I’ve been penalized by Google!
As I’ve mentioned previously, building niche sites is probably one of the most popular ways to make money online. I’ve been having a bit of a dramatic time with one of my niche sites and thought it would be worth sharing the story. Basically, one of my sites has been pinalized by the boss, Google. This is what happened to my traffic:
Google can pinalize a site for a few reasons. If they feel like your site is ranking higher than it should be due to “black hat search engine optimization” or something else, then it can de-index your site or move it lower down in the search results.
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Social Referral Marketing – Would you “like” a coupon?
Referral marketing is nothing new. Businesses have always recognized the power of referrals made by their customers. Something along the lines of “refer a friend and save 30% off your next bill” has proven to be very effective for businesses.
Studies have shown that referred customers are both more loyal and profitable than regular customers. If you sell products online, implementing a referral program can improve your sales in both the short and long run.
With the rise of social media, referral marketing is evolving. Various new startups (including one I’m involved with) are giving companies an easy way to reward the customers that click on that all important share button.
Social referral marketing allows businesses to raise awareness, drive traffic and acquire new customers. With the speed that referrals can spread, a well planned incentive can spread through the networks virally.
Vouchers go Viral is UK’s own social referral platform. It’s a site that’s populated with vouchers (aka coupons) from various retailers. For a customer to use a voucher, they simply click on one of the share buttons. I’ve been involved with this company for about 5 months now. We only operate in the UK at the moment but plan to expand in the future. If you want to know more about what we do, just send me an email!
Like A Coupon is a similar company in the US. It’s a mix of group buying and social referral. The website features various coupons which need to be tweeted or liked a certain number of times before it’s “unlocked” and can be used.
First Page of Google with Build My Rank – It Works!
NOTE: Build My Rank is currently closed to new members while they make improvements to the service. Sign up to their email list to be notified when they re-open their doors. Also, I mentioned the niche site and keywords in this post but as you can see in the comments section below, the people at build my rank kindly asked me not to reveal them so I am doing as they say. The data is still all relevant though!
On the 16th of January 2012, I published a post about how I was going narrow down my SEO strategy to two simple steps.
1- Continue adding content to the site.
2- Build high quality links to the site with Build My Rank
I did exactly that. Before this experiment, my key phrase was at position 62 in the Google search results. It’s currently at number 9 which shows that this extremely simple SEO strategy worked a treat!
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First Page of Google with Build My Rank – Case Study Part One
NOTE: Build My Rank is currently closed to new members while they make improvements to the service. Sign up to their email list to be notified when they re-open their doors. Also, I mentioned the niche site and keywords in this post but as you can see in the comments section in this post, the people at build my rank kindly asked me not to reveal them so I am doing as they say. The data is still all relevant though!
As part of the Niche Site Competition, the aim is for one of my niche sites to be on the first page of Google for my search term. The search term gets about 8000 exact searches per month so getting on the first page would generate some decent traffic.
While I’ve been working on the external search engine optimization on my various projects, I started to suspect that the majority of my results were from a service called “Build My Rank“. It’s basically a blog network where you can post articles with links back to your site to the various blogs. I’ve used various blog networks in the past and seen great results, but Build My Rank works in a different way to most and has been pretty amazing so far.
Facebook vs StumbleUpon – Paid Traffic
Google Adwords is usually the first thing that comes to mind when paid traffic is mentioned. Facebook is changing that. Facebook Advertising allows you to get extremely targeted traffic for a very reasonable cost. You can use Facebook Advertising to get more “likes” on your Facebook Page which is great, but for this case study I am talking about paying for direct traffic to your website.
StumbleUpon is a “discovery engine that find’s the best of the web, recommended just for you“. Users of StumbleUpon fill in a form about their interests and then start “Stumbling”. With each click of the Stumble button the user is shown a website, image or video that matches their interests. Like Facebook, you can also pay for highly targeted traffic on StumbleUpon. The difference with StumbleUpon is that the user Stumbles onto your website where as with Facebook Advertising, your traffic comes from users who decide to click on your advert.
Facebook EdgeRank: The algorithm that more people should be thinking about.
Any social marketer should already know about the EdgeRank, but understanding how it works is becoming increasingly important for anyone who runs a Facebook page. Knowing more about the Facebook EdgeRank is useful to know, even for social Facebook users.
What is the Facebook EdgeRank?
For some reason, Facebook refers to News Feed stories as “Edges”. There’s only a certain number of Edges that can be displayed on peoples Facebook news feeds before it get’s a bit overwhelming. The Facebook EdgeRank is an algorithm that decides what makes it onto people’s feeds as “highlighted stories” (Previously called various things such as “top stories”). The way the news feed works has changed a few times and is likely to keep changing.
Currently (December 2011), the news feed usually has a few highlighted stories on it. If you’ve not been on Facebook in a while, the highlighted stories are usually at the top. You can change this so that the highlighted stories come below the recent stories but the default is to have the highlighted stories at the top. The highlighted stories are the ones with the blue triangles in the top left corner.
Making Money With Bitcoins – An Interview With Philip Daniel
Bitcoins are an absolutely fascinating topic. If you’ve not heard of Bitcoins before then I must warn you that it does get a little bit technical sometimes. If you have no interest in computers OR economics then you may not find Bitcoins as interesting as I do. There is a great deal of real money involved in the topic though!
Before we get to the interview, I’ll let you know what you are in for. Basically Bitcoins are a digital currency. You can buy and sell Bitcoins, you can purchase items with them or you can exchange them for mainstream currencies like US$.
To get your hands on Bitcoins you can either buy them or mine them. Mining Bitcoins involves using computer resources to solve complicated algorithms to unlock Bitcoins. That’s all about all I know about them. I’ll now hand you over to Philip Daniel who has plenty of knowledge and experience with Bitcoins:
Tell us a little bit about yourself:
I am a senior economics major at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. I will be graduating this coming June and hope to get a job working in the financial sector or going on to graduate school to pursue a Ph.D. Computers have always been a hobby of mine so Bitcoin fit my interests perfectly.
Making Money Online INSTANTLY with fiverr.com
What is fiverr.com?
Fiverr is where you can pay $5 for a product or service. It can be anything from having a logo designed to having someone make a decision for you (yes you really can pay someone $5 to make a tough decision for you!)
I have used fiverr.com before as a buyer but I wanted to see what it was like as a seller.
Making Money With Images
About a year ago I decided that I’d try and learn a little bit about photography. I bought a decent camera (a DSLR) and had a play.
I knew that there were websites that sell the rights to images. I found out that these “stock photo” websites allow your to add your images into their library, and anytime someone pays them to use one of your images, you get some money. People buy the rights to these images so that they could use them on their website, in a newspaper article or for any other reason. That’s pretty much all I knew about these websites, but I wanted to find out if there was any money to be made.
I submitted some of my favorite images that I’d taken after having my DSLR for about a month. I know nothing about photography (as we will soon learn), so I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I thought that my images looked good enough to be used on a website.
The first website I used was fotolia.com. I also submitted to a couple of other sites, but got the same result from all three.
Making Money with Micro Niche Websites
What is a micro niche website?
Different people have different definitions for micro niche sites. To me, it’s a website that:
- Focuses on one very specific topic.
- Has about 10 or less articles on it.
- Isn’t regularly updated.
- Gets its traffic from search engines.
You will have come across a micro niche site before. You search for something very specific like “best Christmas movies” and come across a website that only contains information about Christmas movies and nothing else. The site will be small and will usually have adverts on it of some sort.
These websites are created with the sole purpose of ranking highly in search results, and earning money by advertising.
Emails are soooo last year!
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