Have you been checking any of your websites stats lately?

Been seeing a few wild rides in the SERPs?

Been lurking in the doom & gloom of some forums lamenting the latest Google Algorithm tweaks?

Ready to say “Google – you win, it’s just not worth it?

If so, (& I admit to being guilty of a few all of the above), then this is for you.

When it come to making creating success it the crazy world of SEO especially, this is so very apt.

Thanks to BusinessInsider for showing it to me.

Succinct but true!

No further comment necessary….

Edit

Peter (Sire’s) comment below got me thinking….

Google is not God?

Well, as a budding Internet Marketer, you sure could have fooled me. If you’re involved in any type of online endeavors just think of how many times in an average day that you think about Google, or how Google will touch you.

Let’s look at yesterday for me…

I was penning some articles for Operation Cobra. The sole purpose of these articles was so Google would reward me with a back link for a page on a website of mine,  which of course would elevate my pages’s rankings in Google, so Google would send me more traffic.

In order to get the article to be viewed favorably in Google’s eyes, I had to do some research on the right keywords to use, so of course I consulted the Google Keyword Tool. I popped into the Google Traffic Estimator to verify I had the right keywords. I used Google’s gmail to send an article to an outsourcing contact to get re written, so I’d have further opportunities to get more back links for Google to crawl.

I spent 20 minutes in the Pond (which is btw the absolute best $10/month I’ve ever spent on any resource) and read threads on SEO optimization so Google would love ya, how Google punted people from their Google Adsense program, how Google’s Panda algorithm update decimated entire sites & people’s income, how people were seeing the “Google dance” when they were trying to rank sites in Googles’s index, or even how they got sent into the Google Sandbox when they inadvertently pissed Google off. There’s post after post of talk about Google did this, Google wants that, Google upgrades/downgrades, and barely a mention of Bing or Yahoo.

A further 10 minutes was spent checking traffic stats in the Google Analytic’s program (it should have been 5 minutes but Google keep changing the damn thing & I can never find what I’m looking for), and switched over to the Google Chrome browser when I wanted to do an Incognito search on, you guessed it Google!

I got a note from Market Samurai saying they were down for a day or two, as Google had changed something in the way they access the Google Keyword data that drives their software.

I installed the Offline Google App in Google Chrome so I could work on Google Gmail while I was in the plane on an upcoming trip down under.

And that was before morning coffee….

Oh my god, that’s a lot of instances of Google.

Next I’ll be saying “Oh my Google!”

One of the neat things about spending time in this Internet Marketing world is you kind of “evolve” over time. Heaven knows I have!

I’m sure you’ve seen that the Premium Version of the great Plugin ComLuv has been installed on Rocket Rider.

ComLuv really is a great way to boost your exposure through both commenting and accepting comments, not to mention about the best anti spam trap system I’ve seen, – the G.A.S.P. function built into it.

However, it seems there’s always some one out there looking to game the system!

But you’re doing it all wrong dude

I’ve noticed one persistent person commenting on various posts, and each comment is reasonably decent, obviously the person has read the post, and (though there’s certainly nothing wrong with that), equally obvious that English is not their first language.

The website url listed with the comment is a very legitimate looking site, all about used cars, and as I always visit the sites of those commenting to see if I can reciprocate in some way, I saw no problems.

However, one of the greatest features on ComLuv is it’s ability to read the feed of the listed website and return the last ten posts, one of which the person commenting can choose from, and it displays under the comment.

Great! They get an extra link, courtesy of ComLuv and my wide open “do follow” blog.

However, after seeing 4-5 comments from the same person, I studied the website and posts a little more carefully. It seems though the listed website was about cars, the posts were about anything but. In fact I couldn’t even determine what they were about as  they were written in Hebrew!

For all I know they could have been about little blue pills or something else I definitely don’t want to have my blog associated with!

How did they do that?

A little digging shows that the feed for the used cars site was indeed showing posts from entirely different websites. So ComLuv was correctly delivering what it was meant to, but it appeared someone was deliberately trying to game the system by using a fairly benign site as the anchor, but had somehow injected  different websites into it’s feed.

How did they do that? I really don’t care…

I’m not smart enough to figure out what they’re up to, but a couple of things I am smart enough to do.

• Read the comments
• check the included url
• check the appended “recently posted” link
• decide which button to hit, “approve” or “delete”

You see this is my blog, and ownership gives me a certain privilege, the privilege of being “the boss”.

Do yourself a favor, find another blog to spam!

btw, all your comments are now deleted, I think the boss did it!

Or should the title be how NOT to change hosting!

You see, for years now I’ve been blithely paying two separate  hosting companies fairly significant monthly fees for having a VPS on each.

Why VPS’s? Well, back in the day of those horrible MFA mass generated websites…come on, we all tried them…we were all taught VPS’s with multiple IP’s etc, and spread everything around. Well, I’ve long since left the low road, and now operate strictly on the high road, and have long known that I didn’t need them anymore, but frankly it was just easier to leave things be.

Easier maybe, but certainly expensive, and definitely overkill.

When the Dream becomes a Nightmare

What bought about the need to change was observing that whenever I hit “publish” on Rocket Rider, all my sites on the one host would be down for anywhere between 15 – 30 minutes. This despite having been advised by my host to “buy more capacity” a couple of times, and yet the problem persisted . All my sites were slow to load as well. Seems like this host wasn’t the “Dream” I thought it was!

I was discussing this with a fellow proponent of developing guest articles, who got me to check his site out, and holy smokes did it ever load fast. He introduced me to his host, WhateverComputes, actually  a Canadian company, operating from my neighbouring province, Saskatchewan, that appeared to have everything I needed, and all on a simple shared hosting plan, that was certainly competitively priced. Being local was a plus, as was having real live people on the end of a phone, vs. online “chats” that the others offered.

Long story short, I studied up a little on how to change hosting, and bought a yearly package.

Then the fun began….

I had forgotten just how many sites I had accumulated over the years, & stupidly thought, I’ll just do this myself over a weekend.  I knew I should be posting a job on Elance or such, but naively thought I was pretty savvy, and the job would be  a piece of cake! No sense spending the time setting up an outsourcing project, and I’d likely save $50 -$100 by doing it myself.

On my very first transfer, this blog, I ran into trouble. It seems I understood a whole lot less about databases, effects of caches left by certain plugins etc., than I thought, and within hours was pleading with my new host for assistance. Despite being offered great advice, it was beyond me, and I enlisted their expertise to finish the task.

The transfer was tricky even for them, and I learned quickly that the hourly rates of tech help in Canada is a whole lot different than what you’d pay on Elance!

Fast forward to today, two full weeks since I started this “weekend project”, countless hours of frustration and I’ve almost got all my sites from the one host up, so about half way to the finish line. I soon discovered that it was easy to setup a blog when you are doing one at a time, but it’s an entirely different story when you have a dozen to move.

• Which data base goes where?
• What name servers have you changed?
• What was the password for that config file?
• How come that plugin has corrupted everything?

The pity of it all is I KNEW BETTER! I can actually recall James Martell saying something like:

If you can’t do it in 15 minutes, then take 15 minutes to post a project on Elance or the like.

Awesome advice. I should have listened!

One positive out of all this though, is I have a whole new comprehension of how to change hosting, but it sure didn’t come easily!

Over the last few months I have become very interested in the “art” of guest blogging, or maybe more correctly “guest articles”, as a means of creating web traffic. There are two primary reasons guest blogging does this as far as I could see, creating a back link, and exposure to your site from people clicking through from your author bio.
To be honest the primary motive for me was purely the back link, but along the way I’ve come to appreciate the site exposure, as well as the unexpected bonus – relationships with the blog owners.

The Back link

I first became interested in Guest Blogging when I became a student of Paula & Wanda’s Amazonian Profit Plan, especially after they revealed that their real success came after they formally embraced guest articling in earnest after following the advice of their mentor, James Martell & his Affiliate Bootcamp. Particularly appealing was the thought of getting quality links, & a resulting traffic spike, without participating in the multitude of “schemes” that seemed to do nothing but drain my Paypal account with their monthly fees!

I’ll admit I did everything wrong when I first attempted this. Horribly wrong. Couldn’t find blogs, when I did, I was targeting the wrong blogs, then they wouldn’t accept my articles. I got accused of “blog spam” even, in all a disheartening experience.

The turnaround was when I revisited James’s website & downloaded his “Outsourcing Essentials” MP3 course & listened to it while on my daily hour long walks – a perfect complement of 5 one hour sessions.

This in turn led to listening to a 10 part MP3 course on James’ PAD technique of Guest Posting.

The back links started building, and best of all NO rejections. It taught me that when done right, other blog owners LOVE these posts.

The key was learning HOW to do them, then OUTSOURCE everything!

The Relationships

I found that getting a blog post up on quality blogs often requires some “back & forth” emailing with the owner, as the blogs I target are pretty discerning,  particularly in what graces their pages. An example was getting this post up on Steve Scott’s site. Along the way I spent quite a bit of time reading Steve’s blog & in particular how he is a proponent of building a list.

I’ve always known I should be building a list, but had never given it an honest attempt. Holding me back was not having anything substantial to offer as an enticement to sign up to my auto responder.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, Steve had the perfect offer, a very meaty ebook on my favorite topic, “How to Find an Affiliate Niche” – a PDF that’s got tons of great content & is conveniently branded to his excellent course “Affiliate Marketing Without the Bulls**t” (love that name!), both of which I have no problem attaching my name to & promoting.

So my list is born, if you haven’t already I’d love for you to join.

Guest Blogs – To Accept or Not?

One struggle with Rocket Rider is it was never really intended as a full time endeavor, and my time was more focused on building links to my affiliate site, so finding time to create worthwhile posts was a struggle.  However, I’ve come to realize that other people will likely be happy to provide that content, & with my training from James, I will be perfectly comfortable in handling the “mechanics” of selecting suitable posts, posts I’ll be proud to have grace these pages, which in turn will free up my time for getting my stuff out on other peoples sites, that will;

• Create quality back links for my affiliate site
• Get me great content for Rocket Rider

Yes, I will be accepting guest posts, just as soon as I have crafted the perfect “Submission Guidelines” page…

Content is king. How many times have you heard that? It comes up over and over again and with good reason. You can have the slickest backend and the most stunning graphics on your website but if your content is not informative, compelling, and engaging you’re going to have an uphill battle making an online business successful.

If you’re counting on getting organic search traffic as part of your marketing plan, then you need to provide those search engines with real, meaty content. Not the keyword stuffed articles of the past, but content that helps the search engine achieve its objective which is to deliver the most relevant return to a search. That means your content has to be informative in the eyes of the search engine while at the same time engaging the reader and keeping him or her on the page.

Take a look at your best competitor’s website and pay particular attention to the content. Does it inform? Is it easy-to-read? Does it engage you; does it make you want to read more? If this is the leading competitor in your field the answer is probably yes.

Now next question is…can you do that yourself? Writing is a separate skill set, and writing web content is a subset of that skill set. If creating content isn’t your strong point or you simply don’t want to spend the time to do it, you can turn to a freelance contractor to do it for you.

Plain Vanilla to Rocky Road – writers come in all flavors and prices

Once you make the decision to outsource your content you’re going to find that you have a wide array of freelancers to choose from. You’re also going to be amazed at the incredible range in price. Remember that outsourcing is a global industry and there can be highly qualified writers living in parts of the world where $3-$5 per article is a livable wage. But you’re going to find there are other writers who will charge upwards to $50 for the same article.

How can there be that big a difference even given the global nature of the business? The answer to that question is partially years of experience, professionalism, credentials earned and reputation. So your challenge is to strike a balance between the budget you have and the quality you need.

When 60% off really isn’t

Here’s a quick story that ought to deter you from making a decision based on price alone.

My house was in need of a new roof. I had shopped around the local contractors and home improvement stores and determined that the cost to replace my roof would be about $4000.

One afternoon I was sitting on my deck when a chap approached me and said that he was an out of work roofer and he’d like to offer a bid to replace the tiles on my roof. He said he been out of work for over three months and really need is a job and was willing to do it for $1500.

He had references and after I checked them I thought “how lucky am I”. Here I am, needing a new roof at the same time this poor guy needs to work. I’m going to save 60% on this project. I called him up and hired him.

The adventure begins

The next day he shows up on the job informs me that he’s going to need an advance because he doesn’t have enough money for gas for his truck. He asked for $100 and I gave it to him.

He worked for about a half a day and then informs me that his back was sore and would have to take a couple of days to get back in shape.

Three days later he shows up and advises me he needs another $100 advance. I reluctantly paid it and he went to work on the roof. However, he didn’t show up the next day or the day after that. I finally reached him by phone and told him that I was leaving for a week and when I came back I expected the job to be complete. I also informed him that there would be no further advances. He agreed and I was certain that when I came back from vacation the project would be done.

The frustration continues but….

So when I pull into my driveway after a relaxing week off I look at my house and see that nothing had been done on the roof. I felt like I was in some kind of contractor purgatory. I had made my expectations clear to the contractor and he had agreed to live up to them yet the job remained untouched.

A few days later he did show up and he began working in earnest. The net result is he did an excellent job of replacing my roof. He’s a skilled roofer but with absolutely no business sense. I got my new roof and I only paid the $1500 price. However I think that the frustration I experienced and the delay in the job completion was probably worth $4000.

Roofers and writers have more in common than you might think

My first experience outsourcing content went much the same way as my first experience outsourcing roof repair. I made a mistake of making price a principal evaluator. While I did check feedback and samples and thought that I had made an informed decision I quickly learned that I had done an adequate job of “shopping around”.

There are a number of things that can go wrong even with a simple article writing project and as a rule the less you spend the more likely the problems. This rule is not absolute. Sometimes you can find a qualified writer who is entering freelancing for the first time and who will bid low just to get a start on a reputation

Language and the use of language can be a real problem if the writer’s native tongue is not English. When English is a second language there are often problems with grammar and syntax. When this occurs asking the contractor to rewrite the article is just a waste of time. Assuming they did the best they could in the original draft, asking them to write it again won’t result in different performance. The net result is you end up doing the editing… Not something you had expected to do.

The other problem with contractors on the low end of the price spectrum, be they English speakers or not, is timely performance. If you purchased a deal at $5 per article and a land another deal at $7 per article guess which one gets done first. I often think that’s why my roofer did not show up. He needed cash now and if he could find a cash job he would do that before he finished my project.

Outsourcing is still the best option

It doesn’t matter what your website is promoting; be it digital cameras, dog walking services, an eight man tent or even arc welding services you’ll be able to find a talented freelance writer to create your content for you. The challenge is in evaluating the contractor and weighing the cost of his or her services against the potential revenue that their content may generate.

Have you noticed how Guest Posting seems to be the new craze in getting valuable, & lasting back links to your website? There must something to it, as some of the pioneers of effective, white hat, SEO experts quietly utilize it’s effectiveness. In fact a couple of my mentors, Paula & Wanda, swear by it, and go so far as to say this is the one type of back linking that you should be spending the majority of your time at.

They tell me they first learned of this from one of the pioneers of guest posting, James Martell, who has even coined an acronym for it, PAD, (Professional Article Distribution)

I’ve been spending some time learning this “art”, so I can augment the linking I do with the Actually Rank service I subscribe to, but like everything that’s effective in this business, it’s also not easy. In fact, so far I’m finding it quite time consuming, and as I delve into it further, I know it’ll have a fair cost involved, as there is no way I’ll be able to handle all the article writing required, so I’ll be relying a lot on outsourcing.

(Speaking of outsourcing, I subscribed to the Virtual Staff Finder blog recently, and so far I really like what I see. I’m certain that when I’m ready for a full time VA, I’ll be calling on Chris’s service to make it as painless as possible.)

In the meantime, like everything, before I jump in to deeply, I’m going to learn the ropes of guest posting myself. One of the most difficult components is actually finding suitable websites that will accept such articles.

In my quest to find blogs to approach with offers of supplying a free article, I came upon this simple little tool. It’s great, give it a whirl & try it out.

It works even better when you are running SEO Quake

Guest Blogger Finder

It was a beautiful spring day here in Alberta & my wife and I enjoyed a cruise in the country in her ragtop, exploring new country roads & enjoying the splendid scenery of our majestic Canadian Rockies.  As always I found my mind wandering to my favorite subject/pastime/business – developing a passive income through affiliate marketing.

The more time I spend working on my affiliate marketing business, the more I am realizing this really isn’t a highway to riches, in fact it’s more like a country road to riches, i.e. you’ll get there eventually, but there will be a few potholes, curves, detours & road blocks in the way. However, anyone who has spent some time on country lanes, knows that eventually they lead to more well traveled roads, which in turn will feed into a secondary highway, then ultimately to a freeway.

Potholes – aka Google Algo Updates

No matter how traveled the road, there’s always some potholes, and trying to figure the latest algo change from Google is a pretty big one.  Yes, the country road is more likely to have more of them, and as I travel toward the more smooth sailing paved roads ahead, sure, I hit a few . However, the road smooths out, potholes get repaired, and you get through them. (The same goes with Google’s algo changes.)

Along the way, I find I also get smarter by learning to avoid these changes, just like I know how to dodge the potholes.

Curves – aka the endless pitches

To me the curves are the endless pitches we face with being part of this business. You know what I mean, a new plugin that some whiz kid has developed, or the latest linking scheme that looks so darn good that it just has to be easier than the tried & proven (read – boring) methods that I am determined to stay with this time. I have to learn to slow down and negotiate these curves, just as I learn to back off a bit, (ok, maybe peek at these pitches), but never come to a complete halt.

Detours – aka back to the link building basics

To me the detours are when you’re cruising along with your road map, read – Amazonian Profit Plan, by your side, when all of a sudden you come to an obstruction totally blocking the way, (read – your latest guest post offer was just rejected), and you need to travel a different route for an extra hour or two, (maybe fire up Build My Rank) in order to travel the planned distance for the day (meet your linking objectives in my case).

Detours though, always get you to where you’re headed,  it just sucks when you’re confronted with them.

Roadblocks – content creation mental blocks

Happens all the time on the highways, same as when negotiating your affiliate marketing journey. You always have a choice, wait it out & hope the road will clear in time (the Google dance will subside), or maybe take another detour, (referring to your road map – Amazonian Profit Plan – for directions) or perhaps, as with my latest roadblock, (the realization that there was some things I just wasn’t cut out to be doing by myself – constant content creation) and that you need to enlist some help, get a tow, (read – listen to Pat Flynn’s Podcast on hiring VA’s)  to get you through the blockage.

At the end of the day we traveled past an enterprise I’ve been observing for the last five years or so, a smallish “Tree Farm” being established on a some land near our home. As we cruised by on this cloudless Sunday, we noticed the whole family toiling away in one of the plots, this time digging up a couple of acres of 2-3 year old trees that had succumbed to our Alberta winter, and had all died.

Imagine – years of toil, seedling cost, irrigation, weed control, cultivation and they’re all gone and before they’d realized a penny from it all. It kind of puts the challenges faced with learning the affiliate marketing ropes seem pretty insignificant by comparison.

I couldn’t help comparing their business model to mine. A huge investment in both time & money, constant & arduous physical labor, and absolutely nothing but expenditure with zero income for YEARS.

It makes the model outlined by the Amazonian Profit Plan seem pretty attractive by comparison doesn’t it?

Oh, the last task of the day was to check my Amazon stats, & yep, a couple of sales occurred while we were were cruising.

I love affiliate marketing!

I’ve had a bit of an “on again, off again” experience with Twitter. I fully understand how it can be a great enhancement to my affiliate marketing efforts, and in particular how it can be a big part of bringing eyes to Rocket Rider, yet I admit I’m still a bit apprehensive of the whole concept.

A year or so ago, I “bought into” a method of building a Twitter following that turned out to be somewhat ill fated, and the creator quietly disappeared. (In fact this blogs name was inspired by the product name “Twitter Rocket”.) The concepts were just fine, and indeed they worked. The trouble was it got vilified when the creator developed an affiliate program, and most people were using the method to sell the product, which in turn taught more people to use the method to sell the product. No wonder it failed!

I’ve recently opened a new Twitter account, @therocketrider, and spent a fair bit of time researching the RIGHT way to do it this time, and was very happy to come across this excellent Twitter tutorial from one of my favorite blogs, Web Traffic Cafe.  Teaching you on how to sensibly combine automation with personal involvement in tweeting, this focuses on building your “presence” (your blog), rather than “selling” directly on Twitter.

The automation part can all be accomplished with free tools, but I opted to purchase TweetAdder, and I have to say it is excellent, well worth the small one time cost.

I do like to keep my day to day involvement with the actual tweeting though, and can see how this could become both addictive & time consuming, but I do believe the “personal touch” in tweeting can’t be eclipsed with any tool that’s pure automation.

Buffer Your Twitter Account & Tweet Away

Then again recently, I stumbled on an excellent guest post on AlexWhally.com that was describing a really nifty little app, Buffer, that since I’ve implemented I absolutely LOVE. This little application allows you to tweet an excerpt from something you’re reading, that is UNIQUE, rather than the normal tweet of just the headline. The uniqueness really makes a difference in the click rate it seems.

Rather than re-invent the wheel and make a long review here, I encourage you to read all about it from the same post that sold me, it’s right here.

btw, it’s FREE. Well, there is a paid option that’s quite inexpensive, but for me the free version does all I need.

Update: I’ve since upgraded to the 5o Tweets for $5/mo option, & spent roughly an hour loading my Buffer with Tweets of tips & advice from pages on my blog, other blogs I like, and articles that intrigued me. I simply add an “Thanks @blogownersid  to the end, and I have an automatic “reach out” to other folk I want a relationship with. Now there’s a buffer of 10 days worth of tweets automatically dripping out & I just top up the buffer when I see something interesting. Pretty neat.