James Hume - Entrepreneur Blog

Well after reading tons of information, talking with several different webmasters, and asking a shit load of questions, I’ve decided what direction I want to take my network. I want to shoot for the long term, and that means I need to learn SEO. Here is what I plan on doing with BuyShotGlasses as far as SEO goes. I predict this post to be a long one, so get ready for it.

I was recently on the phone with a friend of mine at Wickedfire, and we were discussing the issues I was having with BuyShotGlasses (lets call it BSG for the remainder of this post). I built a pretty decent site, however I was having problems getting some links for the thing. Building links has always been a weakness for me. But after talking things over with him, and blasting out a few PMs to some other guys, I was on the right track.

I think BSG has the potential to become a $1/day earner, and thats it. $2 per day is really pushing it. Why are the earnings predictions so low? Because of the potential traffic. While I picked a niche that was (should) be easy to rank in, there is a reason why its easy to rank in. There isn’t a lot of search volume for the niche. The collective daily search volume for my 3 main keywords is around 250 searches. 

Depending on how BSG does in the rankings will decide how much of those 250 searchers see my site. Then I have to convert them into customers. Mind you, most of those searches will come off the main keyword ’shot glasses’. So my overall goal with BSG is to get 100 unique visitors per day. If I achieve this, I will be satisfied. After that, I want to optimize the traffic as well as possible using multiple revenue streams: affiliate marketing, eBay partner network (EPN), Adsense (more like Adcents haha), and private ad sales. Those are listed in order of importance, with affiliate marketing and EPN being a toss up for first place. I feel that my site is targeted enough to do well with affiliate marketing.

Now lets talk about SEO. I’ve learned a lot about SEO in the past few weeks. Previously, all I have done to BSG is do your basic on page SEO, and do some social networking submissions to gain backlinks. Where did that get me?

• Top 5 for ‘buy shot glasses’

Great, that list is small. And I ranked for a keyword that doesn’t even bring in traffic. Hell, the only reason I ranked is because of my domain most likely. So what am I doing differently?

• Fresh Content - I built a nice static site, however Google likes new content. I built a blog awhile back and updated it daily for two months. I did nothing in terms of SEO. It was consistently getting 150 uniques per day. So obviously new content allows you to rank for even more keywords. And that means more traffic.
• Sitemap - Oops, forget to build one of these. Since I’ll be adding new content daily, I want Google (Yahoo and MSN as well) to find it.
• Link Injecting - But in a totally non-blackhat way. I’m just posting around on sites that allow me to inject a link to a site. Simple as that.
• Some Blackhat - Okay, I’m going to need a few paragraphs to explain this tactic, lets get rid of these bullets:

I’m talking mild blackhat. I won’t be spamming in order to get thousands of backlinks. What I’m going to do is build a network. I’ll have 3 layers of sites:

• Layer 1: Money Site(s) - In this case, BSG will be the money site. This layer needs to be as white hat as possible. That means 100% unique content, information that needs to be updated daily, and nothing that will risk people thinking its spammy in any shape or form. 
• Layer 2: Link Juice Sites - I’ll be purchasing around 5 domains that are in the same niche as BSG. The content will be ghost written; I don’t want to waste time making it seem professional, and I don’t want it to be flagged as duplicate content either. The ONLY outbound links coming from these sites will be pointing at BSG. And eventually, they will become 301 redirects to BSG passing all of there link juice to it.
• Layer 3: Spam Sites - Its all about numbers here. For the purpose of this small network, I will be creating around 7-10 sites for each link juice site. The spam sites will link to the link juice sites. These sites will have duplicate content, and they will be constructed on other peoples servers: think squidoo lenses, wordpress.com, blogger, etc.

This technique and similar techniques have been discussed numerous amounts of times all over the internet. I’m going to try it with BSG, however I’m going to be watering it down. I want some longevity out of this network, therefore its not going to be 100% spammy. I want all of the sites to be quality, and hopefully boost up BSG’s rankings.

I’m going to start off on layer 2 once I have BSG ready. Its currently getting some directory submissions done. This project has transformed from just another site to an experiment that I’m using to learn about SEO. Sadly, she doesn’t rank anywhere for ’shot glasses’ anymore however I hope to get in the Top 20 when I’m finished with layer 2. When layer 3 comes by and fails to push BSG to the Top 20, I’m going to do some serious evaluations on what went wrong.

Wish me luck, I’ll keep everybody posted on how it goes. Keep in mind that this is just an experiment. And if you like what your reading, I’d appreciate any comments you have.