Crafty little forum link
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.
How I find profitable niches and make money
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!
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?
Got WordPress? You must use this plugin
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.
I’ve learnt so much from this geezer
Feb 26, 2010 General Stuff, SEO
Just thought I’d share a link with you folks cos I think it would be of huge help with your SEO.
The Blog is called Blue Hat SEO by a chap called Eli. You might have heard of it already. If not; get yourself over there now and learn some serious shit.
I really enjoy the way Eli writes, he is very laid back and just blogs away in an informal, chatty manner. I like his style and I’m going to try and be a bit more laid back myself 
Some of the tips on there are quite dark grey but I think it’s important to know some of that stuff if your gonna get your sites ranking quickly.
How to find good “do follow” links
Jan 25, 2010 SEO
As I keep harping on about it; getting good quality back links to your site is the best way to help climb the rankings of the major search engines.
When I first started out, I just indiscriminately sent spammy emails to webmasters or posted comments on blogs. Obviously this did not work, so I set about to become a link building master! I’m nowhere near that yet but I do think that I have come on leaps and bounds and I would like to share with you a couple of really useful tools that I use.
If your building links for SEO purposes then you need to be able to find good quality links from established sites that will pass on some link juice.
Here is how I do it -
Firstly, you need to download and install the Quirk Search Status plugin for Firefox. This free tool will highlight links on a website that are “no follow”. So when you are researching a potential site for a link request you will know immediately whether to bother or not.
I will head on over to Google and enter the main keyword that I want to rank for. eg “computer desks”
Starting in the number one position, I copy the web address and head over to Link Diagnosis where I paste the address to get a comprehensive back link report.
The brilliant thing about Link Diagnosis is that not only does it give us all our competitors back links it also lists them in order of page rank and link strength. We can also see whether a link is “no follow”.
Now the hard work really begins! After exporting the Link Diagnosis results into a csv file I will slowly work through the websites one by one (I don’t go lower than PR3 ). I will have a look at the site and get a feel for it and hopefully find a “Contact Us” section. I will also double check with the Quirk Search Status plugin that the links on the site actually are “do follow”. If they are “no follow” they are highlighted in red.
Then I will send a friendly email to the webmaster. I always like to mention something relevant so that they know my email is not spam and I have actually looked at the website. I usually don’t ask for a link exchange. I might explain why my site would be of interest to his or her readers and add that they may want to post a link to my site.
Link Building is a time consuming pastime and I try to break it up into small chunks. I aim to send around 10 emails to prospective sites per day. It is also a good idea to keep a spreadsheet so that you can track your progress.
I use Filemaker, and have written a small database so that I can see who I’ve emailed and on what dates etc. If you have a copy of Filemaker it’s pretty easy to do.
Tags: do follow, link building, no follow
