Creative ways to market your business

Marketing your business is never an easy task. There are many different ways to market yourself, but often times you have to think outside of the box to get your point across. There are a few simple steps you can take make your business stand out from the rest of the crowd

A great way to market your business is to team up with other local businesses. See if there are any available spots open on your local chamber of commerce. Start showing up to community events and making your presence as a local business known. Another great way to market yourself is to team up with other local businesses and offer deals and specials to the community.

 If you want to take the step and market yourself on your own, host your own events. You can use these mixers as a way to invite the community out and get to know them as they get to know more about your business. You will have to find a good restaurant or bar that allows you to have conversations, but still offer plenty of entertainment for guests. A piano bar, like BIG SHOT PIANO LOUNGE RESTAURANTin Arlington Heights, Illinois is a perfect example of a great destination to host an event like this.

 If you want your business to grow, you will have to put in the effort. This means putting the time into marketing your business to potential customers. You can rely on word of mouth marketing to do some of the lifting, but you will have to go out on your own and do some of the work yourself. Owning a business is an exciting, if not challenging, opportunity. If you have committed to starting your own business, you have to commit to growing it and keeping it viable. Be creative and market yourself to watch your business grow.

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Earn money online in 2016

Making and saving money has become easier than ever with the emerging of technology. The following are some ways to do both because if you aren’t taking advantage of the money that can be saved and earned, then it seems like you are throwing money away. 

If you are a proficient writer then there are quite a few places to earn money. There are various content production companies that hire writers and sometimes pay very well. Building a portfolio of your writings is important as many of these companies require samples to be allowed to write in their community.

Saving money online is very easy as there are vast amounts of coupons and deals offered. Even huge sites like Groupon offer coupons for companies like Travelocity that are updated daily. You are not doing yourself a favor by not checking out coupons before departing on a shopping trip.

Selling old or used things online can help earn some extra money without doing too much work. With online auction sites and online payment systems like PayPal, the consumer is much safer than they were in the past when selling or buying things online. Old smartphones just laying around can bring in quite a lot of money as there are people is buy and sell old phones for a profit.

Buying used items online can help save money as many items are as good as new but the owner upgraded or found no use for it. This is especially true when it comes to technology. Around Christmas time, there are ads on sites like Craigslist of TVs or smartphones for a fraction of the price you would pay for the new item. The owner is selling them because they were bought a newer or better version of the product they already owned. If lucky, some posters are willing to give things away for free as long as you handle the transport of the object.

Technology has made making and saving money easier than ever. Next time you are thinking about going shopping, look around for some deals or coupons online before you depart. The worst thing that can happen is you save a little bit of money, best case scenario is that you save a bunch of money.

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Can a domain recover from a penalty over time?

I wrote a post last year saying that aaronchua.com is no more because it seems to be under a penalty. I drew this conclusion based on (i) it has lost its sitelinks and (ii) it has lost rankings for many of its keywords.  After a year of non activity, I was surprised that this penalty seems to be lifted by itself. If you do a search for aaronchua.com, you can see that it has regained back its sitelinks.

Click the image for a bigger view

Hence, I decided to continue blogging here again. No point wasting an aged domain that has real content on it in case I need to channel its PR to a new site. More importantly, I have learned quite a bit during the past year and this is a good place to share some of these lessons and insights. 

How to make an Amazon niche site for 2014 and beyond

I never quite making amazon niche sites. However, these site look very different from the first batch that I made last year during the 50 Amazon site challenge.  Most of the these early sites were filled with buying keywords. The articles were mainly concerned with terms such as 'best product', 'product review', product under XX dollars" etc. These kind of articles do bring in buying traffic that converts very well but the problem they create is making your whole site looks like a spammy site, regardless how good your articles are. 

Since then, my affiliate sites have gotten a lot more diversify. Each of them now has an information and an product review component. The informational aspect has no monetisation embedded and their purpose is to serve the user which hopefully can attract some real links which can be channeled to the product review page through onsite linking.  I found this model to be working very well and most of my sites do receive natural links from search traffic visitors who found them useful. 

Is building links necessary to get search traffic?

None of my affiliate links have gotten into any penalities. One of the reason is that I don't build any links to them. None what so ever.  I focus on identifying a good niche and focus on writing all the content to answer the problems for that niche. It works very well and my sites can gather search traffic in a matter of months with no manipulative linking on my part. Below is a screenshot for one of new sites that was built in May this year.

Click the image for a bigger view

Sorry I can't reveal the site at the moment but I might do so when it gets a bit stronger as a public case study. The bigger point here is that you don't need links to get search engine traffic, especially in 2013. Google has been ruthless in rolling out their algorithm updates and it actually makes it easier for proper sites to have a shot at claiming the first page for many keywords.

Conclusion

This site proves that some domains do recover over time especially if you know you have not done anything that might trigger a penalty. Sometime, you just have to let the search engine sort itself out and hope for the best.

It feels good to blog here again and I will be writing some stuff that you guys who still want to make some money online will appreciate.

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Aaronchua.com will be no more

For the few readers that I have, this is to inform you that aaronchua.com will no longer be updated. This is mainly due to the EMD penalty which, strangely enough, has affected this site. I have no idea how to reverse this and I have no intention of trying since this is not a money making site for me. I will still be blogging at my early retirement blog so I hope to see you guys there.

Thanks for all the time you have spent reading aaronchua.com. I hope you have gain something from it.

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Dead end sites Time to get rid of mine

I wake up this morning, look at my numbers and say to myself "what do the f*ck am I doing?".

I had over 100 sites Only of a few are making serious money and I was wondering what am I doing with the rest?

Enough! Time to get rid of what I called dead end sites and move on to sites that had the potential to be a real business.

What are dead end sites?

These are sites that had very limited potential. Example? How about this? Blue torch  holder. How dead end can you get? Limited branding. Limited product extension. Limited audience. So, why make them? Because they bring in money fast. Small amounts but fast money. This creates a tiny sensation in our brain telling us that we are on the right track because money is coming in. Just do more and we will see bigger results. That is why we throw ourselves into these dead end projects so fast and furious. Just look at all the Squidoo madness going on now. People are contented grabbing a couple of hundreds or even thousands more before Christmas comes.

Enough of these dead end sites and projects!

Why am I contented with sites that make only a couple of bucks per month when I should be thinking of doing things that bring in millions of dollars.

Yes, millions of dollars. That is only a tiny fraction of the amount of money flowing through the Internet right now. I have  restricted myself enough. Time to really go forward and work on open end sites.

However, open end sites have a big problem. They might not have immediate result. Why? Because they are so open ended that they can go anywhere. This means that you might not be doing the right things during the initial period even though the site has potential.

What if you picked the wrong model?
What if you picked the wrong audience?
What if you picked the wrong product?

Open ended site need time to figure itself up. To be able to experiment and learn what is working and what is not. The good thing is that they can lead to many possibilities which is why they are open ended. Try doing that with bluetorchholder.com.

My early retirement blog is an example of an open ended website. It can go literally into different models. I can sell an ebook, I can create a social network for people who want to retire early, I can sell a newsletter picking the best investment for the week. What I can do with it is not fixed but I need time to figure out where my niche is and how best to make money from it.  However, once I figure that out, you bet that I will be making more than USD10 per month.

How about you? Have enough with dead end sites?

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How to make money with Amazon 2013 edition

The making money online landscape has changed significantly since Google rolled out Panda and Penguin. Making money with Amazon is no exception. Before the algorithm changes, my Amazon niche sites were pulling in close to USD1000 per month in amazon affiliate fees. They were all wiped out when the changes came. Fortunately, I didn't give up completely and started my Amazon 50 sites challenge. Last month, they are close to making USD250. So slowly but surely, I am starting to earn with Amazon again.

Today, I was reading Griz's old posts and they reminded how good the past few years have been. In terms of making money online, there was no keywords you couldn't target. Loans, cosmetic surgeries, cars, product keywords, credit cards, hotels etc. As long as you work continuously on getting backlinks that contain your anchor keyword, achieving high rankings is matter of when, not if.

I am afraid things are not as simple now. Certain keywords and niches such as landlord building insurance are off limit and I need to recognise this change. However, that is not saying that I can't make money with niche sites. While most IM folks have gone off the niche site bandwagon and started making authority sites, developing their own products or selling kindle ebooks, I still make niche sites and are earning money from them.

In this post, I like to share what I have learn from 10 months of doing the Amazon 50 site challenges. It is going to be long but hopefully, you can gain something from it.

The steps for making money with Amazon have not change. They still boil down to the following:

• Select a niche
• Pick keywords with high search volume and low competition
• Create content
• Build backlinks to the site

 However, how I go about doing each of the steps has completely changed.

How to select an Amazon niche

Most people combine keywords and niche selection into one process. I don't. I like to examine niches independently from keyword research. In fact, my niche needs to be more forward looking so I look closely at news and forum discussions. That is how I turn up keywords such as glamping.

Most IM folks depend on tools such as adwords, longtail pro, market samurai etc. These tools are backward looking and they are actively mined everyday. To avoid competition, I need to look elsewhere for my gold mines.

So what do I look? News , forum discussions, trend sites, blogs from forward thinkers etc All these represent gold mines that I find gems in. By the time these new niches appear in the keyword research tool, I will be 6-12 months in front of everyone with my content and links.

Using this criteria, my camping site (4seasontent.org) will fail the test. That is why it has not made any money. It is competing in a niche which is saturated with both real brands as well as other IM folks. Just check out this competitor: 4seasontents.org. He or she also doesn't have any traffic as well, thus strengthening my point that it is difficult to compete in niches where there is nothing new to optimise for.

How to chose Amazon keywords that you can rank

After the Google Panda and Penguin updates, learning how to pick the right keywords have become more crucial. In fact, learning what keywords are impossible become more important than search volume. Unlike the past, I now totally avoid certain keywords because I can never ranked for them, no matter how much content I write or how many backlinks I throw at the site.

First rule to remember: avoid product keywords.

Although Amazon is all about products, it is getting next to impossible to rank for any forms of product keywords including category product keywords, brand product keywords and even product model keywords.

Below are some screen shots showing you the Google search results from the amazon sites that I have revealed:

Mini cupcake maker

4 season tent

Gps tracker for kids

 

In every one of these product keywords, you see real ecommerce stores or brands taking the top slots. That was not the case in the past where niche sites or article directories such as hubpages can rank for them. 

I don't know whether this was part of the algorithm changes but from a user point of view, things have definitely changed. As an affiliate, I need to step away from these keywords because I know I can't rank for them no matter how good my SEO skills are. Google has predefined what kind of sites should appear for these product keywords and if I can't be such sites, I will never get into the first page. 

That is not saying that I can't make money as an affiliate. I just need to find other keywords that I have at least some change of ranking. So what is the secret?

Find keywords that requires subjective human opinions

Or what I called humanised keywords. These are keywords that indicate that searchers want to read from other sources besides the brands and the ecommerce stores. They represent areas where niche review sites and personal blogs have a chance to compete in. 

The most common example is the word 'reviews'. Take any product keywords and add "reviews" behind them. You will see a completely different search results.

Let's see one such result when I take one of the keywords above i.e. gps tracker for kids and add "reviews" behind:

Gps tracker for kids reviews

By adding the word "reviews", I now can see sites such as toptenreviews.com as well as article directories such as Squidoo and Article Dashboard. Heck, even my own site is ranked just behind Amazon. This is how I am able to get traffic for my Amazon niche sites even though product keywords have become off limit.

This strategy can be applied to any humanized keywords. Besides 'reviews', other examples include:

• ratings
• recommendations
• best
• all the Q+A type of queries that might lead to a purchase

Hence if you want to make money with Amazon in 2013, learn how to pick these keywords and you will see search traffic.

How to write content for your niche sites

What I try to do is to focus on what information searcher might need with before or after the purchase of the product. This is how I try to add value in all my niche sites. For example, in my minicupcake site, I am starting to include recipes that users can use after buying the mini cupcake maker. In my early retirement site, I created an excel sheet that calculates how long it takes to retire early based on dividend investment alone.

The worst kind of content goes round and round without addressing the main points. I used to write articles that read along these line (if it is an article about interior decorating ideas):

"It is easy to come up with interior decorating ideas. All you need to do is to take a close at your surroundings and try to draw inspiration from them. Most people have ideas not because they thought deeply about it but because they observe all the stuff happening around them. If you want to have more ideas, learn to adopt a different perspective and .... blah blah blah"

Nowadays, if I am doing this article, I will borrow a book from library and learn the different interior decorating techniques. I will then find images to illustrate these techniques and create a long list post.

A lot of work? Yes but I can't take short cuts anymore if I want my sites to survive Panda or other future algorithm changes.

How to build backlinks to your niche sites

I believe in quality over quantity when it comes to backlinks. A couple of value passing links wins over hundreds of spam links. To get those, I used a concept called link sponge.

This concept is similar to link wheels or link pyramids. In case you are not sure what these are, this is how they work. Folks would build web 2.0 sites on public blog networks such as those on tumblr, webs.com etc. Each of these sites links to either another web 2.0 site or to the money making site directly. They in turn will be strengthened by having lots of spam links from blog comments, forum profiles, directory sites etc pointing at them.

The idea is to get these web2.0 sites to absorb all the spam links and point that link volume to your money site. Since web 2.0 can take more link abuse due to their domain authority, they effectively act as buffers to your real site. If you attempt to throw volumes of such spam links directly at your site, be prepared to see it disappear from the SERPs.

So, link sponge works in similar fashion, with one important exception. Rather than absorbing spam links, link sponges are real resources that can absorb authority links. For example, there are many established sites that give out free links to sites that have valuable children resources. If you want to absorb these links, you need to build a useful resource that will be linked by these child friendly sites. Then use this site to link to your affiliate site in the kids market. That will be a hell of a link!

Conclusion

Affiliate marketing will still be well and alive in 2013. There will be always be room for a site to recommend products or services to its reader. The trick here is to learn where to look for niches where you can establish a useful site that isn't too competitive and where you can still earn a nice commission.

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Is SEO dead? A claim from Yazekie

There is a blog post in the Yakezie networking claiming that SEO is dead. I have left my comment there but I don't know if it got through because their commenting system is so messed up. So, I will be reposting that comment here in case it didn't go through. No point wasting good content! LOL

**********

SEO is a marketing tactic. Just in all marketing tactics, as long as someone knows how to use the tactic well, it will continue to be a useful way to acquire users or customers.

There are lots of spam emails but do you think 'email marketing is dead'? Probably not. Similarly, SEO will never die.

Most folks who claim that SEO is dead saw it as a pure manipulative practice designed to misguide the search engines. That is not what SEO is all about.

As to whether your suggested SEO practices are sufficient, let me just say this: within each marketing field there are differing levels of expertise.

In email marketing, there are people who has 50% open rate and there are folks who scrape by with 5%. Can we live with 5% open rate? Of course we can, but a good email marketer knows all the practices that makes email marketing more effective for him.

Similarly for SEO. Anybody can live with basic SEO or even no SEO. However, for those who understands and applys it a bit better gets to enjoy a higher success rate.

Basically, SEO is about the following:

- keyword research
- content
- links
- feedback metrics

Any one of the four areas have depths that can make one's SEO more effective. Take link building for example. Most SEOs falsely believed that links are everything and they advise getting volumes of spammy links. The real link builders like Eric Ward understands that the true value of links lies in their ability to pass traffic and visibility to the site. As such, his link practices are safe, generates a return for the site owner and avoids depending 100% on Google traffic.

I shall stop here but I hope you understand where I am coming from. SEO cannnot be dead if you know how to use it effectively.

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Amazon Challenge #9: Make 200 dollars with Amazon affiliate

Welcome to the blog with ever declining traffic LOL. Yes, the traffic on aaronchua.com has been going down for some time now. In fact, as I look closely at the traffic from April to current, it might seem that the site has been penalised! Really nice Google. The only site where I have real info is being penalised while my amazon niche sites are going up with traffic!

Anyway, let's get to the real meat of the article. My amazon sites pulled in a nice income for Sept 2012. Nothing really to brag about but a nice side income nevertheless.

Below are the screnshots from my amazon and skimlinks accounts:

Amazon income: USD141.96

Skimlinks income: USD93.48

Compared to the last update where I reported less than USD100 in Amazon earnings, this month's results are quite encouraging.

Why the increase in income

Increase in traffic: After restarting the amazon niche, a couple of sites started to pick up traffic. My mini cupcake site for example is starting to see 15 visitors per day and has earned USD10 this month. Not bad for a niche that I thought is dead.

One site taking off: One of the weird niche in my portfolio of sites made some nice sales. Actually the site only made 2 sales but they are for high ticket items, thus earning over USD80 this month.

More site starting to earn: Maybe it is nearer to Christmas but more sites are starting to earn with the same level of traffic.

What I am busy with

Besides working on my amazon sites, I have been working on my home decor online magazine site, my early retirement blog as well as exploring other affiliate programmes.

My home decor site is coming along nicely. It has about 30 over posts now and I just scored a wonderful backlink. I have been reading Eric Ward's linking newsletter and it has opened my eyes on what is real link building. It has nothing to do with anchor text, dofollowed or PR. Real links give you traffic, visibility in the relevant community and even natural backlinks. This is what I have gotten with this one backlink.

What I did was to find a non profit website which is looking for donations. I donated a token amount and my site was featured in their donations page as well as their newsletter.  This gave me some traffic as over 100 people in the niche visited my site due to the link. Among them, 2 nice folks gave me a backlink each that drove even more visitors. For a small donation, I gained 3 natural backlinks and visibility in the relevant niche. Not bad!

My authority site project

My early retirement blog is still very much in its infancy stage. There are now over 40 articles on the site but traffic is dismal. Less than 10 visitors to the site each day. I don't really know what to do next but to add content and see what happens. I guess a lot of authority sites start out this way especially if they don't do much promotion.

How to make money with Amazon in 2013

Next post will be a much longer one about my experiences in making money with Amazon and what to do to avoid being penalised. The article is almost done and I should publish it next week.

Note: I didn't publish my article on the 10 blogging niches because there seems to be very little interest in it. Too bad as these niches are not your typical long tail niches. They are up and coming industries that represent opportunities for anyone to make money from.

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Google update targeting exact match domain EMD Are you affected?

Typical Google. Launching another update to get rid of folks like us. This time it is targeting low quality exact match domains. Since I have 50 of those for my Amazon 50 niche site challenge, I am already mentally prepared for the worst to come.

After checking through the stats last night, none of my sites are actually affected even though all their domains are exact keyword domains. Amazing! There is no obvious conclusion but I am guessing that one of the following could explain why my sites were not affected.

Reason #1: I build my sites correctly

If any of you have been following me in my amazon challenge updates, you will know that I build these sites differently from my past sites. Specifically:

• No more writing keyword stuffed titles that matches the keywords in my domain
• No more getting spammy backlinks
• No more focusing on one set of keywords
• Trying to write something of value to serve the folks coming to the site
• Using different themes

That is basically how I have been building my sites. Although their traffic is not high, it is steadily increasing. The mini cupcake maker site for example has gone from 1-2 person a day to about 5-10 a day. I believe the true potential will come in another 1-2 years as the sites gain more content and age. 

Reason #2: I was lucky

This is definitely one possibility. Maybe the alogorithm missed my sites because I wasn't targeting the ultra spammy niches like finance, legal, home furniture etc. Or maybe I was targeting keywords that had low monthly search volume. Too low for the alogorithm to care.

One key observation

One of the key observation was that none of my sites were pulling in traffic from the keyword in their domains. Let's take the mini cupake site as an example. I have never gotten one person typing in the keyword mini cupcake maker. Instead the following is the list of keywords that are bringing the site traffic.

The above image makes one wonder if this is a good leading indicator to tell you if your site will be penalised. If your site has lots of different keyword combos like the one above, you are probably doing your optimisation correctly. If you are seeing lots of repeated and targeted keywords, you might be getting too aggressive in your SEO.

Anyway, it is still early days and I will continue to monitor the effects of this exact match domain algorithm update.

Hope none of you has been affected. 

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How many keywords can you get on page one with one article

How do you sharpen your SEO skills? There are a couple of things that I do and this is one of them.

In my previous article on how to get traffic to your blog without backlinks, I mentioned that decreasing your reliance on link building improves the remaining aspect of SEO, which is mainly keyword reseach, copy writing, and developing metrics & analytics. In this article, I want to zoom in one aspect, which is copy writing.

Everything else aside, I am not a good writer by any standard. I have poor grammar, lots of spelling mistakes and no voice to call my own. So, the copywriting I am talking about is being able to think and write in the same mental mode as the readers you want to attract.

A good SEO copywriter produces lots of longtail keywords naturally. By placing myself in the same mental mode as my user:

• I use the same terms they use 
• I ask the questions they ask
• I provide the questions they ask
• I talk about related things that they might be interested in

This is how my content can meet the needs of all those longtail searches without me forcing it. This in turn is how you can increase your longtail traffic.

If you want to hone your copyrighting, set yourself a metric.

For me, every content that I produce, I target to have at least a couple keywords which the content is on the first page of the search engines. I don't care which keywords or which search engines. I focus on getting into the head of my users so that I understand the context, the timing and the reason for their search.

If you practice this long enough, it will come naturally in whatever materials you are writing. I have not completely master it yet but I have improved quite a bit since I first started sharpening this skill. If your niche sites have low traffic after penguin, time to hone your copyrighting skill as well.

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How to get visitors to your blog without backlinks

Since Panda, I have been building niches and blogs without using any methods that Google frowns on. Specifically, I have stopped buying or manipulating links to get top rankings in google for my blog. All the amazon niche sites that I have built are done with content and by targeting the right keywords that nobody is bothering to optimise for.

In this post, I want to encourage you to sharpen your SEO skills by not building links. From my past experience, building links makes you lazy as an SEO. Everyone just buys them from places such as trafficplanet.com or fiverr or blog networks. Your whole SEO strategy becomes a routine of:

• using keyword tools such as keyword researcher that helps you identify those long tail keywords and
• buying links to rank all long tail keywords

Take away the link buying option and most folks making money online will suddenly lost their way on how to get visitors to their blogs or niche sites.

If you want to improve your SEO skills, why not learn to build sites without backlinks. If you need some hints, here is what I have been doing to get visitors from search engines without placing links excessively:

How to get visitors: Method 1

Use google news or any rss monitoring tools to see what kind of news are happening in your niche. For example, in my 4 season tent site, I spotted a new trend called glamping tents. This is a new kind of camping trends that combines outdoor with luxury living. Some people hate it while some don't. The key for us is to see how to generate content that spark more interest and searches. Here is the step by step method

• Scan for new terms in your niche
• Identify a few terms and start writing entry level articles that targets beginners wanting to know about these new terms
• Write a couple interesting content that can potentially be shared such as a list post or a contradictory article or even some funny images etc
• Link these new interesting content from the first batch of entry level articles or tell your visitors to search for such information

This method is what I called link and bait. You target the less interesting but easy keywords to pull in visitors and lead them to your more interesting ones so that these can potentially be shared. You can't directly just work on the interesting articles because no one gets to see and share them. You need to build some kind of traffic funnel from the entry level articles first.

How to get visitors: Method 2

Use lots of images that are named and tagged properly with keywords.

A couple of my amazon niche sites are developed this way and have received lots of traffic from Google Image. The good news is that some of them are even buying stuff so image search can be monetised. Remember to use a wordpress plugin that helps to take visitors directly from the image to your post so that your content can be read.

How to get visitors: Method 3

Leverage of popular article directories such as Squidoo to pull in traffic for you. Say I want to build more traffic to my 4 season tent site. I will create a Squidoo Lens that targets a long tail such as the best 4 season tent for 2 people. Due to the authority of these article directories, they can rank without backlinks and pull in traffic from search engines. If the articles have a link back to your site, some percentage of the traffic will click the link and visit your page.

You can do this for multiple long tail keywords and traffic will increase over time.

This strategy was used in the past mainly to get more links but how you should be using it now is to treat the article directories as traffic funnels. This will ensure you write better quality content that will drive folks to visit your site.

Conclusion

Seo might only be about content and links but the way you combine these pieces can lead you to different traffic strategies. If you don't start to explore these different permutations, you will always be one step behind others in terms of your marketing prowess. Time to leave the backlink game behind and see what SEO really can offer.

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Amazon Challenge #8 When do you gave up on your site?

August is not a great month in terms of Amazon earnings. From the chart below, you can see that only 3 sites made money so far. Fortunately, site #23 earned its first 2 sales and surprising, broken even immediately as one of the items sold was over USD300.  Site #4 and #11 continue to made consistent sales even though their traffic is low.

Click to enlarge

The question I am thinking about today is this: when do you give up on your site? I was prompted when I looked at the chart last night. If I had dropped site #23 earlier, I will never have earned back its set up cost of USD14. In fact, a similar thing fact to site #5 last month when it made its first sale after 7 months of waiting, although the revenue was not enough to cover the cost. 

However, will things always turn out this way? Will they all make sales eventually? That is the question I am asking myself as I looked at site #2 and site #7, which had never made any sales. Site #2 was especially disappointing even that it was the second site that I built for the challenge. 

I would like to hear your opinions about this issue. For me, IM has taught me this: as long as you have something out there, you will make some money eventually. It might not be a lot of money but there will be income coming in. Hence, never give up on your projects. Even though things might look all doom and glommy now, persist and you shall be rewarded.

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Choosing Amazon keywords based on unqiue selling proposition for your niche sites

Most of us choose keywords based on search numbers, level of competition and commercially viability. With the onslaught of Panda and Penguin, most of us will need to step on our game. The easiest way is to create interesting content that will be shared. So,should that be one of our keyword selection criteria when we decide on what niches to choose?

I don't believe in passion sites because it seriously limits what markets we go to. Most offline businesses are not really passionate about their business's core subjects anyway. Instead, I proposed that we choose niches based on whether we can create interesting content that can be shared so that we can get both traffic and links.

So, what are the kind of unique selling propositions that we can create for our amazon sites? Many will say real reviews but I don't that is enough anymore. No matter how real your reviews are, you are never going to beat Amazon itself for the sheer number of reviews it has. We need to add other values to our amazon sites. Below are a few examples:

Unique selling proposition #1: curate modern products

People like to share the new and the interesting. For products, that means finding the latest and the interesting products in our niches, rather than just showcasing what they can buy from Amazon.

Example: I have a camping Amazon site (site 25 in our list of amazon sites featured in the Amazon Challenge update #7). It is a boring site: http://4seasontent.org/.

For a while, I couldn't think of anything to write until I bumped into this: fieldcandy.com. Then it stuck me. I can curate all those unique and contemporary tents and post them to the site. They might not result in sales but they have a chance to bring in real traffic and maybe even links.

You can extend this concept to virtually any product based niche sites. Use one portion for reviews and the other to curate interesting new products in the niche.

Unique selling proposition #2: adding tutorials or guides

Another way to differentiate your amazon sites is to add a tutorial or guides section. These are purely informational content to help readers of that niche. You can see how this work in digital-photography-school.com/. There are 3 sections in the site: photography tips, camera reviews and post production tutorials. Only the reviews section is monetized with affiliate links.

 

Example: I am thinking of doing this for my minicupakemaker.org site, where I will introduce 1 section on making mini cupcake and another on how to decorate them.

Readers:

• do you select niches based on whether you can create interesting content?
• do you have any ideas on how to create interesting content for Amazon sites?

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How to rank without backlinks and get traffic to your site

I am not a big fan of building backlinks to get rankings and traffic. Backlinks can often get your site into trouble. Just ask the folks whose sites have been penalised by the Penguin update. Of course, the IM folks are starting to say things such as varying your anchor text to make backlinks effective. To me, that is going to be a short term solution. When penguin 2 or whatever animal comes, don't be surprised if these guys are wipe out just like in the first penguin.

So, do I mean that sites don't need links? No, but you don't need as many links as what others have been saying. Links matter when you decide to go for keywords that are solely being competed by links. That is your own choice and I would say, your own stupidity if you decided to rank for keywords that are based on link wars.

However, not all keywords compete on links. You need to observe the SERPs and see how the competition is like. For example, there are certain types of keywords (such as news driven keywords) where the freshness of the content is more important than links. In such cases, you need more fresh content and no amount of backlinks can help your site.(Try to experiment with a sports event related niche and you will know what I mean).

In SEO, there are basically 3 areas that we can work with:

• keywords
• content
• backlinks

Within each area, there are opportunities to groom our skills.  This is where the meat of this article is

How to rank with good keyword research

Keyword research is a diverse area that offers anyone opportunities if you can specialise. Within keyword research, I divided it into the following:

• trend keywords
• keyword divergence
• long tail keywords

(Note: for new readers, you might want to familiarise yourself with the concept of longtail keywords and trend keywords)

How to be good in trend keyword research: You need to be a person who reads widely, especially the technology blogs. Other good resources include blogs that highlights small businesses as well as articles that focus on trends in specific industries. When your radar is up, you will start to see lots of keywords that are literally wide open with little or no competition. To rank, all you need is content.

How to be good in detecting keyword divergence: This kind of research is for people who like to attack popular niches. Understand this: the more popular a keyword is, the more likely that there will be new ways to search for this term. Why? Because people get tired of seeing the same results for the keyword they are searching for so they will try different terms to see different results. The more popular a term is, the more likely this will happen and the more diverse the terms will be. It is your job to learn when such divergence will happen and grab the chance to optimise for these new terms that essentially describle the same niche.

How to be good in longtail keywords: The discussion forums are your goldmine. Spend some time looking through the forums of your niche and you will start to know what are the specific longtails relevant to your niche. Seriously, the kind of questions that people asked in the forums is exactly the kind of long tails keywords that will appear in Google. Even though they might not appear in any Google keyword tool, rest assured that as long as people ask such questions in forums, they will be searched for in Google.

Mastering any one of the above will equip you with enough unoptimised keywords that don't need a single link to get traffic from Google. If your current keyword research is only from Google keyword tool, time to step up your game.

How to create a new query space with great content

Being able to produce great content is a wonderful skill. There are some folks who are just so good with headlines and content that they draw traffic from diverse sources, not only from the search engines. For SEO purposes, there are certain things that you can do with content which allows you to draw traffic from Google without backlinks.

Create a new query space with your content: What is a new query space? It is about creating interest in a search term that nobody has searched for, thereby generating search volume for this search term. I have seen this occur with my own eyes in the tech industry.

There was a VC blogger known as Andrew Chen who blogged about startups, user acquisition and viral marketing. In one of his essays in 2011, he mentioned a new term called "growth hacker". This refers to a special group of marketers who can achieve rapid growth for a startup by exploiting technical leverages in popular platforms, thereby fuelling its growth using with users of that platform. 

Ever since that essay went live, I have seen this term used frequently in many other startup/technology blogs. In fact, I did a check on Google insights and this is what I found:

Guess who is ranking for this term? Andrew Chen of course. He has single-handedly created a new search space using content alone and his blog is now enjoying high rankings for this term without using backlinks.

If you have skills in crafting such content, you don't need backlinks. All you need is to draft a new memo, give it a sexy term such as 'growth hacker' or 'pillar content' or 'write epic shit', posted to a platform (can be yours or others) where there is an audience and watch your search traffic increase. No backlinks needed!

If you can't create such content, at least be able to spot it and exploit it if you can. Such new query space is also part of the trend keywords research that I mentioned above. If you cannot stimulate new query space with your content, at least learn who to follow those who can. When they come up with a new query space, quickly attack it and make it yours.

I hope this article can convey the message that you can get traffic from Google without focusing just on backlinks. Links are important but they willl never be the MOST important.

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Amazon report #7 Making new niche sites after Penguin

For folks who might have missed my previous post on how to make money after penguin and panda, I have show you that some of my Amazon niche sites are still making money. Below is an updated chart that shows you my earnings.

Click on image to enlarge

First, let me take a moment to explain the chart:

• Niche: Self explanatory
• KW: keyword search volume for the main keyword
• Domain: keyword search volume for the domain keyword. Most of the time, this is the same number as KW but in the event that I couldn't buy a Exact Match Domain, I will get a slightly longer domain that still some keyword volume. For example, if I couldn't buy patiochairs.com, I will try to buy patiochairsforsale.com or buypatiochairs.com
• Price: prices of the products being promoted
• Profit: the difference between the costs and the revenue for this site. Currently, only 4 sites have managed to make profits. I expect this number to be higher as we progress further. 
• Green columns: this represents the monthly revenue for each site
• Red columns: this represents the monthly cost of each site

 Now, let me comment on some interesting observations:

• Low cost of setup: the cost of setting up one Amazon niche site is so low that sometimes, all I need is one sale to make profit. This is what happens for site 8 & 10. They were not making money when all of a sudden, a single sale for both sites means they are in the black. 
• Make money with low traffic: All of my sites have low traffic. We are talking about 1-8 per day and yet collectively, they represent a number that can still be montized.
• Item specific: Whether you make money with Amazon depends a lot on the product you are promoting. Even within the same niche, you might have products that convert well and those that don't. For example, I initially thought all appliance niches can convert well from my earlier experience with one site in this niche. This made me outweigh the niche during my product selection (as you can see from the spreadsheet above). Unfortunately, most of them didn't convert as well as my first site. Lesson learnt!

Why am I restarting the Amazon 50 sites challenge?

After the penguin update, I thought all my Amazon sites were penalised. This turns out to be a false assumption. Some of them lost traffic simply because the fresh content bonus worn off. As the time goes on, some stes started to get long tail traffic. That is how I know they are not dead. They are not getting traffic simply because they are not ranking well. This is why I decided to put more effort into them before the big Christmas season rolls around.

Niche sites that I have built after Penguin

Since July, I have been putting some resources into Site 15 which is a gardening site. You can see this quite clearly in the spreadsheet by looking at where I am spending money on in the red column during July and August. Anyway, here is my plan going forward:

• A mixture of information and review articles: This is to avoid the Panda penalty. I don't want all my articles to contain affiliate links which is what I used to do. 
• Better quality articles: I found a great write at Fiverr who has extensive experiences with the gardening niche so I hired him to put some really useless stuff on the site.
• Less spammy backlinks: I ordered some questionable backlinks from Fiverr when I was building the first batch of Amazon sites. That was a bad mistake as it mght have caused some sites to incur the Penguin Penalty. What I am doing now is to get one solid link from an aged site, either using Fiverr or to do a guest post. The rest of the links will depend on how good my content is. I am seen how somebody use Pinteret to pin some of my articles in my Amazon sites so I know I can get those natural links. 

That is for this update. Lots of keywords research tips coming up in future posts as I started my Amazon engine again. 

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Can you make money with Amazon after Penguin and Panda

Did everybody just gave up on making money online now that Panda and Penguin has arrived? I hope not because things are actual much easier now. With Penguin, it is now quite possible to rank sites without ever requiring a single backlink. Just keep your site to 50% natural articles and 50% keyword focus and you will start to see traffic. Seriously.

Anyway, the point of this post is to show you guys that despite my amazon sites being penalised, I still manage to squeeze out nearly  USD100 on them despite not touching them for several months. This strengthens my belief that the online model still works out and any investment you made is still going to make you money.

Let me share some of my stats with you:

For the Amazon challenge, I invested a total of USD804. Out of that, 50% goes into buying 40 domain names while the rest of the USD400 goes into buying content and backlinks. Currently, I have earned about USD582, leaving me with about USD220 to go before breaking even for my investments. After that, it is all pure profits.

The best thing is that out of the 40 domains I bought, only about 18 have been built, even though all will be paid for within 2-3 months. I have about 22 domains which I have not done any work which means they have not been penalised which means I can still build them out properly in the future. 

So, even though it might not be big money, it still shows that investing in making money online still works, despite all the setbacks.

Below is a screenshot showing my amazon sites.

Click to enlarge

My plan going forward is to purchase another set of domains that relates to the best sellers according to the table above. This time around, how I build these sites will be slightly different:

• Content: Mixed up the content. 70% will be news or list type of content that can potentially be shared while 30% will be product reviews
• Links: No more ordering of fiverr backlink services. Just maybe 2-3 links from my own network of sites. Only 1 will contain anchor text. 

My final advice is this: don't sit around and wait for penguin update to turn around your penalised site. It probably will not happen. Just start a new set of sites and watch out for over optimisation and you will be fine. Hey, if I can make money even with penalised sites, I am sure there is much more opportunity out there. 

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Buy and sell domains to make money

I know people say you can't make money buying and selling domains in 2012 because all the good ones are taken. That is true to some extend as all the single word generics such as candy.com, or chocolate.com is taken. However, you can still make money, just like how people can still make money off properties even though they are so expensive now compared to 20 years ago.

Anyway, I am not an domain buying expert but I want to start building my domain portfolio. Maybe I will lose a lot of money and maybe I wouldn't. It is hard to say as domain selling can be like a lottery game but I believed if I stick to buying good names, sales will eventually happen.

In buying and selling domains, there are 2 models that are happening in the market today:

Quick flips: In general, there are many small business who are willing to pay a few hundred dollars for a good .com that describes their business. Here are a few examples, DallasAcRepair.com, NycLawFirms.com, CleaningExperts.com. What you can do is to buy them for around USD25-100 on godaddy auctions and then try to sell them by emailing companies that are listed on Google for these keywords. It takes a lot of emails to get one sale but it can be done.

Long term investments: Another way is to build up a quality portfolio that big companies or well funded starts might desire. Most of the time, these domains are not exact match keywords. In fact, most bigger companies or well funded startups doesn't want exact match keyword names unless they are single words like Apple.com, Amazon.com, Kayak.com etc

Very seldom, you will hear names such as MobileHealthConsulting.com or SocialNetwork.com. Instead, you will see names such as FastPay.com, HealthTap.com, SkyDrive.com, DropBox.com, VoiceWorks.com. Although the latter may seems random, but the common thing is that:

(i) they are short,
(ii) they are memorable,
(iii) they imply certain things or industries although not explicitly,
(iv) they are easy to spell with no overlapping letters between last letter of the first and the first letter of the second word
(v) you can imagine a business build on top of these names. 

It is hard to sell these names. Most probably, I might need to hold them for a long period of time and wait for the company who wants it to approach me. It is almost like a lottery ticket except that you have some control over the quality.

Given these two approaches, I am more incline to the second investment model. Although long term, I think it will bear bigger fruits. This is based on my belief that over the next 10 years, the meaningful domain names will get lessor but there will be more online businesses coming, not to mention existing businesses who want to upgrade their names by truncating them.

Let's go back to history to see the foundation of my belief.

Back in 2002, it is hard to believe that a name like VoiceWorks will be sold at 45k because there was plenty of single word domain names for that price. In fact, many domain sales were based on how much type in traffic the domains can generate. These traffic metrics become an important part of a domain's value.

In 2012, single word domain prices are at least 6 figuress. I think these high prices plus the fact that there more online business in 2012 explains the shift towards 2-3 word names that is meaninful, has some form of relevancy to their businesses and is more affordable compared to the 6-7 digit single word domains.

An article  from Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures lets me know that I am not insane to hold this belief. In that article, he stated that the budget they recommend for a good domain has increased from 10k to 50k. To see VCs recommending such an increase in domain bying budget within a span of a fe years strengthened my belief that domain names might still be a good investment area.

I believe in 2022, even 2 word brand names will be in short supply which is why I am building them up now while they are still affordable.  If you are interested to follow up my progress, I will be blogging about my domain investment journey from my early retirement blog, rather than here.

I hope to see you guys there.

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Is Jared Cooper from www.designbyhybrid.com a scamer

Ok folks, don't waste your time reading this post. It is meant for me to do some SEO work to some guy who has been very dishonest in his business dealing with me.

Jared copper (email: sales@designbyhybrid.com) of www.designbyhybrid.com first approach me with the desire to buy one of my domain names.

Frankly speaking, I wasn't expecting the sales as I bought the domain for development. However, I decided to sell it as I figured that my busy schedule might not allow me the time to fully develop this site. As a result of this thinking, the sale price was finalised fairly quickly.

I created the invoice and sent it to him June 16 2012. During this time, I also took the trouble to let me know that if he changes his mind about buying the domain, it is fine by me as long as he drops me a note.

After waiting for 7 days, the payment did not arrived and I wrote him an email saying how disappointed I am with his business courtesy. I also told him that I am going to write about this experience here to let people know how he treats his business contacts.

Immediately after this email,  Jared Cooper contacted me. He explains that he has been traveling and reinstated his interest to buy the domain. He even expressed clearly in a follow up email saying that he would pay on the same day. Note that at this point, he can still back out of the deal.

So I gave Jared Copper another chance. I resent my invoice and waited. Guess what, anotehr seven days passed and still no reply or payment. This is when I decided to write this.

What I am going to do is simply to rank for his name Jared Cooper, his email (sales@designbyhybrid.com), his telephone (310.491.6323) and his company's web address (www.designbyhybrid.com). I hope that if other domain investors or companies searcheed for Jared Cooper or any of his related information, they can read this post and see what kind of business courtesy he has.

The issue I have is not the money. It is a small amount (USD300 for the domain) but it is the way Jared Cooper lies to me and failed to meet the promises he made. I want to make sure that whoever deals with him in the future know the kind of person he is. In fact, now that he has aroused my interest, I am going to dig out as much as I can about him. It should be a fun investigation. 

Aaronchua.com has certain authority so let's see if this post is sufficient to rank for Jared Cooper. If not, I will start to add more content about him and to round up some links from my PR4 network. This should be enough.

For those who have read this post, a simple advice: never pissed off a SEO guy, especially one who has competed in some of the most competitive keywords. You never know what will appear in the search engines. 

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