99% of my audience should know I’ve already moved to Detailed.com and Gaps.com, but if you didn’t, then here we are.

I’m secretly hoping this might go out to some RSS feeds of people who have forgotten about me and might want to check out what I have going on, but maybe not.

Either way, thank you for following over the years, wherever, and whoever, you are.

I’m still not entirely sure what will become of this website, but it has been one hell of a journey.

Thanks for joining me for the ride.

– G

The post I No Longer Blog Here: Please Join Me on Detailed.com and Gaps.com appeared first on ViperChill.

If you could rank them by how many backlinks those articles have, you’re left with foolproof solution for finding content ideas that attract links and comments. Fortunately, with the technology available today this is totally achievable in minutes and doesn’t require you to fork out for a virtual assistant to do all of the grunt work. In today’s post, I’ll show you exactly how it’s done, and a whole lot more.

While a lot of the ‘whitehat’ link building web is focused on “writing great content” that sole focus could mean you miss out on some great opportunities to improve your standing in Google.

Jon Cooper has one of the best link building minds on the planet, and here’s what he tweeted just a few days ago:

While you can shout “Just write quality content” all day long, those of us who rank in Google are more often than not actively trying to do so. You can still focus on writing great content and add smart link building to your mix.

A Unique Formula for Finding Popular, Linked-to Content You Can Replicate in Any Niche

When it comes to analysing content to see what people are interested in reading about, we already have the likes of BuzzSumo to analyse how popular something was socially, but social shares don’t always correspond to links. What does correspond to links? Getting people talking.

If something is worth commenting on in 2016, it’s far more likely to attract a link. And if you want to attract links to your articles, then write something worth commenting on. Just like you can learn from articles which received thousands of Pins on Pinterest or Likes on Facebook, you can also learn from the success of others in attracting comments and apply that to your own endeavours.

I’m going to dive right into this first tactic and use Copyblogger.com as my example site to work with.

What I first need to do is find a list of the blog posts on Copyblogger. You could wait around for a virtual assistant to collect all of the links manually but thankfully we have tools like Screaming Frog (free for analysing up to 500 URL’s) which can automate the process for us.

If I just open up Screaming Frog as-is and run Copyblogger through the tool, I start seeing results like the following.

The problem is that most of these results are useless unless I’m analysing their on-site SEO.

They aren’t actual posts from Copyblogger and if you’re using the free version of Screaming Frog, you’ll use up your 500 URL limit very quickly.

Fortunately Screaming Frog does have an Exclude setting, allowing you to pull back only the types of results you’re looking for. Here are some of the terms I have blocked to get a better picture of Copyblogger articles.

In other words, if these words are present in a URL, then Screaming Frog will not list them.

To find this box simply go to Configuration > Exclude and then add the terms you wish to exclude. Think “dot star [word] dot star” if you’re looking to write a list of terms quickly.

Another option to help remove irrelevant results is to go to Configuration > Spider and uncheck most of the options, as shown below.

Now if I run the tool again, I should get some ‘cleaner’ results.

As you can see, I’m finding the actual blog posts that I was looking for with little ‘fluff’.

Once you have your list, use the Save option so you have your list of URL’s.

“This is just a list of pages from Copyblogger. How does that help?”

As you probably guessed, there’s a bit more to this tactic than simply finding all posts on the Copyblogger blog.

The next tool I want to use in my arsenal is URLProfiler which you can find here (not an affiliate link, there are none on this blog). While this is a paid tool you have the ability to scan up to 50,000 URL’s with their 14-day free trial as many times as you want.

I use URLProfiler when I want to extract something from a page and have it linked to a specific URL. In this case, I’ll be extracting the comment counts from each blog post on Copyblogger.

(Note: Screaming Frog does have a similar feature to what I’m about to discuss but I could never get it to work. Also, URLProfiler allows backlink count analysis which you’ll find useful in a moment).

Once you open URL Profiler you want to either copy and paste in your URL’s from Screaming Frog or right click and select ‘Import from Screaming Frog SEO Spider.’ Usually I do the latter. That should look something like this.

There are only 32 links because I don’t want to scrape their entire website. I have data about Copyblogger already.

What we want to do next is head on over to the website in question, Copyblogger.com, and select the data you want to copy. This is slightly easier to do in Chrome than it is Firefox, but both are suitable. I don’t think Safari, IE or Opera will work.

What I want to copy from Copyblogger, are their comment counts.

Articles that receive a lot of comments are usually great to model in terms of content to write for your own website, and typically receive more links from articles that wouldn’t invoke readers to leave a comment. There’s a lot to learn from articles that get people to actually write feedback on a specific site, rather than social media, and especially so in 2016.

So I head on over to the Copyblogger website and click on an individual blog post. From there I right click on the data I want to copy and click Inspect (I’m using Google Chrome) like so.

Then I need to right click on the element again in the Console window and click Copy XPath, as shown below.

If you’re familiar with Regex and so on then you can use those skills, but XPath has been the simplest one for me to get and it has worked 95% of the time.

Then we want to head back to URL Profiler and follow the steps in the image below.

Now click Apply and let URLProfiler do its thing. Depending on how many URL’s you import the job could take anywhere from a few minutes (less than 500 URL’s) to a few hours (50,000 URL’s).

I then get back an Excel file and with a little cleaning (i.e. removing irrelevant columns from Screaming Frog) I get some very interesting data.

I pulled back 392 articles with at least 10 comments, 221 with at least 50 comments and 81 with at least 100 comments.

Once you’ve done this process once you can be getting new data on any website in a matter of minutes.

Please note: For most websites and web hosts this kind of scraping is likely against their Terms of Service. I don’t accept any responsibility for what may happen if you take this too far (hence this post is titled ‘Advanced’). Please be responsible if implementing this kind of tactic by running the tools during low-traffic hours of the day, not pulling more pages than you need and so on.

Now I know the most commented articles ever written on Copyblogger I can analyse them to work out why they received so many comments. You can also take this further and use URLProfilers option of accessing the Moz or Majestic API (both free) to get backlink data on every single post.

In other words you can see the most commented on and linked to articles on any blog on the planet. For me this has been an absolute goldmine of information for new industries I want to enter and far better than just checking social shares with the likes of BuzzSumo.

I use this process for so many things that I actually rent a server from Amazon so I can run these tools at max speed. When you’re collecting data on over 400,000 URL’s (which was one of my recent crawls) then you can get the data back in a few hours rather than a few days.

If you get creative you’ll find there’s a lot more valuable information you can use this tool-combination on than just analysing link and comment counts.

Thanks to Joshua for his help with the tools needed for this.

Find Private Networks and Link Opportunities (Without Analysing Backlinks)

It’s a well-known tactic in the SEO world to check the backlinks of your competitors so that you can find any possible link opportunities that you can duplicate yourself.

What isn’t so common is to find out where your competitors are being mentioned without links, which may still pose some opportunities.

One such tactic I like to employ is to search for a phone number or email address associated with my competitor.

I’ve actually use the first option to find companies who are relying on other’s to rank sites that they then rent out to that specific business. Then you can delve into that site and see how they’re building links which help them rank.

For example, here’s a website which is ranking for a search term which receives more than 10,000 exact searches per month.

The website is featuring a real brand with a logo, Twitter account and Facebook page which has nothing to do with the domain name of the site I see ranking.

If I search for their phone number instead of just looking at backlink analysis tools then I find another part of their network, here:

This is a totally different site they’re using which also appears to rank well for their chosen keywords.

Another result leads me to a Twitter account with their phone number, and once again I find another website this webmaster is operating.

The keyword tools I use did not find this mini network they’re operating in order to dominate a sector of the pet niche in a certain state of the US.

However, when searching for a phone number (or other key details like the first line of an address, or their email address) you can generally uncover a lot more with your analysis.

AROUND(Number) is a Google Search Operator Which Improves Upon Regular Link-Finding Queries

One query I haven’t seen any other SEO blog touch upon is the AROUND(?) search operator. It has been useful in a number of situations for me in recent months when trying to find specific strings of text in search results.

It has been so useful that I’m surprised I haven’t read about it in the marketing world before — I found it when looking through some programming discussions on Reddit.

What this query allows you to do is essentially find words that are within a certain proximity to each other.

For example, you already know that if you search for niche “submit article” you’ll find sites in a particular niche which accept guest posts. This is a common search query shared on blogs about finding posting opportunities along with “write an article”, “submit your post” and so on.

However, if we search for something like niche “submit” AROUND(4) “article” we can see pages for a specific niche or from a specific website which reveal a sentence where submit and article are not together, but still in close proximity.

Not more than four words apart, in this example.

So what I’ve done here is try to find websites which say submit and guest post within four words of each other and also have the world gold in their URL.

Searching for “submit tip” or “submit guest post” would not have revealed this result.

Look how much more natural that search query is. It’s something you clearly wouldn’t find from a typical “submit article” search and opens up a lot of other link opportunities that SEO’s aren’t finding with commonly shared queries.

For example a sentence could have been “If you would like to submit your article” which a simple “submit article” search prior would not have found.

If you change the number after AROUND (the one in brackets) you increase the allowed space you can have between two words.

Let me give another example of how this query is useful. I recently noticed that some WordPress websites publicly show how much traffic their pages are receiving. This seems to be some kind of option in WordPress – I’m not sure where – but the WordPress forums are full of people wishing to turn it off.

Here’s one such website which reveal their daily pageviews for each article.

My first idea was to simply scrape their website (using the tools in the first tactic) and see which were the most popular articles they’ve ever written. That being said, I no longer run any viral pages on Facebook so I wouldn’t really have anything to do with the information.

I instead decided to check was which other websites reveal this information publicly.

Thanks to the AROUND search operator, I can do exactly that.

(I went to page two for this screenshot since the first page is just people asking how to remove it from their sites)

As we can see, even the USA government are in on the action to help out us marketers.

Now to be totally honest I didn’t find anything too interesting from sites that publicly share their pageviews. I was actually hoping to make a tool out of it but not many big sites share their stats. I found some interesting article ideas on a few sites, but nothing that was really worth the hour or so of trawling through the results.

Just think of all the standard search queries that you can now expand upon and find more natural results. Things like:

• niche “top tools”
• niche “recommended websites”
• Niche “submit a post”
• Niche “favourite links”

No longer do you need the words to be ‘touching’. You can specify how far apart they can be and broaden your link building horizons.

I’m hoping this query gives you some ideas of custom things you can search for you may not have been able to find previously. As I said, I use it far more than I ever expected it would and now that it’s in your arsenal, I hope you find places it can come into play.

Reverse-Analyse The Links of Successful Flippa Listings

When I used to write articles for SEOmoz (now Moz) back in the day, I wrote an article about four ways of building links that are currently working well for me. While the article was written in 2010, one of the tactics I shared there is still relevant today: Finding sites on Flippa with a lot of search traffic and analysing their backlink sources.

The reason you want to do this is because it’s interesting to see how some websites are ranking quickly, receiving a lot of traffic from search and are able to sustain that traffic. It’s essentially an open diary of what is working in SEO if you focus on the right listings.

For example, here’s a listing that’s live on the website right now.

I have blurred out the name but they’re completely open about these stats (I don’t have to be logged-in to see them) so while I’m not sharing anything others can’t find, I’ll at least protect the URL.

As you can see, their traffic has grown fairly rapidly.

This is only interesting to me if most of it is coming from search, which in this case, it is.

While the numbers aren’t huge, search still makes up most than half of the traffic to the site, and at least 33% of that is coming from the United States (meaning there are more lucrative opportunities for monetising that traffic).

If someone has built a site worth a few thousand dollars in less than a year which relies on search traffic, I’m always curious to know how they got there.

If we analyse their backlinks, it’s an interesting, albeit familiar story:

As you can guess the links they’ve built are pretty awful and almost entirely consist of comment spam.

However, their anchor text is very diverse so I think this is what has helped them stay under the radar and still benefit from these types of links.

Of course, as I often say, it depends what niche you’re in as well. Trying to do this for ‘Gold IRA’ is just incredibly unlikely to work, but an image-based site can certainly benefit from automated and fast link building.

Build a Private Database of Proven Promoters

I first heard about this tactic from Brian Dean on a podcast with Eric Siu a few months ago. The idea is simply to create your own private database of real people who have already shared your content or content that is very similar to what you write about or plan to write about.

You can then use that database to let people know when you publish new content that they may be interested in.

For instance, here are two women who have tweeted content I’ve wrote in the past few days.

If we click on Heidi’s profile (thanks for the tweet, Heidi!) we can see she has a very impressive number of followers and a genuine blog in the internet marketing space.

In other words, she’s the perfect type of person to strike up a relationship with if I want more shares (and potential links) on future content.

Please note that I will not be contacting Heidi or Kellie and request that others don’t either. They just recently tweeted my articles and therefore ended up in this example.

Heidi, like many website owners, does not seem to publicly display her email address. Instead she has a contact form if you wish to get in touch with her. If this is the case with someone you wish to add to your ‘list’ then simply send a friendly thank you email to establish some sort of connection. You’ll also receive that persons email address when they reply to your email.

Kellie on the other hand does show her email address prominently, so while I should still send her a thank you email, I could also add her to a ‘list’ very quickly.

I typically just make a simple spreadsheet in Excel which looks like the following.

I don’t write down any full names as I’ll generally never use them.

You may be curious why I use ‘Company’ as the column heading for the tweet where they wrote about me. This is just a preference based on the email messaging platform I use. When I import the email addresses later, it will ask me what variable I wish to assign tweets to, and I choose Company.

I personally use Reply for my email outreach but there are literally dozens out there so do your research first. I honestly just used the first option that looked good enough for what I needed, but it can get quite pricey.

Once I’ve imported the list, I’ll set-up a campaign to send a message like the following.

Note that I’m using the Company variable for where the link to the tweet they wrote about me will go.

While this is quite a slow process (it can take a minute per email and many people don’t share them publicly) I actually think that adds to its charm. There are less people who are willing to take the time to do it and therefore you’re going to get a better response on your emails.

I haven’t really utilised this much for ViperChill – though I may in future – but have for other sites.

Of course, if the site that you’re trying to promote is new (like mine have been), then you can’t say things like “You previously tweeted an article of mine.”

In that case you need to find similar articles to the one you are looking to promote, and then find the people who shared them on Twitter via their search engine.

You certainly aren’t guaranteed any links with this method, but if you could get an extra 100 Twitter shares on your next article from real people with real followers, you greatly increase your chance of finding the ‘linkerati’ who actually have the power to link to your content.

I did this for my article on ’16 Companies Dominating Google’ a few months back. Someone recommended an influencer who might like the article – they had no idea who I was nor had they ever read ViperChill to my knowledge – and I sent them a quick tweet about the post.

Then this happened.

I’ve never had more than 40 likes on a single tweet so it just goes to show what the right people can do for your promotion efforts.

Sharing good content is often good for the person sharing it, as it shows them as being an authority in their particular field.

Reverse-Analyse Scholarship Link Builders

When I talked about scholarship link building in my state of link building report, I received more hate emails and publicly negativity than I ever have. So much so that one Reddit sub-Reddit went crazy about what a terrible person I was and how I was giving away advice to people who don’t deserve it.

Normally negative feedback really gets me down, but in this case, I totally accepted it.

If you don’t see any moral issue with students taking the time to fill out forms in the hopes of winning a scholarship – when there’s likely 99.9% zero chance you’re even giving away a scholarship – then we couldn’t be any more different.

The example I shared in my last post was a brand new coupons website suddenly deciding to give away a scholarship in the first month of their opening and just got “lucky enough” to pick up dozens of .edu backlinks.

I can not be convinced they weren’t doing it just for links, and more than likely have no scholarship to offer.

I won’t be covering the tactic again, but I will state what there is to learn from the people who do this: What other types of links they build.

People who use scholarship links often:

• Use donation links
• Guest post
• Participate in PIN’s
• Buy links on websites
• ‘Sponsor’ software in return for a link

If you want to know what works in the world of SEO, you should be following the people taking the time out to create these scholarship pages and then contacting the universities for a link.

While I don’t agree with their methods, they’re on the pulse of what works.

Here’s the example I shared in the past, and some of the other links that they’ve picked up.

In one minute I’ve found an absolute goldmine of SEO knowledge by just checking one website. I can also replicate every single one of these links if I wished to do so.

I’ve found one site I can donate to (it’s cheap) and two directories which accept links from anyone, as long as you get in touch with them. If I ever went the scholarship link building route (I wouldn’t), there’s two additional places I can get links from as well.

The site was only started in 2016 so those links that shouldn’t really work are starting to pay off for them.

This site is actually small in comparison to another webmaster who is building thousands of donation, scholarship and paid directory links.

Just look at their traffic stats to see what I mean.

They’re around 4x bigger than the first example but following the exact same method of link building.

Start from one source, like websites listed as offering scholarships, and then work your way backwards through other links they’ve built.

This tactic alone will give you more insights into SEO than the Google Webmaster blog.

A Little-Known Reddit URL for Finding Promotion Opportunities

If you’ve been following my journey on my personal blog at Glen Allsopp.com you’ll have seen that I shared exactly how I planned to write this article. In one update I wrote,

What I tend to do with articles like this is totally ignore what’s out there on the web until I’m finished my own post. Then I’ll search for something like “Advanced link building tactics” (the topic I’m writing about) and see if there are any great ideas I can include. I’ll try to add something the original author hasn’t covered but will always link back where it is necessary.

In other words, I never read articles on the subject I’m writing about until I’ve actually finished my own article. I want it to be original and don’t want to be swayed by the ideas of others.

The following tactic is something I actually found on Reddit just as this post was about to go live, and thought was an excellent tip to add.

Reddit has a little-known feature that allows you to see where a domain was shared anywhere on their website. So you could not only check your own website, but the performance of your competitors as well.

For instance, if I use the following query – http://reddit.com/domain/viperchill.com – I can see these were the most recently shared stories from ViperChill on Reddit:

What you can see in this highlighted box is that someone submitted my article to a sub-Reddit I didn’t even know existed and was actually able to send me thousands of visitors to my site in a 24 hour period.

Now, granted, those visitors did not stay on the site very long (with seems to be a common theme with ‘Redditors’) but I can take some things away from this:

• I found a Redditor who reads ViperChill and has a bit of ‘authority’ there
• I learned about a new sub-Reddit I could possibly promote to in the future
• I received a lesson in writing Reddit titles for different audiences

If your site is new or you have yet to really write any content worth sharing then looking up your own domain will likely pull back few results, if any at all.

However, there’s no reason you can’t run your ‘competitors’ through the same query and get insights on sub-Reddit’s to use, Redditor’s who read content in your niche and content ideas you could cover yourself.

I decided to look up my friend Pat Flynn’s blog, Smart Passive Income, to see the results for his website.

I actually didn’t get the best of results back, so I modified the search URL a little, to this:

https://www.reddit.com/domain/smartpassiveincome.com/top/?sort=top&t=all

This will show me, from highest to lowest, the posts from Pat’s site which received the most upvotes in the history of Reddit. You simply need to click on ‘Top’ then ‘All Time’ if you want to do it manually, or you can just use the query above and swap out the domain name.

With that query I get the following result:

Now I’ve learned that I could potentially angle some of my future content towards the /r/productivity crowd and even though I’m in the internet marketing / make money industry, they could still respond favorably to the content.

Reddit links themselves aren’t really worth anything but if your post does go viral, you have an opportunity to reach the type of people who could link to you.

Rank for Terms the Linkerati Are Searching For

The term Linkerati, coined by Moz.com’s Rand Fishkin, refers to people who have the ability to link. Meaning they have some place on the web that they could actually link from, whether it’s a forum, blog, online store or similar.

If you don’t get the attention of people who can actually send links your way, then you aren’t going to pick up any links.

This gem comes from Ken Lyons, who shared the tip back in 2013 on a creative link building post by PointBlankSEO. Before I add my own ideas to the original concept, here’s what Ken had to say a few years ago,

We optimize and link to the “become an author” pages on each site we run this on so the doc will rank for search operators in specific keyword verticals. This gets us a steady flow of guest posting inquiries. We offer to “swap content” with bloggers that want to guest post on our sites. If you’re unwilling to or can’t swap, we won’t publish your article.

With the number of sites we run, we swap an average of about 100 articles per month. What I love about this tactic is the efficiency: link opportunities come to us versus us having to prospect for them. This really puts us in the driver’s seat and means:

– We can insist on only swapping with sites that meet or exceed specific quality thresholds.

– We have total control over link placement within the article and aren’t restricted to a single author bio link.

– We’ve been able to build ongoing relationships with others who run portfolios of sites and swap with them on a pretty regular basis.

How smart is that?

Rank for terms that link builders are using to find link opportunities in Google, then offer to work with them to help both of your sites. Similar to what I recommended with PIN’s, but actually having people come to you to pitch content.

So you could set-up a dummy website like “Real estate backlinks” or “real estate guest posting” and try to rank for relevant terms to each of those. Then make it very open on your website that you offer link opportunities, and people should get in touch with you if they want them.

Only once they get in touch do you start negotiations that are beneficial for both of you, rather than just plainly accepting their guest post on one of your websites.

As Ken says, it’s likely that not everyone will be a perfect fit, but just like my success with outreach for paid links (see below), you’ll find the right person to work with now and then who makes it all worth it.

Why Maps are the new Infographics When it Comes to Link Building

When infographics became all the rage a few years ago it seems like every other article I was reading had them embedded. People saw them as a way to “ethically” build quality links to their website, and get a few extra pins on Pinterest.

Infographic creation companies sprouted up across the web and some startups dedicated to their creation received millions of dollars in funding.

While infographics are no doubt useful and visually appealing, I would argue their massive success is due to the SEO’s of the world creating them for links.

This could well mean that maps, or more specifically interactive maps are going to be the new infographic when it comes to link building.

After all, the biggest publications in the world are sharing them on a constant basis.

I took this screenshot on the same day this article is going live.

David McSweeney gets the credit for noticing this trend and doing a huge write-up on the topic a few months ago. Since his article I’ve certainly seemed to be noticing this more, and no doubt your average webmaster will be picking up on the idea soon enough.

It’s Working for Insurance Companies

I don’t really want to link to this one as it’s clearly just some SEO agency having created this for their client, but if anything it shows that even obvious implementations of this strategy can attract links.

GoCompare, a UK-founded financial comparison site created an interactive map on the topic of ‘What Powers the World’ which you can find here.

While it no doubt took technical skill to put together, it’s incredibly simple and doesn’t really reveal much at all.

The map, while seemingly irrelevant for what GoCompare was founded to produce, has been able to pick up links from over 100 different domains.

The obvious ‘problem’ of course is that for most people, these maps aren’t going to be easy to create out of the box. Keep in mind for however that for many people the same was true for creating infographics and still is today. I couldn’t design a beautiful infographic without help from others even though I’ve used Photoshop for years.

I think we can expect to see more ‘map creation services’ popping up as people look to capitalise on this opportunity while it’s seen as a more ethical (and perhaps easier) way to build links.

Do note that maps don’t have to be interactive to be shared. This following one was featured on Business Insider recently and is nothing more than a static image.

As long as the angle you’re taking for promotion is interesting then maps offer a nice visual which could attract views and social shares for whoever publishes (or republishes) the information.

If you’re interested in this tactic the first thing I would do is spend a few hours going through other examples of maps and simply noting which ones received a lot of social shares. Then try to find ways to make popular angle’s relevant to your own industry.

The Report That Earned Me Hundreds of Links (And Still Works in 2016)

At 18 years old, not long after I have just moved to South Africa, I started a personal development blog called PluginID (no link as it’s no longer online).

I was trying to grow my reach with the site as much as possible and basically wanted to track my own progress compared to other bloggers in the space. I decided to create something which showed me exactly that.

If I recall correctly the following script cost me around $150 to put together, but thanks to the links and attention it received, it was more than worth it.

There were 71 sites on the list from the last count I can find so while the sites at the top weren’t interested in promoting it, those who were lower down the list definitely came back now and then to check how they’re doing.

It’s funny to see the metrics I used to track back then and the ones we track today. It’s almost a history of the internet.

Google Pagerank is dead.

Alexa barely gets talked about anymore.

Technorati is dead, too.

These days the reports that I put together look something a little more like this:

Note that this is not my own website but is a design I helped to advise on. I talk more about it near the end of this video.

As a bit of an internet time-capsule, I wonder if we’ll still be counting links, likes and Twitter followers five years from now.

I absolutely love the twist that Nathan Gotch has put on this idea (and not just because he has been far too kind in ranking me). His stats are not based on any particular scores like share metrics but his personal opinions of each article.

Showing he reads and rates so much content in the SEO world instantly makes him appear to be an expert on the topic.

And of course, everyone who is mentioned there wants to share it as well. While Nathan doesn’t seem to have picked up links, keep in mind that they’re generally much harder to get in the IM space because everyone is more likely to Tweet something than link to it. And people are definitely tweeting.

I’ve seen dozens of tweets (and made some myself) but I’m unsure how to find them all directly due to Twitter shortening the URL’s.

The great thing about this idea is:

• Every month, some of the 10 people who are featured will share the page
• It’s fairly easy for Nathan to put together since he reads the blogs anyway
• It’s useful for his audience (I’ve found a few cool new blogs via his list)

As long as he can share 10 links for his audience each month it’s really a win-win for everyone.

How could you do that in your industry?

Could you curate a list of the top 10 articles about cooking, health and fitness, vegan recipes or anything else?

Notify those who get featured and start becoming the standard ‘go-to’ resource in your niche for the top content found on that topic. If you’re passionate about the industry you’re in the articles should be easy to find.

And don’t worry about “giving away” authority. I linked to 71+ blogs back in the PluginID days but people kept coming back to my site because I had the list and must have known a lot about the topic if I knew all of these sites.

Reverse-Analyse the Link Building Efforts of Wikihow Link Builders

Wikihow is a website which receives an estimated 86% of it’s traffic from search engines, according to SimilarWeb.

While their external links are no-followed, once again the webmasters who are taking advantage of their resource have built a lot of other links you can duplicate as well.

Whenever Wikihow pages link to external sources they use the heading text “Sources and Citations”. Therefore with a custom Google query you can pull back relevant pages from their site.

If you edit the query to include a word relevant to industries you operate in, you can find active webmasters building links in your space.

Similar to previous reverse-analysis ideas I’ve shared, you would then go and analyse other backlinks these sites have picked up and find some great link opportunities.

Literally Just Ask Websites If They Sell Links

I’ve put this towards the bottom of the article as it’s probably the least advanced tactic here due to how simple it really is.

That being said, it’s rare that you’ll find bloggers talking about buying links these days, especially when it’s frowned upon.

Then again, there have been some big brands who have experimented with it for SEO reasons, even if they don’t endorse the tactic directly.

I’ve bought so many links over the last year that I almost wish I could offer link buying as a service (it wouldn’t be fair to the sites I’m buying them from if I was “caught”).

As I said, this is a very simple process. I simply give a list of 1,000 or so domains (gathered from lists of top blogs in various industries) to an assistant who then log’s into a email platform I set-up and then simply asks them if they have links for sale.

While the success rate is fairly low – many webmasters are scared of selling links – you do find people who have huge networks of links for sale, with fair pricing.

[EDIT: The people who sent me this example email asked for the graphic to be removed from the post. I do want to make clear that there was zero identifying information on the sites selling links, nor who sent the email. They simply recognised their own email they sent to my assistant. However, out of respect I removed the image.]

Most people you come across have websites they’re passionate about but they just don’t receive that much traffic and therefore aren’t making money. If they can get an extra $50-$100 per month for essentially doing nothing then many of them will jump on that.

Just make sure when you’re sending emails you’re not using a domain or email address that you care about.

For less than $3 per month you can use a private email option with Namecheap (found here) and then you don’t have to worry about setting up new hosting and so on.

How to Consistently Pick Up Targeted Backlinks from the Top Sites in Your Niche

While Dale Carnegie left many nuggets of wisdom during his time with us, the following quote is undoubtedly the truest.

“Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” – Dale Carnegie

People can be talking metres from you without you hearing a single word they say, until your name pop’s up, and suddenly your brain is able to tune in on that discussion.

I would argue that the second sweetest sound to a webmaster or product owner is a favourable review of something they’ve created

Trust me, the best way to get anyone in the world talking about you is to have success with something they sell.

I have an entire page dedicated to people who have success with my Marketing program and if anyone else sends me a video testimonial, you can be sure I’ll be quick to put it up there as well.

One obvious place to start is somewhere like Clickbank and go through their marketplace to find products relevant to your niche. This is a bit of a tedious approach though because most of the reviews and testimonials that are found on sales pages, if they exist at all, rarely contain any links to the authors website.

Instead, I would head on over to iTunes and find the top podcasts in your niche, and then see if those podcast hosts have any products or services you would personally be interested in.

For instance, let’s say you’re a golf coach, run a golf course or sell golf equipment online. If you head on over to iTunes the first or second result you’ll find under a podcast search for ‘golf’ will be the Golf Smarter show, which has over 500 episodes.

While there are no site names in the description, if I Google the name of the podcast I quickly find Fred’s website. I also find that he has a product for sale, for a very reasonable price.

When you find something like this there are two approaches you can take:

• Reach out and ask Fred if he would be interested in featuring your review of his show on the website
• Reach out and ask Fred for a preview and in return you will review the show for him

The review would then link back to your website and Fred would have a chance at getting more sales by actually having reviews on his site (he doesn’t have any yet, which is surprising).

Please note that this is just an example: Please don’t flood poor Fred with dozens of review requests.

Another example is the podcast IMTalk, designated for those in the middle of training for an Ironman. It’s surprisingly popular:

If we head on over to their website we can see not one but three opportunities to get a link from them.

You could:

• Purchase and review their products (ask if they’re interested in featuring testimonials upfront)
• Sponsor their show
• Submit content for their audience

Using Copyblogger as an example once again, you can see that the reviewers of their ‘Authority’ program get a nice backlink from a great domain.

While these links take a bit of effort, it’s probably one of the best links you could get if you also run a fitness website or more specifically one catered to those training for an Ironman competition.

I have a special announcement coming on Monday so if you’re not already on the ViperChill email list please do be sure to opt-in below or in the right sidebar. Thank you for reading!

The post 13 Advanced Link Building Strategies You (Probably) Haven’t Used appeared first on ViperChill.

I’ve seen other people put together eBook’s and blog posts on this topic before but they usually just contain a huge bulleted list with no information on how they found the niche, why they think it’s a good niche to enter and how you would actually make money in it. I really didn’t want to do that when deciding to cover this topic, so have covered each niche in a lot of depth so you can see if it’s the right fit for you.

If there is a positive response to this kind of post I’ll definitely do more like it in the future, so please do share your feedback in the comments!

Come Closer to Your Screen For This First Opportunity

A few months ago I was doing some backlink analysis and noticed a network of websites which were all competing for a similar keyphrase, slightly tweaked for different industries.

I ran their sites through my usual go-to tools like SEMRush and Similarweb and was slightly blown-away at what I had just discovered. A network of low-quality, thin websites with barely any links was ranking for queries which, when combined, were being searched for millions of times per month.

I have since taken advantage of what I found that day and actually never planned on sharing it.

While I’m not the only one to to have discovered the opportunity, as you can see from a recent tweet of mine, I haven’t seen it covered elsewhere.

When an SEO guy tweets a G Trends screenshot of how fast one of your niches is growing and you hope noone else saw it.

— Glen Allsopp (@ViperChill) July 11, 2016

You may be wondering why I was concerned about a lot of people finding this opportunity before and why I’m sharing it with tens of thousands of people now. Well, I went a little overboard with the research for this very article and found so many niches you can capitlise on it with that I’m really not worried about competition.

“Enough of the hype, Glen, what’s the keyphrase?”

Near me.

That’s it. That’s the search query.

Or more specifically, something near me. This screenshot of keyphrases which Thumbtack – a popular services marketplace – are ranking for should give you some idea of the potential.

Another reason this opportunity is interesting to me is because it doesn’t seem to be taking much to rank.

In two of the search terms above, exact match domains are performing very well with very few backlinks. I’m not going to ‘out’ the sites but they are very easy to find when you start analysing the opportunities here.

I was able to pick up a few exact match domains myself so they’re definitely still available. I did add a few more domains to my list before going live with this article, but left out quite a few others I found.

All of the other sites I’m ranking in this space are .com’s so I’m curious to see how well the recent .co.uk purchase works out, targeting a UK-specific search query.

While I’m certainly not the only one to catch on to this, it’s always a good sign when you see exact match or nearly exact-match domains ranking well in Google. It means there are very few authoritative sites which Google thinks should be ranking.

It’s funny to see that some people are trying to capitalise on this new opportunity already with some high-priced domain names.

Now, I am aware that a large number of ‘near me’ searches are likely performed on mobile and are from people hoping to find map listings in the search results, rather than actual websites to click on.

However, the dozens of near me sites I’ve investigated appear to be receiving a lot of traffic without being featured on any kind of map pack.

I’ll use an authoritative site, HoursInfo, to give an example. I picked them because they have a number of rankings related to ‘near me’ search terms but aren’t some small time webmaster capitalising on the opportunity. You can see they are some of the most popular terms the site ranks for.

Now, I am aware that their rankings for the highlighted search terms are not great. I’ve sorted the results by volume rather than ranking position, just to show how many searches there are with ‘near me’ in the keyphrase.

Some examples of high rankings they have attained, along with their search volume, include:

• Dominos near me: 450,000 searches per month (Ranked #5)
• Post office near me: 368,000 searches per month (Ranked #2)
• Chase bank near me: 368,000 searches per month (Ranked #5)
• Gamestop near me: 165,000 searches per month (Ranked #6)

There are many more, but you get the idea.

Here’s the SimilarWeb graphic to give an idea of how much traffic they really do receive.

I’ve started ranking a number of ‘near me’ sites but they’re not high enough to show any impressive stats. That being said, I know the traffic is there due to how many small, exact match domains I’ve found ranking and their predicted traffic stats among a number of different analysis tools.

If nothing else, this could be a good niche just to test your SEO skills.

In regards to monetising the traffic, it really depends on what industry you choose. For terms like dog grooming and pet spa’s, how to monetise the site should be fairly obvious.

Making Thousands With…Bone Broth

Bear with me here; I haven’t totally lost the plot. If you haven’t been following the latest health crazes over the past year then you are probably as equally as confused as I was when I first came across this healthy meal.

Bone broth is simply a broth that is primarily made of bones and contains few vegetables (if any) which makes it different from stock.

The reason I like this topic is not because it’s some fad to jump on, but bone broth is actually proven to have a number of medical benefits. If you don’t think Apple Cider Vinegar as a health remedy is going to die out any time soon, then neither is this.

The large spike on this graph is for January of 2016, whereas the topic was talked about most in the middle of 2015. That makes me believe that people are going to go crazy for this product once again in January of 2017, when we’re in “New Years Resolution mode” and anything “healthy” tempts us to keep our wallets open.

If you’re wondering where the money to be made – “Can’t people just make it themselves?” – then you would be surprised how much people are making (and charging) for this concoction.

I first came across the topic where the owner of a Broth website, Kettle and Fire, was discussing how much a new plugin for his Shopify store made him in sales.

It was the first time I had heard of ‘Bone broth’ so I was intrigued to learn more.

That’s when I saw it being hailed as a new healthy drink option by the New York Times and MSNBC. From there, I found a number of other stores selling the broth, and it’s certainly not cheap.

That’s $70 for just 6 packs.

If you’re into natural, healthy eating then this may just be the niche for you.

You could affiliate yourself with someone who sells bone broth, make your own, or simply use variations of the term to drive traffic to other health products and offers.

If selling products on Amazon is your thing, I can imagine this is going to be a great market to start dominating now.

The Huge Opportunity with Tiny Houses

The Tiny house movement sounds exactly as it is: It’s a movement for people who want to be able to live in tiny houses.

Believe it or not, it’s a growing trend.

When I first found a video about tiny houses on Youtube I thought they were just a cute little idea. Fast forward 45 minutes and I had found myself looking at dozens of little tiny houses and being constantly impressed with what people can do with their homes.

I was also amazed to see Tiny House Youtube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers, especially when I hadn’t previously knew that ‘tiny living’ was a thing.

On some popular videos I found the Youtube comments weren’t just people insulting each other – for once – but people with questions where you can get ideas for building the solution. Here are the comments on one particularly popular video.

Just from those two comments alone you can get the idea to:

• Create a directory of people who build tiny houses and send them leads for a fee
• Review products designed for tiny houses and promote them with affiliate links
• Create a step-by-step information product on building your first tiny house

If I was going to take this on personally I would go with option two, and review products. I would focus on creating an Instagram page showcasing tiny houses and then reaching out to manufacturers to see if I could get products to review.

While tiny house owners seem to want to spend as little money as possible, the one in the video above cost $77,000, which certainly isn’t cheap. While they don’t want to spend a lot of money, they’re still spending it, and I could see tiny product reviews working very well.

GPS Car Tracking

I’ve been building this blog post over the past few months so any time a new industry or niche idea comes to me, I write it down.

It was interesting to see that one Reddit thread I wanted to cover had actually deleted the opportunity they were talking about.

Although the original poster seemed more than happy to share the idea originally – as you can see in their discussion title – it seems like they didn’t feel that way for very long.

Commenters absolutely loved the idea and everyone started thinking of businesses around it. I think this scared the original poster.

You may question my integrity when I highlight what was there, but every single comment reply explains what the business idea was. It received nearly 700 upvotes on Reddit so has already been seen tens of thousands of times.

And of course, only those interested in the niche will take any action (see my closing statements in this blog post) so there’s not too much to worry about.

The original idea, shared on Reddit, was good but not something I would go for myself, which is why I’m more open to sharing it.

The idea was to buy GPS trackers on Alibaba and then go and fit them on cars in your local area for a fee. Apparently they’re fairly easy to install and then people can have peace of mind if their car ever gets stolen or they want to track where their kids are driving when they’re using their car.

I prefer online businesses to those offline, and while people can make some good cash with this – many commenters were excited about copying it directly – it’s too labor intensive for me and the scope is too small.

Instead, I would consider doing things like:

• Importing the GPS trackers and selling them via Amazon or my own Shopify store
• Creating a lead generation site for those wanting this then selling the leads to people who can do it
• Reviewing each tracker and promoting them with affiliate links

I think this niche is only going to get bigger as it becomes easier to set-up, so there’s a lot of potential here.

Laserless Tattoo Removal

With more people sporting tattoos than any other generation in history, it makes sense that we would have more people than ever trying to remove them.

While laser tattoo removal is a growing trend, so is the desire to remove tattoo’s without any lasers.

Right now, admittedly, there aren’t huge volume numbers for this search term. Most estimates point to various terms, like “non laser tattoo removal”, receiving around 200-500 searches per month.

That being said, there is a Clickbank product on the topic that seems to be selling quite well, so there’s definitely a market for it.

And I predict that market will grow.

As far as monetisation goes, I would personally try to target people via these “lessor” keyphrases and sell them on a more expensive solution (providing it is a better solution). I don’t think there are any alternatives that are better than lasers for removing tattoos.

Tattoo removal shops typically charge over $1,000 for the service so if you’re able to generate leads for local businesses, they’ll definitely pay for you for people you can send their way.

Will Automation Increase 18 Wheeler Accidents?

Legal industries online are some of the most profitable out there. Unfortunately, many of them are dominated by large firms which Google view as authorities in the space so even if their page ranking has little to no internal links, they still rank.

Fortunately, there are still a few opportunities. Many of which I’m taking advantage of with the rank and rent model (I cover it in-depth in a 20 minute video in email number five). If we look at 18 wheeler accident, we can see that the results aren’t dominated by top legal firms, but actually by news sources.

However, there is one site that was able to break through the news.

I edited the screenshot so it was not too long. The legal site here was ranking in 7th for me.

Now you may be thinking this is a very obscure and unsearched for industry to go after, but the numbers are quite impressive.

According to Google Keyword planner:

• truck accident: 8,100 monthly searches
• 18 wheeler accident: 1,300 monthly searches
• truck rollover: 1,300 monthly searches
• truck accident lawyer: 1,000 monthly searches
• semi truck accident: 1,000 monthly searches
• truck accident attorney: 720 monthly searches
• fatal truck accident: 390 monthly searches

The keyphrases I’ve highlighted in bold are the ones that interest me most as I feel I could directly make money with them. While the first will include people looking for news results, I believe it will also include those looking for help with legal action after suffering an accident themselves.

The suggested Adwords bid price for ‘truck accident lawyer’ is $139.72. That means Google suggest you will need to bid $140 per click if you want to get one of the top ad spots in search results for the US. In other words, this industry is worth a lot of money to lawyers and they’re willing to pay to get clients.

As far as monetisation goes, as I mentioned earlier, I would primarily be focused on the rank and rent model. Either rank a website in this industry and rent it out to an actual legal firm, or get in touch with legal firms and ask how much they are willing to pay for leads you send their way.

Finally, I do wonder if this is an industry which is only going to be worth a lot more money in the future. This is one field where automation is likely to happen, at least in part, over the next decade. Those automated truck lawsuits are going to set a very interesting precedent for vehicle automation as a whole.

Car Shipping Companies

Just like with the legal truck angle, car shipping companies present another great opportunity to use the rank and rent model or rank to lead generation model.

Some of the most searched for terms in this niche include:

• shipping a car: 8,100 monthly searches
• auto shipping: 8,100 monthly searches
• auto transport companies: 6,600 monthly searches
• car transport companies: 4,400 monthly searches
• how much does it cost to ship a car: 4,400 monthly searches
• car shipping companies: 3,600 monthly searches
• how much to ship a car: 2,900 monthly searches

It’s nice to see so many variations of how to phrase the question and yet each search term still has some form of buyer intent.

Let’s look at the search results for one of these terms, ‘Car shipping companies’.

Note: I removed the ads from this screenshot to reduce its length.

RD in the screenshot stands for Referring Domains. This means how many different websites are linking to them. The lower the number, the better. While companies like Uship will have thousands of different sites linking to them, it shows that the smaller, newer competitors still have a chance to rank in Google.

But these guys rank so far down. Are they really getting traffic?

Well let’s look at the worst ranking website in my screenshot, Shipmycar.com. Remember this was actually lower down because ads are normally in the result but I removed them to shorten the graphic.

If we look at SEMRush we can see they’re growing quite well organically.

Of course, these numbers aren’t huge, but they don’t have to be. When people are searching for these terms they’re generally ready to part ways with their cash, or doing the final research before they do.

There’s also the great local SEO angle with ‘ship a car [city]’ type search terms. According to one of the websites ranking, the most popular cities to ship cars to and from are:

• New York, New York
• Los Angeles, California
• Chicago, Illinois
• Washington
• San Francisco
• Boston, Massachusetts
• Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
• Dallas, Texas
• Miami, Florida
• Houston, Texas

If you’re outside of the US there is probably even less competition. If you’re in Europe for example then research things like “driving through Europe” or “car shipping to Europe” and so on.

This isn’t always an obvious niche that people think about so the current competition can definitely be beaten if you’re willing to put in the work.

Security System Reviews

With 2,400 searches per month and a suggested Adwords bid price of $14 per click, this is a search term I really like. Not only because of the acceptable search volume and clear ad presence, but because the term ‘reviews’ signals intent. It shows someone is likely looking to purchase a system in the near future.

This opens up the opportunity to either promote your own products, use a dropshipper, or promote Amazon products as an affiliate.

It’s also a niche that seems to be growing as well, as security systems become more affordable.

If you see anything like the following in search results, it’s always a good sign.

Whenever I come across a growing niche that has recent dates in the search result, it always peaks my curiosity. Mostly because standard ranking factors (age, most links, domain authority) often don’t apply and a few basic links pointing something written recently are all you need.

Millions of Parents Need ‘Kids Party Ideas’

One niche I’m surprised to see hasn’t been dominated too extensively by huge brands is that of specific party ideas for kids.

If you have young children of your own and could see yourself writing about this niche and sharing photos of your parties with others, this could be the niche for you.

I first read about this website when looking at a success story for a certain website builder.

Although his website is very prominently shared as a success story around the web, I do want to be a bit more coy and block out any concrete information as to what his site is.

The main website in his network is ranking for more than 31,000 different keyphrases, some of which are searched for thousands of times per month. In another effort at being respectful to their success, I have blocked out number 1 rankings they’ve sustained for a long time.

The stats are even more impressive when you consider than the website “only” has links from 400 others. That’s not a huge number from a site which gets millions of visitors each month from Google.

Especially when many of those links are from websites which anyone can pick up a link from, just by taking the time to register on them.

While it’s not a niche I would be interested in personally, I think it could be a great side-project for anyone with young children.

I would monetise the site with things like an eBook detailing the best party ideas, and then including a directory which takes a commission for leads on things like party magicians and clowns. There’s also the chance to link to party props and decorations as an Amazon affiliate.

A Niche That’s Virtually Yours for the Taking

If I just said “get involved in the virtual reality niche” that would be a little boring of me, and typical of the poor profitable niche ideas blog posts I’ve seen in the past.

I’m sure you already know that virtual reality gaming (and other forms of erm…entertainment) have a big future ahead of them and companies like Facebook have invested billions of dollars into what they believe will be a huge new market.

So as an SEO knowing that the world is going to be searching for virtual reality “things” in the future, where do you start when looking to conquer Google?

Personally, I would start by looking at the news.

Not what TechCrunch is saying about the industry, but who the readers of TechCrunch are investing in.

One such example, is UploadVR. A one year old blog which raised over $1.25m just seven months ago.

While the numbers aren’t huge for the investing world, it’s a pretty big sign that people think a blog on the topic is going to make significantly more money than that back. The sum is even more impressive when you consider that we’ve barely even scratched the surface with usable products that anyone can easily own.

When I first saw the ‘virtual desktop’ a few months ago I have to admit I was blown away. I’ve never played with an Oculus Rift or similar device, but I would love to get the chance to. Virtual desktop for VR basically negates the need to take off your headset to look at other things on your computer.

How cool is this?

When I first saw this I instantly thought, “Someone is going to make a Google competitor that works so incredibly well in Virtual Reality.” Google will then go and buy them most likely, but still, I think that’s one of the next big things we’re going to see from a well-funded startup.

Sadly I am not a well-funded startup and nor do I want to take on that challenge, so we have to spread our horizons a little bit.

Looking at the categories of UPloadVR.com alone you can learn a lot about the areas of search that are going to be popular:

• Google Cardboard
• Oculus Rift
• Virtual reality shopping
• Virtual reality advertising
• DIY Virtual reality
• Virtual reality cameras
• Virtual reality jobs

The list goes on. I think any one of these could merit a stand-alone website.

If you’re really into this niche and willing to do extra research, upload VR have one cool feature as part of their design.

That’s right: The pageview count for every article.

For a stats-nerd like myself, I love having this kind of data available.

I’ve no doubt you could pay a programmer $100 or so to scrape the website and figure out what the most popular posts in their history have been. Keeping in mind that some will have just ‘gone viral’ and won’t necessarily be searched for, it would give a lot of insights into the potential future of this huge industry.

The Web Needs a Pole Dancing Directory, Believe It or Not

You’re probably going to wonder what I was “Googling” when I say this but I just couldn’t get away from this niche when doing research for this post. I really didn’t want to write about it at all because it’s not a keyphrase as such but I just had to cover it.

After all, these niches are supposed to be for you and not for me, and I know quite a few people personally who would actually like to tackle a project like this one.

I first came across the ‘Pole dancing course’ niche on Clickbank, where there are a few eBooks and membership sites for sale (which you could promote as an affiliate).

Then a few weeks ago I received an email from an ex-Girlfriend who I haven’t spoken to for years and remembered she used to take pole dancing lessons, and still does.

For guys not in the know, pole dancing lessons are not just for women who want to work in the nightlife industry. I’ve seen a few classes in person and people (mostly women, of course) have a lot of fun with it. It’s physically demanding so a great way to keep fit.

As I always say “Go local” I started looking for pole dancing courses in different locations around the world. Whether that was states in the US or for major cities in the UK.

The competition is fierce.

There are ads four ads for everything I searched for and then the map pack and…it’s tough.

But I wouldn’t write off the niche just yet.

One thing that I found was missing in this industry was a directory. One place where you could find reviews of the different places to get lessons for a specific country.

I would personally create a huge directory of all the schools and academies out there in the UK and allow people to rate and review them. Then for each city you could of course reach out to the various schools and offer advertising opportunities on the website.

Just for London alone, look at the type of queries people are searching for:

• London pole dancing class
• London pole dancing school
• London pole dancing academy

I found 17 diffferent schools in London alone, so it’s a competitive market.

I would say this industry is my ‘wildcard’ as there are not too many angles to enter it from unlike other ideas I’ve shared. This is just an opportunity I think some passionate could do really well with, and I would have been doing someone an injustice if I didn’t write about it here.

A Millionaire Reaches 27,100 Monthly Searchers for What?

I was reading an AMA on Reddit’s Entrepreneur section recently and came across the owner of an online store for glass pipes and other smoking-related items. Since I was working on this article at the time, I decided to do some research into the types of keywords his site was ranking for. After all, it had generated over $6M in revenue in 2016 so far so the site must be doing quite well.

While there were many keywords to choose from, the one that stood out to me was “dab rigs.” Mostly because I had no idea what that was. At 27,100 searches per month, I decided to check the search results.

Even searching from the US there are only Google shopping links in the right of search results – no ads – and I love search results like this which have:

• Forum threads ranking
• Blog posts from 2016 ranking
• No huge ecommerce sites like Amazon ranking
• No hompages ranking; only sub-pages

I think if you were going to create a dedicated website solely on ‘dab rigs’ then you could have a good chance of ranking well. It’s also a buyer-intent keyword, so if smoking and paraphernalia are your thing, it could be for you.

Just Starting with SEO? Maybe Try This

If getting high is your thing but you’re new to the SEO world, you might want to start with a lessor search term to test your ranking and website building skills. Another term which dab rigs go by are ‘concentrate rigs’.

Again I had no idea what this is but Google tells me,

Dab rigs focus on flavor rather than filtration like traditional water pipes because concentrates are typically already refined, and do not need debris filtration like traditional dry herbs.

The more you know.

If you’re going to have success in this niche, you should have known this anyway.

While concentrate rigs “only” gets 1,600 searches per month (still not bad for a buyer-intent keyphrase), the .com is available.

And if you’re angry it’s not available by the time you’re reading this post, I promise it was. Go and check Whois…someone just registered that today.

It doesn’t mean you can’t attempt to rank for the keyphrase though. Try concentratehq or concentraterigs.net and so on. Just because someone got the .com it doesn’t mean they’re actually going to put any work into it.

How to Soundproof a __

When I first attempted to take up podcasting a few years ago I discovered the office I was working with (a fairly square room with little furniture) was far from ideal when it came to acoustic sound. I had to purchase a number of foam panels for certain areas of my wall in order to get rid of the echo I was experiencing in the room.

That’s why I know this is a good niche to enter, because people are willing to spend money to fix this problem, especially when they’ve spent money on a good sound system / podcast microphone / studio equipment.

A few relevant search terms in this niche include:

• how to soundproof a room: 12,100 monthly searches
• how to soundproof a wall: 2,400 monthly searches
• How to soundproof a door: 3,600 monthly searches
• How to soundproof a bedroom: 1,000 monthly searches

As you can imagine, the list really does go on.

Even just for a door, the number of long-tail keywords which are searched for – found via Google Suggest – are many.

• How to soundproof a door
• How to soundproof a door cheap
• How to soundproof a door with household items
• How to soundproof a bedroom door
• How to soundproof a hollow door

If you enter this niche, you have absolutely no excuse to ever run out of topics to write about if you’ve really done your keyword research.

Another reason I like this industry is because the search results are dominated by blog posts.

Not homepages.

Not huge brands.

Not ecommerce companies.

But bloggers who wanted to cover this topic with their own advice.

The obvious option when it comes to monetisation is linking to stores to purchase the acoustic panels you recommend as an affiliate, but there are many more options to take especially if you’re reaching people who run recording studios or are just getting into podcasting.

And I went the extra mile:

Whoever goes and registers this, please actually build a site on it.

A Genius ‘Rank and Rent’ Niche Idea

I love this one. Not because it follows one of my favourite online business models – the rank and rent method – but because it’s such a different take on the niches that people generally associate with this business model.

We’ve all heard about recommendations for injury lawyers and office rental and so on, but you’ve never heard anyone talk about this niche.

Mommy makeovers.

I’m not even going to look at the search volume for this one because I don’t care. It makes logical sense that people are searching for this and even if the numbers are small, it’s once again a buyer-intent keyword.

Oh, and a reader of ViperChill is already renting out four websites in this niche.

I asked for permission before sharing the niche here.

I said I would not check the search volume for this term, and I won’t, but the Google Trends graph is encouraging.

I could totally see local beauty salons and hair salons willing to pay for leads generated by these search queries.

Love this one.

Heavy Equipment Rental

I won’t claim to know much the construction industry but I am pretty sure about one thing: Companies are far more likely to rent the equipment they use around the world rather than own and transport it themselves.

Renting construction equipment is a very lucrative industry because some items can cost thousands of dollars per day

In the UK, crane hire for 5 hours is £390 ($514). This is not a huge crane that you see working on malls or car parks. This is for a very small crane which sits on the back of a lorry and can’t lift more than 10 tons. They’re expensive to own, and expensive to rent.

There are so many different angles to take with this niche because of how many different types of heavy equipment people rent. It was funny to check a few domain names and see how much people want for them.

And another.

If you don’t have the budget for these, I understand. Unless I was really into this industry and wanted to make a huge authority site, I wouldn’t consider them either.

However, being the overly curious guy that I am, I did manage to find a few .com’s which are available and do pick up some searches each month.

Here they are:

• RentRototiller.com – 720 searches per month
• DingoRental.com – 590 searches per month
• HydroseedRental.com – 590 searches per month

As of hitting publish these domains are available. I’m sure they’ll be gone very quickly. Not to worry; I’m sure there are many, many more as well. I didn’t do too much research into them as I won’t be entering this niche myself.

I will be straight with you, as I feel I have been for the entirety of this blog post: There are big players in this niche. Companies with hundreds of millions of dollars – like CAT – dominating the search results for most queries.

That’s why, if I were to take this on, I would go local.

Don’t just go for broad rental phrases but go for the rental phrases for specific areas. To give you a starting point, the top five US states for construction work are currently:

• Oklahoma
• Illinois
• Florida
• Texas
• California

If you’re outside of the US, like myself, then research areas where construction companies and homeowners are more likely to be looking for heavy duty equipment.

As luck would have it, we can also combine my first niche recommendation with this one. Sunbelt Rentals rank very well for a number of rental search terms. The last query on this list is interesting:

Don’t just tackle this from a generic standpoint. Try to be creative.

As with other industries I’ve covered, the aim is not to get thousands of visitors landing on your website each month. It’s about getting the right visitors and being able to convert them as a lead to send to companies who can pay big money for them.

And finally, a good way to know if this is the niche for you: You already knew what a hydroseed and rototiller were without searching Google (because I certainly didn’t).

The Simplest Ever Guide to Finding Your Own Highly Profitable Niche Ideas

The above search term, admittedly, comes with a number of ads in the search results. Buyer intent keywords usually do if you’re based in America. There are far lessor ads when I change my proxy settings to non-US countries so keep that in mind, but the majority of readers here are based in the United States.

If you’re seeing ads for anything you search for after reading this post today: Make sure you learn from them.

One website I see constantly running ads is http://bestreviews.guide.

For example, for the ‘security system reviews’ keyphrase I see them buying ads for this term and then sending traffic to the following page.

Every single ‘View Product’ link is simply an Amazon affiliate link.

Since Security system reviews was an interesting niche to explore, we can then analyse what other industries http://bestreviews.guide have “caught on to” in order to give us inspiration for other industries to enter.

For this example, I’m going to use SEMRush.com. I did recently purchase a premium account, but for the purpose of this example I will not log in, meaning I’m only using data which is freely available.

When I enter their domain name and look at other terms they’re buying ads for, I see the following results:

While some of these may be search terms they’re just ‘testing’ to see if there’s money to be made, you can generally conclude that they are making money, otherwise they wouldn’t be bidding on the terms.

Best bluetooth earbuds is only going to increase in popularity if the rumors are true about Apple’s next iPhone coming without a headphone jack.

Best portable air conditioner is only going to increase in popularity if sponsored scientists continue denying the state of global warming.

For any ads that you see in Google when performing your research, put them into SEMRush to see what other industries they’re advertising in and then analyse the organic search results.

BestProducts.com = The Biggest Link Network Google Won’t Penalise

It’s not secret that I’m disappointed as to how well BestProducts.com are ranking in Google. Especially since they only benefit from sitewide footer links on Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Elle.com. It’s seems highly ironic that Google will go through Black hat world forums looking for sites and networks to penalise but totally ignore the big fish right under their nose.

I guess Hearst Media spend enough money on Google Adwords.

That out of the way, there is something to learn from BestProducts.com: 99% of their rankings are for keyphrases where freshness counts.

For certain search queries, how recent something was written matters far more than how many links it has to a certain page, or how good the on-site SEO is, and so on.

This is known as Query Deserves Freshness, or QDF for short.

Therefore, if we analyse the terms they’re ranking for, we can see opportunities where new sites and pages actually stand a chance of ranking.

I’ve logged into SEMRush.com now to give you a list of some of those terms, for your inspiration:

• wireless earbuds: 90,500 searches per month
• best wireless earbuds: 22,200 searches per month
• best vacuum cleaner: 22,200 searches per month
• best waist trainer: 22,200 searches per month
• waterproof bluetooth speaker: 18,100 searches per month
• lighted makeup mirror: 14,800 searches per month
• best portable speakers: 12,100 searches per month
• moscow mule mugs: 33,100 searches per month
• best bluetooth headphones: 40,500 searches per month
• best workout headphones: 6,600 searches per month
• tattoo cover up makeup: 6,600 searches per month
• best blender for smoothies: 5,400 searches per month

The list goes on, but hopefully there’s inspiration for a variety of niches there.

We’re not done with huge companies and their unstoppable networks just yet.

Small Business Phone System: A Link-Ring Example

“Small business phone system” isn’t a niche I have chosen to cover because I think you should enter it. Not only because the search results are largely dominated by big brands, but if Google Trends is to be trusted then it’s a dying industry as well.

Take a look at the following screenshot to see how brand-dominated the results really are.

You’ve got Cisco, Telstra, ATT and so on. Any rational SEO would look at this search result and think “I’m leaving that one alone.”

What you don’t know, as I know you didn’t go and search for this term – it’s a pretty boring industry – is that I removed the first result from Google.

And the first result isn’t some other huge telecommunications provider offering this as a service. Instead, it’s a blog, who wrote an article on the topic in 2016.

With an estimated 3,600 searches per month, I would say this sends Business News Daily at least 1,000 monthly visitors thanks to their ranking. Ironically, the site is owned by Purch, another of the 16 companies who I reported as dominating the world’s Google search results.

The reason Business News Daily is ranking, is because of Purch’s network. Just look at this example from TomsITPro.

The highlighted text is a slightly more professional way for a private network owner to say, “Here’s a link to another article I wish to rank in my network, and another”.

The mentions of other Purch-owned sites, Top Ten Reviews and Business News Daily are internal links to their own articles on the topic.

Does a network owner really need to cover the same topic three times? I think the better question for these 16 is, why wouldn’t I create this article on all of my sites? Why take one search result when we can have many more.

My annoyances aside, it shows that even brand-dominated queries can be outranked by an in-depth and linked to article on the topic, so don’t count out all opportunities at first glance.

Sorry I Just Killed All of These Niches By Blogging About Them

If you genuinely believe that, then don’t take action on any of them.

Though please allow me to remind you that I dedicated an entire blog post to a Pomodoro app I would love to see built and not a single person created it.

Many, many people got 80% done, but nobody went ahead and actually finished it.

Why? It more than likely wasn’t something that they cared about enough. They just finally had an idea to work on and started working on it.

If I had the interest to do so I would be building far more ‘[industry] near me’ websites but they’re just not very exciting. I do have a few on the go, as I said earlier, but I’m really not putting that much work into the sites. I’m relying (hoping?) on them to rank with minimum effort.

And when someone comes into those industries with a bit more effort, they’ll outrank me and take away some of my marketshare.

When I asked people whether they would be interested in this article before going live, a popular comment was that I would share how I found the niches as well.

While I hope you got something out of the industries I shared, I hope you got more out of how I found them, and you can too in the future. Even if ViperChill readers don’t make these industries saturated, they will be one day, and you need to know how to find other opportunities.

If you got something out of this article and would like to see more of them in the future, please do let me know in the comments below. I have a stack of industries I consider but don’t have time to enter, but at 7,000+ words I think I’ve covered enough for part one.

The post 51 Profitable SEO Niches to Dominate with Low Competition appeared first on ViperChill.

If you are loyal to Google guidelines, the teachings of blogs like Moz and love playing by the book, then you’ll probably realise with this article that we possess a very different perspective.

When I first started my internet journey – where I spent day and night trying to make a living online – I tried and tested more website ideas and angles than you would believe.

Today, I’m still pushing the boundaries to see what works. These boundaries most often pertain to SEO, since it’s what I’ve enjoyed the most over the last 11 years.

I’m in the fortunate position that my business it not tied to some employer who dictates how I have to do things when it comes to promoting web properties. As such, I’m always willing to ignore everything I previously thought about marketing and to be open to new ideas and opportunities.

This blog post details one such opportunity, but I realise it will not be for everyone. Not everyone is the position to implement it for their online business, and even if you are, you may question the ethics of what is coming up.

With that disclaimer out of the way, today I’m going to introduce you to the world of PIN’s. Just before I do that, I want to talk about why I think they’re necessary.

I Predict We’ve Got Four to Five Years Left to ‘Do SEO’ As We Know It

This isn’t some “SEO is Dead” article you see go viral in the SEO blogosphere every six months, but a genuine prediction based on how Google search results have evolved over the last few years.

Google make all of their money via ads so quite simply want more people to click on them (and more often). The less success people have with SEO, the more likely they are to move to Google’s advertising platform.

Long gone are the days when we’re presented with just 10 blue links on a page.

The White Space Between Search Results Has Increased

It’s known that the higher up the page a search result, the more clicks it will receive. Therefore, when organic search results are pushed further down the page they’re going to be receiving fewer and fewer clicks. Not only are they lower down now in mobile results due to spacing, but the change is being tested across desktop results as well.

The search result on the left includes the new extra spacing with the ads taking up far more vertical space than the search result on the right (graphic via SEMPost).

There Are More ‘Featured Snippets’ Than Ever Before

There isn’t much to say on this one besides feature snippets are to be found for millions of search queries in every industry imaginable. What, when, how and why questions are often answered with a featured snippet box.

This not only pushes ‘organic’ search results further down in search results, it also attempts to give you the answer right from the results page. We can argue whether or not it’s useful for searchers, but for SEO’s, it gives new meaning to having the top result in Google.

‘Map Packs’ Completely Changed Local Search Results

Some call them ‘map packs’, some ‘the local pack’ and some even call them the ‘snack pack’. Whatever your term of choice, after being introduced a few years ago SEO’s have been trying to figure out how to get themselves and their clients into the pack to compensate for a lack of expected search results.

After all, these local listings take up a large portion of screen real estate.

I’m not complaining about this change; I’m simply pointing it out. There’s no doubt it makes search results more useful and that is Google’s aim (usually) after all. While Google did reduce the listings from seven to three back in August of 2015, the redesign of the listings with adding spacing means not much changed in terms of organic results being seen.

Those Map Packs Now Contain Ads, Too

We’re not going back to Google updates of a few years ago to make a point about Google evolving. Just last month Google announced that the map / local / snack pack would now include ads, as shown below.

This image is a mockup by Barry Schwartz, though the real thing looks very similar

It’s interesting to follow both PPC and SEO guys on Twitter and see the difference in reaction. PPC guys are over the moon since it gives them more traffic opportunities for their clients and SEO guy’s, well…I’m sure you can guess the reaction.

Based on how Google’s past, it’s not one of surprise.

They Have All The Answers

The knowledge graph was released in May of 2012 and it’s almost disappointing when you don’t see it for queries when looking for quick answers. For example, when I want to see how my football team, Newcastle, have fared against Liverpool, I literally don’t have to click anywhere.

Whether you want to learn about how old someone is, what 12 x 56 is or who discovered Radium, Google has the results right there for you. As a searcher, I love these quick answers, but as an SEO, it’s just one more thing which has lessened the likelihood of people clicking on my website if it doesn’t appear in this box.

They Continue to Make People Scared of Link Building

Google are great at making people fearful of performing any type of SEO. After all, this was the company that introduced the rel=”nofollow” attribute so we could link out to websites without giving them “link juice”.

That isn’t the real headline for the article – I’ve got to have some fun in these serious posts – but Google have publicly cracked down on pretty much everything when it comes to link building. The list includes, but is not limited to:

• Guest posting for links
• Using directories for links
• Utilising private blog networks
• Adding links to website themes
• Adding do-followed links to widgets
• They literally created a ‘no-follow’ tag

That’s not all; they openly share how much human intervention is involved in finding people abusing the guidelines, rather than algorithmic. This tweet speaks volumes.

Anglo Rank was a small network being promoted on the Black Hat World forums.

Just think about this for a second. One of Google’s first employees (and former Head of Web Spam), worth millions of dollars, dedicated his time to actively targeting a tiny little network on some private forum just to scare other people away from doing the same.

The simple fact is that Google can’t figure out with absolutely certainty which links are earned, or bought, or manipulative, very effectively.

Now I’m not taking anything away from Google here. Their company is worth hundreds of billions and mine, well…isn’t. They have undoubtedly created the world’s most sophisticated search engine.

But as I said earlier, it’s far easier for them to get us to police ourselves than it is for them to police us.

Big Brands Dominate the Long Tail

As SEO becomes increasingly difficult and searches are more and more dominated by big brands, the long tail will be the final frontier of search traffic opportunities.

When I said we only have a few years left to do SEO as we know it, the long tail will be where the majority of SEO’s focus their time through on-site SEO changes and content marketing.

While we’ll still have opportunities for SEO to ‘work’, long tail search results just don’t seem to be as diverse as they were in the past. It makes sense to me that Google have some kind of ‘filter’ whereby if they’re not sure what to list for a search result, they simply show more results from an authoritative site to be on the safe side.

Logically, this makes sense, but as an SEO, it could be a worrying sign of things to come. You can see this lack of diversification above in my screenshot of the map packs as well, with Yelp dominating the first three organic search results.

The Lack of Diversity in Search Results Will Only Get Worse

If you’ve only found ViperChill recently then it was likely because of my recent article, How 16 Companies Are Dominating the World’s Google Search Results. It has been shared thousands of times on social media and been read over 40,000 times, making it one of the most popular articles I’ve ever written here.

In the article I highlighted how Hearst Media were using their brands like Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and Woman’s Day to point footer links to a new website of theirs, BestProducts.com.

That strategy, which would get the rest of us penalised, continues to work incredibly well.

“Just follow the Google guidelines.” Why?

Since that post, I was also contacted by a few people associated with the brands I had featured. One of those people I talked with was Tre who works in the growth department of About.com. I had already mentioned in the article how About planned to spin off into many more verticals over the coming months, which he confirmed.

I admit I’m being a little pedantic with my highlighting, but when you’re Director of Growth for About.com you’re going to share which terms are driving traffic to one site with the team that is in charge of another.

I appreciate Tre’s replies and I’m sure there’s only so much he can say, but About.com’s real goal with their spin-off’s is to no doubt own ten search results, instead of one.

PIN’s: My Version of Fighting Back While I Still Can

When I talked about why I started using private link networks and then continued to use them after Google’s “crackdown”, my primary reason was very simple: Writing quality content and getting ‘whitehat’ links wasn’t working for me. I was being outranked by people with crappy link networks who could build their own ‘relevant’ links on a whim and I decided to fight back.

You could view PIN’s in a similar light. I am utilising them because we’re not competing on a fair playing field, and what is supposed to work is very rarely what ranks, at least in the industries that I operate in.

While I don’t wish to reveal those exact industries, let me give you an example closer to home, with ViperChill.

I will say in advance that this is a search term I really don’t care about ranking for. I have no idea how many times it’s searched for each month and honestly, I doubt it gets many searches at all.

Here are the search results for the query, ‘Future of blogging’.

My site is usually either in 10th or 11th for that term, yet by every SEO standard metric I should be number one.

• I have more links to the page ranking than anyone else
• I have more ‘domain authority’ than most other pages
• My title tag seems more relevant than half of them

Yet in order to get more traffic for this search term, which I think I ‘deserve’ from a 10,000 word article which took me weeks to put together, all I have to do is one thing.

It’s not getting more links. It’s not improving my on-site SEO. It’s not building better connections with influencers.

All I need to do to get my traffic back is to add a sentence to the start of the article which says ‘Last updated: July 25th 2016‘.

This is a search result where how recent an article was posted is more important than whether it’s actually a good page to rank.

I don’t actually have to update the article; I literally just need to make it appear to Google – thanks to that one sentence – that my article was updated recently. This one sentence, this ‘trick’, would bring me back the ranking I feel I deserve. (Though, again, I doubt this even gets searched for. It’s just an example).

This is not theory. If you look at the first sentence of my WordPress SEO guide that’s exactly what I’ve done before, with great results.

This little change is not too dissimilar to what I need to rank in other industries. I don’t need better on-site SEO. I don’t need to build natural links from relevant sites through content marketing. I simply need to add more domains to my private link network and write more guest blog posts.

Yes, these are both tactics that are looked down upon by Google, but they still work incredibly well. In 2014 when I covered Google’s crackdown on private blog networks I did mention that they would now be less likely to care about private link networks.

In my exact words:

What I expect to happen is that Google will ease off looking into private networks. The damage is mostly done.

Why? Because they’ve already made people scared to build them. The best way to deal with people trying to game the system is essentially making us as a community police ourselves so we don’t try to game the system in the first place.

The continued use of private link networks and guest posting for SEO is part of the reason why I will get a lot of criticism from this post. How to implement these tactics more effectively, which I’ll talk about later, will be the larger reason for criticism.

The Approach to Take

One of the first ideas I had when I started out online was to assemble a team of people who could work together to build a huge website. At the time I was following the growth of TechCrunch and Mashable and saw how quickly they were able to grow thanks to having a team of writers.

My idea was to essentially connect a team of people who all worked on one website and in return everyone had a percentage ownership. The logic being that working as a team would result in the site growing faster and even if revenue or a sale price was split, we would have more success than working on our own.

It’s a similar idea a number of ViperChill readers had after reading my last article on the small number of brands dominating Google search results.

While it’s a nice idea, in theory it doesn’t work so well.

Some will want to dictate the direction of a site that others don’t agree with and more importantly, some people will put in far more work than others. If you’re writing more content than others and your articles are getting better traction, you’re going to want to increase your ownership compared to someone barely putting in any effort.

There is another option you can utilise if you wish to team up with others though, and that’s a PIN.

It comes with all of the benefits of creating your own team, without the downsides of worrying about who is contributing what work.

What the Hell is a PIN?

A PIN is a play on the acronym PBN, which is commonly referred to as a private blog or link network.

I’ve received my fair share of critics over the years for talking about PBN’s and their success – and continuing to build them – but there’s a reason I do: They work.

I simply don’t believe that playing by Google’s rules is always going to get me the results I want. In some industries I wouldn’t make the money I do without them. I don’t use them for clients, but do for my own websites.

Going forward, I think PIN’s are going to be crucial to my success in certain industries, and I think they are going to be crucial to a number of people reading this as well.

PIN, stands for Private Influencer Network.

Before you think that just means making some “friends” online and building up your connections, allow me to continue.

I define a Private Influencer Network as a group of people looking to rank their websites in Google in similar industries (but not the same) who work together to help each other reach their objectives.

Essentially, they use any opportunities they have to build links (such as private blog networks, guest blogging, interviews, blogger round-ups) to send backlinks to other people in their network. In return, other people do the same for them.

The end result is that for the work you would do to build ten backlinks, you can get twenty to forty (of the same quality) in return.

A $100,000/m PIN Operating Right Under Your Nose

I first came across a Private Influencer Network a little over a year ago. A few ‘influencers’ in a particular field were using their private blog networks to – quite simply – link to each other.

I didn’t think much of the tactic at the time, until I found another example of this happening just a few months later.

Then three months after that, I found my third example. This time it really got my attention.

A group of just five people (from what I could tell) were ranking in one of the most profitable industries online and undoubtedly making over $100,000 per month in the process. I operate in the niche, which is how I found their collaboration, and know the numbers very well.

This is when I started working on building my own, PIN.

Finally, the idea to write this blog post came to me when I found yet another PIN. One of the members of this network is one of the most well-known SEO’s on the planet and is reading this article. He already “knows I know.”

If you follow the SEO blogosphere, you’ll undoubtedly know who he is.

One of the sites they are promoting also very likely also makes more than $100,000 per month. I’m not involved in the niche, but I know others who are and with the rankings they have, those numbers wouldn’t surprise me.

I reached out to the owner of the ‘money site’ they had all teamed up to promote. I keep a private database of paid link opportunities and one of them costs more than $10,000 per year. I found their website there, so sent the main owner an email.

One months revenue spent on link building is a small price to pay when you’re doing huge numbers thanks to gaming Google.

While some would view four to five guys linking to each other to make more than $100,000/m from a one-year-old website as shady and unethical, I’m personally impressed at how well they are crushing a very competitive niche so quickly.

While there is a chance that a PIN could be “outed”, the last two examples I found were so well put together that I’m almost certain I was the only person who connected the dots.

If you’re not trying to rank in an obvious industry that’s constantly monitored by SEO’s – like blogging and internet marketing – the chances of your PIN becoming uncovered are relatively low. Much lower than having your private blog network discovered.

As you’ve probably already figured out more succinctly than I am at getting to the point, members of a PIN use any opportunity they have to ‘link out’ to take care of their whole team.

While I’ve been fairly slow on the uptake to building my own PIN, I have been slowly building them in a few industries over the last few months and I’m excited to see what the future holds.

I didn’t want to write this blog post until I had a better understanding of how to build and manage them, because managing them is actually the most time-consuming part.

You have to make sure everyone in the network is pulling their weight and giving (and getting) equal opportunities. Opportunities, of course, is code for links.

A Real-World Example of How a PIN Works

One of the websites I find myself checking for ideas and inspiration is Entrepreneur.com.

I recently found an article on the website, published by a contributor and not a staff member, which could serve as a great example for how PIN’s work.

Let me say it in bold (for those just skimming) that the example below is totally legitimate.

I’m highlighting it because it’s natural, but could have been used in a non-natural way.

While the screenshot below might be the longest ever embedded by me into a blog post, there is something much more important that I have to say about it.

There is no specific reason I have singled out this article. It was simply the first article on Entrepreneur.com when I was looking to give an example for this post. Proof of that is the date. This article is going live on July 25th whereas this article I’m featuring below is from July 22nd.

It just happened to be a great example to see a PIN (or what could be a PIN), in action.

I made the article a little shorter than the original (the screenshot was long enough, I know) but you can see the majority of it here. The first thing you’ll notice is four mentions of Weekdone. Unsurprisingly, these are all links to the company that the author works for.

A good guest article, utilised for a PIN, will link to other recommended resources that are connections of the author. The links should be relevant, but also to other people in your network so that you are ‘owed’ a link back.

Now on the surface (without my large logos stuck over the text) this looks like a totally normal article (albeit with a little overuse of linking back to the authors employer). If you do a little more research, you’ll learn that the other two highlighted companies, Zlien and Mavrck, are actually clients of Weekdone.

In other words, Weekdone likely earn some bonus points from their clients for mentioning them in an article on Entrepreneur.com. I see nothing wrong with this and it’s a one-off occurrence so it’s not done for SEO manipulation; I’m just trying to show how a PIN link looks without actually revealing one.

Essentially everything looks natural until you look under the hood. It’s normal for a client to talk about a company they use, as shown below where the relationship continues.

Once again, I’m not saying they’re doing anything wrong here. It was one of the top articles on Entreprenuer.com as I was finishing up this article (the post is only three days old) and happened to make a good example.

The truth is that Entrepreneur.com, along with Forbes and the business sections of the Huffington Post, are great resources to see mini PIN’s in action. The people who write content for these sites generally try to get as much out of writing for them as possible.

They link to their friends, and their friends link to them.

A PIN in Action

I wanted to create a graphic for this section but your understanding of the concept is far more important than your ability to decipher my poor Photoshop skills. Before it gets a little bit crazy, I have assumed that there are just two ‘influencers’ in your private network.

The yellow box is your money website (the website you wish to rank in Google).

The brown boxes are private blog sites you own (optional).

The grey boxes are link opportunities you’ve created through guest posting or similar.

While the graphic is admittedly not the prettiest (I did warn you), the concept is very simple.

Some of your private network domains will point links to the other influencer in your network, as will some of your guest posts on other websites.

In return, the other influencer will do the same for you.

Once you start adding more people to your network, things get a little bit more messy, but the principle remains the same.

When I try to visualise this with four influencers as part of your PIN it gets a little ugly, but here goes.

The golden rule you need to remember is this: If you receive a link from someone from a specific source, you need to replicate the link in kind.

So if you receive a link in a guest post from someone in the network, you need to give them a link from a guest post you write.

Essentially meaning that the work you do for 10 links for yourself gets you 30-40 links in return. This number varies because sometimes it’s a bit risky (such as using blog networks) to link out to the same sites which are linking to you but you still receive more links than you would have without your network, for essentially the same work.

The Types of Links Which Are Shared

I originally tried to write these guidelines as if there were four people in a PIN but it became a little bit too complicated to read (and write). Instead, I’ll assume there are only two people in your PIN and show you what types of links you could generate or other ways to help each other.

If there are more people in your PIN, which I highly recommend, then understand that Influencer #1 will sometimes link to #2, while #4 sometimes links to number #3 and so on. It’s basically just varying the following link opportunities to keep things fair for everyone.

The types of reciprocation that can take place.

• You can tweet or Facebook share an article from another influencer
• You can retweet or publicly thank another influencer for mentioning you
• You can utilise a guest post opportunity to link to a relevant quote or article from another influencer
• If you use build private blog networks, you can use some to link to other influencers
• If you find articles where comments drive traffic to your site, you can inform other influencers
• When being interviewed you can link to a relevant quote or article from another influencer
• Sharing link opportunities you find on your site they can utilise for theirs
• Offering website design advice
• Utilising Web 2.0 properties to give links and get the same in return

If performed properly, there is no reason to hide that you have a connection with other influencers in your niche. The only thing you would have to care about is that the obvious mission for having these connections is to help each other’s search engine rankings.

If you are outside of the internet marketing world you don’t really have to worry about other people finding your private link networks, but always keep a few rules in mind to avoid footprints.

Ready to Build Your Own PIN? Here’s My Advice

If you see the benefits of utilising a PIN for your own search engine rankings, and actually getting more than rankings in return, then here’s my advice for setting one up.

A PIN Must Have a Leader

As I mentioned earlier, I didn’t want to write about this topic until I had attempted to do it myself.

My short but relevant experience tells me that there has to be one person (or two at most) who is in control of the group you gather together to make sure that everyone in the team is pulling their weight.

In other words, you need to make sure that the people who are receiving links are doing their part in giving them as well.

The leader must also make sure that members of the team are active. It’s no use everyone playing along for the first few weeks while the idea is hot and then dropping off the map.

Bringing Together Your Team

While some of you may be excited about getting started on this – and some horrified that I’m even talking about it – there’s one important caveat to keep in mind.

Do not bring anyone into your team who has never shown any self-drive in terms of search engine optimisation.

If someone:

• Doesn’t already have a website they wish to rank
• Doesn’t regularly produce content for their own sites or others
• Doesn’t have at least a basic knowledge of SEO fundamentals

Don’t invite them to be part of your network.

I assumed this would be the case from the start of building my own, but I’m even more sure of it after trying to get other people excited about the idea who weren’t actually willing to contribute to the rest of the teams’ success as a whole.

A simple test to see if someone would be right to join your network is to send a candidate over to this article and have them read about this concept for themselves.

If they don’t immediately “get” the idea and they don’t reply with something like “I can see this working well” then it’s not someone you want on your team.

You shouldn’t have to convince anyone to work with you. They should see it for themselves. If they’re against it because of ethical reasons, then that’s totally fine (and understandable) but again, it’s a sure sign that they’re not someone you want in your team.

As far as communication goes, there are a few platforms out there that would be useful.

You could create a Skype group where people get together. I certainly recommend that everyone get on a call together at least some point to make sure you all understand each other’s roles.

Slack is another good option, as you can keep up to date via their mobile app and have a history of previous agreements.

A private Facebook group is another good option.

Both Slack and Facebook allow there to be a leader who can add or remove members to the network.

The platform is really up to you. My only recommendation is not to lay out all your plans in Google Docs ;).

Take One Step Back from Your Current Niche

It should be obvious but I’ll state it anyway: You don’t want to work with people who are targeting the same keywords as you.

However, you still want to connect with people who are in a relevant niche (I’ll give you the chance to connect with ViperChill readers at the bottom of this post). For instance, if you’re promoting your real estate website then it makes sense to team up with other realtors, just not for the same region.

If you’re in the weight loss niche then it makes sense to collaborate and grow your audience with other people in that niche, but target different keywords and / or promote different types of products and services.

Whatever niche you’re in, imagine you’re shopping for that specific industry on Amazon but go back one category to find people to work with. Again, I’ll give you the opportunity to find PIN partners at the end of this article.

Footprints are Hard to Find, But Still Be Careful

From the PIN’s I’ve discovered and the ones I’m working on myself, I’ve found you really don’t have to be too careful when it comes to leaving some kind of footprint. After all, it doesn’t ring any alarm bells when Copyblogger keeps mentioning Problogger or Mashable keep linking to TechCrunch. It’s “natural” and something you can expect from the owners of websites who have developed friendships with each other.

Where you have to be careful is primarily with private blog networks and not creating footprints of clearly linking back and forth to each other from the same sites at all times. Of course, you don’t have to use private networks, but remember for each link you give out, you can get three to four back, so it can dramatically speed up the process of ranking your site.

You Need to Know How the Microphone Works

And how to sing.

One of my favourite authors, Daniel Priestley, said the following in his book The Key Person of Influence;

You don’t need to know how the microphone works, you need to know how to sing.

He was referring to the technology behind the microphone and how, when it was first invented, your time would have been better spent learning how to sing than how a microphone worked, if you wanted to reach a lot of people.

When it comes to ranking in Google, I don’t think that’s the case. You need to know how the microphone works and how to sing.

There are going to be people who worry I’m encouraging armies of people to come together to take over the Google search results.

The truth is that I don’t believe people who can’t sing – in this case, can’t produce great results for search engine users – will have much long-term success.

There’s no point putting all of the work into your PIN if the end result is going to be a crappy website.

The third example of a PIN that I mentioned earlier now easily does in excess of over $100,000 per month. What I didn’t yet tell you is that they built a fantastic resource for their industry. The site doesn’t have many pages (less than 50), but each one genuinely solves a question that a particular searcher is looking for an answer to.

I don’t view utilising a PIN as a way to “sneak” up the Google results and send thousands of visitors to an ad-riddled website.

Instead, I see it as a way to help you start getting great content noticed that could attract natural links once it is.

I mentioned at the start of this article that I would likely weed out some of the audience of ViperChill. I want to make it clear though that I’m not trying to help people with shitty websites rise to the top of Google.

While I believe there is a great opportunity here, it isn’t easy. Turning the concept into reality sounds much easier on paper (or in a blog post).

The truth is that when it comes to making money online, most people are, quite simply…lazy.

They may be excited about this idea for a few weeks but if you’re going to use this to rank in an industry worth ranking for, you should be aiming for keywords that take a few months to get any serious traction for.

Links Aside, The Connections You Build Can Be Invaluable

I’ve already briefly talked about the other benefits this kind of network can have, besides link building.

You can connect with people who have a genuine passion for your industry who in turn spur you on to put more work into your site and help you improve your online ventures. Whether that’s giving advice on your design, your writing, your strategy or anything else.

Working online can seem lonely at times, especially if your offline friends don’t have an inkling to do anything online. When you’re aiming to make money from your web projects it’s nice to find other people on the same journey.

In my future of blogging post a few years ago, one of the most popular on the site, I mentioned how some bloggers had worked together to help grow their respective audiences in the same industry.

TechCrunch and Mashable grew incredibly quickly at the same time while investors were putting more and more of their money into web-based projects. They mentioned each other thousands of times.

Smaller operations – though still huge – like Copyblogger and Problogger would guest post on each others’ sites, promote each other’s products, send traffic to each other via their email lists and essentially enhanced both of their own images through their connection.

I took the time to actually figure out how many times some sites mentioned each other, which you can see in the graphic below.

While links were a key factor in all of these partnerships, I wouldn’t essentially class them as private link building. Most of the links didn’t include any specific anchor text and they weren’t to random affiliate sites or anything like that. All of them were trying to build authoritative online businesses and found someone with a similar passion on the same journey.

While TechCrunch and Mashable were almost in direct competition with each other, they still highlighted the stories that the other site got to first. Michael Arrington later sold TechCrunch to AOL for $25m. Pete Cashmore is still the CEO of Mashable though according to Politico.com, is trying to sell the site for around $300-$350m.

That’s a partnership that certainly paid off for both of them. Pete holding out six years on his sale seems to have been a smarter choice, however.

A Facebook Group to Find PIN Partners

For what is probably a very limited time only, I’m giving access to a private Facebook group where people can assemble together to potentially build their own Private Influencer Network.

I don’t want the comments here to be full of pitching opportunities, so let’s take this elsewhere to see what industries you’re working with. To be approved for the group you must leave a comment here with your Facebook name or put your Facebook initials at the end of a comment. Facebook will likely recommend the group to people who have no idea what PIN’s are and I don’t want to do a lot of moderating.

Don’t reveal your exact niche when you start a discussion, just simply zoom out of your niche and reveal a higher category that you would like to work in. You can find the group here (remember to comment to be approved).

Thank you, as always, for reading.

The post PIN’s: The Future of Private Link Building appeared first on ViperChill.

I can clarify I did spend more than 60 hours of work on this article, yet the sad part for me is that most of that time can be summarized in a simple bar chart. The rest of the time was spent coming up with a good headline but I clearly failed at that, so let’s see if I did any better with the chart.

I Manually Analysed 1,000 Search Results to See How Websites Ranked

I’ve been guilty over the years of making generalizations like “private blog networks are dominating Google” or “natural link building is almost impossible in some industries” so a few weeks ago I decided that I would respond to my own sweeping statements and analyze how people are actually ranking their websites in 2016.

As you can imagine, doing this analysis manually was a very time-consuming process. I managed to overcome most of the monotony by seeing this work as a chance to discover more link opportunities for myself (and my clients). My private database grew by over a hundred rows which means that there were many replicable links in my findings.

Now, before the SEO world tells me how unscientific the following data is, allow me this one caveat: I agree. The following findings are primarily based on my personal experience and viewpoints. There is, unfortunately, no way to exactly determine which backlinks are most integral in helping a web page rank.

The Results

The goal of my research was simple: Which specific type of link was the most instrumental in helping a website to rank.

Of course, every website I reviewed of course received backlinks from a number of different sources but I wanted to discover which ones were helping that particular website the most.

Because this was performed manually – I couldn’t automate the process even if I wanted to – I understand that there is nothing exact with my findings.

There are said to be over 200 factors which Google use to rank websites and while links from other websites are certainly the most impactful, it’s possible that my personal views are not entirely what is helping these sites rise to the top of search results.

That being said, I’ve been doing SEO for 11 years now and much of that time has been spent on link building. I wanted these answers for myself, so there is hopefully some merit in the following data.

Enough with the writing. Here are the results.

That’s it. The equivalent of working two and a half days straight without taking even a one-second break mostly boils down to that single graph.

As you can see, what I consider to be ‘natural’ link building tops the chart. This really shouldn’t be too surprising since that is how Google is supposed to rank websites (for the most part).

I should add that I don’t believe 21% of these results I checked were ranking because of links. Some were on powerful domains like Youtube.com or Amazon.com and therefore were ranking primarily because of the domain the result resided on. These links were still analysed, with most coming under the mixed category.

Due to the industries I analysed (revealed further down) there’s also a chance that there are more ‘low-quality’ links then you would find with a much broader dataset. However, you’ll find I picked the terms I monitored for good reason.

There were two key things that surprised me with these results:

• How low in quality the backlinks were to many top ranking websites
• How few private link networks I uncovered

The second point was especially interesting to me as it feels like I’m finding private link networks on a daily basis. What’s probably happening is that my brain makes some kind of internal ‘event’ when I come across one and therefore I’m less likely to remember all of the times I didn’t find them.

Kind of like how when you purchase a new car you start suddenly seeing it everywhere yet you didn’t even notice it before.

More seasoned SEO’s will probably be interested in how I classified those links but for the most part, by ‘low-quality link’s’ I generally mean links that anyone can replicate with a high level of ease and they weren’t earned in any way.

Link Classifications

The six categories that I have chosen to split links up into are:

• Natural
• Press Releases / Articles
• Poor Links / Spam
• Mixed Links
• Network Links
• Guest Blogging Links

To clarify again that my decisions are based on what I believe the strongest links the site has are.

Natural

By natural I simply mean that while a webmaster may have a mix of links, they are earned links rather than those that appear to have been gained in order to increase search engine rankings.

Though SEO may be a consideration at times – such as utilising signatures in forum posts – they’re essentially the types of links that you would happily show a Google reviewer and not be concerned about.

Press Releases / Articles

Sites in this category derive their rankings primarily from using press release services which allow you to embed links or embedding them in article directories which allow you to post your own content.

Low-Quality Links

These are primarily links that people can build either manually or automatically with tools that were likely built just to influence search results.

The types of links here include things like irrelevant blog comments, forum profile pages, social bookmarking links and very often from non-English Blogspot blogs.

Mixed Links

Sites in ‘mixed links’ appeared to have a bit of every type of link without any certain type – at least to me – being a major factor in why the site was ranking.

Though not all here used guest blogging or network links, mixed means that they had some natural links and some that were clearly built for gaming Google.

Network Links

This is for sites whose rankings clearly rely on the ownership of a private link network (often known as a private blog network, or PBN). While I can’t be certain sites were utilising their own PBN, it’s highly unlikely an outside source did it as a form of negative SEO, and – let’s be fair – it’s very easy to tell what’s going on when you find a network.

Guest Blogging Links

Though many webmasters did utilising guest blogging, few seemed to benefit from it as their main source of links. In fact, I only found a handful of webmasters primarily benefiting from this.

I’ve Already Got the Data, What Else Can We Analyse?

Since I was already relegated to the idea that I was going to analyse all of these search results anyway, I decided that I may as well collect more data on the way in the hope it would produce some more interesting charts.

Once again I’ll be the first to admit that this is far from scientific. Brian has a much better analysis with 1 million search results if you want some broader results. My sample size is admittedly too small to set the SEO world on fire with the following graphs but I still thought it would be interesting to analyse.

In the GIF below so you can see that all of this data really was collected manually. Huge thanks to my brother who I roped in to help with the grunt work on this.

Where I have tried to separate myself from the likes of Brian’s data is that I’ve specifically monitored industries that you could make money in if you were to rank on the first page of Google.

With Brian’s data, I have no idea if those million search queries were focused on the medical field or other technical subjects which simply wouldn’t apply to what the majority of us are trying to rank for in Google.

The Clickbank affiliate marketplace was a big inspiration for my keyword choices since people are successfully selling products in the industries I monitored. Here’s a sample of the keywords that I analysed:

I am aware, as stated above, my search queries of choice would likely result in more lower-quality link profiles than the web as a whole but again, I wanted to look at industries that myself and ViperChill readers are more likely looking to rank in.

Number of Backlinks

We all know that backlinks aren’t created equal, but would the data support that?

I can see why Brian didn’t include backlink count in his own analysis: It doesn’t make for the most shareable of graphs.

The average number of backlinks to all results was 22,771. This is for the page ranking and not the domain as a whole.

As we can see, my data shows very little correlation between backlinks and rankings.

The simple reasoning here is: Not all links are created equally. Ten links from quality, relevant websites have a much greater impact than one thousand links from the same domain.

Referring Domains

On the topic of receiving links from varied domains, I predicted that comparing the number of referring domains to Google rankings should result in data that’s a little more conclusive.

The average number of referring domains to all results was 236.

While I again admit my sample size is small, this data matches pretty much everything else out there I’ve found in regards to the correlation of referring domains and search engine rankings. It basically shows that if you can get a lot of different websites to link to you, that’s going to result in higher rankings (for the most part).

Of course, there is the caveat that ranking highly gives you the chance of more webmasters linking to you, but let me just have my moment here with my first decent chart, OK?

Social Shares

I didn’t expect too much with this one but I had the data so simply decided to chart it.

The average number of social shares for all results was 3,823. Again, this was for the page ranking and not the domain as a whole.

The main reason I didn’t expect much from this graph – even if it showed a trending line – is because you can’t distinguish correlation and causation. You can’t show whether social shares helped a website to rank or whether they’re simply a byproduct of writing great content which would have attracted links anyway.

Domain Rank

Domain rating is a metric from Ahrefs which, according to them, “has the highest correlation with the Google search rankings. That’s why I always recommend that Ahrefs Domain Rank be the first SEO metric tool to check whenever you’re analyzing a website.”

The average Domain Rank for all results was 63.

I added a trend line to the graph to show that there really wasn’t much change here at all. In fact, Domain Rank was almost perfectly flat across the results.

I imagine if I were monitoring far more ranking positions for each search result then we would see a trend, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary here from page one.

URL Rank

Similar to Domain Rank, Ahrefs also gives a URL Rank rating to specific pages on a website. The majority of results in my testing were internal pages and not homepages, which makes looking at URL Rank (UR) more interesting to me.

The average URL Rank for all results was 23.

The results here are certainly a little bit more conclusive. A higher UR seems to have a good correlation with how well a page will rank in Google search results.

Word Count

There have been numerous tests to see whether longer content ranks better in Google so thanks to Word Checker I was able to run these numbers as well.

The average word count on all results was 1,762.

Again, the argument of correlation versus causation is relevant here. Are pages ranking because they have more words in them or because content with more words in it is likely to attract more links?

Personally, I argue for the latter. I’m far more likely to get links to an in-depth content piece I write rather than something short and sweet. That’s a trend I’ve seen on hundreds of other websites as well.

Behind the Scenes: The Link Building Tactics That Still Work Today

I decided to do put together this report on the state of link building as I’m a little tired of the same SEO advice being rehashed over and over. The thing about our industry is that anyone can start a blog, simply regurgitate what others have said and then instantly appear to be an expert on the topic.

I really like how Aaron Wall of SEO Book put it,

Most of the info created about SEO today is derivative (people who write about SEO but don’t practice it) or people overstating the risks and claiming x and y and z don’t work, can’t work, and will never work.

And then there are people who read an old blog post about how things were x years ago and write as though everything is still the same.

Since I started ViperChill 11 years ago I’ve been testing almost every theory I can when it comes to search engine rankings.

For example, I recently sent 1,000+ clicks to various search results (from around the world) to see if an increased click-through rate (CTR) would influence search engine rankings. Sadly my data didn’t show any noteworthy changes:

It cost me a few hundred dollars to perform this test and would have made a great blog post if there were any big shifts, but sadly I don’t have any data to support that idea.

I’m always testing, but there isn’t always something to say about my findings.

A Note Before We Get Into ‘Outing’

As I have mentioned in a number of previous blog posts, I will never reveal URL’s when looking at the backlinking strategy of small brands. My experience tells me that big brands will never be affected by my writing and I have proved that on a number of occasions.

I’m about to discuss the slightly shady SEO practices of both Houzz.com and Desk.com, companies both worth billions of dollars (Desk is part of Salesforce). I have dedicated entire blog posts to both of these companies before and there were no repercussions, hence I believe there is zero chance of them having any issues buried deep in a blog post like this one.

As I’ll mention in more detail later, I’ve seen that big brands can “get away” with shadier tactics as long as their overall link profile is natural (and abundant).

Billion Dollar Houzz Prove Widget Links Still Work

In April of 2014 I wrote a blog post about Houzz, the multi-billion dollar home design community.

To summarise much longer commentary, I revealed that Houzz were using their widget to unsuspectingly embed dozens of hard-coded links in the websites of those who used it. Their search traffic grew at a phenomenal rate thanks to the tactic.

Within 24 hours of my blog post about Houzz’s shady tactics going live, they removed all links in their widgets, as shown below.

Unfortunately I do not have a larger graphic for this (it was over two years ago that they had this design) but my prior research provides many additional screenshots.

The problem is that the links they embedded on webmaster websites were hard-coded so even when Houzz changed the widget, those links didn’t disappear and they still benefited from tens of thousands of links from thousands of referring domains.

As you can imagine, their search traffic at the time was through the roof.

Clearly someone from their team read my article and as stated, the hard coded links were removed in less than 24 hours of it going live.

Sadly, Houzz have (partially) gone back to their old ways.

As we can see, Houzz recently added back a link to /photos/ on every single widget their members install on their websites.

As per Google’s guidelines, widget links embedded in this way should definitely be no-followed.

Linking to their /photos/ page is smart as it’s essentially a sitemap to the rest of their website, funneling the “link juice” to other strong pages.

Thanks to SEMRush we can see that 7 out of the 10 most high-volume search terms sending traffic to Houzz are actually photos pages.

I am aware that widget links are not the only reason why Houzz are ranking for these terms but the whole thing is a little bizarre to me.

The three main things I don’t understand are:

1. They already retracted after being caught before. Why do it again?
2. Do they really not care about their users that they can’t put a no-follow on the widget?
3. They are Houzz. They’re still going to get a ton of search traffic anyway.

The last point is the main one for me. It’s not like they’re some newcomer to the online design space and need to implement these sneaky tactics in order to rank higher.

They’re worth billions of dollars and are expected to IPO next year. Let’s see if the Houzz SEO team are still subscribed to ViperChill. I’ll update this post if there are any changes.

Footer Links Still Work

We already know this from my report on the 16 companies dominating Google in regards to owning a powerful network, but there’s sadly more to the story than that. Big media publishers are not the only ones who get away with putting footer links wherever they can.

In 2013 I wrote an article about how to get a link from SoundCloud.com. The answer today is still the same as it was back then: Give them some software to publicly use on their site and put a footer link back to your website.

Salesforce’s Desk.com continue to do exactly that.

Here’s the footer for SoundCloud (http://help.soundcloud.com)

Here’s the footer for JWPlayer (http://support.jwplayer.com)

Here’s the footer for Wunderlist (http://support.wunderlist.com)

The list goes on. There are over 1,000 unique websites sending links back to Desk.com with this exact anchor text.

Of course, we don’t have to guess who’s ranking first in Google.

Note: I removed the ads for a “cleaner” screenshot

This adds further weight to my theory is that as long as you have enough backlinks, you can ignore most of the Google guidelines and still be totally fine.

Marie Haynes has a great article about what is and isn’t “allowed” when it comes to footer links but this tactic certainly toes a very fine line.

Past Link Building Still Holds Strong Today

Even if you aren’t active on online dating sites, you’ve likely heard of Match.com, Tinder and OKCupid.

But what about Mingle2?

It claims 12 million users and is second in Google for ‘Free Online Dating’ yet you’ve probably never heard about it in any form of media.

In fact, you’re more likely to have heard about The Oatmeal.

That’s not a random connection. Matthew Inman started his internet career at SEO company Moz (named SEOmoz at the time) then went on to build the dating site in just 66 hours. His massive success in promoting the platform with viral content and quizzes would later see him sell Mingle2 to Just Say Hi. You probably know he continued to use his amazing talent for creating viral content at The Oatmeal.

For those who aren’t reading a line of text in this post, allow me to put that in graphic form for you:

Within a few short months of Matt creating Mingle2 it quickly rose to the top of Google for some very popular search terms. Today, 10 years later, the creative links he built are no doubt helping to sustain those rankings.

I don’t want to give too much analysis on this result because I actually think it’s one to watch for how creative Matt was in getting backlinks.

In fact I think if you have some spare time today you should go and analyse their backlinks in more detail. Matthew perfected the art of getting people to want to talk about his content.

As far as link building goes, let’s just say that what they were doing back then would definitely result in a brand being outed today. Those broken guidelines allow Mingle2 to keep their amazing search traffic.

11.7M Reasons Writing Good Content Still Works

For a few years now I’ve considered Steve Kamb (of Nerd Fitness fame) a good friend of mine. That may have something to do with how many Jaegermeister shots we drank together in Cape Town.

I knew Steve was receiving a lot of traffic from Google for his guide to the Paleo diet so I reached out to him to see if he would share any specifics. Especially since the blog post received links from over 800 domains.

Here’s what Steve said,

I wrote the article in Sep 2010 it looks like. In March 0f 2012, Google started to love us all of a sudden sending 76k views. April reached 100,000+ and then it slowly climbed up to a peak in June of 2014 where it was viewed 555,000 times.

Then Google must have changed something and it dropped all the way down over next 6 months to 100k-ish in Dec 2014, where we’ve kind of stabilized over the past 18 months. The pageview count for May 2016 was 87,000.

Steve kindly shared the following graph as proof.

You can click on the picture to view it larger

Even though the article is six years old and has dropped down a few places in Google search results, it still picks up links to this day. Getting real, “earned” links to quality content is far from a dead opportunity.

There are four core reasons I believe Steve’s article still regularly attracts links:

• Reason #1: He already ranks highly in Google for the term so when people want to link to a guide about the Paleo diet, they see what is ranking and link out
• Reason #2: Steve wrote one of the best articles on the topic. People simply wouldn’t be linking to it naturally if it wasn’t an incredible resource
• Reason #3: The article is linked to in the sidebar of every page of his website thus sending it more pageviews than it would have otherwise received (especially since it was written so long ago)
• Reason #4: He has built a loyal audience of people who genuinely love his content and want to support him in any way they can. It makes sense to them that when they write about the topic, they link to Steve.

As you can see, I believe that earning links to your content is far more than just “writing something worth linking to”. It helps if you’ve already built a trusted audience – or you’re willing to work to build one – who would love for more people to hear about your work.

You Can Buy Your Way Onto Forbes or the Huffington Post

I get pitched a lot of SEO services via ViperChill and I also actively seek them out myself. It’s always good to know what others are doing since SEO is pretty much my life (as sad as that may sound).

I regularly receive emails like the one below, revealing specific websites which I can purchase links from.


Click the image to view larger

While the sites in the screenshot above are relatively “small time”, they’re often very safe to use as they have a harder chance of being detected (they’re not going to appear on the first page of an Ahrefs backlink report, for example).

It’s not just small unknown websites that you can buy your way onto though. I personally know of three different companies who offer the chance to get you on the likes of the Huffington Post for a modest fee.


Click the image to view larger

Once you spend a bit of time reading the various sites you can easily see which websites are selling links and which authors are the most commonly writing them.

For instance, this article and this article on Business Insider seem to be clearly paid for. There are many others posted by the same author but there are no mentions of the content being sponsored. The author seems overly intent to give credit back to the person he’s writing about (my emails to him did not receive a response so I can’t say for certain).

I will not link to it but another recent article on Business Insider was heavily promoting a webinar that the featured marketer publicly admitted paying for. The article literally linked straight to his webinars where he was selling a coaching program so the traffic must have made him a few sales.

Easy-to-Obtain Links Can Dominate the Right Industries

By easy to obtain I literally mean links that anyone can go out and build for themselves right now with little to no wait time or approval process.

These sites generally allow you to just sign-up, create some content, and link away. You can see the types of links I’m talking about in the screenshot below.



While these types of links are barely better than no-followed comments on a Japanese cat blog, they can work in the right industries. Particularly industries that are new or would appeal to a certain demographic you never consider i.e. grandmothers who knit or guides on the world’s best rollercoasters.

Although it may seem like most popular searches are dominated by people who know a thing or two about SEO, it’s certainly not always the case. The site with the links above is relying on Google for almost all of their traffic.



While these certainly aren’t the types of links I recommend building for your own site – unless you need some quick diversity links – it goes to show that they can still work if you’re targeting the right niche.

Manual Link Hunting Gets Search Traffic

When you’re averaging 805 links per domain linking to you, there’s probably something a little fishy with your backlink profile. That’s certainly the case with this .info website (I highlighted it’s .info so you can see it’s the same site in both graphics).



If my yellow highlighter effect is doing its job then you should be impressed to see that they’re ranking for over 1 million keywords in search results.

And these are not just any old keywords either. Some of them are being searched for tens of thousands of times per month. You can see the same website displayed in the SEMRush graph below.



Without adding yet another screenshot to this already image-heavy article, just trust me when I say the quality of their backlinks leaves a lot to be desired.

That being said, I do have some respect for the owner in how much work they’ve done to build these links. They ‘abused’ a few opportunities but put the work in. The links come from sources like:

• Wikipedia external links
• Comments on news articles (via actual news websites) with relevant stories
• Opportunities likely found via links their competitors earned

It actually gave me a great idea for a niche to get involved in as well, so although the work for this blog post was immense, I’ve found a number of opportunities because of it.

Private Blog Networks Still Work Very Well

Being totally honest, I expected to find more link networks in my research than I did. Especially because I was monitoring the type of industries where this practice is likely to be more common.

Here is how an obvious network looks when you analyse their backlinks:



The example above is actually what I would call a “good” example. Meaning that they websites ranking and linking to each other are actually good sites and far more searcher-friendly than the typical blog network I am sure you can picture in your mind.

It simply provided a nice screenshot to illustrate my point into how these networks work.

Of course we’ve already learned that if you have thousands of links pointing to a number of websites you own, you can interlink them and dominate Google search results.

Update: Some commenters seem angry that I “only” found as many PBN’s as I did.

Two things to note: I found more than are in the chart above, I just didn’t rate them as being the biggest contributing factor in why a website ranks.

The number could also be lower because of people hiding their networks from Ahrefs. I may do a smaller version of this study again with something like Link Research Tools or Monitor Backlinks (I’ll have to check if they use their own network) which people are less likely to block.

You Can Get Dozens of .EDU Backlinks for $1,000

Ever since I started SEO at 16 years old and spent countless hours browsing the Web Workshop forums (no longer online) I’ve heard about the power of .edu (education / university) backlinks.

It makes sense that these links would pass a lot of authority because of the sites they’re coming from. They’re certainly not easy to attain naturally: ViperChill has over 100,000 links yet only 8 of them are from .edu sites.

I don’t even know how I received those 8, since the university of Calgary link to a blog post I wrote five years ago which no longer exists and Australia’s Newcastle University is somehow linking to me via pingbacks.

One tactic that I’ve found is becoming increasingly common in order to obtain .edu links is to offer a ‘scholarship’ on your website and receive dozens if not hundreds of .edu links to your site in return.

It’s certainly not new by any means. With a bit of sleuthing around you can see sites – clearly just offering a scholarship for a link – have been employing this for a number of years.



I’ve tried my best to be respectful to the site owner and not reveal their website but anyone who is using this tactic and thinks they’re doing so under the radar really has no idea what that phrase means.

As this is a behind the scenes report on what still works in 2016, I wanted to make it clear that this is still happening today and people are benefiting from it massively.



There will obviously be people who are pissed off I have “exposed” this tactic but to me there is nothing shadier then making students believe there’s a chance they could save money on their education yet they probably have no chance to do so at all.

Is there really anyone checking to see if a coupon website launched in 2016 is going to keep to their $3,000 promise?

Exactly.

While these guys are supposedly offering $3,000, I’ve found some offering as little as $1,000 and still picking up a large number of links.

The Future of Link Building

It would be wrong of me to write a huge report on link building without speculating on what the future of link building might entail. We all know that backlinks are a large part of why websites rank today, but will that still be the case tomorrow?

The SEO industry is fortunate to have enough bright minds that people tackle problems like this. My good friend Jon from PointBlankSEO wrote a great report to try and answer this very question.

In his conclusion, Jon makes an excellent point:

The real threat is more foundational than links. Justin Briggs explained it best in his response earlier. The aspect of ranking a page organically in Google’s results has slowly declined in value, both because of other SERP features & search ads. There’s still a ton of money to be made, but we should work like we’re living on borrowed time.

Today, natural organic search results are lower down in listings than ever before.

Mobile results are spaced further apart. “Map packs” in search results take up half of the screen on a desktop. Google’s one box tries to answer user queries straight from the results page.

I don’t see any major ranking competitor to links in the near future. The entire Google algorithm which provided better results than Altavista and Yahoo back in the day was built on links and 18 years later they’re still a key factor in why websites rank.

That being said, my main concern is where SEO will be in three to five years rather than what matters to rank. We’ll always figure out the last part. The first part is out of our control.

Teaser: There’s One Tactic That is Dominating Them All

Over the past 18 months I’ve found one link building tactic to be working incredibly well. It’s not brand new in the sense of “Wow, University’s give out links so easily” but in the sense of “here’s how to make all of these current options work even better.”

If I wrote about it, I would probably lose a large chunk of my audience, but that’s something I’m willing to do.

Next week I’m going to introduce PIN’s, a new way to conduct link building which could fit anywhere on the spectrum of whitehat to blackhat.

It’s a very risky topic to cover so for that reason I want to dedicate an entire article to it, rather than just add another section to this report which could be taken entirely out of context.

If you’re new to ViperChill, enter your email in the box below (or in the right sidebar) to make sure you don’t miss that update. I’ll send it out the minute it goes live.

Thank you so much, as always, for reading.

The post The State of Link Building 2016: What I Learned Manually Analysing 1,000 Search Results appeared first on ViperChill.

]]> http://www.viperchill.com/link-building-2016/feed/ 168 http://www.viperchill.com/google-control/ http://www.viperchill.com/google-control/#comments Mon, 06 Jun 2016 13:54:48 +0000 http://www.viperchill.com/?p=8831 In the Academy Award-nominated film Food Inc, filmmaker Robert Kenner reveals how the varied choice of items we see on the shelves of supermarkets is actually a false presumption. Instead, that seemingly endless variety is actually controlled by just a handful of companies. Today I’m going to reveal how the huge diversity we perceive in […]

The post How 16 Companies are Dominating the World’s Google Search Results appeared first on ViperChill.

]]> In the Academy Award-nominated film Food Inc, filmmaker Robert Kenner reveals how the varied choice of items we see on the shelves of supermarkets is actually a false presumption. Instead, that seemingly endless variety is actually controlled by just a handful of companies.

Today I’m going to reveal how the huge diversity we perceive in Google search results is once again a few large corporations controlling what we assume to be choice. More specifically I’ll reveal how just 16 core companies are dominating the most popular industries online and how that situation is going to get a whole lot worse.

To begin our journey down the rabbit hole together, I want to take you through a series of events which uncovered something I had never considered before about the industry in which I operate: Are the Google rankings I aim to get for myself and my clients actually controlled by just three hands full of companies?

Around two weeks ago I came across a post on Reddit about Hearst Media. I was unfamiliar with Hearst Media but very familiar with the brands they own such as Esquire, Elle and Cosmopolitan.

The Reddit outing, which was shared on a new account, claimed that Hearst were using their powerful brands to “game Google” and rank a new website of theirs very quickly, using slightly shady practices.

Being an inquisitive marketer I had to check it out for myself. The quick summary is that Hearst clearly were (and still are) using their authoritative brands to point links to their latest venture, BestProducts.com.

While I expected BestProducts.com to be receiving a lot of traffic from the brands linking to them – which also include Marie Claire and Woman’s Day – I didn’t expect Google to have taken such a huge liking to them. Especially when the site in question had zero reason prior to be ranking so well (it was owned previously then the domain dropped a few years ago).

To give an overview of what was happening for those who are skimming this article, the situation looks like this.



The arrows in this picture represent links.

There are far more brands involved in this network, but we’ll get to those in a second.

As I stated earlier, I was far more surprised by how Google reacted to this.

Launched in October, They Now Receive More than 600,000 Visitors from Google Per Month

Here’s the graph that kick started the countless days of research I did for this blog post.



As we can see, the estimated traffic to BestProducts has shot up dramatically in the last few months. SEMRush is showing similar numbers, as we’ll get to in a second. With 62% of their traffic estimated to be coming from Google, that’s at least 600,000 organic (free) website visitors for the month of April.

I expect the data for May will be significantly higher, but I have to wait until June 10th to see (that’s when SimilarWeb confirm they’ll update their reporting).

So Why Am I Surprised?

Tons of authoritative sites linking to you is obviously great for SEO.

But as anyone who has been involved in search engine optimisation for a period of time might wonder, surely getting so many sitewide links in a short timeframe should raise a bit of a red flag?

Even if the links in question are from some of the biggest media brands in the world.

Here’s a few examples.

Esquire.com (Product Reviews)



Elle.com (Beauty Reviews)



Cosmopolitan.com (Beauty Reviews)



MarieClaire.com (Reviews)



PopularMechanics.com (Product Reviews)



Now, I will say that 90% of me thinks there is absolutely nothing wrong with this. In fact, you’ll see the majority of this post is focused on why I’m surprised Google give the resulting website so much traffic.

Quite simply if I owned a lot of websites, I would be fine linking them together. If for nothing more than from a usability standpoint.

That being said, 10% of me is a little surprised that these link texts and locations are constantly changing. I think it’s a bit risky on their part.

As of publishing this post, Cosmopolitan use ‘Beauty Reviews’ as the anchor text of their footer to the site. Previously it was in a different placement and used the anchor text ‘Style Reviews’.



These are not static footer links that have been left alone (and not just on one site). They’re changing to different pages – and using different words – on a fairly frequent basis.

To me this takes the situation away from “they’re just linking to their own site” to “they’re doing a lot of tweaking to see which results in higher rankings.” You could argue they’re testing it for usability reasons, but you’ll see in a moment why I think they know a thing or two about SEO.

Before I get into that, I wanted to see if I could figure out when these links were added to their network.

Were they all thrown up at once and it took a while for them to have an impact, or was there some clear plan behind the links from Hearst Media’s various brands?

Here’s some of the data I managed to uncover on when each site first linked to BestProducts (I bolded those that linked on the same day).

• PopularMechanics.com – November 5th
• Esquire.com – November 5th
• Cosmopolitan.com – January 1st
• Seventeen.com – January 12th
• RedbookMag.com – February 23rd
• Elle.com – March 15th
• CountryLiving.com – March 18th
• WomansDay.com – April 5th
• MarieClaire.com – April 5th
• RoadandTrack.com – April 13th

For my own curiosity, I was glad I took the time to trawl through every screenshot on Archive.org to find these answers. It’s now obvious that the people working for Woman’s Day, Marie Claire, Popular Mechanics and Esquire had some conversion that went along the lines of, “Don’t forget, today’s the day we have to put those links to Best Products in the footer.”

As I said earlier, I don’t really care too much about what Hearst media are doing with their “link network” of magazine brands. I don’t see anything wrong with it and don’t think Google should either.

That being said, because I’ve done more research for this blog post than any other, I do want to add that they purchased the most successful SEO agency on the planet just a few years ago.



If you can’t read that because of my small post width (I’m working on a redesign), they paid $325 million for an agency that generated more than 60% of their revenues from SEO clients.

At the time of acquisition iCrossing were also the biggest search agency in the world based on revenue numbers. In other words, the staff at Hearst Media comprises of a large number of people who know a lot about SEO.

To me this explains the slow buildup of network links and the semi-frequent changing of URL’s and link text in their website footer.

I Have No Problem With What Hearst Are Doing. Google’s Reaction Is What Really Interests Me…

I’ve said it a few times but I’ll say it once more for anyone skimming the post: This is by no means an attack on Hearst Media. They own the websites so they’re welcome to do with them as they please. They also made BestProducts a rather attractive looking website.

Then again, I’m surprised at how well their strategy is working. I’m not naive – I know that authoritative links equal a good chance of increased search rankings – but I didn’t expect they would be outranking some of the biggest brands on the internet for search terms that can make them a lot of money.

From Zero to $583,000 in Free Search Traffic

We’ve already looked at the data from SimilarWeb, but the stats from SEMRush are interesting as well.



SEMRush pips BestProducts at ranking for over half a million dollar’s worth of search queries (if you were to buy them via Google Adwords) in a very short space of time.

Their Top Keywords According to SEMRush

Some of those incredible rankings they’ve achieved include:

• hairstyles: 11th (450,0000 searches per month)
• short hairstyles: 7th (301,000 searches per month)
• best wireless earbuds: 1st (22,200 searches per month)
• short haircuts: 9th (301,000 searches per month)
• best running shoes for women: 1st (18,100 searches per month)
• bluetooth speakers: 11th (165,000 searches per month)
• lighted makeup mirror: 1st (14,800 searches per month)
• best makeup brushes: 1st (14,800 searches per month)
• haircuts: 7th (165,000 searches per month)
• short haircuts for women: 6th (110,000 searches per month)

They’re still ranking for these terms, which is why I predict the SimilarWeb traffic graph will increase a lot when they update their data for May.

Their Top Keywords According to SimilarWeb

It’s interesting to see how different the data from SimilarWeb and SEMRush seems to be, but they’re at least right that BestProducts are ranking for what they state they’re ranking for.

• best dishwasher 2016
• best smartwatch 2016
• best gaming headset 2016
• best action camera 2016
• best bluetooth speaker 2016

Hey, I did tell you all just before new year that you should be writing 2016 everywhere on your site.

I could make this page infinitely scrollable if I show all of their rankings, so I’ll just share a couple to show they really do rank.



While they aren’t a top result for this one it does show that they’re likely still getting hundreds of clicks per day for just one search term.



It’s certainly not just with BestProducts that Hearst are having a lot of SEO success though. Just look at how their brand is doing as a whole…

Hearst Alone Absolutely Dominate Certain Sectors of Google Search Results



Worried about ranking top three? Why not just take all of the spots.

Sadly, Google Search Results Will Never Look Diverse Again

At least not to me.

You may think Hearst are some kind of exception and partly, you would be right. However, they’re certainly not alone.

Purch also own some of the biggest sites online.

They all already link to each other in the footer of every site, but it’s my understanding that they were all fairly big ‘brands’ on their own before being purchased. Just look at the traffic numbers for some of those sites:

• Toms Hardware – 51 million visitors per month
• Top Ten Reviews – 17.5 million visitors per month
• Live Science – 20.6 million visitors per month

I don’t have to go into their domain stats; you already know they have authority.

Purch and Hearst compete in many of the same industries and one of Purch’s sites – TopTenReviews – also ranks in my screenshot above for the dishwashers search query.

There’s no doubt they are watching the success of one of their bigger rivals and if they see that they can spin off new web properties into valuable entities, it must be very tempting to follow the same path.

Sadly, the more research I did for this post, the less and less varied Google search results appeared to be. Time after time I was able to trace back the top ranking websites to some of the biggest media companies in the world.

There are of course some I’m missing (especially outside of the English language) but these are the companies I found most often in search results across the board.


Click here to view a slightly larger image.

To show you I’m not being dramatic, let’s take a look at some actual search results I believe that these networks are dominating. They’re not just limited to one sector.

They’ve Taken Over Software



That’s a little bit of a long-tail example, so let’s look at something far more popular.



They’ve Taken Over Food


Image results were manually removed from this screenshot for clarity

And another…


For this screenshot I removed some Google images so I could fit in the search results

They’ve Taken Over Technology



I’m starting to feel like I was one of the only people who didn’t know about these brands.



They’ve definitely got a big hold on the technology industry.



They’ve Taken Over Gaming


Note: One Youtube result was removed from this graphic so I could fit in the screenshot

They’ve Taken Over Health



They’ve Taken Over Automotive



They’ve Taken Over Beauty



They Buy Out the Competition



They (More than Likely) Share Keyword Data Across Their Network

I can’t blame them for doing this, but it’s certainly interesting to see.



It’s not only the big broad keywords that send a lot of traffic they can share either. If you have similar brands, you should definitely be taking advantage of the long tail.



Why have one top search result when you can have two (or many more)?

These Companies Get $20,000 in Links Just for Buying a Domain Name

When Google search results are so reliant on one thing then we’re all a little bit at the mercy of whoever has the most money to throw at the problem.

Whenever these big brands start a new website the tech and news blogs share it with the world, and that means link acquisition.

Hearst’s Best Product Got Incredible Links On the Day of Launch

Here is Racked.com, ironically owned by another of the sixteen, talking about their new brand.



As Did Time’s New Breakfast Site

Even if you’re just writing about the first meal of the day, it’s notable to those in the tech space.



As Did IAC’s New Health Site

There are few better links to get about a new brand than a mention from TechCrunch.



It’s Clear That Domain Authority is More Important Than Ever

If you didn’t “catch” on to this after seeing how well BestProducts are ranking then let me make it clear: There are almost no backlinks from other sites pointing to the top ranking pages of BestProducts.com.

They do have some internal links – mostly from the footer of PopularMechanics articles – but very few. However, they have a ton of strong links pointing to their homepage and category pages, which is spreading the ‘link juice’ around their entire website.

This is inline with what Brian Dean reported when he analysed 1,000,000 Google search results:



As he says, “In other words, the domain that your page lives on is more important than the page itself.”

Overall, it makes sense that domain authority plays a big role in overall site rankings (it’s not easy to get internal links) but I’m surprised to see it being so important.

How IAC’s About.com Used Their Authority to Catapult a New Site to the Top of Google

When TechCrunch covered the launch of About.com’s new standalone health website, Very Well, they had this to say regarding their SEO,

One of the greater challenges for About.com will be SEO. The company current has pretty good juice when it comes to Google searches, and launching on a new domain with a new brand could prove difficult to migrate.

The other interesting thing they quoted, which a lot of other news sites picked up on, was that,

Verywell will launch with more than 50,000 pieces of content ranging from common medical conditions like diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis to simple health tips like how to get more sleep or advice on fitness.

That’s a lot of content for a brand new site.

50,000 Pages of Content Did Nothing for Their SEO.

From what I can tell, Very Well seemed to come online around February of this year. The first mentions or evidence of the site didn’t appear until April, but some of their older content has February 2016 as the publish date.

Now the day they launched the site – whatever that really means – was April 26th, 2016. That means they added 50,000 pieces of content to a dropped domain in the space of two months.

During these two months not a single website analytics tool (such as SimilarWeb, Alexa or Compete) detected any traffic going to VeryWell.com

Luckily, About.com Has Some SEO Authority to Throw Around

As TechCrunch noted, About.com are one of the most SEO-authoritative brands in the world. It seems like no matter what you search for, they’ll be there ranking on the first page of Google.

It’s interesting then that About.com decided to risk that authority by pointing their health-related sub-domains straight to Verywell.com, as shown below.



This is just a sample of those I found. There are many more.

To be clear, these sub-domains used to have sites on them. They’re not just randomly redirecting. They were previously used by About.com.

WIth a wave of links from About.com and the media web talking about IAC’s new web brand, VeryWell started to get noticed on website analysis tools. Most notably by Ahrefs.



That’s a lot of links in a short period of time. Surely it must be setting off a few red flags like they did for Best Products.com? Heh.

“How’s That New Site Ranking, IAC?” Very Well!

If you want to know how this new brand is doing in Google, take a look for yourself.



That’s a recording of 3.6 million visitors to the site with 56% of that reportedly from free search engine traffic.

IAC must be pleased with that. So much so in fact that I think this situation is only the tip of the iceberg.

This Domination of Google Results Is Going to Get Much Worse

Over the last two weeks of dedicating day and night to this topic I found a lot of similarities in these mega brands.

Many started offline in publishing and brought those titles online while many purchased their own competitors and ran different brands like they were separate entities. For instance, IAC purchased About.com while AOL (now owned by Verizon) purchased Patch, TechCrunch and The Huffington Post.

However, the most common thing I’ve found in my research is that they all plan to spread the authority of their online presence.

IAC’s About.com Will Disperse into Many More Verticals

Speaking with TechCrunch, their CEO Neil Vogel states, “What we learned in rebuilding what we were is that we don’t want to be that anymore. About was built during a different time in the internet, where scale translated to trust. But the internet has changed. No one wants advice on their 401k from the same people that give advice on how to bake a pie.”

As TechCrunch also note;

Learning that, About has shifted its focus to building out verticals around its troves of topic-specific content, with Verywell being the first.

After seeing the quick SEO success of Very Well, I’m sure they’ll be bringing that plan forward.

Time Have Already Spun-Off into Two Verticals

Back in September of 2015, Time Inc’s ‘The Foundry’ (sort of like their internal incubator) launched a car news website called The Drive. Time recently revealed the site is now receiving more than 2 million unique visitors per month.

More recently, Time launched a website called Extra Crispy. Oddly enough it’s a website dedicated to breakfast, but if you saw the screenshots above then you’ll know they’ve received a TON of links back to this site, simply because it was created by Time.

Two of the 16 Are Teaming Up

Just last month, two of the sixteen brands I’ve highlighted today actually acquired a new company together named Complex Media.



The video-focused company claim to reach more than 50 million unique visitors per month.

With Verizon purchasing AOL last year for $4.4B, I wouldn’t be overly surprised to see them make a few more content-focused acquisitions. *Cough* Verizon will buy Hearst *cough*

Hearst Built BestProducts.com in Just Six Weeks

I’m not even talking about how long it took to get the content on the website. I’m talking about sitting in a meeting one day and having the idea for the site to actually having it online and getting links from some of the most powerful domains in the world.

Digiday reports that Hearst can move fast. “We’re now at place where we can spin up properties incredibly quickly,” Young said. “This went from idea to launch in six weeks.”

Young also commented that, “We have a strong new platform. Now we can start applying that to new opportunities.”

Which to me can only mean that more BestProducts-like websites are on their way.

A Depressing Summary, but Not a Negative One

Though this post may seem like a bit of a “it’s us against them” fight, that really wasn’t my aim.

The more research I did for this article and the more I realised certain brands were owned by the same company, the more I felt like I was watching Food Inc, the documentary that revealed the thousands of brands you see on supermarket shelves are really owned by just a handful of companies.


Side note: If anyone has the skills to make a similar graphic with the brands I covered here I would include it

It’s not too dissimilar from what I’ve shared today. Thanks to Jason and Mary for putting this graphic together.


Click here to view larger

As I’ve always said, I write articles that I personally think would be interesting to read. In 11 years of immersing myself in the online marketing industry I’ve never seen anyone talk about the huge dominance that certain players have on search results. So, as the research was interesting to me, I decided to share it.

Let’s take an ideal worldview for a second. If Google’s ideals are to be believed, results from queries in their search engine should produce results that searchers want to find.

For that reason, I’m sure teenage American girls searching for advice on colours of eye-liner aren’t thinking “Ugh, really Google? Beauty tips from Vogue again?”

Similarly, when I’m searching for tech product reviews, I’m actually happy results from The Verge appear over some site I don’t have much faith in. I trust The Verge, and I’m more likely to click on their results than from anyone else.

From an objective standpoint, the Google results are good, if not great. They provide what the searcher, and I, are looking for.

But I’m a marketer. If you’re still reading this article, I can assume with 99% certainty that you’re one too.

As a marketer I learned how little Google care if a new site gets hundreds of thousands of links very quickly.

I came away with even more belief in the importance of having a strong domain (read: a domain that has a lot of backlinks) if you want internal pages to rank.

I also became a little fearful that these brands are going to spread into even more verticals, taking their already huge financial war chests and filling in all of the blank Google results they don’t yet own.

If we want to debate whether it’s fair or not or whether Google should make changes, a court of law in the US has twice protected their search results under the First Amendment. Meaning it is totally up to them to list and rank websites wherever they wish.

The first time they won a battle on their rankings, a company called CoastNews were suing them for $5M because they ranked at the top of Yahoo and Bing but were nowhere to be found on Google.

At the end of the day, Google is a business that aims to make their shareholders money and if we as webmasters are looking to rank higher in Google, it’s usually because we want to make more money as well. I can’t feel it’s unfair and want to profit from it at the same time. After all, I do have several niche agencies which profit from ranking other people highly in Google.

I can complain – it’s a shame Google can’t detect some of what is going on here – but it’s not going to change anything about how I run my business.

All in all, I simply hope you found my findings as interesting in one go as I did while discovering them on the way.

You Can Still Fight Back

Next week I’ll be going live with a report on the state of link building in 2016 so if you want strategies on how to get links to make your sites rank, make sure you enter your email in the box below (or in the right sidebar) to make sure you don’t miss it.

Thank you so much for reading.

The post How 16 Companies are Dominating the World’s Google Search Results appeared first on ViperChill.

]]> http://www.viperchill.com/google-control/feed/ 358 http://www.viperchill.com/billion-dollar-clone/ http://www.viperchill.com/billion-dollar-clone/#comments Wed, 27 Jan 2016 16:42:13 +0000 http://www.viperchill.com/?p=8360 On the 15th of January 2008 the domain name Groupon.com went live for the first time. 2008 was also the year that IndieGogo became one of the first ‘crowdfunding’ websites. A year later, the biggest rivals of each would launch in the form of Living Social and Kickstarter. At the start of 2012 Uber – […]

The post How to Steal the Next Billion Dollar Website Idea: A Case Study appeared first on ViperChill.

]]> On the 15th of January 2008 the domain name Groupon.com went live for the first time. 2008 was also the year that IndieGogo became one of the first ‘crowdfunding’ websites. A year later, the biggest rivals of each would launch in the form of Living Social and Kickstarter.

At the start of 2012 Uber – previously known as Ubercab – started to expand internationally. Just a few months later, Logan Green would launch ride sharing competitor Lyft, which rode on the back of Uber’s success to a $4bn valuation. It’s no coincidence that success stories in new industries often come in pairs. In today’s report I look at how you can capitalise on a trend which could see you at the helm of the webs hottest startups.

At the heart of if this trend is the pivot, a technique ViperChill readers have used to make as much as $100,000 in a single week. Before we continue, I want to peak the interest of 66.1% of ViperChill readers and say this: If you’re reading this and you’re based outside of the US, your potential success with this method just went up tenfold. You don’t have to thank me later; some equity will do just fine.


24 Million Reasons to Pivot from the Best Startup Ideas

In 2010, Singaporean Karl Chong was visiting New York and noticed the rising popularity of group buying websites across the U.S. He saw such potential to bring this concept to his home country that he quit his investment banking job in America and convinced his brother Chris to join him in moving back to Singapore to start a new online venture.

It wasn’t long before the brothers launched their own daily deals site, Beeconomic (Be-Economic). It followed the exact same daily deals model you’re likely well aware of today. In December of 2010 – less than a year after the site launched – it was purchased by Groupon for $24m. The site was then rebranded to Groupon Singapore which Karl and Chris still work on today.



When asked about their success, Karl says, “We gained a first mover advantage being the first to start up in Singapore, allowing us to build relationships with premium businesses. Locals enjoyed our “sweet deals” and our subscriber base grew at hundreds per a day, thanks to our $5 referral program.”

Beeconomic wasn’t the only deals site that Groupon ended up purchasing on their whirlwind buying spree. Other entrepreneurs from around the world thought they could apply the same concept to their own countries as well.

Looking to show impressive growth before their IPO, Groupon picked up a number of other country-specific rivals such as:

• SoSasta, a daily deals site for India
• Citydeal.de, a daily deals site for Germany
• ClanDescuento, a daily deals site for Chile
• Darberry, the leader in daily deals for Russia (which later became Groupon Russia)
• Disdus, an Indonesian daily deals site
• Crowdmass, a group buying site in Australia
• Beeconomic which of course later became Groupon Singapore

6 months after the purchase of Beeconomic, Groupon went on to purchase Melbourne-based group buying site Crowdmass. The acquisition was not primarily based on their user base or revenue, but focused on sourcing more good employees to add to the 100-strong Australia team they already had.

I’ll cover a little later why this kind of purchase not only makes sense for the company doing the acquiring, but makes a lot of sense for you as a potential startup founder as well.

The $3bn Website Clone Factory Which Hires 30,000 People

The original title for this post was ‘How to Pivot Off Multi-Million Dollar Website Ideas’ and was based on weeks of my own research collecting data into the various companies that have successfully pivoted off ideas which had sent investors wild.

I literally changed the title in the last few hours after a restaurant conversation with Diggy where he said, “Today I was reading about this company who just clone other businesses and they’re making a ton of cash doing it.” I replied, “Dude, that’s exactly what my entire next article is about. Send me the link.”

The article he sent me was entitled, “What It’s Like to Work at a Startup Clone Factory“. It covered the story of Rocket Internet, a brand now worth billions of dollars majorly thanks to their shameless cloning of popular U.S startups and bringing them to other countries around the world.

Although I only read the story yesterday – it was released less than 48 hours ago – the name of the company sounded awfully familiar. I don’t know how I remember this, but when I wrote SEO and the Stock Market back in September of 2014, I covered a company called Zalando. I had focused on the German version of their operations but noticed “they’re also running a .co.uk version and even a .pl version of their site.”

Wikipedia best describes Zalando as being ‘inspired by US online retailer Zappos.com’ and as you’ve probably guessed, is a creation of Rocket Internet. They had taken the Zappos concept to Germany, the UK and Poland while building a brand that is now worth more than a billion dollars on its own.

Zappos is not the only website they’ve been inspired by as you can see in the picture below.


Credit: TheHustle.co, though I can’t seem to replicate this image

I’m very open when my post ideas come from other sources but in this case the timing is purely coincidental. It’s really weird to read a detailed report on something just as I was about to talk about it.

It turns out that everything I cover in this post – the concept of pivoting off successful startup ideas – is exactly what Rocket Internet do. They take popular US-based startup ideas, build clones of them for other countries and throw money at them until they succeed.

In the article Diggy was referring to over last night’s Khao Pad Gai, an ex-employee reveals how they fine-tuned their process in deciding which startups to clone, “We tried cloning Airbnb, but it didn’t work because it’s so brand and community focused. Even though we had a staff of 400 in 15 offices within two months, it didn’t work. Eventually we realized the best companies to clone were e-commerce businesses.”

On how intense they were about copying the specifics of big websites, nothing was left to chance, “We’d copy a website exactly. Ollie would even hire a guy with a PhD to study the sites we were cloning. He’d send us a weekly digest on the company we were cloning. We’d get everything in that digest. If Amazon slightly changed their cart image or moved it just two pixels to the left we’d know and copy it. During our weekly calls we’d talk about how to replicate the site exactly.”

If I continue with this section I feel like I would be cloning the original article (terrible joke, I know) so please do go and give it a read if you’re interested in learning more.

Now let’s continue with what I was originally going to share…

You Too Could Have Been Part of Expedia’s $3.9bn Acquisition of HomeAway

It’s not just in the daily deals space where we can reveal savvy entrepreneurs pivoting popular ideas from overseas into success on their own home turf. HomeAway – which was acquired by leading travel-planning company Expedia for almost four billion dollars just a few months ago – grew rapidly because it acquired much smaller, similar operations around the world.

In fact, they acquired so many smaller startups on their rise to industry leader that I’m just going to share their domain names with you. Take a look at this buying spree…

• Cyberrentals.com
• Greatrentals.com
• Holiday-rentals.co.uk
• A1vacations.com
• Triphomes.com
• Fewo-direkt.de
• VRBO.com
• Vacationrentals.com
• Ownersdirect.co.uk
• Escapehomes.com
• Homelidays.com
• BedandBreakfast.com
• Escapia.com
• Realholidays.com.au
• AlugueTemporada.com.br
• Secondporch.com
• Travelmob.com
• Stayz.com
• Gladtohaveyou.com
• Dwellable.com

They snapped up some of the biggest brands in Australia, the UK, Canada and Brazil who were all essentially offering the same thing.

Buying outside of their local area is something that’s clearly enticing to big US startups with a lot of money to spend. There are four key reasons why this acquisition strategy works so well for them:

There’s a team on the ground. They don’t have to go and register a new company, find managers and staff and train them on the entire concept of their new business. There’s a team already in place who understand the industry and its potential.

They have established partners. Whether that’s in the form of local shops offering deals or homeowners looking to rent out their homes, it saves time and money if you already have other people working with a company.

There’s an existing user base. Customer acquisition can be expensive. If you already have some users and an established brand in your local country that saves a lot of time.

Growth figures impress investors: Companies flush with cash are expected to start showing signs of growth, especially if they’re going to seek further funding rounds in the future. Acquisitions can be one way to speed up this growth and excite new investors with their potential.

After raising $250m in a single venture round in 2008, HomeAway CEO Brian Sharples told Inc.com, “There are going to be some great opportunities [for acquisitions] the next couple of years.”

He wasn’t kidding.

AirBnb, a HomeAway Rival, Also Grew via Country-Specific Acquisitions

Airbnb, the popular place for homeowners to rent out their homes, didn’t get caught up in as much of a buying frenzy as the last two examples, they certainly used acquisitions to help cement their place as a leader in their field. Some of their purchases include:

• Accoleo, a marketplace for students to rent out their flats in Germany
• Crashpadder, a peer to peer accommodation site that grew to dominance in the UK
• Vamo, an event discover platform that allowed you to book accommodation in multiple cities

Even Amazon, the online shopping powerhouse acquired the UK’s BookDepository.co.uk and Australia’s Abebooks.com to help speed up their international growth.

jCrush, The Jewish Dating App You Only Now Want to Know About

If you think this concept of ‘stealing’ popular ideas is just to create a company that could get acquired then think again. Huge opportunities to create a profitable business – whether you aim to sell it or not – arise any time there’s a new market sector opening up.

In 2012 location-based dating app Tinder was launched to the world and just two years later the company would announce they were now registering one billion ‘swipes’ per day. The success of Tinder, which was later acquired by the owners of Match.com, inspired a number of entrepreneurs to create their own spin-off with interesting angles.

Something you may not know is that the location-based dating app for gay men, Grindr, was launched three years before Tinder.

In the same year as the launch of Tinder, Dattch – now known as HER – was released to target the lesbian and queer (their own description) market. Though it took a while for them to gain traction they secured $1m in funding in 2015 to grow their brand.



They’re certainly not the only company to try and capitalise on the lesbian angle either, Findhrr and Scissr have to be two of the smarter names trying to get a piece of the taco pie.

It’s not only the niche that opportunistic entrepreneurs are targeting either; many have created their own twist from the general model we’re more accustomed to with Tinder. You’ve got:

• LinkedUp, a career-orientated dating app that uses your LinkedIn account instead of Facebook (like Tinder)
• jCrush, a dating app for Jewish people.
• TatChat, a dating app that helps people connect with fellow tattoo enthusiasts
• Collide, a dating app for Christians
• Hinge, where You can only match with friends of your (Facebook) friends
• Bumble, where only girls can send the first message

If anyone creates Marketr I want unlimited Super likes (why didn’t they call it Super swipes?) please.

The key of course is not only to be one of the first to notice a new trend and capitalise on it within a smaller niche, but to get people talking about you as well. I didn’t find the above examples by trawling through the App Store. I found them because they managed to get other websites talking about them.

$500M Says There’s More to Uber’s Competition Than Just Lyft

At the start of December 2015 Uber’s valuation reached a sky-high figure of $62.5 billion. The success of the ride-hailing app has meant that rivals across the globe have also been able to raise hundreds of millions of dollars in an effort to become the ‘Uber’ of their own country.

To name just a few examples, overseas rivals include:

• Ola, the Uber for India
• Yidago Yongche, the Uber for China
• Easy Taxi, the Uber for Brazil
• Go Jek, the Uber of Indonesia

These companies are raising some serious cash. Just three months ago Ola raised $500m to help them dominate the taxi space in India. They actually started before Uber and Lyft but aimed to work with current private companies rather than creating a separate entity with their own drivers.

Easy Taxi was much later to the game – starting in Brazil in 2011 – and has since received more than $77m in backing. They currently have 400,000 taxi drivers connected to their service.

The story behind Go-Jek is perhaps even more interesting. The business had been growing very slowly and was only a part-time distraction for founder Nadiem Makarim.

Then, as late as the middle of 2014, investors started asking him about the opportunity to invest in his business thanks to the popularity of Uber and similar services around the globe. That’s when he started working on Go-Jek full-time and the rest, as they say, is history.

ViperChill Readers Have ALREADY Pivoted to $100,000+ Success. Here are 5 More Opportunities

My blog post back in February of 2014 about the success of Viral Nova was one of the most popular ever on this site. Just one week after that post went live I highlighted the success of a ViperChill reader who had made $100,000 in one week by copying the model and taking advantage of Facebook’s traffic.

Five months later I shared three more success stories from readers who were changing their lives by creating their own version of the popular site with different angles (and focusing on different locations).

It’s not even something that was only successful in 2014. Just a few weeks ago I received an email from someone in Russia who is still having huge success with the model.



I check on his Facebook page now and then and I can tell you it’s as active as ever.

I have built one of the biggest brands in my industry by mimicking a lot of the Viral Nova model so I owe it to Scott de Long for being so open about his success. I’ve never thought about cloning a much bigger idea though, have you? Maybe it’s time we start.

Here are a few startups which could possibly make a great base to build off of for your own successful pivot.

FiveStars

On the back of a recent $50M investment, FiveStars has a concept that isn’t too far removed from Groupon but done in a way that Foursquare really should have taken advantage of. You download their app and it shows you businesses local to you that offer rewards and discounts for eating there.

The only problem? There aren’t many offers outside of the US to benefit from. Like most startups in America, they seem to be focused on the likes of Seattle and San Francisco before focusing on other areas.

Though already an established brand with 10,000 local businesses in the U.S. and Canada, they’ll no doubt be looking to buy up opportunities internationally to fuel their growth. Even if they aren’t, it’s a great concept that could potentially work in your home country if there isn’t a similar rival already.

Less common markets such as Germany, Brazil, Indonesia, New Zealand and Vietnam and a few that spring to mind.

Boxed (and a recent $100m investment)

Just this month Boxed received $100m for their Series C fundraising round which brings their total capital raised to $132.6m. Investors clearly think that this new concept – the idea of being able to buy bulk sized versions of your household favourites – is going to take off in a big way.



Keep in mind that Rocket Internet believe the best startups to clone are those in eCommerce.

Right now the concept is just taking off in the US but again, I can see this working in the UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand or let’s be honest, anywhere in the world really.

The offline version of these concepts in stores like Makro and Costco work incredibly well, so I would almost be surprised if it didn’t work online too.

GasBuddy

I mentioned in the introduction that if you’re outside of the US, the opportunities to have success with a spin-off tend to be much greater from what I can tell. The US is the world’s largest economy after all and with over 300 million people, you’re bound to have a lot of competition when it comes to startup ideas.

There’s no reason you can’t apply those ideas to your own country though.

One app that recently caught my eye is called GasBuddy. It allows users of the app to earn rewards by reporting the current price of petrol in their location. Then main use of the app is then to help you find the cheapest petrol near wherever you’re driving.

It’s such a neat little idea and something I could see working well in any country. The idea already has competition in the UK with ‘WhatGas’ and ‘Petrol Prices Pro’ as the leading apps but there didn’t seem to be options for other countries I checked.

OneRent (a smaller investment, but still with huge potential)

Just last week (January 21st 2016) OneRent raised $1m in seed capital to fulfill their aim of becoming a full-service rental management solution for landlords and tenants.



Where’s the opportunity? Well they clearly display on their homepage that they currently only service Seattle and the Bay Area before they focus on expansion.

From what I can tell the core services they offer include:

• Property marketing which essentially puts your listing on 40 other listings sites
• Tenant screening through background and credit checks
• OnDemand showings of rentals, 24 hours per day
• Lease creation
• Rent collection
• Property maintenance

I absolutely love this idea. If I owned a number of properties it sounds like a perfect solution. What a shame it’s only available in the Bay Area. Maybe someone reading this is in another major city like Amsterdam, Cape Town, Miami, London, Madrid, Oslo or anywhere else in the world with high property rental rates.

Let me go a step further and tell you the ten most popular Airbnb cities by number of listings. In other words, if you are based in any of these cities, there’s a huge opportunity for you with a similar model to OneRent.

• Paris (43,800 listings)
• New York (32,200 listings)
• London (24,100 listings)
• Rio de Janeiro (17,800 listings)
• Barcelona (14,900 listings)
• Rome (14,700 listings)
• Berlin (13,300 listings)
• Los Angeles (12,200 listings)
• Copenhagen (11,400 listings)
• Sydney (10,000 listings)

I haven’t researched other startups in this field enough to tell you this is a no-brainer, but the idea of someone taking care of rental showings 24 hours per day seems ingenious to me.

Flight Advisor

Not all of my ideas are going to just be based off spinning the location of an app or service. You can also take an entire concept and simply apply it to a different industry as well. You make up one third of my audience, America, so I made sure not to forget you here.

Hopper has raised over $21m to create an app that uses big data to predict and analyze when the best times are to book flights. The app can tell you whether it’s best to book your trip to Las Vegas now or wait three days, and even suggest that you should make sure you book the flight before a specific date.

While it obviously requires work and smarts to put this together, Hopper is consistently in the top 1000 apps on the entire app store in the United States, even though it launched a few years ago.

I could totally see spin-off versions of this working well.

What about a version that analyses hotel prices by monitoring the likes of Agoda to let you know when the best deals on rooms will be available.

Or how about a version for car rentals that looks at the prices of the likes of Hertz to help you get the best deal.

Think of anything that people like to shop around for and start exploring whether there’s a market for that.

6 Sources to Help You Find the Next Billion-Dollar Pivot

If pivoting off of the next billion dollar idea sounds like something you would like to try for yourself, here are some great sources of inspiration to make sure you’re first off the mark.

CrunchBase

First for a reason, Crunchbase is my absolute favourite resource when it comes to finding great niche ideas to capitalise on. It’s literally a dream come true for anyone looking to discover the hottest upcoming trends in any industry.

The reason Crunchbase is such a good tool is simple: It monitors startups that have received investments.

If a startup has received an investment it generally means they’ve came up with a new idea that is going to grow, and they’ve been able to convince someone else that the idea is solid enough for them to hand over their hard-earned wealth.

Just look at some of the investments from just this week that could give insights into future industries about to take off:

• PokitDok received $35.08M to make healthcare transactions more efficient
• Innovid received $15M to help advertisers create and measure video experiences on any device
• Shuttl raised 20M to help transport the people of India in air-conditioned minibuses which are odered via phone apps
• PepperTap received $51.2M for their India-based, grocery delivery service

There were many more investments around the world this week, but those four alone raised more than $100M with ideas that weren’t on anybody’s radar just a few short years ago.

TrendHunter

I’ll be totally honest and say that I generally enjoy this website for the browsing experience rather than getting too much out of it. I think the real value is probably found in their custom reports which are going to set you back hundreds or thousands of dollars. I’ve never purchased one, but I’m sure the custom PDF’s are a goldmine to some of their clients like Kellogg’s and others.

While it is more of a ‘fun’ way to get ideas, they definitely can jump out at you. Most of the competing apps I found for Tinder, such as jCrush, were found on TrendHunter.

/r/InternetisBeautiful

Before I give you the link to this page I’m going to preface it with a warning: You can easily lose hours of your time if you don’t stay focused on the task of finding great website ideas you can spin off location-wise or industry wise.

A Reddit sub-Reddit, Internet is Beautiful showcases interesting websites and ideas that people have found online. To get great content that isn’t too stale I recommend searching by the top submissions of the previous month. This link will do just that for you.

ProductHunt

I mentioned in my last article that I find myself hearing about Product Hunt more and more and in the last few weeks that hasn’t changed at all. I think this is going to be one of the biggest breakthrough websites for 2016 just like Pinterest was when that first started out.

The page you’ll probably get the most use out of is their ‘Tech Collections’ page. While this won’t update as often as their Tech page, you’ll find a lot more ideas in one spot.

If nothing else, Product Hunt can be a great way to send thousands of visitors to your new creation if you truly get involved in the community.

A Somewhat-Hidden Kickstarter Page

Though I rarely fund projects on Kickstarter – I move around too often to have a dedicated delivery address – I do find a lot of inspiration in the hot products that make their way onto the site.

It’s easy to find the most funded projects of all time, but they’re likely a little ‘dated’ and not something you can really take much advantage of.

What you may not know is that there’s another little page on Kickstarter that is far more relevant and interesting for those of you who may be looking for ideas that you too can ‘spin off’ into other ventures.

This page allows you to see active listings (meaning within 30 days of being published) that are already funded. Meaning these are hot topics that the userbase of Kickstarter are excited about right now. And because it’s live, you can check back in weeks or months to come and find yourself with more ideas to steal.

Be Open to Inspiration

If you can’t tell from my Inc ideas series, I’m constantly on the lookout for new ideas and inspiration to take my web projects (or even just my blog posts) to the next level. This open-minded curiosity is something I’ve honed over a period of time and definitely not something I think I was born with. Though I do warn that if you take it too far your mind is going to be constantly seeking them out; not just when you feel like it.

I’ve personally set-up a system – which I’ll likely talk about in my next blog post – where I browse a certain succession of websites for a 15-20 minute period each day. I’m not there to read their articles but just to skim what is going on to see if any ideas jump out at me.

As I’m obsessed with cars (and equally depressed at their prices in Asia) I find myself reading a number of car blogs on a semi-regular basis. One site I follow is called Car Advice, which focuses on the Australian car market.

The site was founded by Alborz Fallah and was expected to generate around $7m in revenue in 2015. That’s interesting in itself, but what I find more fascinating is that Alborz has just launched a new site called BoatAdvice.com.au.



As someone who was ahead of the trends when it came to launching a blog on car reviews and now knowing exactly how to deal with car manufacturers, I sense that Alborz is betting on this being a very profitable new venture.

If you’re interested in the world of boats and fishing, there could be a great opportunity for you to follow his lead here. Even more so if you live anywhere near a harbour or coastal area where you could actually take the latest boats out for a spin if given the opportunity.

I could totally see this working well in Miami or Cape Town or anywhere else it isn’t too surprising to hear your friends’ boss has their own boat.

Set aside 10-20 minutes each day just to casually ‘scan’ the web to see what is popular and you might find these opportunities catching your eye far more frequently.

Is This an Unethical Tactic?

There are no doubt some people who are going to think this is not the most ethical of ways to make money online. I know that when I read about Rocket Internet copying websites down to the exact pixel I didn’t feel very good about it (you should see their Pinterest clone) . I think you can pivot from profitable ideas without having to steal the exact design elements of the site you’re copying.

On one hand, I can see how it would be disheartening for someone with an original website or app idea to see it taking off in another country or with a slightly different twist before they had time to get around to it.

On the other hand, if you’re creating a great service for end users (they wouldn’t be making money if they weren’t) does it matter if someone brought Zappos or Pinterest or Amazon to Germany before the big guys could do it? I sure wish Amazon shipped more products to Asia and I wouldn’t be mad at the slightest about an exact clone if I could finally get fast shipping on the products I wanted.

If I had a third hand, I would ask if there were any original ideas anyway?

In his bestselling book, Steal Like an Artist, author Austin Kelon says, “Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.”

Zappos may be a pioneer of focusing on selling shoes with incredible customer service, but they’re neither pioneers of selling clothes online nor incredible customer service.

Pinterest may have taken an approach to tagging interesting content in a new way, but Del.icio.us and Evernote might have something to say if you believe their core concept of ‘scrapbooking’ of tagging content is original.

When the market leader in mens grooming, Gillette, felt competition from shaving clubs they just went and created their own.

This little niche alone has quite a few funny pivots along the way. I had fun highlighting them with a different coloured font.



As long as you aren’t trying to duplicate a website design or trying to infringe on the location or exact angle of the ‘original’ idea creator, then I really don’t have too much of an issue with the potential of cloning. After all, the competition makes the average person win in the end.

Ideas Are Worth Nothing at All

When doing research for this post I noticed a number of examples where people wanted to talk about their ideas for web projects but they’re often very scared that people will come along and steal them. They’re scared of even pitching their idea to investors in case they don’t hand over any funds and instead pass the idea on to other startups that they work with.

The truth is that all of these ideas you have or will have after reading this post are worth absolutely nothing if you don’t do anything with them.

It’s not about having the idea, it’s executing on the idea and putting it into action.

You can say I got lucky when my ‘Please Don’t Kill Feedburner’ site hit the homepage of Hacker News but was I lucky in buying the domain, setting up a theme, emailing three bloggers for pictures of their cats and then dreaming up hashtags for people to use when sharing the site?

I have no doubt that this post – or the concept it represents – is going to result in a few project ideas hitting your mind in the next few days and weeks as the content here sinks in.

And to further show you how few people actually take action, think about that Pomodoro With Me app I mocked up a few weeks ago. I received dozens of tweets and emails from people who said they were “working on it right now” and would send me a demo as soon as it was done.

Guess how many I’ve seen? 1.

And it was only half finished.

I don’t know where your moral compass lies on this entire concept, but I for one will continue seeing where I can take new startup ideas and apply them to my own projects. If you do the same, I would love to hear about your journey.

I’m here every step of the way if you need a hand.

The post How to Steal the Next Billion Dollar Website Idea: A Case Study appeared first on ViperChill.

]]> http://www.viperchill.com/billion-dollar-clone/feed/ 117 http://www.viperchill.com/traffic-side-project/ http://www.viperchill.com/traffic-side-project/#comments Wed, 13 Jan 2016 16:58:42 +0000 http://www.viperchill.com/?p=8285 I would argue that when it comes to making money online, the most important skill you need is not in being able to find untapped niches, knowing how to do A/B testing, creating attractive websites or even having a great ability to write. Instead, the most sought after skill in my eyes is being able […]

The post 6,595 Words on a Traffic Generation Tactic You’re Not Using (But Should Be) appeared first on ViperChill.

]]> I would argue that when it comes to making money online, the most important skill you need is not in being able to find untapped niches, knowing how to do A/B testing, creating attractive websites or even having a great ability to write. Instead, the most sought after skill in my eyes is being able to generate website traffic. To get eyeballs on whatever it is you have created.

After all, a lack of (targeted) traffic is often the reason why most online ventures fail. If you can’t get enough people to see what you’ve built then you’re never going to get any kind of financial return. Today I want to share a way to drive traffic to your website that doesn’t follow any of the traditional methods you may be accustomed to hearing about.

• It doesn’t rely on free search traffic from Google
• It doesn’t require paid advertising campaigns via Facebook or Adwords
• It doesn’t involve connecting with influencers
• It doesn’t have anything to do with email marketing

It is perhaps one of the most effective ways online to get people to your website yet it’s probably one of the most underutilised. So much so in fact that I can guess with 99% certainty that you aren’t currently using this to promote your core online business.


I won’t claim it’s some mind-blowing idea you’ve never heard of or considered before, but I hopefully want to present it to you in a new light that may convince you to give it a serious try. While success with this method is far from guaranteed, the potential upside is so large I think you would be doing yourself a disservice not to attempt it.

While there are no certainties it will work for you, this ‘tactic’ should really be focused on in terms of giving, without expecting anything in return. The reason it can work so well is because it doesn’t have any kind of negative connotations that you’re ‘marketing’ but instead providing a lot of value to a loosely defined target-audience.

If you’re struggling to get people to your blog, Saas offering, eCommerce store or other kind of website, it could just be the key ingredient you need to take your traffic and income to the next level.

Introducing what I’ll simply call, the Traffic Side Project.

The Traffic Side Project: A New Approach to Growing Your Core Online Business

The inspiration for this blog post came around three months ago when I read an article on Medium about ‘Side Project Marketing’. In the post, author Ali Mese makes a very compelling argument for online business owners to create side projects – often on new websites – that give great value to a particular industry and lightly promote your core venture.

Core meaning a site that you actually plan to make money from.

Although Ali shared a lot of examples in his post – a few of which will be covered here – I couldn’t help but think of far more in other industries that could give you inspiration for your own successful side project.

The key to creating a successful traffic side project is to provide value to a niche-focused target audience without asking for anything in return. This value can be in the form of insights, humour, practical advice or any other kind of angle which would make a general member of your industry online glad they stumbled across it.

While the bigger aim is to make more people aware of your services and offerings, you’re far more likely to succeed if you can put that as far back in your mind as possible. Your intentions for your ‘traffic side project’ will present themselves in the little details and it’s the end user who is supposed to benefit the most here.

To give an example that’s close to home I want to talk about a website I created a few years ago.

At the time, bloggers were reliant on RSS subscribers more than ever and many of them used Feedburner to track how many people subscribed to their feed.

I still have an RSS feed through Feedburner if that’s your preferred way of receiving content, but RSS feeds are largely ignored these days (even by tech-savvy web users) due to increasing usage of social media and the downfall of services like Google Reader.

After Google’s acquisition of Feedburner in 2007 they provided very little in the way of updates or support the following years. As Google started to kill a few other web projects, Feedburner users became increasingly worried that Feedburner could be next on the chopping block. It certainly didn’t invoke confidence when it would take weeks or even months to fix issues the service sometimes had.

With fuel added to the fire from likes of TechCrunch and CNN speculating on the services’ potential demise, it was a very scary time for a lot of bloggers.

We relied so heavily on our RSS feed readership to drive people back to our websites the concern wasn’t to dissimilar to how you would feel today if Facebook announced they were closing down fan pages. You would likely be losing a core portion of your audience and have no easy way to export them anywhere else.

On a whim, I decided to create a website to try and get Google’s attention and some answers about the future of the service. I creatively (heh) named the site, Please Don’t Kill Feedburner.

The site has turned into some kind of Japanese sex-advice blog so I won’t link to it, but here’s an idea of what it looked like:



Since the topic was getting a lot of press at the time, a lot of fellow bloggers supported the idea – though none knew I was behind it – and started using the example tweets I had created to spread the message. The site and the relevant hashtag, #pleasedontkillfeedburner, started to pick up a bit of steam.



I went to sleep that night happy the website was finished and hoping someone from Google would actually see it and prompt them to give us an update.

Unbeknownst to me someone had just submitted the site to Hacker News and a few hours later it would make its way onto their homepage. I woke up to see that thousands of people had landed on the website overnight.



While it’s not the millions of visitors people might associate with ‘going viral’ these days, I was quite proud of the result. Not only did the site reach 9,000 people in its first 24 hours but there are a few other notables:

• The site received between 300 and 500 backlinks (!) depending on which link checker you use
• The domain is was a PR 4 before I let it expire
• It was shared on social media over 1,400 times
• The entire website was built in less than one day

I never created the site to help grow ViperChill but it definitely could have been used to do so. I only took credit for the website a few years later as it wasn’t my aim to get anything other than Google’s attention. Then again, I did get to guest post about it on Moz which sent traffic back to ViperChill eventually, so (in part) you could call this a successful TSP.

One thing I could have done to promote ViperChill at the time and still have the site go viral would be to put a little link in the footer to take credit for the idea.

It’s certainly not unheard of for a credit link in a website to generate a financial return. Just ask Jessica Hische.

In 2011 she launched a simple flowchart website entitled, Should I Work for Free, which you can see below.



If you’re not a web designer yourself, show this to one and watch as their face lights up while reading through all of the scenarios. Their face will light up because this website covers something very personal to them in a fun way. Any designer has no doubt been asked at some point in their lives to create a free website for someone; whether it be a colleague, friend or family member.

According to Ali, after the website went viral among designers online, Jessica received more client inquiries than she was able to handle. The site doesn’t even link directly back to her design work but instead an online store where you can buy a print version of the flowchart.

If you look at the about page on the site she links to, her self-descriptive headline says all you need to know. “Jessica Hische is a letterer, illustrator, and crazy cat lady known for her silly side projects and occasional foul mouth.”

Maybe it’s time you helped your online business grow through ‘silly’ side projects? It’s certainly better than not growing at all.

Before I get into how you can do this for your own online ventures I want to give some more examples to not only show the power of a Traffic Side Project but hopefully get your creative juices flowing as well.

How Crew Reach 11 million Uniques Per Month With Their Unexpected TSP

WIth just three months of cash left before they went bust, Crew founder Mikael Cho needed something to help turn his company’s fortunes around. After a photo shoot for their website redesign they found themselves with a lot of extra pictures they didn’t need and decided to give them away for free on a website called Unsplash.

That simple decision became the best the struggling company has ever made. Unsplash is now frequented by up to 11 million visitors per month as they continue to follow a very simple concept: Every 10 days they give away 10 high-resolution photos absolutely free.



The photos are absolutely beautiful and perfect for designers around the world. On Unsplash you’ll notice a header link which says “Made by Crew” which redirects you back to their core service of matching people with the best designers and developers in the world.

In no uncertain terms, this traffic side project saved their business.

Once Crew saw the power of traffic side projects like this they created many more including:

• Moodboard: A tool for making boards about your mood that are easy to share
• App Cost: A way to calculate the likely cost of a mobile app you’re looking to develop
• Launch This Year: A 20,000+ strong community of people launching an online community this year
• App Vs. Website: An interactive tool helping you to decide which is right for your next project

These side projects have brought in over 100,000 email subscribers and make up three of the top five referring websites back to Crew.

How the Fastest Growing Search Engine Uses Traffic Side Projects

Over the past year search engine DuckDuckGo grew from 5.3 million search queries per day in January to over 9.3 million by the end of December. It’s no surprise then that Moz.com’s Rand Fishkin predicts it will be the fastest growing search engine of 2016. Based on those numbers, I would have to agree with him.

If I ask anyone who uses DuckDuckGo why they chose that search engine over Google, it’s unlikely their innovative search features are the first answer that comes to mind. Instead, the answer almost always has to do with privacy.

DuckDuckGo have done a great job at branding themselves as the search engine for private searching. They did this by not only creating one traffic side project (TSP), but a number of them. The most popular, DontTrack.us, is little more than 15 images on what other search engines do to track you as an individual (which DDG don’t).



This one-page website has been shared 46,817 times on Facebook and reached the homepage of Reddit without having a single social share button on the site.

Another traffic side project by DDG, known as DontBubble.us, has been shared on Facebook 24,643 times.

I came across both of these TSP’s naturally over the years, multiple times, and it really reinforced my belief in the service as one that truly cares about your privacy. Aligning with the ideals of an end user is a sure-fire way to increase visitor numbers which is shown in how fast they’re growing.

How a Digital Agency Created a TSP That Reaches 150,000 People Per Month

With my most recent post covering the Pomodoro Method, I thought it would be nice to show a potential side benefit for anyone who was willing to try and build the site I mocked-up in the article. (As a side note, there have been a few attempts submitted to be via Twitter and email, but I’m yet to see any finished projects I could actually use.)

Marinaratimer.com was created primarily for users of the Pomodoro Technique and features a typical 25-minute Pomodoro timer, a custom timer and also a kitchen timer. This simple but beautiful site has clear branding on it by an agency called 352. You can see this most clearly in the headline of their about page.



It’s likely that people using this method of being productive – which is a little more ‘nerdy’ than most – are going to be freelancers and more tech-savvy web users. That audience is not a million miles away from being the type of people who could be interested in the development services of an agency.

SimilarWeb reports that the site receives up to 200,000 visitors per month with 53% of their traffic coming back to the website directly. I can’t tell you how many of them have converted into clients, but I’m sure Marinara Timer has been a highly successful TSP for 352 Inc.

A Simple Traffic Side Project That Launched a $55,000/m Online Book Editing Service

In 2011 Natasa Lekic left her job as an editor of a book publisher in New York to seek out a new career. Two years and dozens of interviews later, she was still searching for something to do. After failing to get into other industries she decided to focus on what she knew and loved, which was book publishing.

She launched NY Book Editors as a way to give authors the chance to work with some of the best editors in the world that they would never normally get access to.

With just an $80 investment (spending $20 on Squarespace and $60 on an SEO class), she knew that she needed to get eyeballs on her new venture.

On a whim she created a map to curing writer’s block that she knew her target market would no doubt struggle with at one time or another.



This very simple infographic received over 54,000 notes on Tumblr and sent tens of thousands of people to her website thanks to the link back to it underneath the graphic and the branding on the top left corner.

Among other things, it helped launch NY Book Editors into the mind of wannabe authors and just three months later her business was already doing over $8,000 per month in revenue. By the middle of 2015 it had passed the $55,000 per month mark and is continuing to grow.

A TSP Set Monthly Traffic Records for this Video Start-Up

While Crew created Unsplash to give away photos, the founders of Veed.me decided to create a version for videos known as Coverr. If you’re a developer looking for videos for your clients websites or you have a video as the background on your own homepage, Coverr offers options to match any industry.

In the middle of 2015 SimilarWeb estimates that Coverr was reaching 150,000 unique visitors per month which no doubt sent a lot of traffic back to the Veed.me website it’s branded with.

Like Crew once again (do they use the same marketing company?), Veed.me created an interactive website to help you determine the cost of a video, not dissimilar to Crew’s interactive site to help you determine the price of a mobile app.

After you go through their 10 questions, you’re presented with an estimated cost of the video and a link back to their site where you can find the type of people who can create that video for you.



The site reached over 60,000 people in its first month of launch and once again sent traffic back to their money-making site. In fact, Veed.me’s best ever traffic month is the exact same month that their traffic side project, How Much to Make a Video, launched.

Take a look at the graphs below to see what I mean.



There’s no coincidence here. TSP’s really can help take your online business to new heights.

2 Million+ Visitors by Curating Free Tools

Since Ali was the inspiration for this post, I have to give him more credit by highlighting one of his own personal success stories. Back in January of 2015 he wrote a blog post covering some of the tools he uses to help with building and marketing an online business. This included the likes of free image editors, on-site seo analyzers and tools to help you generate content ideas.

In February he noticed the post was starting to go viral and by March he had received over 600,000 visitors to the guide. This prompted him to create a new Tumblr blog on a separate domain so it was easy for him to keep the list updated and (possibly) hide any type of self-branding which could hinder further sharing.



Since then it has become one of the most popular items on Product Hunt (with 1,600 votes at the time of writing this) and the site has received over 2 million visitors. I seem to be seeing Ali’s name a lot more often these days so it’s doing wonders for his personal brand.

He’s sold over 700 copies of a $129 digital product on how to get website traffic so there’s at least a $90,000 return, no doubt in part from his success here.

The thing I love the most about this example is that while it’s an incredibly useful resource, it really isn’t that difficult to put together. You could create something like this for all kinds of industries.

The Free Teardowns Keeping a UX Designer Booked Out Full-Time

Samuel Hulick is a UX designer from Portland, Oregon and also happens to be the brains behind what is one of the most popular usability sites for marketers, UserOnboard.

On the site Samuel literally tears down the onboarding process (the way apps and websites turn visitors into members) highlighting not only what they do well, but where they could improve their process as well.



It’s clear that Samuel has a great grasp on what it takes to get people interested in what you’re doing without having to go out and actively seek customers. Here’s the top tweet on his Twitter page which has been retweeted over 350 times, “The secret to successful customer acquisition is realizing that you don’t acquire customers — they acquire you.”

I reached out to Samuel on Twitter to see the reasoning behind starting the site:



Through the website he is able to sell his book, training programs and consulting services. The site currently reaches over 130,000 visitors per month in the USA (again, according to SimilarWeb) and is one example where what started as a traffic side project to sell his book is now actually a full-time gig.

How to Create a Traffic Side Project That Saves Your Business or Grows Your Bank Account

The more I’ve been thinking about this concept over the last few weeks, the more I’ve found ideas to be jumping out at me at random times. I’ve often found myself opening Evernote to add them to the list in order to make sure that I don’t forget them.

The aim with this section is to share some of those ideas and help you generate many more of your own.

First of all, I want to make it clear that I think your traffic side project should be niche-defined, but fairly loosely. This gives you the potential to reach enough people to share your project but still be relevant to enough people who could be interested in your main website. In other words, I would recommend focusing on reaching 100,000 people over a million, but also 100,000 over 10,000.

Narrowing your focus-reach means you’ll be more likely to create something that a particular audience would be interested in, rather than creating something generic that doesn’t quite hit the mark. Before creating a new tool as a side project, the team at Crew always ask themselves one question, “Does the tool solve a problem the kind of people we want to work with have?”

As I have mentioned a few times in this post, it’s imperative that you’re happy to create your traffic side project whether it actually sends traffic back to your website or not. There has to be some other motive to create it than potentially growing your core business.

• The team at Crew simply had left over photos available from a photo shoot and thought they would be useful to others.
• I just wanted Google to reveal their plans for the future of Feedburner
• Jessica Hische just wanted to create a fun chart because of all the requests she gets for doing free work
• Samuel Hulick studies onboarding all the time anyways so decided to openly share his thoughts

While there will of course be somewhere in the back of your mind hoping that your TSP takes off (I wanted my Feedburner site to spread so that someone at Google would notice it), there has to be something more than traffic that drives you to create it. You have to care about creating something useful, humorous, interesting or insightful for your target audience far more than the potential upside for yourself.

This mindset is going to give you a far greater chance of making something that can drive traffic your way.

Take Your Best Content to the Next Level

Although you may have a few ideas running around your head already for a traffic side project, it certainly doesn’t have to be based on an entirely new idea. In fact, it may be the case that you’ve produced popular content before which you could repurpose in another way.

For instance, some of the top blog posts on ViperChill have been:

• My guide to WordPress SEO
• My guide to link building
• My unmasking of Ramsay a.k.a Blog Tyrant
• My free video series Cloud Blueprint

Any of these could be repurposed onto a separate site and promoted again without having to come up with an entirely new idea. I would remove much more branding this time around so that they stand out on their own and then bring a small percentage of traffic back to ViperChill.

An example of content I could promote again is my free video series Cloud Blueprint. It’s a few years old now and seriously needs updating (that’s why I didn’t link to it here). The method I cover in the video series is still very solid so I could create a brand new website and share updated videos alongside social share buttons.



With a little push from my current audience I’m sure I could get an updated version out to thousands of people who hadn’t heard of the ViperChill brand before.

Maybe I should do just that.

Find Inspiration in the 1,000+ Vote Club on Product Hunt

I don’t know how they managed to get the word to spread so fast but it seems like I’ve been hearing about Product Hunt everywhere. I actually haven’t even found a good use for the site yet so I don’t even know how it’s taking off. Then again, I don’t use Pinterest and that has hundreds of millions of active users.

One interesting use of Product Hunt is to find the items on the site which have received over 1,000 upvotes (we still call them that outside of Reddit, right?). Since they’re enjoyed so much by the community it’s a great resource for you to find ideas to build for your specific industry. Some of the most interesting popular items include:

• DuetDisplay: An app that lets you use your iPad as a second display
• Noizio: Ambient background sounds for your Mac
• Code4Startup: Learn how to code by cloning real life startups
• Brick by Brick: A free guide to building awesome communities

That last item is none other than a Traffic Side Project in itself, with clear promotion for a community app called Telescope.



While it may look pretty, there is very little to the guide and I’m surprised it was actually so successful.

Improve Upon an Existing Idea

One tool I used a number of times while writing this blog post is called Link Tally which seems to be a side project of Hubspot, a marketing company that has received more than $100m in investment capital.

Link Tally ranks highly in Google for variations of search queries like “Find how many times a link has been shared” and that’s exactly how I found it. The only problem is that it doesn’t work anymore.



The only count that ever seems to work is how many Facebook shares something has received. I’m sure Hubspot could fix it but I doubt they really care (it has probably been broken for a while). I know I could have my programmer code up a solution in about 20 minutes if I asked him to then all I have to do is put it on another domain.

Maybe there has been a TSP in this post that you thought you could improve upon? If so, don’t hesitate to see what you can do. The original idea has already proved there was someone who wanted the solution you’re going to create.

Similarly, I said that the Brick by Brick guide to building awesome communities may discuss awesome communities, but the guide itself is far from awesome. All I can tell is that if you’re going to create a minisite like this where content is your main focus, make it pretty.

Make the content awesome and relevant to your niche and you’re onto a winner there as well.

Create a Blog (If You Don’t Already Have One)

Telling you to build a blog is about as 2010 and unsexy as it gets, but you can’t discredit the power of blogging. After all, you’re reading one right now and any link I share has the potential to be viewed thousands (if not tens of thousands) of times. That’s powerful.

Blogging, which can often be thought of as one of the slowest ways to generate traffic and get people to a website, can certainly be used as a traffic side project as well.

• Minneapolis based Top Rank Marketing get more clients than I’m sure they can handle thanks to their award winning marketing blog, Top Rank Blog.
• Moz.com wouldn’t be generating millions in monthly revenue without the success of their content marketing
• Tim Ferriss says that his popular Four Hour Workweek blog has sold far more copies of the book with the same name than the book has helped to bring in readers to his blog.
• Seth Godin has written over 6,000 posts for his Typepad blog which has no doubt helped to make 17 of his books bestsellers.
• Copywriter Demian Farnworth found his guest post on Copyblogger resulted in phone calls and email exchanges with HubSpot, KissMetrics and Treehouse all interested in his service. He says, “I routinely turned down work as a freelancer because the demand was so high“.

Although I’ve said many times that you shouldn’t follow my blogging schedule of posting a lot of content very infrequently, I would actually say it’s one of the best strategies to follow if you’re just starting out.

Don’t try and please all people with random articles here in there. Instead focus on writing truly epic guides for your industry.

If you’re building a real estate blog for example then don’t tell me how to make my home look better for selling (everyone does that) but instead show me all of the realtors having success promoting their listings on Instagram, and then teach me how to do the same.

Writing amazing, in-depth content takes a lot more work than writing two or three generic articles, but nobody remembers the generic articles so why even bother?

5 Specific Ideas from the Top of My Head

As I mentioned earlier, a lot of ideas have been whizzing around my head the last few weeks while thinking about this article. Most were for my own sites which hopefully gives credence to their being some great possibilities with this angle but there are a few I would like to share in the open.

You’ll notice these generally have a marketing / freelancer vibe to them as it’s the niche I tend to be involved in the most, but also so you could see how these ideas could work in one industry that you could then apply to your own.

A TSP for Marketing Bloggers: ‘What type of website should you build?’ Interactive Quiz

We’ve already looked at the “How much should my video cost” app.

We’ve seen the “Should I use an app or website?” app.

I also shared the “How much should my app cost” interactive site.

I know from my experience in the internet marketing world that people just getting started online would absolutely love a quiz that helps them determine whether they should start a blog, podcast, forum or other type of website based on their current skills and personal interests.



The design of AppvsWebsite, shown above, would be a great template to build upon.

Once you provide the answer then link back to your own site with a guide for that specific medium.

Of course, this wouldn’t just work well in the internet marketing world but could be used in so many different industries. I am going to make something like this for another blog I run which I think could really take off.

A TSP for an SEO Company: Create an Interactive Guide to Google Operators

Not everyone is going to be interested in learning all of the tools of the trade when it comes to Google shortcuts but those that are probably have a few things in common.

• They’re a little bit nerdy.
• They probably have a website
• The probably want more visitors to that website
• Technology in general, interests them

Don’t those sound like the characteristics of someone who could potentially become a client of your SEO company, or at least have the ability to spread the word about your cool interactive site to someone who would be?

The structure I envision for this idea is a simple full-screen slideshow which shows you the results of certain search queries. In some instances it would show you search results side by side so you can see the different results when using specific queries. For instance, here is how I would show off the difference in using quotes and not using quotes for search results.



Not all examples would be able to use side-by-side comparisons like this but you should be able to easily skip to the next option with the slider icons on the left and right. A visual representation like this would surely make the search operators much easier to remember as well.

A TSP for a Graphic Designer: Share an eBook Cover PSD Every Week

There are hundreds of millions of blogs on the internet and a large majority of them give away some kind of eBook as a lead magnet for their email list. Writing an eBook is fairly simple, but creating the cover isn’t. It’s a process that more often than not has to be outsourced to someone with more skills to you. Even if that job is found on Fiverr.

A designer looking for clients would do very well by releasing a free eBook cover every week that people could easily edit in Photoshop. Each week they could be branded around a different theme or for different industries. You would only have to create a tutorial for editing the PSD’s one time then you could continue to release them for life. If you have an actionscript to go with it then that makes the entire process even easier.

If the idea were to take off – which I’m sure it would if the covers were of a high quality – you would no doubt find yourself clients looking for custom covers or other graphics they are likely going to need for their blog.

A TSP for Web Designers: Free Attractive Gifs for Twitter

If you aren’t already aware, Twitter allows its users to share images alongside their statuses. Many website owners have been using static images as an opportunity to draw attention to their tweet, but few have been using interactive GIF’s because they’re generally harder to put together.

One GIF that really caught my eye was shared by Barry Schwartz in relation to Google confirming their latest algorithm update.



If you saw that in your Twitter stream, would it get your attention?

I have no idea if Barry made this himself or he took it from Google (Update: he made it himself) but I do know that even with my decent ability in Photoshop, I don’t have the skills to make this, nor the patience to learn.

I would love to share GIF’s like this alongside my Twitter statuses though so if someone were to create ‘generic’ GIF’s that could apply to many different types of content I think they would be on to a winner.

A TSP for Any Niche: The Curated List

You’ve already seen Ali’s list of tools for businesses that received over 2 million visitors. While it was helped to go viral in large by being featured on Product Hunt, it’s not actually the top item of its kind on the website.

In fact the most upvoted ‘product’ ever is a website called Startup Stash which is very similar to Ali’s idea but some would argue it’s laid out in a more beautiful manner.



It’s such a simple idea but so useful at the same time. I could see this working so well in an unlimited number of industries. Just a few ideas that come to mind include:

• A curated list of the best golf courses in the world, organised by continent, country and weather based on the time of year
• Best places for amateur photographs to get their images seen
• The best places for graphic designers to show off their talents
• The best websites for people looking to land a better job including not only job sites, but guides on improving their CV and interview skills
• A resource on the best SEO and website analysis tools
• A curated lists of sites for musicians to get their sounds heard
• A curated list of the best communities for gamers to interact with online
• A curated list of the best sub-Reddit’s for people interested in X
• A curated list for real estate brokers to promote their listings and guides on how to improve them

I’m just sprouting off a lot of random ideas here but it’s all done purely with the aim to help you see if this idea could be relevant to your own specific industry or perhaps an industry you have a client in.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Side Project

The only real criticism I found towards Ali’s original article on this topic was that people wanted to know how to promote their side project once it was created. Just because you build something else on a new domain, it doesn’t mean you suddenly then don’t have to worry about traffic. If anything, the more traffic side projects you build, the more websites you have with a lack of traffic problem.

In a moment I’m going to recommend some tools and services to use that can help send some initial traffic your way but they should only be thought of as secondary option. No amount of free or paid traffic is going to help your side project go viral if it simply doesn’t resonate with your desired target audience.

If my Feedburner side project was more about making sure ViperChill didn’t lose subscribers rather than bloggers as a whole, I doubt anyone would share it.

If Crew decided to put their watermark on the free images they give away on Unsplash, I doubt anyone would put them on their site.

If App vs Website required me to tweet or Facebook share the site before revealing which one I should build, I don’t think that would send more customers to Veed.

There’s no real way of knowing whether the side project you’re looking to create will pay off. All you can do is make sure at least someone in your audience will benefit from it.

• If Please Don’t Kill Feedburner hadn’t reached the homepage of Hacker News it wouldn’t look like much of a success story.
• If my WordPress plugin ViperBar (no longer online) wasn’t pushed on the back of my already large audience I wouldn’t have had thousands of people install it.
• If Unsplash didn’t capture the attention of a few influencers early on you wouldn’t be reading about it today.

You simply can’t predict what will work and what will fail. You can get better at it, but there’s still an element of luck involved when it comes to these things.

All I can say is that none of these side projects would have the chance of helping their creator if they weren’t created in the first place.

There is a risk that the time you spend on a side project would have been better spent on your core project (most likely because it didn’t ‘take-off’). The only way to offset the loss is to view your side project as nothing more than being an additional benefit to the audience you currently have and view it ‘taking off’ as something that either happens or doesn’t.

Don’t rely on it, but do give yourself the best chance for success. Here are a few options to help give you that initial push:

• StumbleUpon Ads: You may be surprised to see this one at the top of the list but StumbleUpon still have an active community of users who can be reached cheaply. They users of their service don’t have the best bounce rate, but those who do stick around can certainly help to share your idea further
• Share on a Relevant Sub-Reddit: RedditList is probably the best place to help you find sub-Reddit’s that will be the most useful for you to share your new creation. /r/InternetisBeautiful is probably a good place to start for more general side projects.
• Post on Product Hunt: While I haven’t taken the time to learn enough about this site yet, a few of the TSP’s mentioned in this post have found success there. Note that you can’t submit links unless you’ve been invited by another user or you’re active on the site first.
• Reach Out to Influencers: Use both email outreach and direct tweets on Twitter to stand the best chance of getting noticed. Make sure the branding of your own site is at an absolute minimum when you do this so they believe they are sharing something valuable to their audience and not just helping you promote yourself.
• Utlise Other Social Media Ads These include Reddit, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook and more recently, Instagram.

This was a tough article to put together if for no other reason that I keep coming up with ideas to create a TSP for the various industries I’m involved in an honestly just want to get started on them straight away. If you feel the same way, then my job here is done.

I would love to hear what you think about this article in the comments. Thank you so much for reading!

The post 6,595 Words on a Traffic Generation Tactic You’re Not Using (But Should Be) appeared first on ViperChill.

]]> http://www.viperchill.com/traffic-side-project/feed/ 100 http://www.viperchill.com/simple-productivity-tool/ http://www.viperchill.com/simple-productivity-tool/#comments Thu, 07 Jan 2016 13:23:15 +0000 http://www.viperchill.com/?p=8274 Today’s blog post will reveal my biggest goal for 2016, nine niche ideas with huge potential and the most effective productivity technique I’ve used over the last few years. Let’s begin by talking about the productivity technique which is often referred to as the Pomodoro Method. If you’ve followed any kind of productivity guide online […]

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]]> Today’s blog post will reveal my biggest goal for 2016, nine niche ideas with huge potential and the most effective productivity technique I’ve used over the last few years. Let’s begin by talking about the productivity technique which is often referred to as the Pomodoro Method. If you’ve followed any kind of productivity guide online in the past then you may already know about this way of working in 25-minute time blocks.

Between each you take a five-minute break, and then work for another 25 minutes.

Generally, Pomodoros happen in ‘rounds’ so you’ll do four of them in a row – not forgetting the five minute break between each – then give yourself a much longer break after the round. I don’t really follow this method at all – I’ll share my own version in a minute – but I don’t think I would be where I am today without the Pomodoro Method. Telling myself to work for “just 25 minutes” is far easier than sitting down and thinking “I have to write a blog post now.”


Millions have found the same to be true for them as well.


As I’m writing this very sentence, the seconds are ticking down on the Pomodoro app on my phone. When a ‘Pom’ is underway, I will not succumb to any distractions.

I won’t answer any calls.

I won’t check another tab in Chrome “just for a second”.

I won’t look at any Tinder notifications my phone might throw out.

Nothing.

In the rare case there is something I really need to check – like someone who never calls has phoned me four times – then I’ll simply hit pause on the Pomodoro app I use (though this is very rare).

The reason I’m telling you about the Pomodoro Method is because I believe there is a huge opportunity to create an amazing website and online community focused around this way of being productive.

And like with most ideas in this series: If you build it, I will use it.

There aren’t going to be a ton of opportunities for everyone to be successful with today’s core angle, so I’ll also be sharing some other niche ideas you can spin off from this concept as well.

I have so much belief in this idea that if someone were to pull off what I’m about to outline in a big way, I wouldn’t be surprised to see them have hundreds of thousands of active users in a short period of time.

After all, could you tell me one person you know that doesn’t want to be more productive?

I could totally see my friends and family using this, and it’s rare for website ideas to have that potential without already existing.

Before I get into the specifics, I want to give a little background on how I personally use Pomodoros and how others I know use them, so you can hopefully understand the huge opportunity I’m about to present.

How I Get Things Done: My Pomodoro Day-Flow

As I explained earlier, Pomodoros are generally done in rounds. People typically do four in a row – that’s 1 hour and 40 minutes of solid work (with 20 minutes rest) – and then take a longer break of 30 minutes, an hour, or more.

This is the general method, but I don’t follow it very closely.

I tend to do at least eight Pomodoros per day, but aim to complete at least ten. While 4 hours and 10 minutes of work (10 x 25 minutes) might not sound like much to be proud about completing in a day, you have to remember it’s about real, focused work on serious tasks without interruption.

I’m not multi-tasking. I’m not taking breaks within the Pomodoro itself. And I’m not starting my timer on things like reading or cleaning up my office. They’re taken very seriously.



This screenshot is from the day this article is going live, but the rest of the post was actually written a few weeks ago.

The four unproductive days represent Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. The two biggest spikes represent 12 Pomodoros completed for those days. Today (Thursday) I’m currently on Pomodoro #9 which you can see on the far right.

For me personally, my breaks between Pomodoros are very sporadic. If I’m producing content like I am right now, then it’s likely I won’t take a 5 minute break between Poms but skip the 5 minute break, finish another one, and skip the break after that.

Often when I’m writing I get in the “zone” and I really don’t want to take a break. Getting started for me is the hard part so once I do get going I let momentum take over.

On other days I can take breaks of more than an hour between Pomodoros. Life is not some perfectly structured machine – even when you don’t have a 9-5 job – so things tend to crop up which stop me from flowing one Pom into the next.

As I write this, with 14 minutes and 13 seconds left on the clock, I only have a few hours before I head to Bangkok to shoot a commercial I have been wanting to make for almost a year. Because of that, I won’t be able to get my ten Poms completed.

(I count shooting the commercial as work, but because I don’t believe it’s the best use of my time, I will not track it in the app).

You may be wondering why I, or anyone else, would track how many Poms they complete in a day.

Why not just do as many as I can and be happy with that? Or why not just count them when they’re tough? As a famous bodybuilder once said, “I only count the reps when they start hurting, because that’s when they count.”

Well, I’ve actually found on my most productive days, I’m competitive about them.

I’m not the only person I know who works around Pomodoros. Diggy, my business partner, is obsessed about them too. And because we sometimes work in different cities or at least in different offices or houses, we generally ‘show off’ to each other via a chat app how many Pomodoros we’ve completed in a day.

Here’s one such example:



If my numbers are low, he’ll take a dig at me. If they’re high he’ll be a little more motivated to push on and try to catch up with my numbers for the day before he goes to sleep.

As an aside – for those of you who don’t know us personally – we’re not really that serious about this. When I say we take a dig at each other, it’s just friendly. We don’t really care who wins for the day; we just want to push each other to get work done while we can instead of messing around on the likes of Facebook. Mostly because both have huge goals in life.

While I don’t share my daily Pomodoro count with my brother – we’re on different time zones so I don’t want to wake him up or vice versa – he also relies on them heavily.

Ever since he started working from home he has found them incredibly useful to help keep him going, especially when it’s easy to procrastinate because he really can work at any time of the day.

So where are you going with this rambling story Glen? My apologies, but you really did have to read this backstory to understand the potential of what I’m about to share — especially if you don’t currently use the Pomodoro Method to help with your productivity.

Forget Income Reports, I Want to See Your Grind Reports

As I’m very much into internet marketing and the overall industry, I’m aware of most of the big blogs in this space. One trend that has grown over the last few years, spurred on by the likes of Pat Flynn and John Lee Dumas, is people sharing their income reports from their online ventures.

I won’t go into the full details of why I’ve grown to dislike them so much here – it could take an entire blog post – but for the most part I find they simply tempt beginners to copy them in promoting the same affiliate products, rather than getting into other niches where they could make a killing as well.

(Side note: I’m a huge fan of John & Pat and I totally understand their own reasons for sharing income reports, but I’m going a different route and would love to see them try it also).

So here’s what I say to anyone who shares a public income report: I would much rather see your grind report.

I would prefer to see how much work you get done each day and be inspired by that, rather than how much income you made because someone chose a to start their new website on a web host you recommended.

I think showing off your true activity levels would be so much more inspiring for beginners, and really show people you mean it when you say things like, “You’ve got to put in the work. You’ve got to take action.”

What if there was an online community where anyone around the world could show off, in public, how many Pomodoros they complete each day.

What if they could be charted over time like in the Pomodoro apps I use?

What if I could see how many Pomodoros other people are doing each day, or have done just today? Especially those who I connect with on Facebook or Twitter to make it even more interesting.

I really can’t imagine this kind of thing would be difficult to put together. Here are a few features of the iPhone app I use daily:

• It has an adjustable 25 minute countdown timer
• It lets you change the colour of the app background
• It tracks how many Poms I’ve completed over the last 14 and 30 days
• I can change the sound it makes when a Pom is over (woo!)

That’s it.

And it cost me $4.99.

It’s doesn’t even have what would no doubt be my favourite feature: A way to export that data into some online community where other people can see how much work I’m doing and I can see how much work they’re doing.

And to take it a step further, just imagine you could see how many people were currently completing Pomodoros LIVE around the world.

Let’s say that you wake up one day and you’re not feeling particularly productive…

You could open up this app or website and see that 654 people are online completing Poms, or a blogger you follow is on three for the day, or your friend is about to finish his first one.

I’m living proof that those with a competitive nature totally get inspired to do more with this kind of set-up. You saw in the screenshot with Diggy above that we’re already competing in a fun way; it’s just that our approach is messy and slow.

That’s a problem for us, and we would love for one of you to build a solution.

To show how serious I am about this, I put together a little Google Charts graph highlighting how simple the reporting can be. We’re not looking for fancy analytics – my $5 app doesn’t have them – just a way to see how much work we’re doing.

Because I’m a big believer in the idea that you can’t cheat the grind, if I’m not getting the results I want to in life, I can look at my chart and see exactly why. I’m either not putting in enough hours, or I’m kidding myself and completing Poms on the wrong (usually easy) tasks.




If you can’t see the graph, please click on over to the post to view it on site.

If you hover over a particular week you’ll see more details about it. I’m not a programmer whatsoever and I created this in two minutes using Google Charts. Pretty cool, no?

It would be awesome to see graphs for:

• How many Poms you’ve done each day over the course of a month
• How you’ve done each week compared to the previous month (shown above)
• How you’re doing as a percentage of other people on the website
• How you’re doing compared to your friends

If anyone reading this goes and makes this website, makes it beautiful and gives me great charts to track overtime, I’ll be your first customer.

In yet another hopeful display of how serious I am, I’ve put up a few mockups of how I think a great website like this would look structurally.

Mockup #1: The Core Interface



The main Pomodoro screen should be as clutter free as possible. You might even want to remove the counts of how many Poms you’ve completed for today and leave that up to the stats page (below).

I really like the idea of showing how many people are online and being productive, which you’ll also find in the Headpsace meditation app I’m a big fan of.

Mockup #2: The Stats Page



Hopefully the image is fairly self-explanatory. Here you can see how well you’re doing on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, and then check in on the progress of other people you follow as well.

In the screenshot we can see Ramsay (@blogtyrant) is on track for an awesome day. Don’t think he’s too productive though; he’s in Australia so he’s hours ahead of everyone else!

Mockup #3: The Group Chat



I’m not great at drawing chat windows in Photoshop but hopefully you get the idea. The left panel could show not only who is online but how many Poms they’ve completed for the day, with a big chat window to give everyone space to encourage each other and talk about what they’re working on.

I imagine this feature alone would be awesome for those who partake in mastermind groups.

Want My Money? Additional Features I Would Certainly Pay For

There are nearly 300,000 results in Google for “The Pomodoro Technique” and no doubt millions of people who have tried it in their daily lives.

To make this tool really take off and potentially reach those hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of users, I believe that at minimum the three sections I’ve outlined above should be completely free for all users.

They’re enough to get the job done, but if you’re serious about this method of being productive, you may want something a little more. That’s where some additional features might come in handy.

Premium Feature #1: Group Moderation

Instead of just throwing everyone into a chat, make it so that premium users can delete messages they’ve written, assign admin privileges to other users and give them an option to ‘start’ rounds for the entire group, meaning a Pomodoro will start for everyone at the same time.

Premium Feature #2: Link it to an App

The only thing that might personally put me off the above solution is that I’m not always at a PC when I’m doing a Pomodoro or even if I am, I may not have an Internet connection. While an app will be more expensive to put together, we’re looking to build something that could potentially be used by millions here, so I think it’s worth the investment.

Think of apps like Evernote where you can write notes offline and they sync up to the web later.

Premium Feature #3: Allow Us to Make Financial Bets

If you’re in a close group – like I imagine the #marketingcrew group above would be – we could each pitch in say $50 and whoever completes the most Poms in a week or month collects the prize money. While I wouldn’t expect the amounts bet to be life changing, they could be an added incentive to be more productive.

I’m sure getting more work done even at the cost of $50 would totally be worth it. There would be the possibility of ‘cheating’ but the real aim here is to push everyone to produce instead of procrastinate. I can’t imagine any of the people I would likely do this with would fudge their numbers.

Premium Feature #4: Screenshot my Page as Proof I’m Working

I haven’t totally fleshed out in my head how this could be used in a lot of ways, but it could definitely help to hold yourself accountable to make sure even during a Pom you’re not slacking off.

I’m not sure how the technology works exactly, but I know Upwork.com (formerly oDesk) have the ability take random screenshots of a freelancers screen so employers know they’re actually working and not claiming more billable hours than they actually worked.

Though I take all Poms seriously, this could be useful for those just starting with the technique who may even find 25 minutes a long time to focus.

BONUS Marketing Tip: Give Me a Widget!

Let me show the world how many hours I truly put in. How much I grind to achieve the results I get.

I’m proud to be a hard worker, so let me inspire others and show that if they want more from life, they need to put in the hours too. Make it easy to paste the widget into a blog sidebar or even take up an entire page if I were to dedicate one to it.

Add a link back to your website in the bottom of the widget, of course. Even make it an optional affiliate link so I get credit if anyone joins the site as a premium member because of me.

10 Other Potential Angles to Take With This Concept



With any niche idea I share, I aim to not only give you one core concept, but suggest other ways that concept could spin off into other industries you may be more interested in.

So instead of just a generic online ‘Pomodoro community’ like I’ve outlined above (now referred to as PomCom’s), you could niche down into smaller industries and grow a passionate audience around similar projects.

For instance, picture a PomCom for writers where the app will actually track their word count during each Pomodoro (by writing directly on the app or website), and then share that in a chart with fellow writers.

This would be amazing for bloggers, book authors, journalists or any other hobby or profession which involves writing as its primary role.

As someone who at times has actively tried to learn the Thai language (tones are difficult!), I would have loved to be part of a PomCom that consisted solely of people learning Thai where I could share how many words I’ve learned each day or at least how many Poms I’ve completed towards learning.

The whole idea being, once again, that you can’t cheat the grind. If I’m not making progress with Thai, I only have to look at how many 25-minute time blocks I’ve dedicated to it to see why. Lack of these will almost certainly result in a lack of progress.

There could be a PomCom for serious cyclists who track how many miles they’re putting in each day on their bikes and comparing them with others online. This wouldn’t necessarily be Pomodoro-related, but it’s just another idea that can ‘branch out’ from the original concept here.

The frameworks I mocked up could still be relevant.

If you see some kind of community you could create that benefits from any kind of progress reporting then don’t feel like you have to be bound by the 25 minute limitation. Do whatever you feel would be more relevant for that specific audience.

A few more PomCom ideas that come to mind include:

• People learning a specific instrument and wanting to show how many hours they put in while getting feedback from others on the same journey
• Students tracking how much time they’re spending with revision and being able to form online study groups with others learning the same subjects
• Bodybuilders tracking their weekly workouts and current weight so they can show off to others. I can imagine this would work very well for people looking to build their authority as personal trainers as well
• A site for women planning their wedding where they can check off all of the things they need to do before their big day and get advice from other brides-to-be.
• Beginner pilots tracking their hours in the air and being able to talk with more experienced pilots
• A weight loss PomCom for people who do best by tracking their results and find motivation in the success of others on the same journey
• Or how about collectors of anything being able to keep track of how much memorabilia they have in their position and talk with likeminded people

If anyone ends up making that original, generic app (or the one specifically for writers) I will be your first paying customer in a heartbeat.

And if I would pay for it, surely someone else would too.

The World’s Greatest Marketing Blog

If you follow me on Facebook, you’ll see that yesterday I revealed my biggest goal for 2016: To make ViperChill the best marketing blog in the world.

Now of course this is an entirely subjective goal. The best movie when I was a kid was Matilda but you were probably more fond of something else (just kidding, I know yours was Matilda too).

There’s no real way of determining the best blog in any category so I will purely be judging myself on this one and not expecting to win any kind of award. It’s a goal that has little other purpose than for me to push myself to write the best content I possibly can on a more regular basis. I relaunched this blog in 2009 and I’ve always been infrequent with my posting so it’s more of a challenge to see what I can become, rather than what I can get back in return.

In my recent guide on how to make money online I talked about a personal development blog I used to run and how my sole focus for the site was to reach 10,000 subscribers.

• I didn’t have any income goals
• I didn’t care how many people followed the site on Twitter
• I didn’t want to reach X amount of comments per post
• I didn’t want to write a book or be featured on a specific website

All I wanted to do was reach 10,000 subscribers. It might seem like a weird goal because it doesn’t really tie directly into anything else, but it was something I wanted to achieve. You will find yourself setting ‘strange’ goals like this when money becomes a byproduct of whatever you’re working on.

In 2016 I want ViperChill to become the best marketing blog in the world by my own standards. I don’t mind if anyone agrees with me; it’s more of an internal goal I have for myself.

Now the reason I tell you about this goal is because I want you to watch how much work it takes for me to try and make this happen, and hopefully use my grind as inspiration to work harder on your own challenges this year.

Look at how many articles I write. Look at how active I am on Facebook. Look at how many comments I reply to on every article.

I also want you to be able to see how many Pomodoros I do throughout the year, so someone please make that app and website. If I get anywhere close to my goal it will be by and large thanks to the Pomodoro Method, because I get so much more done with it than without it.

Who knows…maybe the headline for this post will be true in 12 month’s time (at least in my eyes).

The ‘Click’ I Experienced Recently

As I wrap things up I want to get back to the subject of productivity which spurred on this entire post.

Have you ever had one of those moments where you’ve been working on a problem for a while or trying to understand something and there’s a moment when everything just ‘clicks’ together?

Where something ‘goes off’ in your head like a light bulb and suddenly everything makes a lot more sense? Even stranger is that the answer you’ve been looking for tends to be incredibly simple.

This happened to me earlier last year and ever since then I’ve stopped wondering why I’m not achieving stretch-goals I’ve set for myself and instead I’m actually achieving them.

My click, was simply this: Every single Pomodoro I complete takes me one step closer to my goals. And every day I don’t do as many Pomodoros as I should have, I shouldn’t be surprised why I don’t have what I want within reach.

Now I know this is incredibly simple, so let me explain this a little further because it’s unlikely the ‘click’ happened for you after reading that bolded sentence.

All of the work I now do on a daily basis is purely revolved around completing Pomodoros. If I’m not doing a Pomodoro, I’m not working on the most important tasks I could be doing. And in order to achieve the big goals I have set for myself in this lifetime, I need to keep working on the important things to get there.

So it all comes full circle in a very simple manner: Every single Pomodoro I complete gets me one step closer to my goals.

In my last post I talked about the compound effect and how little things can stack together over time to create much bigger wins. Just make sure you keep hacking away at the little challenges consistently.

For once, I’m a little lost for words on what else to say here. It was just such an incredibly powerful realisation for me to think “the only way I will be successful is if I finish more Poms” and have my whole journey simplified in such a way.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, sorry for wasting your time with the last section. Hopefully my writing ability will improve in 2016. If you did get what I’m saying then I hope it simplified your journey for you as well.

Thank you so much, as always, for reading.

Update: I was interviewed on this very topic by Chris Winfield, sharing my daily productivity process.

The post How a Simple Productivity Tool Helped Create the World’s Best Marketing Blog appeared first on ViperChill.

]]> http://www.viperchill.com/simple-productivity-tool/feed/ 104 http://www.viperchill.com/make-money-online/ http://www.viperchill.com/make-money-online/#comments Tue, 05 Jan 2016 14:35:20 +0000 http://www.viperchill.com/?p=8265 Updated: August 10th 2016 As we enter the first week of a brand new year, your motivations are probably higher than ever to make 2016 the year to finally achieve all you’ve been dreaming of. Whether you’re starting a brand new foray into making money online or you’re hoping to take your current income to […]

The post How to Make Money Online in 2016: An Unexpected Approach appeared first on ViperChill.

]]> Updated: August 10th 2016 As we enter the first week of a brand new year, your motivations are probably higher than ever to make 2016 the year to finally achieve all you’ve been dreaming of. Whether you’re starting a brand new foray into making money online or you’re hoping to take your current income to the next level, today’s guide is guaranteed to put you on the path to success.

Yet, to do so, I’m not going to give you the information you would probably expect:

• I’m not going to give you a niche idea with no competition that is likely to make you millions this year.
• I’m not going to share any tips on how to get more visitors to your website.
• I’m not going to ask you to opt-in for my ‘little black book’ of online success secrets

That kind of stuff hasn’t worked for you before. If it had, you wouldn’t be curious to read the rest of this article.



Let me be totally blunt with you: The rest of this post has as much to do with life in general as it has to do with making money online. It took me far too many of my 11 years building websites to realise this, but the strategies for success in both certainly seem to go hand in hand.

While there are certainly great resources out there to help you succeed online, they’re everywhere. I’ve written more than 500,000 words on this website alone – that’s enough to fill six marketing books – but knowledge in the hands of those who don’t use it is worthless.

Today I want you to consider achieving online success in a new light.

Not in terms of the niche you choose, how to get visitors or what to sell them, but what you can achieve by what you become and how a new perspective on work and life can dramatically increase your chances of crushing both.

Before we continue, I readily confess that I’m no productivity guru. I haven’t (yet) made 8-figures in a single year and I haven’t created any kind of app that is valued at billions of dollars.

All I can say is that after starting this very website ten years ago at the age of 16, I’ve personally interacted with over 10,000 people looking to ‘make it’ online, and it’s very clear why a lot of them – myself included – fail.

This guide is written as much for me as it is for you. More on that later.

If you truly want to make 2016 your year, get rid of the notion that you need some magic resolution, and be prepared for a mini-awakening. You’ll do far better following the fundamentals I’m about to reveal, than not.

Live Like You’re on Commission, Not Salary

One of the best books I’ve read recently is entitled The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, by John C. Maxwell. It’s a very straight-forward, practical and to-the-point self-improvement tome. Just how I like them.

John covers many aspects of personal growth in the book, but I particularly like the story of the salesman who looked out a restaurant window and noticed a snowstorm brewing. He asked his waiter, “Do you think the roads will be clear enough in the morning to travel?” The waiter replied, “Depends if you’re on salary, or commission.”

The point of the story is that if you’re on a set salary, you’ll likely phone your boss and tell him the roads are too bad to travel. If you’re on commission, you’ve got to go and make the sale. Otherwise, you don’t eat.

In each scenario, there is a different why.

There’s the “Why would I go?” mentality, when you know you’re getting paid anyway. And then there’s the “Why would I not go?” mentality, when you need to put food on the table.

To have this commission mindset, which is always going to result in a lot more action, you must always keep in mind why you’re doing what you’re doing:

• Are you trying to be a better example to your kids?
• Is there a dream house or car you want to own?
• Do you want to have more so you can give back more to others?
• Are you trying to attract a certain person into your life?

Depending on the country you live in, there’s probably a very easy way to make it to old age – and eventually your coffin – without putting in too much effort. You could find a part-time job, make friends with the local weed dealer and live off ramen noodles for a pretty long time.

Yet since you’ve found this website there has to be something else that is driving you to achieve more in life than the bare minimum.

Have you strongly identified what that why is?

It doesn’t matter if it’s spiritual, material or philosophical; just make sure you’re able to clearly define it.

I personally have far more than just one why for the things I want to achieve, and write down new ones every time they come to me. Just for the discipline of working out, I have eleven items written on the Notes app of my phone to remind myself of the reason I’m putting in the effort. I don’t always need to read them, but they’re there when I do.

There’s more to living like you’re on commission than just knowing your why for doing things.

When you’re paid a salary, it doesn’t matter how much additional work you do, you still get paid the same amount. Yet when you’re working for a commission, the more you sell, the more you get.

Do you want to live this life doing the same things and getting the same results, or do you want to be able to get more by doing more and becoming more?

We are INCREDIBLY fortunate (bold and italics don’t express my feelings strongly enough) to live in a time where we have the opportunity to say “I want to become an online millionaire” and actually have some chance of making that happen. A time where we can say – today I’m going to write five articles on this topic and try to rank this site in Google – and have everything at our disposal to do so.

You have a PC. You have an Internet connection. And you have some way of inputting words and ideas onto the Internet. Even just leaving a comment on this very article could result in someone discovering you for the first time, finding your website and connecting with you in a new way.

We’ll never truly grasp how lucky we are, but at least try to work like you know it.

Find your why and realise how limitless our potential is because we actually have the freedom to put our desires into action.

Trust in the Compound Effect

The definition of compounding, in the investing world is, “The ability of an asset to generate earnings, which are then reinvested in order to generate their own earnings. In other words, compounding refers to generating earnings from previous earnings.”

To put that another way: Over time the small things stack up to help you earn bigger things.



This is an important concept to keep in mind, especially because we live in a society where quick fix solutions are constantly presented to us. We’ve got:

• The fast ways to lose weight.
• The tips to speed up language learning
• The promise of finding a perfect partner, tonight.
• The best strategies to get rich from the Internet, often within a 7 or 30-day timeframe.

If you believe these quick fixes truly exist in some magical manner, the fastest way to rid your beliefs is to suffer the pain of wasting money on them. You will no doubt still be looking for a solution afterwards.

Ironically, positive results tend to find you a lot quicker when consistency becomes your focus, rather than speed.

The headline for this section was lifted from one of my favourite books, The Compound Effect, by Darren Hardy. In it, Darren says, “It’s not the big things that add up in the end; it’s the hundreds, thousands, or millions of little things that separate the ordinary from the extraordinary.”

And doing them consistently over a period of time.

I’m willing to bet that if you were able to travel in time and follow the daily life of anyone in modern history who has been successful, your initial excitement would quickly be replaced by boredom.

If you sat down with Bill Gates through his daily programming, Stephen King through his daily writing, Jay Cutler through his daily workouts or Beethoven through his daily piano practice, likely very little would change day to day.

As exciting as we may often predict the lives of these people are, I’m also willing to bet for the most part – at least while on the path to success – they were very mundane. Not to take anything away from them of course, I’m sure they have fond memories of these moments.

Yet it’s unlikely you’ll feel like you’re living in the movie The Social Network, where everything snowballs, seemingly overnight.

The compound effect can show up in many areas of life. When you start a new fitness routine, for example, you see very little difference in results day by day and neither will those around you. Yet as the weeks and months go on, as long as you stick to the plan, the results will become a lot more evident.

If you haven’t seen certain people for a while, they’ll likely make some comments on your physique that confirm you’re on the right track.

The day to day doesn’t change very much but the end result – where all the little parts of your effort compound on top of each other – shows a far more radical change.

The thing I love about the compound effect is not only the results it can generate, but the entire concept of it.

I mean think about it. All it asks of you is that you do something small, today.

It’s not asking you to jump out of bed and run a marathon. It’s not asking you to write that novel that’s stuck in your head. It’s not asking you to give a speech in Chinese. Instead, all it asks is that you run today. That you write some pages. That you add words to your vocabulary.

And the final thing it asks is to do the same thing again tomorrow. The end result being that all of those little actions you repeat over a period of time will result in something much bigger.

Could you perform some small action today towards one of your goals? We both know the answer to that.

To give a more personal example, a couple of weeks ago I decided to undertake what is probably going to be one of the biggest challenges of my life. I would rather not say what it is in case I ‘fail’ at it once again, but it’s on the scale of writing a 300-page book from scratch, memorising large portions of the Bible or learning to read hieroglyphics.

When you begin to undertake such large challenges, the long road ahead can look daunting. Yet, if you hack away at the mountain of work piece by piece, it can be surprising how quickly you start making some serious progress.

Just writing 500 words per day on your book is certainly manageable, wouldn’t you agree? In a month you would have written almost a quarter of the size of most business books.

Just reading 20 pages of the Bible per day means you will have gone through 600 pages by the end of a month. Learn five words per day of a new language and there’s 150 new words added to your vocabulary each month.

Trust that your little actions over a long period of time can result in huge rewards and watch your results flourish.

Make Motivation Your Habit

I’m a very adamant believer that while being successful is not easy, it is also not complicated. In fact, I think the entire path to becoming successful can be summed up in this section alone.

The first requirement to be successful – in whatever way you define success – is to have the motivation to be successful.

Having the desire to succeed and create more for yourself and others.

Once you have this desire to improve – to change – you then need to look at the disciplines which will best help you make progress.

Let’s assume for a minute that ViperChill is the only thing I have going on in my life. Imagine that I have no goals in life other than to make this the best marketing blog in the world and to share better niche ideas than anyone else on the planet. With that desire, the best disciplines I can possibly implement are to wake up early, and to write.

Waking up early helps me to get more done in a day, and writing is without a doubt the best way I produce content (trust me on this one). I could try to improve sharing my message via other media, but I’ve been doing this long enough to know that for me, the best thing I can do is to produce more (and more valuable) written content.

Once I’ve defined the discipline then I need to…well…discipline myself to make sure I do just that.

As you’re likely well aware, if you do something consistently over a period of time, that action becomes a habit.

If I push myself to perform a challenging action often enough, I will get to a point where it becomes much easier. So waking up early and writing straight away becomes an action I take as if on autopilot. This is actually the case for me right now, but I assure you I have other things I wish to achieve.

Reaching this almost autopilot state is the point where you need far less motivation and far less willpower to actually get something done.

I’m not struggling to write this at all; I’ve been doing this for months at a time, for years of my life. When I take a break and get back into it, writing is initially difficult. But once the habit has resurfaced there is very little mental challenge. You can see from what I shared before New Year that it’s no longer rare for me to wake up and write.



Now if I had set myself the challenge of writing 7,000 words before 3pm and hadn’t written for weeks, I would be lying on the floor, crying for the day to end. To just jump into such a huge workload from nothing is not easy.

Yet when you choose the right disciplines for your goals and again, discipline yourself to stick to them until they become habitual, everything gets a lot easier.

In simple terms – and remember I did say I don’t think success is complicated – the whole process looks like this:

• You have the motivation and desire to change something in your life.
• You define daily disciplines which you think will help you make that change a reality.
• You discipline yourself long enough for those actions to become habits.
• Your daily habits take over and shape your weeks, months and years, as you progress toward your targets.

If you think I’ve simplified things a little too much, I can only guess it’s because you haven’t implemented the right disciplines for yourself, and stuck with them.

The absolute best place to start is to make motivation your habit. Constantly top up the ideas and things that drive you, so the rest of the formula takes care of itself.

As another quick example, here are some pictures I printed to hang up on my wall a few months ago. You may recognise them as having been shared on the ViperChill Facebook page.



I actually took them down from my wall a few days after ordering them as I wanted to paint my office to brighten it up a little bit.

And I never put them back.

Not because I’m lazy, but because I don’t need them. They motivated me enough in a few days to turn certain disciplines into habits, and I only looked at them again to take the photo for this blog post.

Just don’t wait for that motivation to come before taking action, as you’ll read later.

Focus on One Thing

When you’re just starting out online, it’s so easy to get caught in the trap of trying to do anything and everything. There are so many products targeted at beginners offering the route to ‘quick success’, and it’s easy to fall for them.

If you are a total beginner to making money online, I think this is the section you’ll struggle with the most.

Me just saying to someone “don’t go and buy all those shiny looking marketing products” or “just stick with that one website and make it successful” has never actually worked in deterring people as far as I know. Instead, people seem to have to actually go through the pain of buying shitty products or the struggle of running dozens of sites before they realise the advice is solid.

If you’re not a total beginner then just think back to the products you’ve bought in this space before that didn’t even come close to delivering on their promises. Or maybe they did deliver the information they promised but you just ignored the parts which were to do with taking action.

In his book, The ONE Thing, Gary Keller talks about how passion and focus can lead to the kind of results you’re looking for, “Passion for something leads to disproportionate time practicing or working at it. That time spent eventually translates to skill, and when skill improves, results improve. Better results generally lead to more enjoyment, and more passion and more time is invested. It can be a virtuous cycle all the way to extraordinary results.”

So it may be one traffic source, one niche idea, one product you follow or one anything in this space that you decide to focus on. Stick with it long enough for one of three outcomes to happen: You gave it your best and it didn’t work, you’ve figured it out so thoroughly that you’re ready to move on to the next thing, or you see it through and dominate with your growing skillset.

You’ll know whether you’ve given something your all and you’re either ready for a different path or the next level of your current one.

To demonstrate the power of focusing on one thing for my own business ventures, I have a great story about a popular site I used to run.

After a year and a half living in Cape Town, I had moved back to England because my online projects were finally making me more money than my full-time marketing job. I started spending much more time writing for a personal development blog called PluginID (no longer online).

I really wasn’t focused at all on making money with the site; I just wanted to grow my audience.

While reading a personal development book (I wish I could remember which one), there was an exercise which suggested you write to your future self in a year, proud about a goal that you’ve achieved to see how it feels.

You know how most marketing and self-development books have exercises we just skip over? Well, for once, I actually completed this one.

I took the time to write myself a letter stating how good it felt that PluginID had passed the 10,000 subscriber mark (RSS was still huge at the time) and how I had got there. I maybe read this letter a couple of times, but honestly forgot about it.

Then after living in Amsterdam and Cape Town (again) for over a year, I returned to England one Christmas and started going through all of my stuff. That’s when I found the letter.

The funny thing is that by then the blog had surpassed the 10,000 subscriber goal, become one of the top 10 personal development blogs in the world and I later sold it for a mid-five-figure fee.

(For the curious, the site was quickly sold again a month later for a $10,000 profit. A devout Christian took over and changed the content focus dramatically, marking the beginning of the end.)

While I am not crazy enough to think that simply writing the letter helped me gain thousands of additional feed subscribers, I have no doubt that because it was a huge, sole focus of mine for the site (I didn’t have any income goals), my mind sought as many ways as possible to make that happen.

It’s important to have goals of course, but I had but a single goal for that site, and I truly believe that’s a huge reason why it was successful.

Surround Yourself with the Right People

Or at least fewer of the wrong ones.

If you’re ready to take your life and your income to the next level, you need to take a serious look at the people around you. It’s an oft-repeated cliché in the personal development world to question your current social circle, but it’s also repeated by almost every teacher for a reason.

Throughout my life I’ve generally had a small social circle and being totally honest, at times it’s something I’ve questioned. Maybe it’s a product of spending so much of my last few years in Asia, which can often attract the ‘wrong kind’ of westerner, but I rarely meet people who I feel like hanging out with on a regular basis.

One of the reasons I’ve questioned myself at times is because I’m a pretty big believer in the quote, “If you think everyone else is an asshole, you’re usually the asshole.” 2015 was a year when I really tried to grow my social circle, as it just felt weird only having a small handful of friends for most of my life.

I really wish I hadn’t.

I made a lot of ‘friends’ but gained nothing from their friendship. I won’t go into the boring details here, but a lot of people turned out to be nothing like the people I thought they were, or who they tried to portray.

However, I did fortunately learn to appreciate the small but awesome social circle I have so much more.

I don’t care if someone has money or they’re successful; the main thing I care about when making new friends is that they have drive. They want something more from life, whatever that may be, and they’re willing to put in the work to get it.

I don’t care about the colour of your skin, your race, your religion or gender. If you’re driven, you’re a positive person and you get shit done – even if it has nothing to do with what I do – I’ll probably get along very well with you.

Sadly it seems those people are not so easy to find.

I’m sure you’ve heard the various quotes about how “you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with”. I always kind of ‘got’ the idea, but it wasn’t until 2015 that I felt it in action. I felt I was being so dragged down by others that I truly came to understand the quotes.

Right now I only have three friends in my local area that I consider to be close friends. That means I’m missing two spots if you believe we’re most representative of the five people we’re most often around. Well, another thing I learned from personal experience this year is that you don’t have to be in the same vicinity as those five people who make up your average.

This is probably going to sound weird, but I spend almost as much time following some people online as I see those three people offline. The likes of Patrick Bet-David, Darren Hardy, Grant Cardone and Eric (now Dr. Eric) Thomas are among a select number of people I get inspiration from on an almost daily basis.

• Patrick was an immigrant from Iran who moved to the United States before enlisting in the army. He now runs a multi-million dollar insurance company.
• Darren was abandoned by his mother at 10 days old and grew up with an abusive father, yet later went on to found SUCCESS magazine. It sold 1 million copies in the first week of its relaunch.
• Grant is an authority on sales with over $500m in his real estate portfolio.
• Eric is one of the world’s top motivational speakers and went back to get his PHD in his late thirties. You probably know him from the “When you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe” video his voice was dubbed over.

Don’t those descriptions sound like the kind of people you should be spending more time with if you’re looking to be successful in any area of life, not just with making money online?

I’ve watched hours of their video content and read all of their relevant books.If I’m ever feeling a slight lack of motivation I’ll watch one of their videos on YouTube, even ones I’ve already seen.

Just like the three close friends I have offline: They’re positive, they have a drive to succeed and they get shit done. That’s all I look for in people.

What qualities are you looking for in other people around you?

Do the five people you spend the most time with primarily exhibit those qualities over anything else? If not, you need to change that and fast. Please trust me on this one, because I certainly learned the hard way.

Stop Spending Time on Pointless Shit



For two years between the ages of 21 and 23 I read more work by Seth Godin than any other author or blogger in existence. Feeling like I connected with almost everything he wrote made me what some people would describe as a ‘fanboy’.

I haven’t read anything from Seth in a few years now – I should really fix that – but something simple he once said about his productivity levels has stuck with me all these years.

“People ask how I can write so many books or publish so many blog posts. Well, I don’t watch TV, so there’s 3-4 hours per day I get over the average person.”

While I also don’t watch TV, it’s still easy to fill those extra hours with things that really aren’t the best use of my time. It’s easy to get lost on Reddit for an hour, start flicking through Tinder when I’m bored or load up some documentary on YouTube.

I’m almost certain there has to be a snowball effect when it comes to these things. If the first hour of your day is spent browsing Reddit, watching anime or checking threads on your favourite forum, it doesn’t exactly set you up to be productive for the rest of your day.

Similarly, if I ever wake up with a hangover, the last thing I want to do is open up my text editor of choice and start cranking out an article or checking my ad campaigns on Facebook.

I don’t know what you do in your ‘downtime’ but you more than likely have a lot more of it than you should. At least if you have big goals you want to achieve while you’re on this planet.

The first step to improving in this area is to be honest with yourself in defining what those pointless activities are.

I found that I could browse some stupid news site for an hour and the next day I wouldn’t be able to tell you a single meaningful thing I learned from it. I could watch a VICE documentary on hallucinogenic honey and feel like I’m ‘learning’ something, but not be able to tell you what that honey is called or even which country it’s found a few days later.

I’m not suggesting you become a robot and do nothing but grind out tasks every waking hour, but keep in mind that if you don’t control the inputs to your mind each day, it can be hard to focus on the things you know truly matter.

Be honest where you’re wasting time, and create a plan to replace those hours with something that will help make your dreams a reality.

Focus on Giving

Givers are people who focus on the value that they’re providing, with less thought on what they’re going to get in return. Yet from what I can see in every facet of online business, those who give the most also tend to get the most back.

• The people who transition from blogger to successful author are usually the bloggers who have written hundreds (if not thousands) of insightful articles and grown a loyal audience who will gladly pick up their book.
• The podcasters who gain tens of thousands of regular listeners take the time to study their topic in depth and make sure their show is interesting.
• The people behind successful YouTube channels produce videos week after week, for months and years on end, that entertain their target demographic. If you don’t play around with video, trust me when I say those videos take more work to put together than you would expect.

It’s easy to see the end result like the successful book, the chart-topping show on iTunes or the Forbes column telling you how much Supercars of London makes on YouTube, but you shouldn’t forget the consistency of giving over the years to get to that point.

The amount of stuff they put out there that other people truly enjoyed.

In his highly interesting book, Give and Take, Adam Grant talks about the concept of being a giver or a taker. Here’s a quote from the book, which may make you question why I’m recommending becoming a giver, “Research demonstrates that givers sink to the bottom of the success ladder. Across a wide range of important occupations, givers are at a disadvantage: they make others better off but sacrifice their own success in the process.”

Adam went on to further clarify, “So if givers are most likely to land at the bottom of the success ladder, who’s at the top—takers or matchers? Neither. When I took another look at the data, I discovered a surprising pattern: It’s the givers again.”.

He explains that the givers who rise to the top of the success ladder generally gain things that they weren’t seeking from the act of giving, such as a support network that they can rely on. An Amazon review describes how to be a successful giver, “Give, but make sure one is giving with a sense of purpose, and to people and things one cares about. Give, but not when it comes at the expense of one’s own projects.”

For instance, teachers face less chance of burning-out by seeing the great work that their students go on to achieve.

Jim Rohn gives further credit to this idea with his popular quote, “Give enough people what they want and you can have everything you want.”

If Steve Jobs’ goal for Apple was more about making a ton of money than making awesome products, Apple would unlikely be the global powerhouse it is today.

If Brad Pitt cared more about the girls he could get from being famous, rather than the amazing movies he could make, I doubt you would know his name.

If Daymond John wanted expensive cars more than he wanted to make a cool fashion brand, I argue he would be worth far less than the $250,000,000 that he is today.

While we are all of course building Internet businesses to get a financial return, find something outside of yourself that gives you a higher desire to do what you’re doing online. You’ll not only find the journey more rewarding, but research shows you’re far more likely to get that financial return as well.

Accept Criticism Will Come as Part of the Territory

And then make sure it does not get in your way of taking action, whatsoever.

As the saying goes, if you don’t want to receive criticism, then do nothing, say nothing and be nothing. That’s the easiest way to ensure you never receive negative feedback in life. On the same note, don’t expect to receive any praise or accolades either.

You’ll find with any online businesses that starts to get attention (especially if you’re active on social media), there’ll be ignorant people sending less than desirable comments in your direction.

Thanks to the Internet, because people can say anything on any medium, they will.

And those who are angry, disappointed or upset – whether they have a logical reason to be or not – will be far more vocal than those who love what you do and never want you to stop.

No matter what I write on ViperChill, someone will criticise an aspect of my article or the message I’m trying to share. Some will no doubt tell me this article was far too long, as usual. To show you what I mean, here’s some feedback from my latest article about how to get millions of visitors from Google in 2016 (link).

While the overall response was overwhelmingly positive (I never lose sight of the positive these days), some of the comments I received were as follows:

• “Sorry dude but this is nothing new. Seasoned SEO’s know this” – on Twitter by someone I consider a respectable marketer.
• “Yeah this is called Predictive SEO, people have been doing it for a long time.” – a mix of comments on Twitter and Inbound.org.
• “Who is going to read this???” via response to the email I sent out about the article.

Or my personal favourite, from admin@khh.com who left a comment saying:

• “Every veteran webmaster facepalms as you think this is something new and innovative.“

Cute.

As I wrote on a Facebook status not too long ago, this kind of feedback really used to bother me. After putting so much work into an article, it would really get me down.

There seems to be something in our DNA that reacts to negative feedback far more strongly than we react to positive feedback. You can see this in the celebrities who are constantly quitting the likes of Twitter because of the comments they receive.

Rihanna for example has been found attacking users of Instagram who insult her, yet you won’t find her responding so readily to the thousands who say how amazing she is.

So what’s my solution to the negative criticism? Post less? Only post really amazing content? Get more personal? Make sure nobody in the history of the world has ever written about or considered what I’m about to say?

Actually, none of the above. There is no solution.

You just have to accept it and keep doing what you’re doing.

I think the biggest turning point for me – to get to the point where criticism means so little to me anymore – is simply believing I did the best job I could and shared a message I know would benefit at least someone.

As I’ve often said, I write long articles and go into a lot of detail because they’re the kind of articles I like reading. You can find hundreds of alternative sources who get to the point much quicker if that’s your thing.

You’re never going to please everyone, so the best thing you can do is to have 100% belief in yourself. 100% belief that you tried to make something cool, or tried to help at least one person, or thought you would make someone’s day better, or whatever is relevant to your own online journey.

And if you’re still doubting how much awesome value you have to give – in whatever form – please rid yourself of those incorrect beliefs before you produce anything else.

As Patrick Bet-David would say, criticism is a sign you’re on to something good, “Make some noise. Get rowdy. Be bold. Play offense. Don’t entertain small thinking. Don’t tolerate any negativity. Show the world what you’re made up of. And along the way you’ll give birth to a ton of haters and BELIEVERS. One doesn’t come without the other.”

Right now, the USA is deciding who will be their next President. No matter who wins the election, almost half the country is still going to have either not bothered to vote at all, or voted against the person now running their country. Imagine that; winning something and still having 200+ million of your own citizens either not caring or wishing you hadn’t.

It’s OK for your audience to shrink or evolve, because if you’re sticking to the same beliefs and values, you’ll just attract more of the ‘right’ people. Just as important is to never take the criticism personally. You never know someone’s personal situation in life on the other side of a computer screen.

I know it’s not always easy to see the lighter side of negative comments but just remember…we’re dying! One day at a time. Do I really need to care that some lawyer in Austin Texas thinks my ideas are beneath him and I make him facepalm? I’m more concerned he’s focusing on directing hate at me rather than helping his clients.

Read More Books

While there are of course successful people who will claim they never read books, more often than not successful people do tend to fall into the category of being voracious readers.

• Warren Buffett, the world’s most successful investor, says he spends up to 80% of his day reading.
• Bill Gates, who created Microsoft and is now more focused on being a billionaire humanitarian says that he gets through a book per week and has done for years.
• Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal and founder of Tesla and SpaceX, has spoken of his love of reading autobiographies of past greats like Howard Hughes, Benjamin Franklin and of course, Nikola Tesla.
• Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, insists on reading 3 hours a day.
• J.K. Rowling, the first ever billionaire author, read ‘absolutely anything’ as a child.

According to Business Insider, President Obama, Albert Einstein and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg are all avid book lovers, too.

For me personally, I’ve found that reading is almost meditative. It’s something that I feel benefits my life greatly and at the same time is completely relaxing. The books I read are almost always business-related, and I’m constantly highlighting sentences or paragraphs, but the whole process is very chilled out.

I don’t read fiction books, but I like the idea that they open you up to a whole new world and allow your imagination to run wild. With business books, I ironically like when they both reaffirm my current beliefs and when they give a different perspective on an idea that I already had.

If you’re still not convinced you should be reading more, here are some scientific benefits which may help you decide:

• Readers are more likely to exercise…and vote (Source)
• Reading can enhance your memory (Source)
• Reading makes you sexier (Source)
• Reading reduces stress (Source)
• Your vocabulary expands (Source)
• It can help prevent Alzheimer’s (Source)
• You’re more likely to ‘get ahead’ (Source)
• It can make you smarter (Source)
• Reading non-fiction can increase your empathy (Source)
• It improves your analytical thinking (Source)
• It can be therapeutic (Source)
• Better readers make better writers (Source)

I know it was cool to say in school that you never read books, but it’s time to get serious. If you’re looking for a great book to start with, I recommend The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone or Smartcuts by Shane Snow.

Take Massive Action



Because I know you didn’t take enough in 2015.

You didn’t.

I’m not even questioning whether you worked on the wrong things and that’s why you didn’t get the results you wanted. Even if you worked on the ‘wrong’ things, enough action would have seen you move away from them quick enough to recover by the second quarter of 2015, never mind the fourth.

I know I didn’t do enough this year. I probably did 20% of what I was capable of doing.

I feel I worked at least 75% of this year, but it was mainly on the wrong things. Things that didn’t excite me that I had to grind through, and because they didn’t excite me, I didn’t work on them enough. And because I didn’t work on them enough, it took me too long to realise I was not getting anywhere on a particular path and then too long to change direction.

There’s a small, simple quote from Eric Thomas that I like to keep in mind, “You can’t cheat the grind.”

You don’t have to tell me you worked hard and didn’t get results.

You don’t have to tell your family how hard you’ve been working.

You just have to be able to tell yourself that you did the work, because deep down inside you know whether or not you did what you’re capable of doing.

I know I didn’t. Did you?

Only after you’re honest with yourself can you make a change. You can’t cheat the grind because it knows exactly how much work you’ve put in.

I’ve found the stronger my desire to achieve something, the more sources of “Why?” I find and the more action I take. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, since more sources of why also increases my desire.

Now, not taking enough action doesn’t necessarily imply you’ve been lazy. At times, it’s possible that we greatly underestimate how much time and energy it would take to achieve something. That’s why I actually set longer timeframes for myself in order to get something done and plan to expend more energy than is probably needed.

In the past this would have caused my to delay a task until the last minute – just like in my school days with homework – but I don’t have that issue anymore now that my why’s are strong enough.

If you’re not doing enough then quite simply, your desire to succeed – however you define it – is not strong enough. You need to find some goal and destination that truly makes you come alive. That makes you want to jump out of bed in the morning.

Work on Your Personal Attitude Towards Everything

We’ve all been guilty of blaming outside sources for our current situation in life. Especially if that situation is not aligned with our ideals.

You can blame the economy.

You can blame politicians.

You can blame your parents for not giving you a better start in life.

You can blame your boss for not increasing your salary.

You can blame your age and the idea that you “just got started too late”.

You can say the only niche you’re passionate about is too saturated.

And on it goes. You get the idea.

If you find yourself making any of these claims, or giving any other excuse why you’re not successful, you’ll seriously hinder your chances of any kind of success. The moment you think that success is to be found outside of you for any goal, it will make it much harder to reach, if you can even reach it at all.



Another quote from Seth Godin – which I’m paraphrasing here – went along the following lines.

“So many people reach out to me to try and get me to talk about something they’ve made. They think that if I just give it a mention on my blog, all of the pieces will fall into place and they’ll get what they’ve always wanted.

Well here’s the truth: If your business success relies on someone like me to promote it for you, then you’ve already failed.”

I’ve never shared this with anyone before, but I’ve actually written a book.

Yet unlike the books you’ll find on the personal development or business shelves of your local bookstore, it’s written purely for myself.

Whenever I feel demotivated or unsure I’m on the right path. I read it. Having those feelings often was exactly why I wrote the book in the first place.

The book has no foreword, no chapter numbers and no introduction. Instead, these are the exact words it starts with, “Your success lies in the hands of no-one else. Nobody is holding it behind their back, keeping it away from you as you as you frantically reach around their waist trying to grab it. You don’t need to connect with any ‘influencer’ in order to succeed. This is all on you. You can become the leader in your field. Never ever falter on that belief. You can do this entire thing on your own.”

I have so much belief in how important your personal attitude is that I read my own words to myself every single day. Yep, you heard it here first. ViperChill reads his own book to himself.

And it works.

While it’s inspiring for me to know that I can do anything I want on my own, the more important message is that I’m not putting responsibility for my results (or lack of them) on anyone else’s shoulders.

I proudly accept the position I’m in, and the challenge ahead, as my challenge.

It’s incredible how your attitude towards anything can flow into all areas of life.

Recently, a friend of mine purchased a brand new BMW in Thailand. The car cost around $150,000 so it’s a car out of reach for most people (you’ve got to love those taxes).

If you’ve ever been to Thailand you’ll know how scarily close scooter and tuk tuk drivers like to get to other vehicles as they’re whizzing in and out of traffic. After one close call I asked her, “Aren’t you worried they’re going to drive into your car one day?” She replied without a flinch. “No, that’s why I have insurance.”

Isn’t that a much more laid-back way to look at things?

In his best-selling book, What to Say When You Talk to Yourself, Shad Helmstetter makes a very profound claim about the importance of how we look at things and talk to ourselves.

“After examining the philosophies, the theories, and the practiced methods of influencing human behavior, I was shocked to learn the simplicity of that one small fact: You will become what you think about most; your success or failure in anything, large or small, will depend on your programming – what you accept from others, and what you say when you talk to yourself.

It is no longer a success theory; it is a simple but powerful fact. Neither luck nor desire has the slightest thing to do with it. It makes no difference whether we believe it or not. The brain simply believes what you tell it most. And what you tell it about you, it will create. It has no choice.”

To show you the true power of your attitude in all aspects of life, I want to set you a challenge.

Just for the next seven days, I want you to be the most positive person you know.

No matter what happens, I want you to try and view everything in a positive light. To find the silver lining in every experience.

See how often you can catch yourself with negative emotions when there is a much better alternative. This is one of the things I have to work on much more myself and I certainly will, because I know how beneficial a practice it is.

Only when you put the responsibility of your results solely on your own shoulders will you give yourself the best chance of achieving them.

Wait for Motivation and You’ll Be Waiting for Success

I’ve been working on this article for a few days now and as I’m writing this section, it’s 10:11pm on a Wednesday night, two days before Christmas.

I’m on my 8th Pomodoro of the day, and my eyes are almost closing. Yet here I am, working on an article that isn’t going to be published for almost two weeks – and I’m two-thirds of the way through it at this point. It’s not like I need to be focusing on it right now.

Yet if I didn’t do it right now, when else am I going to do it? There has to be a now to get it done.

And while I recommend that you should make motivation a habit, I’m certainly not waiting for motivation in order to crank out this section.

While it was tough to get started, I know I’m going to feel great when it’s done.

As John Maxwell says, “To do the right thing, I don’t wait to feel like it. I recognise that emotion follows motion. Do the right thing and you feel right. Do the wrong thing and you feel bad. If you take control of your behaviour, your emotions will fall into place.”

He’s not wrong.

Every single day the first task I do, after meditating, is write. I start my Pomodoro timer and write about any topic. It doesn’t really matter what it is; I just force myself to write. Then before I eat breakfast, I complete two more Pomodoros which are focused on writing. I’ve already learned it’s one of the best disciplines I can set myself.

Before most of the rest of the world is up I’ve written for an hour and 10 minutes and at least for me personally, I’ve started my day off perfectly. I rarely know what I’m going to write, and very rarely am I excited to write. Instead, as the Nike slogan goes, I just do it.

While you’re out there looking for motivational quotes to help you get going, someone else is creating a success story that they write motivational quotes about.

It didn’t take me long to realise that browsing /r/GetMotivated or watching inspirational videos on YouTube will not make the work I have to get done any easier. I don’t expect they will for you either. All too often in the past I would wait for the right time or mood before taking action. A wiser Glen realises there is no right time.

You either get started and put in the work, or you don’t.

Going back to trusting the compound effect, if you’re anything like me you’ll notice that motivation also compounds. I get motivation from knowing I can complete tasks and get things done, which in turn builds more motivation and helps me to get even more done.

So the next time you’re waiting for the right time to get started or you find yourself looking for a bit of inspiration to keep going, just try one thing for me. Do the action, then tell me if your real motivation doesn’t come from that, instead of some pretty results in Google Image Search.

I think you’ll find yourself pleasantly surprised.

Hate It and You’ll Hate the Work. Love it and…

…there’s less work. Not no work – I think that’s a myth – but certainly less.

You’ve no doubt realised that most of the points I’ve covered in this article apply to almost anything in life, and not just towards Internet marketing or more specifically, making money online.

I am aware of this.

Something I’ve learned from starting hundreds of different online ventures over the past 11 years though is that if you’re working on the wrong thing, the work is work.

If I’m trying to build a site in an industry I have no interest in, completing tasks really feels like trying to sprint in a swimming pool. Everything is working against you.

To be creative on topics that I don’t care for, like the latest beauty trends or games like Minecraft, is a huge, huge mental challenge for me and something I can easily procrastinate on indefinitely. But when I have an idea that’s close to home, when it’s something that really interests me, the amount of work I have to do is the same, but it doesn’t come with the same emotional and psychological baggage.

Let’s again use this very article as an example.

I enjoyed planning out the individual sections and deciding on their headlines and order. I loved writing key sentences that I know people are going to find powerful and I edited this document with a lot of excitement, partly anxious to see how people will react after I hit ‘Publish’.

But I truly did not like hitting ‘Start’ on my Pomodoro timer at 7am in the morning to write 95% of these words. It wasn’t fun, I didn’t feel inspired and certainly no keystrokes flowed from my fingertips like it all was meant to be. There were a lot of forgettable moments in putting this article together.

Yet, because I was excited about helping people with this post and getting their reactions, that excitement and interest definitely helped me power through the tougher times.

And that’s why it’s so important when you’re doing anything online, to at least have some aspect of the project that’s enjoyable for you.

If you don’t love your product, you’re never going to support your customers.

If you don’t enjoy your finished articles, you’re not going to care about the comments.

If you don’t enjoy recording your podcast, you’re not going to give its editing the time it deserves.

There are no overnight successes online. (Even the guy who created Ship Your Enemies Glitter and made $80,000 seemingly overnight had to have the idea, buy the domain name, set-up the site and tell someone about it.)

If you want to increase your chances of success then you must find some joy in the industry you’re working on, the angle you’re taking, or the people you’re serving. Without that, you aren’t going to push to get through the not-so-fun stuff, because trust me, that not-so-fun stuff has existed for everyone who has ‘made it online’ in one form or another.

While the saying “focus on an industry you love” is the most overused phrase in Internet marketing, it’s the only thing that’s going to make sure you do the work you don’t love, besides sheer willpower.

You Must Keep Aiming for the Next Level



Maybe you didn’t do too badly last year. Maybe you set out to follow some New Year’s resolutions and actually stuck with them. If that’s you, then congratulations.

But what did you do next?

Celebrate a little and then sit on cruise control for the rest of the year? Fall back into bad habits? Reward yourself too much and forget to set bigger goals?

Once you’ve hit one goal, move on to the next.



I’ve met enough multi-millionaires to know that once you hit certain financial goals, life gets boring very quickly if you just sit back and relax.

To demonstrate my point, think of the CEO’s of all the top companies around the world. People like Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Tim Cook. They could spend a million dollars per week for the rest of their lives and still have enough to leave for their families for generations to come.

Yet, they are still on a mission. They’re still putting in the work like never before.

• Richard Branson wants to spread the Virgin brand into more industries.
• Bill Gates is trying to fight malaria across Africa.
• Larry Ellison is fighting to keep Oracle’s huge marketshare in an industry rapidly gaining competition in the form of well-funded startups.
• Tim Cook wants to continue the legacy of Steve Jobs and take Apple to new heights.

It’s not about the money. It’s about having bigger goals linked to their personal mission of what they want to achieve in life.

These are the people who you could accept would hit the snooze button and coast through life because they’ve ‘made it’ yet they’re probably putting in more work than anyone reading this – myself included – day in and day out.

Success and moving forward has become a habit for them.

I would go so far as to say this mission to go further is why they were successful in the first place. As Jim Rohn would say, if you want to have more, you have to become more.

One thing I love about building a business online is that you can constantly find yourself hitting milestones.

An article may go viral and you hit a traffic goal you hadn’t expected to reach for a few months. Maybe you write something that resonates with people and your blog post receives 50 comments. An influencer you’ve been talking with could finally tweet about you and send you 100 email subscribers.

There are so many angles to ‘win’ and grow that building a successful Internet business can be incredibly rewarding; not just from the fact that you can make money from anywhere you choose.

They say the journey is the best part, and mostly I would agree, but we’re only on the journey to get to a destination. It doesn’t mean we’ve ‘arrived’ in life. It just means we’re checking in to the next stop, and then you’ve got to pack your bags again and get ready for the next take-off.

If you find yourself reading this article for a second or third time in the future, be more wary of how easy it is to reward yourself and ‘take a break’ once you’ve hit some initial goals. If you don’t set higher ones, you may find yourself back where you first started.

Believe That You’ve Got This

It’s no secret that most entrepreneurs fail far more times than they’re successful. It’s certainly the case for me. I’ve started more than 100 websites targeting different industries over the years and I would say 90% of them went on to achieve little to no success.

Sometimes the reason these sites ‘failed’ is because I went into a niche for the wrong reasons – such as focusing almost entirely on their income potential – but often it was because of my own personal doubts that I’ll actually have success in that industry.

In 2015, I spent over $10,000 building an online community for women and while I started with a lot of enthusiasm, every single hurdle I came across made me doubt that I should actually be undertaking the project. I made back exactly $0 from that site, and that $10,000 doesn’t include the investment of my time, which I value at a much higher price.

On projects where I have a sense of confidence that I can really make something happen, coupled with an interest somewhere, I end up sticking with them and more often than not that confidence helps me succeed.

I started a website last January that now has 650,000+ Facebook likes and is one of the top brands in a multi-billion dollar industry. This has allowed me to make connections with some of the richest and most influential people in the niche I’m targeting.

While this probably sounds egotistical, from day one I’ve known that I could make the website a huge success because I saw so many things that others in the space were doing wrong. That belief – which I would prefer to call being confident rather than arrogant – helped drive the growth of the site immensely.

If you have any doubts about your ability to make more money from the Internet than you do in your current job, please do your research so you can eradicate them immediately.

Start by researching success stories of people who have been in your shoes and reaching out to potential mentors and ask if they ever doubted they could make it. You’ll be surprised how much you can learn from both.

Write a Book for Yourself

THIS IS BY FAR THE MOST IMPORTANT SUGGESTION I CAN GIVE YOU. (Highlight, caps-lock and bold, check. It’s that powerful.)

Imagine for a second that our brains have a very limited capacity when it comes to retaining anything we read.

The capacity is so limited that by the time you’re on the third Harry Potter book, every subsequent chapter you read overwrites your memory of the beginning chapters of the first book. If this were the reality for the human brain, would you find yourself reading more of TMZ.com or more of Inc.com?

Fortunately our brain capacity is not so limited, but I like to sometimes think of it in this way as a reminder to control the input sources which affect my thinking, habits and ultimately, my life.

This is one of the main reasons I wrote a book for myself.

My book contains what I believe to be the most important advice I can follow, and the most important things I can do, in order to reach my own personal definition of being successful. While it’s not something I could ever sell or release publicly – it’s written in a very personal manner – you can find key aspects of what I cover in the book on this very page.

The single reason why I wrote a book just for myself was because I wanted everything I believed to be true in one place, for times when I doubted what I was doing or believed.

Now, I certainly don’t read this book daily because fortunately, I don’t need to. I’ve read it enough times to be able to repeat every word aloud without looking at it.

Yet there are times, maybe for a brief 10-15 minute window once per fortnight, where things aren’t going my way and work isn’t progressing as I would like, that I need a little ‘pick me up’. This book reminds me that I’m on the right path, encourages me to keep going, and includes a few other important messages which I genuinely believe to be true.

Zig Ziglar, one of the most recognised names in business and leadership, recommends that people who purchase his motivational tapes listen to them at least 16 times. That may not sound too extreme until you realise I heard this while half-way through a 7-hour recording!

While listening to 7 hours of information more than 16 times may sound a little ridiculous – it did to me when I first heard him say it – I later understood his point. Listening to something so much means not only that you can finish most of his sentences (and recall bad jokes of snakes not having a leg to stand on), but the content literally spreads through your entire being and belief system.

And that’s the important point I want to get to before you just start writing anything in your book (if you’re going to do it at all).

You must believe what you’re reading or hearing.

If there are some aspects in Zig’s message for example that you don’t quite follow or relate to, then you probably shouldn’t listen to it again, never-mind 16 times.

Your book should be made up of the disciplines, action steps and truths about success that you – and you alone – believe will help you get more from this thing we call life.

It doesn’t matter if anyone else agrees with them. If you believe them, that’s all that counts.

Someone reading this might say that I should focus on public speaking and improving my podcast so I can reach more people. Yet in my book I tell myself to ignore that at all costs and to focus on what (at least I believe) I do best, which is sharing my ideas through writing.

If they’re right and I’m wrong I’ll figure that out through right action anyway, and I’ll update that section of the book. It’s only a few pages long so I can reprint it anytime I like.

If you take nothing else from this article today, could you at least start putting together that book? A book that covers things like:

• The steps you need to take to make your dreams a reality.
• The disciplines you wish to become your habits.
• Reminders why you’re working so hard, if you ever doubt the work is worth it.
• The people, besides yourself, that will benefit most from your success.

And anything else you feel would inspire you if you’re ever feeling low.

Make it as personal and emotional as you can, because only you are likely to ever read it.

In 2016, I’m going to produce more content for ViperChill than I ever have in a single year. I would love to support and mentor you on your own journey, and hope that you’re interested in supporting me on mine.

If you’re ready to start tackling a new niche with your new found motivation, here’s a great place to start.

Thank you so much for reading. I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but we certainly have some big things to do together this year, so buckle up…

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