name by linking inside the thread itself, using the person's name as anchor text.
Click to expand...

I never even thought to link to the article within the article, although I guess it makes sense. Should I be doing that within all of my articles, or just a few? The thing I want to avoid is the site coming across as spam because of all the hyperlinks, but I guess that fear is coming from the fact that I'm acting as if I'm the demographic that'll be visiting the site and I know lots of hyperlinks immediately make me press back or go somewhere else.

Now, about categories... I could do something similar to what you did with the baby shoes example, but I don't think the specific categories get a lot of searches, and I'm assuming that matters.

That being said, I had a question: Hypothetically, if I wanted to begin building backlinks to my main domain ASAP, could I do so? Like, while I setup Wordpress on Xamp and tweak site design, could I also start working on link building? I wasn't going to do this, because I want to work on writing content first, but I was just wondering if that'd work because I know it takes a while for Google and Yahoo site explorer to index those links.
 
needthatscrilla said:
I never even thought to link to the article within the article, although I guess it makes sense. Should I be doing that within all of my articles, or just a few?
Click to expand...
It`s probably not such a big deal, it`s just another way to optimize for your keyword. But linking within your site, whether like that or from one post to another when the appropriate keyword comes up, all helps.

needthatscrilla said:
Hypothetically, if I wanted to begin building backlinks to my main domain ASAP, could I do so? Like, while I setup Wordpress on Xamp and tweak site design, could I also start working on link building? I wasn't going to do this, because I want to work on writing content first, but I was just wondering if that'd work because I know it takes a while for Google and Yahoo site explorer to index those links.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I think it`s fine. Don`t go crazy on the links at first, but it`s good to build up your links gradually as the site grows. That looks natural to the search engines.
 
Don't build links until your site is on its server.

You need to remember that you can rank 1 blog post for many keywords, but you can't rank many posts for 1 keyword. So you want to generate really huge keyword lists of all kinds of variations of your keywords, and blog about each one, focusing directly on each one specifically. The competition will be very low, and you should be able to start popping them up on the front page 1 by 1 pretty quickly.

So what I meant by doing 5 at once is pick 5 keywords, write 5 articles, post them all to your blog, and build links to each of them to get them ranking. It just helps with your sanity a bit :)

SEO takes time. You're trying to build up trust with Google. They don't trust you yet. But they are able to know a shit ton about your site, so as you start ranking keywords 1 by 1 on the front page, they're going to notice you're getting traffic for those keywords, and that you probably deserve traffic for other, more difficult ones.

It's simply SEO Siloing. It's an old technique, and there's more to it than what I'm describing, but it does work very well, and you get the benefit of traffic much earlier on than gunning for the big keywords first.
 
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Some more shit to think about:

Study Mahalo, eHow, About.com...they have their sites setup so that they can pretty much crush low comp keywords. Look at how they structure their content.

Listen to Bombastic, he knows his shit
 
needthatscrilla said:

Questions—

  • I'm having trouble picking a domain name. Should I just go for any .com that includes the main keyword? Do hyphens between words have any negative effect SEO-wise, i.e cheap-xxx-xxx.com?
Click to expand...

Didn't see this mentioned here but make sure it's ok with the company if you use the main product in the domain. A lot of times it's against their TOS and all that hardwork will void when it's time to get paid.
 
Bombastic said:
Yeah, I think it`s fine. Don`t go crazy on the links at first, but it`s good to build up your links gradually as the site grows. That looks natural to the search engines.
Click to expand...

This actually touches on a question I had. I know Google gets upset when you build lots of links very fast because they see it as spammy. What would be a good link building routine for me to partake in? Is 50 backlinks/day for a week too many links? Should I space the days I work on link building? My goal is to get over 1K backlinks within a month. Is that something I shouldn't do?

dchuk said:
SEO takes time. You're trying to build up trust with Google. They don't trust you yet. But they are able to know a shit ton about your site, so as you start ranking keywords 1 by 1 on the front page, they're going to notice you're getting traffic for those keywords, and that you probably deserve traffic for other, more difficult ones.
Click to expand...

This had a light bulb going off over my head. Thanks for working it the way you did, and for bolding that last part. I know you said to pick 5 keywords and write 5 articles for 'em optimized for low competition keywords for my sanity, but I think I'm just going to dive in and write 3 - 5 articles per keyword. I will just have to be meticulous getting backlinks for those articles. Unless you advise I just go with 1 article/low competition keyword?

pocketrockets said:
Didn't see this mentioned here but make sure it's ok with the company if you use the main product in the domain. A lot of times it's against their TOS and all that hardwork will void when it's time to get paid.
Click to expand...

Thanks for lookin' out, homie. Should I assume if the #3 site for the main keyword has the product name in its URL that the company does not mind? Or, should I look further into it. Thing is, I don't know how it'd be worded. I was just looking at the company's TOS and couldn't find anything specifically saying otherwise. Any tips?
 
Never mind about the 3 - 5 articles/keyword. I've got 41 related keywords total that have low competition, but a relatively high search volume. I will begin with the one with the lowest competition and work my way up.
 
Day #2

So, today was relatively low key. I did, however, write 5 articles optimized for 5 low competition keywords per the advice of dchuk. Rather than write 15 articles by this Sunday, I have decided to commit to 5 articles per day until Sunday. I want to hit the ground running with regards to content and 3 articles per week is not hitting the ground running, it's hitting the ground crawling. If I stick to that goal, I will have 35 articles written by Sunday. Coupled with my goal of having the domain registered, Wordpress design done in Xamp to transfer over (not sure how to do that, so I'll need some help), and hosting set up by Sunday, too, I can drip feed 1 post a day for roughly a month while I work on link building and writing more content.

I had a few questions, though.

  • How often should I link to the main domain/keyword in each secondary keyword's article?
  • Do you see any problems with me putting a signature of sorts to each of my blog posts that have links to the page where visitors can browse the products I'm selling? For example:
Not what you were looking for?
Get more info and browse more [product page link] here!


  • I asked this before, but how many backlinks per day should I be working towards to make substantial headway in a short amount of time in that regards all while avoiding looking spammy to Google?
  • I asked this before, too, but I need to figure out a domain name and have yet to land on a good one. I was thinking I could do something like buy-cheap-xxx-xxx.com, but like I was saying before, I didn't know it hyphens fucked things up SEO-wise. However, that domain would incorporate my main keyword and secondary keyword, so if that's advisable, I'll go ahead and purchase it.
  • Anyone have any tips on how to find relevant forums, blogs, etc. with a high PR that I could leave my link on? I have been using a pretty tedious method to do so which basically goes like this:
Go to Google
Search for: "main keyword" inurl:blog (or forum)
Use SEOQuake's tool to index the search results by PR

However, SEOQuake only ranks PR for the search results on the immediate page. I tried using AutoPager which allows you to put a lot of Google pages on one page, but SEOQuake only gives info for the original page and I don't know a way around this.

  • I was reading a blog that said leaving links on sites with a PR 2+ is really good because most people leave their links on sites with a PR of 0. Looking at my competition, this definitely rings true. They have 3 sites linking to them with a PR of 6. A few with a PR of 3, and the rest are 1s or 0s. So, I can only imagine if the former is true that if I start planting links on sites with PRs that have a PR of 2+ more than I do on those with PRs of 0 or 1 I will only do myself good.
That's it for questions, but I do have a something a tad bit off topic I want to share. Today while browsing my university's bookstore, I came across two books: The Greatest Salesmen in the World and The Greatest Salesmen in the World, Part II, The End of the Story.

I'm only a little bit of the way through the first so I don't have much of a summary to leave you with, but I do have one of the most motivational quotes I've ever read in my entire life. I'm actually going to print it out, mat it and frame it so I can constantly look at it. That quote is this:

I will persist until I succeed.

I was not delivered into this world into defeat, nor does failure course my veins. I am not a sheep waiting to be prodded by my shepherd. I am a lion and I refuse to talk, walk, to sleep with the sheep.

The slaughterhouse of failure is not my destiny.

I will persist until I succeed.

Figured I'd share because I know that little quotes such as these give me the motivation I need to write those final 2 articles for the day, or see the good in spending all this time writing about shit other people would find me weird for writing about. Hope someone out there finds the quote as motivational as I did!
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