BANS Today

Five Most Common SEO Mistakes

Written by mbpage on November 28, 2008

I have been trying to get to grips with tagging wordpress posts and the value of such an exercise.  As we all know finding up to date info on the web on a topic like wordpress can be nightmare.  Gawd knows how many plugins I have installed over the last year that were no longer needed becuase an upgraded version of wordpress has included that functionality.

As an example of a change to come I have made extensive use of the sticky post plugin over the last 6 months or so but wordpress 2.7 will have this feature included.  So my first tip today is to review your plugins against wordpress functionality when upgrading as 1) they may conflict and 2) they may no longer be needed.

Anyway back to tagging.  How do you tag properly?  It seems most people don’t and in searching I came across an article with the title of this post Five Most Common SEO & SEM Mistakes.   Not only does what it says about tagging make sense but so do the other points the author makes so check it out.

It was also interesting to learn how much traffic he himself lost when switching to wordpress and not making use of technorati tags.  Best I can tell the current version of worpdress does not produce technorati tags so if you want to boost traffic an install of the technorati tag plugin is highly recommended.

What to you guys think?  If you’re reading this and think this information is out of date please let me know.

I’ve Hit the Wall

Written by mbpage on November 14, 2008

Yep it’s finally happened I’ve hit the wall.  I think I’m on track for another record month, will I certainly am with the sterling depreciation v the dollar which I incorrectly reported last month had put downward pressure on earnings.  Can’t believe nobody pointed that out.   A sterling fall means more pounds for my dollar earnings lol.

Anyway I’m now juggling too many balls and I don’t think I’m going to get past $2,500 per month without outsourcing some of the work.  As I stated before my goal is to turn this into a $100,000 business within the next 2 years.  It seems the most sensible route is to outsource a lot of the content production so I’ve added a couple of proposal requests to Elance and I gotta say there are some dam good people out their charging very reasonable rates.

This leaves me free to focus more on building the other two or three supersites I’ve got planned, monetization and the seo and link building side of things.  In one way I’d rather write the content but I can’t see me trusting anyone enough to build links at this stage.

If you wan’t to build a business you need to outsource.  When you, or if you have hit the $2,000 per month mark I encourage you to reinvest a proportion of your proceeds to take the business to the next level.  One thing I am aware of from reading countless posts and forums is the number of people who claim not to be able to afford relatively low cost investments that would grow their business.

When  I was only earning a couple of hundred bucks a month I was still trying new scripts, tools and plugins which cost money.  Don’t be a cheapskate - remember you can make money without cost in this business e.g. montetize a squidoo lens - no cost other than your time.  There isn’t another business opportunity on earth that enables you to do that.  To try something similar on main street you would have to take huge financial risks so don’t worry about a couple of hundred bucks even if you lose it.

Wordpress SEO

Written by mbpage on November 10, 2008

Following my despressing experience with Blogging to the Bank 3.0 (avoid at all costs) I have to say I could write a better ebook myself with only 6 months experience!

I have got a lot more comfortable with Wordpress over the last 3 months or so  and can pretty much tell the good from the bad and the ugly now.  A cracking Wordrpess SEO guide can be found on Yoasts Blog.  Yow will learn a massive amount for free and pick up some tremendous plugins.  Check it out, its free but it’s worth paying for.  Good job.

I also want to give another look out to Mark and Soggy and their respective blogs at thenichestorebuilder.com and buildanichestoreblog.blogspot.com.  I credit these two guys with getting my own niche stores to $2000 per month revenue and rising so if you want to succeed online follow their advice.

I’d love to make a greater contribution myself and one day I will.  For the moment I have to spend most of my time building my own business.  I’m trying to replace an  income of $100,000 a year and I’m only a quarter of the way their.  Hopefully in another 2 years time I’ll have made the grade.  Wish me luck.

Blogging to the Bank 3.0

Written by mbpage on November 5, 2008

I bought this e-book a couple of days ago and wonder if any readers of this blog have done the same.  This product is being promoted by many super affiliates judging by the number of emails I have received.  Before I share my own thoughts and views I’d be interested in hearing from purchasers of this, or editions 1 or 2.   What do you make of Blogging to the Bank 3.0?

October Earnings Update

Written by mbpage on November 4, 2008

Well another month flies by!  Life continues to be most interesting in niche store building circles.  Google really hates BANS now and I mean really.  I created two blogs (with little content admittedly) which were indexed quickly, ranked very well compared to BANS vanilla stores but have since been deindexed.

This proves beyond doubt to me that there is no point wasting time and effort setting up niche stores using Build a Niche Store if you want to rank well in Google.  That is not to say you can’t make good money elsewhere.

This months income was another record coming in at what would have been $2600.  Unfortunately the £ took a major battering against the dollar depreciating 25% in a week which has meant adjusted earnings of approx $2000.  I’m deilighted with this though and now have some great keywords ranking high in Yahoo and improving all the time as I continue link building.

A couple of my no hope older sites have also started to earn after doing nothing for 6 months.  I think this reflects the fact that the keyword competition was very strong e.g. home gym equipment but I now have a couple of top ten keyword rankings for gym related terms which are starting to get some traffic.  This surprised me as I had more or less written the sites off.

I am confident that Yahoo earnings will continue to rise.  I still have probably 20 sites or so that don’t rank well currently but are moving up the order with regular link building.  I don’t spend long on this probably an hour a day, so it will take some time yet.

So good old Yahoo is paying the bills but I am not happy at being reliant on this one search engine.  As I said Google hates BANS and I really have no idea what it takes to get ranked with Live.  All my sites are indexed (many just a couple of pages) but nothing I do seems to make a difference.  I treat all the sites the same yet I have one recent addition that is fully indexed, ranked for keywords and performing well.  It’s a shame I have no idea why.

So back to Google.  To make big money, in my opinion you have to rank well in Google.  For this reason I have abadoned BANS and all  my new sites are developed with Wordpress, Revolution Themes and a mixture of PHPbay, popshops and other monetization tools.  I wish I’d made the transition sooner but then I was still learning and still am.

The big difference is that I have had to bite the bullet and focus much more on content.  The problem with this strategy is that it is much more time consuming and there is a limit to the number of sites you can run.  I reckon 5.  This is a far cry from my 75 BANS stores. 

 Indeed I have only just launched one of the new style sites.  I have another in development but it will be another week before it is ready to launch.  These sites are not sales focused yet and until I have 20 pages or so indexed I will not be adding any monetization.  As I add content I wil l begin to add stores so each site will, over time, become a super site on a theme and have the equivalent of 10-20 BANS stores.

Because the stores are themed e.g sports they can serve multiple niches in one place.  Easier to maintain but requiring a different link building strategy as there is a need to deep link to the store pages.  The aim is two fold to get traffic from people interested in the content and to get traffic from people wanting to buy.  It therefore has dual appeal and will hopefully, in time, form the foundation for an authority site.

So there you have it.  A record month, hopefully another record month to come (first couple of days look good) and a radical change in strategy.

For this reason the focus of the blog will change to cater to a wider niche store building audience.  Hopefully I will retain my existing readers.  One day, when I’m making 10k per month I’ll put it all together in an ebook and it will be a lot better than most of the crap out there given some of my recent purchases!