What I have started off with now is keep generating backlinks to  my websites. Over the past 2 years all I had done was mainly build backlinks to the home pages, and do a few posts every few weeks or so. So some of my homepages have been on page 1 of the Google search results for my main keywords for a while, and I have seen some consistent search engine traffic from it. But there I was, thinking how much more traffic I could generate if I managed to get my other pages on page 1 as well, for their keywords!

Luckily, I have been a subscriber for Backlink Builder for a while now, I just never did anything with them. Seriously, I was sitting on a Goldmine and just didn’t take the time to act on it. Well, when I finally decided to come out of my hiding a few weeks ago, that’s what I decided to do – go systematically through Backlink Builder and start building those all important backlinks to my inner pages, as well.

As I had the thought of reporting about it on my blog here, of course I wrote the “starting positions” of some of my pages down before I started. Here they are:

On March 24 I had:

And then I started with my backlink campaign. Just went systematically through the files that you get with Backlink Builder, linking back to my inner pages with the keywords for those particular pages as anchor text. I made a point of writing down which anchor text I used on which site, and which page on my site I linked back to. For that I designed a very simple table which I fill out as I go along (otherwise you lose track). If you click on the image you can see it in original size. I created it on Open Office.

My next date when I checked my keywords was April 6, so just about 2 weeks later. These are a few results:

Can you see the huge jump in those keywords? It’s nearly unbelievable.
These are the positions as of today (April 29):

I find this just amazing. Now, some of the rankings still jump around a little, but I am quite positive that it will come further up again. The jumping around at the beginning is quite normal.

You know what else happened now that my inner pages are up in the search results?

• My traffic has increased – from between 500-600 views a day to most days between 900-1000.
• My affiliate earnings have increased so far by about 30%. For example, one of my Affiliate Programs made me $72 yesterday:

So – all is green in my books, so to speak! This stuff really works. You build a niche site with a few relevant pages, create some good content on those pages, – it really pays off to put effort into making the site a site that your visitors will enjoy and benefit from! – and start building links to it. I’m chuffed!

Looking forward to your comments!

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.

Never mind, I still want you to have this post, I might just try and leave out the screen shots I did – you will still be able to follow, trust me. So here it goes:

Have you ever wondered how to create a flash looking banner or button to advertise your website? I certainly did, and a little while ago I actually found out, from one of my fellow webmasters Maya, who runs a very successful blog for beach lovers called Completely Coastal. I came across her blog searching for possible sites for a link exchange to my beach site. And there it was, in her sidebar on the right hand side – a great button to advertise your site, even with a copy-and-paste html code for anybody to grab it and display it on their site! Of course I needed to know how she did it. And Maya was so nice to explain it to me.

One thing I changed in her instructions, though – she said she created the button with Paint.net, and I tried that, but I have to say I found the program too complicated for me, I just couldn’t work it out. (Blonde? )

The software I have been using to create my banner is called XHeader, and it is probably one of the best free website tools I have downloaded so far. It is absolutely free and so easy to use, it’s not funny.   In fact, all the header graphics for this site and for my site Healthy Diet Weight Loss have been created with XHeader. It really comes in handy for all sorts of graphics for your site.

So after Maya explained to me how to create a banner or button for my sites to advertise them, I played around with XHeader for a while to create a nice 125×125 graphic. If you have a look at my website Lighthouse Home Decor

(note: this is my Beach Decor website, and I am starting to build backlinks to some of the inner pages of it now to get the pages ranked in the search engines, too, not just the home page, that’s why I use another one of my keyword phrases “Lighthouse Home Decor”; this will over time give me more visitors to the site through my other keywords, too),

you will notice the new “button to grab” on the left hand sidebar towards the bottom. This is exactly what Maya has on her site, too, and that’s what I want to show you. You can create all sorts of sizes of banners or logos with XHeader.

When you create a button or banner for your site, I believe it is important that you keep it in line with the theme of your site, like colors, pictures, etc. What I have done for my Lighthouse Home Decor site is just grab a piece of the site graphics and incorporated it into the button (you find the crab and the thong at the bottom of the site )

So, here is what you do:

1. Download your free software XHeader and install it on your computer.
2. Have a good play with the software – you can’t do anything wrong! Here is what I usually do:

• Click on “new”

• Click “Create a blank header”

• Enter the size of your graphic. Now, the square little button is 125 x 125 pixels. But you could really make it any size you want.

And then just start having a go at creating a nice button! I usually start by importing an image, then adding text and transparency etc.

Once  you have created your masterpiece, just save it as .jpg in a location of your choice. (I always go for “superb” size).

Once you have done that, you need to upload the image to your website. I have a self-hosted WordPress blog, so I uploaded it (from the folder I had saved it to) via my free FTP program FileZilla to my website (wp-admin/images/YourImageTitle.jpg). You need to do that because you will need an URL for the image.

TIP: If you do not know much about file transfers via FTP, there is another solution: Photobucket, a free image hosting site. Just become a member of photobucket, and you can upload any number of pictures or graphics from your computer to your account in photobucket, and each of the photos will then have an URL for you to use.

So, once your image is uploaded to your website (or Photobucket) and you know the URL, here is the magic:

To display the button on your site, including the Text window with html code for other people to “grab it”, you need to use this code:

<img alt=”Your keywords for your site” src=”the URL of your Image“/><br>
<textarea style=”width: 125px; height: 125px” name=”textfield”><a href=”The URL of your Website” target=”_blank” title=”The Title of your website“><img border=”0″ src=”the URL of your Image“/></a></textarea>

The red colored text is what you will have to fill in with your details. Voila!!! Isn’t that cool??? I thought so.

…I am going to upload my new button for this site straight after doing this post, so check out my sidebar and let me know what you think!! And if you like, you can also grab my new button and put it on your site…

Thanks, Maya, for your very much appreciated help!

I would love to hear back from all of you who try this out, to see how you go. And of course, if you create a banner or button for your website or blog like I have done with this method, let me and my readers know and leave us a link to your site so we can check it out!

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!

Get Website Traffic

I am writing this to “further” my previous post on how to get website traffic.

Last night, for some reason, I went down my list of bookmarks in Firefox and saw the folder “Online Classifieds”. Well, I thought, I nearly forgot about all my classifieds I have got going! I haven’t looked at them for quite a while!

I know that online classifieds are a bit of a “red rag” for many Internet Marketers as it is widely assumed that they do not work (any more) to achieve any sales/conversions when advertising  websites. Whilst that might partly be true, some of them still have some pulling power when it comes to creating traffic for your website, even to make (affiliate) sales, IF YOU DO IT RIGHT.

One of my favorite online classified sites is US Freeads. When I logged into my account I found the following statistics:

As you can see, my ads for my Beach Theme Home Decor site are definitely getting looked at! I have each ad optimized for a certain keyword, and the good thing is with each ad I can target a specific page within my website to generate traffic not only for the “home page”, but for pages within.

What I also like is that writing these ads is quite simple, all you want to do is get people to click through to your website. Have a look what I have done in some instances:

Unfortunately, the links you put in the ads are  NOT dofollow (the search engines won’t “count” those links towards your sites ranking), but either way you will be getting traffic to your site. Just make sure you do your keyword marketing research right and try to optimize your ads by putting your keyword in the title and once or twice in the body of the ad. Also, if possible, link your keyword to your site (make your keyword the anchor text for a link to your site).

Now, I have got a premium account with USFreeads, which means I pay an ongoing $6.99 a month, and for that my ads get automatically renewed each month. So once I place and ad, that’s it, it will run forever without me having to think about it. Set and forget! If you don’t want to spend money on this, of course you can renew your ads once a month yourself, not a problem.

Basically I just wanted to mention Online Classifieds as a way to get website traffic as well. It might not be huge, but every bit helps, and it doesn’t take long to set the ads up.

I did mention at the beginning that you can make affiliate sales with classifieds, too, and I will get into that in one of my next posts. So stay tuned!

Get Website Traffic

Today I want to talk about how to get website traffic.

You see, I am still going with Alex Jeffreys Coaching Program, even though I haven’t really had a lot of time, I keep slowly working away at it. And I have just discovered that Alex has put up a contest for all fellow students to see who can drive the most traffic to their website within the 2 week period from 1st August to 14th August 2009. Now, obviously I am starting more than half way through the competition because I have not been up to date with his teachings, and I certainly won’t win the contest, but I still think getting more traffic to your website is always a bonus!

So, as a little twist in Alex’s competition, we are supposed to talk about how we are driving traffic to our websites, too. Petra-Weiss.com is an established blog (up for about 11 months), so I have been getting constant traffic already. But how did I do it? And how am I going to get more traffic in the future?

Here is a screenshot of my current Google Analytics account; I have only installed it a couple of weeks ago, also as a “homework” we had to do in Alex’s Coaching program. (Google Analytics is an excellent way of analyzing where your traffic is coming from, how many pages visitors look at, how much time they spend on your site, and what sort of actions they perform. I didn’t know it was that good, but you can really improve your sites performance when working with these figures).

Google Analytics Shot Petra-Weiss.com

Now, over the past 2 weeks and a bit I had 574 visits and 1017 pageviews. I also had a 66.55% bounce rate, which represents the percentage of initial visitors to my site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within my site. So you can guess that I am not too happy about that!

But how do I get website traffic to my site, and how am I going to improve it?

• I have been commenting on other blogs occasionally. This can definitely be improved! When I picked the blogs I commented on, I was mostly looking for top commentator blogs, as you can gain great backlinks to your blog when you make it to the top commentator list. Also important for me was that the blogs are “do-follow” so the link actually counts in search engine ranking terms. So part of my strategy with commenting was SEO. But one should not forget that in traffic terms, any comment on another blog (ideally related to your niche) has the potential to drive traffic, as other people see the link and might decide to click on it, whether it is do-follow or not! So I will be putting myself out there more and not worry too much about only commenting on do-follow blogs.

• I have been trying to optimize my posts for the search engines by picking keywords that have high search volume and low competition. It has actually worked – over half of the traffic to my site comes from the search engines! I am doing it again with this post; I looked for long-tail keywords in regard to driving traffic to a website, and I found “get website traffic” with Google’s keyword tool – it gets searched for 14,800 times a month, and when entered into Google Search within brackets it has only 70,700 competing sites! That is fantastic! So I am trying to optimize this post for the search term “get website traffic” to hopefully get some traffic to my site through the search engines! Have a look at my Google Analytics account regarding sources of traffic to my site:
  

  Google Analytics - Traffic Sources Petra-Weiss.com

I actually hit the Jackpot with my “Free Affiliate Insider” scam posts – I landed on page one quickly and everybody who wants to know something about the program “Free Affiliate Insider” lands on my blog! Search Engine Traffic is the best traffic you can get; if you make it to page one for certain search terms, you get free and often quite considerable traffic to your website.

• I have been building backlinks to my site, also to improve my search engine rankings and get more traffic. I signed up with Angelas BackLinkBuilder Program through the Warrior Forum, for only $5 a month she is supplying you with 30 high page rank backlinks per month which you can use to link back to your site(s). This offer was too good to pass up! Now, whilst this might not be giving me much traffic in the short term, it will pay off in the longer term as my site search engine ranking will improve and I will therefore gain more free traffic from the search engines. Voila!

• I have been active in different IM Forums and have my sites links in my signature. So for every post I make, there is another link to my site(s) for people to click on. But truth to be told, I have been to busy to do much in forums lately, also something I have to improve on immensly!

• Yedda and Yahoo Answers. Yedda and Yahoo answers have acutally given me a fair amount of traffic from the answers I left there alone. If you go and answer questions on either of those sites, and you leave a link to your site, people are quite likely to “check out what you have to say” when they like your answer.

• Twitter, Facebook – hmmm, this is absolutely to be improved on! Shame on me, for ages I haven’t even been following my followers on twitter, which is a shame! I need to get more active in Social Networks and get the word out.

• Writing Articles, Squidoo Lenses – as much as I know that this will get you more traffic, I simply didn’t have the time to get too much into that lately. Something to think about regarding outsourcing. It could well be worth spending the money for somebody to write me some articles. If you optimize your articles with good keywords, they can bring in a fair amount of traffic.

This is mainly what I have been doing to get website traffic to petra-weiss.com. What have I planned to do in the short term to really try to spike my traffic for the contest?

1. Twitter – I will tweet a lot more, maybe re-tweet some of my greater posts , not only tweet when I make an update to my blog which is about once every two weeks…
2. Comment, comment, comment. I will comment on many of the other students blogs (some of whom you will find here to the right in my sidebar; absolutely great people there!), on other IM blogs and just try to add more value to the community!
3. Keep going with answering questions at Yedda and Yahoo answers. Both invaluable traffic sources for me!
4. Forums – be more active in forums.

Puh, I am sure that’s not all, but that’s about it for me tonight, it’s nearly 11 pm and I have to be up for my accounting and bookkeeping studies tomorrow morning, so if I find more things I can add to this list I will do so – later. Might just do a few tweets before shut-eye, though….