phoenixrising journal

phoenixrising

phoenixrising

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Apr 14, 2010
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San Diego
Alright fuck it, journal time. Will be good to get my thoughts out of my head and onto some (digital) paper. I'm 1.5 weeks into IM and here's what's gone down.

What I've done so far:

Day 1: identified what I thought to be an average competition niche, did top 5-10 analysis and determined that in time I would learn enough and be able to outrank them because they weren't fully optimized for the keyword / didn't have a lot of backlinks. I registered the exact match .org, threw on wordpress 3.0 and themed/plugin'd it out and wrote my first content post.

Since then, I've written 7 more articles and schedule posted them in over this last week. I stickied the article I hope to convert the most onto the front page, and did some manual social bookmarking.

Quickly realized that this seemed to be something that could be outsourced for less than the cost of my time, and overall it didn't seem like something that would be a necessary skill...could be wrong though.

Where I am now:

I'm waiting on the social bookmarking to complete, and checking on the site daily with the Piwik open source stats that I tossed onto the site. In the meantime, I identified another niche that I think I can dominate and just so happen to enjoy quite a bit. I've registered the exact-match.org domain, written 2 articles and optimized theme a bit.

Some shit I don't know:

The strategy I used on my 2nd site was to pick a broader keyword for the niche as my domain name and homepage, and then create WP categories for slightly less competitive subniches within the niche, and then plan to write articles that target as many long tails as I can (without writing shit redundant content).

If my site structure is kind of like:

main-kw.org/subniche-keyword(categories)/long-ass-tail-keyword(posts)

is that a solid structure? Also how to tags come into play, currently I don't use them at all.

If you read this, thanks a ton.

-pr
 


Today:

Learned a bunch of CSS. I'm going through CSS: The Missing Manual cover to cover.

Used some of the CSS I learned to customize my WP themes a little bit, but I still need to learn and practice more.

Got my first legit comment on a blog by someone who apparently loved the articles, and also did some niche research to come up with some other potentially profitable markets.

Social bookmarking on my first site was done (by lalit_burma from WF, I'd recommend their services).

This Weekend:
1. Work my way through CSS: The Missing Manual
2. Create ezinearticle/etc account for my site, post articles to those sites to get more links and traffic juice.
3. Work on 7-10 articles for my 2nd site so I can drop those in each day or so.
4. Customize themes, add plugins.

Anyone know of a good site that helps you to choose color palettes for your sites? I have no skills in that area yet.
 
kuler

colourlovers.com/

for some color stuff. Pick a theme that you like and you have all the colors that are a nice match to use.

hf with that
 
if you're trying to learn web design, keep studying CSS and PHP, etc. If you're trying to learn IM, buy yourself a theme at themeforest and then just start pushing content and links. CSS won't make you money at this stage, and that's what you care about.
 
Thanks thekaine.

dchuk, I'm currently using atahualpa 3.5.1 free theme for wordpress that seems to have a ton of customization options. I'm learning CSS and PHP just for pure interest in addition to the articles and links stuff that I'll be doing.
 
Today:

1. Redesigned sites using Kuler to pick what I think are some niche-targetedish color palettes, formatted CSS a bit to make the pages more attractive and easier to find content that I want them to read.

2. Created a yahoo email address for my 'character' that I have running my niche site, registered the character with ezinearticles and submitted an article. Ezine is one of the best directories, right? I assume they do some kind of plagiarization check, but if my article is similar to my own website do they have a problem with that? If so, I can always delete my post and repost it after approval.

3. Wrote some more articles.

Questions:

1. Is there an easier way to register for email addresses, article directories, etc that I can learn how to do? I want to accumulate an extremely solid base of knowledge, so I'm fine spending a ton of time learning how to automate stuff so I can do it in the future in whatever way I want to.

2. Best way to learn PHP? I've gone through tizag.com tutorial, but I do a lot better when I'm doing and deciphering how what I'm doing is affecting the result. Are there any good books or maybe a basic project I could work on?
 
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Today:

2 July 4th bbq's = overate like a true american. back to surfing/cutting tomorrow!

1. Looks like the first site I created is now #11 on G (up 6 spots from #17) and #3 on Yahoo (up infinity spots from nonindexed). Dunno how I got that high on Yahoo so fast, I guess my keyword has a lot less searches on that engine?

2. Pumped out an article, threw a video on there as well, wrote down plans for tomorrow, the week, and the month as well as what I want to get out of this site $wise and experiencewise.
 
If you want to learn php etc, then you need a local server to mess about with. If you are using windows, install Xamp Then you can mess about writing and testing your own code. As mentioned though dont try and do everything at once. If you want to learn AM, concentrate an AM. Get the basics down first. If you plan on search engine traffic rather than PPC, then concentrate on getting traffic 1st. Once your getting decent traffic, If you get a shitty conversion rate THEN you can piss about with design. Not much point doing so beforehand if you dont have much experience, chances are all your good design ideas suck arse for conversion. Once you have the traffic you can split test and gather data.
 
man all of the SD guys are comin out of the shadows lately. Maybe we should plan a mini meetup?

as for learning php, a lot of times it helps to follow along with a tutorial, and for that I recommend the nettuts.com stuff. Seeing things applied to real projects instead of reading a page that explains the effects of all of the string functions in PHP is way more helpful.

The best way to learn though, is to pick a small project and make something. Build yourself a todo list app, make it write to a text file. Then make it store shit to a db. Then make it Ajax based with JQuery.
 
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Today:

1. Got WAMP server, figured out how to use it.

2. Wrote 3 articles, scheduled them to post. I'm liking this post scheduler - thinking about writing a ton in a day and then scheduling them so I can work on other aspects for the rest of the week.
 
phoenixrising said:
Today:

1. Got WAMP server, figured out how to use it.

2. Wrote 3 articles, scheduled them to post. I'm liking this post scheduler - thinking about writing a ton in a day and then scheduling them so I can work on other aspects for the rest of the week.
Click to expand...


Absolutely a good idea if you want to someone automate the process. If you end up out sourcing an article writer and you trust them, just create a temp login in word press and have them upload the 20 articles and post them at a specified integral if you really want to have some freedom, although that does require money.

Good luck bro.
 
ty for the link DanWesson.

twstdaffiliate - I actually just meant WP's built-in scheduler thing. So I could write 7 articles or so and have them post 1, 2, 3... days out.

In general I'm thinking the model I'm using is kind of meh for conversions, but I don't have enough traffic to really make an accurate data based judgment. It's a blog about a broad product that I have optimized for http://www.mykeyphrase.org, three word phrase getting 18,100 global searches.

The way the blog is set up is I will research longtails or specific brands/products within that broad product niche and write a post about it. I also found one Clickbank product relating to it, and it obviously offers way more $/sale than going through Amazon Affiliates, so I think I need to focus on the CB offer while keeping the longtail product specific articles on the site but off the main page. Thoughts on this / how to do this in WP?

thanks all

Current Ranks:

Google: 11th
Yahoo: 3rd
 
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Today:

1. Did a bunch of NetTuts/PsdTuts bs, got really sucked into learning a lot of design based shit but it was fun so whatever.

2. Looks like my site got reindexed and it's #9 for my main keyword! W000000t I'm sure I'll look back in 3 months and lol @ my current self but for right now I'm pretty amped.

3. Need to build more links - I created acct. and wrote an article @ EzineArticles but I need to go and throw down some more links, maybe create a Squidoo lens/etc, I haven't read up much on how to build links.

4. Friend of mine that does v. well in ppc/seo suggested I turn my header img into a banner ad for the clickbank product that I'm promoting in one of my posts so it gets impressions no matter what post people are on / end up finding. Need to figure out how to do this.

If I get to top 3, I think this site can easily make $200/mo or so. We'll see. go go go go go go go
 
Today:

1. Wrote some posts to schedule.

2. Took the only CB product for my niche and made a 160x600 banner ad for it to put in the inner right widget sidebar of my page, I think it clears some of the extraneous whitespace and helps in that it will get promoted no matter what page they enter in on. They won't need to view the specific CB related post for it to have a chance to convert. Not sure how I didnt think of that sooner.

3. Made my first sale today, and traffic is picking up to about 20 visitors/day, should get quite a bit more if I keep putting in the work.

4. Gonna have to find a way to streamline this whole process of register domain->get it hosted->CMS customized->articles researched, written and scheduled->article directory articles. We'll see as time goes on.

Ranks:
Google: 9th
Yahoo: 1st!
 
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