A Little Rant

Ranting is something that I don’t like to do and I suppose it doesn’t make this much of an advanced blog, but I thought I’d rant anyway. I think there might be something to learn, if you want too.

Basically, I’ve been experimenting a little bit with cheap $7 ebooks that I set up and sell. I know selling these cheap is not smart. I use these cheap ebooks to test out niches that I want to dive into. I want to see that I can get some sales with some crappy little ebook before I make a more comprehensive and more expensive product to sell.

As an affiliate, you don’t have to put up with all the shit. Even if you’re a publisher at Clickbank, you don’t have to put up with a lot of the shit from customers. You’re going to get shit from people no matter what, but for $7 (minus 50 cent fee from Paypal) it’s not worth it.

It’s been about 5 days now since someone bought this $7 ebook. I do it independently through Paypal, so after they make the purchase they’re supposed to get redirected to a page to download. Of course, some people don’t get forwarded to the download page. This is probably a problem on their side and not with Paypal.

Well, this person pays at 4:03pm. I get an email at 4:06pm telling me that they didn’t get the report and that it was supposed to be instant. At 4:25pm (when I first saw the email), I replied back with the link for them to get it with an apology. A few minutes later I get an email from Paypal saying that they opened a dispute. It hasn’t been 30 minutes since they purchased and they opened a dispute.

Here is what they wrote in the dispute: “Ordered your report, which was supposed to be delivered electronically right away. No link, no response after email sent. Send me the report NOW or I’ll continue to pursue getting my money back through paypal.”

They haven’t responded to my email since. Hasn’t closed the dispute or anything.

I suppose the point of this rant is that you’re going to have to put up with shitty customers no matter what. There is nothing that you can do about shit brains like that, but I think it is important to make it worth your wild. $6.50( $7 after fees) just isn’t worth it. E-Junkie can help with this sort of mess since it will email them the file.

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On another rant side note, EzineArticles had a 100 articles in 100 days event. I didn’t know about it at the time until I got an email telling me that I qualified. Basically they told me that I could get a free mug. Not that big of a deal, but a free mug is a free mug.

Well they eventually sent it to me, but I have to pick up the parcel at the post office. It requires me to present photo ID and a signiture to get it. That wouldn’t be a problem, but they addressed it to one of my pen names. Dumbasses.

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Dynamic SEO Search

Obviously automating what will make you money is a desirable thing to do as a webmaster. Dynamic SEO is a concept where you have a website that consistently grows its content for search engines. It’s something that is done automatically too. Not to mention that you can use the information here for your own research.

The key here is that your visitors are going to build the SEO content and they’re never even going to know how.

Check it out

Looking at this page should give you enough information for what I’m talking about. Basically you want to have a search box for people to search your site. You’re not necessarily doing this for the sake of them finding content, but merely to build a dynamic page for their search.

You’ll notice that when you do a search it will go to it’s own unique URL (/search/the-text-you-searched/). That page is now permanent. Back on the search page you can see a list of the searches, with links to the unique pages. This is so search engines can spider and index them.

You’ll also noticed that the listed search results also have a number in brackets. That’s to illustrate that if something is searched more than once it will be counted. Obviously you have no reason to share that information with regular users. I’m just showing it to illustrate that I’m counting. What you can do is make a 4122.php (or whatever you want to call it) file and access that on your own to view a list of the counts. That means you have your own proven keyword research, which is good.

Building This

The logic here is really quite simple. A very simple database is needed here.

ID auto_increment
Search varchar 100
Perma varchar 100
Count int

Basically you want to store the actual searched text. You also want to create a perma link address and store that too. If someone searches “How is that?”, your perma should look like “how-is-that”. Everything that isn’t needed should be stripped.

When you’re checking a search against the database, search against the Perma values. There can be slight variations in lower/upper case letters and punctuation. Just search the Perma and if there is a match, increment the count.

The Result Page

Your actual result page can be customized anyway you want to be. Typically you’ll want it to look like your normal page, so users at least think they’re on the same site. As you can see from my example pages, there isn’t anything there. Don’t do that, I’m just giving the basic shell of what this search thing should do.

First off, you do not need to show any decent search results. Obviously, the less dynamic the content of the page, the less likely Google will like it. That’s not to say that long tail keywords won’t get traffic because they will, but the more competitive words will not get any love.

There are few things you can try…

1. You can make a table on your database that is for affiliate links. You just basically you need ID, Affiliate Link, Title and Summary for the table. You can add in as much of them as possible and when someone searches you can use these as the results. It’s your choice if you randomly choose the top three of them or if you search the links for something related.

2. If you have a blog you can always search against that database. You can put an affiliate link first result and list related blog posts as the rest of the results and you can even give a little summary of the text. Now, I’m not going into the algorithms of searching a database. There are obviously smart ways to do this mathematically and stupid ways. I don’t care how you do it. All I know is that having different results showing up with 100 characters of the blog post showing up as a summary, you’re going to end up with a pretty unique looking page in the eyes of Google.

This is all you have to do. It is as simple as it gets to creating dynamic SEO that you don’t have to worry about. Your users will build your site every time they take a search. Not to mention the fact that you have access to actual search data, which you can use.

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August SEO Project Begins

Well, I just finished up my June Project. Basically I’m going to let the domains in that project marinate for a bit and see how they progress into the 3rd and 4th months.

I gave you guys a little into here. I also gave a break down on the competition and guess what? I can’t tell which keyword is which. Google changes things around so much I can’t match up the numbers. I probably should have fixed this up in a spread sheet before I posted it, so I’m going to do that now.

Here is the new breakdown (Format Style: Direct Competition – Indirect Competition, Current Backlinks)

Keyword 1: 43300 – 1120000, 2
Keyword 2: 43600 – 304000, 2
Keyword 3: 26900 – 483000, 1
Keyword 4: 30600 – 406000, 2
Keyword 5: 22000 – 1980000, 1
Keyword 6: 35300 – 2000000. 1
Keyword 7: 71800 – 2080000, 3
Keyword 8: 37700 – 330000, 47

* Backlink count is based on Yahoo’s Site Explorer numbers.

I wanted to fuck around with this for a little bit to truly understand the Google process. I thought about taking stats from every day over the entire project. I’d compile it in a spreadsheet and compile it into a graph to see over the entire project and the movements of searches.

I won’t do this because it seems like overkill, but I will take an official reading once a week. That should enough of the instability of the ranking process, without me being an anal prick about it.

Scheduled Link Building Process

Monday: Link Directories
Tuesday: Blog/Gov/Forum Links
Wednesday: Link Directories
Thursday: Content Day
Friday: Press Releases and Link Directories

I know this doesn’t look balanced. There’s an awful lot of link directory submissions, which people don’t view as the strongest. The problem really is that with blog/forums, you can pretty much get a comment on most of the blogs and forums in one full day of work. After a few weeks it becomes harder to productively build links in specific areas, so that’s why link directories are common here.

I hope this will be educational for you.

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The Location Database

As promised, I said we would go into advanced topics and that is what I want to do today. My mentor that I had during my adult webmaster days recommended a locations project as a great tool for search engine traffic. The problem back in the day was that it took a lot of work and it was very tedious.

In order to follow this post you will have to Learn a Server Side Programming Language. You can still do this manually. It’s a lot of fucking work though. This doesn’t take much time.

I want us to stipulate a few things:

First, there are specific keywords and niches that you’re going to struggle with. There is no way in hell that you’re ever going to get in the top 10 at Google for weight loss. I don’t want to be a negative person, but the chances of you actually achieving that will be very slim.

Secondly, people will search their location along with the keyword. You might not find a lot of people that do this, but it is done. This type of thing happens in some niches more than others, but it is done.

Lastly, when people do search *niche name* *city* there isn’t much of any competition for it. There might be a few thousand pages and none will ever be optimized properly.

For a few cities, this isn’t that big of a deal. If a city gets you 5 hits a month, than you got nothing, but if you get 5 hits a month for every city in America than you got some real traffic. Add in other places like Canada, Europe, Australia/NZ, etc and you’re going to get a lot of traffic in your niche.

Since we are going to use server side programming and a database, we can automate this process. We can use the same database over and over again. Once the programming is finished, you can use the script on all your sites and have 1000 pages added to your site with 30 minutes of tweaking.

The process that is going to take the most time is making the database.

The Database

I thought about how this database should be made and I couldn’t keep it as simple as city and state. When I added mine, I added more information so I could add them to each of the city pages to make it ever more unique.

Basically for your database you will want the following: city, state, country, a few communities/neighborhoods in the city, a few landmarks/tourist places in the city, and a unique few lines about the city. That’s how I made my database.

I made my database like this:

ID int auto_increment
city varchar(32)
state varchar(32)
population varchar(10)
neighborhood1 varchar(32)
neighborhood2 varchar(32)
neighborhood3 varchar(32)
site1 varchar(100)
site2 varchar(100)
country varchar(3)
abstract text

In retrospect, I forgot about cities and states that were actually two words. It’s perfectly acceptable like this, but you just have to do some more tedious programming to make sure you’re changing around “New Jersey” to “New-Jersey”, so it’ll properly work in the URLs.

You could also add in permalinks for each:

permacity varchar(32)
permastate varchar(32)

Either way you should be able to program either way and since you only have to program once, you don’t have to worry about it.

Building this database can be done a number of ways. You can obviously outsource the work because it is a pain in the ass. You can buy a database, but I doubt you’ll find a database like this. You might only find city/state databases. Or you can do it yourself. I made my own, I just did it for one day a week and got through it.

If you make it yourself, than you have to make a back end admin section to add them in. It’s just a standard form that you fill out. I found programming the back end with delete functions and edit functions to be more tedious than building the front end.

The Front End

The front end is relatively easy. Anyone that knows php should be easily able to do this. Just make sure you structure your directories properly:

domain.com/State/City/

You also have to make sure that your state page lists all the cities under that state.

I’m not really concerned about the content of the state page, it’s the cities page. What you want to do is put the title of your page *NICHE* City, State. You also want to have H1 tags at the top of the page for *NICHE* City, State.

What you want to do is write out sentences and work in the information (php in [] brackets):

Welcome to my page on *Niche* for the great city of [? echo $city; ?]. It doesn’t matter if you live in [? echo $community1 . ", " . $community2 . ", or " . $community3; ?] because I will be able to help you with your *NICHE PROBLEM*…

You get the idea. You’ll obviously want to have a link off the page to your affiliate link and also a link back to the state page. This type of structure has been proven to be unique enough for the search engines. It appears with Google that the less sites there are for a particular search, the less they care about regurgitated content.

If you don’t think it is unique enough you can add in random functions. As you can see the page starts with “Welcome to my page on *Niche* for the great city of”, you can set up a bunch of different starting sentences and make them be selected at random. It’s sort of like those article spinners. This should work good enough.

The last thing you need to do is create a sitemap page or something to list all the cities on the site, so Google can find and index them all.

That’s it. That’s all you have to do. Once the database is done and you’ve done the programming, you can just reuse it over and over again. You just have to change the unique pages for cities and states so they obviously fit in with the niche.

You’re done. You just have to keep building the database and let it grow until it makes a ton of pages. Oh and you don’t have to wait to finish the database before you set up pages. The pages will grow with the database, so you can get this all set up now.

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Learn a Server Side Programming Language

I’ll admit in the past that I haven’t been the biggest supporter of this type of thing, but I’ve changed my view. If you’re unfamiliar with a server side programming language, it is basically something that is executed on the server to produce the page, rather than some static HTML page. For example, this blog works that way. There are no static pages, they’re all produced when requested by a visitor.

There are a lot of different options you can choose from that are server side programming.

CGI/PERL: When I got my first webpage in the 90′s, this was the language of choice. Pretty much all hosting will have this because it’s just so old. Personally I’ve never known how to program in perl, but you can still do it.

Server Side Includes (SSI): I’ve done very basic programming with this in the past. You can tell pages that use it by the extension. They typically are listed as .shtml. I’m not exactly sure how versatile, but it’s definitely an example.

Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP): This is the language of today basically. It’s the one that I sat down and learned. It’s like a lot of the other languages out there like java, C, C++, etc. That made it pretty easy for me to learn in a relatively short period of time. Go with PHP if you’re looking for something to learn because it has the most free information available online to learn and the most community forums with active people.

I thought it was important for me to explain to you why you should be learning this. Like I said with my very first post, this is an advanced blog. I want to talk about advanced topics. In this case, PHP gives us a lot more power to automate. This is the only reason that I want to use it.

The problem you’re going to run into is that you’re going to have too many websites at one point. You’re just going to run out of time every single day because there is just too much to do. When you can automate a 1000 page website instantly, than you’re rockin’ the shit.

This is why you have to learn server side programming because that’s exactly where we’re going with this blog and I’m definitely not going to give you a copy of the language you’ll need to do things.

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SEO Project Starting in August

I thought it would be interesting to start this blog off with a project that I will be doing and obviously documenting for your benefit. I’ve already bought 8 domain names for the project and all the research has already been done. I’m obviously not going to share the domain names with you because frankly it isn’t any of your business, but obviously I can share the wisdom along the way of ranking them.

Objective: I have a very simple objective for this project and it is to get all of these domain names to rank for their specific keywords at Google in the top 10. Preferably the higher the better.

The reason that it is starting in August is that I want to give it time for the domains to slow index. I know everyone seems to want to get their site indexed by Google within a few hours. Like, who the fuck cares. It’s not like you’re going to make the big bucks getting indexed in a few hours. A slow indexing for me is something that takes about 3-4 weeks to happen. I typically let Google find the site from an article directory or something like that.

It’s sort of like a month for the domain to sit because you just can’t go nuts link building right away.

The reason that I’m doing 8 domains is that SEO is something that takes time. I don’t except to get any decent results until at least 3 months in. It would be retarded to go one domain at a time. I can balance 8 domain names without much of a problem.

I’ve been doing it with 8 domains on a previous project that I’ve been updating on my wiki. You can view the project here. Even though that project is progressing in a decent manner, I don’t think it is truly an objective project. Some of the domain names are on the older side. One of the domain names I think is personally getting punished by Google, so it’s hard to view the results.

This one will be much better because at least more variables are controlled. It’s going to be interesting because I hope to dominate every single one of these terms.

I really do want to start this now though, but I know I have to wait a bit. The domains are bought. Landing pages are made. Slow indexing is occurring.

Here is the keyword breakdown (First number: “keyword in quotes”, Second number: keyword):

Keyword1: 41,200 – 320,000

Keyword2: 41,900 – 1,100,000

Keyword3: 40,500 – 279,000

Keyword4: 28,800 – 137,000

Keyword5: 32,000 – 121,000

Keyword6: 20,400 – 2,230,000

Keyword7: 38,100 – 403,000

Keyword8: 76,400 – 378,000

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Umm, I don’t want to end this post just like this. It needs a little more substance, so I thought I’d talk about the like June Project I was working on.

I’m about a month and half into this project. The results have been interesting. There has been significant movement in the first month. I was able to get into the top 10 for a keyword I never thought I’d get. I’ve been bouncing around position 7 – 10 for it. I’ve noticed this second month that things are having a hard time moving. They’re sort of stuck where they are now.

The funny thing is that one of my keywords I’m ranking for is being outranked by a site with no backlinks. It has absolutely no fuckin’ backlinks and it’s on the top 10. I’m stuck on page 8 or something. All that tells me is that it just has to sit for a while and eventually it’ll move.

I might write something of substance tomorrow. But I’m hoping the project will be a very interesting and educational project in the future.

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I’m Back, With an Advanced Blog

Hello Readers,

Well, it’s been a while since I last posted. I put things on hold with the old blog because I felt things getting stale. It was like I was writing blog posts, for the sake of just writing one. I didn’t want my blog to be that way, so I took sometime off to figure out some things.

As you should be picking out right now, the blog is on a subdomain now, and it is that for a reason. I want to talk about more advanced topics now. I’m sure you’re getting sick of the same old shit from blogs. I took a peak in at the Warrior Forum the other day to see the same old shit, with the same old topics and the same old advice. It annoys the hell out of me and I certainly hope it annoys the hell out of you.

I want this blog to be the next evolutionary step in my process as a webmaster. I didn’t want to tear down and redesign the old blog. I wanted to keep it up as a catalog of information that I was using as I grew as a webmaster.

For that reason I welcome you to the new blog…

But before you get excited, this site is going to be about much more advanced topics. A lot of things are going to be over your head, but I promise you the information is good. I’m just giving you a warning now that the topics are advanced in nature.

Also if you take a look at the blog, you’ll probably think it looks like a blog, but a little different. That’s because it is a fully customized front end and a WordPress backend. This is probably going to make it into an advanced blog post, but there is a reason I did it. WordPress has a very easy to use backend administrative area. Sometimes the front end stuff just doesn’t look the way you want it to. Now, I can just do whatever I want.

I thought I’d give you guys a shout out to the advanced blog. It’s not fully finished yet. There are a few things I need to tweak. Also as I get more posts the site should fill out better.

Cheers,

Christopher

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