Seven Somewhere

How’s your About page?

Clare — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:49:10 +0000

So today in the Adsense 101 Bootcamp we’re looking at information pages – one of which is the wonderful About Me page. Every Wordpress install comes with one set up and ready and waiting to be filled in – but what do you do with yours? Delete it? Complete it?

Steve makes some valid points about the importance of the About Me page to show your visitors that you are indeed a real person and that you do know something about this niche.

I admit that my About Me pages aren’t the best; so I set about looking up some good examples and found this: Great About Me pages.

I’m now inspired to write a new About Me page – but what about you? Is your About Me page up to scratch or could you use a little inspiration too?

List Exploding Squeeze Page Secrets

Traffic Bug – I don’t think I’ll sign up after all

Clare — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:44:09 +0000

I’ve mentioned Traffic Bug a few times here over the last couple of weeks and I’ve spent some time loading up a couple of my websites to build some backlinks.

According to the stats report it’s done the following:

Total Directories Submissions: 91
Total Social Bookmarks Made: 96

Strange thing is there is not one single backlink showing against the domains I’ve inputted. Now it does say that the directory entries are made over time, but I’ve had email confirmation for about 10 entries, and those 96 social bookmarks must be appearing somewhere so why no backlinks?

I did a bit of digging and found these two forum threads – TraffiC Bug looks like a sham and Anyone using Traffic Bug?

Seems not many people are seeing signs of backlinks. Someone said that Traffic Bug is about getting your site indexed not building backlinks – seems like an awful lot of effort if that’s the case!

Suffice to say I will not be signing up at the end of my trial period tomorrow. Instead I am going to give Link Juicer another shot.

A Sunday Challenge – Market Samurai meets Traffic Bug

A Sunday Challenge – Market Samurai meets Traffic Bug

Clare — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 14:51:29 +0000

We were all set to head out to the cinema today to see Alice in Wonderland in 3D but the showing had sold out already and we’re having to go out of town to catch a later showing instead. Which means I had a couple of hours to kill and decided to do an experiment with my two new toys: Market Samurai and Traffic Bug.

I’m in the trial period for both of these tools and will probably sign up for both tomorrow. But in the meantime I’m putting them through their paces!

I used Market Samurai to drill down into a keyword for my travel website. I found one with 111 daily searches and a 2% competition rating. There are 131,000 competing pages though and some of them are serious contenders with aged domains and a ton of site backlinks. Saying that backlinks to the specific page are all green and someone has just appeared overnight with a brand new site just using the keyword in a .net domain. It looks like a one page adsense site with no backlinks.

I then used MS to find some more long tail keywords relating to the main keyword to use within my article.

I wrote a short article using the keywords and then set about submitting it to Traffic Bug. I hadn’t set up the main site yet so I spent five minutes doing that and then another five minutes setting up the submissions for the specific page. As I’m writing this I already have 10 bookmarks to the main site and 10 to this article.

So now I’m going to head off to the cinema and see what happens. I’m looking forward to using both of these tools; usually I just throw up a blog post and hope for the best, but from here on in I’m going to do some MS research before I start writing and then add it to TB to promote it for me.

I’ll report back next week on what happens next…

Adsense 101 Bootcamp Week 2 – Are my Xfactor sites dead in the water?

Clare — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:52:13 +0000

This week in the Adsense 101 Bootcamp we moved onto keyword research and site structure. Steve did a great job of walking us through the keyword research from seed keywords through to the long tail and how to find the gold nugget keywords that would not only bring in money but also be relatively easy to rank for. He then showed us how to use those keywords to build a website structure.

My keyword tool of choice has always been Micro Niche Finder – but Steve uses Market Samurai. Now this piece of keyword research software has been around for a long time, and I have used a demo version before but never really gave it much attention. I decided to download the latest demo version so that I could follow Steve’s videos step by step – and boy have I had a revelation!

Market Samurai looks quite amazing – it has so many modules, from keyword research to SEO competition analysis to backlink reviews and promotional tools – oh and a rank checker.

So I plugged in some keywords and started to investigate the competition levels and numbers of daily searches. It’s really hard to find those gold nugget keywords!

Today I decided to feed in my Xfactor keywords… and now I wish that I hadn’t! Of the ten sites that I built based on MNF results let’s say only a handful of keywords are even worth trying to compete for and a couple of the sites appear to be dead in the water. Goes to show that you have to invest almost as much time into the keyword research as you do into building the sites.

So where do I go from here? I don’t really want to try and build backlinks to sites that are not worth trying to rank for – so I’ve dug up some fresh keywords for six of the ten sites and for now I’m going to just abandon the other four. I’ll concentrate on these six and then see what happens.

As I type this MS is running in the background processing keywords for the other domains I have lying around and I’ve come up with a few decent finds.

I want to test some things out in MS – like whether I should concentrate on SEOCTRs with low percentages and ignore the number of results, or whether I should limit the number of results too. I’ve picked a range of keywords to target and I’ll monitor them to help really whittle down the filters to find the easy to rank keywords for future sites and pages.

I think I’m going to raid my PayPal account again and invest in this software – it’s currently selling for $147 but if you sign up within six days of downloading the trial then it’s just $97 – which given the power of this tool looks like a bit of a steal!

Here’s the link if you’re interested in the free trial: http://www.marketsamurai.com/

Even if you’re not interested in the software the Keyword Research videos are definitely worth watching http://www.noblesamurai.com/dojo

Do you use Market Samurai? If you have any tips to share I’d love to hear them!

WP Exit – Exchange your product for backlinks

Clare — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:23:47 +0000

I just came across an interesting WP plugin called WP Exit. I don’t know how many of you sell products on your website but I’m sure like me you have a lot of people make it to the sales page and then click away. This nifty little plugin tracks those visitors and when they leave without buying it offers them the product for free in return for promoting it for you.

So you ask the visitor to post links on say Twitter or Facebook linking back to your site and to let you know when they have done so. Then they get the product for ‘free’. How much are backlinks worth to you?

It’s just shy of $10 and I think it may well be worth testing out.

Find out more about WP Exit.

Twitter Success Tactics Review

What’s in your ping list?

Clare — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 11:24:55 +0000

The great thing about a Wordpress blog is that when you’ve written a post you can tell various other sites and services to stop by and check it out – which helps the post get indexed more quickly.

The services you are pinging can be found in the Writing section of the Settings menu in your WP dashboard. Here’s my current list:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://feedshark.brainbliss.com/

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://www.blogsdominicanos.com/ping/

http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php

http://www.feedsky.com/api/RPC2

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://api.moreover.com/RPC2

http://bblog.com/ping.php

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates

http://xping.pubsub.com/ping

So the question is – who are you pinging?

No related posts.

Brainstorm keyword ideas with the help of the Google Adwords tool

Clare — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:08:43 +0000

Today is Day 6 in the Adsense 101 Bootcamp and Steve has produced some helpful videos all about keyword research.

I was doing my homework for today and remembered a ‘trick’ I had discovered for generating seed keyword lists. I thought I’d share it here for you.

Search Google for your niche and find two or three information authority websites. Note down their URLs and then head over to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
On the left hand side you’ll see an option for Website Content.
Check the radio button and then paste the first URL in the box that appears. Check the box underneath it so that it searches more than the homepage.
Now click the Get Keyword Ideas button.
Up pops a whole list of keywords based on the content of that site.
Use the Choose/Hide column to display drop down to filter the content so you can see the advertiser competition, global monthly searches and CPC.
Scroll to the bottom and select export all to CSV/Excel
Then rinse and repeat with your other websites that you found.

Simple! Give it a try and see how it works for you.

If you have any keyword brainstorming/generation tips you’d like to share I’d love to hear them – that’s what the comments box is for

Want to generate $1700 in 77 days and win an iPad?

Clare — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:16:15 +0000

Oh me oh my I think I’ve gone ever so slightly mad. As you know I just reached the end of week one on the Adsense 101 Bootcamp which means I still have nine weeks to go to kick start my Adsense earnings. I also have plans to launch a PLR store of sorts in addition to finishing off my membership course and maintaining various Xfactor sites. So what did I just do? Yup, I signed up for another challenge!

I’m blaming my good friend Isobel for this one as she was the one who brought it to my attention. Have you heard of the Rhodes Brothers? They’re a bit of a force in the IM world and they are kicking off a Supper Affiliate Challenge on March 17 to help people go from 0 to $1700 a month in just 77 days. Sounds good right. And the kicker is that if you reach the goal they’ll give you an Apple iPad as well as some other goodies. Now me being an Apple geek that one really caught my eye. If that weren’t enough if you don’t reach the goal then they’ll refund your investment three times over.

I headed straight over to the Warrior Forum to check this one out – options were $77 down in one lump sum or to sign up for their membership site over at the Simple Cash Blog. The latter option costs $27 a month and you’ll need to be a member for at least four months to take the challenge so it works out slightly more expensive in the long run – but then you also get access to all the membership content so it seems like a better deal to me.

They say that you need to be prepared to spend at least two hours a day working on the challenge – which I think I can just about manage.

I’ll be posting my progress here so be sure to check back weekly after March 17 to cheer me on – of course if you want to join in the challenge yourself then that would be even better! Here’s the link to the sign up page for the Simple Cash Blog – once you’re in you can register for the challenge by clicking the link in the right navigation.

If you want to read more about it or take the $77 option then head to the original WF thread - but be quick as there aren’t many of those one shot payment places left.

Is it March 17 yet???