The Best Web Host - Host Gator

Everyone always asks me who they should host their site with, i've tried a couple, all were pretty average, expensive and didn't provide everything i needed. However i found Host Gator and fell in love lol seriously what a dream come true. Cheap as chips - around $7 a month. A crap load of storage space + way way too much bandwidth lol you get like 100 MySQL databases - along with a pile of software to run your databases such as MyPHPadmin etc. PHP5 is the default on the servers - but you can ask for PHP4 support and they will switch you over. The support is sensational and all up i couldn't be happier! I have 10 pretty large sites hosted with them, and to this date havn't had one single problem. Servers are always up and email is always working!

If your looking for a host you should pretty much stop looking now, go check out Host Gator today. See for youself lol i'm not bullshitting you!

Keyword Research

I've got a little routine i go through when im doing keyword research. It's pretty simple really.

Using Google's Keyword Tool i find a pile of related terms and their aprroximate search volume. I then look at the most relevant keywords with the highest traffic. One by one i do a search on that keyword in google and check out the competition.

When i'm looking at the competition i look at PR mainly, but also a couple onpage factors - like keyword density. It is also useful to do an "allintitle:" search such as: allintitle: funny stuff - this will return only the pages that have funny stuff in their title. I like to stay away from any keyword that returns around a million results for this search.

SEO - Backlinks and the Sandbox

Well i'm going to assume that most of the people reading this know that backlinks are pretty much the "be all and end all" of SEO. I mean onpage optimisation is important - but without the back-links to back it up you'll never get good results in the SERPs. I just want to quickly talk about some things i've noticed.

The other day i bought 6 links to one of my sites, all with the same anchor text. Previous to buying these links i was sitting on page 3 for the keyword. Around 3 days after buying these links I thought i'd check the serps lol just for fun, i really didnt expect anything to have happened that quickly. To my suprise i was no longer on page 3... or page 2 or page 1 lol infact for this keyword i was no longer listed in the first 15 pages (i didnt continue searching lol) i assume i wasn't listed in the serps for this keyword at all. So i did some research on what some people call the google SandBox. It would appear that since my site is so new, google was a little suprised by the sudden growth in backlinks and put me in the sandbox for the keyword i was targeting.

So it's been around 3 weeks now and i'm still not in the SERPs for this particular keyword, however i have noticed something else. For miss-spelling of the keyword or long-tail keywords which include the keyword i was targeting i'm much further up in the SERPs, around position 5 infact. So it should be interesting to see where im ranked when they let me out of the "sandbox" lol.

Anyway i really just wanted to say that unless you can buy permanent backlinks, then they really arn't worth it, and will propably do more harm than good. Also if you are building links - and your site is very new (less than 6 months old), i would suggest building slowly lol maybe 1 a week? And use slightly different anchor text - still using your keywords, but in a different way.

By the way - i've found that some of the best backlinks you can get are from digg and yahoo buzz. Also comments on blogs are great if they are "do follow".

Hope to hear of any experiences you've had with the "sandbox" and paid links.

Nick

Google Adwords - Inactive Keywords...

I've read a couple ebooks on Adwords and all of them screwed me lol they sell the books with stats such as - look at my cpc - 1-2 cents lol They advise newbies to set their Max CPC at around 10c (for search). This just doesn't work, and has caused me much frustration over time. Here is the biggest mistake i believe most rookies, like myself, make.

So you just found an awsome product on clickbank you think will sell. You head over to adwords and you set up your new campaigne (first campaigne in many cases). Your lazy like me so you link to the affilate page directly, which i believe is fine for most clickbank products - as they have their own high quality landing pages with good copy, keyword density etc etc. You hit up some keyword tools and get massive keywords lists for your adgroups. Set the Max CPC at around 10cents and you leave the computer happy as ever lol

The next day you check your clickbank account to find you made $0.00 lol devostating. You then go take a look at adwords lol turns out nearly all of your keywords are inactive haha. Here's the thing - googles quality score is based on two things mainly - the relevance of the keyword/ad's relevance to the landing page and more importantly the click through rate of your ads. I've found that the dominating factor is the latter - CTR is king. So what has happened to your keywords? Well since you've set your CPC so low, even though your ad and keyword are extremely relevant to the landing page, your ad is getting horrible positions - around 9-14 or even lower for more competitve keywords. So as a consequence your CTR is going to be horrible, thus killing your quality score and leading to inactive keywords. Then once this starts happening google stop "trusting" you as much, and you will be pounded with higher min cpc.

I've found that initially you need to set a Max CPC that will get you up into the top 3 positions. Then just make your ad better than the surrounding ads and you should start to see a solid CTR. You should start seeing a decline in your average CPC after a certain amount of clicks. When you start to see this happen you can start to reduce your Max CPC slowly. Hopefully as you reduce your max cpc your average cpc will also decrease, while maintaining a high quality score.

Anyway, would love to hear some other peoples experiences with adwords lol it isn't as easy as the ebooks make it sound.

Increase Your Website Traffic Using Digg!

When i first started on the net i read somewhere that if you submit your stuff to digg you can get heaps of traffic. So i headed over to Digg.com and submitted a couple pages from my site lol checked Google Analytics the next day and saw that i recieved 2 visitors haha i gave up on digg right then and there. Around 2 months ago i was speaking to a pretty successful webmaster and he gave me the key to digg... friends!

The thing with digg these days is that people are posting stuff every second! Your lucky if you post stays on the up and comming page for more that 10 minutes lol so you need to get a shit load of friends, and then send the "shout out"! So go to digg and add as many friends as you can - i think the limit is around 1000 these days, but it changes all the time i think. It's really easy, you just click on a username and friend them, then add all their freinds (you can only add friends one by one lol painful). It will prob take you a week to get upto 1000 freinds - you can only add around 30-50 before digg has a cry and say you've been adding friends to quickly lol they stop you from "friending" for around 5-10 minutes and then your all set to go again.

So once you have your friends you submit your content, then you send a shout to your friends. I've found that digg limit you to shouting to around 100 friends at a time. So you have to break the shouting up into groups.

When you shout i've found its best to send a nice message such as: "Just thought you might like to check this out. Hope all is well :) Digg if you like..." etc etc. However i've noticed alot of people use a more direct tone such as - "Digg this and i'll digg yours" lol funny thing is that i usually digg these kinda shouts haha so experiment a little bit and let me know!

Couple other things before i finnish up. Make sure you use relevant and high traffic keywords in the title for your digg submission and obviously for the page your submitting. I've found that posts of mine that hit around 30 diggs rank really well on google - both the digg page and my sites page, google love digg lol

Anyway hope you all give this a go, i should warn you though, you will really only see results if you post quality content - this wont work with crap content, and im glad it doesnt lol

Hope to hear from you regarding your experiences with digg!

Nick.

Who Am I?

So who am I? Well I’m not rich and famous like all the other internet gurus out there. I’m just a kid trying to make some money on the net, with pretty much no success yet. I started with this internet stuff around 6 months ago and I’ve made around $40 revenue lol that’s revenue! Subtract costs such as hosting, advertising etc and I’m way down.

So why have I made this blog? Well even though I’ve had no success thus far, there’s a lot I want to talk about – SEO, Affiliate Marketing, Adwords, and much more. I’ve learnt a hell of a lot in the 6 months I’ve been doing this, and now I want to share my thoughts, and hear yours.

Hope I can help some people, and I hope some people can help me :)

Nick!