20130425
From Russia with... um... Ulterior Motives?
Not much is happening here at TNB this week, so this will be a short post.
Rank - Niche Site I (aka, GPT) has reached #26 and #38 for two of its three keywords. The third keyword remains unranked. Until this week, all searches that have led people to GPT have been longtail keywords that are not particularly useful in terms of generating income. This week, for the first time, two people who were actually searching for relevant content visited my site. This is an indication that GPT is rising on both G and Yahoo. Hopefully this will translate into ever-increasing traffic.
Four backlinks have shown up for GPT on Alexa, a comment left on a relevant blog, and now several entries from the primary layer of the link wheel. I'd like to start seeing some of my AMR links show up... to just at least reassure me that that was worth doing.
Niche Site II is now ranking at #64 for its main keyword. It is still unranked for its other two keywords. I still have not done much backlinking for this page, however, it has two backlinks, according to Alexa. I attribute this to having installed the Alexa toolbar. Both of the links are incidental blog posts, and it seems that as I visit them, Alexa is now watching, and recording those links. G and Y are unimpressed.
BTW - the Alexa rank of all three sites has been steadily rising. You and I know that is meaningless, but it is still fun to watch.
Income - Not much to report here. I made another 2 cents this week. The disturbing thing is that these are impression ads that are paying, and I am afraid that the entire income from the site is due to nothing more than the traffic created by me when I turn the computer on each morning. Again... nothing substantial will happen til we get on G's first page.
Russian Weirdness - Aside from the constant bombardment from Russian and Chinese spiders crawling my sites (which I have tried to throttled!) I have had a weird happening. I had a sudden spike here at TNB, all referrals from a particular web site. I went to that site to see what the deal was. It turned out that the site was some sort of Russian website that distributes bootleg movies. Apparently, this is what is known as "referrer spam", where the visitor to your site is not a visitor at all, but instead a bot that visits just long enough to be recorded in your stats. What is their intention? To have you click on their entry in the log and visit their page! These sites will be things like the bootleg movie site, porn, virus pages, and yep, I had several hits from something called Al Jizzera America. Which, I have to admit, REALLY pissed me off. Where are those Anonymous people? Where is the FBI? Why the hell is there an Al Jizzera America?
Bah!
20130415
A Little More Money and A Little More Alexa
Alexa
I have been wondering about this Alexa rank business. For two reasons: One was that I wondered if it helped with traffic or rankings or something, and two, I use the Web Rank tool bar, and it shows the Alexa rank for my page everytime I look at it. That made me curious. And also, I am competitive, I didnt like NOT ranking for something where others were ranking.
Anyway... I read that some said that that your site has to be visited by someone running the Alexa toolbar to be ranked (which seems pretty dumb to me). Others said absolutely not, Alexa, owned by Amazon, did not use their toolbar to measure rankings. Well, I HATE toolbars, anyway, so I tended to believe the latter. But, finally, curiosity got the best of me, and I installed the Alexa toolbar. That was last Friday. Today, three days later, niche site I, aka GPT, has an Alexa rank. You will be glad to know that GPT is now ranked 21.5 million. Which, I assume, is dead last.
Does this benefit me in some way? Probably not. But, and here is what I found interesting, the Web Rank toolbar also shows backlinks by G, Bing and Alexa. And suddenly, Alexa seems to know about a backlink to GPT. This backlink, apparently the only one that anyone can find anywhere on the internet, was from a blog post comment that I left on a related website back in February. Odd how it suddenly showed up.
Speaking of backlinks, there is also one showing up for one of my blogs that supports GPT. That one was found by Bing, and is from my efforts on SocialADR. I have found SocialADR interesting thus far, and a far easier way to generate links than mass article marketing. At this point, I have no way of knowing which is more effective.
MMO with InfoBarrel
I have neglected to write another InfoBarrel article, but last night I logged on just to check out my account (no real reason) and I saw that my article had managed to make 2 cents. Great! I think I will write another article... and maybe I will actually put a link in this one!
Rank Check
Every Friday, I check my main keyphrases and see where I am ranking. GPT has dropped onto page 20 for one keyphrase, and is still unranked for the other two. Last week, it was ranked 28th. Nich Site II is now on page 5 for one of its keyphrases, but remains unranked for the other two (I do three keyphrases for each site). This is somewhat disturbing... I have done a linkwheel for GPT, and a SocialADR campaign, only to see it drop. I am unsure what is happening there.
Meanwhile... I have created only one blog that points to Niche Site II, yet it has risen on its own. Better on-page SEO? Better targeted text? Not sure.
At this time, my plan is to run one more SocialADR campaign on GPT, create the linkwheel for Niche Site II, and then run a SocialADR campaign on it as well, and hold off on mass article marketing until I see what happens with its page rank. And, while this is happening, I am going to churn out a couple of InfoBarrel articles, and link one of them to Niche Site II and one to GPT.
My internet marketing business, tentatively dubbed Two Dollar Monkey, has now made a grand total of $0.05. I really need to turn this around RSN (real soon, now) and make some headway.
I have been wondering about this Alexa rank business. For two reasons: One was that I wondered if it helped with traffic or rankings or something, and two, I use the Web Rank tool bar, and it shows the Alexa rank for my page everytime I look at it. That made me curious. And also, I am competitive, I didnt like NOT ranking for something where others were ranking.
Anyway... I read that some said that that your site has to be visited by someone running the Alexa toolbar to be ranked (which seems pretty dumb to me). Others said absolutely not, Alexa, owned by Amazon, did not use their toolbar to measure rankings. Well, I HATE toolbars, anyway, so I tended to believe the latter. But, finally, curiosity got the best of me, and I installed the Alexa toolbar. That was last Friday. Today, three days later, niche site I, aka GPT, has an Alexa rank. You will be glad to know that GPT is now ranked 21.5 million. Which, I assume, is dead last.
Does this benefit me in some way? Probably not. But, and here is what I found interesting, the Web Rank toolbar also shows backlinks by G, Bing and Alexa. And suddenly, Alexa seems to know about a backlink to GPT. This backlink, apparently the only one that anyone can find anywhere on the internet, was from a blog post comment that I left on a related website back in February. Odd how it suddenly showed up.
Speaking of backlinks, there is also one showing up for one of my blogs that supports GPT. That one was found by Bing, and is from my efforts on SocialADR. I have found SocialADR interesting thus far, and a far easier way to generate links than mass article marketing. At this point, I have no way of knowing which is more effective.
MMO with InfoBarrel
I have neglected to write another InfoBarrel article, but last night I logged on just to check out my account (no real reason) and I saw that my article had managed to make 2 cents. Great! I think I will write another article... and maybe I will actually put a link in this one!
Rank Check
Every Friday, I check my main keyphrases and see where I am ranking. GPT has dropped onto page 20 for one keyphrase, and is still unranked for the other two. Last week, it was ranked 28th. Nich Site II is now on page 5 for one of its keyphrases, but remains unranked for the other two (I do three keyphrases for each site). This is somewhat disturbing... I have done a linkwheel for GPT, and a SocialADR campaign, only to see it drop. I am unsure what is happening there.
Meanwhile... I have created only one blog that points to Niche Site II, yet it has risen on its own. Better on-page SEO? Better targeted text? Not sure.
At this time, my plan is to run one more SocialADR campaign on GPT, create the linkwheel for Niche Site II, and then run a SocialADR campaign on it as well, and hold off on mass article marketing until I see what happens with its page rank. And, while this is happening, I am going to churn out a couple of InfoBarrel articles, and link one of them to Niche Site II and one to GPT.
My internet marketing business, tentatively dubbed Two Dollar Monkey, has now made a grand total of $0.05. I really need to turn this around RSN (real soon, now) and make some headway.
20130409
Backlinking Thus Far
After some interruptions (life, you know) and a couple of outright mistakes, I have completed the first round of backlinks using the "link wheel" that everyone loves. I took an article that I had written for my page, and carefully spun it, mostly by hand, using AMR. Although much of AMR is clunky (it being a clearly utilitarian tool and not a smoothly polished "app", if you will) it gets the job done, and the spinner part works quite goodly. So lets break this down.
Article
I wrote this article for the GPT web site and decided that, as an experiment, I would use it to do this first round of links.
Spun
I took the article and spun it using AMR. With the spintax in place, AMR can post the article an infinite number of times (although, infinity will hardly be needed). I also exported 10 spins to use on blogs and whatnot.
Blogs
I created 5 new blogs using things like Tumblr, Wordpress, LiveJournal, etc. I made five of these. On each one, I posted a spun version (one of the ten that I had saved to the hard drive) of the original article. Each article has two links, one to the GPT homepage and another link to one of the pages deeper in, like, for example, the job board. Note: I did not do a blogger one. Anyone care to guess why?
Mass Submission
After I had the five blogs ready to go, I did a mass article submission using AMR. Of course, article submissions are not what they used to be, and so instead of thousands of possibilities, the list only included about 600 possibles. Of those, it managed to submit only 120 successfully. Instead of setting up a submission for each blog (as perhaps I should do) I opted to spin the links so that of the 120 articles, only about 24 point to each blog site. It seems to me that there are alot fewer article sites these days, probably because they were devalued by the evil G, they simply started going away. The days of being able to even do a mass submission may be numbered.
Each of these mass articles has 2 links in the "resource" box, not in the article itself. Again, the links randomly rotate between the 5 blogs.
SocialADR
I created an account on SocialADR, and began using it to drive links to both the main page and the blog sites. There is conflicting advice from internet marketing types on this, so I decided to mix it up. Since I am using the free version, it doesnt seem that very many links will be generated all at once. In any case, all I have to do now is log on each day, share 5 links that I like that were submitted by other folks, and then the links I have ready to share will be posted. It does not mean that my link will only be shared 5 times. Instead, for example, one of my links was submitted 18 times in a matter of seconds. So, that seems to be a good thing. Of course... assuming that these links actually help.
Rank
Since I was out of town on Friday, I was unable to do a rank check for my keywords (using LTP) to see where I am. After refocussing my keywords (I would prefer to say keyphrases, really) last week, I determined that I was off the page (in a bad way... i.e., not SERPed at all) for all of my keywords. As of Monday night, I am ranking 28th for one of my keyphrases, but still zero on the other two.
Note: I have both the niche sites focused on three key words each.
Traffic has increased... which is to say, that I am now getting 1 or 2 people a week, and all of those on long tails associated with the military paralegals page. Not sure if I should do something about this or not.
I will update the ranks after Friday when I see how they went.
Out!
Article
I wrote this article for the GPT web site and decided that, as an experiment, I would use it to do this first round of links.
Spun
I took the article and spun it using AMR. With the spintax in place, AMR can post the article an infinite number of times (although, infinity will hardly be needed). I also exported 10 spins to use on blogs and whatnot.
Blogs
I created 5 new blogs using things like Tumblr, Wordpress, LiveJournal, etc. I made five of these. On each one, I posted a spun version (one of the ten that I had saved to the hard drive) of the original article. Each article has two links, one to the GPT homepage and another link to one of the pages deeper in, like, for example, the job board. Note: I did not do a blogger one. Anyone care to guess why?
Mass Submission
After I had the five blogs ready to go, I did a mass article submission using AMR. Of course, article submissions are not what they used to be, and so instead of thousands of possibilities, the list only included about 600 possibles. Of those, it managed to submit only 120 successfully. Instead of setting up a submission for each blog (as perhaps I should do) I opted to spin the links so that of the 120 articles, only about 24 point to each blog site. It seems to me that there are alot fewer article sites these days, probably because they were devalued by the evil G, they simply started going away. The days of being able to even do a mass submission may be numbered.
Each of these mass articles has 2 links in the "resource" box, not in the article itself. Again, the links randomly rotate between the 5 blogs.
SocialADR
I created an account on SocialADR, and began using it to drive links to both the main page and the blog sites. There is conflicting advice from internet marketing types on this, so I decided to mix it up. Since I am using the free version, it doesnt seem that very many links will be generated all at once. In any case, all I have to do now is log on each day, share 5 links that I like that were submitted by other folks, and then the links I have ready to share will be posted. It does not mean that my link will only be shared 5 times. Instead, for example, one of my links was submitted 18 times in a matter of seconds. So, that seems to be a good thing. Of course... assuming that these links actually help.
Rank
Since I was out of town on Friday, I was unable to do a rank check for my keywords (using LTP) to see where I am. After refocussing my keywords (I would prefer to say keyphrases, really) last week, I determined that I was off the page (in a bad way... i.e., not SERPed at all) for all of my keywords. As of Monday night, I am ranking 28th for one of my keyphrases, but still zero on the other two.
Note: I have both the niche sites focused on three key words each.
Traffic has increased... which is to say, that I am now getting 1 or 2 people a week, and all of those on long tails associated with the military paralegals page. Not sure if I should do something about this or not.
I will update the ranks after Friday when I see how they went.
Out!
20130401
Traffic and Income Report
First Quarter 2013
I report some of my sadly low traffic numbers, and reveal that I am now officially making money on the internet! I will be reporting in (probably quarterly) to keep you updated on how I am doing!Niche I (paralegal training)
The paralegal site had 253 visitors in the first quarter. And GREAT NEWS!!! I have made my first revenue as internet marketer. A whopping $0.03!Niche II (rats)
The rat site has had 92 visitor, and I imagine most of them are me. I am not convinced that the tracking software is very good at figuring out whether a visitor is me. Sure, I have a unique IP number, but since most of the "visits" were direct hits, I think they are either me, or spiders the computer thinks are human.Another odd thing, I have three different plugins that are supposed to track traffic. And Google Analytics on top of that. None of them ever have the same number about anything. Suspicious.
TNB
The Niche Blog has had 135 page views in the first quarter. Since this site is not really monetized, it doesnt matter all that much. I am writing this stuff as much for myself as anyone else, as a record of this journey.InfoBarrel
My first article (the one with no links and no pictures) was accepted by InfoBarrel, and is now live on the site. Feel free to read it here. Yes, I know you shouldnt use an anchor text of "here". Google needs to get a grip... I bet half the legitimate links on the internet say things like, "here."I have had 3 views and 2 reads. As always, I am convinced that all five of those are me.
My intention is to write another 9 articles so that I can be "pre-approved" and write whatever I want. And, I'll be able to go back and shoot a couple of links into the first article, and put it to work. My next article will link back to one of my sites... definitely!
Lending Club
Although I did (finally) suceed in transferring $25 into my Lending Club account, I have not actually purchased any loans yet... in fact, I havent even visited the site. Unfortunately, I have been busy with other things, and I afraid that Lending Club is going to require more attention than I can give at the moment. This isnt just "purchase and forget" investing... I will need to actively manage the portfolio to have success.
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