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Week 6 – Getting Indexed, Writing Content, and Waiting for Google

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It has been another crazy week here at the Love Family Household.  Leah is Coming into her last month of pregnancy, and we should have little Everett to take care of sometime this month.  We are hoping that if we can crack the Online Marketing Business Code we will spend all our time at home or traveling with our child and possibly make some more children.

Even if we can get our niche site to make us a good part time income we would be happy. Leah can continue to work at UPS part time (which provides us with Insurance), and I can continue doing magic shows part time.

So, let us see where we are in this Niche Site Journal.

Week # 6 Results

Getting Indexed

We have finally confirmed that we are indexed with Google.  We launched the blog 3 weeks ago, but we waited till 2 weeks ago to use the WordPress SEO PlugIn to register with Google and other search engines.  With article spinning I have found that we already rank on the first page of bing.com, but I am not sure yet on Google or Yahoo.  I am still trying to figure out how to use Market Samurai‘s Rank Tranker tool, but I should have our rankings by next week’s post.

We did try a web tool at http://www.tools4google.com/search-google-position/keyword_tracking.php.  It showed zero results, but limits search to the top 1000 positions of a particular keyword on Google.

Writing Content

We realize going into the pregnancy niche that we are going to have a high competition rate.  To overcome this, we are focusing on a less popular keyword, but we also need to take advantage of untapped long-tail, non-target keywords.  In other words, we need to write great content that people want to read.  If we create an informative site with lots of content we will get more people to our site.

To capture these long-tail keywords we will use market samurai, but more importantly, we are going to write articles on subjects that we are interested in for my wife’s pregnancy.  The more articles we write, the more keywords we will rank for, and the more we will increase our traffic.  This will give us the opportunity to help more pregnant woman and their loved ones while making a few dollars.

Our goal is to get a total of 20 articles on the website before the end of week 8.  We currently have 6 articles written right now with only 2 of them up on the site.  We should have the finished ones published by next week, but we also need to spin a few of those articles for our backlinking strategy.

Google takes it’s time

It has come to my attention we can’t force Google to rank us number one.  I can’t complain as I have only put in a few hours into marketing.  I am not sure how fast others have accomplished the #1 ranking, but my goal is that we get there in under 4 months (by the first of March).

Income: $0 (Total to date $0)

No Income yet.

Costs: $0 (Total to date $346.30)

We didn’t spend any money this week…. That always makes me happy.

Time Breakdown: 11 Hours (Total to date 81 hours)

We only worked 11 hours this week.  The week of Halloween is always busy for a magician, in case you didn’t know I am a magician, so I had limited availability and needed a lot of rest between events.

Leah’s Time (8 hours):

  • 8 hours writing articles.  It takes Leah about an hour to do research and outline her page, about 30 – 45 minutes to write, and 15 minutes to read back over several times for editing.

Jason’s Time (3 hours):

Plan

Here is an update list of our plans.

  • Week 7: Create articles, spin, and place on other sites with links back to my site. Sign up and plan to use mass article submitter/creator software and social bookmarking sites to point at web 2.0 sites, articles in directories, and articles in external blogs.
  • Week 8: Comment on other related sites with back links to mine, become active in forums, and build a basic social media presence.

Lesson:  Learning Curve

It has come to my attention that comparing my progress to other niche site creators is not a smart thing to do.  The fact that I am spending so much time learning is slowing down my progress tremendously.  Next time Leah and I create a niche site we will have a better understand of the process and will not need to reference or research niche selection, article marketing, how to use the tools we have purchased, etc, etc.  This is why I am trying to present this as a Niche Site Journal instead and hoping you can learn from my mistakes and not have to do the same amount of research.

For those of you who are also attempting a Niche Site, I recommend that you try to do most of your work in one sitting.  I have found that by spreading out my time to work on the niche site I have had to constantly go back and read over information I read the week before.  It becomes a circle of time waste having to read over everything for a few hours, work on what needs to get done, and then stop. The next week I have to go over the process to ensure I didn’t forget anything.

If at all possible do your work in burst broken down into smaller tasks, such as:

  1. Choose Niche, pick a domain, and buy web hosting.
  2. Install wordpress, choose themes, and add plugins
  3. Create content and publish
  4. Article Marketing

By working in bursts you can research the part you are on, implement what you learned, and the next week work on the next step.  Our plan is to use this productivity method for the next niche site.

My Niche Site Journal:

Your Turn

I realize I have not invited people to follow along in the last few posts and wish to do so now.
If you are interested, you should use what I have learned and attempt your own niche site journal.  It can be on a free site like blogger.com or wordpress.com.   If you have a personal blog like this one, that is another option.  No matter were you host your blog, I ask you to go ahead and post your URL in the comment section with a brief description of your strategy.

Backlinking from Smart Passive Income

Week 5 – Back links and Article Marketing

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Marketing Niche Sites is hard. There is a never ending amount of information with a lot of contradictory theories and techniques. I ended up spending a great deal of time looking around at other people’s thoughts on the subject.

There is a lot of content out there in a variety of forms. I spent more time watching videos, listening to podcasts and reading articles then I really should have.

My new philosophy is just to pick one person to follow on this and stick with that.

I have decided to stick with the system Pat Flynn talks about in his the backlinking strategy that works article, but with some adjustments.

My back linking strategy is to create original articles; spin those articles; and submit the spin versions to article directories, Web 2.0 properties, and free blog sites with links back to my niche site.  Then I have to connect to these spun articles through article submission software and to use social bookmarking.

From Jason and Jeremy’s video on Internet Business Mastery

I tried to diversify the “words” that contain my link to my site.

They suggest:

33% Exact Keyword, Partial Keyword, Related Keywords
33% Using sites URL and URLs to specific posts/pages
33% Miscellaneous (such as “click here” or “More Information”)

The articles I submitted had the following anchor tags for the backlinks:

  • 1 had my wife’s name as the author (Leah Love).
  • 1 link was “Click Here” and was in the context of, “for more information click here.”
  • 2 were URL links to the home page of the niche site.

Week #5 Results

Back links and Article Marketing

This week has been a rough one for a few reason.  The first being we had to buy more software to make the marketing strategy work (which Leah was not happy about since we had already spent$262.30), and we might need to buy more software.  The second being that I wasted too much time researching what strategy to use and then doing something different (I talk about this in the lesson learned section below).

Income: $0

No Income yet.

Costs: $84

For the best spinner, we spent $84.  This is the software that changes an article into multiple articles. It changes the articles enough to sneak past being flagged as duplicates.  These articles are used to put on other sites with links back to my niche site as mentioned in the strategy at the top of this post.

Time Breakdown: 14 Hours

Leah’s Time (4 hours):

  • 4 hours writing new content for the site. These will be “spun” for the back linking strategy.

Jason’s Time (7 hours):

  • 2.5 hour studying backlinking strategies and creating a plan
  • 2.5 hour signing up for article directories
  • 1 hour spinning articles
  • 4 hour posting articles on article directories (this took way longer than it should, and I talk about it in the Lessons section below)

Plan

Here is an update list of our strategy.

  • Week 6: Create articles, spin, and place on other sites with link backs. Sign up and plan to use mass article submitter/creator software and social bookmarking sites to point at web 2.0 sites, articles in directories, and articles in external blogs.
  • Week 7: Comment on other sites with back links to mine, become active in forums, and build a basic social media presence.
  • Week 8: Optimize the WordPress site, Google Adsense, and the marketing.

Lesson:  Don’t let paranoia get you off track!

It has been a weird lesson this week, and it sounds awkward saying it, but I let fear lose me about 4 hours of the 10 hours I put in this week.  That means I could have accomplished 40% more if I didn’t make this mistake.

Let me explain.

I have decided to use Pat Flynn’s niche site duel articles as my guiding star in creating this niche sites. I trust Pat because he is honest about his income, his strategies, and cares for his audience. All things that make me believe him, but while implementing his backlinking strategy, I started to question how it worked.

I started reading other websites on the subject, which was a good idea, but I spent 2.5 hours going over everything I could read or watch on the subject. In the end, I decided to go with Pat’s strategy. Reading what others said was not a waste of time, but I could have spent just 1 hour and I would know the same amount of information I do now.

The second thing and the biggest mistake I made was getting paranoid that I would be flagged for repeat content. So I took my spun articles and drastically changed them manually. This consisted of cutting out entire paragraphs from the article and switching the remaining ones around. The problem with this was that the article directories required 500 – 600 words minimum.  I had cut the article down to 300 words on two occasions. This required writing an extra 200 – 300 words to fill in the words I cut out.

This was a huge mistake for several reasons.

  1. When Google looks at my articles next to each other, it looks for a specific percentage of similar word use in sentences.  It doesn’t matter if the paper is in similar order because it looks at similar sentences not similarly structures of articles.  The spin software breaks up the similarity in sentences to get passed as none duplicate articles.
  2. Wasting my money.  I paid the money for using a program to spin articles and not using it correctly.
  3. Wasting my time.  The articles were already different because of being spun.  Me changing them by hand had no purpose other than an attempt to overcome the paranoia of being flagged and not getting ranked.
Another week has passed with a new one coming up.  I hope you learn from my lessons and enjoy following along with my niche site journal.  If you have any questions, feel free to leave the in the comment section.
Sincerely,
Jason Love

My Niche Site Journal:

Leah Pregnant

Week 4 – add plug-ins, add widgets, and adjusting theme

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56 hours into the Niche Site Journal and the website is done. It has been a busy four weeks with a lot of technical mistakes and learning involved.

This week it was hard to find time to work on the niche site. Leah had her baby shower and had some other baby related things going on, which left me to take up the slack.

Plug-ins

In case you are new to WordPress, “Plugins are tools used to extend the functionality of the WordPress platform. However, they are only applicable to self-hosted blogs and web sites using the WordPress.org software” (from http://en.support.wordpress.com/plugins/).

I am not going to explain how to install since this is not that kind of post. Instead here is a list of the ones I am currently using for my niche site.

  • Contact Form 7:  for my contact page I am using this form so that people can contact me without having to give out my email address.
  • Disable Comments:  I didn’t want people to be able to comment on my pages because it isn’t that kind of website. Also, I get enough spam comments on jasonloveslife.com and my other sites. I would hate to have to clean out another site from comment spam.
  • Google Analyticator:  This is how I am connecting the website to my Analytics account for tracking visitors.
  • WordPress SEO:  A plug-in that is allowing me to optimize my pages for Search Engines and hopefully getting me ranked higher.

Week #4 Results

Fine Tuning the website

Leah has had a busy week, so all the work fell on my shoulders. Which has been rough. I did 10 hours Sunday and about an hour a day Monday through Thursday.  The results of which could have been better, but the site is ready to start promoting.  The only issues I see right now are that a few of the pages need another 100 words to be optimal for the search engines, and we will probably do a little more tweaking with the Theme and adding more content.

Income: $0

No Income yet.

iStock photo

Image from iStock

Costs: $47.99

We ended up putting spending a little more money this week than we wanted to. We spent $47.99 on 30 credits with istockphoto.com.  We could have bought less, but I do enjoy using images in my posts. Photos help with SEO and make the site look better.

The truth is, I bought 30 credits with the knowledge that if I have any extra I can use them for other blogs.

This image to the right was purchased from istockphoto.com and represents the internal struggle I had with
spending $47.99 on pictures.  Just to let you know, this image was originally bought for a post on a different blog of mine… So, I am recycling the images I already purchased.

Time Breakdown: 14 Hours

Leah’s Time (0 hours):

  • 0 Leah was busy and didn’t have time this week to help out.

Jason’s Time (14 hours):

  • 1 hour Adjusted theme to make the Google AdSense links look somewhat like the links for the rest of the page.  Making it look more uniform and better designed.
  • 1 hour looking for a new theme.  While adjusting the website and trying to get it to look how I wanted to, I become very frustrated.
    .After the hour I gave up and decided I would stick with what I got until further down the road.
  • 3 hours finding and setting up plugins.
  • 1 hour looking at widgets.  I ended up only using the search bar, but will add more down the road.
  • 3 hour researching the topic and adding content to pages.  The SEO plug-in was saying we need about 50 – 100 more words for a few pages, so I was trying to write more but wanted to ensure it was relevant and helpful.
  • 3 hours messing with SEO plugin settings inside the pages and posts.  Some needed a higher density of keywords and they all needed meta descriptions.
  • 2 hours finding, purchasing, adding, and optimizing images.

Plan

Here is an update list of our plans.  The difference from last week is that we worked out more details of what we want to do for each week.

  • Week 5: Create and implement Article Marketing plan.
  • Week 6: Continue to do article marketing, while improving sites shareability via social media and social bookmarking sites.
  • Week 7: Adjust marketing campaign towards what is giving us the most traffic.
  • Week 8: Optimize the WordPress site, Google Adsense, and the marketing.

Lessons

I learned several lessons this week while working on the niche site journal.  It has been a rough week because of Leah not being able to help.

-Taking breaks

On Saturday, I put in a 10 hour day working on the blog.  I figure it would be okay.  During my Undergraduate work and Masters Degree, it was common to spend days on end working on projects and papers. I thought it would be no problem to sit down and to work for the day. It was harder than I remember.

The thing that saved me was the five to fifteen minute breaks every few hours.  I kept finding myself trying to work and my brain wondering off. It took me about half a day to realize that without a break, I was unproductive and unable to focus.

-Perfection can hold you back

I can’t seem to get the WordPress theme to do exactly what I want, and it drives me crazy. I have also realized that I could keep adjusting the theme for another two weeks before I would be close to happy with it.  Instead of doing that, I will just launch as is and when it starts making me money I will fix, adjust, and optimize the websites.

My Niche Site Journal:

Week 3 – WordPress Site Editing & Content Creation

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We are at a total of 42 hours into working on this niche site with 14 hours coming from this week. This week we’ve been filling up the website with content and adjusting the code to look good. The process is simple: write the article, create or find images for the post, make changes to the “look” of the website, set up Google AdSense, and placing ads on the site.

Pages for the website

Since we spent the week working on the site, I thought you might find it helpful to know what the website is going to look like in regards to the number of pages and what they are for.

  1. Home: We are using this as the Welcome page.  It talks about the product (which is our Keyword); we make sure to give it a personal feel, and we mention the reader as much as possible.  Since our site is on pregnancy, we congratulate them on their expected child or their loved one’s expected child, make sure they feel we care about them (which we do), and sell them on the idea of the product being essential for their health and well-being (which it is).
  2. Articles: This page is in a condensed blog format.  This page will have a list of around five articles talking about the product. Each will show a headline with a very brief description of the articles topic.  These five articles will be their own pages so I will not include them in this list as they are blog posts on the subject of the niche.
  3. Questions: This page is dedicated to quick questions and answers people have about the niche.  We currently have five questions, but hope to populate it from questions we get from our readers.
  4. About: The page that talks about why we created the website, the purpose of the site, and what’s unique about our site.
  5. Contact: We have a form on this page for people to fill out if they have any questions, concerns, or just want to drop us a line through a form.  We created the form using a plug-in. I will share which one in the next update (week 4).

Week #3 Results

Filling in the website with Content

Leah and I have been working on different parts of the niche site at the same time.  Leah has been creating content and designing images to enhance the site.  At the same time, I’ve been adjusting the look of the website while adding the Google adSense codes.  The more we work on the site, the more excited I am about getting the site done, marketing, and then collect the passive income from all the work we are doing these eight weeks.

Income: $0

No Income yet.

Costs: $0

We didn’t spend any money this week, but you might want to. Leah’s undergraduate degree is in illustration and art, plus I have studied digital arts for fun and for creating marketing material for my other businesses.  This means we will be creating a lot of the website images ourselves (with plans to monetize the pictures later with revenue sharing stock image sites).  You might consider getting an image at http://www.istockphoto.com/ (cheapest photos are around $1.50 to use), or you can get custom images done through http://fiverr.com/.

Time Breakdown: 14 Hours

We ended up breaking up the week down the middle because of the fact there was enough work for both of us to put in.  Leah ended up working two hours a day for three days, with one of those days working an extra hour.  I (Jason) ended up sitting down for seven hours to adjust the website’s look, add Google Ad Sense ads, go over what Leah wrote, and add content to the website.

Leah’s Time (7 hours):

  • 1 hour determining what pages were needed for the site.  The way she did this was by looking at other sited on the web and determining what pages were needed for our small site.
  • 6 hours writing for those pages.  Some of the pages were difficult to fill as this is the first time Leah has written for websites.  To make it easier she would look at the sites she liked with similar pages, determine the what objective the page was to fulfill (we listed them in Pages for Website section above), break those objectives into sections, and write based off of those objectives & sections.

Jason’s Time (7 hours):

  • 4 hours adding pages and creating links between them.  Normally this is easy with WordPress as it creates the links for you in the menu section.  In the theme we choose I didn’t like it had the links at the bottom of the page. So, I manually put the links in using HTML coding.
    This didn’t take too long, but the hard part was remembering how to link within the same page.  We used this for the Question page; there is a list of questions, and when you click on the link, it takes you down the page to the answer.  I had to look up again how to do it, and then I had problems, and that meant I had to re-do it several times.
  • 2 hours setting up AdSense banners and getting them on the page.  I had to adjust the sizes several times and figure out the best color scheme.
  • 1 hour editing and uploading to the site the pages Leah completed.

Plan

Here is an update list of our plans.  The difference is that we worked out more details of what we want to do for each week.

  • Week 4: Finishing the Adjust theme for the best look, add plug-ins, add widgets, and finish populating the website with great content.
  • Week 5: Create and implement Article Marketing plan.
  • Week 6: Continue to do article marketing, while improving sites shareability via social media and social bookmarking sites.
  • Week 7: Adjust marketing campaign towards what is giving us the most traffic.
  • Week 8: Optimize the WordPress site, Google Adsense, and the marketing.

Lessons

The lesson for this week is to utilize your strengths and outsource your weaknesses.  For both my wife and I we have different strengths and weaknesses.  She is considerably better at writing articles while she has no clue on how to set up a WordPress theme and make changes.  You might not have a spouse that compliments your abilities, but there are people out there who are willing to do the things you don’t want to do, for reasonable compensation.

Sites like fiverr.com are great for that.  For $5 you can pay someone else to do your web design, image formatting, content creation, etc…  it saves you hours of possible tedium.  I love learning how to create websites, so website creation makes sense.  I hate writing content, so if Leah weren’t here to cover that, I would hire a writer for $5 on Fiverr and then adjust their article to fit my voice.

The Fiverr website can have its drawbacks, but is usually worth the risk because it is so cheap.  You might have to shop around for a someone that does the best job and hire them to do what you don’t want to.  I also want to mention I’m not an affiliate for fiverr.com and use it sparingly because I like to do a lot of the work myself and don’t have a lot of money to throw around.  So, while it is an amazing site where you can get some great work done, there are also people who claim to be better at things than they are.  You can get your money back if you’re not truly satisfied (I had to do this one time), you need to be careful when using it to make sure you understand the process before you begin.

My Niche Site Journal:

Week 2 – WordPress Site Theme and Launching the Blog

Niche Site Journal, on maternity belts, , , , 17 Comments

We put in 14 hours this week. We confirmed a choice for our niche site topic, found a domain name, chose a theme for the WordPress site, and created a logo.

The great thing about using WordPress and Hostmonster.com is that you can get the site up in just a few clicks and about 5 minutes.

For some reason, it feels like we are already behind. As if the website should be finished by now. In fact, we probably could have finished but a few of our choices have forced us to take longer than normal.

  • We decided before starting our search that we wanted to do a pregnancy related site. If we just made a list of our interests/hobbies and looked for profitable niches related to them, it would have been easier and faster.
  • We are very picky on web design. With the niche site, especially at the beginning, the look of the website is not as important. Using almost any of the free WordPress site themes would work as long as they are not too visually busy and easy to navigate.
  • We decided to change the domain, which added an extra hour or two (I explain this in the time breakdown section).

Week #2 Results

Finalizing a niche and WordPress site design

Leah and I have picked a niche that we feel has the potential to make us some money through Google Adwords Ads.  I am not going to share with you yet what the niche is or the web address for the WordPress site until the end of our eight weeks.  This is to keep our numbers from being skewed by visitors coming from this niche site journal instead of organic traffic.

This will help us, in the long run, to get accurate numbers as far as organic traffic from the search engines.

Income: $0

No Income yet.

Costs: $115.37

$93.39 went to pay for 12 months of web hosting with a domain name.  I also used the Whois domain privacy option that was $9.99 (already in the price).  I did this so that we do not have to use our address and contact information in the website directory (it is for privacy).  I also spent $21.98 was for the second domain with the Whois domain privacy.

I used Hostmonster.com because I have had websites hosted by them for several years and have always had great service with them.  I have used 2 or 3 other services since hosting my first website in 2002 and have to say Hostmonster has been the best out of all of them.

Hostmonster.com also makes it easy to launch a WordPress site with just a few clicks.  There are plenty of other hosting services out there, and if you want to get the best deal you might want to shop around, but make sure that they provide high-quality service and have a low rate of website outages.

I also want to mention that I am an affiliate seller for Hostmonster, meaning if you follow my link to their site and order web hosting I make a little bit of money that helps pay for this blog.  I want to tell you this so that you know I’m completely transparent and honest with you, but I also want to mention that I only recommend products that I use and love.

Time Breakdown: 14 Hours

  • 2 Hours going over number needed with Market Samurai for a good Niche Site.  I was still unclear on what were good numbers in Market Samurai for choosing a keyword that was few enough searches to have low competition against other sites, but enough search traffic with high enough AdSense click value to make it worth creating a site.
  • 4 Hours finding keyword.  I spent another 4 hours finding a keyword that matched the criteria I set for myself.  I could have done it in half the time, but I wanted to test several options and figured I’d rather spend the time choosing the right niche instead of creating it and not get any traffic.
  • 1 Hour finding good domain name.  After choosing the niche, I needed to find a domain.  This wasn’t too hard; as all I did was take the keyword and add the word “on” in front of it.  What took so long was once I bought the domain, I decided I also need to by the plural version of the keyword.  So, I bought two domains; one with an “s” at the end and the other without.
  • 1 Hour setting up WordPress site.  This normally takes just a few minutes, but because I had two domains, I decided to have one domain just forward the viewer to the domain that holds the WordPress site.  The problem I ran into here was I put the WordPress site on the wrong domain.
    This meant I had to delete and uninstall the first WordPress installation and create a second one.  Then I had to point the nonplural domain to forward the user to plural version.
  • 2 Hours on WordPress site theme.  I love well-designed websites, so choosing a theme took longer than it needed.  If you are in a hurry, you could use the theme that comes with the WordPress installation. I searched out a free theme to use that I felt would make the site look better.  To get closer to what I want, I had to do some slight modifications to the CSS of the theme, but if you don’t know what that means or how to do it, don’t worry because you can just use whatever theme you like with no modifications.
  • 2 Hours working on logo.  We could have done this in half the time, but Leah wanted to make sure we had a good one that we wouldn’t want to change down the line.  My suggestion for those not skilled in digital art is to either not worry about a logo or go to a website like fiverr.com or 99designs.com to get one created for cheap.
  • 2 Hours writing first post.  Leah went ahead and wrote a post.  It took her about an hour of research and an hour to write an approximately 500-word article on the topic of our niche.

Plan

Our plan seems to be going smoothly for the most part.  We went ahead and planned out the rest of the eight weeks as follows:

  • Week 3 & 4 finishing the WordPress site, adding Google AdSense ads and populating our pages with useful content relating to our keyword.
  • In week 5 & 6 we will experiment with different ways to market the site and get it ranked on Google.
  • Week 7 & 8 will then be dedicated to optimizing the WordPress site and the marketing.

Lessons

For Niche Sites, there is no perfect answers, no magic formula, and no way to get a niche site done other than pushing through the process or hiring someone else to do it for you.  This week we have learned that while we hope to receive passive income through our niche site, the actual creation of the site takes time and effort.  With experience it gets easier but at the start it feels like a slow process.

This is not necessarily a bad thing.  Those who are looking for a quick and easy buck will never finish their websites or their keyword research, leaving plenty of space for those willing to put the time in (like you and me) to reap the rewards of a well thought out and executed niche website.

Your turn

Are you following along or working on a niche site?  Tell me about your experience in the comment section below.

My Niche Site Journal: