EzSEO Newsletter # 124
June 4, 2006 by Andy
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EzSEO Newsletter # 124
Andy Williams
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IMPORTANT: You are receiving this Newsletter because you signed up for it. If you no longer wish to receive it, refer to the bottom of this newsletter for the removal link.
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This week:
1. What separates successful marketers from those that fail?
2. Yahoo obeying nofollow tag?
3. Last Months Niche Blueprint
4. Single site, or several tighter niche sites?
5. This tag & ping thing.
Hi again.
Last week I promised you some pictures of our local street party. Crowds of people (many dressed in traditional costumes) gather to watch the procession go by. Many of the “floats” that go past give out free food and wine. You can see this in a couple of these pictures.
This picture shows my 20 month old daughter waiting to leave for the party.
OK, onto this weeks newsletter (and I apologise in advance for any spelling or grammatical errors as I am pushed for time this morning).
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1. What separates successful marketers from those that fail?
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Simple question, simple answer. Those that fail are the ones who do not take action, or simply give up.
Many of you know how I started online. I wont bore you with the details again, but suffice it to say that it was out of necessity to succeed. I had no option of failure, and the clock was ticking. I know a lot of other successful marketers who had similar circumstances, and went on to succeed online.
You see, when you have limited time to make something happen, the fear of failure does not matter, you work through it. You simply have to go ahead and take action. You don’t have time to consider the pros and cons, and you don’t have time to worry about what happens if you fail, or whether or not your chosen path will work. Failure is not an option.
Some of us need that ultimatum to get us working, others can find the motivation to just do it, even with a comfortable job.
The bottom line is that you have to take action and do it. If something does not work, suck it up, and work at it until it does work.
What is stopping you? Fear it wont work? Let me help you on this one – IT DOES WORK!
Maybe you don’t have a lot of time? Let me help you on this one too. When we first started, my wife stayed up all night, 5 days a week to use the internet connection (we could only use it between 6pm and 8 am). She made time.
I know someone in the military who works at this part time despite working long hours away from home. He found time and has made his business a success. Can you really not find a few hours a week?
Maybe the costs worry you?
Let’s look at the costs of setting up a website. Other than time, you will need a domain and hosting. OK, for me, that costs 8.99 UK Sterling for the domain for one year, plus 3.99 a month hosting (it actually costs me far less than this now with multiple sites hosted on the same plan, but let’s assume I am starting out again).
What other costs? Well, I would hire Wordtracker for one day at the cost of 4.20 UK sterling. Using a certain fr.ee Wordtracker Tutorial as my guide (search Google for Wordtracker tutorial if you have lost your copy), I could research enough keywords to keep me happy for months.
Then I would have to buy Keyword Results Analyzer – by far the biggest investment in my new business. That’s another 52 UK sterling.
Web editor? Well I could use one of many fr.ee options here (with HTML-Kit being a personal favourite), so no cost there.
You might need to add on the cost of your internet connection, but the fact you are reading this probably means you have that anyway (though you can later claim this as a business expense).
So that totals around 70 UK sterling as start up costs (with an ongoing 3.99 per month, plus 8.99 per year). Holy shmoley, have you any idea how much a normal business takes to set up?
Maybe you are putting it off because you prefer to watch TV, or go out with friends than get on with your first site? Well I cant help you with that one, and nor can anyone else. You have to take responsibility.
If you take action and don’t give up, you will succeed. You have all the information you need – follow the recent miniseries from his newsletter – that’s fr.ee too!
Finally, to finish this rant, I want to republish an email I received this week. I have removed the senders details, but other wise left the email intact. I get a lot of emails like this. Can you see why this person has not succeeded yet?
//// Email ////
“Please help!!
I really enjoy your newsletter and I get a sense that you are an honest guy, who has achieved tremendous success and might find it in your heart to help us with a bit of advice.
I’m hoping you can direct my husband and me to a coaching program that has personal contact on some level for feed back that you would recommend to your sister or your best friend.
First of all I’d like to say I was inspired by your account of you and your wife wanting to change your work situation/ lifestyle years back and your mention of the first sale you made with an affiliate and how it changed your life. Obviously your business has grown tremendously-congratulations on your success.
My husband and I purchased a number of your niche blueprints, bought SEO website builder, as well as Rosiland’s Gardner’s course, (and some others), joined Anik Singal’saffiliate classroom for a few months and gave the very in depth building affiliate sites from you newsletter a go. We seem to be at the ready aim, ready aim, ready aim and can’t get to the fire part.
We have received information on Anik Singal’s new program as well as Patric Chan’s program.Both are 8 week coaching programs but we’ve not been able to find any “regular” people who have any comment on the success on either.
It is so much information overload we know we can build a business on the internet but are so stuck and frustrated.
All if the information we’ve received is great but we are getting so stuck on the implementation. We have learned alot but are really beginners.
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated”.
//// End of Email ////
As you can see, buying everything that comes out wont make you succeed. Only you can do that by putting your new knowledge to work.
Don’t worry about failing, just get on with it. Pick one plan of action and stick with it. See it through to the end.
I sincerely hope that 6 months down the line, the couple that sent me this email will send me another one, with details of how their business has taken off. Good luck!
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2. Yahoo obeying nofollow tag?
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This is just a quick heads up. Those who are using the rel=”nofollow” tag to prevent search engines from spidering & indexing certain pages may find that their “hidden” pages still get indexed in Yahoo. I set up a new site two weeks ago, and it is now fully indexed in Yahoo – including the pages that only have links using the nofollow tag pointing at them.
The good news is that Google have obeyed the nofollow links, as have MSN.
Something else I found interesting was that one page I really did not want indexed was. I had forgotten to add the nofollow tag to the links pointing at that page. Google, MSN and Yahoo all indexed the page.
I added the nofollow tag to all links pointing to that page about a week ago, and guess what? Google removed it from their index! Does that mean Google will check for pages in their index and remove those that only have nofollow links pointing at them? Well I don’t have enough data to say yes or no. It may just be a coincidence, since that page had very little content (just a site search box) and may have been removed for that reason anyway.
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3. Last Months Niche Blueprint
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In May, I only released one niche blueprint.
This one was specially written for creating an Adsense site as it concentrated on keywords with high CPCs. A number of these phrases have maximum bids in excess of $30 per click.
Included in the package is a very interesting report by Dave Tropeano on maximizing Adsense income, plus some spreadsheets he put together to accompany his report
If anyone wants a copy of this niche blueprint, there are a few left. Also, for those who bought it already, can you let me know if you want more of these Adsense style blueprints in the future, or whether to stick with the old adsense/affiliate blueprints. Maybe one of each?
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4. Single site, or several tighter niche sites?
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If you have followed my Wordtracker Tutorial as you carry out your keyword research, you have likely ended up with 2000+ highly targeted keyword phrases in your chosen niche.
That can be quite daunting for those planning a website. Where do you start? How do you plan the site? Should you create a single site with these 2000+ phrases, or is it better to build multiple sites, with a tighter niche focus.
Let’s look at a real example based on some keyword research I carried out a long time ago on barbecues. While I am going to use Keyword Results Analyzer in this example, you can all follow the steps by downloading the demo version which includes this database of keywords. You can find the KRA demo here.
If you own KRA but don’t have that database, email me and I’ll send it to you.
OK, on loading the project in KRA, you can see that there are 1942 phrases relating to barbecues.
Order the phrases Descending by Count.
This will order the phrases according to search volume. Those phases that are searched for most frequently will be at the top.
Now, if you are going to build a single website, you should be looking down this list (ordered descending by count), and picking out the phrases that cover the entire niche. Where there are two or more similar phrases covering the same part of this niche, just choose one.
Here are the top few phrases:
bbq
charcoal grills
bbq grills
barbecue
bbq smokers
outdoor grills
natural gas grills
patio lights
BBQ
charcoal grill
bbq pits
sonny’s real pit bbq
natural gas grill
bbq ribs
bbq recipes
bbq chicken
smoker grill
barbecue grills
bbq sauce
portable gas grills
portable gas grill
electric grills
bbq grill
bbq smoker
jenn air grills
electric grill
To encompass the entire niche of BBQ, I would pick out the following:
charcoal grills
bbq grills
bbq smokers
outdoor grills
natural gas grills
bbq pits
bbq recipes
portable gas grills
electric grills
The second phrase, “bbq grills” can probably be left out of this list, as “charcoal grills”, “outdoor grills”, “natural gas grills”, “portable gas grills” and “electric grills” all cover the theme of “bbq grills”.
There are also a few gas grills phrases, so I would reduce those.
My final list would be something like:
charcoal grills
bbq smokers
outdoor grills
natural gas grills
bbq pits
bbq recipes
electric grills
These would make up the main pages of my new site on Barbecues. For each phrase, I would go back to KRA and build a list of secondary keywords. e.g. let’s take the example “electric grills”. How would you find secondaries for this term?
Well, in KRA, open the Advanced Root Word Search screen.
Enter “electric” and “grill” in the first box on the left (labelled AND), and click the Filter Button. This will find phrases that contain both of these words.
Now click the button at the bottom of the advanced filter screen labelled “Make Results Blue”. This marks the phrases so we can manipulate them later.
OK, close the advanced filter screen.
KRA finds 85 phrases related to electric grills.
How do we choose secondaries from that list?
Well, I would select the top few phrases on this list and run a Keyword + Unique report.
Let’s try it and see what we get.
Order the phrases by Count Descending again.
Enter the value of 8 into the “minimum count” box so that we only select those phrases with a count of 8 or more.
Click the filter button.
OK, that has narrowed it down to 21 phrases.
Run the “Keywords + Uniques” Report and save it as a text file.
Here is the report produced:
electric grills
electric grill
outdoor electric grill
electric outdoor grill
electric outdoor grills
portable electric grills
indoor electric grill
replacement electric grill element
meco electric grill
portable electric grill
cooktops with electric grill
electric grill tucson
cooking pre made hamburgers on an electric grill
indoor outdoor electric grill
outdoor electric grills
electric bbq grills
electric bbq grill
electric char grills
general electric gas grill
electric barbecue grills
grills electric
Unique Keywords:
barbecue
bbq
char
cooking
cooktops
electric
element
gas
general
grill
grills
hamburgers
indoor
made
meco
outdoor
portable
pre
replacement
tucson
At the top of this report you have a list of complete phrases that people search for when looking for electric grill information. These are the phrases you should try to include in your page if you possibly can, and if it does not make your page look like it has been stuffed.
However, the lower part of this report is the uniques. These are the words that make up the phrases often used when searching for information on electric grills. These are the individual words that you use to theme your page. Insert as many as you can into your page on electric grills and the search engines will be left in no doubt what your page is about.
Repeat this process for all main pages.
OK, that’s what I would do if I was building one large site on Barbecues. However, there is potential here to build several smaller sites, each one based on one of the main page phrases we worked out earlier.
Here are those phrases again:
charcoal grills
bbq smokers
outdoor grills
natural gas grills
bbq pits
bbq recipes
electric grills
It would be easy to create a single site on charcoal grills, another on bbq smokers, and so on.
Let’s go back to KRA.
Click the Remove filter button.
In the root word box, type in charcoal, and click Filter.
KRA return 88 phrases on charcoal grills, barbecues etc.
How do you turn those phrases into a complete site? Simply by following the guidelines above.
Order the phrases by Count, Descending.
Pick out the words that encompass the niche, and use them as main pages. Run advanced filtering on your database to pull out targeted secondaries and uniques to theme your page.
Here are the phrases I would pick for my main phrases on charcoal bbqs:
Homepage main keyword: charcoal grills
Main page phrases, in no particular order:
drop in charcoal grills
weber charcoal grills
charcoal grill grates
stainless steel charcoal grill
towable charcoal grills
folding charcoal grill
charcoal and gas grill
disposable charcoal grill
meco charcoal grills
Simple, eh?
So, one set of keyword research can yield one large site, or multiple smaller, tightly focused niches.
Which is better?
Well there are pros and cons to both approaches. A large site can often be seen as more authorative. It takes less work to add content, and you only need incoming links to one site. However, if that site did get dropped from the search engines, your income potential has gone.
Lots of sites mean more work, but greater security. If one gets dropped, you have lots of others. Owning lots of sites can work wonders for your reputation though. If you have your photo on all sites (like I do on my ezseonews site), then people researching bbqs will come across your face many times on several different sites they visit. That builds confidence in you as you become something of a guru in the field. Confidence in a website increases conversions.
We have covered only the basic functioning of KRA in this article. If you don’t own it, do get a copy of the KRA demo.
Play with it, and see the many ways that this tool will improve your business.
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5. This tag & ping thing.
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Last week I mentioned the new Tag & Ping craze “sweeping your inbox”.
Tagging is something that has been around a while, its just not something I have ever done myself. I first became aware of it when I checked the reported backlinks to my ezseonews.com/blog at Google several weeks ago. While Google hides most of the incoming links (it only shows two to my blog), one is from a site called tagspage.com. I never submitted this myself, but someone tagged me. That page has a PR of 4, which obviously is helping contribute to my blogs PR5.
Last week I mentioned that I was concerned that this technique could follow the same fate as blog and ping and may quickly become ineffective as it was abused by “quick fix” webmasters.
Tag & Ping definitely works today, and allows you to quickly get PR4, PR5 and higher links, I am just not sure it has a long term future.
Since its launch, Tag & Ping has been promoted by just about everyone online, and it was interesting to see exactly who else was a little concerned by its potential abuse. Of those newsletters I receive and read, only Michael Campbell warned about the potential abuse of this system and the consequences. I guess a lot of marketers are more concerned about making commissions than really helping their subscribers with informed choices. So hats off to Michael, who was my inspiration when I first started online marketing, and is still a guru with integrity.
Do I recommend this system for you? Well, only you can decide what benefit you might make from this system. If quick high PR links that might not last (but could) is something that you see beneficial to your business, visit this page.
If that does not interest you, don’t.
Well, that’s it for another issue. If you want to read the recent issues of this newsletter, you can read them online at my blog.
For older newsletters, you will need to visit the old archives.
Have a great week!
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The contents of this newsletter is copyright 2006 Andrew Williams. If you want to republish any of the articles, you must get permission from the author.
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