Man Im getting worse at blogging ever month! I have the time to blog I guess I am just lazy. I wanted to share with everyone whats going on in my life, there is a lot going on these days :-s

Developer Hut

DH is my core business, I will probably never sell it because I use dh myself to promote my other businesses. I started the business in 2006 and it has been a fun ride the whole time. It was kinda of an accident how I started the company, I had people working for me that did blog commenting for my own projects. I wanted to get the prices cheaper so I started selling the service to get the costs down. That worked out great for a while until problogger blog about me here, that post made me 12k in 2 days. That is when I started to get the business going more.

In the last 2 years I havent done to many updates to the site, I think I put around 8k or so into the site this year. I am now teaming up with 2 people that will help me take developerhut to the next level. We will fix all of the problems that are wrong with developerhut (which is mostly customer support heh). We will also be putting in another 15k or so into the website in the next 2 months. We will be updating a lot of stuff and also adding more products. Below are some of the updates we will be doing;

Developer Hut Updates

Batch 1

- Update WordPress Product: I will design the product so that the customer sends us there ftp info and picks out a wordpress design and then my team will install wordpress and some basic SEO plugins. But we will not do any content. This product will sell for $19.99 and it will be great for people whom creates lots of websites, like me hehe.

- Update Squidoo Lens: lots of small backend updates to this product

- Add Web 2.0 Profile Links: a new product that will get better links then social bookmarks

- Add Wiki Links: a new product that gains link on wiki pages. its neat

- Add Local Marketing Packages: local marketing will be the next big thing, we will create a plan to help business rank there website for local terms.

- Update All-In-One And Recurring Plans: update the products and add all new products

- Add Managed SEO Packages: these types of orders will be managed by a SEO person to get the most bang for there buck.

- Add Managed Recurring SEO Packages: same as above just designed for recurring plans

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Coding Work Batch 2

- Shopping Cart: a way to order multiple products at once.

- Update Databases: update the databases to make them faster.

- Intagrate SSL Better: Fix all the ssl problems so there will be 0 ssl errors on the website.

- Bulk Editing: make it so people can edit multiple orders at once.

- Update Track Your Order Page: the track your order page will totaly be redesigned so people can track lots of orders at once (for example people that will spend 100k+ a year)

- Buy Products Using Credit: Make it so you can use credit on the original products pages.

The costs for the updates will be around 15k or so and it will take 2 months or so. I have also hired someone for customer support, but we will be hiring another person soon so that we will have the best customer support in the industry. I have fucked up the customer support in the past :-s

Option? Let me know any suggestions you have, that will help a lot thanks

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Selling Business

I have a few different businesses, I decided to sell one of them for 70k because I want to get into some bigger markets with more return customers. I haven’t sold it yet but when I do I will do a whole case study to show everyone how I dominated the market. I have a broker working on selling it, so no its not on flippa or anything (everyone has been asking me that, they probably want to know the website haha).

I will do a case study to show everything I did, which is a lot of guerilla marketing. I used a lot of satelite sites to promote the products, its an easy way to break into a market fast and cheap. Ill show you how I did it after its sold. Oh in case you dont know me personally, I build businesses to sell them later, i’m an entrepreneur at heart and I love creating businesses.

Well I have to get back to work, which is basically bossing people around now. I dont do much php or SEO work myself, I outsource everything and my new job is to basically keep the ball rolling. I counted and right now I have 23 people (im not kidding) working on different projects, and I have to make sure everything gets done right. Its a lot of writing… I probably write more then someone that is getting a major in English haha. But I still suck at spelling.

Email marketing is one of my core marketing tools to drive traffic to my websites. This blog post is for a speech I will be doing for the idaho web marketing meetup, please feel free to leave comments if you have any questions.

First, these are the current rules for emailing. READ THEM!

What I will be talking about:

- What is email marketing
- Rule #1, constant contact
- Know your audience
- The actual email
- When to send the emails
- Getting emails
- Automated emails

- What is email marketing?
Basically, email marketing is were you keep in contact with your target audience using emails. Most people think of email marketing as sending out newsletters to increase sales, leads, or traffic. But in fact that is just one form of email marketing that you can do, you can also set up a system so that you can automatically email your list on a schedule, such as all of those ebook people. You can also have your emailing system send numerous email reminders to increase your websites activity (notice that meetup.com sends a lot of reminders, facebook sends reminders all the time as well). You can also do direct emails that are hand written by you to increase your sites activity, one example is sending out emails written by you to your past customers asking them how they liked there products or what not. But of course the old fashion “newsletter” is the most popular type of email marketing.

I believe that most businesses should use email marketing to help there branding. With everyone having smart phones these days businesses can target a bigger audience easier now. Also, one of the bests things about email marketing is that it converts sooo great! I have one email list that has about 2000 emails and whenever I would send out an email the list would make me about $1500 profit, so that is about $0.75 that I made per email address, and ill tell you how I do it;

- Rule #1.. Constant Contact
Ok I know that there is a company that is called “constant contact”, but I have always called my own personal email marketing rule #1 “constant contact”. When you are doing email marketing, you are not making a sale, you are not increasing your traffic, you are not gaining any leads…. no your not… you are building a brand! The traffic, sales, leads, etc are all other benefits of email marketing. The reason why I call my rule #1 “constant contact” is because in order to build your brand you must have constant contact with your target audience.

When your doing email marketing, you should not focus for a sale, lead, or whatever. Instead you should focus on building a “brand” so if someone needs a product then they will think of your “brand”. All of the sales, traffic, leads, etc are all extras from building up the brand by using email marketing. For example, currently I have 0 dentists company’s that email me at all, yet if any dentists company gets my email and then emails me on a weekly basis (send an email Monday morning about the weekly specials and what not) then I would probably call that dentists company when I needed my teeth cleaned next. I may delete/archive the emails as soon as I get them, but in the back of my mind I know the company’s name so if I ever had a tooth ache I would call them because the company’s name is in the back of my head. Notice how godaddy always sends you emails? Thats called branding, you might not need a domain on a day to day basis, but if you ever do need a domain… you have godaddy in the back of your mind

Ok back to constant contact… you should have your email marketing campaigns planned out on a month per month basis, remember that all of the months in the year are different, depending on your niche you can tweak your emails for the season. Like if you sold wakeboards, then you might want to hit up the spring and summer months really hard, and also the Christmas season really hard. Each season will have a different approach to your email campaign, such as in the spring I would use discount codes a lot, then in the summer I would send into emails about wakeboarding contests and new wakeboards in stock (the contests part is to keep them interested), I would also hit up the wakeboard accessories a lot more in the summer. Then in the winter I would have a email campaign that of cource targets the xmas season. You just have to make sure that you are keeping in contact with your email list so that they think of you when they need to order a wakeboard, you want your brand name in the back of the users head for when the time comes that they need a new wakeboard.

Remember this is my #1 rule, make sure you are keeping constant contact with your audience

- Know your audience

You need to research your target audience a ton so you can market to them perfectly. If I had a dentists website then I would have a way different email then if I was promoting ipods. There is a lot more to knowing your audience then most people think, most people think that they can get away with just researching there competitors to see what they are doing on there email marketing. But there is a lot more to it then that, if you really want to research your audience then check out the list below;

1. Research Forums
I always research niche related forums for a new niche to understand how my audience talks and to see if they are smart people whom I’m dealing with. Like I said before, if I had a dentists newsletter then language in the email would be a ton different then an email that is selling ipods. For a dentists website you would want to describe the process so the reader fully understands what you offer them, compared to a ipod newsletter were you would probably just have a simple email that would consists of the ipod stats and such.

2. Test, Test, test
Ok so you know how to talk to your audience, but you don’t know exactly how to run the email campaign, this is were the testing comes in. Depending on your niche there could be a few different ways to target your audience. Some people care a lot about discounts, yet some people hate those kind of newsletters and would rather like to hear about whats going on with the actual company. I am kind of that way, I personally hate those discount emails (like godaddys), but I love reading newsletters about company news or new add-ons to a company.

On certain niches you can send “company news” newsletters and you would probably get the same amount of sales as a “discount email” for a different niche. You have to test, test, and test to see what is the perfect email is so you can get the best conversion rate for your mula. Make sure you keep testing new email styles, sending times, email content, etc to find the best converter, but at the same time you will need to keep testing new emails. I usually send 4 newsletters per month per niche (that is besides my automated emails), so out of the 4 emails I would have 1 test email to see how it works out. You should do the same.

3. Subscribe to your competition… duh
Pretty straight forward huh, simply subscribe to all of your competitors to see what they are up to.

- The actual email

I hear alllllll theeeeee timeeeeee…. “but jon, I dont know how to design the email”, and my reply is always “dont use images!”, Ok listen guys, those image emails are of the past. I have done a lot of my own testing and the conversion rates are way way better on emails without the images (however, you might get the same result so make sure you test, test, and then do some more testing). Images were really popular back in the day, same with myspace. But as time goes by some stuff just doesn’t work as good as it used to, and that includes images in emails.

I think the reason why the images dont work as good anymore is simply because people are lazy. Images takes time to load, infact gmail doesn’t even load the images on default. Also people are using smart phones all the time, and when I’m not around my computer I use my phone to check my emails (like most people I bet), and I hate it when there are images in the emails because the stupid thing takes longer to load.

Also people in general are getting a little smart now-a-days, I use clicktale all the time now and I see that people DO read the content, specialty for ecommerce websites (I suggest to have a very detailed description now-a-days). Back in the day the general rule was “less is more” with ecommerce. But now its more like “more is more” with descriptions. Emails are kind of the same way, except I wouldn’t go into to much detail, the email is made to be the ad so the user goes to your landing page, were you will make the sale or lead or whatever.

- When to send the emails

Oh I love testing this out. I have it down to a science. I’m going to keep this part real short and simple because it is. OK, get this, people get paid on the first and the 15th of the month (not everyone but the majority of people). So the best times to send your emails are of course… the 2nd and the 16th of every month. Well its a tiny bit more complicated then that, but not much. Send your emails on the first Monday after the 1st or 15th. Also make sure to send your email so that it gets sent out at “10am EST”, that will make it so that it will reach your audiences mail boxes in the morning time all across America. Do not send the email in the afternoon, people seem to order more and be more active online during the morning. Dont ask why, but that is how it is (of course do your own testing).

Sending times rules;
1. send the first monday after the 1st or 15th
2. send the email so it goes out on EST, which is like 1-2 hours depending on the EST or the ESD, which is 8am in Idaho.
3. only send in the mornings

- Getting emails

Getting the actual emails might be the hardest part for some people, but if you know how to do it right then you will get good targeted emails. The first thing to remember is never “ask for there email”… never ever ask for the persons email, because they wont give it to you. You need to offer them some sort of tool, service, ebook, discount, etc to get them to enter there email. If you current ask for the persons email and then you switch the email lead form to something like “enter your email to get a free ebook about apples (or whatever)” then I guarantee that your conversions will be twice as much as usual. Now since you know to never ask for an email, the hard part comes.

Gaining emails is kind of easy. There are a bunch of different ways, but my favorite are below;

1. Offer a tool (example; check out this)
2. Gain emails from past customers, you have to ask the customers of course when they are ordering.
3. On the lead form, say “be sent info about \niche\ that we cant publicly post”, and then have an automated reply of some good info about the niche that the user will like. This works great because people always want to know “info that cant be publicly posted online” hehe (one of my personal favorites)
4. Have contests on your website to increase your emails, such as offering a free ipod weekly. Then have the users submit there emails to you for them to enter. People love online contests
5. Offer a ebook, but it works out way better if you write it yourself, John chow has a great ebook which is a good example. He got tons of emails from that.

- Automated emails

I love, love, love automated emails. Automated emails work great with helping brand your business. I use automated emails to let my past customers know about there orders during the whole process, which usually takes about 4-5 emails all together. I only use automated emails on my ecommerce stores because I’m not into ebooks at all. If you want to see how a good company does automated emails then buy something from bodybuilder.com, they have a great automated email system.

Basically, my automated emails consists of;

1st email; Thank you for your order! (confirmed order email)
2nd email; Your order is almost there (sent 3 days after ordering)
3rd email; Your order should be there (send 5-6 days after ordering)
4th email; Feedback (20 days after, basicly you ask for the customers feedback on there order, then you have them go to a web form to submit there data, which increases branding and site activity)

Now you can easily set up as many automated emails as you want, you just have to learn simple php, the laws, and how to use crons. It is actually really easy to set these up if you want to screw around with php, just make sure you follow all of the rules.

I don’t think to many people call “converting keywords” the term “transactional keywords”, I got the term from James. But a transactional keyword is one that will create a sale/lead for you on your website. Terms like “buy red shoes”, “buy shoes in Idaho falls”, “shoes for sale” are all transactional keywords. Keywords like “shoes”. “shoe info”, “what are shoes”, etc are not transactional keywords because they most likely will not get you a sale or lead.

What I will be going over below;

1. What are transactional keywords
2. Using Google external tool to find keywords
3. Using “Searches related to” to find keywords
4. Using your stats to find converting keywords
5. Check competitors “keywords meta tag”
6. Basics to see how hard a term is to rank for

What are transactional keywords
I always add each one of my keywords into Google search and research each keyword that I market and/or spend monies on. You should look into each particular keyword you are promoting with and make sure that the keyword will get you a sale or lead and not just normal traffic were people are just browsing around. If you do not know the difference between a “transactional keyword” and a “normal keyword” then just ask yourself what you would be typing into Google search to buy a certain product.

Using Google external tool to find keywords
I never ever use any paid tools (or anything special) to research my keywords. I always use adwords external tool to find new keywords after doing my main keyword research. Why do I use the external tool? Hell if I know I have always used it. If you have never played around with the adwords tool then you should play around with it for a little while, it works great when researching keywords.

When I research a keyword in the Google tool I always enter a few keywords into the tool and then take a look at what the tools produces. I never look at the global or monthly info because that info is always wrong (at least when I research it is). I don’t bother to much to the competition info much either. I mostly use the adwords tool to find new keywords that I am researching. After I enter a few main keywords into the tool I will then see what the tool produces and then grab a few more keywords that seem to convert.

Using the adwords tool I would gather a list of keywords in notepad, then I would research each keyword in Google to see how much competition there is, how much work it will take, is it a transactional keyword, and I also see if I can find any new keywords that are similar.

Using “Searches related to” to find keywords
When doing keyword research you will notice that at the bottom of some Google search pages you will see a thing that says “Related searches” or “Searches related to”, here is a link to an example search. I use that to help find even more keywords. Most of the time the Google external tool will tell you the keywords first, but sometimes the adwords tool misses some that the “related search” thing doesn’t. Always check out the related searches when doing your research.

Using your stats to find converting keywords
You should always use a stats program on all of your websites. I personally use 3 programs on average; Google Analytics, GetClicky.com, and clicktale.com. I find a lot of great keywords using stats programs, make sure look at your stats often and keep tweaking your list of targeted keywords. Most of the time you will find a good amount of targeted keywords that people use to find the product your selling, make sure your on the look out for these new keywords so you can target them.

Below I have a screen shot of the stats from my survivormanfans.com website. I targeted the right keywords which include “buy survivorman dvds”, “survivorman dvds”, “les stroud dvds”, etc. But if you notice there are some odd keywords in there that looks like they convert, they are “les stroud vanishing world” (which is his new show I just learned of), “les stroud survival kit” (these things might sell pretty good, I never researched it at all) and “les stroud off the grid”. Most of these keywords dont come up when using the google tool and the “related search” thing, so be sure to always keep looking at your stats to find new keywords to target.

Check competitors “keywords meta tag”
Let me show you a little trick I learned back in NAM. Your competitors have done the work to find there keywords for these website, and most websites place there important keywords in there META tags (the code above the body tag for you non-html people). I go to my competitors and check out there META keywords to make sure I am not missing anything. Dont rely fully on this method, but its a good method to pick up a few keywords you might have missed that your competition is using.

You can also check out your competitions website to see how they seo’ed there website. Be on the lookout for any new keywords you might have missed. Take a look at the links in the sidebar and footer, most of the time when people make site wide links on a keyword then that means that the keyword is pretty important. Also be sure to check out the title tag, description meta tag, and of course the keyword meta tag.

Basics to see how hard a term is to rank for
I can look at a search term and tell you if it will be hard to rank or not. I can do that without using any tools. The process is actually simple, but it take a lot of failure to know exactly what keywords to target for. Some of what I look for is below;

1. Check to see what types of websites are being displayed
2. Check to see if the web page is the main directory or a sub. example: domain.com or domain.com/buy-product
3. Check adwords competition
4. Check backlinks on websites

There are more stuff you can do for researching, but Im just explaining the basics.

1. Check to see what types of websites are being displayed
Ok the very fist thing you will want to look at is the types of websites being displayed on the search result. I can tell you now if you see amazon.com, nexttag.com, overstock.com, buy.com, wikipedia.com, walmart.com, etc (shopping type websites with lots of SEO weight and lots of products/pages/content). Those types of websites actually have a good amount of weight behind them, so they rank for long tailed keywords pretty easily, however they never do seo work for there own products (well some of the products but they cant do them all) so most of the time it is easy to rank a targeted site for the keywords. If i see any of the sites mentioned above then I would target that keyword, because it would be pretty easy for me.

Example terms;
Below are some example terms that have lots of the types of sites above;
1. buy white gloves
2. firewood for sale in michigan
3. blue baby cribs

2. Check to see if the webpage is the main directory or a sub. example: domain.com or domain.com/buy-product
Type in “pond pumps” in Google What do you see? Then type in “pond pumps with no filter“. Notice that the first keyword had mostly domain.com type of websites, and the second keyword had domain.com/something-random. Well the second keyword is a transactional keyword (a keyword that someone will type in when looking for pond pumps) and doesn’t have that much completion. The reason for that is because most of the domains for that term have UN-related content.

So searches that have a lot of random stuff pop up are usually easier to rank for compared to search terms that contain mostly domain.com type urls. The reason is because when most companies do there link building they target there main website instead of the sub-pages for the keyword they are going after. With the example terms above it would probably take 3-4k and 1 year to rank for “pond pumps”, but it would cost less then 50$ and less then a week to rank for the “pond pumps with no filter”. You can tell how easy a term is to rank by looking at the urls, if they are mostly domain.com urls then the keyword will be harder to rank then terms like keyword.com/blog-post-about-keyword

3. Check adwords competition
Always check out the current adwords completion for any keyword you are going after. I mostly do adwords first and then move onto SEO, but if you are checking to see how hard or easy a term is to rank for then you can look to see how much adwords completion there is. And if the adwords advertisers are mostly big name company like amazon.com, walmart.com, buy.com, etc then that means that the adwords completion is easy, those company dont spend to much on adwords for certain keywords, they mostly throw as many keywords as they can out there. I have always found that out bidding those types of sites are pretty easy. So if the adwords completion is pretty easy, then the SEO work might be easy as well.

4. Check backlinks on websites
As far as the basics go, knowing how many keywords your website has and how many your competition is very very very important. I use nothing else but yahoo.com to check backlinks.

To check your backlinks…

- go yahoo.com
- type in “link:yourwebsite.com”
- push enter silly
- select “except from this domain”
- select “entire site”

After you do that you will then see how many backlinks are pointing to your website. You select those special options so that the thing will tell you how many links your entire website has, and it also disregards links on your own website. Make sure you select those 2 results so you have an accurate number.

I hope this helps when finding transactional keywords, if you have any questions be sure to ask in the blog comments

I haven’t realized that my last blog post was on February 4th! I haven’t really been to motived to blog lately, I guess I’m getting lazy, but that is all about to change.

So what have I been up to these last few months? Well lots of stuff, in-fact I got too spread out on all of my projects that I had to cut back a little bit. I would love to work on lots of different projects but I am realizing that I just don’t have the time to work on all of them. So lately I have been focused on just 3 niches, and that game plan has been working out great. Lately I have been finding myself bossing other people around more then actually working on stuff myself, the reason is because I have so many projects going on so I have to hire other people to take care of stuff in a timely fashion. I know how to code php, how to design, how to set up wordpress blogs, write content, etc but lately I have been hiring all that stuff out just so I can get it ALL done on-time.

For the last 1-2 months I have been working with 2 designers, 3 xhtml coders, 5 php coders, and of course the customer support lady. During my “entrepreneur life” I have gone from doing all the work myself, to having a crew of people to take care of stuff, but lately I have been mostly the boss guy and not being able to do much of the work myself. Dont get me wrong, I still do some of the work myself, but I only do small jobs these days like fix php errors (theres lots of these little buggers) and doing a small amount of content. I’ve been enjoying every minute of the “boss thing”, I can now afford to outsource most of my projects which leads to a lot less stress and time spent working. I can almost run my whole company through my blackberry and that is how a business should be.

If your curious of some of the projects I have been working on then your in luck;

1. Shopping Cart Added: I spent $900 to have a company update 2 of my eCommerce websites to add a shopping cart system. The site was first set up so that the customer can only purchase 1 product at once (long story why It was set up that way). I spent $900 and within 2-3 days the new update paid for itself from multiple products being ordered at once. I wish I did this update a year ago lol. I am now working with the company to add a system for “related products” and such to help increase sales.

2. Customer Support Lady: I hired a lady to come in mon-fri to do customer support work for 4 of my businesses plus one of my drop shippers business. It has actually taken a ton of time to set this all up. I spent a lot of time writing up questions & answers for her to use when people send support emails. I also have 25-30 full pages of how my businesses work and some instructions for certain aspects of the business. This took a ton of time setting up, and the sad part is that the “customer support book” (that is what I call it) is only about 60% done. I still have about 15,000 words of instructions to add before I am happy with it…. that book is a lot of work, but it should be worth it in the long run.

3. Increasing Conversions: Want to know something funny? My top 3 main websites that get the bulk of my orders gets less then 300 uniques a day, yes that is right, I make my money from 300 uniques a day! That is just my ecommerce websites, I have “satelight” website set up that get way more traffic then that, but the actual money maker websites dont get much traffic. So why do I only get 300 unquies a day? Because that traffic is very very very targeted, I have a pretty good conversion rate

So how did I get my awesome conversion rate? I use Clicktale! Its a great software and I highly highly suggest it!

Want some quick tips that I have learned from clicktale?

1. Phone numbers decrease your sales, only ask for phone numbers if you really need to (I require them for call-backs)
2. A lot of people tell me to get your products above the fold, I actually get a better conversion rate if I add it below the content/fold, check out this landing page for an example.
3. Keep your products grid view simple! People dont like choices on eCommerce websites, keep your products simple (notice that I only have 3 packages of products on developerhut.com?).
4. Make your checkout process stupidly simple…. stupidly simple, make it so a 2nd grader can figure out how to checkout.
5. Give people detailed product descriptions

I have lots more tips, but Ill have that for a later blog post.

4. 3 New products on Developerhut.com: I am working on adding 3 new products to developerhut.com, they are; signature forum posting, wordpress blogs, and a secret product (no one else offers it so I have to keep it on the down low). I already have a wordpress blog creation product, but the new one will make it so you can hire us to create normal wordpress blogs like domain.com. I have been spending a bunch of time setting up wordpress blogs, so I have been training my guys to create them. They are trained to install wordpress blogs with a free theme, add SEO plugins, add some content, and do all of that with 0 footprints. If you order a wordpress blog from us then you will be able to add all of the websites info such as the database info and ftp info and my guys will take care of the rest. That product should be done this month sometime, the other 2 products will be coming out next month sometime.

Well I have lots of work to do tonight, my to-do list is 3 pages long. I was very very sick for 2 weeks in march that set me back sometime, but I will be getting caught up soon. I will be blogging more soon, so stay tuned.

Ok so I have been working on this for the last week and I still have not found a good customer phone support solution, so maybe someone that reads this blog can help me.

My problem: I have 3 totally different business that we need to answer customer support phone calls for. Right now they are all using the same phone number which is Skype. I need to a way so that all 3 numbers go to just 1 phone (preferably a cell phone). I need to be able to see who is calling the phone and what number they are calling so we can answer them appropriately.

Solutions I have Found:

Below are some solutions I have found.

Normal Lan Line With Multiple Lines: This is a possibility, the only problem is that it would cost like 50-70$ per month because of the different lines and from long distance callers, I get a lot of callers from India, Japan, etc.

SecondVoice.com: This company makes it so you can have 2 numbers on the same phone, I am not sure if they allow 3 phone numbers. That is the only problem with these guys.

3 Different Phones: This is a possibility, but it would be a pain in the ass.

Those are the only good solutions I have found so far. I looked into using Twilio but with that solution I would need to do a bunch of coding… which I don’t have time for

If you know of a better solution then let me know, I’m open for all ideas

A lot of people ask me how I plan a to rank websites on google, yahoo, and bing for certain search terms. So I will explain the process here for everyone that asks.

Before You start

Before you ever start any SEO link building campaign you must have a few things done;

1. Website completed: Your website must be completed and the on-site SEO work is done. Using sitemaps, seo friendly navigations, fresh & unique content, text links within your content, seo friendly meta descriptions, etc etc will help a ton with your off-site link building methods.

2. Domain: Google now relys heavily on the domain trust factor these days. I assume that because of all of the sblogs and websites set up purely for spam which lead Google to now look at the domains past record, domains whois info, other domains that the owner has, nameservers, IP address, etc etc. Before you start your link building you should double check to see if your whois info is correct and double check anything else related to the domain.

Once your website is done and your domains info is all sorted out then you can start planning.

Set Your Goals

The first part is pretty important, before you spend any of your time, effort, or money on the link building then you should have a plan on what exactly you will be doing to achieve your rankings. Your link building plan does not need to be written out, in fact I never write out any of my plans (even business plans), all that info is stored in my head were I can continually tweak the plan. If you would like the write out your plan then go right ahead, just make sure that you have a plan before you start working.

How do I plan? Like I said before I plan everything out in my head, I use Google’s free keyword search tool and find the top 5 keywords that would be decently easy to rank for but has enough volume to make a profit. Finding converting keywords like this is kind of a pain in the ass, I have been doing this for a while and I have started many many different projects on the web that I can usually tell what kind of keywords convert and how to find them, but keyword research is a whole different blog post. If you are new to SEO then I would suggest first making your website and then using Adwords to find converting keywords, that is a really great way to easily find converting keywords, the only downfall is that it costs money to use.

After you find your keywords you are going to need to plan your link building efforts. Most of the time I usually let a domain name sit for 1-3 months before I start a project, the older a domain is the more Google trusts it, so the longer you let a domain sit with some relevant content then the easier it will be to rank it when you start your website. Of course that is a whole different blog post as well (I don’t use Google search when doing research about SEO that specifically targets Google), Google puts a lot of weight on the domain name, but I will go over that later.

When I plan my link building I usually start out targeting 1 or 2 of the 5 search terms that I initially found. I always start out slow with my link building, the more natural it looks the better the results will be. I use a lot of different methods but the ones shown below are the most popular ways to start link building. I always start slow and work my way up with the amount of links I add to the website each month. During the first 1-3 months I dont do much link building at all, at the end of the 3 months I usually only have 100-200 backlinks according to yahoo.

After about 3 months or so your website should be pretty established in Google and your current rankings should not fluctuate** that much. But that is about to change. On the 3rd month of your link building effort you should start to increase your link building efforts pretty heavily. instead of just 50-100 links a month you will now need to start building up 200 or so links a month, and also start targeting the long tailed URL. Below is an example of a long tailed URL:

Buy white ice cream
domain.com/buy-white-ice-cream.html

** Fluctuating On Google SERP’s

I can tell how far a long a website is in the ranking process by how much the website fluctuates on Google. If the website fluctuates a lot then that means that Google does not think that the website is the best match for the search term (in other words… you need more links and/or better on-site seo). After a while the fluctuating will slow down, that is when you can really get the link building going because Google now feels like the website is a decent match for the search term (this doesn’t mean you are on page 1, you can be in this phase even on page 4 etc). Then after some time your website will almost never fluctuate, this is when you must take a look at your on-site seo work to see what you need to do to improve it and also work on getting good long lasting one-way links to your website (you can be on this phase on page 2-3, if you are then look at your on-site seo).

How long does it typically take me to rank?

The amount of time it takes me to rank a website depends a lot on the search term and the website. I normally start out with a website that has been sitting idle for 3 or so month, it would probably take me 1 year and 6 months before I get on page 1 for the good keywords I usually go for (IE: keywords that make me more then 3-4k a month from). One such example is a keyword that my buddy that is in the same niche is making 10-15k a month from being ranked #6, I just barley got onto page 2 for the keyword after about 1 year and 1 month, I bet it will take me another 5 or so month before I am on page 1 and my website isn’t fluctuating a lot between page 1 and 2.

I just barley ranked on page 1 for a very high traffic keyword that is making good money, that took me 1 year and 2 months to get on page 1. SEO is not a quick way to make money, but I use adwords/email marketing/forums etc to help. An example of a keyword like this would be “buy baby chicks” (just a random keyword).. it would probably take me 1 year and 5-8 months to get on page 1, and I would spend a lot of money to get there, but I bet you that the people on page one are making 10k plus a month from that term.

However, small terms like “bantams baby chicks” or “buy bantams baby chicks” would only take 4-6 months or so to rank a new site for the term, but that term wont make to much money, maybe a few hundred dollars a month, but if you add those terms up then you can make some good money

After I Have Started

After I start my link building campaign I am always checking my stats to see what needs improvement and what else I need to do to rank. I use Authority Labs to track my keywords stats, its a great program that has a free trial version if you are interested. I check that Authority Labs stats everyday to see how my search terms are doing and what tweaks I need to make for the day. Since SEO is a slow way to do your marketing you kinda have to target a whole lot of terms to make any good money, so keeping track of all your terms is a must.

After I first start my link building I break my efforts down to 3 different phases;

Phase One:

This phase should only be started after your website is done and the on-site SEO work is done. You should do some simple link building such as a small amount of blog comments, directory submissions, and some social bookmarkings. If you are interested in a recurring plan then this is the one I always use (Use that plan for 3-4 months then upgrade).

During the same time you will want to start hitting up other webmasters in your niche about link exchanges, try to get a few link exchanges on very related websites, dont go over board with this, and also do your research and make sure you are not linking bad neighborhood websites or else that will hurt your efforts.

During this time I ussally just do a small amount of link building and then wait for a little while, then after about 3-4 months I move onto the second phase.

Phase Two:

After about 3-4 months of only building up a few links I then put my link building in overdrive and get my site up to page 2-3 in Google before I start my next phase (I can tell which phase I am on by the fluctuating). Below are some different ways to build links during the second phase:

Article Sumissions
Directory Submissions
Blog Commenting
Social Bookmarking
Squidoo Lens/Wordpress Blogs
Review websites
Paid Text Links (only on relevant websites, and not site wide)
Wordpress blog sponsoring
Press Releases
Blog Post Sponsoring

This is the plan I usually use on a recurring basis for 4-5 months.

There are lots of different ways to build links, but the above are some of the popular ones. You will probably need to do the second phase for a little while, I usually spend at least 5+ months on this phase for my bigger keywords. During that time you will want to build as much relevant links as you can while continuously tweaking your on-site seo work to get the best effect. I also watch my visitors closely to see what exactly they do on the website when they come from the keywords I am targeting, I use the average pageviews per visitor to set goals that I work on (like set a goal of 3 pageviews per visitor).

Phase Three

After sometime you will be able to tell that your website isn’t fluctuating as much as it used to, and hopefully by this time you are on page 2 or even 1. Phase 3 is the last phase and this time I usually try to keep my ranking (not make it fluctuate so much) by doing some special link building.

I first downgrade my developerhut campaign to this one. I then also start trying to find different special ways to get links on very related web pages. I simply search google and find web pages that are very related to mine that I am trying to rank, I would then find a way to get my link on those pages somehow.. either by buying them, trading for something (like writing a guest post), email them asking for a free link, or anything else I can do to get more high quality one way links.

The last phase is all about the quality links, and not the quantity of the links. Since your website is on page 2 you just need to focus on the relevant one-way links and your on-site SEO.

Well I am done writing for today, I hope you enjoy this post. If you have any questions then leave a comment, and if you have any suggestions then leave a comment, I am interested in what you have to say.

I used to use sub-domains a ton for my websites, since Google used to treat a sub-domain like its own website it was pretty easy to rank sub-domains for small terms. I would do the link building work for each subdomain ( keyword.domain.com ) and then rank the sub-domains for long tailed keywords. Well Google recently changed something to make it harder to rank sub-domains for search terms, so 2 weeks ago I switched 3 of my websites over from the sub-domain way to a normal link structure like domain.com/keyword.php.

It took me 1 whole day per website to get everything changed over including the 301 redirect work, server dns changes, updating the links within the site, etc. I then did a bunch of link building work after making the changes and as of today I have doubled my traffic for those 3 websites and also double my revenue (Jan is killing Dec revenue wise ). I am still not even half way done with the link building work, so that is good news

But anyways I am not sure why Google changed how they look at sub-domains, but I suggest that you change over any website that rely on sub-domains for SEO, I would switch over to the normal link structure way, it has doubled my traffic.

Anyone have any experience with your sub-domains losing there SERP’s ranking recently?

I am always testing new link building methods to see what works and what does not work. I never ever get my information from forums, blog, word of mouth, or anything else like that. I learn from doing, not by reading, and because of that I am always testing out SEO myths myself. Below are a few myths that I am currently testing.

1. Google not only looks at your domains whois info (and past history, etc), but Google also looks at other domains that are owned by you to see how trust worthy you/your domains are.

I kinda of found this myth myself. In case you did not know, back in 2008 Google banned all of my websites that were on the same IP because I was selling text links (they even banned the websites that were not selling text links but were on the same IP). That was a huge pain in the ass so I broke my websites up and made them harder to find (however I know that if google wanted to find them… google can find them haha). Because of this reason I break my domains down into different whois names, either personal names or company names.

Now because I break my domains down like that, I have found out that google DOES track ALL of your websites (no matter the niche). I am not sure exactly how they track your websites however, it is either by the name on your whois, or the IP on your websites, or a combination of both, or maybe even something completely different… all I know is what Google knows a lot about you and ALL of your websites you have online.

So how do I know this for sure? Well I use fake names for my godaddy info when registering a new domain, I have at least 25 different godaddy accounts with all different whois info. Lately I have become lazy and I have started to register other domains using the existing godaddy accounts, instead of creating a whole new godaddy account. Well I have found out that it is a lot easier to rank websites when you have other existing websites already ranked that are using the godaddy account. So how could that be….. because Google looks at your other websites info to see how trustworthy you are.

Now this is just a myth, but I am researching it so see if it is true, and if it is true… how can I use it to my advantage? But if you disagree with me then please leave a comment because I am definably interested in what you have to say.

2. Subdomains

I used to love sub domains because Google treats them like they are there own domain. So I used to use sub domains for smaller niches and ranked each sub domain for the search term. Now google did something to make them harder to rank for, ever since July my sub domains have been slipping in the SERPs even though my link building plans have been the same. I am currently switching my sites over to a better link structure way, but I would like to know what google now does to sub domains? Does anyone have any ideas on what google is doing with sub domains in there index?

SEO Tip:

Here is a SEO tip for newbies… Google loves websites that have been around for a long time. So if you want to rank a website for a hard term then the best way is to buy an existing domain from 10+ years ago and build a site using that domain instead of a new one. Google loves old trustworthy domains!

I rather do SEO work for a website with 100 backlinks from 1998 then a website with 5k backlinks that is 8 months old… any day of the week.

But anyways, leave a comment if you have something to say… whether its good or bad I want to hear it

I thought it would be a good idea for both you and I if I were to recap 2009 on this blog. 2009 was a very crazy year for me… business model change, recession, coding, and stress are a few words that come up when I think of 2009.

Instead of writing a bunch of BS like “I had a great year because…” or “2009 was a bad year because..” I will post my company earnings for the year and then explain some big changes that happen during the year.

Overview of My Career

When I first started my company I made content based websites that used SEO to gain free traffic, and then I monetize the websites using advertising. As time went on content based websites started making me less and less money every month. In 2007 I launched by first real e-commerce site which was BuyBlogComments.com (I had other smaller sites, but I consider that one my first real one because the backend is custom coded.). Then during the years of 2007-2008 I slowly moved my business model from advertising revenues to e-commerce sales. In 2008 I got really focused and learned php along with making better business decisions. I focused my attention on 3 aspects of my business which are;

1. Backend Reporting: I created a backend that gives me up-to-date reporting on all of my main projects. It has been very very useful.

2. DeveloperHut: I focused a lot of my attention on building up DeveloperHut to make it so I can use my own services. I want to be able to use my own services to market my other e-commerce websites.

3. Network Of E-Commerce Websites: I found out that diversity is my safety net. Not only do I run DeveloperHut but I have my own network of e-commerce websites that make 50% of my revenues (or so… keep reading).

I really didn’t get to focused on those 3 aspects until August of 2008, since that time I have devoted 110% of my attention to those 3 aspects so I can build up a proper company.

Overview Of 2009

During the year of 2009 I got a few things done;

1. Changed Business Models: I dont make much money at all from YPN, Google Adsense, or anything else like that now. I now make my money from e-commerce stores.

2. DeveloperHut Completed: I still have a bunch of work left to do on this website, however I feel that I have developerhut right were I want it, all I need to do now is increase efficiency, increase marketing, increase quality on products, and add new products. In 2009 I build the whole backend from scratch, added like 10 new products, and got the current system down to a science… in other words I got the website infrastructure finished.

3. Network Of E-Com Sites Done: As of now I have a small network of online stores that are 100% done. It took me all of 2009 to get them set up and turning a profit. I still have lots of work to do, but now I get to focus my attention into marketing them and making more money from them.

The Chart

The chart below is the gross revenue for all of my projects combined. I started this February and some of the chart is wrong, but it is close enough for now (when I get some time I will update the bad code that produces the chart). So the chart below is the months February-December.

Small Recap Of 2009

March: From March – June it was rough. That was the time that rev was low because I was switching from content-based websites to e-commerce stores. March was the month that I first started setting up my network of e-commerce websites. At that time DeveloperHut was still a new company and the backend wasn’t that advanced at all. During that time I spent most of my days working my ass off on coding and building up products, along with diversifying ways that profit comes in.

May: If you haven’t noticed…May was my worst month! The reason is because I was having trouble with a merchant, which made earnings go way down. It took me 3 weeks to find a merchant and get business going again. I have learned a valuable lesson there and I now diversify my merchant accounts.

June – July: I got the merchant problem sorted and started using adwords and SEO to rank my e-commerce stores… thus traffic and sales go up.

August: This was one of my most stressful months, besides the first 5 months of 2009 haha. During this time I diversified my e-commerce stores and broken them down to smaller websites that focus on certain niches within the niche (if that makes sense). During this time I had a small problem with one of my adwords campaign which hurt sales for 2 weeks, which accounts for the slight downside, which also goes into Sept a little. Also during this time I launched most of the major products on DeveloperHut, which meant a LOT of coding.

October: October was a good month, I got everything sorted and sales were pretty steady. However I maxed out Adwords spending for ALL of my stores. I focus on small niches that dont get to much traffic, so its easy for me to max out the traffic I can get from adwords. I have had the same campaigns running since March, so during the time from March – October I was continuously editing my campaigns to increase traffic and decrease the costs, and at the same time making sure that I am profiting.

November – December: Both of these months were pretty good, however I would have liked to have a steady increase in revenue during that time… so I guess I failed there. During this time I was focused on finishing up the DeveloperHut backend so I can hire someone for customer support. I also started getting really heavily into the SEO work for all of my websites, I am guessing that it will take 2-3 months before that work starts to pay off, so sadly revenue didn’t go up that month from all of that work

So looking at the chart you can say that I had a good year.. well I had a fine year, but I have a lot of work to do before I am happy with my online work. During the months of June – Now I would focus my attention on just one aspect of the business instead of all of the aspects, in other words I was spreading myself to thin. I worked my ass of during that time to automate as much as I can so I can focus on everything else. Because of that problem my revenues from each aspect would fluctuate each month. An example; lets say the DeveloperHut part makes $10,000 per month and the e-commerce stores make $10,000 per month which means that my company makes $20,000 per month. That means that each aspect was making 50% of the total revenue.

Right now each aspect fluctuates every month, I am currently spread to thin and I need to hire someone for customer support so I can focus on the big picture. If I can focus my attention to both aspect equally I know that my business will increase revenue by 40-50% this year. I know this because each aspect fluctuates so much each month. An example is instead of each aspect making $10,000 each which is 50% of the total revenue, but instead of each aspect making 50% of the total revenue every month, it is something like 70/30 one month, and then the very next month it would be like 40/60. The 70 part of the 70/30 of $20,000 is $14000… and the 60 part of the 40/60 is $12000.

So because of each aspect fluctuating (and developing a pattern) I can get a good idea of how much I can make on each aspect if I could focus my attention solely on marketing and building the business. From the above example we have 2 numbers, which are $14000 and $12000. Lets say that I am making $20,000 per month now, and if I max out the marketing for each aspect (and also focus my attention on them) I would be making $26000 per month, which is a 30% increase.

So as I move into the year 2010 I know that I can increase my revenues easily, but I have lots and lots of work to do before I get there. 2009 was a good year because I got my businesses infrastructure completed, now I get to focus my attention to the marketing aspect. However, 2009 was one of the most stressfully years of my life, I worked all the time and was always stressed about something. But as you can see I got everything going well…. now I can relax and have some fun by focusing my attention on the marketing part of the business… which is what I love to do.

So there you go, a recap of last year. Let me know your thoughts, I read all comments posted here

A lot of people are blogging there goals for 2010 and then looking back at 2009 to see how those goals worked out. A lot of the same people figure out that they failed a lot of 2009′s goals. Wonder why? Its because short term goals work better then long term goals. I have always made very very short term goals, along with having long term goals. I have a to-do list that I make every 3-4 days, on the to-do list I have tasks such as “redo social bookmarking sales letter”, “update writers interface”, “do link building for X website” plus much more. I usually write 2 to-do lists a week, depending on the size of the work.

I find that a lot of people are blogging about there 2010 goals and how they are going to accomplish them. I guarantee that 80% of people that set goals like that will not be on the right track to accomplishing there goals by April.

I have been working for myself since 2006 (I must be doing something right) and during that time I have learned a lot about making goals. I plan my goals in 2 ways;

1. Long Term Goal: I set a long term goal, but I do not attach a date or time frame to it. An example of one of my long term goals is to hire someone for customer support and sales (it actually has been for 2+ year now haha).

2. To-Do Lists: I use to-do lists to set my short term goals (in other words, to get shit done). I believe that I should work smart and not hard, to do so I sit back before I work and think what exactly I should devote my time to. An example; instead of spending 3 hours a day to reply to 50 support emails a day, I rather spend 15 hours one time creating a system that will make it so I would only need to spend 30 mins a day replying to those 50 support emails. That is working smart and not hard. An example of one of my to-do list jobs is to finish updating the order editing system (which is a step I need to take to hire a customer support person)

Having a weekly to-do list will make sure you are on the correct track to accomplishing your long term goal. Instead of spending the time to make detailed long term goals, the energy is better spent in planning short term goals.