I wrote a while back about my problems with mindset, and I thought it was time to update on what I’ve achieved in the mean time, and what I have learned.
As many of you know, I have a family to look after, and as of this time I must maintain my full-time job to pay the mortgage, etc. So the time I can spend on internet marketing is limited.
I can sell internet marketing how-to-make-your-next-million type products, but I have to be honest about this: I don’t enjoy it. I know there are things about business that you will never get to enjoy, like accounts, for example, but I also believe that at least some of business should be enjoyable. It should not end up being all hard slog.
Don’t get me wrong; I don’t have a problem selling material that purports to tell you how to make your next million. If I sell you an internet marketing product, it is up to you to learn from it, try it, and see if it works for you. I just want to do things in a different way.
I wrote in my last post on mindset that I should be developing more tools for internet marketers, and I may well do that in the future, but the problem with that approach is that it takes quite a lot of time, and I don’t have a lot of time. I have been advised to outsource this aspect of my business, but at this time I don’t know how to do that effectively.
So what am I doing?
For now, I have used two internet business models that are working for me:
- selling products, which I’ve already talked about;
- blogging.
I have never made a huge killing from it, but I have made respectable money from AdSense. Most of that has been through one blog which gets about 100 visitors a day, mainly from the search engines. It’s not in the internet marketing niche.
I have been working on making this more successful, and during the last month, I have pretty much doubled my income from that blog. I am also starting up other blogs.
I have invested in a couple of courses from Steven Resell on blogging, and putting some of the information into action has caused that doubling of income. I haven’t recouped my investment yet, but I will do it within six months if I do nothing further at this point.
My reason for settling on this business model is that I can accomplish it in very small time units, and also I can see the effects of my endeavours relatively quickly.
If I am near to ranking in the first 10 for a keyword with reasonable levels of traffic, I can write an article and get it on ezinearticles with anchor text that will improve my ranking for that keyword. The only effect of doing that will be zero or positive. If it’s zero, it doesn’t really matter because it’s not something I’ve spent a working week’s worth of hours doing.
How do I find this low-hanging fruit? I am learning keyword research using Market Samurai which I have purchased, and if you don’t already have it, I strongly suggest you check out their training materials in the Market Samurai dojo, which show you how to use it and are free. Obviously the intent they have in producing these is to promote their product, but whether you decide to invest in the tool or not, it will give you a good grounding in SEO.
The other tip I would like to pass on today is how to find those keywords for which you rank just below page 1.
This won’t help a new site, but will help you if you have an established site. Register with Google Webmaster Tools (I’m also told that Bing Webmaster Tools is worth registering with) and validate your site with them. Click on Your Site on the Web, then Search Queries, and click to show All queries.
You get a list of keywords for which your site ranks which you can download as a spreadsheet if you wish. You get a report that shows you the average position of a page on your site for each keyword. Look for those that show, say, 11 to 15. You also get an idea of the traffic each keyword gets, and the impressions YOU are getting for that search (which will obviously go up a great deal if you can get on page 1). The chances are that if you are already ranking for a phrase, then you can improve that ranking with relatively little link-building.
You need to find out the page on your site that is ranking for that term. Either search Google itself or look at your analytics to do this. (You do have Google Analytics set up, don’t you?)
Then just write an article, use the keyword or something containing the keyword that is appropriate to your page as your anchor text, and submit to a dofollow article directory such as ezinearticles. Submit to several to multiply the effect.
My other tip is that currently in Labs there is a Site Performance feature. Google say they use the time a page takes to load up as one of their ranking metrics, and I believe it.
I have been using that feature and improving the access time of my site (which is on shared hosting, by the way). I haven’t done much in the way of link building over the last month, but I have seen traffic build up quite a bit.
Google Webmaster Tools makes suggestions for you, but only based on what the Google robot has found, i.e. you can’t make changes live and see the result. However, they also provide you with a link to a Firefox plugin that will add a feature to Firebug to test your page’s speed live, and make suggestions.
I did that, and found out that the theme I was using had many additional CSS files that were being requested. I changed to a different theme that did not use several independent CSS files.
I did that last Tuesday.
It is now Monday morning, and I can already see an increase in the number of impressions being reported for Wednesday by Google Webmaster Tools. In addition, my AdSense figures are up for the last three days. I think one of them is a record for me, actually.
By the way, I haven’t seen anybody else advise the above, so this may well be worth taking to heart.
What do you think? Am I barking mad, or have I hit on something here? Please add a comment with your thoughts.
