These are the current (as in, taken today) stats of the site I made with this methodology. All the traffic is organic, as in from search engine or incoming links. The site ranks for many of the keywords.
I am certain most people took my post with the step by step guide humorously, but it is not. It is a real methodology, and it works. I am also certain people will say the stats are fake. I don’t care.
Read it again, and just fucking do it.
Popularity: 5% [?]
If you are looking for the RSS prize I mentioned in the previous post, I said you will only find it in my RSS feed!
Long term project management. It sounds hard, doesnt it?
Its not really. I know, I know, not all of you have studied business/computers and management in the university.
Universities are overrated though. There is nothing to be taught there that you cannot learn for yourself from seminars and/or good reading.
Anyway, lets stick to the subject. Project management is about managing a project, to:
See? Simple really. It is all common sense. Grab a book on project management and read it (I will dig up a recommended one, can’t find it right now). You will learn a lot.
But the most important thing is not to learn a lot, but to see where you can use all those clever ideas.
On your business of course, where else could it be?
Learn the basics, and make PROJECTS. No, those scribbles on the napkin are not projects. Projects are well thought out, start-middle-end ideas, with a timeline (google it), projected budgets, outsourcing partners, a deadline, and well written specifications (check out the listings on elance for an idea).
Dont go the other way, to plan for a stupid website for five months! No, that is wrong too. Do the exact amount of planning required. Just give it some thought, and make it happen. A project outline is not an excuse to delay the start of a project, its a step by step map to completion of the project.
I know, it is not easy for the first timers (I also assumed there are no first timers on this blog, I tried to shoo them all away with my cheesy attitude). Once you actually complete a few projects, once you know what you need exactly, and can imagine a project in your head from start to finish without anything solid (or digitized, whatever) then you will be able to chourn out projects like a Quake 3 Nailgun spits lead.
I will let you do some research and reading, while waiting for my upcoming post. It will feature an example project management of the creation of a site, from start to finish, and the whole philosophy behind it.
Popularity: 6% [?]
I just ran a beta trial on the new tool by the SeoQuake team. The tool is called SeoPivot, and it is basically a “which keywords does my site rank for” tool that truncates the data by the most searched terms.
You can do the same process for your sites by using google webmaster tools and the adwords keyword search tool, and check out the most trafficked keywords. But the SeoPivot tool does the same faster and better.
For example, the results for glowleaf.net are these.
The potential and the position columns are those that interest us. For example, I could easily rank for the keyword monies for the linked page, as it ranks at #35 and the seo potential is 2500, which is juicy enough.
The first result is the keyword “2fight” which I am not sure that is a real traffic maker. This may be a silly result from an algorithm (oh wait, the whole SEO world is run by silly algorithms…)
Also, the “Seo potential” is overly optimistic, since it assumes that you can rank for #1 and get 50% of the search traffic. The statistical data per serp positioning on traffic gain are roughly as shown by the picture below
Even the #1 position does not ensure 50% of the traffic. You also have to factor in google’s sublinks in serps, extended site listing as well as adwords competition (the ads are bound to steal some traffic even from the #1 listing, its their job). As a rule of thumb, I would take into consideration 20% of that column’s value.
Anyway, the tool works fine and shows some data that can be used right. The free trial only shows the top 5 results, but a single day run only costs $12.39 which is pathetically low. Realistically speaking, you only need to run this once for all your sites and then do the seo optimization.
Finally, I would like to add something. Since this was posted on a forum, some of the thread replies were “This does not generate much data, it only shows a bunch of keywords”. The data it shows are filtered to the level that it shows only the keywords that will actually bring in traffic, AND the keywords that you have a chance of ranking for (<300 site position). Also, if you run the tool on your miserable 2 month old website, what did you expect to get?
Popularity: 10% [?]
It seems the less I write, the more readers I get. Strange huh?
Anyway, lets talk about a serious issue in any business venture. Optimization.
Optimizing something, means to bring it at its optimal state, at its best capacity. Some things can be optimized, others cannot.
Optimizing is a good thing, an essential thing. But I see many people getting caught in it too early.
For example, lets take a ppc campaign. You can optimize every aspect of it, every keyword, every color on the landing page, every little thing. Should you do it though?
No, basically. At least not until you have some serious volume.
What people do not understand, is that optimizing means a percentage increase, not a quantity one.
If I earn 100$ from a ppc campaign, is it worth it spending hours split testing landing pages and ad copies to squeeze out e.g. 4% improvement?
Of course not, the 4$ are not worth the time spent.
If I were to spend my time and ingenuity on coming up with ten times the traffic volume for that campaign, would then be worth optimizing it? Assuming the campaign earns 1000$, then 4% becomes a much less ignored 40$ profit. Still, 40$ are peanuts to some. What “a nice chunk of cash” literally means is certainly open to discussion. But still, there is a line for everyone. Make sure you point out that line, it will make your decisions much easier.
Please note that in the above example, the time that the optimization takes, is exactly the same! Yes, it costs the same amount of effort to gain 4$ and 40$.
Is it worth to you wasting 2-3 days working to earn 40$? If it is not, then instead of optimizing your campaign, focus on growing it.
Why am I babbling about this? Well, I recently went to a total overhaul of my web assets, and optimized a ton of pages. I am the sort of webbuilder, that builds something crude, and lets it rank and ripe before spending more resources on it. I also work on numerous projects simultaneously, and ruthlessly shut down whatever does not work.
Due to the strategy described above, there were huge margins for optimization on those assets.
First came my domain portfolio. I checked the stats, and simply removed the automatic registration from the non profitable ones. They were around 200.
Next, I saw that I was getting paid from my parking service by paypal, losing a 4% every single month. I was surprised to discover that my dear parking service offered free wires! Silly me, switch payment to wire, 28$ more every month, 336$ per year. Add in the domain renewal costs at around 2000$, and that is a nice sum to save.
Following issue on my list was my SEO. A quick look at google webmaster tools top search queries showed me dozens of keywords that needed a slight push to get me to the 1st page. But what do you know, we just saved 2300$! Pour that into linkbuilding then. The ranks were up in no time, followed by traffic, subscribers, buyers, links, more traffic etc etc that I am too bored to measure.
Next came my campaigns. I threw some brainstormed new ad copies to the mix, and tracked conversions. What do you know, another winner ad with an amazing CTR!
Last, I took the time to actually socialize, and call my affiliate manager on an offer that I have running for months. I said “Hello, I am the affiliate with the username Glowleaf. Can I get a payout increase on this offer?”
He checked my stats, and replied “Of course.”
The payout increase results in 110$ more profit. Daily.
Did I get the payout bump because of my big balls? No. I got it because I have VOLUME. The AM would be a retard to even consider rejecting my request.
Where am I going with this?
You need to focus on getting the volume first. Once again, optimization is a percentage increase, not a quantity one. It takes the same amount of time to optimize a 100$ campaign and a 10.000$ one.
So:
I like to play real time strategy computer games. There is a rule on them, one that I follow religiously, the so called four Xs:
Explore. Expand. Exploit. Exterminate.
Know the ground. Have scouts. Keep an eye on people, on the market, on everything. If it happens, you need to know it first.
Spread your claws on everything, whatever lies in your reach. Make sure you reach far. If you want to specialize in your niche, own as much area of that niche as possible.
There are always systems functioning in everything. All systems do not touch each other perfectly, leaving holes between them. Some people call them “opportunities”, I like to call them “glory holes“.
Use your knowledge, your foothold, your assets and everything else you got to leave no one in your niche alive. Metaphorically speaking of course…
More on the four X’es soon.
Popularity: 55% [?]
You can now set your own crawl speed on Google Webmaster Tools. What does this mean?
Many things actually.
1st, this shows that Google acknowledges that its automated settings are sometimes crappy, and an algorithm cannot always predict the perfect crawl rate for a site. Google is seldomly known to give options to the webmaster that affect rankings.
2nd, this makes Google Webmaster Tools even better than they already were.
All of you newbies, try to resist the urge to set the crawl rate at max. You don’t need it. On 99% of sites, the automatic setting works fine. There are only a few cases where you might need a custom setting. For example I have a few sites with thousands of pages, but only 10% of them are indexed. I assume that setting a faster crawl rate on those will help index a few more thousand pages.
It will be rare for someone to want to reduce it, despite the fact that Googlebot is the most frequent visitor, the automated setting is usually optimal. Maybe on huge indexed database sites? Nah, not even then.
So, when should you increase it? If you have a very new site, setting the bar at max might increase the indexing time. No idea, I am just guessing here. Try it.
Also, you might want to increase it a bit if you have a frequently updating site and you don’t see your new posts on a search after a few hours. Although, as I said, the automated settings usually adapt to that scenario. But, if it does fail, here is your setting that will fix it.
Popularity: 47% [?]
