I mentioned I was getting a new design a few days ago, as one of the things I was doing to boost subscriber count… the design is shown below.

What do you guys think?

It’s clean, Web 2.0 ish, was done by a friend. The blank space at the top is room for a mascot – the little guy you see currently is getting redrawn.

More about who did it and the process when it goes live, but would love to hear your opinions.

Some updates…

If you squint (or click through to make the image full size) you’ll notice the topic of the 55+ page free report. I can promise you that it’s insanely high quality and i’ll be adding to it as we go on – hopefully it’ll become the ultimate resource about that topic. A couple people have looked at it / proofread for me and they liked it, but we’ll see what you guys think when it’s out (if you want to help proofread and get an early sneak peek, hit me up on MSN/Skype).

Quality matters less than I think

Although I don’t mind putting out 400 word generic articles on my niche sites to build backlinks, the silly thing I’ve done is that I have a way too high expectation of what quality should be, especially on this blog.

For example, although I think “how to install a wordpress theme” might be useless information for me to put out, a lot of people need to know stuff like that. Or, an article on how to make money writing articles – most of you would think that’s way too basic but there are people out there that would kill for that kind of information.

So I’m going to be putting out a lot more information on here, generic, but helpful stuff. For example stuff like 9 ways for teens to make money, 10 things you should do to get more blog comments etc. Both a mix for SEO and for social traffic from places like Digg, Stumble Upon etc.

The bonus for you guys is that I’ve disabled blog broadcast and will only use it to send out the elite articles, so if you subscribe to the Aweber list you’ll be getting only the top stuff (and some other info that won’t even be displayed on this blog). I’ll be pre launching the free report through Aweber, so if you’re signed up you’ll automatically get it.

Monetization

Unfortunately, I’m a bit of a weak person when it comes to promoting in this niche. I can sell a $10 report like the best of them… however I didn’t do it enough when I previously owned this blog.

My problem is that on this blog I interacted with people, and when I did that they became friends. I find it almost impossible to ’sell’ to friends, even if the information is useful – I’d rather spend an hour helping someone out than telling them to go buy a $47 product.

However, although I still love you guys I’m going to try and get over this irrational fear – I’ll be recommending stuff on here from time to time, although as always I maintain that a) you don’t need anything I recommend b) I won’t promote stuff too often and c) I won’t promote shite products.

This blog has a Marketing Team

As I mentioned, I’m currently in India training my employees – one of their tasks is to promote this blog. I’m teaching them about things like article marketing, blog commenting and forums… now you may notice a couple comments on your own blogs from them.

They’re still getting the hang of everything, including comment etiquette etc – they are real people, they are taught to try and add value, and they are passionate about marketing. So if you notice a comment on your blog that doesn’t sound like me… it’s from one of them and hopefully it’ll add to the discussion on your website.

Make Money Dynamo

A couple people have asked me about MMD – I’ve moved all posts to this site, although I didn’t do 301 redirects or anything too technical, just stuck up a maintenance page with a link to this blog.

MMD still has 200~ subscribers and I’ll be getting my employees to share their experiences on it, what they’re learning in internet marketing and so on in the next week or so. I’ll introduce them on this blog as well – but just wanted to let everyone know what was up.

Of course, they’ll be promoting that, this as well as a few niche websites so that’s quite a bit of work, but I see a lot of potential in all this.

Link Juice And Stuff

Due to the requests of a few spammers (or blogging friends ) I’ve decided to add dofollow and KeywordLuv to this blog (along with the already existing CommentLuv). Now I’ve added another plugin called Lucia’s Linky Love (I think) which makes comments dofollow only after 7 of them – this prevents people coming by, dropping a link and never coming back. CommentLuv is nofollow, your anchor text comment keyword will be dofollow after you’ve made 7 total (it shows your number I think although I’m not sure what it bases it on, either email/name/URL – any one of those I’m guessing ).

That’s it for now. If you’ve got any suggestions (re the theme, the blog itself or anything else), feel free to share em. I’m pretty proud that I managed to keep this post under 1,000 words, although it was a close ish one.

Getting subscribers has long been a problem for people – especially in the internet marketing niche where people are more aware, but also in other niches. I plan to try and take this blog to 10,000 subscribers by January 24th 2011, a promise I made when I joined… I’ll talk about how I plan to do that as well as some tips I’ve used for getting subscribers on other sites.

For a social blog like this one, subscribers are one of the biggest things used to judge whether the blog has value. Unfortunately, you can have a tonne of good content, but subscriber count is one of the biggest things people look at when visiting, and if yours isn’t at least at a reasonable level, most will just pass you by without seeing what you have to offer.

There are quite a few blogs with completely rubbish content… yet they’ve grown because of their subscriber base. On the larger blogs, people think that if XX,XXX people have subscribed, there must be something valuable to offer… so I should do the same.

Although I don’t plan to make a tonne of money with TUK, I do plan to build it up to reasonable levels. Why? Because having a blog in this niche means power in this niche, and thus it’s much easier to build JV connections, launch products, seminars and things like that in the future.

My employees are slowly working on building search engine traffic for this blog, as I’ve never focused on it before… so that should help a bit, anyways here’s how I plan to build this blog to 10,000 subscribers+

New theme. This theme is a bit… boring. I don’t know, I just don’t like it very much. Although I won’t be getting a complicated magazine theme done, I’ve hired a freelancer to create a new theme that has been coming along pretty nicely. I also plan to redo the mascot, and have contacted the guy who did the first one… so when the theme is ready, the guy at the top that you see will have a new look.

If a site looks nice, people are more likely to stick around and thus have a greater chance of of subscribing.

Killer incentive to subscribe. At the moment the incentive for people to subscribe is a free 30~ page report detailing how to make money with WSOs. This is bringing in about 5 new subscribers a day through optins. However, I think the WSO topic is a bit ‘too’ niche… a lot of people don’t know what WSOs are, so ignore it. I’m considering taking all the information that’s been posted on this blog about Adsense and compiling it into a large report to use to build optins – that should have some more interest.

If you can give away something valuable that will pique people’s interest, they’re more likely to subscribe to your blog. If you run a dog training blog, create a short 10 page report about teaching your dog tricks or something related, and as long as it’s well positioned and you’re getting traffic, you’ll get subscribers.

Easy to subscribe. In this niche, everyone know’s that the emails sent out aren’t personally created. So rather than ask for the Name + Email, I’ve only asked for an email address, something I was advised by a partner. This has slightly increased optin amounts. At the moment I’m getting about 3-5 new optins a day through the blog for the free report – which is pretty pathetic (IMO) but I haven’t done too much work on this site yet so that’s better than nothing.

Contests. Contests were one of the things that grew this blog massively when it was just starting out… I plan to hold a few more. Probably just for cash, maybe for a few gadgets.  The good thing about contests is that it’s win / win for all three parties, as long as they don’t happen too often. If prizes are sponsored, advertisers can generally get the same amount of exposure just by sponsoring a prize rather than buying a paid review, maybe even more exposure as with a paid review generally you tend to ignore them unless they’re of extreme interest. For example, at the moment I’m not really promoting paid advertising on this blog, however when I do so a review would cost at least $200 – $300.

Whereas if an advertiser sent me a cool music gadget or something funky to give away in a contest, something that would be worth maybe $100 maximum, this would cost less for them and also get more interest (people would read the post, and maybe even check out their website to find out how / what they could win. For me, I get to expand my reader base by bribing you guys with cool gadgets in the hope you stick around. For you guys, you have the chance to win stuff for doing relatively little work. Win / win / win.

This works for other niches too – for example you could give away one of those weight loss exercise machines (that cost $50-60) on a weight loss blog just for an optin. You’d get people interested in losing weight signing up just for a chance of winning, you might get other weight loss blogs linking to you, you could make it go viral if you require people to tell their friends… you get the idea.

Comments. Although I don’t have the time to leave hundreds of comments on blogs every day, I do have an evil strategy that will allow me to do this without spending too much of my own time (personalized comments, not spammy crap). I’m putting it into testing at the moment, but will update on how it goes. The good thing about comments is that you can get a lot of active visitors on your blog this way – if you comment on A’s blog, there’s a reasonable chance A will comment back if your blog is in the same niche, or that A’s readers will check you out if your comment looks interesting enough.

At the moment I have a list of around 20-30 blogs that I think provide interesting content and although I’ve fallen behind on doing so, I try to comment on them as often as possible when I have something useful to say (which isn’t very often, granted ).

Increase traffic/conversion. This is probably the most important point in this list, which is why I’ve put it last. The problem most people don’t have bigger lists is because they don’t get the traffic. Common sense dictates that either increasing your traffic or conversion rate will mean your list grows.

For example:

100 visitors a day at a 3% conversion = 3 new optins a day.

200 visitors at 3% conversion = 6 new optins a day

100 visitors at 6% conversion = 6 new optins a day.

Either by increasing my traffic or my conversion rate, my list number will shoot up. Some of the above can help me do this  - the theme would probably increase conversion rate, since I plan to have either a popup or a footer ad – it won’t be too annoying though, I promise! and things like contests, comments, SEO etc will increase traffic.

These are just some of the ways I plan to grow this blog. Nothing new really, but hopefully it’ll give you some ideas. Feel free to ask questions or give your own suggestions.

When starting with internet marketing the tendency is look for big, easy money, to go “glamorous” instead of sticking to the basics. With the amount of products coming out in this niche alone each and every day, all of them telling you to go after and all of them promising different things, it can be very confusing for anyone – no matter how experienced – to get started.

Since I rebought this blog I’ve tried to keep the post content solid and put out information about building a long term business, something I didn’t start doing for quite some time because I was always chasing the big thing. The main purpose of my company is to work on and setup more sites for my niche site empire, and although we’ll also be looking at one time income (like site flipping, for example) our primary focus is small money every day that will add up to a lot over time.

The problem with the “boring” way of making money is that people can’t really see the potential, with all the hundreds of other ways claiming to make you $50,000 per month or $20,000 per day. Why purchase an Adsense eBook that (realistically) tells you you have to work 3 months to start earning $1,000 per month when you have Product A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H telling you you could be making $15,000 per week with *insert method here* starting tomorrow?

So today’s post will show you the potential of what can be achieved with long term website development. I’ve done an interview with Trent Brownrigg, someone I’ve known for a year or so online. One of Trent’s primary business models is niche website development, and he also works on site flipping from time to time. Combine the two and you get a website that he sold for $48,000 – not a bad sum of money by any means, and a true example of the potential of starting a long term business.

The interview is shown below.

Hi Trent, thanks for agreeing to the interview. How did you get started in internet marketing?

TB: You are very welcome!

I actually got started with internet marketing sort of as a fluke. I had no idea what it even was and I certainly wasn’t searching for it or anything like that. I had just graduated college back in 2003 and was searching for a job in the major that I studied when I came across a work at home ad that looked interesting. It turned out to be some envelope stuffing scam or something like that so I never did it, but that was the point when I somehow started researching internet marketing and everything started from there.

What are the main ways in which you make money online?

TB: I like to spread out my income streams so I make money several different ways. I earn from affiliate marketing, network marketing, Adsense, selling advertising, site flipping, from my own products that I create, and sometimes from other ways. But it all boils down to SEO really. I say that because almost all the money I make from those various methods is from websites/blogs that I have gotten ranked highly in the search engines.

My basic strategy goes something like this… Find a niche, build a website, write some content, get backlinks, and repeat the process all over again.

You recently sold a niche website for $48,000. Could you walk us through the process, including the time it took setting that website up, your monetization methods and how you got backlinks?

TB: The site was in the work at home niche so it wasn’t really a “niche” website in the traditional sense of the word. It was actually the first real website I ever started. I had a few on free hosts before it that I threw up as a newbie because I didn’t know any better. But this one was the first site I bought a domain for and actually cared about. It started as a very simple one page website with some regular black text on a white background. Over time I added hundreds of pages and made it look a little better, but it was always a very ugly site. I used a WYSIWYG editor to build it and there was nothing fancy about it. Even to this day it’s still really ugly because the new owner hasn’t changed it much.

I was never worried about how it looked. All I cared about was getting it top search engine rankings so I focused on building backlinks. Regular link exchanges still worked really well when I started the site so I did a lot of them at first. Article marketing was also one of the main ways I built links to it. I am a big fan of article marketing because it has always worked for me. But I don’t do it the same way a lot of people do, which is blast out as many low quality articles as possible to a few top directories. Instead, I focus on writing high quality articles then I manually submit them to all the top directories and some average directories as well as submit them to any websites I can find in related niches that accept them. It takes a long time but it works, and I find that I can get a lot better results with far fewer articles that way.

I also did other things to get backlinks such as guest blogging, home page link partnerships, dofollow blog commenting, directory submissions, forum signatures, social sites, and other stuff like that. It also got a lot of natural links from other websites once it started ranking highly. I never purchased links or did any shady stuff that I had to hide. It was all done out in the open and for free. Pretty much the only money I ever spent on that site was for hosting and the yearly domain renewal. That’s how I do it with all my sites.

When I sold the site it ranked highly on Google for almost every major keyword phrase there is related to work at home, home based business, home business, and make money at home. And it still does.

It was monetized with affiliate links, Adsense, and paid advertising for the most part.

Listing it must have been hectic. Did you get a lot of interest, and what did you do to make your listing stand out?

TB: Listing it really wasn’t all that bad. I spent a couple days gathering all the information I would need for the auction, wrote it up, and listed it on Sitepoint (flippa). I didn’t do anything special to make the listing stand out other than write up a long description with all the information I could think of that anyone would want to know about the site.

I don’t really know how much interest it had because it wasn’t listed for long enough to see. It got a Buy It Now bid of $48,000 just two days after the listing went live. I also had a very well known internet marketing guru offer me $60,000 for it the next day but I had already started the transaction with the other buyer and I didn’t think it would be right to back out of the deal with him just because someone else offered me more money.

I was sad to see it go but it was time to move on. There are times when I do regret selling it but then I think about how nice the $48,000 pay day was!

How do you select a niche? It’s one of the hardest things for beginners, not knowing what to create a website about from the hundreds of thousands of niches out there. Could you give us some tips?

TB: There’s no real rhyme or reason to how I select a niche. It’s quite random. I’ll see something around the house or on TV or somewhere online that I think might be good for a niche site, so I write it down to research later.

Here’s a recent example: I used to hate coffee but on vacation a few months ago I started drinking it for whatever reason, and now I drink it every day. It got me thinking about how many people really do drink coffee and other drinks that are coffee based, such as cappuccino’s and other similar drinks. So, I started researching various related niches and came up with a bunch of ideas for websites. It turns out there are a lot of people looking to buy coffee makers, cappuccino machines, and other stuff like that.

I try to find niches where people are looking to buy rather than just looking for free information. Those are the ones that tend to be much more profitable. If it has some competition but not so much that it will be really hard to compete, and has enough of a market to be profitable then I’ll go after it.

Most people build sites in big niches like “Make Money Online” and simply can’t compete so they give up after a while. I have sites in that niche but I also have them in a lot of much smaller and easier niches to compete in. Finding a good niche isn’t very difficult. There are things all around you that could be turned into profitable websites. You just have to be on the lookout for them and do enough research to see if they are worth going after.

What is your opinion on some of the shadier ways of making money online, especially blackhat programs?

TB: I’ve never done them so I don’t really have much of an opinion on them. I guess I would just say to stay away from that stuff. There are plenty of legitimate ways to make money online that are much better in the long run so there’s no reason to go for the quick buck with blackhat methods.

Have you ever considered doing a large product launch in the internet marketing niche?

TB: Yeah, I have considered it in the past but not for a long time. That used to be one of my goals several years ago but now I’ve been an internet marketer long enough to realize it’s not something I want to do. I’ve done a few smaller information products over the years that made me a lot of money but it’s just not my style so I quit doing it. Not saying I will never create a product again because I probably will, but going for a huge product launch of “the next big thing” just doesn’t appeal to me anymore.

Thanks for your time Trent!

You’re welcome! It was my pleasure. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to share a little bit about what I do.

Hope you guys enjoyed the interview!

When I bought this blog from the old owner, interviews were one of the things that were quite popular on here (check out the category Interviews). I want to continue doing them, maybe not as often but I’d like to keep them around. If you like the interviews, do let me know.

And make sure you check out Trent Brownrigg – there’s links to a few of his sites that have solid information that will help you.

Adsense is one of the things that has always intrigued me.

My first earnings in ‘passive income’ was through Adsense – a proxy website in 2007/8 that was making $20.00+ per day without me working on it. I promoted it in the standard way you promoted proxies at the time – social bookmarking swaps (Digg/StumbleUpon) mainly and for some reason it shot up to those levels in less than a week.

I used to get excited logging into my account every day, realizing I’d done jack all work and seeing that twenty dollars. Eventually I moved onto other things after I was scammed out of that site… but I’ll always remember the ease of it.

I’ve recently (as in the last few months) concentrating on focusing on niche website development again, focusing on building basic websites around long tail keywords and using Adsense/affiliate products on them. This was the main reason for starting my company – I want to build up enough passive income so that I can retire I can relax a bit more than I’m currently doing so.

Anyways, I’ve seen a reasonable amount of success with Adsense, but wanted to take it a step further and build it up to higher levels… here’s my strategy, the tools I used and how you can get started.

My Adsense Inspiration

There are two main people that are the reason for this focus:

a) Grizz – I suck up to him all too often on here (when I owned it in the past, at least ) and it’s because he’s awesome. There’s enough free information on his site to get you started – check out How To Make Money For Beginners. Solid info.

b) Xfactor – another Adsense king (to the tune of $300 – $500 a day). Read his Warrior thread for 30+ pages of free information that will help you get started with Adsense.

Now see, the main problem people have is getting traffic. Once you get that targeted traffic, you can pretty much use it for whatever you want – Adsense, affiliates, products, whatever. My primary goal is Adsense and self created products, but what you do is up to you.

What John (Xfactor) recommends is that you go after product keywords, where the searcher is looking to buy something / information about buying something and thus are more likely to click your ads. I’ve followed this for some sites and have found it works pretty well – a CTR of 50% and over at times depending on the template used.

Now of course there are tools that help shorten time with various parts of this however knowing that a lot of people don’t have money to get started I’ll provide both the free way (how I started) and a few tools that I use now.

The Free Way To Making Money With Adsense

Blogger vs Hosted Websites

Although I used to look down on Blogger, despite starting with a blogger blog myself (about football, in case you were wondering), Grizz and a few other sites changed my opinion. See the misinformation I was given after reading various ’social’ blogs was that blogger blogs couldn’t rank, were less powerful than standard sites etc. Through experience (I’ve tried blogger blogs to rank for one day/week “hot trend” keywords that I didnt want to buy and setup a site around) and from looking at Grizz’s blog, which is a Blogger blog and ranked for top keywords, I have to admit that Blogger is just as powerful as Wordpress or HTML sites – it all depends on how you use it.

However, if you’re going after a keyword that has any kind of long term value I always recommend you buy the domain ($9 from Name.com using the coupon code CRUSHIT) and setup a Wordpress site on hosting ($0.01 your first month with Hostgator using the coupon code 404page or jury).

The main reason for this is because I love Wordpress, being a code newb and more importantly this gives you a way out.

See I’ve always been someone that looks at the immediate rather than the long term, which has been stupid in the past (for example I’ve taken an up front $2,000 for a site making $200 passively per month), something I’m going to change however if you have a need you have your way out in the form of selling the site when you own it. Selling a Blogger blog is against TOS whereas you have no problem listing your own site (say you have an emergency and need $$$, or don’t have the time for online stuff anymore, you get the idea).

So get your own domain and hosting.

Okay, now step by step the free way to making money with Adsense.

Finding a keyword – Google Keyword Tool

Google Keyword Tool gives you suggestions for keyword variations (for example, if you type weight loss it’ll give you 50-100 long tails/related keywords).

Type in a keyword of your choice and play around with it. Make sure you change “Match Type” on the drop down box to Exact.

You’ll get dozens of keywords. Look for anything with 2,000 searches per month and up on the Global Monthly Search Volume after sorting it in descending order.

Above is an example search for “table” shown sorted in descending order (taken a long time ago but the tool hasn’t changed since then ).

Your next step is judging the competition for individual keywords.

Read this post on how to analyse your competitors to see whether you could outrank them.

A simple rule – I’ve found that if the exact keyword is available in .COM / .NET / .ORG and there isn’t another site developed with that keyword (for example, if dressingtable.org was available and .COM and .NET weren’t developed sites) the term is easy as hell to rank for.

Domains are powerful – I’ve found simply by setting up a Wordpress blog with plugins and the exact keyword as my domain I’ve ranked top 5-10, sometimes without any backlinks at all.

If there is another site and it’s developed, it means ranking is still possible but you’d be pitting your skills against another internet marketer. Never scared me but if you’re starting out you may not want to do that.

Once you find a keyword, and after checking out your competition you want to see if the domains are available.

A site that helps you check whether the keyword is available as a domain in .COM / .NET / .ORG extension is Instant Domain Search. Simply enter your term and it’ll automatically search for you.

You may want to do this before you analyse your competitors.

Next step – is this keyword going to make me any money?

Two ways to do this.

Easiest way is Spyfu.com – plug in your keyword and see if are ads.

Generally you’d estimate you get around half of the ad cost so look for a minimum ad cost of $0.40 per keyword.

Here it’s just under $0.40, but there are a lot of advertisers – depending on competition strength we’d still probably go for this keyword.

Now we’re still covering the free way to get started – this can take a lot of time but I’ll list it. If you’re going to use Blogger.com, you’d check if your keyword is available as keyword.blogspot.com and setup a site.

I’m going to assume you have enough money for a domain and hosting (under $10 for your first site – if you don’t have that write a couple articles or sell something you own on ebay) so let’s cover Wordpress setup.

With Hostgator your control panel has Fantastico – I’m not going to cover that as that would make this post too long but basically it’s a breeze and takes about 2 minutes to setup.

Once Wordpress is setup, you need a theme:

Best Free Themes for Adsense

There are two I’ve used in the past:

1) Pilkster

2) Bluesense

I’ve found that Pilkster tends to do slightly better CTR wise but Bluesense looks a lot more professional (a lot less like an MFA site )

Plugins for your WP Blog

1) Google XML Sitemaps

2) All in One SEO

The first two are the main ones you need. If you want to save time, though, get:

3) Easy Privacy Policy

4) Ultimate Google Analytics

5) Contact Form 7

The bottom three help track stats, and add a privacy policy / contact form to your site (needed for Adsense sites)

Also get an Akismet API key (if you don’t have one) and activate it to stop most spam.

You’re looking to setup a website with 2-5 articles as pages, targeting your main keyword and any sub keywords you’ve managed to find.

An example niche site that was sold on Flippa recently is Cheap Picture Frames (this site is HTML).

Once that is done your aim is to build backlinks to it. John recommends article marketing, but you can also use forum signatures, blog commenting, social bookmarking, linkwheels… or even hijack existing links.

Sites will bounce around for the first couple weeks so build a few and build backlinks depending on whether they’re ranking (ie if you’re ranking at no5, building a few backlinks may see you rise to no2).

The paid way to make money with Adsense

There are three things I recommend you get that will save you time.

1) Micro Niche Finder (aff link)

Basically does all the steps of the keyword research above in about 3 minutes for all your keywords. I’ve heard Market Samurai is decent too and plan to try it soon, but I’m pretty happy with MNF.

MNF costs $97 and if you have the money get it as it drastically saves time. If you don’t want to spend, that’s fine – you can get it later.

Here’s a couple examples of the results MNF gives you:

Keyword, local / global results, ad cost, strength of competition and domains available (exported into Excel).

Here’s what the actual results from the tool look like. Pretty slick.

So instead of going to Instant domain Search, Spyfu, Google Keyword Tool and Google to check the various results, you have everything displayed for you.

Again, you don’t need it but it’ll save you time. You can get Micro Niche Finder here.

2) Clickbump themes (non aff link)

Another thing that’ll save you time. The Clickbump theme provides you with five variations of a theme made for Adsense / affiliate sites, and have a sweet backend that lets you input your ads, change theme, colour etc easily.

Costs $47. Not needed again (you can go with the free themes) but it gives you some variety if you want that. Check it out at clickbump.com.

3) Xfactor course (non aff link)

Basically all the content of the thread and a little more than that summed up into 90+ pages of Adsense advice. Costs $77. Not needed (spot a trend here…? ) but it’s very detailed and will help you understand Adsense better / save you some time. Check it out at Adsense Masters Course.

Another couple resources:

Forum thread with more Adsense information

Make Money With Adsense Today.com Griz

Unfortunately since I rebought this blog the posts seem to be way too long… but I hope the information above helped. And of course if you have questions/comments etc, the comment section is below.

One of the biggest (and best, in my opinion) ways to make money online is to rank for simple, long tail keywords using basic SEO skills and use that traffic to generate money either through Adsense, product sales or affiliate marketing.

First off, let me state that I’m no SEO legend – unfortunately if you’re looking to rank for terms like “credit cards” or “weight loss” which get millions of search hits per month, I can’t really help you there. However, if you’re looking to rank for longer tail keywords which see anywhere between ten visitors a day to a few thousand visitors a month… this report should help.

The problem with ranking for a term is that there are other people that you have to outrank, either because they’ve specifically decided to rank for that term or have done so without knowing.

Those guys are preventing you from making money, and the nicest thing to do is (politely) annihilate them.

No, you won’t be using blackhat techniques or illegal methods to cause harm to them, just using your own awesomeness and new knowledge to outrank them… and steal their traffic.

This was originally part of a paid product I wrote to build a list with a partner titled Google Hijack… it’s edited slightly and republished here so you guys can take advantage of the information.

This is the exact strategy I use for part of my own niche marketing business, and it works pretty well.

Please note that this is my SEO advice which I have learned from a couple years of trying to develop niche websites (and eventually doing this successfully). You may not agree with parts of it – SEO is not an exact science – although the way I’ve detailed works for me and those that have put this into action. Just a little disclaimer.

Your first step is finding a keyword. I’m assuming you already have one – I’m not going to go into keyword research or anything in this post, although I will do a post about this soon if you guys like this type of content.

You’ll need a couple tools to begin (free)…

1) SEO Quake – http://www.seoquake.com

SEO Quake adds a toolbar to search results when you Google your keyword. Below is a screenshot example:

Here’s what the important terms mean…

PR: the pagerank of the domain. Pagerank in itself is a worthless number, but here it helps because it tells you the authority of the links linking to the website you’re trying to outrank.

L: Number of links to the exact page which has ranked for the term. So Wikipedia has 5,190 links to its Internet Marketing page.

LD: Number of links to the website. In this case, Wikipedia.org has over 104 million links pointed at it

Age: The older the website, the harder it will be to outrank as Google likes age. Luckily for you, most long tail websites will have been created within the last 3 years so they’re easy enough.

Now basically, Google looks at two things:

1) On page SEO (how your website is optimized for the keyword)

If you grab the exact domain keyword for a term (for example, internetmarketing.com (or .ORG or .NET) you have a much better chance of ranking for it than someone without.

If you install basic Wordpress on the keyword domain, with the All in One SEO Pack plugin (and input your keywords) and the Google XML Sitemap plugin, you will outrank 95% (and sometimes 100%) of your competitors just doing this, depending on their strength.

2) Off page SEO (in bound links and their quality)

Google rates links to your website by three things:

Number of links x quality of links x anchor text

So for example, ten backlinks with the anchor text “internet marketing” from Wikipedia, InternetMarketing.com etc would be a lot more valuable than 1,000 backlinks with no anchor text from unrelated websites.

Your basic hijack strategy is to look at the pages competing for a search term, better their on page SEO and better their off page SEO. It sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Your second tool you’ll need for the hijack strategy…

2) BacklinkWatch.com – http://www.backlinkwatch.com

This tool tells you the anchor text used in the backlinks for the domain.

You could replicate exactly the backlinks already pointed to a competitors website, add a couple of your own and bam, you’re outranking him/her easily once those backlinks kick in.

Now here’s what you do to outrank someone for a long tail keyword:

1) Buy a domain with the exact keyword in it. If they aren’t available in .COM / .NET or .ORG, grab keywordx.tld.

So for example, weddingcakesx.com

Or you could add shop / details / info… you get the idea. But you want your main keyword to start the domain and your terms to be all together.

2) Setup Wordpress and get the following plugins:

- All in One SEO Pack
- Google XML Sitemaps

3) Change your permalinks to /%postname%/

4) Add content to your website.

I’d like to add a special note about content.

You want to have your keyword mentioned around 3-5 times per 400 word article. No more, no less.

You want your content to be boring if you’re using it for Adsense websites (of course, grammar, spelling etc should be alright but don’t engage your visitors as they’re one time and all you want them to do is click your ads) and interesting if you’re using it for affiliate websites (so that they believe your content has value and will click through to the product you’re offering, or sign up to your list)

That’s it!

Some rules…

If the competitors for your keyword have less than 50-100 links pointing at the page and less than 300 links pointing at the main site, they’re insanely easy to outrank. (They’d be PR2-PR3 or less, anything more than that is still possible but will be a bit harder as generally that means quality of links is higher)

If your competitors are less than 2 years old, they’re easy enough to outrank. If they’re greater than 2 years old, they can still be outranked depending on the number links to the page.

If your competitors don’t have the exact keyword listed at least in the title and in the meta description (the text below a link for a Google search result) they’re easy enough to out rank unless they have thousands of links.

Now of course there are some exceptions…

If your competitor has a high PR, but is not optimizing for the term, they may rank simply because the authority of their website is strong. They’re easy to outrank if you optimize yours better than theirs.

If the competitor has very few links, but a high PR this may mean that they cannot be outranked (look at other examples on the page to see what the general strength of those ranking on the first page is).

Why? Because as mentioned above, 10 links from Wikipedia.org with the proper anchor text (you can use BacklinkWatch to check where links are from and their anchor text) is more powerful than 1,000 links with rubbish anchor text. And if a competitor has a high PR, it generally means links are from authority websites.

Your first step after this is to go look at different keywords and get a feel of the domains ranking for this. Once you examine competition for a bit, and try ranking yourself, you’ll get a better idea of exactly what it takes and whether or not you can outrank a term.

Now one of the ways I love to get websites that I can outrank is by surveying Flippa.com or DigitalPoint.com websites for sale section and looking for websites already on sale and making money.

Generally they want 7-10x revenue (so for example, a website making $10 a month the seller would want $100).

I can take 25-50% of what they want, invest it in a website and have it outranking theirs pretty soon.

That way I save 50% of the asking price, build my websites from the ground up and set up easy income streams that last ages if not forever. I can then sell these for 100% (or even more, if I optimize it and rank for other terms or increase it’s ranking to the top three so it makes more money).

Your goal is to build more backlinks than they do, either on the same pages or on pages that are ’stronger’ than theirs. So if they have 15 backlinks of which 10 have the anchor text required, you build 20 with 15 having anchor text.

It’s as simple as that.

Building 20 backlinks (which would take a day or less than $10 if outsourced) will take  you above the website you’re targeting. And you could keep building more with that anchor text – having 50 backlinks with the anchor text would see you outrank some of the results above it and increase your ranking.

Find a keyword, optimize your website for it and destroy your competition. Sounds easy, right? You’ll find out how easy it is when you do it! There’s no point in having the information if you don’t use it.

The “hijack strategy” works for pretty much any non-authority website (it will work for an authority one too, but will take more time obviously as they have age on their side).

The basic concept (in case you skimmed the above post) is you find a website that looks hijack worthy, optimize your page to match it and then build more/stronger backlinks than it currently has. Once your website is making money, you either keep building backlinks until you rank #1 (or focus on other keywords as well) or create a new website. Rinse, repeat, etc.

Feel free to ask questions, otherwise good luck!