In August 2010, I was one of the lucky few chosen to attend an epic bash at the Playboy Mansion.  The two day event was put on by the ad network Epic Direct, which was then known as Azoogle Ads.

This party was to reward their top earners for the past year – 50 of them to be exact – and to also recognize their ad partners.

I wish I could say I was one of the top earners, but I would probably be writing this from my yacht somewhere off the coast, instead I’m sitting on my couch at home.

Luckily, for the lower tier earners like myself there was an essay contest.  The instructions were simple: in 250 words or less, describe why you should join the biggest party of the year at the Playboy mansion.

Simple enough, but I never win anything so I quickly decided against it.

But, as fate would have it, I stumbled upon a post titled When Opportunity Presents Itself… on Shoemoney’s blog which happened to be about this essay contest.  Shoe went on to explain that “if people spent half the time applying themselves as they do coming up with reasons why they are not successful they could do amazing things.”

That was all the motivation it took.

Immediately after reading his post I spent 20 or so minutes jotting down why I should party at the Playboy Mansion.  Here’s the final product:

Why should I be invited to the “greatest party of the year” at the Playboy Mansion?  Well, I’d be selling myself short if I didn’t say I was the Chosen One!  You see, my destiny actually began in utero when my mother would read me articles from Playboy magazine to keep her lil’ baby from “kicking a hole through her stomach” at night.  It worked, as those delightful articles put me to sleep faster than a narcoleptic on Nyquil.  Fast forward eight years to a time when most kids my age were running away from girls with cooties, I was vicariously living as Hef while hiding under my mom’s bed with a flashlight looking at the latest edition of Playboy magazine.  I remember wondering why mom had more Playboy’s than Tiger Woods had girlfriends, only to quickly realize her friend Jen who always spent the night was more than just a “friend”.  And the heavy panting, like that sound a dog makes right before it throws up, coming from their room at night wasn’t “just the TV”.  Many therapy sessions later and I happen upon ShoeMoney’s blog to read a post about the contest of all contests.  My childhood fantasy was about to be fulfilled.  I was just a 250 word essay, riddled with ridiculous analogies, away from crossing numero uno off my bucket list.  And the rest will be is history.

Yup, those 232 words earned me an all expenses paid trip to party where the biggest celebrities in the world have partied, with some of the most beautiful women on earth and to mingle with some of the most successful internet marketers out there.

But, it’s more than just an essay or luck that allowed me to cross #1 off my bucket list, it was the willingness to go for it!

We all start out at the bottom and in order to get anywhere, you must step out of your comfort zone, stop making excuses and go for it!

I hope by sharing my experiences with you through this blog that you see how a regular guy can do something with himself by taking chances.  Learn from my mistakes and experiences so you feel more comfortable stepping out of your comfort zone and take chances in life!

Who knows, maybe you’ll be crossing #1 off your bucket list soon!

How I Crossed #1 Off My Bucket List And Partied At The Playboy Mansion

In the first post in this series I chronicled how I came up with my idea for Missing Child Alerts… plus a few tips to help you find your inspiration.

Now, I want to discuss the creation process – from design to final product.

But, first, there are a few things to consider before you get too deep into the creation process. This planning process will help you really put things into perspective before you make the final leap.

Identify your audience
So, you have the next great mobile app idea, but who exactly do you envision using this app?

Hint: don’t say everybody!

You need to narrow down and focus on who this app will appeal to or benefit the most. This will help in the creation process, but more importantly in the marketing (and possibly selling) process of your app.

Which Devices To Create Your App For
There are three major players in the mobile device market – iPhone, Android and Windows Mobile – all of which require different frameworks and coding languages! This is important to understand.

Luckily, in my case I was able to find a solution that made it easy and affordable to create my app for all devices, which I’ll get into below.

Monetization
If making money with your app is your goal, how do you plan on monetizing it?

The two main ways for mobile app monetization are either selling your app or offering it for free, but with ads displayed on it.

In my opinion, even if you plan on releasing a paid app, you might want to still consider offering a free version. Offering your app for free will typically generate far more downloads of your app, which you can then use to promote paid versions, as well as other apps you may release in the future.

Who’s Going To Build The App?
Unless you have a strong coding background in say Objective C or Java (or even HTML5) and are familiar with SDKs that go along with each app store, you will most likely want to hire an experienced individual(s).

Finally, Keep Things Simple!
I can’t really stress this enough. Of course, you want your app to have all the bell’s and whistles and perform every great function known to man, but keeping your app simple will not only help you keep your sanity, but will save on cost, time and inherently the risk involved.

How I Created My App

Now, that you have your app idea in mind and planned out, let’s take a look at how I finally created my app.

As suggested above, I first identified my target audience. As much as I would like an app that helps find Missing children to be for everyone, I knew the target audience – the people I would focus the majority of my efforts building and marketing this app too – would be a smaller group of people.

More specifically, people with children, as I feel they would be more emotionally drawn to the app.

This is extremely useful, especially when it comes time to market the app because it narrows down the audience that will be most interested in this type of application and will be more likely to download it, share it, etc.  This will allow me to get the most bang for my buck, so to speak, as far as time spent marketing.

“If It Don’t Make Dollars Then It Don’t Make $ense?”

Then came monetization…

How was I going to make money from the app? Do I even care if I make money?

Ultimately, what it came down to was… any income made from the app would just be a bonus.

Being a father of 3 young children, I was just more interested in creating a quality app that would help locate missing children. I knew going into it that it wouldn’t be a huge money maker, nor did I care. I’ve made a good living from my web endeavors and I’m very grateful, so it’s time to give back!

And while there are ads on the app to help cover the recurring cost of push notifications when it comes up, it’s made less than $20 in a year’s time, … and I could care less!

Now, the two biggest unknowns to me at this point were:

1. Which devices did I want to create the app for?
2. And who was going to build it?

I really didn’t want to limit my audience to say, just iPhone users, or just Android users.

However, and this is a BIG however, the cost to create this fairly simple app, from actual quotes I received from several different companies, would be roughly $2,000 per device!!

Therefore, if I wanted to create this app for iPhone, Android and Windows mobile, it would have cost me roughly $6,000.

So, after doing some research on the matter, I came across a neat little open source framework called PhoneGap.

Basically, what PhoneGap does is it allows you to create mobile apps using HTML5, CSS and Javascript, put them in a wrapper, and turn them into a mobile app that works across all mobile devices as if it were a native app (mostly).

Depending on the complexity of your app, PhoneGap may not be right for you, but for my simple app it was exactly what I was looking for.

Now that I knew what devices I was targeting, and subsequently, the framework being used (PhoneGap), it was time to find an experienced PhoneGap developer.

I have a LOT of experience using oDesk so I created a simple job description and posted it.  This is one of those times where you don’t want to get to detailed in the initial description as not give away your idea. You’ll want to attach an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) to the job posting so when applicants request more information about the job, you can have them sign it to protect your idea.

**Tip – Not all mobile app developers have an in-house graphics team, which can lead to an additional expense. Make sure you know exactly what you’re paying for and if you want, even do a little bit of the leg work yourself buy collecting your own graphics to be used in the app.
After weeding out the applicants I finally chose a company called Agile Infoways, which I can confidently say did a great job from start to finish.

Since this was my first mobile app they really helped me out through the whole process. And while I’m typically a firm believer in “You get what you pay for”, by utilizing off–shore services combined with the PhoneGap framework, I was able to create the app for all the major mobile devices for $1600! About $4400 cheaper than the average quote from competing companies who wanted to create the app in native languages.

So, with the company chosen, work was to begin!

I sent Agile Infoways the graphics I collected for the app and a rough layout of what I wanted the different screens and navigation to look like.

Let me tell you, and this is something I could have done better, but the more detailed you are in exactly what you want your app to look like and perform, the easier and quicker it is for the programmers to put it together. For every extra minute you spend on this step, you save yourself an hour of hassle later down the road (completely made up statistic, but you get the point).

There are several tools out there for creating wire diagrams and storyboards to assist you in this process, but to be honest, I just used a simple image editing program to create a rough design of what I was looking for.

“Rome Wasn’t Built In A Day”

Like the old saying, don’t expect your app to be built in a day, either… or even weeks. Mobile app creation is a long process, in my case taking just over two months when it was all said and done.

But, that doesn’t mean you just sit on your hands for two months while the programmers are busy punching code. This is an opportune time to setup your developer accounts for Apple and the Google Play Store, as well as chart you your marketing plan for when the app goes live! You want kick the app off with a bang, so having a solid plan in place ahead of time is crucial, which we’ll get into in the next part of this series.

Plus, during the creation process, the programmers should be sending you test copies of the app for you to try out on your phone. Be sure to take advantage of this and thoroughly test and provide detailed feedback so they can it right.

**Tip – Be careful of a little phenomenon we in the software world call “Feature Creep”! This is where you constantly think of new features to be added during the beta phase that you think are must-haves before you can release your app. What this does essentially is just slow the release of the app. While a lot of extra features would be nice to have, most are not that important and would be great additions to a phase2 or later release.

One of the nicest things about working with Agile Infoways was when the app was completed and it was time to submit to the app stores, they helped me out through that entire process, which can be somewhat confusing, especially for a first time app submitter.

The Apple app store is very picky on what they allow into their store, so if they don’t accept your app the first time, don’t panic, as it may be some little error or infraction that can be fixed.

Luckily, my app was accepted on the first submittal!

So, when it was all said and done, two months and $1600 later, I had my first mobile app in the app stores and ready to be downloaded.

But, it wasn’t time to uncork the champagne bottles just yet…

Nope, it was time to get the word out, which I’ll dive into how I marketed my newly released mobile app in the next post.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments below!

Creating Mobile Apps On A Budget

The interwebs can be a scary place…

Especially, if you’re not very tech savvy.

And, unfortunately, many small business owners who could really use the web to get their fledgling business off the ground face this reality.

Now, as many of you know, I love developing solution to people’s problems.

Just as I did with my Missing Child Alerts app and I do every day with OnlineChimp.com, I have recently set out to help small business owners, with very little computer experience, create simple, elegant and affordable websites to help their business grow!

A New Product Is Born

While the world was anxiously awaiting the arrival of Kanye and Kim’s baby, I’ve been in the lab brewing up something special.

Something that, as the title of this post would suggest, is designed to help small businesses grow online… easily and affordably!

This little project I’ve been tinkering with on the side for a little over a year now (and can partially account for my recent absence from this blog), is a small business website builder tool called Online Chimp’s Website Solution.

The Inspiration

I’ve done a lot of marketing and web design work for small businesses over the last decade and I noticed two things:

1. Most small business owners are not very tech savvy (OK, that might be generalizing a bit, but out of the clients I have either taken on or leads I have spoken too, this is true)
2. And most of them do not have big budgets to hire a dedicated “web” person (or they don’t realize the potential value in it)

I typically work with clients that have larger budgets, but I also wanted to create a cost-effective solution for those without deep pockets, so I figured I could alleviate two problems here: help grow my business while helping small business owners grow theirs!

It’s a win-win!

Crimeny, Another Website Builder Tool?

Yea, it seems as though every major domain registrar, and then some, have their own website builder software.

And, I actually asked myself the above question before deciding to pull the trigger.

After many restless nights, soul searching, and hallucinating in a sweat lodge, I ultimately felt it would be a good idea for the following reasons:

• I wanted to create a tool that I would know forwards and backwards so I could easily customize it per client (if need be) and provide a level support unfound with other tools.
• I have my own ideas of what would be easy to use, and while this varies greatly depending on the clients level of experience, I didn’t feel some of the other solutions out there were really user-friendly.
• I have ported over many websites from free and paid website builder tools, and one thing always remained consistent: the code sucked! Now, I by no means believe I’m some sort of god-like programmer, but I do know a thing or two and I spent a lot of time (and am still refining) the code in my tool to be standards compliant, fast loading and search engine optimized.

There are a few other reasons, but those are the big 3 that motivated me to charge head first into such a crowded space.

Check it out: Online Chimp Website Solution

And I’d like to ask you for a little feedback…

If you were to create an easy to use website builder tool, what would you add/leave out? I love brainstorming with others so send me your ideas via email or in the comments below.

Thanks!

Helping Small Businesses Grow Online… Easily And Affordably!

*This is the first post in a series focusing on creating mobile apps – from idea to the store. Stay up-to-date by following me on Facebook or twitter.

One of my goals this year was to diversify my income and create a mobile app.

The biggest problem I faced was coming up with an idea that I felt comfortable investing in.

Creating mobile apps isn’t cheap (at least I thought) and you’re not guaranteed a return on your investment.

I had many ideas on my plate, but none that I wanted to pull the trigger and actually have developed.

Until…

Out Of Tragedy Comes Inspiration

Friday the 13^th in a small town just a few miles from my house, 10 year old Lyric Cook and 9 year old Elizabeth Collins went missing.  Their bicycles, a purse and a non-working cell phone were left near a lake just a few miles from their house.

The response from the community was HUGE!  I was fascinated by the support of all the people who came out and helped search for the girls, organized candle light vigils, and so on.  I have friends living hundreds of miles away in completely different states that saw the story on Facebook and the national news.

I was so impressed by the outpouring of support from my surrounding community that I personally wanted to help in the most effective way I felt I could.

I saw how fast the word of these missing girls spread through social media and thought if there was a way to easily notify people when a child goes missing and make it as easy as possible to post information and a picture of the child on their Facebook wall, that it may help bring these missing children home.

And that’s how the idea of my Missing Child Alerts App was born.

My initial goal of coming up with that million dollar app idea turned into creating an app that hopefully makes a difference in people’s lives. And also, to help support the National Center For Missing & Exploited Children, since the app wouldn’t have been possible without their hard work and dedication.

I do have small ad at the bottom of the free app, but I don’t expect that to cover the cost of creating the app or to even pay for the monthly cost of push notifications if I outgrow or have to change to a paid solution.  And like I said before, that wasn’t the point of creating this app…

So, that’s the back story to how I came up with the idea for my first mobile app.

Finding Your Inspiration

Chances are, you’ve already had an Ah-Ha moment and thought to yourself, “Hey, that would make a great app!”, as I seem to get those moments on a daily basis.

But, if not, and you’re struggling to find that killer idea for your own mobile app, then here are a few suggestions:

• Try to solve a common everyday problem you have.  Some of the best and most popular apps solve little annoyances people face from time to time. For example, the Flashlight app seems so simple, but I’ve used it more times than I can count!
• Have you ever looked at a group of people and noticed they all had their heads down looking at their phones?  People like to be entertained, constantly, and they look to their phones to fulfill that.   Creating an app that can help entertain or keep people busy while they have downtime has a good potential to be successful.
• Find a narrow niche that has a need, but little competition.  For example, fisherman often use the moon phase to find out when fish feed more aggressively.  So, creating a simple app displaying lunar phases and targeting it towards fisherman would be an example of a narrow niche, fulfilling a need, and if there were very few similar apps in the marketplace, it could be a huge success.

Creating Mobile Apps

Then next few posts in this series will cover exactly how I created this mobile app for both iOS and Android devices for under $1600, how I’m currently sending out push notifications for free, submitting the app to their respective stores and finally how to market the mobile app once completed.

While I didn’t create this app with generating a large income in mind, you will hopefully be able to take a few pointers away from what I learned and apply them to your unique situation/idea and create a profitable app for pennies on the dollar…And without a lot of the headaches I faced!

So, be sure to follow along!  And, of course, if you have any questions/comments please leave them below.

Finding The Perfect Idea For My First Mobile App (And How You Can Too)

Dan McGonagle of LinkvanaReviews.com and I have thrown together a little guide to help those wanting to get the most out of Link Emperor and to get a general overview of what’s working now as far as SEO is concerned.

This guide is ONLY available to those who buy Link Emperor through my affiliate link below, through Dan’s link on his site or it’s free if you’re a member of MarketersRelief.com.

What’s Inside:

• As the title would suggest, this guide will ensure you get the most out of the already powerful Link Emperor! This is an extremely powerful service so make sure you use it right!
• How to PROPERLY do tiered link building.  There’s a lot of information out there on how to do tiered link building – folks putting videos on forums, people selling tiered link building services, etc. – but MOST of them aren’t doing it right, or should I say most effectively.
• Importance of anchor text variation and how to do it right.
• And MORE!

All you have to do is try out Link Emperor through this link, then send me an email with your order number.  I will then email you the Link Emperor Best Practices Guide asap.  It’s that simple!

Updated: The feedback is starting to roll in:

Ive been using LE for 2+ months now so I know their system pretty well. Even with my knowledge the book gave me new ideas to deploy which I didn’t use & think of myself. – Dave

If you’re not quite sold yet on what Link Emperor can do for you, then check out this in-depth Link Emperor Review.  It’s a 100% hands-off total link building solution that I use myself – with great results!

Start your 7 day trial of Link Emperor for only $7 AND get the Link Emperor Best Practices Guide NOW!

Link Emperor Best Practices Guide

**Update 9/15/2012: Grab your own FREE copy of the powerful Link Emperor Best Practices Guide when you subscribe through my affiliate link. This guide will ensure you get the most out of this ultra-powerful service!  But, first read through my detailed Link Emperor review below and check out my case study to see exactly how you can start ranking your websites completely hands-off!

**Update 11/19/2012: The guys at Link Emperor just made a few considerable improvements to the program, even fixing one of my main gripes! First they added the ability to do tier link building, completely hands off.  And they even take it a step further by only juicing up the best tiers based on their built-in algorithm.  Secondly, you now have full-control over the types of links built to your site! I believe this is especially important in the current climate of the SEO world!

Link Emperor is another one of those link building services that claims to be totally hands-off, building you a multitude of links completely on autopilot. But, does it deliver?

What is Link Emperor?

In a nutshell, it combines some of the most popular link building services/strategies out there and organizes them in one central dashboard.

Have you considered using SocialAdr, Dripable, etc, or software such as Xrumer, Sick Submitter, SENuke and so on, but never knew if they were worth the money? With Link Emperor you get the best of all of those along with many other link building services to build links to your sites 24 hours a day.

Blog posts, web 2.0’s, article submissions, Google +1’s, .Edu & .Gov Links, Wiki links, High-PR blog comments, press releases, forum profiles, tiered link building, social bookmarking and so on…ALL included in Link Emperor! And you get to choose which types of links you would like built. For example, if you want to increase social signals sent to your site, then you can allocate more of your link credits to go towards those. Or if there are certain spammy link types you want to avoid then you can completely turn those off.

More than that however, it combines keyword research, link building and rank tracking all in one tool. This means it does the keyword research for you after analyzing your pages, it then automatically targets the keywords that their built-in algorithm decides will be easiest to rank for, then it builds links for these keywords to help your rankings and traffic sky-rocket. You can even track all of your rankings for these keywords and any keyword you choose.

Another important point, especially post-penguin, is that it allows for random prefixes and suffixes for anchor text, as well. And you can easily adjust the randomization of anchors.

Another benefit for those with clients is you can use Link Emperor to run a hands-off SEO business. If you charge a local SEO client $1,000 a month and you spend $147 on the “Soldier” Level account you could pocket $853 in profit every month – completely hands-off! Plus your clients get a custom branded dashboard area featuring your logo’s.

I was almost dreading writing up this Link Emperor review because of the multitude of features it has built-in, so if you want to learn more about the features then check out their sales page and watch their video. They even a have a forum you can ask pre-sales questions, etc.  Anyways, let’s jump in and look at the exact strategy I used for this case study.

Link Emperor Review

Link Emperor has four different pricing options at the time of this case study, which are:

Now, for this case study, I wanted to give Link Emperor a fair shake, but at the same time, I know a lot IM’ers don’t have enormous budgets to work with. So, I chose the Gladiator option. For those on an extremely small budget or those who are a little skeptical they do have a special for $7 for 7 days where you get 7,000 link building credits.

Specifics of the site I used for this case study:

• 6 months old
• Price comparison site for recreational water crafts
• Monetized with Amazon affiliate links
• No active link building for two months prior to test

My strategy was to play it (relatively) safe and be less aggressive with certain spammy looking link types (which can be subjective). It’s very possible that I could have received better/faster rankings by being more aggressive with certain links, however I tried to avoid blasting my site with tons of spun content, especially since some of the link providers I noticed didn’t take the level of care I personally would when it comes to spinning articles (one of the cons I found. I did recently notice that they have Jon Leger’s ArticleBuilder.net built-in which you can use to generate your own unique articles if you so wish).

Here’s a snapshot of exactly how I have my links allocated:

*You can email support at support@linkemperor.com and ask for a free account evaluation and they will have a look-see and offer suggestions to get the most out of your link building efforts. Be sure you include your username or registered e-mail address for your account when you email them.

When you add your lander pages, or the URL’s you want to rank, Link Emperor works it’s magic and finds a bunch of easy to rank for keywords, which you can adjust how much link building you want, if any, done using these anchors.

You can also add your own keywords that you would like to rank for. I added three high competition “buyer” keywords, each pointing to a different URL on this test site, that I would like to eventually rank for.  These were:

Keyword 1 – 4,400 exact local. This keyword I’ve been tracking for a while with Rankerizer and it’s a brand name. Went from nowhere, to position 39 after a week and is sitting at position 28 at the time of this post.

Keyword 2 – 6,600 exact local, high competition buyer keyword. Not the best keyword to track for such a short test, but still saw some progress; started at position 83 and moved to 78 at the time of this post. (Click to enlarge)

Keyword 3 – 3,600 exact local, high competition buyer keyword. Another keyword that isn’t the best keyword to run a short test on, but would be highly lucrative once in the top 3. Started at position 42 and moved to 14 at the time of this post. (Click to enlarge)

No too bad after only 5 weeks, but for the money you might expect a lot more. However, remember when I mentioned that Link Emperor builds links using long-tail keywords that are easy to rank for? Well, I ended up getting a lot more first page results then I initially anticipated (click to enlarge):

Because of these first page rankings my traffic doubled in the short amount of time I ran this test:

*You get detailed reports of all the links built, so take advantage of this and run them through Linklicious or your favorite link indexer. I might actually contact Justin from Linklicious and see if they’ll integrate with Link Emperor to make it completely hands off.

As mentioned above, the site that was the subject of this case study is an Amazon affiliate site for water crafts, many which sell in $1000 to $2000 range, that result in an average of $100 in profit per sale. So, when I was able to double my traffic, I was easily able to get my money back from using this service in just one month. I’m excited to see where this site will be a few months down the road without any work done on my part.

I know for many the price is going to be an issue. When I started out I would scoff at the idea of shelling out $497 a month. Even the $147 a month plan would have been a stretch. But, in the absence of money, I had time! I had plenty of time and desire to manually build backlinks. Then when income started rolling in I was able to reinvest that money into link building services to free up some of my time to focus on starting new websites. As your portfolio and income grows, so does the amount of money you can reinvest.

With that being said, do I feel this service is for everybody? History and my own experience would say no. But, if you have solid converting site(s) or simply prefer hands-off link building and are comfortable investing in your business, then by all means try it out! There’s a 30-Day money back guarantee, which is rare in this industry, so if you don’t see results simply cancel and ask for your money back. I review products in a completely unrelated niche and one of my “rules” is I will only support products that offer a money-back guarantee, so it’s extremely refreshing to see that sort of guarantee in a link building service.

Give link Emperor a try for just $7 for 7 days!

*To be totally transparent with you, the links pointing to Link Emperor within this review are affiliate links, which means I may earn a commission if you click through and order their service.  Keep in mind this in no way affected my final viewpoint of their service. Thanks!

Link Emperor Review – The ONLY Link Building Service You’ll Ever Need?

If you’re into the whole SEO thing and frequent blogs/forums etc. then you’ve probably heard of the penguin update…

And you’re probably sick of hearing about it – or more so the speculation and mass hysteria.

So, for me personally, I plan on looking past the speculation and clearing the waters the only way I know how…

Through testing on my personal sites!

So, what does this have to do with my niche site?  Well, this particular site was kicked square in the nuts by the penguin.

Now, where most people would give up or cry about how evil Google is, I plan on taking the lemons Google gave us and making lemonade!

A few things:

Testing

I have a mixed bag of sites – some affected negatively and some actually gained ground.

Two of my sites I created at the same time and have the exact same backlinking portfolio, meaning I only used one service for both of these sites, yet one gained ground while the other fell off the map on the exact same day – April 24^th.

Because of this, I plan on focusing on on-page factors first.  There are a few glaring differences between the two sites, especially when it comes to content, outbound links, etc.

Secondly, I plan on creating a more “chaotic” backlink portfolio to my affected sites.  By this I mean varying anchor text and so on.  Google love chaos, and subsequently penalize sites by identifying certain patterns  that look “unnatural”, so I plan on feeding the penguin what it wants.

There are too many factors to decisively tell what will be responsible if/when I’m able to bring my affected sites back, but it may help identify what has a better chance of working.

Am I Mad I Had A Few Sites Affected?

Yes and no.  It’s all part of the game so you must brace yourself for it and prepare for doomsday!

And don’t let people fool ya into saying this is why you must go white hat!  There are plenty of examples I’ve personally seen of sites that aren’t over-optimized (following conventional wisdom I guess) AND had never built a link to their site at all – ever – and they were still affected.

Plus, with this particular niche site I created, and actually ALL of my sites, I create VALUE!  I don’t make small niche sites with one page and slap up Adsense.  I create real value driven sites that aim to help people.  And the only reason I may be slightly upset is that the sites that replaced mine on the first page are laughable in most cases.

Fighting web spam my ass.  Increasing the likelihood of people using Adwords? More likely the case. Remember, Google is a for-profit business.

Moving Forward

I plan on using my aforementioned tests results and applying what works to this niche site to see if it helps.  It still receives longtail traffic (which convert better anyways), and is still making money.

If you have personally used a technique that helped get your sites rankings back please share in the comments or email me and I will test it out on my site. 

More importantly, I plan on building up traffic through various other sources for this site, thus cutting Google out of the equation.  I recently added a forum to help build a “community” and give people a reason to come back.  I created a YouTube page and plan on adding multiple videos and building up that subscriber base, as well as adding an email list.

These are just a few things I already do with my authority sites, but thought I should quit putting it off for this niche site.

Time to make that lemonade!

Niche Site Update #5 – When Google Gives You Lemons, Make Lemonade!

I’m about to show you how to be 30x more productive with your SEO efforts…

And like a lot of the methods I use, this little tip/tool is absolutely FREE!

But, first I want to bore you with a quick story about myself.

I’m very meticulous (nice way of saying I suffer from OCD – thanks mom) in that I track and plan most everything I do.

For example:

I have a spreadsheet set up for all of my workouts which detail every rep and pound I’ve lifted over the last ten years…

I have my diet plan written out in detail, displaying my caloric, carb, protein and fat goals for each day, displayed in my kitchen…

*In all fairness, I’m not a total prude…I do have a spontaneous side, which usually just gets me in trouble…

Now, this may seem crazy to most, but it helps me analyze what works, what doesn’t and to identify patterns so I can spend my time more efficiently.  It may take a little work upfront, but it pays off tenfold in the end.

This meticulous tracking of data has helped in countless ways with improving my conversion optimization and SEO productivity, as well.

For every site I’ve owned and still own, I have an excel sheet set up to track certain backlinks like my web 2’s, guest posts, anchor text’s I used, etc.  I also track what services I used to backlink these anchor sites.

But, this is where the fun part comes in!

Introducing SEO Tools For Excel

This little add-in to Microsoft Excel can make tracking your campaigns and analyzing data a snap.  In fact, it has saved me countless hours…and more importantly my sanity.

SEO Tools For Excel was created by Niels Bosma and turns a simple Excel sheet into a powerful SEO tracking tool.

So, how can SEO Tools For Excel help YOU?

• It allows you to monitor and analyze your back links
• Check if you’re backlinks, or your site’s links, are indexed
• Check Google pagerank for sites
• Count the number of Facebook likes, Google + and Tweets for any URL
• Research a sites Alexa popularity
• Scrape any website or web service and pull that data directly into Excel
• Conduct domain research, for example, find out when a domain expires, etc.
• Pull data from Google Analytics
• Avoid duplicate content
• Onpage SEO analysis

And that’s just a few of the features of this popular tool!

Installation is easy.  Just visit the downloads page and download either the 32 bit or 64 bit version, depending on what version of Excel you’re using.  If you’re not sure what version your Excel program is then simply click File ==> Help and over on the right hand side you’ll see your version.  It looks like this in Office 2010:

Once you’ve downloaded the file and have it installed, which is as simple as dragging and dropping the SeoTools.xll file into an open spreadsheet, then you’ll now have the Seo Tools tab at the top:

Simply click that tab and it will display the full suite of tools you can use:

How you use the extensive suite of tools is up to you and your unique situation. But, don’t be afraid to jump in and test all the different features.

And since you’re soon to have all this extra free time on your hands now, feel free to comment below!

Turning Excel Into An SEO Productivity Powerhouse!

I’ve been strangely addicted to that show on National Geographic Channel called Doomsday Preppers.

You know, the show where various people reveal their plans for survival when, as they all seem to put it, “shit hits the fan”!

Weirder yet, it was my wife who turned me onto the show…

Anyways, I couldn’t help but notice the glaring similarities between the show and SEO.

After all, BuildMyRank, ALN, High PR Society and a few other blog networks recently met their doom.

And, unfortunately, so did the livelihood of a lot of IM’ers who relied on those networks for their rankings.

First, let’s cover a few facts:

• Search engines are constantly evolving.
• It’s getting increasingly harder to rank your site/keep it ranked.  Still not necessarily difficult, but just think about how easy it was 5 years ago!
• You never know when the next algorithm is going to hit and your site is going to drop off the map.

If you’re running an online business who’s success relies on the search engines then doomsday is inevitable, as I’m sure you’re well aware.

So, how do you prep your business to avoid catastrophe?

How, even after all the Panda updates and the demise of some major blog networks, did my rankings and income actually improve for all of my sites?

Diversify your link portfolio
Those who rely heavily on one type of link, link network or service are bound to be hit sooner or later. Remember, there are MANY types of links you can build plus networks or services to utilize if that’s the route you want to take. I cover a variety of these in my link building strategies page.  These are all strategies that I still use to rank my sites.

Don’t rely on the search engines
Google is great, don’t get me wrong.  And Bing and Yahoo have their place, as well. But, they’re just one source of traffic.  And relying on them to fuel your business is not a very good idea.

So be sure to take advantage of the many other avenues out there like Facebook or Twitter to help drive traffic. Build an email list.  Add a forum to your site to give visitors a reason to stick around and come back often.  Network with others in your niche.  Submit guest posts.  Write kick ass content!  But above all, give readers what they want, which brings us to…

Provide value
You need to provide value to give your site’s visitors a reason to come back, share your site with their friends and so on.   The search engines, in my opinion, are a great way to get tons of targeted traffic.  But, it’s up to you keep those visitors coming back or convert them into sales if that’s your goal!  Some people profit well with one page niche sites, but since I don’t have any experience doing that, I can’t comment either way.  However, in my personal experience and the basis of my online success, building content rich authoritative sites that naturally give people a reason to want to come back and promote your site is a better long-term strategy.

Am I immune to the evolving world of internet marketing?  Is my business model “doomsday proof”?

Unfortunately not.  But, the old “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” saying that you’re probably sick of hearing is not only true, but vital to your future success.

Remember, diversify your business portfolio in every way that makes sense to your unique situation…

For example, if one site fails, have 4, 5, 6 or maybe more sites to fall back on.  (I’ve had more sites fail than I care to admit!)

If one linking source gets wiped out, you have a wide enough backlink portfolio that your site holds strong.

If your site gets deindexed, have another source of traffic!

These are just a few examples…

So, long story short, Prepare for the worst!

The best way to do this is to stop, take a step back and ask yourself if you could handle a major catastrophe to your business.

Put yourself in a position where you’re comfortable if your business was to take a hit.

In other words, prep yourself for an online doomsday!

Btw, I’m in no way a Doomsday prepper in real life.  In my current state, if “shit WAS to hit the fan” and the world saw a major catastrophe, my survival odds aren’t looking so well!

Luckily my wife is formulating a plan!

How Doomsday Preppers Can Help Your Online Business Thrive!

Update: This post was written in 2012.  Some of these gigs may be effective still, but most likely they’re not. And, if they are, I would still be leary about the long term results.  I am working on updated link building tactics so stay tuned for that.

In this edition of my Fiverr gig review, I will be looking at 4 more SEO related gigs to see what impact thay had, if any, on my test site rankings.

Plus, I want to uncover a few other Fiverr gigs I use and the reasons why.

And in case you missed it, check out part one of my SEO Fiverr Gig Review.

So, let’s get started!

Transform your article to powerpoint and PDF and submit it for backlinks for $5

This gig basically takes an article you provide, turns it into a powerpoint and pdf file, then submits it to the top 10 document sharing and slide sharing sites. They then ping the backlinks for, as they say, faster indexing.

I tried this gig on an inner page of my niche site and I targeted a long tail keyword with easy to medium competition.  The page was nowhere in the top 100 before testing this gig.  It took a few days but it appeared at around position 45 then after a few weeks of slight movement it’s now sitting at position 41.

I will do 200 social bookmarking submission for your 2 URLs for $5

This gig will submit your URL, up to two of them, to 100 social bookmarking sites.  For an extra $5 they will spin the descriptions, create RSS feeds and submit those feeds to RSS directories.  I ordered the gig, used just one URL and ordered the extra’s to try and get the most benefit.

I pointed this gig at another page on the same niche sites as above with easy to medium competition.  Before starting this gig the page was not in the top 100.  It jumped around position 80 or so for a few weeks then completely disappeared again.  It hasn’t been in the top 100 for the last month.

I will submit your article to my man myarticlenetwork, ArticleRanks and spinandsend account for $5

This service will submit an article you provide to MAN (My Article Network), ArticleRanks and Spin And Send.  I linked back to an inner page on an authority site of mine that was a product name and medium competition.  The page was not in the top 100 to start out with and two months later still hasn’t broke the top 100.

Sorry, there’s no screen shot for when my page doesn’t reach the top 100 for the keyword.

I will prove that you can rank ANY low or medium competitive keyword to the first page of Google with my powerful link building service for $5

Obviously, the ol’ bullshit detector was going off before even testing this gig, but hey, why not give it a shot.

I tested this gig on an easy to medium competition keyword, a keyword they claim they can take to the first page of Google.  The page is an inner URL on an authority site and is also a product name (not the same as the one mentioned above).

This particular page was at position #24 at the start of this gig and has slowly been dropping since and is now at position 49.  To be fair, the page was as high as position 4 at one time and was starting on a decline before I ran this gig. Either way, it didn’t help.

In addition to the gigs I tested for this review, there are a few that I frequently use for various reasons.  In no particular order:

• I will make 20 000 GUARANTEED Instant Blog Comment Backlinks with Scrapebox for unlimited urls and keywords for $5 and I will create Xrumer Backlinks 20 000, 30 000, 40 000, 50 000, 100 000 Links Verified Forum Profile Backlinks for $5: You’ve probably heard of the importance of getting your backlinks indexed.  Furthermore, you’ve probably heard of, and perhaps even tried out, a few different backlink indexers, but IMHO none of those backlink indexers work as good as blasting your backlinks with comments and profiles.  Both of these gigs WAY over deliver so you typically end up with hundreds of thousands of links AND you can point these links at an unlimited amount of URL’s!  And notice that I point these to my tier 2’s and tier 3’s, NOT my money site!  So, once a month I spend $10 and blast my money sites backlinks with  these two packages.  Works better than any backlink indexer and is affordable.
• I will use 22 PR8 to PR5 social bookmark to create backlinks MANUALLY to your website for $5: I’m a big fan of social bookmarking…when it’s done right!  These social bookmarks make great tier 2’s and I usually blast these with comments or profiles to pass more juice through.
• I will spin and submit your article to 7450 Article Directories, Get 500+ Google Backlinks + Full Report + Ping for $5: Sometimes I like to blast my web 2.0’s and other tier 2’s with AMR blasts and this gig does just that.  I like this gig because they even provide the article for you, making it completely hands off.

Now, I’d like to hear from you…What Fiverr gigs am I missing?  What gigs do you frequently use if any?  Let us know in the comments below!

Fiverr Fever! A Review Of Various SEO Fiverr Gigs – Part 2