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.

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

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

Yup, that’s me right there on Sebring Raceway back in 2008 during the 12 Hours Of Sebring event. I’m posting this now because I didn’t have a blog I could post this on before, and because I wanted to remember how much fun it was to be there. I regret having to miss the even this year because it’s simply a lot more fun than Hot Import Nights / Days, or any other car show for that matter. If you live in Florida and you enjoy motorsports in any way, you have to attend Sebring at least once in your life.

12 hours of Sebring happens every year during March, usually around spring break, and is the most fun you can have camping on a racetrac for 5 days. Here are the key ingredients for 12 Hours of Sebring:

1. Beer
2. Sunburn
3. Lots of Photos
4. FUN

I remember the first night I got there, I had gotten off of work early and had taken a writeup in advance for having to miss a day I was scheduled for. I pulled in around midnight and could not tell where I was, but was guided to the Mazda Corral section by Chef Chris of StreetUnit. I met up with the SU Crew and was immediately sold a Street Unit Hoodie, haha. It was cold and it came in handy. It’s actually one of the most comfortable hoodies I’ve owned to date. Anyway,  I set up my oversized tent and joined everyone else with a cup of GoldSchlager

I probably didn’t fall asleep until about 2 or 3am that night, which was a challenge because I always have a hard time falling asleep in irregular places. Also, I had never been ”camping” before this point, especially not on a race track.

The next morning… 

Waking up the next morning was both pleasant and annoying. It was pleasant because of the smell of fresh air and the country feel, coupled with being in an unfamiliar place. On the other hand the drone of teams doing practice laps on the track at 6a.m. made for a novel alarm clock with a modest “snooze” interval. It was quite a surprise to wake up this waythough. Once I was up and out of my flimsy residence, I grabbed my camera and started snapping some shots with my camera, which can be seen if you click on the picture above or to the left. I think I had taken around a 1000 pictures by the end of the week and only 200 of them were good enough for viewing.

For breakfast, I had gotten talked into trying a Philly Cheesesteak which I had never had before in my life, and I don’t know why that is. The Philly’s I had at Sebring were probably the greasiest ones I’ll ever have, but they were amazing and I’d go back to Sebring just for a Philly.

Later that night everyone gathered under the giant canopy we had playing Halo, and we set up a table to that I could dominate some beer pong. I never thought I could have so much fun just camping on a racetrack. The next few days were really just rinse and repeat, but not boring in any way, shape, or form.

I have to say that the Mazda Corral was lucky to have toilets available for them with the Corral grounds and right across the street from us as well. Showers were about a quarter mile walk there an back, and were a unique experience all in themselves…

I think the best moment was when the picture of me on track was taken. Every Corral was able to take its members on the track for a lap or two, and maybe an extra one for good behavior. Somehow, the Mazda’s despite having the youngest drivers had the most well behaved drivers on the track and we earned an extra lap on that. Just in case you may be wondering, some of the other Corral’s included Audi, Porsche, and other high end brands. Anyway, being able to finally put my car through some twists and turns felt amazing. I think I tried nailing every turn around 40-50 MPH while compensating for understeer since the ground was wet and my car is FWD to begin with.  I wish I had a video of the track time, I’d watch it daily.

I need to go back to Sebring in 2010, I need some people to commit to it with me.

This was a while ago but it had jogged my memory a bit when I posted the Hot Import Nights picture. This makes me miss Orlando, I had a lot of fun there.

I’m the car that was catching up, in the right lane. Launching the Speed3 is not the easiest of things with so much low end torque.