The title says it all, really. A writer who has been with me now for about 18 months and who has done some really good work for me in that time took it upon herself to fleece me.

What I mean by that is – she decided to offer my work to her cousin in return for payment, without informing me she was doing so. Her cousin then took a short cut and copied content that was already on the web, which was then sent back to me, or posted straight to my websites.

In all, I would guess there’s been about 30 or so articles that were sent to me which have turned out to be duplicated content. At 10 bucks an article, that’s a fairly hefty price tag to be paying for copied content, particularly so when you consider the fact that I could have been sued by the original content owners.

But what’s more – some of that content I’ve been trying to rank in Google.

Thus in other words, I’ve been investing a fair amount of cash trying to get this content ranked high in Google, and because its duplicated, the chances of ever ranking where I wanted it to rank are pretty much nil. Money down the drain, it could be said.

You may be wondering why I never checked the writing when it was returned to me.

For obvious reasons – I trusted my writer in entirety. What a costly mistake that turned out to be, but fortunately I’ve not been threatened by a law suit – yet!

There is one thing I did find out from this rather sad episode. Who said that you can’t rank non-unique content in Google? You can!

Some of the stuff I had written up was for my travel website. My travel website is based on where I now live – North Borneo, Malaysia.

Most of the site content I actually wrote myself, since I’ve personal experience and photos of the area. Plus, I enjoy doing it, which makes a huge difference.

Even if the site were to make no money at all, I’d still enjoy creating the content because not only is it good stuff, but I know for a fact that many people do appreciate reading it and looking at the photographs.

However, for some of the articles, I prefered to outsource to my regular writer.

Lo-and-behold, when I checked Google for those articles that were dupe content, they are all ranking top 20 in Google for their main keyword term, which is the article title.

I had been led to believe that more recently, Google were going to add duplicate content to their supplementals. Or in other words, the chances of duplicate content ranking in the top hundred search results for anything half worthy was pretty much nil. So I thought.

That is not the case. In fact, some of these duplicated articles are ranking in the top ten.

Mind you, this is for very uncompetitive keyword phrases – very much long tail phrases – and that is where I believe the difference actually is.

If you or I were to try to gain rankings for competitive keyword phrases when our articles are duplicate content, the chances of seeing any light at the top of Google is pretty much nil. But its now a proven fact that if you are targeting uncompetitive long tail phrases like what I was doing, you’ll still in fact be able to gain high rankings.

Keep in mind also that I did not do much (if any) backlinking to these webpages. So it shows you just how uncompetitive theses terms actually are.

On a final note… I made a sale today on the same travel website for a total of $170 US dollars. A single sale.

I put my heart and soul into this website, since its one of the few true passions I actually have (other than drinking too much alcohol and smoking too many cigars) and now – finally – I’m starting to see some results.

The rankings are coming along very nicely, albeit mainly for long tails, which was of course my original intention.

I write about anything and everything to do with travelling within Sarawak, Malaysia.

That ranges from what food is available here (the food is wonderful!), to the best places to eat, to what there is to see whilst spending time here in or near Kuching. A bit about the history of the place. The wildlife and the botany. The natural beauty that surrounds this part of the world, not least the scuba diving and snorkeling. About sunset cruises where you can see dolphins, and crocodiles in the swamps that lie along the coast of the South China Sea. And of course the orang utans, which are still able to roam in their natural habitat, although it is now a wildlife reserve and is man-managed.

I would have added some nice photos to this post, but alas, I lost them when my computer hard drive was damaged when my cat jumped on my laptop.

Needless to say I’ll be adding a whole lot more content to the site, and taking a lot more photographs too. There’s not much that can better doing a job that you love and getting paid well for it, is there?

FLEECED! is a post from: Life and Times of an Internet Marketer

Today’s post is written by Brendan Hufford, a regular commenter here on my blog.  In the past four months, he has started down the path of internet marketing without looking back.  Today, he shares with us a great tool that many people who are new to internet marketing may not know about: Google Alerts.

First, I would like to thank Joseph Archibald for providing us with amazing content for free.  Of the seemingly millions of seo, niche marketing, internet marketing, etc. blogs and sites out there, I’ve found this one to be one of the best and the small community he has built here is awesome!

If you haven’t purchased Jo’s e-book yet, you need to do that (note from Joseph – more on the way soon!).

Seriously. Stop reading this and buy it. The link is over on the right hand side, just above here…

(Note from Joseph: I’ll pop the check in the post today, Brendan. Can you remind me how much we agreed to?).

…

Okay, let’s continue.

I was amazed one day while chatting on a forum about mixed martial arts that somebody mentioned they use ‘Google Alerts’ to keep them up to date on their favorite fighters.  I thought it sounded interesting so I logged into my Google account and set it up for some things I was interested in regarding the websites that I run.

The first thing I was surprised at was its power.

You mean to tell me that Google will send me a personal e-mail daily, weekly, or instantly, whenever they crawl a new page for my chosen keyword(s)?  You betcha!

If you want to be minimalist, have them sent to you weekly.  If you prefer, have them sent daily.  But I’ve learned that having them sent as it happens is a colossal waste of time.

I wanted to take a minute to share the benefits of Google Alerts and a rough guide on how to use them.  What I won’t cover is how to set them up.  Google does a fantastic job of that already (http://www.google.com/alerts).

If I could give you one tip on setting them up though is to put key phrases you want in “quotation” marks so that you don’t get a bunch of random junk, especially if you are searching for a popular keyword.

I would also suggest different “Result Type” settings depending on what you are searching for.

“Everything” is great if you have time to read through things you have chosen to search and “Discussions” is excellent for building backlinks or marketing (more on this below).

So what should I set in my Google Alerts?

• Things you want to learn about.
• People you want to follow – if you really follow a specific person on the web, this will alert you to their guest posts and interviews.
• Things you’ve written about.
• Yourself and your brand – see what people are saying and remember to thank people for mentioning you.
• Question queries – “what is the best digital camera?” and “what is the best golf putter” are great queries for you to jump in on and comment with a link to your site.  It also helps to see if your pages are getting noticed for those queries.
• Monitor affiliate products – this is also a great way to check on your marketing competition.

So what are the benefits of Google Alerts?

Education – Excellent for Internet Marketers because if I wanted to learn more about white hat SEO (whatever that means nowadays), I could set the Google Alert and get a daily e-mail about it and read the latest news instead of reading what Googol thinks is the “best” information.  If you want to stay up to date, it’s definitely something to check out.

Networking – I have met a TON of people because my Google Alerts take me to their blogs.  I can leave comments and have even set up a few guest posts from this aspect of Google Alerts.

Backlinks – Like I mentioned above, you can very easily blog comment and forum comment with the “Discussions” search and put a link to something you’ve talked about before. In addition, if you have alerts set up with your site name or brand name as the keyword, then you can see if people have cited your work or mentioned you and forgotten to link to you.

Spinning – I’m hesitant to write this here, but if you don’t mind spinning other quality articles on the web, this is a great way to find new articles on topics you need for your sites.

What I’ve found to be the most helpful part of Jo’s site is the comments and the discussion that follows.  So if you’ve used, or are using, Google Alerts, please let us know how else we can use it!  If you aren’t currently using it, you really need to.  It’s one of the best free tools on the internet!

Google Alerts: The Best FREE Tool You May Not be Using is a post from: Life and Times of an Internet Marketer

Here’s the video and download link of the webinar with Rob Cornish – how to successfully launch a product online…

Successful Product Launch Interview with Rob Cornish – Video and Download Link is a post from: Life and Times of an Internet Marketer

Today, I thought I would write a post which is particularly relevant to all those folks who regularly read my blog but rarely if ever comment. That’s fine – I know we are not all the commenting “type”. Apparently, the average amount of comments received by a blog is only 1% of total traffic. Fortunately, this blog is quite a bit above that.

Anyhow, I received a brief email today from a gentleman who sometimes writes me to check that he’s on the right tracks. As you know, I do try to answer almost every single email I get – other than those great long book-like emails which I’m sorry to say I simply don’t manage to get around to making a reply to.

Here is the email I received this morning. The gents name I will leave out for reasons of privacy…

Email title: Awesome “THANK YOU”. (I actually thought it was spam, LOL!).

Hi there, Joseph.

Just wanted to thank you for your great work. You’ve inspired me and your blog posts and you answering my e-mails kept me going and I just realized that during last week I’ve made three sales of a product I’ve been affiliating. That’s an awesome feeling, to see that after a few months of work (4, actually) I actually have achieved something.

So thank you so much and please do keep up this great work you’re doing.

Cheers!

Now, in no way am I banging on my own drum and saying just how wonderful I am. Well, okay, I know I’m a top notch bloke/dude – I have to accept the truth after all

The point being that when I receive emails such as these, it makes my blog post writing all the more worthwhile. So please – everyone – do feel at liberty to flood my inbox with emails of praise because now and again an ego boost is just what the doctor ordered!

I want to say in return – thanks to everyone who reads my blog, regardless you choose not to comment! Comments are great and I love the interaction, but if you choose not to comment, then that’s cool too.

Blogging can be hard work, which is why I choose to only write a post when I’ve got something worthy to say – I shy away from hard work these days and much of what I do comes merely from inspiration, which makes life more of a joy!

———————–

On another note…

and in case you were not aware – and most of you probably are not… You may remember the Google project I started back in mid October whereby I set out to rank a very high level search term in Google’s top ten within a matter of a few months.

Just as a quick reminder – the main keyword phrase I chose receives 450,000 searches in Google each month on a Global basis (that’s exact searches, not broad or phrase searches).

You may also remember that after about 7 weeks, Google dumped some of my webpages from the rankings and I thought that was game over.

However, within a further 3 weeks, those webpages came back up in the rankings, so I decided to pick up the pieces behind the scenes and try to persevere with it.

Yesterday, I finally managed to crack top ten with the high end search term, although it is currently dancing around a little and sits back in 12th spot right now – as far as I can see, anyhow. This is in Google US according to the Goog Adwords Keyword Tool. Its actually ranking top ten in Canada and the UK I think, and probably a few other countries besides.

In all, its taken just less than 3 and a half months to gain this top ten ranking in Goog, for what is obviously a very competitive term indeed. (I did originally research the keyword phrase and I saw some weakness in the top ten, hence my reason for choosing it in the first place – keyword research is, erm… key!)

Thus, as you can see from my own work, its actually very possible to rank a very high end kwd phrase in Google by dumping a whole ton of backlinks on your webpage from the very beginning, even if some of your webpages do get penalized by the almighty Google.

Besides the high end term, I’ve also gained a whole gamut of top ten long tail rankings for the site, even though there are no more than about 18 pages of content on the domain.

Plus, one of my secondary terms with over 18k search is now sitting pretty in the top ten also, with another new term which receives 110,000 searches a month in Google placed in the high 20′s. I only began to focus on that particular term about 2 weeks ago. Previously, it was resting just outside the top 100.

I think one of the main messages here is this – don’t always presume that what you read about ranking in Google is actually true. Don’t be afraid to do your own experiments.

As you know, I’m the guy who does just this. I don’t take Google at “face value”, I do make a big effort to do my own trials, many of which I share with you on this blog. I don’t like sticking with run of the mill.

If some guru comes to me and tells me “Joseph, that does not work…” – I’m the guy who may well try to find a way to make it work. I don’t particularly like the word “CAN’T“.

Truth be told, very many of my projects fail. But some are very successful, such as this one. I don’t shy from failure.

You hear fairly regularly about scientists who failed time and time again at their projects, but finally – and regardless that everyone else is saying that they can’t – they do make a big break through and that break through brings them fame and fortune.

Well, although gaining Google rankings may not bring us fame, they can indeed bring us fortune and a great lifestyle to boot.

Thus I say to you – do not be afraid to do your own trials. Don’t shy from failure. Build up your knowledge base as to how others gain rankings and/or make money online, and then build on that knowledge by doing your own trials.

And don’t be afraid of failure. Failure is GOOD! Failure brings us a step closer to success, and success may be just around the next corner for you.

From Apparent Failure to SUCCESS! is a post from: Life and Times of an Internet Marketer

Here’s a link to the post where you can watch the webinar video or download it to your computer. This is GOOD stuff so please don’t disregard it!

http://www.josepharchibald.com/successful-product-launch-interview-rob-cornish-download-link

I mentioned this up and coming webinar – “How to Successfully Launch a Product Online” – a few days back in the comments section here on the blog, and now its time to post about it. I know its going to be popular, so book your seat now before there’s no places left. And yes – I do mean that – the webinar is limited to 100 people only.

In this webinar you’ll learn exactly how the one and only Rob Cornish managed to create and then launch his own product online which went on to make $79,000 within a period of only 4 days – yes – $79 thousand US greenbacks in a mere FOUR DAYS! The product went on to generate a whopping $270,000 in all!

And he did not even have to rely on Google, which will come as a relief to many of you who wish to emulate his success, no doubt!

So if you want to learn about marketing your own product successfully without having to rely upon the good graces of Google and SEO, then do join us for the webinar which will be broadcasting live on Wednesday, February 1 at 8:00 PM. It should last about an hour and it will have you sweating with inspiration and excitement to get going yourself!

Simply click on this link to sign up…

https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/434451470

How to Successfully Launch a Product Online – Live Webinar is a post from: Life and Times of an Internet Marketer

These guys are debating keyword research.

This is a guest post by Tom Ewer of Leaving Work Behind.

Niche sites are a much-discussed topic in the world of internet marketing. Everyone has an opinion – whether the topic is keyword research, content creation, backlinking strategies, or any other marginally contentious point of discussion.

Let’s be honest – your head is probably spinning with the wealth of conflicting advice out there. Fortunately, I am not here to compound your misery. I just want to give you one solid piece of advice and then point you off in the right direction.

What I am about to tell you is something that I desperately wish I had known when I first started building niche sites, some eight months ago. I know for a fact that I would be much further along in the development of my niche site portfolio if I had followed this one simple rule.

Okay; that’s enough suspense-building. Here is the one thing you absolutely must do as a newbie niche site builder.

Diversify

I spent the first four months of my niche site building efforts on just one site. I poured an enormous amount of energy into it, producing three articles a week, every week, without fail. I spent hours creating web 2.0 properties and feeding mass article submissions to them.

Do you know what happened? I got Google slapped. Terminally. I got a little too overexcited with my backlinking, and got what I deserved. Whilst the experience taught me an extremely valuable lesson, I was essentially left with nothing.

I had basically been banging my head up against this.

Do you know how much that niche site earned me in total? $82.36 gross. In reality, I made a massive loss (relatively speaking) on the project. Although the site was making $4-5 per day at its peak and growing, all of that was now lost.

Don’t Make It Difficult For Yourself

So please, learn from my mistake. If you are brand new to niche site building, you need to prepare yourself for a huge learning curve. There are so many little intricacies that catch you out – that is the nature of the beast.

But do not fear – it’s not all doom and gloom! Not by a long shot. Let’s talk about the right way to start your niche site building endeavor.

Your short term goals should be to (in order of importance):

1. Persevere
2. Learn
3. Earn

I call it the PLE principle – mainly because it sounds funny when you say it out loud (you just did it, didn’t you?). The numerical order of the PLE principle is extremely important, because if you do not persevere, you will never learn. And if you do not learn, you will never make any money. It’s that simple.

And let's be honest - we're in it for the mighty dollar.

The Key To Niche Site Success

The key to niche site success isn’t effective keyword research, masterful content creation, or brilliant backlinking (although all three are of course very important). The key to niche site success is perseverance. Everything stems from your willingness to approach your niche site projects with enthusiasm and determination, over a prolonged period of time.

Which brings me back to diversification. Unless you are particularly masochistic, you will want to see results in order to persevere. Whilst we all understand that ranking in Google takes time, we don’t want to be sat in our chairs three months from now, with no pages in the top ten, or worse, a one-site project that has just been Google-slapped to hell.

So do yourself a favor – don’t build a site. Build a portfolio. Don’t build a quasi-authority site with 10 posts – build 5 micro-niche sites with 2 articles each. If you are targeting 10 different keywords on five different sites, you’ll feel like things are happening. You will sense that undeniable sensation of progress. And that is what will drive you to persevere. And as I have already said, everything else will fall in place behind that.

Pictured: what we are aiming for.

Practical Considerations

As long as you are not throwing vast quantities of money at your sites by outsourcing all of your work (which you really shouldn’t be doing if you are brand new to niche sites), you need to adopt the attitude that failure is okay, or even welcome. Failure in niche site building will teach you lessons that you will never make again.

So with that in mind, do not be afraid to target modest keywords. There is no shame in focusing your efforts on keywords sharing the following characteristics:

• 1,000 exact match local searches per month
• CPC in excess of $1
• AdWords competition in excess of 50%/medium

Just make sure that you target really low-competition keywords. Whilst you may not immediately pick up gems, you will be really heartened to see your niche sites getting onto the front page of Google. You will begin to realize that it is actually possible – that you are learning how to build profitable niche sites.

When it comes to competition, look out for a top 10 that shares the following characteristics:

• Three or more sites with a PR and domain age of 2 or less. This is more of a rule of thumb rather than a set-in-stone requirement, but low-PR/domain age sites can be exploited, and also suggest that the barriers of entry are low.
• Poor onsite optimization. Check that the exact match keyword is not featured in the URL, title, headers, and meta description of your potential competitors. Good onsite optimization can make a huge difference to your ability to rank above more influential pages.
• No root domains.
• Less than 10 domains (as opposed to links) pointing to the page (as opposed to the domain on which the page resides) that is ranked.

If you target keywords by following the above instructions and engage in some modest backlinks building, you should see positive SERP rankings before long.

Then you'll be happy, like this guy!

Now Get Going!

Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.

~ Dale Carnegie

The sooner you start building these sites, the closer you will be to seeing the kind of results that will drive to you persevere. You’ll soon get hooked into the PLE principle – and then it is just a matter of time. If you have any questions at all, just leave a comment below or ask me via my Facebook page.

Tom Ewer is the owner of Leaving Work Behind, where he blogs about Keyword Research & SEO, as well as his quest for internet marketing success and location independence.

Creative Commons photos courtesy of Bev Sykes, dingatx, MoneyBlogNewz, gin soak and Gina Parody

The One Thing You MUST Do As A Newbie Niche Site Builder is a post from: Life and Times of an Internet Marketer

Apologies for not posting on my blog for quite some time. As mentioned before a number of times, I only post when I’ve got something worthy to say, otherwise – what’s the point – its all hot air. I’m not a hot air sorta guy, except after a few pints of Guiness etc

So what’s going down in the Archibald camp? Anything worthy of mention?

Well, the hard-drive on my newest laptop was trashed by my cat knocking my laptop to the ground. Fortunately because I use Dropbox (free account) almost all of my more important documents etc were perfectly fine. Although all my photographs of Asia over the past 4 years have been deleted. Nothing much to worry about – I’ll just take some more
With regards to online business, first up – I’m just about to trial a tool that has been offered to me for exactly that – trialling. Its not exactly a tool as such, but rather a backlinking system, but its a paid for service, so that should be very interesting. Just need to finalise a new site I’ve put together strictly for this purpose, and we’ll be off to the races. I’ll let you know how that’s progressing as and when I do see some progress.

Next, I’ve been getting creative. I talked about doing this a short time ago. My philosophy for the year 2012 is to get more creative.

If you are new to this game of internet marketing, getting creative is not at all easy, as you have to learn “the system” well enough, to then start playing around with some theories. But trust me – as you progress and you spend more and more time on your online busines (internet marketing, that is), you do enhance your capabilities to “think outside of the typical box” as the saying goes. I used to try to do that a lot, but really it does not necessarily come easily and it seems that experience is the key.

So, I’ve now actually come up with 3 (or arguably 4) different game plans for which I may very well end up creating information products for, during this coming year. 3 of those are in full swing now (not the info product, but the actual implementation of the system), but there’s a whole lotta testing and trialing to be done on 2 of them, whilst the other – well, I may even be able to launch a product on that “system” by April. And right now, its looking good!

These products are intended to be ebook based, with videos too, just to make it nice and broad for everyone. Some folks prefer videos to reading from an ebook, whilst many others have invested in Kindle or an iPad and so forth, so the ebook format is still thoroughly popular.

Its too early to dot any i’s or cross any t’s, but let’s put it this way, I’m very excited about all of them!

Let’s face the facts here - if you could work 20 hours a week and make a fantastic income, would you prefer to do that, than to work (slave labor) 80 hours a week to make a similar income?

This is the beauty of what I’m discussing here. Using your time far more wisely than you have EVER done previously, to leverage things in such a way to not only free up a whole lot of your precious time each and every day, but also to improve your bank balance beyond all previous dreams and desires.

Thus I will say – in this instance, quality is far, far better than quantity!

I don’t know about you, but from being a very young kid to being a middle aged (young) man, I’ve had it drummed into me that when it comes to earning a good income and when it comes to being “happy” in life (its for you to describe what “happiness” actually means for you), you have to work hard hard hard hard!!

That tends to mean, you have to work very long hours. Thus, in which case, oftentimes, quality takes a dive out the window. Its not easy to be quality focused when your belief is that to gain the best results you have to focus on quantity at all costs.

The more you do, the better it becomes.

Have you too heard that before – perhaps from your parents when you were a kid, or from your friends at school? Or indeed, from your boss at work. After all, working the typical 9 to 5 job goes totally against the quality over quantity ethos. Are you always going to be at your most productive for 8 hours out of every day whilst at work? What about the days where you feel lousy but you still have to report for work regardless. Is that time well spent? Or is that time that you’d be better resting up in order to re-charge you batteries for another day?

Well, FINALLY I’ve managed to change my thinking and refocus my efforts on an entirely different point of view.

Thus I tend to work far less hours online than I have done for the past 4 years (I do still fiddle around on somewhat trivial pursuits however), and tend to use much more time to think about how I can push my business forward – how to leverage my time far more successfully and efficiently.

In fact, I rarely even take the time to think about it, but rather – I just let the ideas bounce around in my head from time to time.

If you too are keen on doing something similar to me, but seem to be struggling to gain momentum in terms of your ideas seem to be run of the mill and thus not particularly marketable, I would suggest you don’t worry about it and try not to get frustrated. As I said, it seems to take time and experience to then be able to “re-invent the wheel” as they say.

Some of the very successful information products which are based on topics such as affiliate marketing are indeed merely simple ideas “stuck together” to make a very workable game plan. Its the same thing that I did with the Warrior Forum 40 Day Challenge, and that ebook sells as well now as it did when I first put it up for sale almost 2 years ago. To be honest, my marketing efforts are appallingly pathetic, but the sales keep on coming.

Let the ideas come to you, rather than you trying to force them.

When I try to force ideas, I generally end up with nothing much in return. Best to let those ideas self-generate. Or indeed, make some space for yourself each day. Set aside 20 minutes or something each day, and turn off the phone etc. Put on some relaxing background music if you wish. Sit in your most comfortable armchair, or lie in your bed. You get the idea – I’m not trying to pretend I’m some sort of mind-set coach or anything. This is just stuff that I hear that tends to work for many of us.

I was chatting with a Dutch gentleman just a couple of days back in one of the local Kuching hotels. He’s a thoroughly intelligent chap, and has taken early retirement at the grand old age of 45, to now live life relaxing by the swimming pool or on the beach, or indeed – on his yacht. He used to be a CEO of one of the biggest European banks, thus his monetary wealth is superior to most. In fact, he owns a few properties in South East Asia, one of them being in Bali.

Anyhow, he was telling me about an acquaintance of his, who merely sets aside some time out of each day to generate business ideas. They can be from any angle of business, it matters not.

Well, apparently this gentleman is now so wealthy he does not know what to do with his money. And how did he attain such monetary wealth? Selling his ideas on to other businesses. That’s it! He spends an hour or two each day on idea generation (emphasis on quality over quantity!) and then sketching down on paper what he comes up with. Obviously some ideas work incredibly well, whilst others not so well.

I don’t know about you, but I think this is a fantastic way to focus our time. I guess you could say its something akin to Tim Ferris’ 4 Hour Work Week concept. Quality over quantity!

I’ll be discussing a bit more about my up coming info products in the coming weeks and months. I’m telling you now – although I’m sure that my ideas are not totally new (although I’ve never actually read or heard of anything similar being marketed), these ideas are purely focused on wealth creation. Online wealth creation. And I’m not just talking about a few bucks here and there. I am talking about the potential to make many thousands each and every month!

Its not that I’ve spent days and weeks behind closed door coming up with great ideas. Far from it! All I’ve done is to utilize a lot of my current knowledge base to create some new and potentially thoroughly workable ideas.

What’s further, I’m really hoping that these ideas, these concepts – are as close to fail-safe as can be. In other words, if I approached a person who was new to online marketing, and I laid out just one of my ideas so that they could then go and implement them with no further input from myself, they would indeed make what could very well be a whole heap of cash flow, regardless of Google (albeit these methods are still dependant on Google, since that is and has always been my forte in the online business world) mood swings in terms of rankings in search.

Mind you, you would have to follow very closely with what I intend to map out. Its no good chopping and changing to fit your own moods. Success is dependant entirely on my “map to success“. After all, the reason I’ve been investing my hard earned cash and spending a reasonable amount of my own time on these systems, is to ensure that they will actually work for anyone who cares to implement them, and follow the system very closely indeed.

I’m excited, and I hope that comes across in todays blog post!

Creating a Road Map for SUCCESS in 2012 is a post from: Life and Times of an Internet Marketer

If you are currently annoyed, angry, frustrated, feeling utterly miserable and helpless – about having a website recently dumped down the Google rankings, then perhaps you can now take at least some heart from what I’m about to tell you. Listen up…

I set up a website around 9 months ago now. It was an MFA (made for AdSense) site – quickly set up the site, quickly added some content, quickly started the backlinking process, and voila – job done – a few top ten rankings within weeks, literally! And this was an EMD also (EMD = exact match domain name to a half decent keyword phrase in this particular case), although the kwd that the exact match is to only gets around 600 or 700 searches a month in Google according to Google stats, so the ranking of the EMD would hardly make me a millionaire over night.

Well, as it happens, the rankings did appreciate rather quickly – in fact, this niche has become popular over the past couple of years or so, so I was in fact surprised at just how quickly the rankings did materialize. I think in its hay-day, the website had about 6 of the 8 kwds I was targeting in top 10 and that came about within around 10 weeks of me buying the domain name. Yup – that was surprising!

Mind you, there was only one higher end kwd phrase with around 10k global search a month in Goog (according to Goog stats), where in the main, the rest of the kwds attracted anything between 500 and 3000 searches a month. So even though AdSense pays fairly well on this niche, the competition is still not particularly high end due to a fairly low geared search volume on the whole.

Okay, so there I was, happily moving up through the rankings for all my kwd phrases after only about 10 weeks, and the income was appreciating in tandem. Nothing huge by any means, but for example – one week may have seen 8 bucks, the next week saw 11 bucks, then then next 15 bucks and so on – you get the idea – the rise in income was gentle, but it was a definite rise all the same and ROI (return on investment) was good and looking better all the time.

But guess what – around about week 12 – 14, Goog did what they do and dumped all my rankings. The only ranking to stay in the top 30 was the EMD keyword phrase. All the rest plummeted out of the top 100. Thus the penalty was fairly harsh – site wide, as opposed to page or kwd “wide”. The site was of course still indexed in Google, so things could have been worse, but they were bad enough.

And yeah, I probably deserved it – I’ll come clean. I got greedy, and I wanted more, more, MORE!!! And I got a bit slap happy with my backlinking processes I guess. Silly boy – never learn!

Okay, so I gave up on it for a bit. Then I returned to it and did some light Blog Blueprint linking (4 to 10 posts/backlinks every third day of the week) to the EMD – for about 3 weeks, and that was 4 months ago. And yes, the EMD was bobbing about – between 9th and 20th in the generalized Google rankings (according to Scroogle that is).

The odd day still saw the site making a bit of income (particularly more recently when the EMD kwd phrase seemed to be appearing in top ten more often than for a long, long time), but mostly there was nothing at all, and none of the other kwds besides the EMD were interested in climbing up. In fact, that’s not entirely true. I remember seeing perhaps 3 of my previous 8 kwds gaining top 50 rankings but that was about it. I thought the domain was a gonner, I really did. Thus I stopped backlinking to it entirely about 3 months ago.

Woops – I remember I did do some SocialADR work on it a good while back to, but again, nothing much came from that – Goog simply were not going to love me any longer, boohoo!

However, I checked my traffic stats today and suddenly there’s life on what was a previously dead domain.

And yes – I have made some income on AdSense today from this website – not a lot, but a single click thus far. If I remember, average click through is around 10 – 12% which is nothing great, and I could probably do some testing and improving on that. On the other hand, it ain’t too shabby either.

And yes – I checked my rankings in Scroog and I’m back in top 15 for most of my kwds with a good few of them in top 10 again, and my EMD in 3rd according to the database that Scroogle uses, and according to the Google US database also.

Remember – I’ve not backlinked to any kwd phrases for the past 5 months other than the EMD kwd phrase. And I’ve not backlinked to the EMD kwd phrase for just over 3 months now. But Google have seen fit to re-rank my site once more. A site that they initially dumped almost entirely from their top 100 rankings some 5 to 6 months ago now.

That’s pretty much half a year of penalization to face, and I’ve ever since been thinking about setting up a fresh site and doing it all over again within the same niche – except this time, making sure that I avoid the Google castigation of course!

Obviously I’m going to want to push my re-gained rankings, right? But I surely do want to take it very easy, much as I am now doing with the high end Google project site, which is still sitting comfortably in the rankings, but not doing a whole lot quite frankly. But that’s fine – no rush after all!

So what am I going to do? Did I hear someone say “use Build my Rank…”? You got that right! I’ll let the new-found rankings sit for a couple of days, then get all my previous kwds that I wanted to rank back into BMR and I’ll set the links to 1 – 3 per day. No other backlinking for now! Otherwise, it makes sense to begin building out the site and adding in fresh content in the hope that Goog keeps on loving me and the site that’s returned from the dead

The moral of the story is…

It would appear that indeed, even the harsher penalized websites do come back in the rankings in Google (not if your website was de-indexed though), and they come back strong too. Nothing new there – most of us are somewhat aware of this fact. But I thought I would let you read about my own findings just to cement your belief in this, because sometimes its easy to refuse to believe this any longer – or to forget that it actually can happen, and you just give up entirely.

Or you simply don’t have the patience to hang around for months whilst Goog do nothing other than merely tease you.

But the fact remains – GOOGLE WILL RE-RANK YOUR SITE, EVEN AFTER A REALLY HARSH DUMPING!

Recently Suffered a Ranking Penalty in Google? Read This – Return From the Dead! is a post from: Life and Times of an Internet Marketer

In brief – some of you who have emailed me and yet to receive a reply may be wondering wassup… Well, I’ve still got this virus thing, which is now into its 4th week, and although just yesterday I really did feel some revitalization with regards to focus on my business, physically I’m as near a total wash-out as you can imagine. If I’m out of bed for more than 4 hours or so on the trot, its bed time all over.

The worst of the hot and cold flushes seems to have past by now. I did consult with two doctors here in Kuching, only to be told that yes – I do have a serious viral problem which is causing turbulence with my white blood cells and also inflaming my kidneys, but other than that, no one knows what’s wrong with me.

What to do other than to sit it out and “hope” for improvement?

I’m not one to complain about this sort of thing – there are oh so many folks in this world far worse off than I. Nevertheless, the real “killer blow” is when you are physically spent all the time and mentally incapable of adding 2 and 2 together to get 4. That kinda thing occasionally gets you worried because you start to think your business may be doomed due to your incapacity to even think half intelligently.

Oh, I know – time to crack open the malt whisky and open that fancy box of cigars I bought on the way home from Phuket! I’ll drink to that!

Let’s get on with the main post…

Indeed you read the title right – the fast rankings Goog project has a second lease of life, which was of course on the cards. The previous rankings have re-materialized – all but one of them, and there’s a newbie ranking on the block also which gets 1.9k global search volume in Goog monthly and is now sitting in 6th spot in Goog US.

Otherwise, the rankings go as follows:

Hi end 450k + search volume (global) in Google per month @32 (all-time highest was @25).

The kwd that gets just less than 3k searches a month in Goog is @13 (all-time high was @12).

The 8.1k search volume per month kwd is @5 (previous high was 7th).

And as mentioned, the 18k search vol kwd has apparently been given the harshest penalty (that was the newest kid on the block) and is still not showing top 50 (previous high was @17).

So now the question begs to be asked – what to do??

Do I continue to wallop the site as a whole and hope that Goog don’t notice? Erm, no. Chances are Goog will notice this sort of behaviour very quickly indeed, and I’ll get dumped fast!

Do I simply use a couple of tools to try to “ease” the rankings upwards from where they are now? Hmmm… yes, that’s probably a wise move. But there is still a fairly high risk for being dumped, and I’m more risk averse at the moment than I tend to be normally.

Do I sit and do nothing like I’ve been doing since the dumping took place almost 3 weeks ago? Yes, that also seems a wise move. After all, I can see what comes of things – maybe Goog will see fit to push the rankings upwards off the back of the previous backlinking work, in which case I should be happy to ride the wave. I get the impression however that there’s not much of a wave left to ride…

So here is what I am going to do. Sit and wait it out and see how much further the rankings can climb without me lifting a finger. Once these ranking appear to have petered out, I’ll start to gently nudge the main kwd phrase all over, and focus entirely on that main kwd phrase (lots of variations of the main kwd phrase).

Fact is, I doubt very much indeed that this will be enough to get the thing even into the top 20, but it makes sense to go slow and sure for now and not rock the apple cart more than I have done. Or does it make sense? Perhaps its wise to start firing on all cylinders once again…

I do want to make money from this site, so I am a bit wary of setting the guns blazing. Perhaps its wise to just make it one of those “background” websites, where you simply leave it to do its own thing and in time come back to it and really focus a lot more on it.

The current rankings are pretty solid and are enough to generate a small income, even though the current kwds that are ranking top ten are not going to be life-changers in terms of making an income – unfortunately these kwds appeal to the freebie seeker brigade. I sense this site may be best served by letting it mature. Let me know what you think!

Here are the previous posts in this Fast Google Rankings series…

Post 1: http://www.josepharchibald.com/rank-new-site-google-weeks-very-competitive-niche
Post 2: http://www.josepharchibald.com/rank-website-weeks-google-competitive-niche-post-2
Post 3: http://www.josepharchibald.com/update-on-the-new-project-ranking-high-in-google-with-fast-backlinking
Post 4: http://www.josepharchibald.com/update-rank-high-and-fast-in-google-in-a-competitive-niche-post-4
Post 5: http://www.josepharchibald.com/post-5-fast-google-rankings-project
Post 6: http://www.josepharchibald.com/post-5-fast-google-rankings-project
Post 7: http://www.josepharchibald.com/post-7-fast-google-ranking-project

Oh yeah – one other thing, just in brief. Not sure about you but I get the impression that Christmas sales have been incredibly slow online this year. I can qualify that statement but I shall not as I want to keep this brief.

The site that I purchased with the consideration of making a fast sale – I’ve decided to keep it and work more on the rankings. The traffic numbers are up really nicely, which does not necessarily mean profits are wildly high, but sales are ticking over just about fine. I’m thus figuring that if I keep doing what I’m doing with this site and keep pressing the rankings to get a number of top 3 positions, I’ll be onto a GOOD thing! More on this to follow in the coming weeks…

Post 8: Fast Google Rankings Project – Round 2? is a post from: Life and Times of an Internet Marketer

Just after heading on back to Kuching from Phuket (the land of the teeny black trunks and amazingly hot women who are only interested in money) I thought I would bring this special offer to your attention.

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Now in my opinion, that is a true steal! But only if you are in the position to take advantage of its potential. If you are not sure if you are in a position to take advantage of its potential, let me know and I’ll give you some feedback about what I think.

What’s more, even though my own commission for this product as an affiliate is 20%, I’ll throw in a further 7 bucks to make the price $60 for the month. Can’t say fairer than that now can I? If you want to avail of the further $7 off, simply email me with proof of purchase (Paypal receipt) and your Paypal ID.

To get in on the special, use this affiliate link…

 
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Backlinks Genie Going Cheap on the High End Account for 2 Weeks Only is a post from: Life and Times of an Internet Marketer