Build a Niche Store Earnings Update - September
Written by mbpage on September 11, 2008
Well I guess I should apologize for not posting anything worthwhile for the last couple of weeks. I’ve been flat out building my first corporate website for a friends business and despite what I said in an earlier post, I’ve built another 8 or 9 stores.
August was a record month earnings wise coming in at around $800 but I can’t help feel a sense of disappointment. I have invested 5 months of 60 hour weeks in BANS and a measly $800 is not a lot to show for it.
I am in this for the long haul but I grow more nervous with each week that passes having come across a number of reports of de-indexed sites and canceled EPN accounts. The thought of 5 months, and rising, work counting for naught is not a pleasant one.
Putting the negative to one side what happens next? Well I think I’m going to set a target of completing 75 stores by the end of the year. I currently stand at 55 so that could be a big ask but I can put them up pretty quickly now.
The major change I have made this month includes a paid subscription to Terapeak. The jury is out on its value as eBay appear to offer restricted views of the data but it is a bit of an eye opener. I will provide an update on this product once the stores built as a result of the research are a month or two old.
The end of September will mark my first 6 months with BANS and I will go through my basic store building strategy then encompassing everything I have learned to date. This should be a valuable post for anyone new to BANS and a big time saver.
My main objective now is to devise a strategy to start ramping up site visitors. I’m a bit stuck here as I have optimized my site pages, submitted to directories and employed an active link building campaign. What else is there to do? Well content is an obvious one but everything I read says do more link building so rather than content for the site I’m moving to article marketing.
I’m going to use Article Marketer for this purpose. I have had mixed experience of them to date and find their editorial policies as bad, if not worse, than ezinearticles.com but the distribution is excellent and results in many backlinks per article.
I have also decided to get Stompernet’s SEO Course as I still feel I’m missing something in terms of off page activity. I have no proof for this other than unsubstantiated reports of traffic claims and earnings. I know though, that my long term success will be dependent on my keyword ranking in the serps so this is where I will focus much of my attention for the next 3 to 4 months.
Tags: article marketer, article marketing, BANS, Build A Niche Store, Build a Niche Store Secrets, search engine optimizationWhy KEI Sucks
Written by mbpage on August 15, 2008
When I started to learn search engine optimization one of the suggestions was that you should identify keywords with high KEI. Is this something you do? Well perhaps you should reconsider. KEI is supposed to be a useful indicator of our potential to rank in the serps for a given keyword or keyword phrase yet it has many inherent disadvantages.
Consider this example from my research today “baby”. Do you think you could rank no. 1 in google for the keyword “baby”? Not likely, in fact, never in a million years if you’re a one man band yet guess what? The KEI is 27.98. I’ve read on many forums that a KEI of more than 1.0 makes a keyword attractive so by those standards this looks a no brainer.
Let’s delve a little deeper though. If we look at the number of searches we see that there are 159,000 searches a month for the term baby (nice) and the competition is a paltry 901 million!!!!.
So we can see the need to exercise some common sense here. The competition is way to fierce regardless of the KEI to target this keyword. What we want is a high number of searches with as low a competition number as we can find.
Take a term like “cat stroller” KEI 27.59, searches 2000 per month, competition 159,000. In theory this is the kind of term you should be targeting. From this it is easy to conclude that we need to take all three variables into account when choosing keywords to target. But there is another problem.
KEI varies according to the data center, keyword program and search engine you obtain the information from - massively. I targeted a phrase recently where the competition was shown to range from just 400,000 to 7 million, the KEI varied from 0.25 to 75 and the search volume from 2300 per month to 27000 per month depending on where I pulled the data from.
This is the reason KEI sucks and why a good dose of common sense is also needed when evaluating data. Just try to get the same results I did for the word “Baby” and you’ll see what I mean - you’ve got no chance.
Now I’d love to offer a silver bullet to solve this mess but it simply doesn’t exist. There is no current solution to this problem and until something comes along we have to rely on common sense and gut feel. Hardly scientific, but hey, that’s part of the challenge.
In summary then KEI is a useful indicator but no more than that. You still need to take account of search volume and competition, take the figures with a pinch of salt and test your results.
Tags: choosing keywords, google, kei, keyword phrase, search engine optimization, SEOPosted in: Obeservations, SEO
Get to the Top of Google
Written by mbpage on June 18, 2008
I have just finished reading Get to the top of Google
I’d give it 8 out of 10.
Posted in: Books
