On April 19th Google released another Panda update (3.5).

On April 24th Google rolled out a new update to their algorithm, now known as the Penguin update.

If your site’s traffic dropped on one of these days, then now you know why.

Quick Panda Recap

If you are new to all this, the Panda update is all about on-site issues like duplicate content within your site, ad placement, poor content, thin affiliate sites, high bounce rate, etc.  For example, one of the Panda updates penalized sites that had too many Adsense ads “above the fold”.

One of my sites was hit because I had a squeeze page as a homepage, and it was seen as a “doorway page”.  Obviously a squeeze page as a home page is not meant for providing a good user experience.  It’s meant to gather leads, so it got penalized.

To avoid the Panda updates your site should be all about increasing the “user experience”.  You want well-written content that is properly categorized within your site.  You want to have videos to increase visitor time-on-site.  You want to have good inter-linking between posts and pages, and you want to link out to related sites and authority sites.  The days of 1-5 page affiliate sites that easily rank are over.  Sure, you still see some out there.  But they are few and far between.

And Panda’s evil buddy the Penguin

And onto Penguin.  While Google has stated that only about 3% of searches were affected by this update, it does seem to be quite a bit more.  I have spent the past week reading horror stories of people with sites they have put 10 years of work into, creating valuable content for their visitors and never having built a link themselves, lose all of their traffic in an instant.  They had seemingly done it “the right way” according to Google.  But they still got hit.

I tried to not take in too much of the “panic” to heart as I read the various marketing and SEO forums over the past week.  You read lots of stories like “my site did this and got hit, my site did that and didn’t get hit,  but this site did this and got hit” etc, etc.  But these are just stories for the most part.  It’s hard to take anything concrete away from them.

The fact of the matter is that there are so many variables to the Google algorithm, we’re all just taking guesses at what works.  We don’t work for Google, and we don’t know their algorithm.  SEO is mainly about doing something and following best practices, and seeing if it works, and then trying to repeat that.  Problem is when people discuss their sites, you never really know the whole story.  You only know your own story and your own site.

Most of the discussions I have had with my SEO friends as well as the threads at the various forums seem to have revolved around 2 main ways Penguin hit sites.

Anchor Text

1 - Sites that have too many links built to their site with exact match anchor text to keywords their websites are optimized for.  For example, let’s say you have a site in which you want to sell green light bulbs.  Your homepage has the keyword “green light bulbs” throughout the content, in the title, in the H1 and H2 tags, etc.  The page is totally optimized for that keyword.

And then to rank for it, you have been building a majority of your links with the keyword “green light bulbs” as your anchor.

These are the sites that have seems to have taken a big hit.  I have one site like this that lost about 70% of my traffic with this update.  And this is what I expect is the problem.

There is also some fantastic data analysis that was done by the folks over at Microsite Masters that supports this.  These are the guys I use for tracking my SERP positions.

Webspam

2 - The next big plausible reason seems to be sites that created links that are surrounded by content that is totally unrelated.  Here is an example:

The two studies, published in the May 3 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine, compared low- and high-dose radioactive iodine in a total of more than 1,000 patients payday loans. The participants, from Britain and France, also received either Thyrogen or thyroid hormone withdrawal as part of the therapy.

In this example, assume payday loans is linked to some site.  This site is trying to rank for payday loans and just spams totally unrelated content on the web with their link in there.  Again, this seems to be another culprit.

Don’t let this confuse you with “spun content”.  I personally believe that this update only targeted sites with links on totally unrelated content whether it was spun or not.

If you have links on content that was spun and still mostly a copy from other content somewhere on the web, as long as it is related to your anchor text linking to you site, then it’s fine.  Again, this is just my opinion based on observations and conversations over the past week.  For example:

Payday loans are specifically designed to be based on the amount of money a person earns at a job. The lender uses the borrower’s pay packet to determine how much can be lent. Because the amount being lent is dependent on the borrower’s actual income, borrowers can avoid getting into more debt that they can handle.

Let’s assume this is spun or copied content from the web (which it is ha).   Here we have the same anchor, “payday loans”, linking out to a site.

So if you were hit by Penguin, can it be fixed?

Well, I’m not sure.  Google has said that this is a algorithm update, and not a “manual” penalty, so in theory it can be fixed if you correct the problem.  For example, if your problem was too much targeted anchor text, you can start building links with generic anchors like “click here” or “see more here” and also more URL anchors like “mysite.com” and “www.mysite.com”.

If these bad links were just devalued, then you can come out of it.  If however your site is now somehow “filtered” or “penalized” then it might not be easy to come out of it.  I, and alot of others, are assuming these links are just simply devalued.  If they are not devalued, and sites are actually now being “filtered” or “penalized” then that opens up even more opportunity for negative SEO.  This would be very, very bad.

More information on this will be coming out in the next few weeks.

How to build links going forward?

I think all of the ways we have been building links will continue to be effective.  We just need to be smarter about it.  Don’t go crazy with the spam, and keep the content surrounding your anchor text related to it.

It seems fairly clear that you need to diversify your anchor text as well, to give the appearance of a natural link profile.  Think about the sites out there that don’t actively build links and just get them from other sites.  They probably have thousands of unique anchors, with a small percentage of anchors with keywords (like “green light bulbs” or “these are the best green light bulbs”) and another percentage of anchors with their URL as the anchor (like “lightbulbshq.com” or “www.lightbulbshq.com”).

If you are going to use blog networks, stay away from the very public ones or the ones that everyone seems to be using.

Build your own network of private sites for linking purposes, or better yet…build a network of related microsites that actually look and feel like a real site.  Yes, this is expensive and time consuming and all that.  But it works.

Guest posting still works too.  Contact webmasters in your niche and ask them if you can contribute high-quality content in exchange for a link.  Some will also take payment for the content as well.

And never forget: if you depend on Google for all your traffic, that you are just one algorithm shift away from losing everything.

So wherever you can, look into other traffic sources.  Social networking, paid traffic, etc.  Where it’s possible, get them into the game as well.  This way if you lose your Google traffic, you don’t lose ALL your traffic.

If you have any questions or want to share your experience with the latest updates, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Recently Market Samurai made big changes to their software’s ability to check rankings in the SERPs, so I no longer use them for checking my rankings.  I do still use them quite often to check competition for keywords and also for keyword research.

For checking my keyword rankings in the SERPs I just purchased a subscription to Microsite Masters and so far it’s awesome.  Here is a look at the rank updates of the 3 main keywords:

Click To Enlarge

Keyword 1

Click To Enlarge

Keyword 2

Click To Enlarge

Keyword 3

Here are some updates for the month of February:

1) February Earnings

Earnings for the month almost eclipsed the $100 mark.  If the rankings didn’t take a bit of a hit recently, we would definitely have gone over the $100 mark.  We did almost double the earnings from January, which is great.

Click To Enlarge

2) Customer Reviews Strategy

I don’t want any content from Amazon on my site, like the customer reviews for example.  I have seen some sites copy and paste customer reviews directly, but I don’t want to do this.  Call me paranoid, but I don’t think da GOOG would like that.  So what I did was take screen shots of the reviews with Jing, which is free and awesome, and then included them in my product reviews.

But when you paste those images on your article, you can’t read them very well because you have to shrink the image to make it fit the page.  So I found a great image zoom plugin simply called Image Zoom and used it for my images so visitors can click the review image to enlarge it and read it (I also use it for this blog as I’m sure you can tell).  So the customer reviews end up looking look like this:

When you click on that image there is a little icon to enlarge it.  Works pretty well.

Also, if you want to highlight a quote from the review to put under the image, what I did was type it out underneath the image.  Then I previewed the page and took a screen shot of the quote and made that an image too.  It looks like this:

So then together, they look like this:

For some reason this theme we’re using here for IMW puts borders around .png images.  But in the niche site there are no borders so it does look much better.  In either case I think it looks pretty good, allows the visitor to get a taste of customer reviews, and also solves the problem of copying any content from Amazon.

3) Design Improvement

I ordered a header from Crazy Headers.  They are only 11 bucks!  I had heard about them and wanted to try them out.  Must say I was pretty impressed by the quality of what I got for the price.  They take as many revisions as you want too.  Pretty nice setup.

4) Personal Touch

I added the About Me Widget plugin so I can put in an image and “About Me” section in the sidebar.  It makes it more personal, and there is nothing wrong with setting up a ghost writer like this.

5) Get Rid Of The Spam!

I installed the Growmap Anti Spambot Plugin to help with the spam.  It works great!

6) Affiliate Link 307 Redirects

I’m not sure why I didn’t mention this my earlier post when I first told you about the plugins I used.  But I used Pretty Link Lite to redirect to my Amazon affiliate links.

7) Get The Social Stuff In There

I added this Facebook plugin that I have found to work quite well.  I include the LIKE and SEND buttons on all posts and pages.

So these are the updates for February.  If anything big happens during the month of March I will throw up a post, otherwise I will update again at the end of March.  Hopefully we’ll double our sales again and get over $200 for the month.  That’s the goal.

If you have any questions or comments I’d love to hear from you!

]]> http://www.internetmarketingwizard.com/amazon-niche-site-part-six-february-earnings-and-updates/feed 4 http://www.internetmarketingwizard.com/how-to-create-a-wordpress-plugin-from-scratch http://www.internetmarketingwizard.com/how-to-create-a-wordpress-plugin-from-scratch#comments Wed, 22 Feb 2012 17:25:50 +0000 Bill Zimmerman http://www.internetmarketingwizard.com/?p=902

Creating products is a great way to increase your streams of income.  There are so many different kinds of products you can create in the world of Internet Marketing, and that is what makes this business so exciting.  There are thousands of ways to make money and endless possibilities.  As I type this right now, people are coming up with new ways to make money and new ways to market products online.

Since WordPress is so huge and so popular, creating and marketing plugins is a great way to not only make money but to also get some exposure to your brand.  And if you are a WordPress user, you have likely at one point or another had this thought:

“I wish there was a plugin that does THIS”

OR

“I like this plugin, but I wish it did THAT too.”

OR

“I like this plugin, but it’s just too buggy and not very easy to use”

These are the thoughts that lead to a new product and a new way to make money online.

So in this post I’m going to go over some steps to take when creating your own WordPress plugin, and also some things to keep in mind.

Find One Problem

So you work with WordPress alot right?  I’m sure you do.  Everyone loves WordPress, and I’m not an exception.  Most of our sites are on WordPress.  It’s easy to use, easy to customize, and looks great.  And let’s not forget about the plugins available.

There are thousands of plugins out there that do all sorts of stuff.  Believe it or not, plugins are still coming out every single day because there are just so many different types of blogs, webmasters, and markets out there that there is ALWAYS some plugin that can be developed that will make a task easier, make a site look better, make conversions a little better, or make some technical task easier to do.  The list goes on and on…

Not to mention, there are always plugins coming out that IMPROVE upon a plugin that already exists or just does something a little different. 

Just look at all of the plugins out there for backing up your blog or for your on-page SEO.  Most of them generally do the same thing, but some have more features and some have less.  Some are free with little support, and some are paid with full support.  Some do just one thing very well, and some do a lot of things pretty well.  I think you get the picture.

That brings me really what encompasses what you need to do to create a WP plugin:  Find a problem and solve it.

Perhaps there isn’t a plugin available at all for what you want to do.  In this case, you will come up with a brand new concept and be the first to come out with anything like it. 

Coming up with a brand new idea is the first way you can create a plugin.

Or perhaps you are working with a plugin, one is popular for a particular task, but it just doesn’t do a few things you want.  Or it’s difficult to work with.  Or it’s not supported.  Or it’s buggy.  You can completely redesign the plugin to do what you want and how you want it, and improve upon the shortcomings of the plugin.

For example, let’s say you are working with a plugin that make it easier inserts tables into your blog.  It works, but not very well.  It’s clumsy and buggy and the task still takes longer than it should to do. 

Take that same concept, which is adding tables into a blog, and design a new plugin that does it better.  Make it easier to work with and less buggy.  Give better support.  If you do this, people will use it.

So taking an existing plugin, and making it better is the second way you can create a plugin.

Find The Solution

I already got into this a bit, but this part is pretty self-explanatory.  If you are developing a concept that hasn’t been done before, then this part will be more tricky because you don’t have a plugin to look at that already does the task so you can use it as an example.

So if it’s a brand new idea, just use your experience with plugins to imagine how it will work.  What exactly will it do?  How will it make the webmaster’s life easier?  How will it make the site look better?

If you are taking an existing concept, and just making a better plugin, what will be better?  Will it be usability?  Functionality?  Features?  Support?  Make sure you plugin stands out completely from the plugin that already exists for that task.  There is no sense in creating a plugin that does something another plugin already does, unless you are sure you are making it MUCH better.

Design It

This part will take some time, and will certainly take a little while if you are new to it.  You can use wire frame software to design the plugin.

Here are two pieces of software we use.  They are both good and both have free trials.

http://www.carettasoftware.com/guidesignstudio/

http://www.smartdraw.com/

Before you use design it with the software, you might want to take a large white board if you have one and start brainstorming some designs.  If you don’t have a whiteboard, just use some paper.  Yes, even in this age of technology Internet Marketers STILL use paper believe it or not.

Find A Programmer

This is probably the hardest part.  Scratch that.  This is definitely the hardest part.

If you have never tried to hire a programmer before, then maybe this is a surprise.

If you have tried to hire one, then I KNOW that this is NOT a surprise.

Sites you can use to find a programmer:

Odesk
Elance
Rent A Coder

Do’s and Don’ts of Hiring a Programmer:

Do’s:

Make sure you are absolutely sure on what you want before you start to look for a programmer.  You don’t want to be half-way through the project or near the end only to realize you forgot something.

Make sure your wire frame is easy to understand and has plenty of explanations.

Your features have to be explicit.  Don’t assume that the programmers will ASSUME what you want.  Be SPECIFIC about EVERYTHING.

The programmer should have experience in WordPress plugins

Read through their feedback on Odesk or Elance or whatever you are using from previous people that hired them.

Interview them on Skype and if possible over the phone as well.

Make sure you tell them upfront if you expect support after the plugin is complete.  Once it’s done and you’ve found all the bugs possible, you will want to release it to the public.  And chances are that they will find bugs too.  Tell the programmer if you want the price to include, for example, 30 days of support for more bugs after you release to the public.

Pay them in milestones.  I would recommend at least 4 milestones.  For example:

• First payment a deposit
• Second payment after design is complete
• Third payment after coding is complete
• Fourth payment after testing and bugs are complete.
• Fifth payment after 30 days of support after you launch it.

Also something else to keep in mind about programmers:  MANY will give you a low offer when first working with you.  And then when you want to update your software or change something, they really increase their price.  They do this because they know it’s easier to work with them and you would rather not have to look for a new one.  Be sure to hold your ground and get a fair price for your new versions and updates.  Make sure they know you have no problem going elsewhere to find another coder.

Don’ts

Don’t pay full price upfront.  Don’t even pay half upfront.  If you are working with them for the first time, I wouldn’t recommend you pay more than 15% up front.  Even though you are protected by Odesk and Elance if they don’t complete their work, there is nothing worse than the hassle of chasing down programmers who disappear.  Don’t tie too much money into that hassle.

Don’t hire someone without any feedback, even if they are very inexpensive.  You don’t want to waste your time and money being the one to experiment with a new programmer.  If you are experienced with outsourcing already and this is not your first project and is a fairly easy job, then maybe you can risk a new coder without feedback just to save a few bucks.  Otherwise, stick to the coders that have feedback.

Never allow too much time to go by without updates.  You should be upfront and clear when you hire the programmer about how often you expect to be updated.

Paid or Free?

Well, this one is tough.  In my opinion, it’s best to have both a free and paid version.  Have a free version with valuable features, and then a paid version with even more features or enhanced features.  There are many ways you can play around with this.

Or you could simply create a free version and use it as a lead-magnet.  People love plugins, so having a free one that is desirable is a great way to build your list.

Other Things To Think About

You will need an ecover created.  You can find various ecover designers on Odesk or Elance, or you can use Fiverr as well.

Also, make sure you think of a good name.  Just go over to the Warrior Forum Special Offers if you want to look at some names to get your creative juices flowing.

Here’s How We Did It

When we created Page Expiration Robot, it was out of need.  We wanted a plugin that allowed for pages to expire on a visitor-by-visitor basis because we knew they would be more effective that way.  So when we present a one-time offer to a customer, we tell them they have 30 mins to purchase.  If they come back after 30 mins, the offer will be expired or different.  And sure enough, if they wait and come back they will see a different offer or see that it expired.

Now we put a great deal of time and money into the plugin, but we still wanted to be able to offer a free version so we could include it in the WordPress directory and also so we could offer it for free to generate a list.

So we came up with a good solution…The free version would allow the functionality of the plugin, but the paid version would make it much more effective.  Basically the free version was good and valuable, but the paid version was definitely better.  It’s a win-win-win-win

So if and when you decide to delve into the world of WordPress plugins, I hope this stuff will get your gears grinding and provide some insight so you don’t make the same mistakes that John and I made.  And we made alot!

This is part five of a series of posts in which I am building an Amazon niche site from the ground up.  Here is a summary of those past posts:

1. I found a product to promote on Amazon and checked the keywords for it

2. The main keyword for the product has alot of searches

3.  I checked competition for this keyword, and I think I can rank it top 3 of da GOOOOOG

4.  I found a suitable domain and bought it

5.  I ordered the first article on for the first product review

6.  I installed my WordPress theme and plugins

7.  I uploaded the first article I ordered

8.  I found 6 more products and related keywords, and ordered content.  I now have a total of 7 product review articles, with one or more keywords targeting each page.

9.  Content ordered, delivered, and added to site.  One article was added every 2-3 days.

10.  After I added all of the content, I went ahead and added to it.  I added more details, better information, some product comparisons, and anything else I thought the writer missed.  I also did the formatting and added images.

11.  I made sure all on the on-page SEO was correct.

You can get to all those posts here on my author page:  http://www.internetmarketingwizard.com/author/willzimm

So, here we are.  I have a site.  I have the content.  I have the nice design, and the images, and everything.  Now I guess some visitors would be good right?  So onto off-page SEO we go.

Step One:  I got some web 2.0′s built

Now this step can be done for free, and you can do it yourself if you want.  I paid to have this done, but as I outlined here you can actually do this yourself.  Here are the steps I personally took to get this done…

First I ordered content for this.  Now, this content does not have to be good AT ALL.  It just has to be original.  I paid about $10 for the original article and then to have that article spun into 20 more versions.  Each one ended up at least 70% unique, with most of them over 80% unique.  I got 3 orders of these, one for each of the 3 main keywords I was targeting.

Once I got the content, I got the web 2.0′s created with the content.  I used a service provider from Blackhatworld to get this done.  I’ve also used service providers at Wickedfire, and I’ve used Fiverr as well.

OK so now that I have all of them created, I let them age a bit.  I waited at least a month before doing anything with them because some of them will get deleted by the site admins.

Step Two:  Scrapebox blasts to web 2.0′s

Once a month went by, I began blasting those web 2.0 links with blog comments.  I did this myself using Scrapebox, and I ordered blasts from both Fiverr and BHW as well.  I explained some of this in my SEO for beginner’s post as well.  I didn’t point any of these links to my niche site, only to the web 2.0′s.

Step Three:  Social Bookmarks

Next step was to order some social bookmarking services from Wickedfire.  This step you really can’t do yourself unless you have software like Sick Submitter or Bookmarking Demon.  Some of those guys I buy bookmarking services from also use custom made software as well.  At this point I don’t have time to learn software myself, which is why I outsource so much of my SEO work now.

But if you want to do it yourself and save some money you certainly can.  What I am ordering is anywhere from 1000 to 3000 social bookmarks to my site for each targeted keyword.  I usually use around 5-15 different keyword variations from the main target keyword.  These links all point straight to my niche site homepage

Step Four:  Build My Rank

Build My Rank is a private blog network that publishes content onto their sites with your links in the content.  Basically you sign up for their service, and use their web-based system to submit articles with links in them.  The articles must be at least 150 words to have one link in them.

The one big thing about BMR that people don’t like is that your content has to be 100% original and have no spelling or grammatical errors.  They do this for one reason:  to protect their network.  Lots of networks like theirs have been de-indexed by Google over the past 6 months or so, so BMR is very careful about the content that goes on their sites.

And it’s also a monthly fee.  But here’s the thing:  BMR works.  Yes it can be pricey and time consuming, but it works and it works well.  Highly recommend using BMR.

Step Five:  Authority Link Network

Authority Link Network is another blog network, but it’s a little different.  This one is a little more advanced, and I would not recommend using if you are totally new to SEO.  The idea behind ALN is that you pay a small monthly fee and add your own domains to the ALN network.  You still own the domains, but you add it to their network of sites.

The whole network is completely contributed by the users of the network.  Depending on the PR of your sites, you get a number of submissions per day.  For example, if you have 10 PR3 domains on the network you can submit a certain amount of articles per day to the network.  And if you have 10 PR4, you get more submissions.  So the more PR you add to the network, the more articles you can submit to the network.

I actually outsource this out, but lots of my friends do this manually themselves.  It’s a little time consuming, but it works.  And it works very, very well.  You just have to get content for it, and buy domains for it.  You can even buy just PR2 and PR3 domains so you don’t spend alot of money, since PR4′s and up start to get expensive.  If you have any questions about this, just ask below in the comments section and I will help you out.

About the content needed for ALN…you do NOT need original content for it like you do for BMR.  HOWEVER, you need to make sure that the content is spun very well, or it will not get indexed by Google.  And more and more SEO’s are beginning to believe that links on original content count more as well.  This of course is conjecture for the most part, but it does make sense.

Step Six:  Unique Article Wizard

Unique Article Wizard is yet another blog network with article directories mixed in as well.  You submit articles in the web-based user interface and the articles are distributed at the rate you specify.  You can submit up to 20 per day.  For UAW you do not need original content like you do for BMR, so many people do prefer using UAW because of this.  You can use PLR content or spun content.  But again, the better it’s spun and more original it is, the better.

Now if you are just starting, and can’t afford alot to spend on linkbuilding I would recommend you start with BMR and ALN.  With BMR you can write your own content and submit the links.  But if you do it consistently you will see results.  For ALN you can simply buy some cheap PR2 domains to add to the network and get yourself started.  Write some content and spin it very well with something like the The Best Spinner and submit to the network.  If you really need to spend as little money as possible, then use ALN.  It just freakin’ works, plain and simple.

So, how has this link building been working out so far?

Here are the screenshots from Market Samurai:

Keyword 1

Keyword 2

Keyword 3

I am also ranking top 20 for a variety of other long tails as well.  Currently I am getting around 80 visitors per day, and got the first sales from this domain a few weeks ago, in the last week of December.  For January it looks like I will clear $50 for the month for this domain.  Not bad for the first full month and not much traffic.  Of course with the amount spent on the domain, content, WordPress theme, links, etc I am still in the red.  But I will be in the black in a few months time.

If you pick the right keywords, put up a nice design with quality content, and get traffic then you will see a return on your investment.  It may take some time, but that is the way it is.  This is business.  And no one said internet marketing was easy.

Next Up:

Next I will get into some other details on the site I changed, other plugins I added, other SEO I’ve done, and more fun and random stuff!

I almost had a panic attack when I saw my site drop from #1 position in Google for about 10-15 keywords to ranking NO WHERE. It just disappeared out of the blue on 31st of December and we noticed it after a huge drop of traffic and sales …but thank God, we got this sorted out.

So how did we do it?

Well, it’s not something in particular, and I believe it’s a combination of many steps and stuff together. We immediately added our site to Google Webmasters Tools to check for crawl errors and we found 189 timeout errors (and this error list was growing bigger every hour).

Then under Google Webmaster Tools, I clicked Diagnostics –> Fetch as Googlebot to see exactly how my home page appears to Google and guess what?

I got Google Fetch Status: Unreachable (see screenshot below)

So why was I getting DNS Lookup Timeouts and Unreachable Google fetch status?

As I said, It could be one or many things together.

Possible reason #1: Malicious Hacking attack

This can happen when a malicious hacker penetrates the security of a site and inserts undesirable content, disguising it so that it doesn’t appear to normal users, but only to Googlebot. Because the source code of the site appears normal to everybody except Googlebot, the problem is difficult to diagnose without the Fetch as Googlebot tool.

Check the website with http://www.virustotal.com for viruses, worms, trojans, and all kinds of malware and/or hire a coder who has SEO knowledge to check up your code manually for any weird code in your server, index file, .htaccess and robots.txt.

Also, since my site is on WordPress, I found a cool plugin that I have installed to protect me from hackers. It’s called WP Lockup

Possible reason #2: DNS servers and Firewall settings

Step #1. Check your domain/server health with http://dnscheck.pingdom.com and contact your hosting provider with any errors and misconfiguration shown there.

During this test, I found some errors in Nameservers, SOA and Connectivity sections and with the help of an IT server admin expert we hired on Odesk, I emailed my hosting provider with the results in the following email…

The server’s DNS obviously has TONS of problems as seen at http://dnscheck.pingdom.com/?domain=mydomainname.com. The SOA errors and rDNS settings must be corrected for the IP’s mentioned below:

97.79.237.241 —-> NS1.INTERNETMARKETINGWIZARD.COM
97.79.237.2 —-> NS2.INTERNETMARKETINGWIZARD.COM

Also please fix the SOA errors mentioned there and check if Google bots are able to access the server and it is not being blocked by any server firewall or mod_sec rules. Here’s the IP list for you to check http://www.iplists.com/google.txt.

Step #2. Go to Just-Ping.com and ping your site from 50 locations worldwide for free.

During this Ping test with Just-Ping.com I found that my site had packet loss between 80%-90% in almost all locations. After re-emailing my hosting provider about this issue they told me that the firewall was setup to allow 1 ICMP packet / second and they removed that limit from the server, so after running another test everything was OK.

Possible reason #3: Blocks and errors in .htaccess and robots.txt files

We removed any blocks in our .htaccess and robot.txt file and are now using clean file that allows everything. Our robots.txt had few blocks so we set it to include only the following…

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Possible reason #4: SEO and/or Redirection WordPress Plugins conflicts

We also removed a wordpress plugin that we had installed about 3 days before everything got messy. It’s called ’404 to start’ and redirects any 404 traffic to a particular page.

Again I’m not sure what impact this had, but it was installed right before the trouble so we figured better safe than sorry.

After I took all these steps my site got back to Google and it’s #1 rankings within 48 hours. Yay!!!

Summary of all steps:

As you can see, I’m not ashamed or hesitant to share what I’m all about and I hope that my learning will be insightful for you — and I’m looking forward to hear a thing or two of what did YOU learn in 2011 in the comments section below.

Top Things I Learned About Health:

• Every problem has expiration time. No problem is permanent.
• Most of the times problems has no power over you , YOU gave them the permission.
• Sometimes all you need is 10 seconds of insane courage to change your life.
• Instead of getting upset, ask yourself  “What can I do to change this?”
• Decide for yourself if there are aspects of your life or your personality that you would like to change and do it.
• The reason that some people make you feel bad and they do it repetitive is because you’re weak! If you don’t stand for something then you’ll fall for everything.
• Choose people who teach you in a positive way rather than a negative one.
• Don’t accept to be the boxing bag of any person who has bad mood that doesn’t has to do with you. Demand respect, you deserve it.

Top Things I Learned About Business:

• Don’t sell your freedom for any amount of money. Better make enough just to live your life with as much freedom as possible than making millions and be a prisoner of your own business
• Character is more important than reputation.  Character is who you are when no one is looking.
• Successful people study and admires the lives of other successful people. Likewise, to obtain maximum success, study the lives of real successful people who has been there and done that.
• The more problems and the bigger problems you solve in the world, the more money you make.
• Say yes to every opportunity to learn, grow and meet new people.

Top Things I Learned About Love:

• People who believes that love has an expiration date while they’re “in love”, they don’t know what a real love is.
• Learn how to say, “I’m sorry Dear.  I was wrong, you were right. ”  even if it is her/his mistake just for the sake of not getting into a fight.
• Be with someone who knows exactly what to do to KEEP you while you’re in relationship. Not someone who will realize it when they’ve lost you.
• Sometimes the best thing you can do for someone you love is to let them go…
• Try your best to save the relationship in ANY WAY you can as long you’re WITHIN the relationship. If it’s end, then it’s already a finished story end you have to move forward.
• If something bothers her, then listen up.  When I am in a relationship I find myself to be more sensitive and trying to understand other person’s “buttons.”  Even if it doesn’t make sense, try your best to respect her/his wishes.
• Ignore the toxic people, situations and dramas in your life. It is easy to recognize them. Their negative words when they get angry sap your energy, their behavior when they get drunk shows you their real face and inner thoughts.
• Losing your health to maintain your love, doesn’t work. Invest in yourself and if your top health status can’t help your love, nothing will help it.
• A real man puts his people and loved ones first – before his technology.  Blackberry’s and iPads are not going to visit you at your funeral.  (When I have a dinner, watch a DVD or spend some time with the person I care, I no longer open a laptop… if you never tried it, at least try it once.:)
• Whether you’re in a relationship or not, you want to be happy. I believe the number one ingredient for happiness, is by far, peace of mind! And those who don’t know how to KEEP the peace in your mind for long, they should go out of your life otherwise you’ll be out of your mind sooner or later.
• Distance yourself from couples who complain about their spouses and have unhealthy relationships.
  Communication is key! Always make time to talk about the day and what things were encountered, any new goals or disappointments.
• Find a spouse that not only loves you but also who has the capacity to heal people otherwise YOU are in trouble.
• Follow your very first instinct and give your all… for 3 reasons. 1) just because you have to  2) just because you feel it 3) just because feeling guilty is the worst thing as it kills you every minute and every day in a slowly painful way.

I hope you enjoyed that….    I have been doing that every year since 2009 and it’s a very reflective time for me.  I would love to hear which one stood out to you and what you learned in 2011.  Leave your comments below.

In this series I am documenting the steps I am taking to build an Amazon review site.  Here is where we are up to now:

1. I found a product to promote on Amazon and checked the keywords for it

2. The main keyword for the product has alot of searches

3.  I checked competition for this keyword, and I think I can rank it top 3 of da GOOOOOG

4.  I found a suitable domain and bought it

5. I ordered the first article on for the first product review

6.  I installed my WordPress theme and plugins

7. I uploaded the first article I ordered

8.  I found 6 more products and related keywords, and ordered content.  I now have a total of 7 product review articles, with one or more keywords targeting each page.

9.  Content ordered, delivered, and added to site.  One article was added every 2-3 days.

Content

First I want to go over the content that I created.  Although I did outsource the article creation and added that initially to the site, there are changes I did make to the content.  The first important thing I wanted is articles of at least 1000 words.  Now you might be thinking ‘what kind of content are you building?’  Well, the answer to this is simple:  if you were doing research on the product, what info would you want included?  What we are basically doing with these review sites is saving the visitor hours of their own time of doing research by combining all of the best and most accurate information about the product possible and documenting that in your article.

While the content I ordered is good quality, it is still not up to the standards that I need.  While it’s certainly possible to find a writer that will deliver to you an article that is exactly what you want, it will be expensive and quite honestly a bit difficult to find.  While I admittedly haven’t really looked so hard for someone to be able to do this for me, I would expect to waste some time and money to find someone.  But once I have this whole Amazon niche site process down to a science, I will explore that option.

My end-goal is to be able to get some sites up the way I want, and then be able to outsource the content creation and site creation completely.  I will show them what I have now, and tell them that is the way I want the next site to be.  Then I will be able to concentrate on other aspects of my business.

So the content should be long, not only because long content is most likely more thorough, but also because the more content you have, the easier it is to grab traffic from long-tail keywords that you aren’t targeting.  So if I am targeting a keyword like ‘rayovac lantern’ … if I have a long and detailed article about it I will grab traffic from people searching for stuff like:  ‘really good lantern’, ‘need the best lantern’, ‘where to go to buy a rayovac lantern’, etc.

Now back to a few details regarding the content.  Obviously you want the features of the product included.  To get details of the product, you can get them from the manufacturer website,  by accessing user manuals, and from Amazon reviews of the product.  Just do a search for the product and go through the results that are already there.  You will be surprised to find that you will rarely find a good review of a product that is so thorough that you don’t need to go anywhere else.  So gather all the information you can get on the product from all these sources and get it all together in your article so it’s organized and makes sense.

While adding the features of the product, talk about the benefit as well.  This is something you will likely not find at all in the sources you use to write the review.  Here is the difference between a feature and a benefit using the same example of the lantern.  That lantern uses 4 watt LED  bulbs.  This is the feature.  These bulbs are very difficult to break, and will last around 100,000 hours so you don’t have to worry about replacing them.  That is the benefit.

And don’t just add all positive stuff about the product.  Include the bad stuff too!  Of course you are trying to bring this product into good light, so you don’t want to highlight the cons of course.  But let’s be honest, rarely is a product absolutely perfect.  Maybe a con is the price.  Or maybe there are just some small things that are more annoying than anything else.  Using the same lantern example, a few of the reviews of that product mention that changing the battery is not really easy.  Is this something you should include?  Of course.  As a buyer, you want to know this stuff.  And if you are reviewing quality products, with a large majority of the reviews being good, you already know the product is high-quality.  Don’t be afraid to add the drawbacks.

On-page SEO

Now I will get into other on-page factors.  What I am going to go over are best practices.  This means that under perfect circumstances, in my opinion these are things you want to do on your page.  But don’t forget about user experience and make sure what you are doing makes sense to your visitor.  So if you don’t get all of them factored into your page, it by all means does NOT mean that you cannot rank well.  Having said that, there are a few on-page factors that I really try to get right.

Keyword density:  Use it as much as you can, but don’t force it.  If you are over 1% or 2% that’s fine.

Keyword variation:  Try to get in at least 5 different variations of your keyword.  So if your keyword is ‘rayovac lantern’, try to use keywords like ‘best rayovac lantern’, ‘lantern made by rayovac’, ‘rayovac lantern features’, etc.  Again this goes back to my points about long and thorough content.  This kind of content should naturally allow for this.

Keyword in the URL:  This is my opinion is critical.  For example:  http://myreviewsite.com/my-rayovac-lantern-review

Keyword in the Title:  Again, this is critical.  Use the keyword in your article title.  You can make this the same as the URL so your title would be:  My Rayovac Lantern Review.  If you can, make your keyword first in your title.  For example:  Rayovac Lantern Review

Meta Description:  There is mixed opinion on this, with many experts saying that it doesn’t have a factor in rankings.  Whether it does or doesn’t, I do it anyway.  When you do show in the search results, Google will bold the keyword you searched for in the description so it will increase click-through to your page.  Just make sure your description is well-written to encourage click-through.

Meta Keywords:  Not a big factor, but go ahead and add them anway.

(NOTE:  As I discussed in part two, I use the Platinum SEO Pack plugin for this stuff. )

H1 Headline:  While this used to be thought as a must-have, recently alot of experts are saying it’s not so important anymore.  Regardless, if you are using WordPress which most people do, the article Title will also have the H1 tag so you don’t need to add another one if your Title already has the keyword.  If you don’t use WordPress, go ahead and add it anyway.  While I don’t think this is a must-have like the Title and URL, it’s close.  I am able to fit this in 99% of the time with no problems.  Again, this is best practice.

H2/H3 Headline:  Not as important as H1, but get it in if you can.  I can usually get this in so it makes sense.

Alt Text in an image:  This one is pretty critical I think and easy to implement.  It’s just best practice to add as many important images as possible, and with Amazon product reviews you should be adding lots of images.  Don’t use the same keyword for every image.  Use your main keyword for one, then your other keywords for the other images.

Multi-media:  If you can use a Youtube video or make your own video to add, I think that is great to do.  While alot of the evidence I’ve seen is merely anecdotal, there is reason to believe that Google is ranking pages better when they have mulitmedia added.

Bold/Italics:   Try to use bold and italic at least once each on your keyword, and other variations of the keyword as well where it makes sense.  Is it critical?  No, I don’t think so.   But again, it’s best practice to do so.

Outbound link:  At least once link out to an authority website which will give the visitor more information on what you are linking.

Internal link:  At least once link to an internal page on your site to give the visitor more information on what you are linking.  This may be a little difficult to fit in with product review sites unless you have other similar products your site that you are reviewing as well.  If you can do it, though, go ahead and link.

There is alot to keep in mind for sure, but just make sure you incorporate as much of this as you can.  I use the Clickbump SEO! plugin just to give me an easy way to check off this stuff, and I talked about that plugin in this post.

While I wanted to get into link building and off-page SEO in this article, it’s already quite long and I do want to be able to hold the attention of you IM’ers with limited attention spans

Next Up:

Link Building and off-page SEO.

See ya!

Now…if you haven’t heard this yet, then you should hear about it now.  Keyword research really is the most important aspect of building a niche site.  It’s not the design, or the content, or the navigation, or the traffic.  Because if your keywords suck, even the best design, great content and huge amounts of traffic won’t make you any money at all.

There are basically two big aspects to keyword research for this site, and other sites like it.  If you are going to be selling products on your site, then you need a keyword that people will be searching for when they want to buy something.  So if you are selling green tennis shoes on your site, you would want keywords like ‘green tennis shoes’ or ‘buy green tennis shoes’ or ‘cheap green tennis shoes’ or ‘green tennis shoes reviews’.  What you wouldn’t want to rank for is ‘free green tennis shoes’.  This is just a simple example obviously.

Now, you might not be monetizing your site by selling products.  So if you are planning on monetizing with ads like Adsense or maybe from BuySellAds or maybe monetizing through CPA networks, you don’t necessarily need a buying keyword.  When you are doing your keyword research, how you will monetize the site is something you absolutely need to keep in mind.  With my site, I am selling Amazon products.  Keyword research for this type of site is a little easier.  Most of my keywords will be for the product name itself.  However, I will also include some how-to type of keywords as well.  I’ll get into that later.

So as of right now I have one product and a few keywords for it which consists of one main keyword which is the brand of the product and a few other variations of that.  If you read my first post in this series, you’ll read a little bit about how I go about finding keywords, what to write about and what to promote.  Some people like to build what many refer to as “churn and burn” type sites.  This basically means they spend as little time and as little money as possible on a site, and build as many of them as they can, and see which ones work and which ones don’t.  The ones that seem to work they keep and they get rid of the rest.

If you want to build one of these sites, what you will have is a thin site with little content and very little value to visitors.  And if the value to visitors is low, then the value to da GOOOG is low too.  These thin sites are often more difficult to rank on Google, and when they do rank they more often get hit by updates such as Google’s Panda update or even through Google manual reviews.

I do not want to build these types of sites.  My strategy is to build sites with multiple products and high quality content.  Not huge sites, but not what I would call a thin site.  Again, I went over some of this in the first post.

So, what I did is not rocket science.  First I search Amazon for related products in the same niche I decided to go after.  And the nice thing about Amazon is they give you 2 lists of products on their product page:  “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” and also “Customers Who Viewed This Item Also Viewed“.  That gave me a list of products to look into.

Then I went to Google and I searched for these products and looked at what other websites that rank for those products are promoting.

Now I have a big list of products, and to narrow down to a handful to go after, there are some criteria I use that I explained in part one of this article series.

The next step after having my list of products is to find what keywords I will try to rank for.  To do this, I will head over to Market Samurai first because it will help me generate a bunch of related keywords for the main keyword.

Then I’ll use Scrapebox to give me a big list of related keywords as well.  And finally I will use the Google Keyword Tool to give me a big list of related keywords.

Now I have a big list of keywords.  I will start going through them and looking at the traffic by putting them into the Google Keyword Tool.  As pointed out in my first post, I want to have one or more keywords that add up to a total of 2000 EXACT matches in the United States per month.

This particular keyword, which is keyword 2 for this project, gets only 600 exact US searches per month, but I will also go after 3 other variations of this keyword to get me up and above the 2000 search minimum.  Here are the Market Samurai results for it.  This shows the statistics for the top 8 results when you search for this keyword in Google:

Keyword 2

Click To Enlarge

(If you are wondering why there are only 8 results, it’s because 2 of the top 10 results were videos.)

Where you see some of the fields are red, it means that MS thinks it’s more difficult to beat.  I’ll go over a few statistics here for you.  For more information on them, you can check out Market Samurai’s help videos.

DA:  The age of the domain.  Now the fact that these domains are all very old might scare some people off.  It doesn’t scare me off, because the PR of these domains is weak.

PR: The Google page rank of the site.  Anything under 4 is considered average.

IC: The number of pages indexed on the domain.

RDD:  The number of different domains that have a link to this domain.  Hope that makes sense.

RDP: The number of different domains that have a link to the specific page.

BLP:  The number of backlinks pointing to this page

BLD: The number of backlinks pointing to the whole domain

BLEG:  Number of .edu and .gov links to the page.  (This stat is totally useless in my opinion as I don’t buy into the gov and edu hype)

DMZ: Is the domain in DMOZ

YAH:  Is the domain the Yahoo Directory

Title:  Is the keyword in the Title tag

URL:  Is the keyword in the URL

Desc:  Is the keyword in the Desc tag

Head:  Is the keyword in the  Header tags.

I pay most attention to RDD, RDP, BLP, and BLD.  These are the off-page factors (backlinks) and are the most important factors when I determine the difficulty of the competition.

After that, the on-page factors that are important are Title/URL/Desc/Head.  These will tell you if the page that is ranking is purposely optimized for the keyword.  If they are, you know it will be more difficult to rank in general.

On-page factor analysis – Looking at the results, the pages in position 2 and 3 are optimized for the keyword, and one of them is the Amazon page for the product.  Besides that only one more, position 8, is optimized.    So nothing too scary here.

Off-page factor analysis – Looking at the top 3 sites, first let’s look at position one.  This page has 905 links to their page from only 11 different domains.  This tells you right away that the sites linking to them have links on every page.  This is much, much weaker than having 905 links from 905 different domains.  I took a look at a handful of those links (with Majestic SEO) and most of them are on pages with page rank of 2 or less.

Then I analyzed those 79 and 34 backlinks with Majestic SEO for the pages in positions 2 and 3.  (You can also use HREFS or OSE).  When I looked at those backlinks, nothing really stood out as being unbeatable.  Most of them are from free sites like article directories and web 2.0′s, which are good links but that alone will not be enough to hold onto positions if someone, like me, wants to take them from you.   And there are less than 100 as well.

Also of interest in the page in position 5.  This page has over 200K links from only 105 different domains.  This tells you right away that these domains have site-wide links to this page, and just goes to show you that it’s not necessarily the amount of links that makes you strong.  It’s having links from as many different domains, and more specifically from as many differ IP addresses, that really makes your backlink profile strong and tough to beat.

Here is another one I am going after:

Keyword 3

Click To Enlarge

This keyword gets 6600 exact US searches per month.

For product 2  and product 3 I ordered one product review article each.  At the same time I ordered 4 more articles for 4 more products, giving me a total of 7 products that will be reviewed on this site to start.  For each product, I am going after anywhere from 1 to 3 or 4 keywords per product.  It could stay at 7 products, or it could grow.  I am hoping things work out and I will be able to grow it.

Here’s the recap of where we are as of now:

1. I found a product to promote on Amazon and checked the keywords for it

2. The main keyword for the product has alot of searches

3.  I checked competition for this keyword, and I think I can rank it top 3 of da GOOOOOG

4.  I found a suitable domain and bought it

5. I ordered the first article on for the first product review

6.  I installed my WordPress theme and plugins

7. I uploaded the first article I ordered

8.  I found 6 more products and related keywords, and ordered content.  I now have a total of 7 product review articles, with one or more keywords targeting each page.

9.  Content ordered, delivered, and added to site.  One article was added every 2-3 days.

Next Up:

I will get into some SEO tips for the site.  I’ll talk about the on-page factors as well as how I will begin my link building campaign.  Stay tuned for more good stuff!

I don’t know about you but when my PC is slow and messy, I really feel slow and messy. It just affects my brain.  Back in 2001 I used to be a computer technician and after trying trying lots of software and whacky ideas 10 years ago, some of  important things on how to keep my PC fast and healthy stuck into my memory. And that’s what I’ll be sharing with you in this article.

I am not going to hide it but I bought my PC in 2008 (yeah it’s little bit of an oldie, I know) but since then my PC never crashed, never got any viruses and never got slow!

In the next few minutes you’ll discover the following…

• How To Make Windows Start Up Faster
• Best Tool That I Use That Spots And Fixes My PC Errors Automatically While I Sleep!
• What Antivirus Works Best For Me!
• My Favorite Backup Software That Gives Me Peace Of Mind!

How To Make Windows Start Up Faster

A typical PC loads a lot of programs every time it starts. Each of the icons in your system tray (the area near your clock) represents an auto-start application. And there are probably other programs on your machine that start automatically but don’t make their presence known so easily. Each auto-loading software makes your computer’s boot time a little or a lot slower.

Remove Unnecessary Apps That Load On Start-Up

• Select Start, Run —> type: msconfig —>press <Enter>. (In Vista, select Start, type msconfig into the Search box, and press <Enter>.)
• Click the Startup tab, and you’ll see a list of all your auto-loading programs, each with a check box.
  
• Uncheck the items you don’t need, click Apply and restart.

Before you uncheck any program in the list… always use your judgment by asking yourself “Does this software need to be on all the time?”. For instance, I unchecked Adobe Acrobat, a program that I use whenever I open a PDF file because it serves no purpose when I’m not reading a PDF file.

My Favorite Tool That Spots And Fixes PC Errors Automatically Even While I Sleep!

The more errors and larger your Windows Registry is, the longer your PC will take to boot and load your applications. My favorite Registry cleaner is Advanced SystemCare PRO.

If you’re wondering what it can do for you, Advanced SystemCare PRO is the best and easiest tool to protect, repair and optimize your computer for faster and safer use with just a single click. It also removes spy- and adware, prevents security threads, deletes temporary files and fixes registry errors. Easy, quick and effective.

Take a look the screenshot below to see how many problems it found on my PC after a week full of surfing and work…

And here’s what happened to these problems within 5 minutes…

One of the many things I like about Advanced SystemCare PRO is that you can set it to run automatically in the background while you’re working or sleeping and you can even schedule scans and maintenance to happen at specific times, or just let the software work when the PC is idle.

Since 2008 I’ve owned Advanced SystemCare PRO, and I promise you I’ve never needed to take my PC in a computer shop to fix it for me because it’s like having a computer technician within your computer.

The #1 Antivirus I Trust And I Rely My Entire Business On!

I’m using Kaspersky Antivirus because believe it or not, it always detects new threats on my PC at a 100% success rate. The price might appear high, but it does include a three-user license and if you compare it to how much money and valuable data you save in case your PC gets infected this is real bargain.

Unlike other antivirus software I’ve tried on the past, Kaspersky Antivirus doesn’t slow my computer. It works in real time, protecting you as you surf the web, download files, send and receive emails, and access files and documents.

Third party testers and security organizations approve and recommend the software. Kaspersky has received top marks in VB100 (Virus Bulletin 100%) tests and boasts certification from ICSA. AV Comparatives has awarded the software with an A+. West Coast Labs has verified the software for anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-Trojan and anti-malware.

What Do I Do If  Something Goes Wrong?

My business is my life and my life is my business so I can’t afford to lose any data. If I don’t have a backup and I lose something, I’m lost. That’s how important backing up is to me. So what do I do in case something like this happens?

I use NovaBACKUP® Professional. It’s easy to install, easy to use and you can start making your first backup in minutes with simple wizards. It’s very flexible software as you can schedule your backups to be stored locally (on your computer) or backup your data online for backing up your backup. Now that’s what I call “Backing Up Your Back Up”.

This is the second post in a series in which I will document building an Amazon products review site.  In my first installment, I talked about finding the products, checking keywords and the competition for those keywords, buying a domain name, and ordering content.

While I waited for that first article for the first product review on the site, I started building my WordPress site.  Now to be honest, I’m kind of annoying when it comes to themes.  I end up spending way too much time finding one, when in the end I will likely change it at least once or twice as the site progresses.  This is a lesson to everyone out there in internet marketing:  just get it done and perfect it later! 

As much as I always say this to not only myself but other IM’ers I talk to, I still fall victim!  So anyways…I spent way too much time on deciding on a theme, but I finally did.

>>>>>>>>>> Here are the themes I liked:

• Medena – free
• Flexibility – free
• Rapid Review Theme – paid
• FlexSqueeze – paid
• WordPress Review Theme – paid

OK once I installed FlexSqueeze I messed around with the settings a bit.  I didn’t really do too much right now.  I don’t care about getting everything perfect (as I talked about above), my main goal at this point is to get the site up and get the content dripped out to it.  By dripped out, I mean I will post an article every 3-5 days.  I won’t put them all up at once, even though I will get alot of the content from my writer at once.  When I get the site ranked on the first page of the GOOOOG and start getting traffic, then I will work more on the site and polish it up.

All of the plugin I started with are free except for ClickBump SEO.  If you are interested in seeing why I use it, I previously wrote a blog post with some videos about it.

>>>>>>>>>> Here are the plugins I installed:

• BackWPUp
• Clicky by Yoast
• Contact Form 7
• Google XML Sitemaps
• Platinum SEO Pack
• SEO Ultimate
• W3 Total Cache
• WP Minify
• ClickBump SEO

After I got this stuff installed and configured the theme a bit, I uploaded the first article I ordered.  So as of right now I only have the site up with one article and that is it.  Let me review all the steps up until this point:

1.  I found a product to promote on Amazon and checked the keywords for it

2.  The main keyword for the product has alot of searches

3.  I checked competition for this keyword, and I think I can rank it top 3 of da GOOOOOG

4.  I found a suitable domain and bought it

5.  I ordered the first article on for the first product review

6.  I installed my WordPress theme and plugins

7.  I uploaded the first article I ordered

Next up:  research other products and keywords for more reviews, and order some more articles.  In the next post I will talk about the research I did to find those other products, the keywords for those products, and the competition.

OK that’s it for now.  If you have any questions or you have any themes and/or plugins you especially like I would love to hear about it!  See ya next time kiddies…