Take care of the pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves

The phrase is a bit outdated for personal finance. I would probably say take care of the dollars and the hundred dollar bills will take care of themselves. Anyway the point is evidently clear. The point is that you need to take care of the little things and the big things will just come.

For example, if you’re looking to get ranked for a heavily searched keyword like “best vacuum cleaner”, don’t worry about it until you’ve taken care of the small things. If you’re not in position 1 for “best vacuum cleaner on the market”, “best vacuum cleaner 2012″ and all the other long tails, you’re not in a position to go rank for that keyword. While you’re busy winning the easy battles for these longtail keywords you’re going to end up winning the big battle too.

This is the best piece of advice I can give you. Do this and you’ll make money and you’ll be successful. If you don’t know what some of the long tails are, go look at your site stats. See what people are searching and see where you show up in the results. Once you get all those long tail keywords number one, I’ll give you permission to go after the big ones.

Good luck.

Let’s say that you have a site on dress pants. And let say there is a keyword you want to rank for like “pleated dress pants”. I don’t know how tough it is to rank for such a keyword and it really doesn’t matter. The point is that people are looking for attributes and characteristics of pleated dress pants. This means that you can go after things like:

black pleated dress pants
blue pleated dress pants
white pleated dress pants
tight pleated dress pants
baggy pleated dress pants
cotton pleated dress pants

You get the idea with those examples. People search all of those terms. Some might only have a few dozen searches a month and others will have a few hundred. The big thing I was trying to illustrate in my previous post was that this type of term is relatively easy to rank for if you target it.

I did a little experiment to see how this would end up working if applied two different ways. This experiment isn’t scientific in anyway, as I used different niches and the number of links may differ. I’ll give the examples as if they were pleated dress pants related. All pages are in the sub-directory of the main domain name.

Method A

Pleated Dress Pants main page that links to the following pages:

black pleated dress pants
blue pleated dress pants
yellow pleated dress pants
…
etc

Method B

Pleated Dress Pants main page that contains all the different keywords (or slight variations) within the pages content (obviously much longer piece of content).

————————-

The question boils down to which one had better results from a search engine point of view. Personally I like method A better because you have laser targeted pages, which pretty much guarantee a click in the search results. Before starting I suspected method B would be the winner.

The Winner? Method B.

When you compare the attributes/characteristic keywords between the two you don’t notice that much of a difference. Some of the keywords hit the front page and some didn’t. With method B, the pages that did hit the front page were much closer to number 1, with many hitting it.

The big difference that separates the two is that the main keyword (pleated dress pants) is shuffling around position 10-12 with method B. With method A it is no where to be found and it makes sense. The fact is that when you build a link for red pleated dress pants, you’re also building a link for pleated dress pants.

I want to point out that this method isn’t as scientific as I’d like it to be. I didn’t send a lot of links to have conclusive results. But I did send fewer links to method B than I did to method A.

Mr. Obvious

This should bring home the obvious point. You should never be building pages of content targeting one keyword. There should always be other related keywords that you put in there. You don’t have to use a high density of those bonus keywords. One time or even zero times works fine. The point is that when you start building links to the page you focus equally on all the keywords you put in.

Lately, I’ve been working hard to change the way I work with my business and the way the business works itself. Backpacking around the world doesn’t really give you the optimum work environment for a business to thrive. It requires a delicate approach because I’m going to be in countries where the internet is patchy at best. Working out of your backpack with a laptop isn’t easy. These are new challenges I’m face with now and as the time comes closer for my RTW, I’m probably going to talk about these kind of issues and building a business that works this way.

Building a Cloud

This is something that I’ve been working on probably for the last 6 months. That’s not to say that I’ve been working on it for 6 months straight. I’ve been playing with it and seeing what will work best for me. The idea behind a “cloud” is that you can access your stuff from multiple computers. It’s often managed on many servers, so it’s virtually never down. I need my entire work operation cloud based. My laptop might break on the trip. It might not be secure to work over a WiFi connection in some countries. My only option could be sitting down in front of an internet cafe computer and working there. What I’m creating is the exact same environment through a cloud. Everything is completely the same because of the cloud.

But this goes well beyond just websites. My business used to be sole proprietor from a government tax view and now I’ve incorporated. This saves me a lot more in taxes, but brings on a more administrative side of things. I need to be able to cloud my physical mail. This allows me to see my actual mail. If I have to forward something to my accountant, I can do it easily over email. These are the challenges of running a legal corporation while traveling around the world for a year (or more).

Automating As Much As I Can

One of the biggest things that pisses me off about Amazon, as a Canadian affiliate, is that they don’t do direct deposit. Shitty Clickbank is able to do this on a weekly basis, yet Amazon has a problem with this. They claim that it is an issue with converting currencies. I have a US Dollar bank account at a Canadian bank, so it really isn’t that big of a deal I don’t think. Anyway, I hate checks. I hate depositing them. Being out of the country makes it impossible unless you have someone acting on your behalf.

As a Canadian, I’ve been able to get around this problem by opening a corporate bank account in the United States. This took a little while to setup, but I actually got it to work. It will be the topic of a future “how to” post for the Canadians out there that want to direct deposit their Amazon earnings. I need to have all my earnings to be directly deposited into a bank account. This means Amazon, as well as some of my other earnings like Clickbank and Commission Junction.

Outsource Like a MOFO

One of the big things I’ve learned since I went from full time (I was doing full time Internet marketing from the very start) to part time is that I honestly don’t have all the time in the world to get what needs to be done. I need to start adding in outsourced work for my sites. Right now this aspect isn’t that important because despite only working part time on this I am still pretty good at getting the necessary work done. I have a pretty good routine and understanding of what works and doesn’t.

But with all that I’m going to end up without internet for periods of a few weeks. That’s not going to make or break me when it comes to earnings, but I need to make sure that work stays relatively consistent over the year. I know I’m going to be taking a crowded 7 hr train ride around a country. And when I get off, I’m not going to feel like working. It’s just one of those things. I need to develop more of a “project manager” role with outsourced groups. I’ll still work like I do now, but I need to accept the fact that I’ll not be able to do it all.

I also have the goal of having more money when I return from my RTW than I had when I left. So another reason for this.

As you can see, my challenges have changed. This means the things I’ll inevitably talk about will change too.

Current Time: Nov. 26 at ~ 8:00pm Mountain Standard Time.

Something I never did was tell you how you should do that. I’m currently doing a test on a site of mine for two different keywords and seeing which way is best. One keyword has individual pages for each variation. So a page for grey dress pants, one for blue dress pants and on. The second keyword has one page, with all the keywords/colors added in. I didn’t use the exact keyword for all the colors, but I worked it in enough in variations. And I’m going to see which one is better. I’ll judge this basis on which one ranks the most variations in the top 10.

The second thing I’m doing is that I’m working on what I’ll call “hobby sites” mainly on web2.0 properties (blogger, wordpress, and my own domains). Hobby sites are the sites that you’re interested in and talking about. Usually it’s really easy for you to work on this site, but you don’t end up making any cash. This still holds true and the hobby sites aren’t being built to earn money. But I’ve noticed that some of my older hobby sites (3 years+) are actually strong forces (high PR, natural links, strong holdings for most keywords, mainly SE traffic). I’ve started to casually hand off links to some of my money sites. I don’t do it in a spammy way. I’m very careful, but I want more of these hobby sites to pass links off. I find that polarizing topics are the best (ie: anything politically). The reason is that you can express yourself how you want. There will be people that agree, people that are warm to your ideas and people that will absolutely hate it. And they’ll link to you from their sites telling you off. A link is a link.

The third thing is a move in diversification. I want to sell advertising space on a website. I know there is money on this, but I honestly don’t know much about it. I’ve started putting this into action. I have to build a very clean, informative site. We’ll see how this goes. I’m going to make one niche type of site that will do this. I’m also going to create a site for my local city that ranks for specific keywords and see if I can sell advertising space on my site locally (through email). I’m not going to actively go door to door because I want something that I can apply to every city I want, regardless of where I live.

These are currently the items that are in development. I’m hoping I can report on this within 6 months and give an idea of how it is working.

Edit:

One of my “hobby” sites has become very strong lately. The traffic has picked up. And that’s what I want. I want power I can push. I don’t need to monetize the site. Check out the jump in traffic below.

These are the stats for my number one site, which probably earns roughly 25-30% of my total income. Hit like this hurt. I honestly believe this major update is temporary. The reason I believe that is quite simple; search results haven’t improved. And really that is Google’s goal. They want people to use their search engine and they need to see an improvement of results. As you should know, I’ve been building similar sites on different web servers for my top earning sites (I’m trying to dominate the top 10). What this new Google update did to one of my top earners was remove it from the front page (lots of content, 2 year + old) with one of my new sites on a different server with 5 pages of content (4 pages + the main page). For this reason I believe the move is temporary and will be tweaked by Google.

But even if nothing changes, all I can do is move forward. And I feel like getting back to basics is important. For a lot of you this may feel like starting from scratch. This just means it is more important to start building from a solid foundation and get things right. I often hear people say that little sites are done and you’re going to have to stick with a few big ones. Horse shit is all I have to say. Little sites, medium sites and big sites all have their place. Mom & Pop’s convenience store website will always be a small site, but that doesn’t mean their searches shouldn’t be any less relevant. The key is diversification. Diversification not only of websites, but also the ratio of big keywords and little keywords. Just as owning own big site and getting slapped will result in your demise, ranking for a few big keywords and getting slapped is the same conclusion.

It is often the small traffic keywords that are more reliable, easier to hold, less likely to be lost from a slap and more likely to convert.

What I Learned from an Adult Webmaster

And when I say adult, I think you know what I mean. When I first started into developing websites, I started with the adult industry. Mainly the big commissions attracted me to the industry. This was a while ago and I gave up with years before I tried again in mainstream sites. I was very on/off with it. I wasn’t dedicated. I didn’t treat it as a business and therefore I struggled with it. But with that failure came a lot of understanding and I owe a lot to an adult webmaster that taught me a lot. He knew what he was doing. And it seems like as I progress forward that I see his advice is more and more relevant.  So I advise you to read this and really try to apply what I’m telling you. This isn’t easy, or glamorous. It’s just no bull what works.

Build. Submit. Forget. Repeat.

This was his mantra; his advise; his philosophy. The submit part is more relevant to the adult webmaster, but the translation to mainstream is Build. Link. Forget. Repeat. All this meant is that you need to build content, link to it and forget about it. Don’t go back and try to make it better. Don’t try to make it look prettier. Don’t check your stats to see if people are coming. Don’t Google your keywords to see if it is on the front page. Don’t check your affiliate stats to see if you made a sale. Literally, build content, link to it and forget about it. Go back to making another page of content. Don’t stop making content.

The key is numbers. More pages, mean more “spider cider” for search engines like Google and in turn the more keywords that you’ll rank for. This is an important philosophy to understand and apply. It may seem like going after one big keyword is really the way to success. It requires a lot more linking, a lot more time and you never know when your fortunes for that one keyword will disappear.

Keyword Research

The thought of keyword research popped into my head lately as I was evaluating a site that I bought earlier in the year. This site was bought impulsively. I saw that it was available and I took it. It was a single word (5 characters) .info. And yes INFO domains are fine. But when I started to do keyword research I realized there really wasn’t a lot of keyword variety to go with. A site on vacuum cleaners could produce hundreds of keywords from a tool, mine would produce around a dozen.

I remembered back to a conversation with him about it. He told me that he didn’t do any keyword research. We should all know what the big keywords in your niche are. We all know the ones that are highly competitive and have a rewarding number of searches. If we were to divide keyword traffic up into categories we would have low, medium, high and super high. Super high would be the untouchable keywords we all know we won’t rank for (like “credit card”). High are the ones that produce high traffic and are attainable within a year or two. Medium and low are the ones that produce maybe a few hits a month to a few hundred.

Since we already know what the super high and high ones are, we have to figure out the mediums and lows. The thing about keyword tools is that they don’t tell you everything. They don’t tell you shit. They’ll give you the basics, but in the range of low to medium you’re never going to see what’s really there. It’s going after low to medium keywords that is the interesting part of the job because you’ll find gems in there. They’re more targeted, better converting and easier to get. And this is why he didn’t use keyword tools. They don’t tell you this stuff. In fact, they get your view so narrow that you often miss out on the keywords found with a little thought and imagination.

The question real boils down to how you get keywords if you’re not using the tool. The key is being systematic. The best way for me to explain this is with an example. Let’s say that you have a site for “dress pants”.

The key here is taking adjectives, characteristics, etc that are relevant to the product you’re selling (ie: dress pants).

So let’s take color: white, pink, red, orange, brown, yellow, gray, green, cyan, blue, violet, black, purple

white dress pants
pink dress pants
red dress pants
orange dress pants
brown dress pants
yellow dress pants
grey/gray dress pants
green dress pants
cyan dress pants
blue dress pants
violet dress pants
black dress pants
purple dress pants

I know that a lot of these colors don’t work that well for dress pants, but take the lesson. You should make each one of these pages on your site. You should find a relevant product to sell to each of them. The pages you can’t find any, you write a page about how they don’t exist and send them to a page that has all the different types of available dress pants.

But what other attributes can we add into this?

Fits:
pleated dress pants
tight dress pants
loose dress pants
baggy dress pants
fitted dress pants

Fabrics:
cotton dress pants
polyester dress pants
wool dress pants
silk dress pants
satin dress pants

Patterns:
plaid dress pants
striped dress pants
checkered dress pants

I know that a lot of these don’t apply to dress pants and it was probably a bad choice for an example, but you should able to to apply these things. A t-shirt would have been a better example, but that doesn’t mean “thinking” like this about dress pants won’t yield the same results. There are attributes regarding dress pants and if you can systematically make pages for them you’ll get results. People do search like this. It might not be the highest volume of keywords, but they are searched. As long as you are advertising exactly what they want, you’re likely to make a sale.

There are also other attributes that apply to the person searching and the end goal they would like from the product. So this is about knowing who you’re selling to. For dress pants, the words professional, conservative, etc would apply because that’s what they want. They want dress pants that make them look professional or they want to have a very conservative type of look.

Anyone that has sold women’s clothes know that they search all sorts of things. Sexy, hot, cute, etc.

With the example systematic keywords above we know that “black dress pants” is probably about the highest volume searched and the most competitive. You can even apply the same thing to that keyword.

professional black dress pants
pleated black dress pants
sexy black dress pants

I hope you’re getting the idea here and aren’t getting discouraged by the whole dress pants niche.

The point of all this is that you’re going to lock up very easy to get keywords that people search. They might not produce a lot of traffic, but it adds up. Some of these searches will start to get double digit searches a day. Nothing near having anything that will pay bills, but the key is numbers. A hundred pages like this will fill out a site and could produce you anywhere from 100-1000 hits a day. You might have to write more content, but overall this is a pretty solid move. These keywords are easy to get. The first two dozen will probably need keywords, but after that everything will start to rank with nothing more than producing the page. Not to mention that the volume of content you have allows you to pick up additional long tail keywords and gives you the chance to go after keywords in the medium to high range.

The big winner with this method is that everything is laser targeted and easy to rank for. Someone searching “pleated blue dress pants” isn’t difficult to sell too. You show them a way to pleated blue dress pants and they’re probably going to buy. Whereas with the keyword “dress pants” you have no idea what their style is or what they’re interested in.

Traffic/Affiliate/Sales Stats

My adult webmaster mentor had a very simple philosophy when it came to stats; don’t. There are people that work on websites that literally spend half their day checking their stats, seeing if they made sales, and doing searches at Google to see if their site comes up. It’s a big fuckin’ waste of time. Here’s an fyi for you. Your stats will be still there for you if you check it later. In fact, his advice to me was to check my stats once a month. When you don’t have stats to check, all you have to do is work. In fact, if you’re someone that is looking to earn with Amazon, you should just work. Don’t check your stats. Just keep working and working until that first check comes in the mail. Check out your stats than and wait another month.

Your sales aren’t going to disappear. Your search traffic isn’t going to go missing from your traffic stats. Your affiliate checks aren’t going to miss your mailbox. Just do the fucking work that produces results and that is building content and building links.

It’s time to work guys and I’m hoping since Google made the big move that some of you are understanding the need for something like this. Get working. Don’t visit this site anymore. Don’t go to forums. Just build content and build links. It’ll all pay off.

I hope this helps and hopefully I didn’t bounce all over the place too much.

But at the end of the day, pissing and moaning won’t help you.

I don’t have any particular beef with WordPress. I like the way it works and it is easy. The problems revolve around security. You have to keep WordPress up to date and the honest truth is that I don’t look at some of my sites for quite a period of time. The only real thing that I want is a commenting system on this site because I like to have people comment. I could develop something in PHP to allow me to create a completely static HTML page with my content and implement a commenting system at the bottom. This is really just too much work for me. So the plan now is to really just harden WordPress. I’m not to a point where I can just not update it. I wish I was, but I’m not. I want to get to that place.

So I’ll keep you posted and hopefully I can come up with something that is quite hardened and I can leave for quite sometime.

I’m giving you all the warning to back away from sites that use scripts because it leaves you completely open to exploitation and are you really willing to take a big hit with your earnings over a few months? Fuck it. Go static.

This wordpress site will remain up because I have a ton of shit I have to convert over to static and it will frankly take me time. So I wish you the best of luck. This site will no long be as it was. There will be no comments or anything like that. I’m not saying it will cease to exist, but it’ll take the way of the static site like at www.amxpert.com.

Fair warning people.

What I mean by that is that there is one simple philosophy that you really need to focus on in this business; And that’s doing what works over and over again. I know a lot of you still are trying to figure out what works, but once you find it do it again. My sites have been really clicking with Amazon and I know for the sake of diversifying that I would be limiting my income. And a big reason for that is I’m having trouble being accepted by US retailers similiar to Amazon (like overstock.com which instantly rejects applications from non-Americans). This is the predicament I’m in. I can generate less profit for the sake diversification, but I honestly don’t want to. I want maximum dollars.

I’ve basically revised my plan. Essentially what works, will be repeated and that will involve Amazon. So an Amazon site that is replicated, will be yet again an Amazon site. There are less variables to worry about.

For diversification, I’m going to come at CJ at a different direction and start fresh. I’m actually with a few companies on there and I’m going to implement some plans and see what clicks. I’ll keep you posted on everything ofcourse, but you can assume my Amazon earnings will be growing and I’ll let you know how CJ goes. I haven’t done any “active” work on CJ related stuff that would show results this year. I’ve written reviews for products, but haven’t backlinked them yet and they’re probably not even indexed. But I do have active sites on there right now that produce clicks and a few sales. So my stats of January 14 2011 are below and that can be a viewed as a base of what I will probably pull in a month or so with the sites I have now on it.

I also hope you guys are following my 2011 action log, which is sort of like a diary of what I do. It’s not that complicated, which is sort of the point.