Paying it forward

Fenrir

Fenrir

New member
Apr 23, 2008
40
1
0
My name is Fenrir and I enjoy long walks on the beach...... oops wrong site.

So I'm a noob and have been a wicked fire lurker for a couple of years now. I've gotten a lot of information / entertainment on this forum and and have kinda treated this place as a hobby as I love to read about and learn new things. I've recently decided to take the plunge and and try to carve out a career for myself with AM.

Since I have learned a lot from this forum I decided that on my first project(s) I will go ahead and post a journal of my progress here in hopes that it might help other aspiring AMers. I also have hopes that in the process I will be able to bounce some of my ideas and thought processes off of others here and gain some valuable insight into the process of becoming successful at this. I will update this as frequently as possible on the condition I actually have something interesting to say.

The start of the journey - Research
I intend to begin with SEO and attempting to obtain organic traffic as I don't have a lot of excess cash to invest in this, I do however have time. In my eyes I believe that the research phase is probably the most important. I did start one blog a few months ago and after doing some work on it I learned a lot and realized that I had picked a pretty bad product to attempt to market. The keyword I chose to target had less than 500 exact searches per month and the allintitle had 3,000. I've pretty much scrapped that one for now and have allocated it for testing.

(The following step I completed about a week ago)
The new site I am working on is a fitness themed site. I've decided to use Amazon to monetize this blog, it will be centered around a type of item that you would purchase for a fitness facility or home gym . I intend to review products on the blog and implement an Amazon store. The research I have conducted is as follows.


  • I browsed Amazon best selling items and selected a product to research - keywords, searches and competition (I had to go through several products before I found one I was interested in pursuing.


  • I used the google adwords tool to research searches per month for keyword variations with my product name in it. I found one that is 3 words long with 2,900 exact searches per month.


  • I did a allintitle:"keywordhere" search in order to see how many sites are out there that have the exact keyword I am after in their title. I think this is a good indicator of how many sites out their are targeting this as their main keyword. The search returned 670 websites.
I began looking at the sites in the top 10 to attempt to gauge how difficult it would be to beat them.​

  • #1 This one is a straight up amazon store, my SeoBook toolbar shows that it has 157M backlinks. This has me a little perplexed, is this actually ran by amazon?

  • #2 This website has 597 banklinks. The website has very little onpage optimization from what I can tell. It is another site that is in a store format with little to no content. The backlinks look to be a mix of blog posts/articles/directories. Nothing here seems too intimidating.

  • #3 This is the same website as #2, just another page.

  • #4 This website is another blog, it is exactkeywordmatch.net It has about 5 product reviews on it that are around 100-200 words each. They are also attempting to monetize traffic through amazon. This website shows 0 backlinks.
I didn't look any further since # 4 looks very easily beatable and #2 and #3 look very possible. At this point the last thing I needed to do is check to see if I can find a decent domain name. I went over to godaddy.com and began searching. I ended up settling on exactkeywordonline.com. With this my research phase was complete.

I still have alot more to post to catch this journal up to where I am currently but I'm out of time for now. I plan to add to this within the next day or so and get it current. Hopefully I haven't put you guys asleep with this already. Feel free to add your opinions to what I have done already or correct me if something I did was done incorrectly or if there was something else I could have done in my research.

TL;DR : I'm a noob documenting the process of not being a noob anymore and attempt to start a helpful thread for others to follow. Tools/techniques used: Amazon bestseller research, Google adwords, allintitle search, Seobook toolbar for checking competitor backlinks.
 


PART 2 - if you build it they will come (hopefully)

So I've grabbed some hosting over at hostgator and got wordpress installed on the site. I found a nice free photo of my product and created a decent header using Xheader, I've also done some work on the theme in order to make the site looks more appealing and not entirely bloggish.

I've added 5 articles so far, the first 2 articles are stickied to show up on the front page. The first article is a general "what the site is all about" and the second article is a "benefits of this product and why you need one". Both of the articles use my main keyword a couple of times to help my on page.

The other 3 articles are all product reviews of different models of my product, I've basically been reading Amazon editorial reviews + consumer reviews and manually spinning them into a review (not very good ones yet, I need to practice this). I've also made a amazon store and added it on a page labeled store with an inline frame. This gives my users two ways to shop, they can either read my articles which have product links in them or they can go directly to my stores and browse.

After I published each of my articles I went through and did some social bookmarking and RSS submits. I used socialmarker for the bookmarking, I did about 20 SB's per post, most of them were from dofollow sites. The rss I did about 10 or so for each article.

This has gotten me up to about 111 according to rank checker.

Plugins I'm using on my site:
AllinOne Seo
CBnets ping obtimizer
Custom Post Order
Exclude pages from navigation(this is for excluding my about/ftc disclosure/privacy,contact pages from the navigation bar. I have added links to the pages in the footer.)
Google XML sitemaps
Statcounter Plugin
Sticky Manager.

I've also ordered one bookmarking package from mohsin on the BST forum and received about 150 SB. At the same time I did this I also added my about,privacy,ftc disclosure,contact pages and dropped to 139.

So far I am getting between 1-5 uniques per day from bookmarking connects. More updates to come.

I'm wondering how effective the Amazon stores are, but I'll worry about that once I start getting some traffic.
 
It sounds like you're off to a pretty good start as far as your planning and execution. I can't find fault with your plan...in fact it is pretty close to what I am doing with a duo of product sites I've been working on recently.

With wordpress 3, that exclude pages plugin is unnecessary since you can make a custom nav from the wp admin.
http://www.wickedfire.com/traffic-content/107247-optimizing-wordpress-mini-site.html#post1056627

I've never tried the Amazon store, building out custom product pages instead.
A friend of mine put one on a site and it did very well last year during the holidays.
 
DanWesson said:
It sounds like you're off to a pretty good start as far as your planning and execution. I can't find fault with your plan...in fact it is pretty close to what I am doing with a duo of product sites I've been working on recently.

With wordpress 3, that exclude pages plugin is unnecessary since you can make a custom nav from the wp admin.
http://www.wickedfire.com/traffic-content/107247-optimizing-wordpress-mini-site.html#post1056627

I've never tried the Amazon store, building out custom product pages instead.
A friend of mine put one on a site and it did very well last year during the holidays.
Click to expand...
Thanks, that is kinda what I was hoping with the Amazon store. My product is one that will have crazy interest from December - February or so (New Years resolutions). It will be nice to have both the product reviews and the store, hopefully between the 2 everyone will find something they want to click.
 
I did a allintitle:"keywordhere" search in order to see how many sites are out there that have the exact keyword I am after in their title. I think this is a good indicator of how many sites out their are targeting this as their main keyword.
Click to expand...

I never understood the logic behind doing allintitle searches to gauge competition when most ordinary searchers aren't going to be doing allintitle searches.

Isn't it better to simply look at the top results for a broad keyword search?
 
This is how I see it.
Examining the top 10 in the SERPs allows you to make a decision on how difficult/easy/impossible you think it will be to outrank any of those sites.

As for the allintitle, it shows how many of those pages are actually specifically targeting that phrase. This can give a decent gauge on how competitive that particular phrase is.

I have seen certain phrases where the allintitle result showed more pages than the broad search for the same phrase. This would indicate an extremely competitive phrase.

Along with a couple of other quick checks, I use allintitle as a quick way to cull down a large list of keywords to determine which ones I want to spend time on.
 
Great start for sure!

For my sites I just set one of the pages as static front page, you can do that in Settings, just like DanWesson said. This way you have full control over your homepage.

I don't know how much money you are willing to spend at this point on backlinking, but I found that instead of purchasing services from BST, you just need a tool that can make most of types of links.

So, I started using Magic Submitter a couple weeks ago. Someone from this forum recommended it, I tried it out and I love it. You can create bookmarks, web 2.0 posts, article directory submissions, forum profiles, etc. with it. It is 5 bucks for 1st month and $67/mo after that. Since it is CB product you can get it for half price, if you buy it through your own affiliate link. I know it sounds sketchy, but when you are starting out, it is better keep the expenses down as much as possible.
 
Andrey said:
Great start for sure!



So, I started using Magic Submitter a couple weeks ago. Someone from this forum recommended it, I tried it out and I love it. You can create bookmarks, web 2.0 posts, article directory submissions, forum profiles, etc. with it. It is 5 bucks for 1st month and $67/mo after that. Since it is CB product you can get it for half price, if you buy it through your own affiliate link. I know it sounds sketchy, but when you are starting out, it is better keep the expenses down as much as possible.
Click to expand...

Thanks man, I'll take a look at it. If it isn't something I grab right now I will keep it in mind for down the road.

Small update - went through my content and rewrote some of my articles with better keyword usage. Rankchecker currently shows 146. Over the next couple of days I'll be adding more content and starting work on my linkbuilding campain.
 
So the site has dropped down to 156. Today I added new content into it and removed my amazon store temporarily. The site currently has 5 back links showing and has a decent amount of unique content focused around my keyword and LSI keywords.

I feel like it should be ranking higher at this point. The only thing I can think of that is causing it to drop would be the Amazon store so that's why I removed it to test if the ranking would jump. In the meantime I'm going to keep throwing content and back links at it.
 
Quick update - Just ran rank checker and I am now up to 19 from 156 for the main keyword. Looks like the Astore was my problem.
 
You have a new site, you are definitely going to bounce around. Keep your link building up and make sure you are specifically targeting your primary keyword with anchor text the vast majority of the time.

Sounds like you are doing well, good job!
 
Fenrir said:
Quick update - Just ran rank checker and I am now up to 19 from 156 for the main keyword. Looks like the Astore was my problem.
Click to expand...

And if you are 204 next week what will you change then?

As PHPGator said, new sites move about quite a bit...it's normal. Changes on your site can take 2-4 weeks to affect rankings, so you shouldn't start making large changes too often in reaction to ranking position. Just keep adding content and building links. Then build more links, and when you are done with that build some more links.

I'd guess your site might have made similar moves with or without the a store.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom
Back