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My SEO Strategy

Yesterday I let everyone know that I was wearing my SEO hat again, and today I want to follow up on that with some techniques and tools that I’ve been using to gain a really good boost in the SERPS. Although the traffic from SEO is free, the link building campaign may not be. This [...]

He Lives!

Yes, Wizno is still alive and kicking. I’ve neglected my blog for the past 2 months because I’ve been busy with a few projects. I’ve been sinking most of my available time into about 4 different projects, and the other day I just upped that to 5 projects. As you may previously remember, my business [...]

23 Directories To Get Your Link Building To The Next Level

Link building is probably the most frustrating part of any SEO campaign. There are plenty of relevant websites you can place your links on, but finding them is half the battle. Being able to post your link, or get your link posted is the other half. This battle is what keeps me from doing SEO [...]

I Hate SEO (Sometimes)

I haven’t been running any campaigns on facebook for the last week, and won’t be running anything for a another week or two because I’ve exhausted my advertising budget. As a result I’ve had to focus my efforts on my SEO websites. Unfortunately, between August and October I was pumping out 1-2 new websites monetized [...]

My SEO Strategy

by Wizno on May 29, 2010 | No Comments

Yesterday I let everyone know that I was wearing my SEO hat again, and today I want to follow up on that with some techniques and tools that I’ve been using to gain a really good boost in the SERPS. Although the traffic from SEO is free, the link building campaign may not be. This makes it important for you to analyze your niche before outsourcing your link building for you.

Update: Since yesterday’s post, the website mentioned has risen another 7 spots on Google, 8 spots on Yahoo (Putting it on the front page), and 3 spots on Bing.

So what/who have you been using?

My current link building campaign consists of social bookmarking, directory submission, article marketing, and some High PR do-follow blog commenting. I was browsing WickedFire one day and found plenty of great offers for link building. I tested a few of them and have found these to produce the best results:

Article Marketing

Article marketing is probably one of the most popular ways to build links, and it’s very efficient as well. Like SEO, articles have a long lasting effect once written and published, despite the initial pain of writing said article. The key is to learn how to write articles for article marketing, which is incredibly simple and I’ll go over it in a future post.

Unique Article Wizard
UAW has been running for several years and is a very well established article marketing system. It consists of thousands of blogs, directories, and even e-mail subscribers that need relevant content for their websites. This service was recommended to me almost a year ago, and I regret not using it earlier.

After using it for just a couple weeks, I’ve noticed plenty of new back links coming in to my site from other related sites. UAW also provides you with a list of websites that it publishes your article to, making it easy to check out the quality of links that you’re getting. I found out that I was getting links from several PR1, PR2, and PR3 websites. I’m sure that as my articles are being submitted there will be a few higher PR websites that send a link back to me.

SEO Link Vine

The size of the distribution network is probably one of the biggest concerns when someone is looking into an article marketing service. UAW is a well established network and continues to grow because of the results it delivers. How does a new comer like SEO Link Vine compare?

This was a major concern for me as well, which is why I did my research. The first step was to sign up for the free content system. Basically, you sign up with SEO Link Vine for a free account that lets you get free articles on a daily basis.

After doing this I was receiving several articles a day for a few of my websites. I checked out the quality of the articles, and the destination of the links. Everything looked legit. This was right before the article submission service went live to the public, or went live for a second time. I don’t really remember.

The service was started by Brad Callen, who is already a trusted source in SEO so you know that plenty of his customers from previous clients must have signed up to test the service, or paid for it. That right there lets you know that he already started out with a rather large network of blogs to submit your articles to.

The other thing I noticed him do to expand his distribution network was to hold a contest, rewarding the top 10 contributors. For first place he offered a 52” LCD TV, and some other great prizes. More points were awarded for adding High PR blogs.

As of now I’ve submitted 4 articles, and they’ve been published to ~75 blogs, and I’m waiting for about 60 more to be published. It just depends on when the blog owner logs in and approves the articles.

Overall, I’ve been very satisfied with the results of SEO Link Vine. Definitely a great resource for more diversified links.

Outsourcing

The combination of these 3 services really helps to spread a lot of links with a lot of different anchor text. I tend to use my websites title, a variation of the primary keyword, or the URL of the website for these submissions. Many of them come from High PR sources so I like to include the right anchor text for those. I save random anchor text for my article marketing.

I’m sure that at some point someone is going to come along and say that directory submissions are a waste of time, but the results prove otherwise. Additionally, I’ve found several links pointing to the websites of big brand names like Disney, Ritz-Carlton, and even several links pointing to government related websites. If it didn’t help, they wouldn’t use it.

Social bookmarking is a great way to build some quick links and get your site indexed. Sometimes this can even lead to more visitors, and possibly more back links. Once your website is indexed and ranked, you have a much better understanding of how much more link building you’ll have to do.

He Lives!

by Wizno on May 27, 2010 | No Comments

Yes, Wizno is still alive and kicking. I’ve neglected my blog for the past 2 months because I’ve been busy with a few projects. I’ve been sinking most of my available time into about 4 different projects, and the other day I just upped that to 5 projects.

As you may previously remember, my business goals for this year were to rapidly increase my earnings from PPC campaigns. Unfortunately, most of the new campaigns I tested did not have instant success like a couple of the previous ones I ran. They lost me a few hundred dollars, and ate up the budget I had for PPC. If I had more money, I would have tried to optimize them, but it just wasn’t an option.

As a result, I shifted my focus back on SEO towards the end of March. I already had one website ranking 2nd for a moderately searched keyword in a fairly competitive niche, so I decided to put the SEO hat back on. I used some of the money I had left to buy a handful of domains and then did some research to see which one I could get ranked 1st the quickest.

The main keywords I’m targeting for 4 of the 6 domains get between 40,000 and 110,000 searches per month according to Google’s Keyword tool. The other 2 get between 15,000 and 30,000 searches, and I plan on leasing those domains once they achieve the #1 spot. I’m very excited about these projects, and have been seeing some great results within a short amount of time.

My main project right now, which is also the one receiving 110K searches monthly, has been doing VERY well in the rankings. The website was launched roughly a month ago, and has already made 2 conversions that have covered the cost of the domain name and a month of hosting. What’s even more surprising is that the first conversion occurred within the first week of the site being fully complete.

In terms of rankings, the website started out around position 200 on Google for each of the 3 keywords I’m targeting. This was at the beginning of May, as of now it is making significant progress. I can expect it to jump anywhere from 5-10 spots every day. Slowly but surely it is creeping up the SERPS.

See the table below:

Ok, so I started this post at around 10am today but got sidetracked and it is now 11:50pm and I just don’t feel like writing anything else. I’ll have to continue this some other time.

Next, I’ll discuss the techniques I’ve been using to achieve some pretty good rankings with my recent projects.

Dropbox & Mozy: Like insurance for your HD.

by Wizno on March 24, 2010 | No Comments

It’s hard for me to use an external hard drive as a back-up drive. It’s just “misused” real estate to me. I can’t come to terms with giving up over a terabyte of space “just in case”. However, I should have learned my lesson when one of my previous external hard drives crashed a few years ago and I lost all my photos, music, and movies. It really sucked…

I’m running on 4 hard drives right now: 2 internal, 2 external. 500gb main HD, 320gb secondary, 750gb external, and 500gb external. You’d think that with over 2TB of space I could sacrifice some… and you’d be dead wrong in thinking that.

My 750GB external drive has 187GB free, and on there is just music, photos, and movies, and some applications.

My main internal 500GB drive has 241GB free and is used mostly for applications and OS files.

The 320GB internal drive was at one point my old external drive, however, it stopped responding when I connected it via USB so I busted it out of the case and installed it internally. Magically, it works! Until recently it was just sitting inside my PC, now it’s being used for all my marketing related stuff. 20GB of that is being used. And I’ve got it backed up on Mozy, which I just signed up for the other day. At 4.95 a month it’s worth it, knowing that that hard drive already crashed once. I also managed to upload all 20GB of it within 24 hours! (Thanks Comcast! I’m gonna try and hit that 250GB monthly cap!)

Now, my 2nd 500GB external I handed over to my mom because she had a 60gb hd in her laptop and tooo many photos. It may have been a bad idea showing her how to upload photos from her camera. She sits on her laptop and organizes every file and makes CD backups. I got tired of her being in my office so I gave her my external to keep her from bugging me.

I also signed up for DropBox, so that I can access projects that I’m working on whereever I go. The free 2GB of storage is more then enough for rotating projects around. I figured it’s best to safe rather than sorry. It’s been a while since I felt the devastation of a crashed hard drive, but I know it would take too long to recover all the files that would get lost this time.

Get a free account, and we’ll both get an extra 250MB of space!

Get Dropbox

Landing Pages…

by Wizno on February 20, 2010 | 1 Comment

So I got myself signed up on Yahoo with an advertising account. And I’ve also launched my first campaign. Did some direct linking, and then decided that it’d be best to create a landing page to maximize my chances for success. The bad news is that I’m a perfectionist and I keep revising the landing page so my campaign is more or less paused.

Good thing is, I’ve been working hard all day to get it done and I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel. And if I don’t go to sleep soon, I might see the sun rise too…

Ok, it’s not that late, but I’m up later working that I usually am.

Time To Diversify

by Wizno on February 12, 2010 | 2 Comments

So… I’ve received most of my commissions back from the Affiliate Networks I deal with, and that feels good. And because of that I’ve been able to run a few more campaigns on facebook, which felt good at first. But nothing has been converting well enough to make profit, let alone break even. I don’t know if I’m just promoting the wrong offers, or it’s a bad month, or what other 3rd variable is causing ‘failure’ but I’m not enjoying it.

As a result, I’m working on my first landing page so that I can diversify into other traffic sources. I’m going to focus on Yahoo and possibly Google. I’ve had the unfortunate experience of being banned by Google already for trying out a few things, and breaking a rule that I didn’t know was there… despite trying to search for it. Oh well.

Anyway, I’m excited to be moving forward and having better luck with a new traffic source. I’m not completely abandoning facebook, but I am parting with it for an undisclosed amount of time.

23 Directories To Get Your Link Building To The Next Level

by Wizno on January 31, 2010 | 5 Comments

Link building is probably the most frustrating part of any SEO campaign. There are plenty of relevant websites you can place your links on, but finding them is half the battle. Being able to post your link, or get your link posted is the other half.

This battle is what keeps me from doing SEO in the first place, however, I’ve decided to move forward and get a few more websites running. I’ve been successful in ranking a website in the Acne niche 2nd for a primary keyword, and 1st for about 5 other related keywords. It’s because that website is doing well that I am motivated to start up a few more websites with a few affiliate products. There’s a few physical products that I know a lot about and wouldn’t mind making a few review sites for to generate some passive income from. I’ve also found a couple niches, which may turn into gold mines with some hard work. As a result, I need to find all possible places to get back-links from so I can succeed in achieving my goals.

Soooo…. I’ve prepared a list of 23 websites that are either FREE submission directories, or are websites that provide links to more directories and websites that you can drop your link at. I hope they help you out, and if they do… Link back to this page from your blog or Tweet this

Wizno, LLC is here!

by Wizno on January 26, 2010 | No Comments

Two awesome things happened today. #1 I registered Wizno, LLC (Finally). Then I applied for an EIN (Employer Identification Number) so that I could open up a Business Account with Wachovia and keep my business expenses separate from my Personal ones. Managing funds isn’t my strongest suit as it is, and this will help me draw a line between personal and business expenses.

Http://www.Wizno.net is the official homepage for Wizno, LLC.

I Hate SEO (Sometimes)

by Wizno on January 7, 2010 | 3 Comments

I haven’t been running any campaigns on facebook for the last week, and won’t be running anything for a another week or two because I’ve exhausted my advertising budget. As a result I’ve had to focus my efforts on my SEO websites. Unfortunately, between August and October I was pumping out 1-2 new websites monetized with AdSense every week and I’m just sick and tired of the work required to rank a website.

In many ways, I believe SEO to be much more difficult than PPC advertising because of all the various theories out there about what’s the best way to optimize a site. I’ve had a lot of luck getting a couple websites optimized and ranked well, but the process is just so tedious that I want to turn around and walk away every time I think about doing some link building.

The thing that keeps me coming back time and time again is that it is passive income. I have 2 websites that are collectively earning 1$ a day on average. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but if I were to slowly scale that up to 100 websites, I’d have a nice ‘base salary’ from SEO, and my CPA PPC campaigns could count as my ‘commissions’.

It really all comes down to having the patience, and work ethic to write articles and build back-links daily. Writing articles over and over for one website just makes me feel like I’m being redundant in what I’m saying, and I hate keeping track of all the links I post.

Ok, enough complaining. I got that off my chest, and no it’s time to man up!

Action plan:

Make a list of websites I have to write articles for, then do 2-4, 200-300 word articles a day.

Find 5 Do-Follow directories / blogs to post links to.

Watch what happens.

How To Be A Dot Com Mogul

by Wizno on November 8, 2009 | No Comments

Doesn’t that just sound amazing? Dot Com Mogul, those words just flow superfluously. But what are the requirements to officially hold this title?

There are 7 requirements to be considered a Dot Com Mogul.

All of your income comes from the Internet.
You must make at least $10,000 per month from the internet, but it can come from various websites.
You can’t hold a job other than your internet businesses.
You must have your own personal blog with your name as your domain.
Your blog must be active and updated at least once each week.
A search in Google must show you as the #1 search result.
You must be willing to show others how to achieve Dot Com Mogul status.

So far I qualify for 4 of these 7 requirements. If you want to get technical it’s 3 because it would make sense that you must first be a Mogul to teach others how to be one, though I do know enough to help others get started. I suppose it’s the readers choice.

Search for Wizno and I’ll show up first.

I update a couple times a week, and that’s not even that hard to do.

My domain name may not be AndrewWisniowski.com but that’s because my last name is complex, and Wizno is much more fascinating.

I’ll be sure to let everyone know when I officially achieve Dot Com Mogul Status. If you want to join me, I suggest you get started ASAP so I don’t leave you too far behind.

Top Reason Why New Internet Marketers Fail

by Wizno on August 27, 2009 | No Comments

Society has molded us to a lifestyle that is not appropriate for everyone. We’re taught as we’re growing up that it is necessary to go to school when we’re young, get into college when we’re older, and find a great job when we graduate. Unfortunately, there is no flexbility with that script.