Jul 3, 2010 SEO
I have recently joined a high PR forum in my niche with the aim of dropping a few links to one of my sites. The moderator is a pain in the ass though and kept removing them.
Then I hit upon the cunning plan of hiding my links behind emoticons. Seems to be working so far, just a shame that they have no anchor text!
Take that you dozy moderator, I beat ya!
It my be that some of you folks have been doing this before, but it’s the first time I thought about it.
Jun 29, 2010 General Stuff, PPC, SEO, Theme Design
I know that this blog has been a bit bollocks so far, but please remember I am still a newbie and it’s all one big learning curve for me.
In the last year I have gone from being totally broke to working full time from home in my own web based business. I’m still a long way from being a millionaire but at least I’m my own boss and I get to do what I please. I know that many of you out there also aspire to be full time web geeks like me so I will offer you tips and little secrets that have helped me to get this far.
Maybe some of the techniques I use are a little unorthodox or sometimes quite old school, but I’m just going to talk about what works for me. Some of you more experienced web marketers may be able to offer me help and advise which I will share with everyone.
Were all in this together folks, we gotta do the best we can with the short time we have. Work hard, earn some dough and enjoy our lives.
What I’m going to do now is tell you how I find new niches to promote affiliate products. I work mainly in fashion but the technique could be used for any sector.
Spyfu
An old tool but a goodie is spyfu.com. For those of you who haven’t used it before it’s a website that allows you to spy on the “big boys” PPC campaigns and see what keywords are performing best for them.
In my sector the major retailers have their fingers on the pulse re – latest trends and fads so by seeing what keywords they are bidding on I can sometimes manage to register a nice keyword rich domain and start some organic seo before the trend really kicks in.
Using this method I have just registered a cool two word .co.uk domain that matches exactly the name of a product that is tipped to be massive this autumn/winter. The name is not a copyright name and to be honest I couldn’t believe that it was available. I’m going to throw up a nice looking site on the domain and start some link building to hopefully make a few quid before Christmas.
I still did the usual research in the Google keyword tool and Google trends to find a nice steady increase in search month on month. I also like to check on Google blogs and twitter to see if the product is getting talked about much.
The next step is to see how difficult it would be to rank well for the term. So I stick my keywords in Google and find that I will only have to compete with a few shitty subdomains and a newspaper article. I’m confident that I will achieve a top 3 spot in time for the gold rush!
Yahoo Answers
As many of you are probably already aware, a lot of traffic can be got from answering questions. I have a site dedicated to electronic music equipment and most of the search engine traffic is from people typing questions into the search engines. If I can’t think what articles to write I will head over to Yahoo Answers chuck some of my keywords into the search box and see what questions people are asking. I’ll then go and write a post answering it. This is not really to get traffic from yahoo Answers itself (although I will still use it) but to get visitors from people typing the same question into search engines.
On one site last year I earned over £1300.00 in one week with a post entitled “Should I Fix my Gas and Electricity prices?”!
Stumbleupon Buzz
If I’m ever looking for some inspiration I will head over to StumbleUpon Buzz to see whats getting lots of hits in my niche. To do this, simply change the word “all” to “[MY NICHE]” in the URL. You should see some sites that are getting lots of views so you can be fairly confident that people are interested in that specific subject.
Ebay Pulse
Another old school tip, but I have come up with some really good ideas from spending 10 – 20 minutes on here. the trick is to drill right down into the relevant category to see what are the most watched items. By doing this you will start to see patterns emerge. The problem is – I come up with so many ideas, I don’t have time to work on them all. Maybe I should start an exclusive news letter about my ideas? That’s an idea!
Ebay Pulse
Trend Blogs
I’m a big fan of some of the trend blogs out there. My favorites are Trend Hunter, Springwise and Trend Watching. I have all three in my RSS reader as they can be great for inspiration. Yes a lot of the items are not specifically related to the Internet, but I still think they can help you to “think outside the box”.
So there you have it. There is my little list of ways I look for niches. It has served me well so far and I am confident that it will continue to do so.
I’d be really interested to hear from you lot! have you got any cool niche research tips that you would like to share?
Jun 15, 2010 SEO, Wordpress
Get me! Not blogged in months and here I am with two posts in one evening!
I just wanted to write a quick bit on Google, site speed and rankings. You may or may not know that the big G now take site speed into account with their ranking algo-thingies. So basically – if your WordPress sites as slow as a one legged dog on tranquilizers you might want to look at installing the WP Super Cache Plugin. It works by creating a static html file from your blog and serves that instead of the heavier dynamic page. So your website loads faster which is good for Google but also for your visitors.
I’ve just done a little experiment in Pingdom Tools to test this out on my Maxi Dress site.
Here is the result -
1. With WP Super Cache turned off -
2. With WP Super Cache turned on (I did a sexy little dance) -
So as you can see – The website loads faster (even with the extra objects that are loaded with WP Super Cache it self) Your visitors are happy and Google is happy.
I know where not saving a massive amount, but every little helps (that’s what I keep telling my girlfriend!) And the site I tested it on is quite a light site anyway.
Jun 15, 2010 General Stuff, Uncategorized
Yeah I’m back! the new me. All fired up and ready to go!
So where have I been for the past few months? Well – I tried a job. That didn’t last long though because I find it impossible to work for people. I was working for Sky TV selling HD TV door to door! I’m quite good at that type of thing because I’ve got the gift of the gab.
So apart from that, I’ve been hidden away in my cave (office) paying my dues, learning my trade. I have spent almost every single hour of the day learning SEO, SEM and practicing my web design skills. So much so that I am really confident that I can get out there and tout my skills to others.
I’m getting quite good at WordPress theme design now too. My latest theme was for one of my niche affiliate websites – The Maxi Dress Shop I’m really pleased with it and it’s earning me some good money.
I’ve also been working on my personality. “What’s that got to do with SEO and Affiliate Marketing” I hear you say. Well – I’ve always been quite a reserved type of person. Always the quiet one. Standing at the back and afraid to make a scene. Well things have happened in my private life recently that have made me sit up and say – “What the f@#k! – I don’t care what people think of me” I’m gonna be my own man and do my own thing. If this upsets some people, well to be honest – I couldn’t care less!! I’m hoping that this new “edge” to my personality comes across in my blog and gives it something a little bit different.
Anyways.. I’m going off on one now. suffice to say – I’m back again. Learnt some mad skills and over the rest of this blog I’m gonna share them with you.
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