New SEO challenge

I don’t usually pay a lot of attention to SEO. Of course I follow all of the basics and do whatever I can to build links, but I don’t go much beyond that.

I like setting new challenges, so I thought I would run a little experiment to see if I can get a new site to rank on page 1 for a two word key phrase.

I have registered the domain quite some time ago and could only get a .info. The top sites are wikipedia, which I don’t think I will be able to outrank, but it would be nice just to get on the front page.

The keyword phrase has a global search volume of 22,200 searches a month, but only 204,000 competing websites.

I am not a big fun of doing lots of scientific testing. I just want to see how much work I have to do to get this site ranked. I have added just one link from one of my own websites, so far. It is indexed and is getting a little traffic from Google.

The site just has a few pages of a few hundred words a page so far. I thought about revealing the site in the post, but on second thoughts, I don’t think it is a good idea.

I have now completed 47 articles on Infobarrel and just 3 articles away from my September goal of 50. I have lost a little interest in Hubpages and still stuck on 60 hubs. I also haven’t done any ezine articles yet.

I just came back from a short break, so I am feeling a little refreshed and hopefully will able to all of my articles done.

Starting a new blog and promoting it

I am planning to spend a bit of time in Indonesia. There are so many things that fascinate me about the country. Aside from Bali however, it doesn’t get much attention.

Anyway I have decided to start a new blog on life and news in Indonesia – AboutIndonesia.com. I found really nice magazine like theme which is available for free. I tried to write enough posts on the site, to look like it was a complete website.

I have already been contributing to an Indonesian expat forum, so my first step in promotion was easy as I just added the site to my signature and I have gotten my first visitors that way.

I have added some links from my existing sites so the search engine bots can find my site, although I am not getting any traffic yet from the search engines.

Next I added quite a few Indonesian expat blogs to my Google reader and have been leaving comments on those blogs. A couple of people have since checked out my site and have left some comments. I have asked a couple of blogs to add my site to their blogroll.

Most of the blogs I found were on hosted domains like blogger and wordpress, so they already have pretty good page rank. Since the blogs are not commercial in nature, as long as you engage with the other bloggers, most will link back to your site. As we all know every link you can get to your site is gold and some sites spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on this.

I have added Google Analytics, Google Webmaster and Yahoo explorer. Next I will hit some directories. I couldn’t find any Indonesia related blog carnivals, so I started my own. It should be another good way to get some new links and traffic.

My goal is also to post at least one new entry a day.

What else would you do to promote a new blog?

Relationship Advice Site and Blog Ideas

The internet is full of sites with varying degrees of knowledge and expertise on a variety of topics and issues. One of these areas is the realm of relationship advice. Starting a website and generating the requisite traffic would be a cinch if you pick the right niche.

People are constantly looking for ways to improve or fix their ailing personal lives, so they look to a multitude of articles on the web for advice on how to get to the place they want to be regarding their relationships.

There are so many different angles one could take when starting a relationship advice website or blog. Here are a few suggestions for creating a successful relationship website or blog:

Relationships Gone Wrong

A site like this could focus on relationships that have gone awry. Rather than a best practices approach, the site could be humorous in nature, focusing on all the wrong moves that can be made in a relationship. Readers would more than likely see some of their mistakes in the stories on the site and learn from a more comedic approach to relationship advice.

Relationship 101

This type of site would be a sort of relationship primer, with advice on how to meet people, what is appropriate, etc. Basic rules of etiquette, advice on attracting the best possible people into your life, and scenarios fully outlined for those who are not very good at the dating scene would be the focal point of this kind of site.

Successful Relationship Stories

A completely opposite approach from the first idea, this relationship site would focus on nothing but the positive aspects of being in a relationship. Anecdotal stories and affirmations would be the main type of content posted on this page or blog. Positivity and nothing but good, heartfelt content could make a great inspirational relationship site.

Relationship Problems and Solutions

This type of relationship site would focus on common relationship problems and different options for solving these dilemmas. Topics would range from taking the relationship to the next level, commitment issues, and tougher topics like infidelity and breaking up. No stone would be left unturned on this type of relationship site.

This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of an MBA degree. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com

Structuring my new website

I am currently in Thailand taking a little bit of a break, but also spending some time on my new travel website. I am still thinking exactly what I want to do with the site.

I decided to use Joomla as the CMS for the site. I was thinking about Drupal at first, but after spending a little bit of time with it, I eventually went back to Joomla. I found it difficult to find good themes for Drupal, like what you can get with Joomla. Drupal is probably more flexible and powerful, but Joomla is a little easier to get a site up and running, in my opinion.

I am using a theme from Joomlart. The theme has an online newspaper look. At first, I couldn’t get anything to work. The documentation for it isn’t great, but once you play around with it for a while, it is not too hard. They have a great support forum, who helped me with a couple of small problems I had.

I want to make user reviews a large part of the site, and Joomla has a great review extension, which I think looks very professional and is fairly easy to set up. I would also like to add property listings later on and again Joomla has some good extensions for this.

I wanted to add a blog to the site and could have done it within Joomla, but you just can’t beat wordpress for this. I imported my old travel site entries into the site and redirected the old site to the new domain. I want to also eventually set up a forum on the site and will probably go with Vbulletin. There are bridges available to link users to Joomla, but to keep it all simple, I might just keep them separate.

I am getting a little bit of traffic now to the site and starting to build links. Travel bloggers are a friendly bunch of people and seem to happily exchange links. I am already ranking for “asia travel guide” which at least is a start.

My goal is to eventually be able to hire some writers to produce content for the site, but that could be a while off yet.

My next great project

The Olympics are over and at least the monetary gain although the monetary gain from the site was disappointing, I am soldiering on working on a new project.

Most of the sites I started are doing ok now and don’t require too much maintenance, therefore I can put a lot of time into my next website. For my next project, I wanted to focus on what I am interested in and what I can see will be fun and interesting developing and more importantly has good opportunities for advertising and affiliate income.

I want to combine blogging, news articles and user generated content into the site. It is something I have been successful with other sites and I hope to replicate in my new project. Since I have less to write about here, I am going to document my goals for the site and how I plan to meet them.

When I did the 28 sites in 28 days challenge it got a bit of interest, so I think it is something that both I and my readers might benefit from.

Website idea: industry blog/news site

Many internet gurus will tell you to build websites based on niche areas with high search volumes. If you are looking for something different, why not start a news site or blog (if there is any difference) on a particular industry. Most industries have some kind of trade magazine that all companies that belong to that industry subscribe to.

Most of those publications are pretty dry reading and are published about once a month. If you need an idea for a website, why not create a blog on that particular industry. You could spice it up a little with lots of industry gossip and news. I would probably restrict it to an industry in just one country or region. You aren’t going to get a huge amount of traffic, but it would be easy to become the online authority for that particular industry.

I imagine you would have to start with doing fairly boring news, but you could then start doing interviews with CEOs and key players in the industry. Most executives love seeing their name in print, so they will send interviews to all of their colleagues and friends. Eventually I think you would get people sending you anonymous tips, which you could then break news and regular business newspapers and magazines might pick up on. Of course, you would need to be careful not to publish anything defaming.

I doubt that Adsense or affiliate links would work. You would probably need to sell advertising directly like what magazines do. Since your costs would be much lower than a printed magazine, I think advertisers would see this as a good deal. Most executives have email and internet now, so I don’t think it would take too long to get recognized in the industry.

Adding a job board could be another source of revenue. Make friends with recruiters and I am should you could pick up on some great gossip.

The tech industry is already so well covered, I would target an industry that is traditionally not so tech savy. Hotel, airlines, mining are some ideas.

Some thoughts on my Beijing website

The Beijing Olympics are finally over and some people have asked me how the blog went. Financially the site didn’t do as well as we had hoped. The site started well during the opening ceremony. It also did well the first week when Michael Phelps won his medals and then traffic tapered off a bit.

If calculate the costs and time of running the site, then we did come out in the red. In terms of the knowledge I gained from promoting and marketing the site, living in Beijing while the Olympics were on, I don’t think you can put a dollar value on. We also now have a site that has thousands of links, which will be useful to launch other sites from and it will still continue to make money, although obviously not as much as when the games were on.

Even though the site wasn’t as successful financially as what I would have liked, I still think I will go ahead and try to put together an ebook on the methods I used to build traffic to the site. We had a lot of success using Web 2.0 sites like Facebook and Youtube to drive traffic.

Huge spike in traffic

I am happy to say that we are getting a great spike in traffic this week on the Beijing Olympic website.

We have also put together a medal tally widget that can be easily added to your blog or website.

Things are going to be very busy the next three weeks, but I am looking forward to reporting back after the Olympics as to how much the site made and the levels of traffic. So far everything is on track.

My first media interview

A Brazilian journalist contacted me this morning about my Beijing Olympic site. I answered a few questions by email and he followed up with a phone call.

It’s exciting to finally have people interested in the site and getting different emails from people. It was a pretty long wait, but I am starting to feel more confident that the site will do well.

And if anyone would like to help out blogging about their favorite athlete, team or country in exchange for some links, please drop me an email.

Finally some love from the big G

It has only taken three years, but I am finally getting some love from Google with my Beijing Olympic site. Perhaps it is too early to mention this, but I couldn’t help writing about it.

Search engine traffic has jumped from 10 to over 70 per cent overnight. It’s weird because I have ranked well in MSN and Ask for some keywords.

I have some good inbound links and have done everything above board. I have spent zero on advertising but have spent many hours writing guest posts and trying to craft good content that gets links.

Persistence is the key to anything. I think many people would have given up long ago if they were in the position I was in with my site.

It might sound corny but I believe:

persistence + passion = profit

I know you can make money from researching obscure, long tail key word phrases, but if you have no interest in that particular topic, I think your only passion will be in making money rather than making a website or info product that is any good.

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