It’s A Short One Tonight

Ok – ok – ok. I said that I would do two hours a night, but sometimes life just gets in the way. In this case, I’ve been feeling a little under the weather and need to stop early, so I only got in one hour tonight. But what a productive night!

Scratch Niche #2

I think some of my sour mood today (and possibly me feeling under the weather) was the fact that I spent two hours last night researching niches and keyword phrases. I dropped niche #1 as being too competitive. Niche #2 was looking good, but honestly I wasn’t happy with the numbers that I was getting from Traffic Travis. Basically, it just didn’t “feel” right.

Trust your gut. It’s most likely right.

So I started on keyword research for Niche #3.

Some Wonderful Discoveries

The first thing that I found was that Niche #3 was a gold mine for keyword phrases that were heavily searched and not heavily documented -which means that I had a very good chance of ranking high in the search engines.

The second thing that I found was that Niche #4 and Niche #3 were related close enough that I could “cross-keyword” the two niches and have each one play off the other. More income opportunities.

The third thing that I discovered was that there were so many good keyword phrases that I could most likely get about five blog sites of it. And that really means more income.

And the fourth thing? I found a good starting domain name, and bought it tonight.

And then?

Well, I realized I really needed to quit before I fell asleep over the keyboard.

The fact is, I can write the articles (next on the agenda) better if I’m not feeling so ding-dang tired.

So, I stopped. I can be much more productive tomorrow night.

Recap

So the niche has been found and the domain has been bought. It has now been three hours into this process.

Let’s see what the next two hours brings.

Best wishes, hold your head high, and Control Your Destiny.

Mike P Smith

The Results of Night #1

Last night I decided to see how quickly I can get an affiliate blog up and running. My goal was for it to take 2 nights. Here are the results of the first night.

I Give Myself a C

The idea was to give myself the full two hours to getting the blog researched, created, and written. Normally, I include the writing of this blog in those two hours, but this time the only “extra” thing I did was to tweet my progress through the night.

I didn’t do as well as I thought.

I was able to locate four niches that seemed promising. I then did the keyword research and analyzed the competition. The first one didn’t work out (although I’ll keep it on the back-burner and check it again later). The second one was a hit, but I ran out of time while researching the domain name.

I was hoping to have the articles done tonight, but that’s not going to happen.

Recap

All in all, a good night. This is, after all, only my second affiliate marketing site, so I have a lot to learn, especially in how to get things done quicker.

Best wishes, hold your head high, and Control Your Destiny.

Mike P Smith

LeFoo, I’m Afraid I’ve Been Thinking

You know, I just realized that I’ve been through the entire process now. I think it is time to do another blog straight from scratch (within the two hours) to see exactly how long it will take.

A Dangerous Pastime

So here are the ground rules:

• All work must be done within two hours
• All work must be done at night
• I must do everything from scratch (except purchase an account on a web hosting company – I’ve already got one of those)
• The entire two hours is to be devoted to the new blog (normally, I include the writing of this blog in my two hours – I won’t for this exercise)
• I will tweet every step that I do in order to keep the time correct (you can follow me here)

My original goal was to have one in a week. I’d like to have one up and running by the end of the second night.

I Know

So the only decision is to start tomorrow night or take tomorrow night off and start two night from now.

I’ll let you know.

This is going to be so much fun.

Mike P Smith

Hey! It Was Fun

So I was wrong. I admit it. Last Night I was lamenting that I most likely would have to go the automated route to put in the links to the popular link sites. I mean, it took me two nights just to sign up. Wrong!

It Was Fairly Painless

Once I got rolling with the system, it was fairly easy. It was time to put Blog Post #5 onto the blog, so I used that post to try out the manual submission process.

A few sites gave me login problems, a few sites also seemed never to come back, but all in all it was a good experience.

I was able to get about 14 of the sites submitted (I ran out of time) of the 39 for which I’ve signed up. Now, I would say about 7 of those sites had nothing at all to do with my niche, so I have a total of 32 in which to do. So about half done.

Here is what I found:

The Hard Ones

Some sites I had to manually enter in the URL, title, description, keywords, and the “I Am Human” question. These sites took the longest, and were about half of the ones to which I encountered. I didn’t like doing this, and this was the part where and automated process would work wonders.

But, they are “authority” sites, so it’s worth the time and effort.

The Easy Ones

The there were the ones to which I could put a bookmark on my Firefox (I use Firefox and Chrome for my browsers), go to the site, click the button, and have almost all the information filled out for me. Zip – zang – boom! And I was done in 30 seconds or less (I think I spent 10 seconds on one site).

Now this is the way to go! If I can get about 20 of these sites bookmarked like this, then I will be golden.

Recap

So, for the most part, I take back what I typed last night. There is merit to doing things manually. It’s good practice, and it doesn’t take that long. Give it a try – you’ll love it.

Best wishes, hold your head high, and Control Your Destiny.

Mike P Smith

I Can’t Believe I Ate The Whole Thing

Ok – so tonight I finished signing up for all of those sites. I’m tired. And I’m glad I did it. The exercise did me good in realizing how much time it will take summiting my blog to the various engines. Can any one say “automation”?

Free Link Building: Worth It?

I used a list provided by a free link builder that I discovered on the web (and has been mentioned before by my mentor) and on the Warrior Forum. Now that I have signed up for everything on that list, here is what I found:

• Total Number of Sites: 49
• Total Number of Dead Sites: 16

16? Yep. That’s bad. Of those 16, they were either:

• Dead sites
• Produced errors (one had PHP errors, another Drupal errors)
• Would not take new members
• Had nothing to do with link generation

All in all, I was disappointed. I’m glad I didn’t go through the entire process a few nights ago. I mean, it took me two nights just to get this far (33 sites).

So What’s Next?

Well, tomorrow night, I’m going to do some submissions and see where that gets me. It will also be time to post Article #5 for the blog, with a reminder that over the next two weeks I need to get at least four more articles out there.

Automation?

I have a sneaking suspicion that I will need to automate this process. But let’s see how the manual process does first.

Best wishes, hold your head high, and Control Your Destiny.

Mike P Smith

Am I Glad It Crashed

Ok – I am getting a real education here. Last night I used a free back link linking service that was suppose to automatically promote my site to about 50 different sites. Well, it crashed last night after 7 sites, so I thought it would be a good exercise to do it manually – tonight being “Sign Up For An Account” night. It was a good decision.

Spammer Alert!

First of all, quite a number of the sites (at least five as I write this, and I’m only half through the list) have very strict rules against “spamming” or “self-promoting” your linkage. And I can understand that. The spirit of some of these sites is in that you can share links with others that you find interesting, not links that get you clicks for your business.

Of course, that’s the business that we are in, so what is one to do? Well, I have no problem signing up for any of these accounts, but I will be sure to post content that is relevant to their Terms of Service. If not, I’m a spammer. Pure and simple.

Who Are You?

Then there were the sites that had absolutely nothing to do with the content for which I was posting. One of the sites dealt with Internet Marketing. Another site was for medical professionals. It had nothing whatsoever to do with my blog. So posting to them is considered spamming.

Unless I did have an article on Internet Marketing and another on Medical Procedures, but I digress.

Are You Even There?

Finally, there were sites that were either down completely or refused to accept new registrants. Like these were going to help me any.

What Did I Learn?

Well, I still have 20 or so in which to register, but I learned one very important thing: If you’re going to use those automated (or even free semi-automated) programs for generating back links, you better know to whom you are linking, and stay within their Terms of Service. Otherwise, bye-bye reputation!

Best wishes, hold your head high, and Control Your Destiny.

Mike P Smith

What a Night!

Tonight was the night I was going to use SocialMarker.com for my link submissions. So since it’s been four days since I posted an article, I posted it to my blog, when there, and gave it a ride.

Why Manual Submission

Social Marker is a manual submission site that helps you submit your articles to the leading authority sites on the internet. So what is an Authority Site? This is a site that Google looks towards as having information of importance to the Internet Community. A link from one of these sites will go far in helping you get your site ranked.

Now, the problem here is that you need to do it manually – as each authority site comes up you need to review the information that is getting posted. Not really a bad problem, but…

…why not automate the process? Well, it appears that a lot of these types of products costs money, and I’m trying to do all of this on a shoe-string budget.

Be Sure To Get Accounts

So I hit the “Go” button and watched the magic.

45 minutes later, I got to #6, and it killed the Social Marker frame. So I had to hit the back button.

I got to #7, and it sent me to my iGoogle account for registration. Ugh.

Then my FireFox crashed on me.

So my first use of the program did not go very well at all.

What will I do differently?

I would make sure that I’ve signed up for all of these services beforehand. I think signing up during this process is not the way to go. I mean, my Firefox crashed hard.

Recap

So tomorrow night I go through each of the authority sites and sign up for an account, then start the process again with the next article submission.

By the way, I had 12 WHOLE VIEWS on my blog (only two from search engines) during the weekend. No sales, though. But I haven’t promoted it enough to get it started, so we’ll see what this week does.

Best wishes, hold your head high, and Control Your Destiny.

Mike P Smith

A Night of Study

After a night of building the links, tonight has been more of a study night – specifically, link building, both manual and automated.

On A Budget

So which is really better? Manual Link Building or Automated? Well, it appears that automated is the way to go. However, it seems that the automated processes will cost more (I saw them from $35 to $49 per month).

Ouch.

I don’t know about you, but I’m on a shoestring budget (read: I’m broke). So I will need to do the link submission manually for now.

Off We Go

I already started doing the link submission last night (see link above), and like I said. tonight was study night, so I haven’t done anything link building for tonight.

What did I learn?

• Article Submission. There are some large article repositories out there (such as EZineArticles). These are huge authority sites, and getting established in these websites will go a long way towards inching you up that Google ladder.
• Manual Backlinks. Forum postings, blog commenting, things like that.
• Social Bookmarking. Do you tweet? Do you FB? You should – in fact there are some free options out there that will help you post to these social sites.
• RSS Feeds. Submit your blog’s RSS feed to sites that act as feed aggregators.

Of course, there is more – that just a sample listing. But they key here is that you have the tools available to you to get your blog up and out front – assuming that you can spend the time.

Then once you make your money, you can then go into the automated process and really see the links soar.

Recap

This is a real short post tonight, because it’s mostly a learning process. What I will do now is determine tomorrow night the path that I will take on the manual submission process (because, yes, I’m broke), and start that submission process.

Best wishes, hold your head high, and Control Your Destiny.

Mike P Smith

Gimme the Traffic!

Well, the site has been written, and has been published. So all that money will start pouring in and I can retire by the end of the month, right? You think? It won’t happen. No one knows the blog even exist.

Website Submission, Here We Come!

So next on the agenda is to submit the website to various other websites (such as Digg, Stumble Upon – you know the drill). Why do we want to do this? Well, in this Golden Age of Search Engine Optimization, the more links you have to your site, the better standing you will have.

Let me be more specific: The more quality and authoritative links you have to your blog will get you noticed more.

What does that mean? Well, you can submit your site all day to every Joe Blow Link Submission service, who will in turn create links for you in 6,000,000 websites, and yet you won’t see your site in Google. This is because Google will place more weight to websites that are heavily trafficked (more authority) than one that don’t. Think of it this way: If you sold fishing gear, would you rather have one link on the world’s leading website on Bass fishing, or 100 links on 100 sites that few people visit? That’s authority. That’s where you want to be.

So off to the authority sites

Of course, the granddaddy is Google, so make sure Google can see your site by typing “site:http://www.mysitehere.com” in the Google search box. If nothing shows, do what you need to do to get Google to index your site.

Next, submit to authority sites. I mentioned Digg and Stumble upon earlier. Frankly, there are many, many more than that. You just have to submit your site to each of these services in order to have your system given a greater authority. I would google “Authority Web Sites” and see what comes up. If you have better ideas, then search on your idea.

But simply create an account, ping your site (your home page), and you’re on your way.

What this is doing is building “back-links” to your site from other sites that the search engines determine to be authority sites. This will have the effect of getting you up in the top tier of searches on your keyword phrase. It still may take some time, but at least you will be on your way.

Recap

Get those back links started, make them count, and the search engines will reward you. And hopefully soon you will see that first dollar.

Tomorrow night is more submissions, so stay tuned. I’m also going to do some investigation with Bing in the next few days.

Best wishes, hold your head high, and Control Your Destiny.

Mike P Smith

Three Cheers!

Ok – I went 22 minutes over my two hours tonight (not including writing this blog entry). So, technically, I cheated. But I also took three days off in the past seven due to other commitments (and just plain tiredness), so I don’t feel too bad about it.

Besides…

IT’S PUBLISHED

Moments Like These Are To Cherish

Here are the grim statistics on this first attempt:

• # of Days to Find Good Keyword Phrase: 13
• # of Days to Publish Blog: 18

Holy Lunar Cycle, Batman! Is that a horrid track record or not? 31 Days – one entire month – to get the blog running. This, of course, includes the days off I took (I think five total – I’ll have to count).

But It’s All Good

The bottom line is that I actually did it. Now, I did all the research during those two hour periods (including writing this blog), so of course the numbers are going to be large. That research and blogging time mounts up really quick.

So my goal for the next blog will be one week (14 hours)

Blog #3? Four days (8 hours)

Blog #4? Two Days (4 hours)

Blog #5? One Day (2 Hours)

Once I get down to 1 per night, I should be able to crank out a minimum of five per week. Remember – this is a numbers game. I decided at the beginning that I had a better chance making this work if I went after markets that had potential rather than ones in which I was passionate.

We’ll find out within a year if that was a good move or not.

Recap

So I did it. I took the action, and it became a reality tonight.

So starting tomorrow night, we begin the promotion phase. That should be a lot of fun.

Best wishes, hold your head high, and Control Your Destiny.

Mike P Smith