Your 1st 10 Free Links With BMR

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to you all. I know not every country celebrates Thanksgiving but you can’t go wrong with giving thanks for what you have.

This morning I mentioned in a forum post or two on InfoBarrel that I have been seeing some fantastic growth in my InfoBarrel income this month. I am still trending just shy of my $1000 goal for the month but it’s close. Today is actually my best day for earnings there this month. With a little luck I may get to $1000 after all.

How am I doing it though you may ask? I built a bunch of media pages to existing articles and linked to them from the article they are attached to. This will be outlined in an upcoming post here on Chezfat.com and I am building links to my best earners with BuildMyRank (BMR) as outlined in my plan to bring more traffic to my  best earning articles on IB.

I noted on the forum and in many posts here on the blog that this service is quickly becoming my new favorite service. I’ve been a member for about 5-6 months or so and I used it quite extensively in the beginning and then less so over the summer – I had a new baby in the house otherwise I would have been all over that. :)

Link Building With BMR - A Breeze

Let’s just put it this way. You can only post up to on average 8.5 links per day to a given domain on BMR. For the InfoBarrel domain that means I can only get about 85 links in a 10 day period. I can have up to 5 domains that I submit to every day which means I can also link build to my own sites but for IB, which this post is about, I can only send so many links out every month.

Each link I build is only 150 words or more of text. That’s it. It only takes me around 3-4 minutes to crank out 150 words and I usually finish them up around 200+. Basically an hour’s worth of work every day can yield me links on IB for the entire day plus some more.

Is it worth it though…

YES

BMR is expensive; I can’t lie. I had reservations when I signed up but they offer 10 free links during their free trail.

A Few Of My Experiences With A Handfull Of BMR Links

In late October I had a brand new site (target Amazon), a few months old at least, that had no links built to it at all. It was receiving on average 4-6 unique visitors a day. I fired up BMR and sent 10 links to the home page, 10 links to an interior page with a “for men” modifier, and 10 links to a page with a “for women” modifier on my root keyword.

These 30 links went live in approximately 4 days and they took me about 3 hours to write. The site immediately, within a few days, started getting around 30-40 unique visitors a day and has already made me 10 Amazon sales of the product. It took me three hours worth of work. This should probably continue happening month after month for a long time. I will obviously be continuing to build this site out and build more links too but that's another topic all together.

On IB, I chose a handful of my best earning articles and started sending them BMR links (see my last post for details). I started out doing 30 links to each page. It takes about 4 days to publish 30 links to the same domain so I’ve only backlinked a few IB articles this month so far. Despite that my income has shot up around $670 per month and this month it’s approaching $1000. BMR links are ridiculous!

I make no apologies for linking to BMR with an affiliate link. Use it if you wish or plug the domain name into your browser and skip the affiliate link if you wish but if you haven’t tried BMR yet I urge you to try the ten link offer. It’s free and there are no commitments except about an hour of your time to write (from scratch) ten 150 word posts to build links with.

My Advice For Best Using Your 10 Free Links

Whether you do this on InfoBarrel or another site you own makes no difference. Identify (if you don’t know already) one of your best performing pages published online and link to this one page only with all 10 BMR links. This will maximize your efforts for promotion and give you results you should be able to measure with in a week to 10 days time.

Ideally you will find a page that ranks somewhere around #10 in Google for it’s keyword and has already shown the ability to earn you money. The 10 links will all go live within a couple days of you publishing them and your page will almost assuredly shoot up higher than before giving you better earnings than before.

This is not guaranteed by any means but it happens almost without fail for me. Vary the anchor text a little with your submissions but just push out 10 links as quick as possible and see what happens.

You have 15 days to publish the links and see what happens before you decide to subscribe or cancel the subscription. If you build all ten links immediately you should have more than a week to watch your rankings improve before deciding the program is worth your time and money.

Give it a shot; but let me say this.

If you try the free trial out and like it you should only subscribe if you are going to use it. The membership fee is steep - $59 per month. If you are not actually going to post anything then just get your 10 free links and move on. If you use it however you will be handsomely rewarded and your membership fee will not be wasted.

OK, enough from me. It’s back to pumping out more BMR links to my stuff. I’ve got student loan bills to pay down. :)

Chime in below with comments about your use of BMR or your questions about the tool.

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My Plan To Bring More Traffic To My Best Earning IB Articles

If you’ve read my last few posts I’ve been talking a lot about my plans for this month.

I want to make $1000 this month on InfoBarrel in addition to what I make elsewhere online. In October I made in excess of $670 so that means I need to make an additional $330 this month alone.

I’m doing that by doing three things:

• Publishing new Articles On The IB Domain
• Adding Media Pages To Existing Articles On The IB Domain (and linking to their media pages)
• Promoting my existing articles on the IB domain which have made the most money recently

For the purpose of this blog post I’m only going to be discussing the third item: promotion.

Identifying The Best Earning Articles

This is easy. If you have Google Analytics running through the background it’s easy to see what articles have made the most over the past day, week, month, year, or whatever. I decided to look at the past three months worth of data and see which articles have made the most.

I narrowed it down to about 10 articles I want to promote heavily. I chose ten because I will be doing a lot of the promoting with Build My rank (BMR) which will send between 7-10 posts a day to their network of blogs. That’s about 8 per day. Over the course of a 30 day month that’s 240 posts published. If I promote 10 articles then I can post between 20-30 BMRs to each one.

20-30 may be more than I need considering most of the articles I’m promoting have been published on the IB domain for some time now and they all are already receiving search traffic but I want to really apply the 80/20 rule here. in this case it’s more like the 95/5 rule. :)

How BMR Works

I’ve said this in recent posts but I will say this again. With BMR I can send between 7-10 links per day to a domain… or even a single URL. I can have 5 domains to submit to if I want or more if I pay for a more expensive membership to the program – basic membership is ($59/month) but as much as I wish it wasn’t the case I’ve never published 50 BMRs in a day. I usually max out at around 30 from brain fry.

The BMR posts allow you to add one link to your site or article for every 150 words you publish. The minimum word count for a publication is 150 words so I generally do 150 word posts for the one link. Sometimes I do the 300 word posts for 2 links but not usually.

Why BMR

Why BMR you may ask. Because they post your mini-articles to a network of blogs which have good page rank and which are filled with unique (non-spun, non-plagiarized, non-PLR) content. They then backlink each post to ensure it gets indexed and builds a pinch of authority so that your link actually matters. The end result is a link that actually holds a good deal of weight.

What About Post Runner

I still use PostRunner but for this experiment I’m mostly doing BMR simply because I am capable of writing more of these in a day than I am capable of writing PostRunners in a day. Also, the links are weightier so they take effect much sooner. PostRunner is hands down a must use tool but I am on a 1-month binge here so BMR is my main focus with PostRunner as a close second.

For these 10 articles I’ll be doing a few PostRunners but probably not a lot more than that unless I find I have more time and metal stamina for writing. (keep in mind I’m still building content for other sites I own). Gotta know when to say when.

Is This Really Worth My Time?

It may be tempting to ask whether this is worth your time after you’ve written 20-30 BMR’s in a single day knowing that you have a ton more to write but – I still ask myself this sometimes but I always snap myself back in place. This is doubling down on my proven winners with a tool that I know works.

I don’t expect these 240 links in 30 days to give me number one rankings but it should increase my traffic to my articles which are most efficient at earning me money. One page view on these articles is worth far more money to me than a single page view on the other 95% of my articles. I’m expecting to increase my traffic to these 10 articles and see if the earnings boost occurs in unison. It may not for every article of the 10 but it most likely will for the bunch as a whole.

So far I’ve completely backlinked 4 IB articles already – I got started in late October on this project and it’s one area where I’ve been spending a lot of my time lately. I’ve got about 6 more posts to fully backlink with BMR – that’s roughly 150 more to go. let’s see if I can get this done by the 14th (hopefully sooner) so I can focus on other things.

The posts won’t all go live at once, since I can only post about 8.5 per day it will take most of the rest of the month for them all to go live. For now they will sit in the queue waiting for their day.

Isn’t Link Building Dying?

There’s been a lot about the death of linkbuilding lately online and my take is this. I know link building is changing and maybe taking a less important role in ranking but it still counts a ton. I want to be building a business online that will last for years to come but I need money now and now link building still matters a ton so I’m going all out with BMR, PostRunner, and guest-posting when I can get to it.

The thing is I can’t be so social for everything I publish so I will do what works and adjust as I go. If you haven’t looked at BMR I have banners for it in my sidebar. Here’s another self-serving link. They give you a free trial (10 links) to see what you think. If you try it out make sure to post those links at something that is a proven money maker. make them count.

My next article will address my thoughts on one of the other two legs of my November IB plan. New Content or Media Page creation. I don’t know which one I’ll be inspired to write about next. Check back in to see.

So far this month I am not on track to hit $1000 for the month. I still have plenty of work to do. I am however on pace to surpass October’s earnings. Hopefully my pace accelerates – I have the quickly growing holiday shopping crowd to help with that so I think I’ll I better make it.

Good luck to you all and your efforts.

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How I’m Making The Most Of What I have On InfoBarrel

If you caught my last income report I made mention to the fact that I just had my best month ever on the site despite putting very little effort into it over the past 3 months.

I also noted my November goal of hitting $1000 for the month just on InfoBarrel. This post will start to outline what I’m doing to make this happen.

As always if I fail to hit my goal I will make a new goal in the future… but I don’t want to fail. My bank account needs the income. :)

How I Plan On Making More Money ON InfoBarrel

I plan on making money off of InfoBaarrel in three ways:

1. I Want To Build More Content On InfoBarrel – This means exactly what it sounds like. I plan on publishing more articles there.
   
   I originally (5 days ago) planned on publishing a lot more content on the site but I have since decided to publish only a moderate amount of new articles while pushing some of my focus on the next two points.
2. I Want To Make More Money Off My Current IB Library – This step can be further broken down into two points:
• Funnel Traffic From Articles To Media Pages – I have a lot of people landing on my articles every day. This is because I have nearly 400 articles published on the domain. Each of these articles makes me some revenue; many of them make money almost every day.
  
  What I’ve found however is that people love clicking on pictures and the media pages on Infobarrel convert into revenue for me roughly 3 times as much as the article pages. That means if I make $1 on my article it takes a third of the traffic to make $1 on my media pages.
  
  Put another way; if I can get one third of the traffic to my articles to click through to my media pages I should nearly double my income.
  
  Now, I don’t believe I can get a third of my visitors to click through to my media pages but if I can get more of them to click through then I will end up with more page views, a lower bounce rate, and more earnings.
  
  Since I already have traffic this is low hanging fruit and it’s where I’m spending a lot of my time right now.
• Funnel Traffic From High Traffic Pages To Related Pages With Affiliate Links – This is another play on optimizing the traffic I already get.
  
  On IB (and any site for that matter) we shouldn’t be looking to stuff affiliate links in every page and we shouldn’t be cluttering our affiliate sales pages with tons of links either.
  
  I do however have many pages on IB that get good traffic and if I can funnel some of them to my other IB articles that do have related affiliate links I can incrementally increase the page views on these articles and increase the clicks on the links.
3. I Want To Get More Page Views On My Best Performing IB Articles – Using Google Analytics it’s easy to see which of your articles are getting tons of visitors and only a small amount of Adsense earnings. It’s similarly easy to see which of yoru articles make the lion share of your earnings.
   
   I have identified a number of my best performing articles on IB and I am promoting them with BuildMyRank (BMR) and with PostRunner.
   
   BMR is a bit pricy for the average person but it is well worth it for the simplicity of the system. You write 150 words or more, insert a link back to your article, and then publish. You can post between 7-10 per domain per day. Each post gets published on a different aged domain blog full of unique and non-spun or plagerized content and as a result the links have a good effect on the page you are promoting in a pretty quick way.
   
   I can only post about 8.5 a day of these on average so I’m only doing my best performing articles first. If I can get a bit more traffic to the articles that make the most money per visitor then I should see a notable gain in revenue for my energies spent.

There is something to be said for just writing a ton but a lot of the time it’s worth stepping back and massaging what you already have in place. I plan on massaging profits out of my existing library while slowly starting a new stream of revenue on the site.

A few days ago I thought about writing a good fifty articles on throw pillows over the next couple weeks but now I will probably stretch this publishing theme out over the next 6 weeks or so instead. This spreads myself out so that I can work on all of the three ways of building more IB income instead of just working on one leg.

More Detail On Addresing each Of The Three Legs

In future posts I’ll go over in a bit more detail each of the three legs I’m working on and provide some IB specific tips for both new writers on the InfoBarrel platform as well as experienced writers on the platform.

In the mean time I invite you to reread my article on making money on InfoBarrel using pictures. It’s a core technique that every writer should employ. Last month I made roughly 25% of my Adsense revenue just on the media pages. They are the simplest things to create; you just have to do it.

Just to illustrate in April and May of this year I added a bunch of media pages to some of my existing articles. My revenue from media pages increased from around $30/month in both April & May to around $80/month in June through Sept. Then in October I started adding more media pages to existing articles and I made $127 on those pages in October. It’s amazing what a little work on existing pages can accomplish.

In November if I keep adding media pages I can probably get to $200 a month (if not more) without publishing a single new article. Of course I will publish new articles but the power of media pages can’t be overlooked.

Good luck IB writers.

For those that aren’t with IB – please signup using my referral link – it will make me feel good about myself. If you do sign up then most of the above is pointless to you. Your first order of business is building a mass of articles on the site. Pure publication. Write, publish, repeat. In future posts I’ll discuss the writing process so check back for that.

For long term IB writers I’ll follow up with more detail on optimization and promotion. I already have a post on the topic of using PostRunner. That post is still accurate and worth reading. I’ve promised for a long time a bit more on BMR and although I’ve got a few banners for BMR on my blog I don’t have a page dedicated to discussing the system. I may (or may not) build that page in the near future.

If you want to check out BMR for free then use this link.

If you have tips to improving income on IB, please let us know in the comments below. I’m especially interested in people that have some knowledge about the tagging system there. I’ve not explored to very much.

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My InfoBarrel Income Report – October 2011

It’s been a while since I wrote an Income report for my InfoBarrel earnings. I won’t go back and detail out the last few months but I will say that despite taking largely a complete break from InfoBarrel for roughly 3 months or so my earnings climbed month over month over month as articles aged, as I built some media pages on the site, and as I built a few links to some of my previously published articles.

My last income report published in July for earnings in the month of June saw a monthly IB income of $518.78 with revenue split between Adsense, Chitika, and Amazon. At the end of June I was removed from the Amazon Affiliate program due to my residency in the state of California however in early October CA affiliates were let back into the program due to CA state politicking.

I won’t go into the details but for now it looks like I’m in the program until at least next Fall and then it’s up to legislation whether I will stay in. We all hear about business uncertainty – this is a perfect example of how government creates uncertainty. Should I invest my time and money into selling Amazon goods? I don’t know… I will marginally push forward on that front I suppose.

July, August, & Sep In Short

In July I went and changed a few of my prominent Amazon links on IB so that I wasn’t leaking as much traffic to not monetized destinations and I got lucky that traffic started picking up that month allowing me to fully recoup that income.

The loss in Amazon affiliate earnings was definitely felt in all three months although Adsense did start picking up for various reasons including a better CTR on IB articles (thank you IB admin for getting the placement of ads right) as well, more media pages published on the site, and a recovery of traffic from the Spring algo updates.

In July I made $557.06 across all sources.
In August I made $557.25 across all sources.
In September I made $494.17 across all sources.

During this time I built some strategic media pages on my IB articles but I mostly focused my efforts, (writing & publishing) on other sites I own and maintain. These other sites of course make their own stream of income which I don’t typically report.

An October Surprise

Around the third of October I was happy to receive the email welcoming me back to Amazon Associates and I was really pleased that they reactivated all my existing affiliate links. This meant that I was essentially going to be making a good chunk of change on Amazon overnight with no extra effort at all. The income is completely based on work I did many months ago – it’s nice to get that back.

I also started building out more media pages on older existing articles here on IB which all convert into revenue much better than normal pages. I outlined how I do this in this post on using pictures on IB. In the end my traffic to media pages increase October over September by roughly 35% and my income on media pages alone topped $125 for the month.

During The Month of October 2011 I made:
Adsense - $534.94
Chitika - $66.70
Amazon - $75.51

For a grand total of $677.15 for the month – a 37% increase over Sept and 9.3% increase over my previous best month on IB, Feb. 2011.

This was not my best month ever online but it was my best month ever for InfoBarrel… and I was only at the 75% revenue sharing tier for the month.

November – A Look Ahead

I posted a bit on the IB forums the last week of October that I was planning on investing heavily into my IB portfolio over the next couple months and that I had set a $1000 goal for the month of November on the site. In future blog posts I cover some of the ways I intend on doing this but in the mean time I’ll shorten it to say I will be marketing my best earning posts, building media pages and linking to them internally, and publishing a ton of new content on the site.

To start off I finished up October by publishing a set of articles on Microsuede Throw Pillows which should do well with some time and love and this put me into the 80% revenue share tier for the month of November. That alone should boost my earnings by a bit month over month but I still will be needing to do a ton of work.

Look for more stimulating article on throw pillows which have yet to be published… and make sure to check out this awesome pet hair remover article for a look into how I like building affiliate sales on the InfoBarrel domain.

Good luck to you all, May November treat you all well.

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Writing Again On InfoBarrel & Setting A new IB Goal

For the few readers I have here I thought I'd take a minute to say I'm back on Infobarrel again publishing up a storm on various product related topics.

My current project revolves around "throw pillows". Not sure how it will do as I haven't even done any research on keywords - just using intuition here and the fact that there are so many ads on Google's front page for keywords revolving around the topic.

Anyway, the recent algo updates hit my diabetic shoes site so I have some income to make up for. My wifes student loan payments are kicking in in january and I had better have enough income to make those sky-high payments.

Yikes, they are crazy high.

Anyway, throw pillows will do it I'm sure. We shall see.

In any event I have published a bunch today and will publish a bunch more there this weekend and get my rev share up into the 85% range (up from 75% the past few months) and then hopefully with some BMR promotion, new publication, and the regained revenue from Amazon income (thank you Jerry Brown) I am setting a new goal for my IB income for the month of November.

$1000

In September I made around $600 on IB. This month I'll probably make around $700. $1000 is the new November goal. Let my fingers fly.

My next post - whenever I get to posting it - should cover som of my strategies which can be replicated by just about anyone. I hope they help, inspire, entertain, or at leats occupy the time of a few of you.

Update on my experiment last month:

I ended up sending somewhere around 3-4 BMR links to my glucose article. Panda hit between then and now so that had something to do with rankjing s but nonethe less I was ranked 119 for the term "Lower Blood Glucose Levels" and now I'm nomber 40. Nice.

See the original post on ranking an old publication on InfoBarrel and my 1st followup here.

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Ranking An Old InfoBarrel Post – Update #1

A little over two weeks ago I started a post on ranking an old publication. See that post first for a primer for this one.

To recap, the purpose of this is to take an existing post that I published well over a year ago and get it ranking better. I chose a post that targets a good keyword that was published over a year ago but was not ever promoted.

At the end of August my IB post on “blood sugar ranges for adults” was not ranked in the top 100 for its main keyword. Two days later after 8 BMR links it was ranked #96 and two weeks after that, this morning it is ranked number #39.

Not bad for whipping up 10 posts to BMR in three days and spending 20 minutes to add 10 internal backlinks to the post from other articles I previously published on the IB domain.

Has Traffic Increased?

No it hasn’t. Not yet at least.

So far my efforts on this old article have increased its ranking to #40 but it still hasn’t gotten any search traffic. Going through my Analytics it has received 3 visitors from search in all of 2011 and none so far in September of 2011.

It looks like I need it to be ranking better to start getting the eyeballs.

The Next Step In Ranking An Old Post

I could very easily pump out 10 more BMR links to this post over the next couple days and see what that does but I’d like to take the opportunity to build some authority to some other old pages in my IB portfolio which can indirectly improve the ranking and authority of this main article on the IB platform.

For this step I’m going to select one other article on IB which I added a link to two weeks ago and throw some short posts up linking to it.

Of the 10 articles I previously chose I’m choosing one that targets the keyword: “lower blood glucose levels” which is roughly 18 months old. To my knowledge it has approximately 2 links pointing at it that I built ages ago and it too gets no search engine traffic.

To date my article on “lower blood glucose levels” has received 6 entrances via 5 keywords in all of 2011. It is currently ranked #119 for its main keyword and now that it links directly to my article on “normal blood sugar ranges” I want it to have more authority and to start getting some eyeballs on it.

More “Simple” Link Building

This afternoon I plan on publishing 5 BMR posts (150-200 words each) linking to my article on “lowering blood glucose” and then publishing 5 more tomorrow giving me 10 links to that post. This should help get the ball rolling.

I will also write up five 300 word posts to be published on PostRunner with the goal of sending five links to each of the two backlinks I built to this post last year. I have their URLs saved in a tracking spreadsheet I made a year ago so this should be easy enough to do.

Basically this will accomplish a couple things. I will boost the authority of existing backlinks to my IB article while building 10 new backlinks to the same article via BMR. I will also hit the on-site SEO factor by adding a handful of links to the article from other articles I’ve published on the IB platform much like I did two weeks ago for the primary IB post.

Is This Really Worth The Effort?

First of all writing this blog post is more effort than actually doing the work. I enjoy it though and want to get blogging again.

Second, yes, it should be worth it but you never know. By boosting the authority of two offsite backlinks on other blogs and adding 10 more backlinks, my post on “lowering blood glucose levels” should be a more authoritative page in theory.

This ‘more authoritative page’ will then be more meaningful in regards to the internal link it gives to my main IB page on the “normal blood sugar range for adults”, which could help that post rank better for its main keyword. It is currently ranked #39 (as shown above) and I still want it to rank higher so that it starts getting some traffic.

Two weeks ago it took me a total of 50 minutes to make and post BMR links and 20 min to build internal links to the first post. This week it should take me 50 min to build and post 5 PostRunner posts, 50 min to build and post 10 BMR posts, and 20 min to build some internal links.

Combined that is 190 min in three weeks – a little over 1 hour a week. Let’s see if it’s worth it. I will revisit this in the near future so follow along.

For The Uninformed
Read these posts for more information on what PostRunner is and what BMR is.

Thanks for reading - send your friends my way. :)

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InfoBarrel Case Study – Taking An Old Unranked Page And Ranking It Quickly

In my last post I mentioned that I would probably be doing an InfoBarrel experiment sometime soon. Today I wanted to introduce the experiment.

On my longevity blog I have a post that gets decent traffic on the topic of blood sugar. This is my first site and it’s fairly well aged and it’s got a few backlinks but I’ve never gone gangbusters promoting it.

In early July of 2010 I posted an article on InfoBarrel backlinking my post on my longevity blog and then left it alone. The backlink probably helped my original article out but I never promoted my InfoBarrel article and as a result ever since publication it has only gotten a smattering of hits. In fact to date it still has less than 100 page views let alone search hits.

How I Am Promoting An Old Article

Two days ago the article was not ranked in the top 100 of Google for my target keyword “normal blood sugar range”. I did not capture a screenshot but I did check it at the time so you’ll just have to trust me.

Two evenings ago I logged onto Build My Rank (BMR) and I published 4 articles (150-200 words each) linking to that IB page. I did the same thing yesterday evening. This has resulted in 8 backlinks in two days pointing at this page. These take very little time to make - just a few muinutes each.

As of this afternoon the page is now ranked number 96 for the target keyword. See the screenshot for verification.

This evening I will be publishing 2 more links through BMR to the same article giving me a total of 10 links. I will then let those links settle in for a while.

In the mean time I went back to Scroogle and searched for all the most relevant articles to “blood sugar” in my published IB portfolio.

Find Articles For Internal Linking
To do this I simply used the search term: site:infobarrel.com “blood sugar” chezfat and then took copied down the top ten urls of my previously published articles. This is basically asking Google what articles are most relevant for blood sugar and then using those articles to link to an article on the topic of blood sugar. Relevance is what I'm after here.

Once this blog post goes live I will be entering all ten of these IB articles and adding a contextual link to the main IB article I’m promoting. This will give me ten highly relevant internal links to my target article all with proper anchor text. This should take no more than 10 to 15 minutes to add the internal links.

I plan on doing a few more steps after this so check back in for that post in the next few days.

Goals
My goal is to get this article ranking much better for the keyword so that it will generate some traffic to the IB platform but also to help out my original article on my longevity blog which is on page one but not yet at the top for the same keyword.

For many months and years now I’ve heard others say that you shouldn’t ever forget about your previously published work. There are opportunities available with what you’ve already written. This is something I’m testing right now and I hope it helps or inspires someone out there.

If you want to run a similar experiment let us know in the comments below.

Good luck and check back in later for part two of this series.

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Priorities

For the few of you subscribers to this blog let me say thanks for sticking around. I’ve had a new set of priorities for some time now. If you have followed along I had major surgery in the Spring and then a new baby joined the family in early summer and ever since then my life has revolved around the baby and my day job. My priorities haven’t been online and I’m fine with that.

As many people reading this know eHow stopped paying out royalties in May and then California & Amazon shut the door on Amazon commissions for CA residents at the end of June. Being a CA resident and a recipient of eHow royalty income this cut off a nice stream of revenue out of my business just when I didn’t have the time to commit to my online business due to more pressing priorities – relationships.

Having said that I can still report that August represents the most residual income I’ve ever seen come through the doors. Even taking away two streams of income every other stream has accelerated and I’ve learned to adapt and find new ways to monetize and do business online.

I anticipate an upcoming adjustment to my priorities in the next couple months. Babies sleep better when they get past those first few months and mothers are less stressed at that stage as well. My wife even asked if I thought I could support the entire family on my online income alone. She was thinking about a timeframe of three years from now. :) I said honey, I can do that and I’ll do it much quicker than that.

To those who have kids – I finally understand where you all are coming from. They are the most important things in life. To those without I hope one day you’ll get to enjoy them. To those who are starting out online keep working hard and never quit. I’ve been listening to IBM’s podcast for the last couple months at the incessant recommendation of Pat Flynn and a recent episode I listened to mentioned perseverance being the best quality you can bring to your internet business.

It may seem like success online will never come but I guarantee you that if you stick at it and make your online endeavors a priority in your life one day your spouse or even yourself will realize that all your efforts have led to the greatest freedom of your life. I look forward to the last day of my day job. It’s getting closer every day.

A shout out to different people with very different philosophies which have inspired and taught me over the past few months: Keyword Academy 2.0, Leo Dimilo’s Internet Marketing blog, Lizzie’s Passive Income blog, Dave’s SEO Tips blog, and Felicia’s passive income blog No Job for Mom, Pat at Smart Passive Income, Sterling and Jay at Internet Business Mastery Podcast, and a few others who’s blogs I closely follow.

If you are an old friend from InfoBarrel I hope you’ll say hi and for the rest of you blog readers I hope you’ll stick around as I reprioritize this blog and my relationships online. I may start a new case study for InfoBarrel in September and I should probably do a followup on my niche site duel site which has done quite well as of late.

Say hi in the comments, I’ll be tending to them again.

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How To Make A Living With A Blog – Day 18 – Use Amplify

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 18.

Day 18 – Set Yourself Up On Amplify

Making a living online can be done in so many different ways. What I am suggesting is just one way and social media has to be a part of it. Many plans for online businesses center around social media but having a center there isn’t necessary, it is helpful however.

Amplify is a social media site that can syndicate your posts across many other social platforms. You can set up an Amplify account, and post to it linking back to your original article and get a dofollow backlink for your efforts. Amplify will also simultaneously autopost (if you set it up, which you should) to a whole host of social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, Buzz, Tumbler, Posterous, and many others. This is great because each of those sites will also be linking back to the original post helping with indexing of the original post and sending a mix of nofollow and dofollow backlinks to the original post.

On your main Amplify page you can also submit your blog’s RSS feed to receive more dofollow backlinks whenever you post to your actual blog, and you can do a lot of your networking (see this big Blog Networking Guide by Christina) that you might otherwise do on other social media sites. Some call Amplify the dofollow Twitter, or the Twitter for people who actually like conversations with people.  I call it social media with an emphasis on SEO.

What I suggest (which I learned from others - namely Lizzie in the TKA forums) is to setup an Amplify account for your niche blog, and then setup dedicated social media accounts at all the places that Amplify will autopost to and link those accounts to Amplify. On your Amplify sidebar you can setup your page to be SEOd to your main theme or your main keywords and then include your main blog’s RSS feed and possibly your Twitter feed.

It may take some time to figure it all out and get things setup but once you get it all going you can easily Amplify any backlink that you or anyone else creates to help get it indexed and ranking a little. After all, a backlink is more beneficial if it is indexed and when it has a little authority behind it.

The thing to keep in mind here is you should be using this Amplify account to Amplify your backlinks and other people's posts, not every blog post you publish. We can’t keep heavily promoting all of our backlinks forever, Amplify will make it easy for us to simply promote our backlinks in the future so we can spend the bulk of our time actually building backlinks and profitable content.

In the first month we can’t overrun our main revenue generating articles with backlinks which is why we spend some good time promoting our revenue sharing articles as well. In months two and three and beyond we can start focusing more on our own blog and let Amplify simply and easily build the authority of our backlinks and because each post we Amplify will be a backlink article from another site we won’t be simply linking to the same domain over and over again, which is a good thing.

Certainly by now you’ve had plenty of time to get everything published (from earlier days in this series) and take a healthy break so after today we’ll get back to writing and publishing so stay tuned to that. Slowly but surely these efforts will start turning into page views and income. Good luck all.

A Personal Note
If you’ve been following along with this for some time, you’ll know I mostly took the last three weeks off. I have deemphasized (temporarily) blogging and have been investing much more of my time building backlinks (and getting my taxes filed).

As many of you know I am a happy member of The Keyword Academy and am constantly using their flagship tool Postrunner (see my review of PostRunner here). Recently I joined another program BMR (similar to PostRunner) and have been experimenting with it to see if it’s worth it to me. That has naturally received much more of my attention as of late. I may or may not review it down the road here on this blog.

Lastly, the wife and I are getting much closer to the due date of our first little man.  One of these days's he'll come so we are in the last phases of "nesting".  This is a fun time in our lives.  6 weeks to go!

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San Diego Memorial Day – A Case Study Revisited

About a year ago I introduced a bit of a case study I was conducting for myself. I was trying some early attempts at GeoTargeting an article. My first attempt was publishing an info article on InfoBarrel on San Diego Memorial Day ideas. You can read more about this case study on the short post here on this blog that I published at that time: GeoTargeting Memorial Day Weekend.

At the time I hadn’t really dabbled much with regional keywords but rather general keywords. General keywords are those which are as applicable in Boise, ID as they are in Austin, TX. This article was really meant for a very specific audience, people looking for information on what to do in San Diego over this short weekend.

Had I really thought about it ahead of time I probably should have targeted a local event or happening that was year round but instead this experiment was not only local but also seasonal. This of course means it gets no page views during the rest of the year and only a little leading up to Memorial Day. Come to think of it I probably shouldn’t be wasting my time on it this time around anyway, but hey, why not do something fun for a change and see if I can learn something new.

Last year I published the Memorial Day article with little regard to how it would be monetized. In fact I had no idea if or how much money this article could make or if it would make any at all. As a result it didn’t really make much as you can see from my InfoBarrel earnings last March 2010.

This year I updated the first paragraph to reference 2011 rather than 2010 and I added a section near the top referencing San Diego’s Sea World as an option for celebrating that weekend. I decided to add a link to Hotels.com (CJ) in the section to see if I could generate any clicks and swing any random affiliate sales my way. This will be interesting to see how it goes.

Overall the article on Memorial day will need to be tweaked some more and I’d like to alter the links to Hotels.com to encourage more clicks but this will be a fun and interesting round two for this case study dating back to Spring 2010.

To embellish the case study even more I will be soon publishing a companion article to this Memorial Day article on IB which focuses more heavily on traveling to San Diego for Memorial Day. This will obviously make drawing clicks through to Hotels.com a bit easier… if I can get any page views to it that is. We’ll see how it goes and I’ll link to the second article when it goes live to be sure.

In 2010 I received 624 page views on this article in the month of May alone, this year we’ll see if I can increase that and see if I can get some eyes on a companion article more tailored to revenue. Cross your fingers for me.

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Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns

http://bestshoesfordiabetics.com

I’ve been ramping up my efforts lately on my Diabetic Shoes website. If you have any experience with sites like these you probably know that they are a bit easier to rank after they’ve aged a bit than when they are new right out of the gate. I started my site back on the 4th of November and filled out the framework of the site back in 2010 including my initial backlinks. You can read more about that process in my earlier updates but largely the months of January and the first half of February saw me really sit on the site just waiting for it to age while I worked on other projects. Sometimes this is worth doing and so far it looks like it’s done well for me thus far.

Since mid-Feb I began looking through the traffic the site was getting and decided to add some more pages of content based on both traffic I was already getting to the site from search engines and based on new keywords I wanted to target which I identified using Niche Refinery, the keyword selection tool provided to members of The Keyword Academy (TKA).

How I Make Money On My Diabetic Shoes Website

Before I go on to what has kept me busy on this site over the month of March I wanted to talk about monetization. I posted a couple weeks back an update showing that my site had starting earning more efficiently; well it has continued to do so.

I have implemented three forms of monetization thus far but only two have converted as of yet. Adsense was the first form, followed by Amazon Associates, and most recently I added a few links to ClickBank in both the sidebar and on a single targeted post. ClickBank has yet to convert but I wouldn’t expect it to so soon after implementation.

Adsense

Considering Adsense is the easiest form of monetization possible it was the first form I implemented on the site. It earned for me immediately back in November and has continued to earn a bit every month until March where it took off. I included an ad on top right of my posts, a wide sidebar on the left of posts below the fold and an inline middle of the post ad which is only included on long posts. Each ad is tracked separately and so I can see which one is performing best.

Overall I made $58.20 with Adsense in March. The bulk of that came from the top ad, followed by the inline post ad, trailing by the sidebar ad. In the long run I want this site to pull further away from Adsense so I will take this into account while I decide on how to switch these Adsense ads out for other kinds of affiliate programs, banners, or other networks. You may wonder why when the return has been so good but it’s because the affiliate sales potential is likely much better as you can see with my Amazon earnings.

Amazon Associates

Somewhere in the middle of the month, I’m going to say around the 15th I made the change on this site to start focusing more on Amazon affiliate sales. After reading the bulk of Dave’s Make Money On The Internet Blog and more specifically his advice on Amazon I began to implement some of his techniques into this site.

Dave makes gobs of money online – he is an authority and he supposedly knows what he is talking about so having given some of his advice a try I can see why he does so well. I thank him immensely for the info he provides. If you haven’t read his blog then make sure to head over and start pouring through his archives. I read everything and it took me the better part of a month doing it a few posts a day. It will take a while but it’s better than any ebook you’ll ever read that’s for sure.

Enough about Dave – He advises you to be overt about your affiliate links if you are building a product oriented website. Y diabetic shoes website has a lot of good information on the importance of practicing better diabetic foot care and wearing diabetic shoes and any readers of the site will be interested in the products and most likely looking to buy them. If that is the case why would you ever want to beat around the bush. If they search for “good shoes for diabetics” why would I ever give them a landing page that didn’t link out overtly to a good pair of shoes for diabetics to buy?

As such I added prominent links in the sidebar pointing directly to footwear appropriate for diabetics filtered by brand and price and then in many of the posts I took Adsense off completely and included a front and center link to the most applicable product the search visitor is looking for. As a result my Amazon earnings jumped up dramatically.

The first half of the month my Amazon earnings were $13.53 on 5 shipped items and the second half of the month my Amazon earnings were $30.85 on 9 shipped items. Overall I hit $44.38 on 14 shipped items which seems quite good to me. I think this is even better than Adsense so I’ll continue to make a slow transition away from Adsense and more to Amazon as a result.

ClickBank & Other Affiliate Programs

As previously mentioned I want this site to veer away from Adsense and into more of a free information site monetized by affiliate sales. Amazon is obviously part of this but there are many other companies with good applicable products for sale which have affiliate programs. Considering this is such a topical site I imagine these programs will pay well and convert well so I plan on pushing more into this arena. I’ve started off by offering a program from ClickBank which is something I can’t offer from Amazon and I intend on finding some other programs and companies to promote which offer better returns than Amazon sales. This will be an ongoing project for me.

Recent Site Promotion

In addition to the monetization strategies I’ve taken on this site I’ve begun to increase the velocity of promotion I’ve done on the site. In early Niche Site Duel updates I mentioned how I like to build up fewer high quality backlinks rather than blasting them with tons of low quality links. I started with a handful of backlink articles which I wanted to be authority links:

• Best Shoes For Diabetics – on InfoBarrel
• Diabetic Walking Shoes – on my longevity blog
• Diabetic Shoes For Men – on HubPages
• Best Socks for Diabetics – on Snipsly
• Good Diabetic Shoes – on Buzzle
• Good Diabetic Shoe – on Health For World

Each of these articles have been independently promoted and they all should be giving me good authoritative backlinks by now. Aside from Snipsly (which hasn’t been showing much promise lately) they all are doing well.

In addition to these main backlink articles I’ve also started promoting each and every post on the site. I’ve backlinked them all (all 18 of them) from SheToldMe, InfoPirate, Folkd, Posturown, and at least twice from InfoBarrel – all of these sites earn me money so my promotion of my niche site has also netted me a fair sum of earnings. Many of my 18 posts also have backlinks from other blogs as a result of my guestposting with PostRunner. As a result all my posts on my Diabetic Shoes website are starting to do very well in the search results and the main index page is being lifted with the tide.

Right now I rank:

• best shoes for diabetics – 3rd
• shoes for diabetics – 15th
• best diabetic shoes – 7th
• diabetic shoes – 17th

Obviously I also rank very well for a large laundry list of long tails because of my depth of content on site and my growing list of backlinks pointing at all of my pages.

Promotion for April

This month I should continue to increase my backlinking of the site with revenue sharing sources and will begin to ramp up my backlinking with guestposting on blogs, primarily through via PostRunner. I will probably add a few more pages to the blog as well based on current traffic trends. In case you don’t know you can almost always get a surge in new search traffic by posting a new post using a keyword or keyword derivative which is already sending traffic your way to an already existing post. This helps dramatically especially in the beginning when traffic is slow to begin with.

March saw search traffic increase to this site from 256 total visits in Feb to 653 total visits in March, an increase of 155 percent month over month. I’d like April to see another increase of over 100 percent as that could increase my earnings by over 100 percent. That would be nice.

I’ll cut this post here but leave you with my earnings history:

Total Income By Month

• Nov 2010 - $5.57 on 3 posts
• Dec 2010 - $15.86 on 5 posts
• Jan 2011 - $17.05 on 6 posts
• Feb 2011 - $15.48 on 15 posts
• Mar 2011 - $102.58 on 18 posts

Total Earnings to date: $156.54


Good luck on your own niche sites – work hard at them and make them helpful to your readers and you’ll be much better off in the long run. Feel free to leave any comments or questions in the comment section below.

For All Other Posts In This Niche Site Duel series:
NSD1 - Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game - November 4, 2010
NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results After 4 Days - November 7, 2010
NSD3 - Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site - November 17, 2010
NSD4 - Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - December 31, 2010
NSD5 - A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update - March 16, 2011
NSD6 - Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites - March 21, 2011
NSD7 - Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns (1st $100+ month) - April 1, 2011


For reference here is the Niche Site Duel hub on Pat's site.

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Making A Living Online – Day 17

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 17.

Day 17 – Get Those Article Directory Links Indexed (And Make Some Money Doing It)

If you are following along with this series then you may still be working on day 16. Hopefully you are about finished up or done completely but if you are like most people writing all this unique content can get tough especially after having written so much already. If you’re not done yet with submitting the 25 article directory links from day 16 then keep at it. Today’s task is a bit smaller and may help break up the monotony.

Over the past few days you’ve submitted a lot of content to article directories. 25 articles were submitted to backlink our revenue sharing articles on Day 14 and 25 more were submitted to backlink our actual money articles on day 16. That’s a total of 50 article directory links sitting out there and they all need some love.

First of all, as we did back in day 7, head over to Feedage and submit your article directory RSS feed to your Feedage account. This will get all your directory submissions some small time “easy” backlinks. If you setup accounts at all four article directories then this should mean you get to submit four feeds to Feedage – shouldn’t take you more than 10 min of your time.

Next you have to start submitting your article directory submissions to IMAutomator, again, this is quick and easy and although you’ve got about 50 submissions to make and it may take you a few days because of daily submission limitations it shouldn’t take up much of your time.

The last thing you have to do (which will actually help earn you money) is to start backlinking all 50 of these article directory publications on SheToldMe and InfoPirate. This will take some time but I have done well over fifty bookmark backlinks in a day so this should still be manageable.

Don’t underestimate this. These links will help get your directory submissions indexed and will help improve the quality of the links they are sending to your money articles and main backlink articles… and not only that but the bookmarks themselves will earn money. From my experience just getting 100 bookmarks up on InfoPirate is an easy income stream of $20-$40 a month. That sounds crazy I know but it is true. SheToldMe (from my experience) isn’t as good for revenue but you will make some money there so it’s worth it.

If you are not yet done getting your directory submissions submitted keep working at that too. This is very important. You need these backlinks. In the future we’ll start adding other types of backlinks in greater quantities but for now these are great backlinks to get and worth the effort.

A Glimpse Into The Future

The work we have done over the past few weeks has definitely been a lot. It is probably more work that you could have ever imagined doing and if you are actually doing it then congrats; your efforts will pay off. We are now earning a little money on SheToldMe, InfoPirate, Snipsly, InfoBarrel, HubPages, Squidoo, and Posturown and each of those sites is also passing links and authority to our money articles which are published on our own site. Our money articles may or may not be earning money yet but chances are that you’ve already started earning a trickle there as well.

The first month is the hardest – it’s a blind leap of faith. You devote a ton of time and energy into producing all this content and trust that you will be compensated for your efforts. Almost every time you will be compensated – some times more that others but you have to make the leap.

So far we haven’t spent any money except for setting up a website to put out initial money articles on. In the future we will start spending some money – not much but the money spent will be worth it and will be reasonable. Just fair warning.

Good luck and work hard – it’s not easy, if it was everyone would do it.

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Make A Living Online – Day 16

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 16.

Day 16 – Article Directory Links To Your Money Articles

By now you’ve surely had enough time to build all the backlinks to your revenue sharing articles as outlined in day 14 of this series. Basically we’ve got roughly 25 articles on a new site right now and they all have a few backlinks but we need to add some more.

In day 14 we started promoting more heavily the main backlinks to the money articles with article directory links at a clip of about 2 per article. We will now do the same things again except this time we will publish these article directory articles with links pointing directly at out money articles.

Previously I noted you wanted to publish on directories which gave you dofollow backlinks like Ezine, GoArticles, Article Dashboard, and Article Blast – this time we will use the same sites (other if you know of any you like) but point them at our 25 articles. At an average of two links per article we will need about 25 articles published over the new few days each sending out links to out money articles. Each “money article” should get about two links out of this.

Again this will take some time which completely depends on how fast you write but you should be able to punch these out in a few days at least, if not sooner. Sure it’s hard work and you may be getting burned out on the subject but that’s the way it goes. Don’t fret and don’t lose hope – this is how it’s done so you just have to suck it up and do the work.

For me I’ve been writing tons of stuff on diabetic shoes as I promote my relatively new diabetic shoes website, it’s a lot of info that I keep framing in different ways, it’s a lot of work but it pays off significantly – just do it and be pleased that it pays.

The next couple days should be slim days while you get this task done but I do have more in store for day 17 – see you then.

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How To Get Free Blog Content – Use PostRunner

Looking to get free content for your blog? Sure there’s always PLR content but seriously, that content is used all over the web. I’m talking about getting free blog content for your topical blog, general interest blog, or niche website.

This post is promotional but short - just a warning. It is not however just a flashy headline.

As many readers of this blog know by now I am a happy member of The Keyword Academy (TKA). So far in my 28 days to be a better IMer series I’ve discussed all the beginnings of getting a niche site going without the use of spinning or the use of paid tools. I’ve only discussed free techniques. Well imagine this. Getting the backlinks you need to your site is so much easier with the PostRunner system included with your TKA membership. As a refresher you can read my older post on using PostRunner to guestpost on other people’s blogs.

Today I’d like to introduce you to the other side of PostRunner, accepting free content from others. Not only do you get access to PostRunner as a member of The Keyword Academy but you also are able to include your own blog in the PostRunner system so that other bloggers and niche site owners can post to your site. This basically equates to you receiving free content to your blog on a constant basis.

Think of this – you find a niche that you think is awesome – let’s say it’s a site on office products. You go out and buy a domain for your site and put it on your hosting account, install Wordpress, and then what? You have to build the content out as well as backlink it to get it indexed and ranking with some authority.

How about this? After building some initial content to your office products site, join The Keyword Academy (free the first month + $33/month thereafter) and install the PostRunner plugin so that you can receive content to your site from other members. You are free to accept anything you want to the site and have complete discretionary control over what publishes.

If you want the site to be only about Office Products then you will note that your site is only about office products and you will only accept topics on that subject. The next thing you know you will be receiving free posts on your exact niche on a constant basis day in and day out. You can monetize the site anyway you wish too so not only does the content get published to the site by others but it can and will make you money at the same time. And if the content submitted to your site is not up to your standard then you simply decline it with a single push of a button.

You can also do the same thing but be more inclusive and accept posts on just about anything – that decision is up to you but when all is said and done you can easily get a bunch of free content to your site which can in time pay for your entire membership fee and more.

My Experiences Owning A Site On PostRunner
I have been a happy member of The Keyword Academy for roughly a year now. I use their PostRunner tool all the time, more than anything else on their site and I can’t imagine not having it. If you want to take your Internet Marketing to a new level then try out TKA for a free month and see if it’s worth it to you. If it looks good then get your own blog hooked into the PostRunenr system, not only will it help the membership base but you will be well compensated from your PostRunner site in due time.

My own PostRunner site is only a few months old and it already pays for itself. It makes more than I pay every month in membership fees. I get around 2 posts a day of free content; there’s no reason why you can’t too. Click through to give TKA a first look for free.

You can also see my post on submitting to PostRunner for backlinks, using TKA’s Niche Refinery for keyword selection (off site).

Yes this is a promotional post but it is a system that I use to make all my money online. It is a tool that is worth using. There are many people that struggle for small gains every day; TKA can get you moving up in earnings faster. Good luck.

Check back in tomorrow for more on my IMer series and have a great weekend everyone!

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More On My Making A Living Online Series – Day 15

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 15.

Day 15 – Edit Your Money Articles

If you are following along with this series then you’re still probably backlinking your revenue sharing articles on the article directories as I outlined on my last post: How To Make A Living With Internet Marketing – Day 14. Backlinking all those articles takes some time so keep at it, you need somewhere around 25-50 articles published to send 1-2 backlinks to all 50 of those revenue sharing articles so keep at it.

In the mean time here is a simple task that won’t take nearly as long for you to do. Our main 25 “money articles” at this point have been published for 2-3 weeks now and we’ve probably received a trickle of traffic to these articles by now. Go into your analytics and for each article identify 1-2 keyword phrases that has already brought search traffic to that article. Check your article to see if that search phase appears exactly somewhere in the article and if not add it.

I like to do this by adding a complete paragraph to the article somewhere. Just go into your money articles and add a short paragraph which includes these exact keywords and maybe a couple related terms that you haven’t yet used in the article. Republish the article and then do the same for the other 24 “money articles”. This will take some time but it at least can be accomplished in less than a single day.

While you are at this task make sure to keep on publishing your articles to the article directories to get those revenue sharing articles of your backlinked and ranking better. Remember, the more you do the better. They don’t have to be the best articles in the world just make them well written with a solid point or two and maybe a little personal commentary on the topic. Keep at it and good luck!

FYI – In case you don’t get it the purpose of editing your money articles like this is to milk the low hanging fruit while the articles are still new and ranked poorly. This is a good task that can give you a break from article directory submissions… just don’t stop doing the directory submissions. Remember, keep at it. This is work, we’re trying to make a living at this, you can’t expect to make a living without doing some work.

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Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites

In early November I started a niche site when I joined many other bloggers in the Niche Site Duel. I have since posted five updates on my niche site: http://bestshoesfordiabetics.com. You can catch up on those posts here, here, here, here, and here.

Recently I’ve also been publishing a series on making a living online and a recent update on that series I noted the importance of building your initial backlinks to your niche sites on revenue sharing websites because they are relatively strong backlinks and they are capable of absorbing a bunch of backlinks right off the bat due to their being published on an established domain.

Today I wanted to drive this point home by showing you the results of my initial five backlinks to my diabetic shoes website. As I noted back in my second niche site update I posted five main backlinks to the niche site from InfoBarrel, HubPages, Snipsly, Posturown, and my own Longevity Blog. That is five sites which earn me money for my publications.

After publishing those five articles I went on to publish others and I also went on to backlink those articles to ensure they get indexed, stay indexed, gained some authority, and passed the best link juice possible to my new website. I published those five articles a little over 4 months ago in mid-November 2010. In that time my entire niche site has made a little over $100 but these five articles alone have made an additional $65.54. That doesn’t even include any of the other backlinks I’ve built on revenue sharing sites so adding those in would increase the numbers even more.

What is interesting is that I haven’t even gone gangbusters on backlinking these five articles. I have only sent 6 links at my longevity blog post and it’s indexed at PR0. I’ve sent 9 backlinks at my IB post and it’s indexed at PR0. My hub has gotten 10 backlinks and it’s indexed at PR0, Snipsly has 5 backlinks and it’s indexed at PR N/A. Lastly my Posturown article has 11 backlinks pointing at it and it too is indexed at PR0. All in all my backlinks have given most of these articles enough authority to get them past PR N/A and I haven’t even hit them hard with backlinks.

What is all of this to say? If you are building a niche site do not underestimate the power of building your main backlinks first from rev share sites. They are a great way to build your first backlinks because of their earning power and their ability to grow in authority quickly. In the last 30 days these five articles have made me almost $10 in Adsense income which is a drop in the bucket but quite significant considering my entire niche site only made $56 during the same time period.

If you are building a niche site make sure to not overlook this income source.  Write good articles to build these backlinks and then promote them with backlinks of their own through article marketing or through guestposting on blogs.  PostRunner is the best system around for this in my opinion.  Once your niche blog starts ranking better and pulling in revenue then your income will start growing exponentially.

All Other NSD Posts
NSD1 - Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game - November 4, 2010
NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results After 4 Days - November 7, 2010
NSD3 - Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site - November 17, 2010
NSD4 - Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - December 31, 2010
NSD5 - A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update - March 16, 2011
NSD6 - Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites - March 21, 2011
NSD7 - Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns (1st $100+ month) - April 1, 2011


For reference here is the Niche Site Duel hub on Pat's site.

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How To Make A Living With Internet Marketing – Day 14

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 14.

Day 14 – Article Marketing – Backlinking Your Main Backlinks
As I said in my last post on day 13 we need to start promoting our main backlink articles on the revenue sharing websites in a more significant way. We should now have about 50 articles published on HubPages, InfoBarrel, Posturown, Snipsly, & Squidoo (10 per site) and they all should have some revenue sharing bookmarks pointing at them already but this simply isn’t enough.

These rev sharing sites should be far more capable of taking a bunch of backlinks than your new site and new “money article” can so we are going to spend some time promoting them with article marketing. This should do two things: it should cause the revenue sharing articles to rank better and earn more for us and it will cause the links those revenue sharing article send to our “money articles” to be stronger and more significant.

Because we have 50 revenue sharing articles to backlink and most article directories let us include two links per submission it will take approximately 25 article directory submissions to backlink all our revenue sharing articles. Yeah, it’s a lot but this is work, you are trying to make a living at this so buckle down and get writing. You won’t be able to do 25 articles in one day but 10 a day should be doable.

One thing to note is that you want to publish these articles on major article directories which offer dofollow backlinks. Splitting yours submissions between Ezine Articles, ArticleBlast, GoArticles, and Article Dashboard is a good way to mix up the submissions and still get plenty of decent dofollow backlinks. Buzzle is another excellent site to use however they only let you link to one URL. Use this site at your own discretion.

Make sure to use keywords which are very closely related to the keyword articles you are linking to and if possible use a keyword which you know is easy to rank for based on your experiences over the last couple weeks.

Some of these sites article directories take some time before they actually publish your article so just roll with it. As articles publish on these directories make sure to submit them to IMautomator and publish a revenue sharing bookmark pointing at each one. You want them to be indexed otherwise they simply won’t help you out that much.

This will take time so get at it. Ideally you would want at least a couple article directory submissions pointing at each of your 50 revenue sharing backlinks so try to work on writing these up and submitting them for publication as much as you can over the next 3-5 days. Good luck all and get to work! :)

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Chezfat Is Getting Social – Join Me On Twitter

Over the past month I have been slowly implementing more conventional “blog” features into my blog here. Not long ago I implemented my own custom domain to get off the old dot blogspot domain and a couple days ago I switched over to a new template which is better for comments as my readership is starting to grow.

Today, I spent a good period of time setting up Twitter and implementing it into my template. I’ve got a Twitter feed for my longevity blog setup so I have a slight background for knowing how this works but even still I’ve never really been active on it.

I used a lot of guidance from Amanda over at BloggerBuster on how to implement a Tweet this post link in the bottom of all my posts. She’s got a lot of Twitter advice for Blogger publishers on this page: Twitter Tools For Blogspot Blogs. If you are hosting a site on Blogspot then her site is a goldmine.

Anyway, feel free to connect with me there on the big T and I’ll do my best to figure out optimal Twitter use and etiquette. We’ll see how quickly I can “get social”. :)

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How To Make A Living Online – Beginners Internet Marketing Day 13

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 13.

Day 13 – More Web 2.0 Submissions

Starting to sound a bit like a broken record here but today we need to publish a few more web 2.0 articles to send a few more backlinks at our main 25 “money articles”. To select what keywords to target with the ten publications for the day dig into your analytics and select a few keywords or keyword variants which are already driving traffic (even if it’s incredibly small traffic) to either your money articles or your previously published revenue sharing articles.

When you publish these articles on HubPages, Infobarrel, Squidoo, Posturown, and Snipsly make sure to not only link out a couple times to your “money articles” but do as much interlinking as you can on the site you are publishing on.

For instance you should have about 8 InfoBarrels published already. The two IB articles you publish today should be contextually interlinked with the other 8 IB articles. It may take some strategic word play to interlink all 8 of them contextually but make sure you do get them interlinked. Do the same on all the other sites too.

The thing to remember here is that these revenue share sites will earn money for you first and the links will strengthen if your build them up causing your site to rank better in the intermediate term. You can’t overload a new site with links so we build a few links from these revenue shareing sites and then make them stronger while our new site ages.

A good rule of thumb is to slowly build links to the main site over the course of the first month or so and then start accelerating them. In the mean time we will start promoting our rev share articles as we wait for the main “money articles” to age and for the links to pass strength to the main articles.

A lot of IM is simply waiting and doing things efficiently. If you trust it work in the long run you will be ahead of the game. Good luck all!

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Blog Template Changes

For anyone out there that has tried to leave comments over the last few days I am sorry that you were unable to. I didn’t even realize it for a few days until Christina informed me but my comments section on the blog simply disappeared.

For a while now my comments section has been performing poorly and I just haven’t felt like dealing with it as Blogger templates are hard to edit when it comes to dealing with comments. Anyhow, my old template, through I liked it a lot, was not exactly well designed for comments from the start and the code must have finally failed this week.

I suspect that Blogger must have been doing some tweaking of the backend code as they are planning on unveiling a new overhaul of the platform. See here for more details.

In any event most of my day yesterday was spent finding another good template which was more current and (hopefully) more stable as Blogger is in constant update. If you haven’t seen the new template, head on over and give it a look. I’ve still got some tweaking to do and I’ll have to consider whether or not if I want to implement a Twitter account and Facebook account so feel free to comment on that if you have an opinion. For now those icons don’t link to anything at all. :)

Now that I’ve got the majority of my template issues behind me I can get back to my series: 28 Days To be A Better IMer. Hope you have a good weekend!

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Making A Full Time Living Online With Internet Marketing – Day 12

To continue with my series: How To Start Making A Living Online: 28 days To Be A Better IMer - I present day 12.

Day 12 – Backlink Your Support Blogs

Back on Day 5 we created one or two support blogs for our main set of “money articles” and on day 6 we submitted the posts to IMAutomator for help with indexing and to the revenue share bookmarking sites for a few backlinks that had the potential to earn. Today we want to send some more substantial backlinks to these support blogs.

Again, on the five major revenue sharing backlink sites, HubPages, InfoBarrel, Posturown, Squidoo, and Snipsly you want to publish two articles a piece each linking to two of your posts on the support blogs. 10 articles submitted in total should backlink each of your blog posts roughly twice so make them count – use proper anchor text and link to those posts in the body of your articles contextually.

Once you get your support blog posts backlinked you should know have about 35 revenue share articles published on the major Web 2.0 properties (8 per site) which should start generating some clicks every now and then giving you a small  (very small) stream of income.

Other Easy Backlinks
After getting these articles published make sure to head over to Feedage.com if you didn't already do this on day 7 and  submit the RSS feed of your support blogs to Feedage to get the posts listed on Feedage’s site. These are small backlinks but they are very easy to setup and because it’s a onetime event make sure to do it. You want to get these support blogs indexed with a little bit of authority for their topics because they should be a good support system for your main money articles.

Obviously if you setup multiple support blogs then you’ll have to perform this step once for each support blog. As I’ve said a few times already it’s a lot of work but it can easily be done so just get to work and make some progress on it. Good luck.

I hope this is helping out a bit – I hope anyone reading this can eventually take control of their lives and truly make a living online one day.

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A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update (#5)

It’s been some time since I talked about my diabetic shoes website that I started as a part of Pat and Tyrone’s Niche Site Duel. In previous posts (1, 2, 3, 4) I discussed (among other things) my feelings about using spun content or mass auto generated article submissions. I know they work and all but I’ve never felt they were something I would feel comfortable doing… so I haven’t.

Instead I’ve built my site (and backlinks) up slowly with unique content I’ve written myself. I have also focused on building my backlinks by focusing on building up only a few backlinks from the major revenue sharing sites and a few strong article directories and then backlinking those URLs to make them strong pages on their own passing a lot of link juice.

What I’ve Been Publishing Lately
Lately I’ve been adding more content to the main diabetic shoes site and some of it I have been publishing based on long tails of things already drawing trickle traffic as well as on other keywords which will actually help the site be a better resource to real diabetics with real foot problems. Basically I do want this site to have a wealth of information on it that is helpful to anyone needing these products and this kind of information.

Some of the keywords I’ve gone after have also been carefully selected based on their difficulty level as defined by Niche Refinery (see my Niche Refinery Review for more), the proprietary keyword selection tool available to members of The Keyword Academy.

Site Indexing
As a result I have built a site of roughly 16 pages plus tags, categories, and administrative pages. The whole site is basically indexed just fine (107 results for the site found in Google as of today’s writing) and many of the pages are ranking well for many long-tail keywords and moderately well for some shorter keywords. One suggestion I may have in this area for you is to get each of your category feeds setup under Feedage as well as your main blog feed. I wrote this article on submitting your InfoBarrel RSS Feed to Feedage a while back which may not exactly be focused on blogs but should help you understand the process nonetheless.

At this pace it will be a while before I take any 1st place rankings for any major traffic keywords but in my book slow and steady, calculated and intelligent design of content publication and backlink promotion will always win in the long run.

Site Design

http://bestshoesfordiabetics.com

It took me a while but back in January I finally worked on the aesthetics of the site a bit by adding a (bit) more “attractive” header. I also set up an appropriate contact page complete with working email form. I should have done this from the get-go but simply didn’t. I have some trouble with building aesthetics when I know there is no search traffic coming in.

I still plan on working more on site design in the coming month but only a little at a time. As I build more content and work on better monetization the site design and aesthetics should slowly change for the better. In the end I want this to look professional but not flashy at all and I do want the site to remain largely text based. My idea is to make many of the pages on the site feel a bit like a store to stay in line with Dave’s Amazon layout for blogs.

Traffic And Monetization Methods
Today the site is roughly 3 ½ months old. I went live on November 4, 2010 and as of today’s writing is starting to make some decent gains in search traffic. I’m slowly adding backlinks to the site in general from the revenue sharing websites as well as the revenue sharing bookmark sites and will be starting to increase my backlinking effort from PostRunner guest blogging submissions (see my post explaining what PostRunner is). I expect in not too much time I’ll continue to see good improvement in the way the site responds to search traffic.

For months now I’ve had Adsense on the site in addition to Amazon affiliate links but as I get more and more involved with Amazon’s affiliate program every day I am starting to lean in the direction of Amazon.

I have also been reading Dave’s excellent material on Making Money On Amazon which I HIGHLY recommend you read (I’ve linked to it twice now already!) and have been slowly implementing some of his advice into my site in the way of side bar links to Amazon product categories and building some posts up as an Amazon store on top followed by an informational blog post on the bottom.

This is new for the site so I haven’t really been able to measure the results of these changes quite yet but I can see how they will help. On my next report I’ll have to add to this topic with my observations on the monetization layout.

In the future I’d like to build in some integration with some specific medical supply stores (diabetic supply affiliate programs I’m thinking) but as always I like to see some traffic first before trying to satisfy their needs with ads and products.

Results so Far
So how has the site been doing so far? Not bad but there’s a lot of room for improvement. Over the last 30 days the site has seen 489 unique visitors with 76 percent coming from search engines. My main low volume keyword: “best shoes for diabetics” brought 18 unique visitors to the site over that time period and I currently rank #3 for it according to Scroogle. Some other long tail keywords worth mention include “best diabetic shoes” and “shoes for diabetics” ranking 7 & 92 respectively. With my upcoming PostRunner submissions those numbers should improve notably.

Always do your searches in Scroogle as your personalization is stripped out of the search results and you get a more accurate picture of where you rank.

As far as earnings on those visitors goes, over the last 30 days I have made $30.60 in Adsense and $25.63 in Amazon earnings for a total of $56.23. Since inception the site has made $48.51 on Amazon and $53.57 with Adsense totaling $102.08 in its first 3 ½ months. Again, not bad but I really should have spent more time on this project considering my last month saw revenue of over fifty dollars on less than 500 unique visitors. That’s a rate of more than $100 for every 1000 visitors which is pretty darned good.

In the coming weeks and months I expect to do some heavy backlinking to the site from PostRunner submissions. That will start inching my search rankings higher and I’ll start seeing some really good traffic and earnings if this earnings pace continues. Obviously I will continue to edit my pages and tweak the placement of monetization links to maximize my revenue per visitor.

One Side Note
I have been busy publishing my 28 days to start making a living online series and much of what I have done for my Diabetic Shoes site has followed what I’ve been discussing over the last couple weeks. I haven’t followed it to the letter or anything but only because I am slowly building the site and because I have access to PostRunner for my backlinks. For a beginner with no cash flow, many people prefer to stick to the free methods before investing in any programs.

Are you participating in the Niche Site Duel, let me know in the comments because Pat’s list is too long for me to follow along with them all. Good luck and good work guys.

All Other NSD Posts
NSD1 - Niche Site Duel #1 – I’m Jumping Into The Game - November 4, 2010
NSD2 - My Diabetic Shoes Site Is Seeing Results After 4 Days - November 7, 2010
NSD3 - Making Progress On My Diabetic Shoes Niche Site - November 17, 2010
NSD4 - Providing Value With My Diabetic Shoes Site - December 31, 2010
NSD5 - A Site On Diabetic Shoes – Another Niche Site Duel Update - March 16, 2011
NSD6 - Benefits Of Backlinking On Revenue Sharing Sites - March 21, 2011
NSD7 - Diabetic Shoes – How My Niche Site Earns (1st $100+ month) - April 1, 2011

For reference here is the Niche Site Duel hub on Pat's site.

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