Niche Site Journal Week 5 – Back links and Article Marketing

It has been a rough week trying to figure out the marketing for our niche site.  There is a lot of information and I spent more time watching videos and reading articles then I really should have.  There is a lot of information out there and a lot of people contradicting each other.

I have decided to stick with system Pat Flynn talks about in his www.thebacklinkingstrategythatworks.com article, but with some adjustments.

My back linking strategy is to create original articles; spin those articles; and submit the spin versions to article directors, use some on Web 2.0 properties, and blog sites with all of those articles having links to my niche site.  Then I have to link to these spun articles through article submission software and using social bookmarking.

From Jason and Jeremy’s article on Internet Business Mastery (http://internetbusinessmastery.com/a-quick-start-guide-to-attracting-search-traffic) I tried to diversify the “words” that contain my link to my site.

They suggest:

Week 5 – Back links and Article Marketing

Marketing Niche Sites is hard. There is a never ending amount of information with a lot of contradictory theories and techniques. I ended up spending a crazy amount of time just looking around at what other people thought on the subject.

There is a lot of content out there in a variety of forms. I spent more time watching videos, listening to podcasts and reading articles then I really should have.

My new philosophy is to just pick one person to follow on this and stick with that.

Google’s New Disavow Links Tool

In my MBA E-commerce class tonight we had a very in-depth discussion about the new Google Webmaster Tools called Disavow Links tool. Before getting into the full conversation, a little background is needed.

Background

Recently Google’s “Penguin” update penalized websites for obtaining poor quality links. Web marketers and blog owners had been using tricks like “comment spamming” or mass article submission to boost their numbers and this update was a way for Google to combat this practice.

In my class discussion, it was the popular opinion that “Penguin” was a good thing because it kept search engine ranks fair to people who had the best site but were not using this tactic to gain their position in search engines.

After we all agreed that it was a smart move on Google’s part our professor brought up Google’s newest announcement about the “Disavow Links” option for Google Webmaster Tools.

Disavow Links tool for Google Webmaster Tools

When you log into your Webmaster Tools through Google you may get a scary “unnatural links”

5 Things Keeping You From Having A Successful Blog

I have been struggling with trying to create a Successful Blog for several years now.  I started writing my first blog using “front page” software for my performing website.  I had no idea people were making money online back than without a product for sale or a service they were selling.

Today it is a new world!  Wordpress makes it easy to run a blog, affiliate sales means we don’t have to have a product to make money, and information on SEO is over abundant.  Even with all these new resources it is still not easy to run a successful blog no matter how you define success.

As I am starting to see more views to this blog on a monthly basis, I have been reflecting on what has taken so long for me to find even a small audience.  I have taken those hurdles and broken them down into a list of 5 things keeping me and others from having a successful blog.  Those include:

Week 4 – add plug-ins, add widgets, and adjusting theme

56 hours into the Niche Site Journal and the website is done. It has been a busy 4 weeks with a lot of technical mistakes and learning involved.

This week we found it really hard to work in time to work on the niche site. Leah had her baby shower and had some other baby related things going on, which left me to take up the slack.

Plug-ins

In case you are new to wordpress, “Plugins are tools used to extend the functionality of the WordPress platform. However, they are only applicable to self-hosted blogs and web sites using the WordPress.org software” (from http://en.support.wordpress.com/plugins/).

I am not going to explain how to install since this is not that kind of post. Instead here is a list of the ones I am currently using for my niche site.

Niche Site Journal Week 4 – add plug-ins, add widgets, and adjusting theme

How many hours in now?  That is right, we are 56 hours of work into our niche site and it is “more or less” done.  In week 4 it has been a busy week and we had a hard time finding time to work on the blog.  Leah had her baby shower and had some other baby related things going on, which left me to take up the slack.

Plug-ins

In case you are new to wordpress, “Plugins are tools used to extend the functionality of the WordPress platform. However, they are only applicable to self-hosted blogs and web sites using the WordPress.org software” (from http://en.support.wordpress.com/plugins/).  I am not going to explain how to install since this is not that kind of post.  Instead here is a list of the ones I am currently using for my niche site.

• Contact Form 7:  for my contact page I am using this form so that people can contact me without having to give out my email address.
• Disable Comments:  I didn’t want people to be able to comment on my pages because it isn’t that kind of website.  Also, I get enough spam comments on jasonloveslife.com.  I would hate to have to clean out two sites from comment spam.
• Google Analyticator:  This is how I am connecting the website to my Analytics account for tracking visitors.
• WordPress SEO:  A plug-in that is allowing me to optimize my pages for Search Engines and hopefully getting me ranked higher.

Week #4 Results

Fine Tuning the website

Your First Emails from Kickstarter

I have been getting a lot of questions lately about the process of running a proper Kickstarter campaign.  I realize this is something people are struggling with and interested in finding the best way to get their project crowdfunded.  To best help these individuals, I will be putting together posts that cover the process.  The posts from the last few days cover the emails that are sent from Kickstarter during the process to give you an idea of what to expect.

In this article we take a look at the first 2 emails you will get when putting together your Kickstarter Campaign.

With Kickstarter, they let you work on setting up your project in peace.  They have several articles on how to set-up your campaign they call Kickstarter School.  After you first start your project Kickstarter sends you the first email: