MasonWorld Late Night Internet Marketing » favicon

Niche Super-Site: Plan for Building Traffic

Mark E. Mason — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 04:52:59 +0000

So much has been going on in the last few weeks. Most obviously, I was able to convince Garry Conn to redesign my blog and create this killer custom theme just form me. Garry is a great guy, and he knows a heck of a lot about niche IM. On top of that, he is pretty handy at php, CSS and graphics. If you need someone you can trust to work on your blog for a fair price, I can honestly recommend him unconditionally. I am still turning some knobs and adjusting some dials (most notably, Aweber), but I could not be happier with the new look (and the amazing service from Garry).

Turning my attention back to Elvis Presley

Now that the new theme is up, I simply cannot believe that my plan to document my creation of a Niche Super-Site started on February 4th. Man, time flies when you are having fun with part-time Internet Marketing. In case you missed the press frenzy in early February (LOL), I am quite literally taking a page out of Caroline Middlebrook's free eBook and documenting my experience of trying to create a niche site. I picked a random topic (Elvis Presley), and so far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

At the end of the long-tail keyword test, we were able to declare victory because I now rank on page one of Google for the killer MMO phrase "Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie.” This shows that on-page SEO works to get listed for a search term. The problem is that where you rank for that term depends on your off-page SEO. For more on this, I recommend the free EasySEO eBook from Josh Spaulding. As I mentioned in my previous post, with “Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie” under our belt, it is now time to attack higher competition phrases -- “elvis presley collectibles" (74 searches per day), the "life of elvis presley" (226 searches per day) and "elvis presley history of" (4383 searches per day).

Simple plan for niche market SEO

Simply put, my strategy is to create a landing page for Elvis Presley collectibles and another for Life of Elvis Presley. I'll write good SEO copy and pay attention to details like making sure the keywords appear in the title tag, headers, beginning of the article, exerpt, etc. Basically, I will simply do all of the things that are documented in the free EasySEO eBook. Once those pages are complete, I plan to use the variation on Bum (article) Marketing taught in Josh's Article Marketing Domination (AMD). If you are not familiar with article marketing, the basic idea is to write articles about your niche containing your keywords. At the end of the article, you include links back to your site for your keywords. You submit the article to article directories. These directories are well indexed, and they allow you people to copy your article, propagating your links. (Note that you do not put these articles on your own site).

In Article Marketing Domination, Josh outlines some key steps for article marketing, including

Creating effective articles
Creating an effective signature block
Submission strategies

So, I plan to put this to the test starting in a few days. The problem is, I need some articles. I am not sure I have lots of Elvis Articles in me (this is why it is useful to choose a niche you really care about).

Buying Articles

Article marketing is the perfect place to use a writer for hire (ghost writer). I was able to hire a lady on ScriptLance to write 20 300 word articles about Elvis for $70 ($3.50 per article). ScriptLance is neat because your job goes out for bids, and you can select from the people that respond. This writer has a BA liberal arts and is US based. The $70 is held in escrow until I am happy. Now, I might not always want to spend $70 on a marketing -- but this is an experiment...

So, we'll see how it goes. The traffic data for HistoryOfElvis.com is contaminated by this case study, so it may be hard to judge. Again, we'll see.

Topics remaining on my list for this niche super-site series include the following:

eZineArticles Content
Write your own content
Set up AA404 plugin
Set up a pseudo-link-directory as pillar content
Remember to back up your data.
Comment Kahuna
Secure WordPress
Other marketing ideas
The 50 site checklist
Others…

Best regards,

Mark

%RELATEDPOSTS%

Niche Super-Site: Using eZineArticles as Content

Mark E. Mason — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:45:17 +0000

I think my eyes are finally returning to normal, so I will be getting back to focusing on the Elvis project after a few days off. Did you miss me? I hope so.

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

You will recall that the purpose of this case study is to get a niche site up and running as quickly as possible in the style recommended by Caroline's eBook and then expand the site into a "Niche Super-Site" by monetizing it with other methods like Adsense search, Amazon, PopShops and phpBay. When you need to get up and running quickly, you need content. The absolute best thing to do is write some compelling original content. Content is king.

Sometimes, you might want to get started by borrowing some content. In this context I really do mean borrow with the permission of the author. I do not mean steal.

One source of content that is "designed to be borrowed" is Ezinearticles.com. EzineArticles.com is a service that tries to match the articles of content authors to the needs of publishers. Article writers can post their articles to be featured on Ezinearticles.com. They have hundreds of thousands of original articles available for use on publisher sites (you are limited to 25 articles per year per site according to their Publisher TOS). Ezinearticles.com has some social-media-like features that allow popular authors (experts) to be featured on the site. The attraction for authors is exposure to "hundreds of thousands or even millions of people" (according to their web site).

So, with the task at hand being bringing up the HistoryofElvis.com website, I searched Ezinearticles.com for "elvis" and amazingly found 921 results. I selected on that I liked based on keywords and posted it on the History of Elvis page on the historyofelvis.com site. Now, organic site traffic gets something like what it expects -- some information on the History of Elvis, and I have started a base for some great original content (to be added later perhaps in the form of blog posts).

Of course, it is well known that use of massively duplicated content is penalized by google. So, you should use this approach at your own risk.

Topics remaining on my list for this niche super-site series include the following:

Traffic strategy
eZineArticles submission
Write your own content
Set up AA404 plugin
Set up a pseudo-link-directory as pillar content
Remember to back up your data.
Comment Kahuna
Secure WordPress
Blog by email
Great podcasts
Running adwords ads
eBooks
Other marketing ideas
The 50 site checklist
Others…

Niche Super-Site: Testing the Long Tail Keyword

Mark E. Mason — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 13:52:28 +0000

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

We really need to start turning our attention to traffic for HistoryofElvis.com, but I wanted to start a small test first. Everybody always talks about long tail keywords, and they can be important for making money in a niche. In fact, Caroline Middlebrook has an excellent article on Long Tail Keyword Research that you should check out.

As a complete aside, saying "Caroline Middlebrook has an excellent article" is completely redundant. Every word on her site is excellent. But, I digress.

Anyway, I thought I would run a test. Let's see if we can rank for a really long tail phrase on HistoryofElvis.com. The phrase I have selected is

"Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie"

Now, those of you on the other side of the pond will notice that I have intentionally selected the Yank spelling of Collectible. According to Wikipedia, although "collectable" is the spelling listed first by the Oxford English Dictionary, and is standard spelling in British English, the dictionary observes that the "-ible" form is also valid, and has come to be common spelling in the United States.

A quick check on google confirms that there are only 200 pages answering to this search, and none of them match very well. Additionally, a look at the Adwords keyword tool confirms that there is no search traffic and that there is no competition for that phrase. So, this should be like shooting ducks in a pond.

So, I have created a page on HistoryOfElvis.com with the following characteristics:

Page title tag is Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie
Page title is Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie
Keyword meta data is set to variations on the target phrase
Description meta tag is set to include the phrase 3 times.
Page slug is elvis-aaron-presley-collectible-necktie
The phrase Elvis Aaron Presley Collectible Necktie appears in the copy many times
The page is linked from the HistoryofElvis.com home page
There is lots of related product copy on the page

Now, to keep from passing page rank from masonworld.com to this page, I am not linking to it from here.

So, I launched the page today. You can find it from the HistoryofElvis.com main page of you are interested. Let me know what you think. I will report back the results in a few days (or you can check google yourself).

Thanks,

Mark

Topics remaining on my list for this niche super-site series include the following:

Traffic strategy
Really long tail keyword test
eZineArticles Content
Write your own content
Set up AA404 plugin
Set up a pseudo-link-directory as pillar content
Remember to back up your data.
Comment Kahuna
Secure WordPress
Blog by email
Great podcasts
Running adwords ads
eBooks
Other marketing ideas
The 50 site checklist
Others…

If you have a topic that you would like to see added to my list, please feel free to leave a comment. Thanks!

%RELATEDPOSTS%

Niche Super-Site: Adding a Favicon

Mark E. Mason — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:46:48 +0000

So far on our journey to build the Niche Super-Site we have discussed:

As I mentioned, I had Lasik (PRK, actually) last week, so I am just getting back to where I can see the computer screen. I am excited about the end result of 20/20 vision promised in 4-6 weeks, but the transition is a challenge for blogging.

Today, we'll talk about adding a favicon to your niche site. That silly icon beside the url at the browser address bar is called a favicon. Why bother? Well, I think that often times in blogging, as in life, it is the small things that matter. Favicons suggest a professionally maintained site, and a favicon can remind people to bookmark your site when they see that quite little icon at the top of their browser. Anything that adds that extra bit of trust that can help us monetize a click should be taken care of. Finally, adding a favicon is EASY, so we should do it for completeness.

Adding a favicon to WordPress is really easy, but it involves editing your theme.

Pick a picture for your favicon. Something simple is most appropriate since the final image is going to be only 16x16 pixels. Not a lot of detail will be possible. Obviously, it needs to be a square image.
There are free tools for drawing your own favicon, but I never use them as I cannot draw (and I have never tried the previously mentioned tool).
There are free favicon libraries too. I never use them either, and I have never tried the previously mentioned site.
There are free tools for reducing a pic you like to 16x16 for use as a favicon. That is what I usually do. For the Elvis site, I have located a jpg of the letter E and used a free site to reduce that to 16x16. That free site results in the creation of a favicon.ico file.
Next, you need to upload the favicon.ico file to your WordPress site. I like to put the icon into ./wp-includes/images/, but you can put it anywhere you like as long as WordPress can find it.
Next, find your theme header file. It should be in ./wp-content/themes/ in a directory named for yout theme (i.e. Prosense or K2, etc.).
I like to take this moment to copy my current header file to a safe location for later retrieval in case disaster strikes.
Using your favorite editor, open up your header.php file and locate the tag.
Add the following code just after the tag but before the tag: ef=”favicon.ico” />

Save the header.php file and reload your home page. You should see your favicon.

If you do not (or if you get an error), check closely the path to the favicon file and the quotation marks above. Some editors will munge the quotation marks during cut and paste operations.

Thanks!

Topics remaining on my list for this niche super-site series include the following:

Traffic strategy

Really long tail keyword test

eZineArticles Content

Write your own content

Set up AA404 plugin

Set up a pseudo-link-directory as pillar content

Remember to back up your data.

Comment Kahuna

Secure WordPress

Blog by email

Great podcasts

Running adwords ads

eBooks

Other marketing ideas

The 50 site checklist

Others…

If you have a topic that you would like to see added to my list, please feel free to leave a comment. Thanks!

%RELATEDPOSTS%