Now, when I say it is my biggest earner, that doesn’t mean much, really. I have been going along at an extremely slow pace over the past 2 years, if I can spend 1/2 hour a day on my Internet Marketing it’s already a lot (and that includes learning about new stuff!). So my site on Beach Decor still earns me around $150/month and has been doing so for the past year or so. But – earnings haven’t gone up. Unfortunately. Even though I have been doing a little bit of work on the site occasionally. Hm. Why?

Well, the thing is this: Pretty much all the time when I did my link building for the site, I concentrated on building backlinks to my home page. Every directory submission, every link exchange, most comments I left, I had them all pointing to my home page. Which is ok – I have been on page 1 of Google’s SERP’s for quite a while for my main keyword “Beach Theme Home Decor”, and am getting really steady traffic from it.

But at the same time I have forgotten about the other pages on my website, the pages that have also been built around specific keywords to be able to achieve good Google rankings in the SERP’s (what else do we do keyword research for???). So, here I have a website with a few pages centered around keywords that could potentially bring in a lot of traffic, but I have completely neglected building backlinks to those pages.

Because that is what a good Internet Marketer should do who takes care of his niche site: Build backlinks to all of his pages to get the most out of potential traffic.

I want to show you something; it is a few screenshots I have taken from my SEOQuake Toolbar to show you what kind of difference in links built back to my sites pages there is:

Backlinks To Home Page

Backlinks To Page "Tropical Home Decor"

Backlinks To Page "Lighthouse Home Decor"

(All these screen shots have been taken with the software “Jing” which I absolutely love it’s so easy to handle!)

As you can see, my home page has by far the most backlinks and thus ranks the best out of all my pages. Some of my pages have only 2 or 4 backlinks pointing directly to them, one or two might even have none! So it is no wonder that they do not rank for the keywords that I had originally designed them for…

So what I have decided to do now is to try and get the other pages of my site that is already doing ok to rank better by starting to build backlinks to them. Instead of building all the links to my home page, I will concentrate of getting backlinks to my internal pages, if possible with the anchor text being the actual keyword. This should, over time, increase the visibility of those pages in the SERP’s and start to bring in some extra search engine traffic through these keywords.

The reason for the earnings of my site not increasing in revenue is simply because there is only a certain number of people searching for “Beach Decor” or “Beach Theme Home Decor”, and I am getting all the traffic I can already from it. But I am not getting any traffic for my other keywords yet as they are not high up in the SERP’s yet, and that is due to the fact that I have very much neglected link building to those pages.

Building backlinks is a tedious process, especially if you do it yourself. But as boring it is, it is a vital – if not the most important – task if you want your websites to be successful and visible on the Internet. The more backlinks a site (or page ) has, the more value Google will put on it, generally, and the better it will rank.

So, even if it is one of the least exciting processes in the adventure of earning money online, I urge you not to forget your link building, especially also to any internal pages you might have within your website or blog, to reach it’s full potential.

Naturally curious, I had to check out the site, of course! And I am a bit of a sucker for plugins, especially free ones…

After downloading and activating the plugin (you will get video instructions on how to do this, if you should not know), I have to say that I am really impressed with the features! I think Mark Dulisse has done a great job with this plugin. It will make your SEO so much easier. I especially like the list of suggested plugins (for SEO purposes) you get within your wp-admin after installing the plugin (told you, – I’m a plugin-sucker!). I was very surprised that out of a list of 13 suggested plugins for SEO improvement I had only 2 installed!!!

I am not going into what this plugin will do for you – you can read all about it on the SEO Power website -, but I will attach a few screenshots from within my blog so  you can see what it will look like.

My suggestion is for you to get the plugin – you will not regret it. I can’t tell you any results yet – I had it only installed for a day so far, I need to give it a little bit of time – but I have no doubt that it will work.

This is just a little gem I couldn’t let pass you by! BTW – if you click on the screenshots, you will be able to have a better look at them.

SEO Power Dashboard

SEO Power Dashboard

SEO Power Keywords

Busy Building Niche Websites

Well, it’s been a couple of months or so since I decided that building niche websites will be what I will do to create an income online for myself.  since I have put my new niche website about Mens Wrist Watches Online, and I am very slowly building backlinks to it to improve its rankings. I think it is important to take the time to do you SEO properly as it will pay back over time.

Here is what I have been doing and will continue to do to get the word out about my site and to get it bumped up to a better search engine rank:

(At present it is nowhere near page #1  (to be honest I haven’t seen it in the first 20 pages of Google yet, so I have some work cut out for me), so the traffic I am getting is extremely low.  I have seen though through StatCounter – you will see the little counter on the bottom right hand side of Mens Wrist Watches Online – that for some keywords which I haven’t even considered it did show up on page #1, and that’s good!)

• Continue to add new pages to the site – this is important as it shows that the site is expanding and “alive”, not stale. And we all know that the more quality and relevant content you have on your site the more the search engines will love you!
  • As I have a big problem with coming up with content for a wrist watch site I did outsource this task on Elance and got 11 content pages for mens wrist watches for $75, and I am very happy with it. It would have taken me months to do this and I would have really struggled. I still have to add some of the pages to my site, and will do so slowly over time.
• Keep commenting on other related blogs or internet marketing blogs and leaving a link to my site, preferably with one of my keywords as anchor text. These blogs should preferably have keywordluv enabled and be dofollow.
• Writing and submitting articles to Ezine Articles – these articles are purely there to provide backlinks to my site in the resources box. The articles are not optimized for any of my keywords that I have for my site, as I don’t want them to compete with my site. I just want great and valid backlinks to Mens Wrist Watches Online. The articles are related to anything that has relevance to watches, like accessories, watches (!), time management etc.
  • Here, as with creating content for my pages, I outsourced the writing of the articles on Elance and got 10 beautiful articles back within a week for $50. Again, I am prepared to pay this amount of money as the website will give me that money back and a lot more over time. Paying for the outsourcing of content and articles is the only money I have spent and will spend for this site. My other niche website about Beach Decor is making me a consistent $150/month from several sources, and I am confident that it will be the same with Mens Wrist Watches online. And I haven’t even started with optimizing for the keywords for all of my other pages, I have only been building backlinks for the main site! So there is a lot more to be gained still, on both sites.

So, there you have it. Building Niche Websites is really the optimal way to earn some money online for me, as I have found in the past that I am not good with keeping up with updating blogs, or writing emails to a list, or anything that requires a lot of time and creation of content on my part.

Mens Wrist Watches Online has already earned me a tiny little bit of money through ebay, so I am confident that it will grow, given time. I can only recommend to anybody with little time who wants to break into making money online to start doing the same as I do – building niche websites! Read my previous post on it, and act. I am sure you won’t be disappointed – I am not!

Hospitalera has written about the contest results on her blog, and I can only urge you to have a read about what she has learned from the competition regarding SEO and how to (or not to) optimize your blogs or websites for SEO. It is an interesting read and I have certainly learned a few new things from it.

SEO is a very fluid theme at best of times, but there are certain key factors in SEO that every blog/site owner should know and follow when building their sites. Things like picking the right domain name, or writing most of your posts with a keyword in mind. Or like linking within your site, with the right keywords as anchor text.  Or backlink building the right way.

Fact is that most site owners (the ones that do not do Internet Marketing) don’t have a clue about all this, and they will struggle to get their site seen because of missing SEO Optimization. Getting your site optimized for the search engines will give you a lot better chance of appearing on page #1 of Google. So whenever you can, learn about SEO! – I might actually write a post about it soon

My online blogger friend from the blog hospitalera.com has joined a contest, and because I believe that she is a nice person and bloggers should help each other, I am posting a link for her right here.

Oes tsetnoc

Now, you might be wondering what this is about, and why I am doing this. Instead of me explaining it to you, why don’t you head over to her blog and have a quick read, – who knows, you might be a nice blogger too and lend her a helping hand…?

Well, there have been hot discussions about whether by having these Plugins on your site you are actually “draining” your own site of “link juice”, because every link from commentators going out might take away a little bit of authority (link juice) from you, and therefore hurt your PageRank in Google. Nobody seems to be really sure whether these plugins do actually hurt your own site or not. That’s why so many bloggers are very hesitant about installing them. Also, there is the issue about possible spam comments – people are scared that these plugins might invite the spammers to leave tons of inappropriate comments for you to deal with.

Guess what – a couple of days ago my mind was put to rest about the whole issue. Because, to be honest, I wasn’t quite so sure myself whether these plugins were good for my blog or not. Want to know what I discovered?

For the last 6+ months my blog has been a PR2. A few days ago Google did an update of PR’s, and my site went up to a PR3! I think that speaks for itself. I have had so many comments over the last few months, and all of them are DoFollow and have links pointing back to the commentators site, and what happened? My blog went UP in PageRank!

This has proven to me that by having these plugins installed and by actively encouraging others to interact with me on my blog I have added value to it, and somebody else seems to be thinking the same . As for the spam comments – yes, I do get more than before, but I have Akismet installed and it’s been protecting me pretty well. Also, I still do approve all comments myself, so there is no problem there.

So, to me it is clear – if you give, you surely shall receive! Now I hope that this post will inspire some of you to do the same…

Get some Luv

I have to throw this post in as a follow up on my previous post on how to get backlinks to your site or blog. I have to admit, I have been a little sneaky. I knew what I am about to reveal already before and could have posted it straight away, I just thought it would do nice in a second post!

Anyway, apart from commenting on do-follow blogs, there are blogs out there that actually have CommentLuv and KeywordLuv enabled. I will explain that in a minute. But I can tell you right away, if you can find a blog that has all 3 parts enabled (do-follow, CommentLuv and KeywordLuv), plus it is related to your niche, you have found absolute GOLD!

Now, what actually are CommentLuv and KeywordLuv? And how are they used to get backlinks to your site?

CommentLuv is a plugin (for WordPress, Blogger, Typepad and Godaddy) that, when installed on a blog, will reward the readers of that blog with a backlink to their latest blog post if they leave a comment. It is actually encouraging people to comment as they are getting another valuable backlink to their own site by doing so.  Plus it is worth thinking about installing it on your own blog, as it is most likely to increase traffic and comments, thus making up for any “linkjuice” loss you might experience by the extra backlinks to other sites.

KeywordLuv is another plugin (this one, as far as I know, only for WordPress, but correct me if I am wrong) which rewards commenters (does this word even exist? “Commentator” can’t be right, though, can it?) by allowing them to place their keywords as an anchor text to their website when commenting, therefore giving them improved anchor text! Having your keywords as anchor text linking back to your site helps your site to rank better for these keywords with the Search Engines, and has therefore the potential of generating more traffic. There is a great explanation of it on this KeywordLuv Plugin site.

Now, to get CommentLuv you don’t have to do anything special when commenting on other blogs. It happens automatically.

This is different for KeywordLuv. To get KeywordLuv and get this fantastic opportunity to use your keywords as anchor text linking back to your site (glee!), all you need to do is comment on a blog that has KeywordLuv enabled and then where you have to fill in your name, you do it the following way: yourname@yourkeyword. This will then ensure that your site’s address – which you will have to provide as well – will be linked to your keyword! It’s as easy as that. Let’s say I would enter “Petra@Healthy Diet Weight Loss” that would then display as “Petra from Healthy Diet Weight Loss”, and “Healthy Diet Weight Loss” would be linked to my blog (no, not this blog, my other blog about weight loss !)

Pretty cool tools, hey?

Now, to finish up here, I have to supply you with a list of blogs that have those nifty plugins, don’t I? Well, I have come across a few sites that have gone through tremendous trouble to provide us with just that, and we all can be very grateful for it! Here are a couple of lists to get you started, but all you have to do is do a Google search on “KeywordLuv blog list” or “CommentLuv blog list” or something similar, and they will show up!

Untwisted Vortex – DoFollow, CommentLuv and KeywordLuv Blog List

[UPDATE - 23 August 2009 - It looks like Untwisted Vortex has reverted back to no-follow and has also taken the blog list down. ]

SEO Traffic Guide – will give you a list of DoFollow and KeywordLuv blogs

Please remember though: Do leave meaningful comments ( not just “great post” or something similar …) , don’t spam, and like I told you before, the best blogs will be the one’s that have to do with your niche. Keep commenting on “normal” blogs as well, it all helps in the long run

Get Backlinks!

If you have a blog or website, how to get backlinks to your site should be one of your priorities in the game of search engine optimization (SEO). Backlinks (links from other sites or blogs that are pointing to your site) are telling the search engines that your site is worth something – after all, these other sites consider your site worth linking to! Backlinks are especially precious if the site that is linking back to yours has a high PR (PageRank). Overall, the more backlinks your site has, the better for your search engine rank, and the more likely is your blog to show up within the first few pages of the SERP’s (Search Engine Result Pages).

Commenting on other blogs can be a great way to get backlinks pointing to your site/blog, – if you comment on the “right” blogs!

See, on my Internet journey I have learned that commenting on other blogs would be a great way to get traffic back to my site, because usually you can enter your blog’s address in the comment form and it will be linked to your name, so other people who click on your name will get taken to your blog. Easy! So here I was, commenting on all sorts of blogs, at the same time thinking I would be getting some backlinks, too!

But far from it. Many blogs have the so-called “no-follow” attribute enabled, which basically means even though you are creating a link to your site when commenting, the search engines will not give this backlink any value at all. It will be like it’s not there for the search engines. So it does not help you with your SEO.

To get a valuable backlink to your site, you have to comment on blogs that have the attribute “do-follow” enabled for their comments. For example, if you comment on a PR3 blog that has “do-follow” enabled, when you add your link to your site in the comment form, the search engines will see that as a PR3 backlink to your site. Your site just got an SEO boost! This is especially helpful, too, if the blog you commented on is related to your niche. Even better for SEO!

Now, how do you find those elusive “do-follow” blogs?

Here is a link to a blog that lists different “do-follow” blog directories, and also talks a little more about commenting on “do-follow” blogs: Get quality backlinks by commenting on do-follow blogs. Pick a few blogs that fit with your niche and start commenting! The blog itself has a PR3 and has do-follow enabled, so you can get a free PR3 backlink straight away! Let these blogs pass some “link juice” to yours!

Don’t get me wrong here – commenting on other blogs, even if they are “no-follow”, will always generate traffic back to your site, and you should not dismiss commenting on “no-follow” blogs. After all, this is all about interaction with each other, not just fighting for better search engine placement (or is it??? )

As a closing thought, I am thinking about possibly enabling do-follow on my blog here. But I need to find out a bit more about it first. Because I have read that when your blog is do-follow, with every link that is pointing away from your site (basically with every comment!) your site is losing a little “link juice”. Now, I don’t know yet whether that is really the case or not, but on the other hand, if a blog has do-follow enabled, it becomes more attractive to its readers to interact and comment, which will make the blog more popular. Hmmmm, something to ponder….

Off you go, keep commenting on other blogs, but make it more worthwhile! Get Backlinks!