Well it is January so its time for another Google Algorithm change. This one was something that I think most of us saw coming but it is worth talking about. Basically they are going to start punishing sites with “too many ads above the fold” . They don’t tell you how many is too many, they don’t say what screen size we need to use to determine if we are going to fall foul of it.

Lucky enough I am not worried as I use wp-easy ads (link is at the bottom of the post) and that has so many options for placement that I know I can control my ads and keep out of trouble. Rather than trying to explain it all here I decided to do a video. I talk about adsense placement but also another plugin you can use to make your sites look better.

Magazine Style Plugin I mention in the video (it is actually 2 plugins, one for posts and one for pages), this is one of the must have plugins for any wordpress install in my opinion

Get Wpeasy ads for $17 instead of $27 using the button here

With all the updates that have been going on other the last few months this could well be the final nail in the coffin for a few adsense sites, don’t let this easy to resolve situation kill your site ranking.

Treat your site visitors with some respect and don’t blind them with ads is what they are after I think.

Please do leave a comment below with your thoughts and experiences

One thing I see mentioned a lot , and get asked about a lot, (probably because I had one of the first tools around to find blogs to comment on when I released Comment Hut ) is how do I do blog comments and why?

So I thought rather than keep on answering questions on forums – even my favorite forum WPG – I would do some videos, in this post I have included the video where I Talk about the why, what to look for and the where to find them. I also mention signing up a different email for each site and then setting up an account at gravatar, I will do another video on this but it really is pretty simple.

I hope you find the video useful, please do post your comments and questions below.

I talk in the video about link diversity and I truly think that the most important things in link building now are

• Link Diversity
• Link Value
• Link Velocity
• Anchor Text Variety

Some of the things I use:-
Social Bookmarking (for link variety)
imautoamtor
Social Adr

Guest posts (good link value)
Postrunner from the Keyword Academy
http://guestr.com I am just starting to look at this one
http://myblogguest.com/ another one I have heard good things on

I will be doing another post on guest blog posting, I am going to try and get Luke Moulton from Guestr to give me some insights and ideas to share

Blog Networks (good link value)
Build My Rank – they give you 10 free links so try them out

There are other blog networks, I have been in some terrible ones with 1k sites that are a week old and all get the same post at the same time, and I keep on looking for new ones to test out. The best ones are very expensive and are kept pretty secret so they do not get over exposed.

What I will do is make a guest post and then put that url into imautomator, I also collect them and then make a rss feed of them and submit that feed. There is no point making a guest post if Google don’t find it so i try and do my bit to push them.

I also use http://animoto.com/ to make videos which i then upload to you tube, viddler and just starting with vimeo. Youtube is for the traffic and the links, viddler or vimeo are used for when I want to embed the video on my sites as they seem to be better quality. This is really more about giving some variety to your site than about the links in my opinion.

Blog Comments
Less is more, better in my opinion to have 50 good ones done that will build your cred and reputation than to have 1k spun trash ones.

Balance
I think you need to look for balance in your link profile, I also don’t go looking for a million links at once, crappy links from profiles on sites that are going to break because they get spammed so much hold no attraction to me.

Where to read good info
People ask me where I find info and who do i listen to, I rarely (read never) look at any IM forums for anything to do with seo, I tend to read the stuff on

http://www.seomoz.org/

http://www.distilled.net/blog/ (their recent webinar on ecommerce seo was superb)

http://www.paddymoogan.com/

and I am starting to read a lot more from the guys at http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk, their podcasts are fun and I found this one to be superb (and not just coz the guy is baldish, with a beard and glasses , like me)
http://www.sitevisibility.co.uk/blog/2011/11/22/interview-with-jim-sterne-podcast-episode-146/

Ok what was going to be a short video post has turned into a lot more.. Please do leave a comment below..and look out for more posts from me coming soon..

A real quick blog post here, I was going to put it on Facebook or Google+ but then thought it would fit better here.

I was in a office yesterday (yes I do leave the dungeon once in a while) having a discussion with a couple of web guys about google plus. They love it and the web designer had kicked the tweet me button off the site to put the google plus button up there.

I felt this was a mistake as “normal” people are just not using g+ yet, I know that the big G are probably using it as a ranking metric and it definitely makes pages get indexed fast if they are linked from your google but for real people it is useless.

We disagreed (put 3 web geeks in a room together and they often cant even agree on what to have for lunch)..

There were 20 people in the office, secretary/admin people and sales people (plus us 3 very out of place geeks)..

“Hi I need some help, which do you use every day, Facebook, Google plus one, Twitter”

So out of 20 people
18 =Facebook regularly
10 =have twitter accounts
2 =use twitter a lot
3 =have not used it since setting it up
5 = use twitter once in a while but dont really seem to know how to use it for personal stuff. “I just post everything to Facebook from my phone”

2 = none – hate the whole idea

Half of them (9 of them women) said “whats the google thing” , the others had kind of heard of it because there is the button on the company site but only 1 had actually looked at it. Even he admitted it was only because the web geek guy pushed him.

I did not ask what they use for personal email, my wife uses yahoo mail and that may well be part of why she has not heard about gplus.

Google plus is great if you are in IM/SEO/Something geeky , and i know the take up numbers are huge but i think numbers alone are misleading, but outside of that they are not there yet.

What does this mean for you and me, if you are using Facebook to build groups and followers in your knitting niche, keep on doing it. If you have time to do the g+ thing as well then start to build a presence but i would not swap out all my time from Facebook to Gplus.

As for twitter.. I love it personally but I do not know if it will ever be anything other than a great social signal..

I know this is a very unscientific study and i could of asked more questions but thought I would share anyway..

Paul

Update:- Patrick was asking about twitter info, and while this is not strictly info, it is interesting if you are a twit geek..

http://www.distilled.net/blog/social-media/twitters-t-co-link-shortening-service-is-game-changing-heres-why/

** This post is in two parts, part one is my thoughts on the whole Amazon tax situation and the 2nd part offers some help for those affected

No one loves politics more than me but more and more I am thinking that one of the pre requisites to work in govt is to wear blinkers and be a bit nuts.

Late last night all Amazon affiliates in California got notification that they are fired. California want Amazon to collect sales tax from everyone who lives in California and buys through Amazon and Amazon doesn’t want to do it.

While I feel the pain of affiliates who are the pawn in the middle of this battle I want to share a thought which may be a bit different from the norm.

Amazon should suck it up and collect tax

Unless they feel they lose nothing by losing affiliates? Maybe they figure they are so well known now that they do not need affiliates anymore? They always talk about how it is the big box stores that are pushing this, well who employs the most people in your state  Walmart or Amazon.

I love the internet, it allows me to work from home and spend time with my wife and daughter and work when I want. But I am just one person, the local Walmart probably employs hundreds of people, so does kmart and many other stores in town. I do not love Walmart, but I bet they put more people into work and pay more taxes than Amazon do here in Utah.

I have heard this called a freedom of speech problem and how Amazon are having their constitutional rights trampled, rubbish! Amazon collect sales tax in Washington state so they can do it, they just don’t want to.

Are they scared that they will lose their price advantage? Or are they just trying to throw their weight around?

Two things in live are certain, Death and Taxes.

Help For Ex Amazon Affiliates

Ok now my rant is over lets see what we can do to help people who are being affected. This company have got a very good system that allows you to still use your Amazon sites – Skimlinks
You do have to add some code to your site and they do want to look at them to make sure your site is of  acceptable quality. The company are a affiliate for Amazon and they put your sales through their account. Since they get so many sales they are on the top payment tier.

Is it as good as having your own account, no. However until the tax situation is finally sorted it is well worth doing so you still earn from your sites.

Sell Your Amazon Sites
I think a lot of people will panic and just sell. This tax change is coming on the heels of Panda and it may well be too much for some people. If your life doesn’t depend on the income why bother with all this aggro right?

This may sound like the easiest way out but is it the best way? I think you should look at Skimlinks first , selling in a panic is never going to get you the best price. There may well be a flurry of sites coming up for sale and that will probably cause some of them to end up selling too cheaply.

Avoid the temptation to throw in the towel and keep on fighting the good fight!

Amazon Sales Tax Map
This post includes a map showing the embattled states
http://www.thestreet.com/story/11052898/1/amazon-sales-tax-the-battle-state-by-state.html

Other reading on Amazon Sales Tax Issue

As I find posts or comments that I think may be relevant and interesting I will add them here, feel free to suggest some in the comments

http://daggle.com/open-letter-jeff-bezos-terminating-amazon-affiliate-program-california-2584

Interesting Comment On Facebook

Amazon has deemed California and 11 (?) other states not worthy of their business; so be it – I refuse to make future purchases through Amazon – directly or through affiliate links – until they re-establish California associate programs.

Now if everyone in the 11 states already affected did that for a week.. what would the $$ affect be for Amazon? I know it would never happen but it is a idea to consider..

What Can I Do To Recover From Panda?

That is the real question, we have all had a good moan and groan about how bad the update is, unfair it is and how Google should look at just my site and fix it. Now lets get real.

The video from Whiteboard Friday that I mentioned on Friday was good and the comments on there are very good. The general consensus seems to be

Better content
Content does not just mean words

• Text -longer and more detailed (including LSI words)
• Video – self made not just something from youtube that is from some other site
• PDFs – make sure you include links as they can be indexed
• Images – resizing is vital as site load speed is now a ranking factor
• Competitions – Giving away a $50 niche gift or gift card could bring hundreds of mentions
• User created content- ask visitors to share their story
• Layout – no more big blocks of text split up with ads

Engagment
No you do not have to propose to every visitor

• Keep them on your site longer – This plugin really helped reduce my bounce rate on sites
• Make them Browse more pages – but do not split your content up every 200 words with a <next page>
• Recommend to a friend, if they like your site enough to bookmark it, like it, tweet it, then it must be engaging right?

Branding
Again not the kind where you bend Google over and attack with a hot iron..although..no lets carry on

• Make your site look decent -pay for a decent header if you (like me) are rubbish with photoshop at least
• Think about paying for a logo for the site and incorporate that – I have used the logo nerds with good results, do a search for them on the warrior forum as they sometimes run specials there.
• Give it a face – when you do a “about” page most people will just put 100 words of text about the niche. Consider putting a pic of you and use your pen name, write about the niche as if you are really interested in it and if you have experience tell them. Be funny and be human.

If you run a site on weight loss where you monetize with adsense and maybe some clickbank you may think paying $30 off for a logo is a waste. You could then use it in the ebook you produce and think of how jaded people in that niche become and how nice it would be for them to think of your site as “real”.

Links
No matter how much we talk about content being important links are still vital

• Easy is not best – Just because sending all your articles to ezine articles is easy it does not mean its best.
• Link Diversity – spread the links around
• Real links – these are links that people give because they love you and your content not because you paid or did something for them.
• Move away from your comfort zone – Look for new places and new ways to get links

So how do we do all this if we are in IM rather than a full time seo with a budget and team members?

Believe in your niche and go deep
Someone on a forum I frequent mentioned he worked for a month on one site, adding pages, building a sales funnel. Someone else just mentioned they did something like 100 pages of content before they started any link building.  I hate to say it but I think that is what the future holds, if you did one site a month you would still have 12 sites a year and if they are making as much as you were with 60 who cares?

Parting thought
Should we drop adsense as an income source?
It is easy to use but is it best?

In my earlier post I had a bit of a rant about Panda and I feel much better for it. But today I want to talk about someone who loves the Panda update. He is a good mate of mine and when he started his site he asked me what he should do to promote it. Now normally I would go with the usual tried and true stuff, but he hates writing articles and didn’t want to spend any money.

So what can you do to build links and drive some traffic.

Stand Out From The Crowd

Join Forums
Not forum profile spam but real forums in his market and he made posts that were on subject and helped people. So if your site is on cooking with vegetables, go join a vegetarian forum and a cooking forum and get involved. You do not need hundreds of forums, just a few that you are involved in.

Some of the other members of the forum run sites and they linked to his posts so he was getting links from friends.

Twitter
He followed the big people in his niche and by posting out daily tweets with info in them and not just links to his own stuff he has built up contacts.  You can do this from your phone while your wife is shopping in Walmart (I know he does).

Facebook
He did a page and shared his own stuff and other peoples stuff. Then he would mention it on the forums and people from there came and liked his page and share his info with their friends.

Web Rings
I thought it was 2002 again when he said he was joining a web ring for his niche. I was more amazed when I heard he was getting traffic from it and the people actually stayed around the site.

Content
The man is passionate about his niche and he will do posts every few days. He will take pics that are relevant to his niche when he sees them and then share.

Not Money Driven
When he started the site he figured he could share his passion and if it made money then great but that was not his idea. (this is easier if you have other income sources of course)

This work got him some traffic and some low 1st page and high 2nd page rankings which he was happy with. After a few months he asked me for some help, he had some spare cash and felt that now was the time to invest in his site.

Guest Posts
Most people tell you to do a guest post on someone elses site and get the link back. He is actually getting well known people in his niche to guest post on his site so he is giving away the link. But they are passionate people so they share the page with their facebook groups and they tweet about it, so they get a link but he gets traffic.

Extra Linking
Build My Rank – we used build my rank to get exact anchor text links
Article Marketing – postrunner and ezarticle link with the links being a mixture of anchor text and domain url links

These have pushed the site into the top 3 for its main keywords

Money
The site has adsense on it but he is now adding specific review pages that are on target for his niche, he will go find the item for sale in a shop and take pics of it. If he knows someone who owns one he will go and take pics in situ. Now the items are $200-$400 and the buyers seem to have money to spend as they often buy lots of extras.

This has doubled his income.

My Take
What does all this actually mean..and how can we emulate it

• Passion – if you are in a niche you hate you wont write quality content, you won’t care if your writers are producing the real deal and your dislike may actually blind you to the quality of the content. You also won’t go the extra mile
• People not search engines – He genuinely likes to talk to people in his niche so he seeks them out.
• Long Term – He did not think for one minute this niche would pay off for him, so he didn’t look at money until he had traffic
• Give – People who guest post for him think they are onto a winner and they provide good quality content which others are happy to share
• Go Social – I do not love Facebook, but that is mainly because I get tired of reading song lines that people post and seeing all the games that suck us in. His Facebook page is full of snippets and content that is on target and is really interesting for people in the niche. So use Facebook but offer something of interest.
• Think Niche not domain – We have been so tied into buying exact match domains for so long that it is going to be hard for people to move away from this one. Sure buy a emd if you can see one but if you believe in the niche then the domain name should not be a deal breaker.
• Stop hunting the easy win – We all tend to gravitate to the easy stuff in life, we all tell our kids to keep working at things and that life isn’t easy. Getting to where you want to be requires hard work son. I heard that a lot and it is true online. We just forgot it with the easy wins we have been experiencing.

I am confident we will all get to where we deserve to be and I will share some more stuff in another post, but right now I am off to play in the water with my daughter, she is far more important to me than Panda. It is easy to forget that in the heat of the moment.

Yesterdays Panda Update post brought out some interesting comments and I have seen many more on closed forums. I thought I would share a video that i just watched. It is from Seomoz and is the latest in their Whiteboard Friday series. I will share this with you guys today and then over the weekend share a story about a close buddy of mine who loves the Panda and why..

Ok not the fluffy, loveable kind but the website ranking eating kind.

Google have been rolling out various Panda/Farmer updates since Feb and it has killed lots of marketers, I find it almost funny how no one seems to be talking about it in IM. Maybe if we don’t mention it then it never happened.

Well it did happen, results for many peoples sites are really screwed up (If you have had personal nut kicking from Panda feel free to share in the comments, or if you didn’t share why you think your sites escaped) and it sucks. Everywhere I see people saying Diversify, do your own products etc etc.

That is great advice but it doesn’t bring back the income from the sites that were ranking. It is also easy to say when you are already diversified, which lucky enough I am. No one likes losing income they have had.

I want my $2 (go on what film is that from).

I actually had a friend who said they felt like crying after this update, I also have a friend who loves it because he has done very well from it..

Eats Shoots and Leaves

What did they do different? Well I will share that in another post this week, right now I will just share some thoughts and some honesty.

My adsense/amazon sites got royally screwed in this last update, lucky enough I am very diversified in my income but I still don’t like a pay cut, I went through all the stages that we all go through when a relationship goes pear shaped .

• Anger – I was furious, it was all their fault
• Recrimination – What did I ever do to them..
• Getting back- I switched to using Bing for my own searching (like sleeping with the ex’s best friend)
• Realization and Acceptance – Yeah maybe the sites were not that great and maybe I didn’t have the link diversity I should of

In a normal relationship break up this is where I go and hang out in some dodgy bars or clubs for a while to prove I can make it on my own still. I am a married man and when I asked if I could go to some dodgy bar to get over Panda I was told I had to go clean up the dog poop in the yard.

Then I start to try and work out what I did wrong and work on it, So that was next, I went on an info hunt

Best Panda Update Information – I spent hours reading tons of post (I link to some at the bottom of the post) but the only one that made me sit back and really think was the one liner was from @dannysullivan at Search Engine Land. “It feels more like a new ranking factor than an algorithm change” .  That really did it for me, that made me think of total change rather than hoping quick fixes would work for ever

I am going to share some things I have done immediately to try and tighten up my posts then in the next post I will share what the differences are between the guy who is as happy as can be with Panda and the ones who aren’t.

Tag Clouds – gone , or I made them no index. They are basically duplicate content and so many people have been putting bucket loads of them on each post it was just getting abused. I actually prefer to just delete them all and 301/404 redirect (i know a 404 redirect is not perfect) them to the home page. The sites I had made using some software seemed to have hundreds of tags (I actually deleted 1400 tags from one customers site)

Thin Posts – If you use any kind of software to build your sites and you have posts that have no images, 30 words and a buy here button that is just not going to cut it. So either fix em up or delete them, if they were making sales then fix them up, if they arent I deleted them. I have used so many diff bits of software to make sites I cant even list them all.

Look at Analytics -Look at all your content and see which pages were getting views pre panda. If your post is not getting 5/10/15 page views a month (totally arbitrary number) either fix it up or get rid of it. If you look at a post and believe in the content on there then commit to doing something with it. Add images, build links, add more content.

Ask Mum – Ask your mum or your wife or someone else who is not a seo/internet marketer what they think when they first see the site. If they wince and run off crying or avoid eye contact with you then you know you need to review your site. Ugly sites were always good for click throughs but times they are a changing.

Review your plugins – Times are changing and your tool set needs to change.
Seo Plugin By Yoast- i was using all in one seo and I just like this one so much more. Maybe I will do a video on it at some point.
Google Plus One -there are a few plugins for this
Facebook likes/shares/hates/don’t care – whatever the latest addition is to their buttons, there are a few plugins for this
Magazine style plugin - Wish I had thought of this one myself. I just spent the last 2 weeks adding this to all my sites and the bounce rate is down and people are hanging around more which is a good thing.

Indexing-if you have a 200 page site and only 20 pages were even indexed, this seems to have really annoyed the Panda and resulted in a sitewide problem. So get your rss feed from the site and get all those posts indexed, or you can remove the ones that aren’t indexed or put them in “do not index” state.

Next Panda Update – Panda is not a continuous updating thing so the work you do today may not help your site for a month or more. This makes it tough to keep pushing with it, but quitting is not an option! Smarter people than me will work out exactly what Google now wants. I think they want more in depth content, images, comments and stuff that a normal site would have. Look at your teenagers site and see what they include (ok maybe no one needs pics of the twilight caste on their site).

Oh and before I finish this, question for you..

Did the person who taught you to drive also teach you history, how to program, be a secretary or whatever your day job is? Probably not, we have different people who teach us different things. So when you want to learn how to promote your small business go to someone who does that all the time.
@LukeMoulton
http://smallbusinessbigmarketing.com/

When you want to read about SEO go to people who do it day in and day out, they test, they have budgets they have teams to kick stuff around and they are not trying to sell you an ebook for $17
@randfish
@paddymoogan
@dannySullivan

Three people I follow on twitter, if you are serious about wanting to learn seo and can afford to join seomoz I hear it is great.

Ok Panda Links that I liked

http://searchengineland.com/your-sites-traffic-has-plummeted-since-googles-farmerpanda-update-now-what-66769
http://www.labnol.org/internet/google-traffic-after-panda/18914/
http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2076480/The-Panda-Enigma-An-Overview-of-Major-SEO-Factors
http://searchengineland.com/coming-soon-google-panda-update-2-2-80848

Please do feel free to comment, retweet, like or link to this post. Oh and feel free to look at any of the links on the right, you buy my stuff and I make money that is pretty much how it all works.

So when you look at your adsense stats what do you see?

You see numbers, the amount of page impressions, the click throughs, cpm and your earnings.

You want more of all of it don’t you? Because more impressions = more earnings. So we all chase more traffic, I know I do. I add pages, I build links and try and rank higher to get more traffic. Because traffic is like cash in pocket.  Maybe you build new sites hoping that will bring in more money. Then of course you have to build links to that new site, add new content and the merry go round starts again.

Image from photoxpress.com

On the 1st and 2nd of every month I have a few things I do. I keep a spreadsheet of earnings for each site and I look at my adsense. If i have a site that has got a click through rate (ctr) of 5% or less I will look at it and maybe try a new theme to increase the ctr. If the following month it still hasn’t improved I will remove adsense from the site.

Why remove adsense altogether? Because the poor ctr on that site does a couple of things
-it annoys the life out of me when i see it
-It brings down my overall account ctr

Why does that matter? Well there has been much talk about how your overall ctr will affect the ads your sites show and the payments you receive. It makes sense to me that Google want to put ads on the sites that get clicks as that is how they make a living. Each add they show must have some cost attached to it (although tiny) and they do not want to spend the money showing millions of ads that no one will ever click on.

So if your site gets clicks they funnel the best ads to your site. As far as I am aware there have been n0 scientific tests carried out on this theory. It may be miles of the mark. However I have seen that as I am removing adsense from sites, my income is going up not down. My views are going down (as the sites got views but no clicks) my sitewide ctr is up and my cpm is up.

I am a long term guy, My cpm may only be up a few dollars, but over the next five years those extra dollars will add up.

Not A New Idea
I know I am not the first person to mention killing adsense on your worst performing sites. I read the idea somewhere else I am sure. I am certain I have mentioned it on forums and I may well have blogged about it. Someone recently posted a link to a old blog post on problogger about it.

However.. if we are so interested in ctr what else could we do..
I read a post on Mark Thompsons Wp Goldmine forum where adsense was being discussed. This was the thread that set this post up really, it made my brain work overtime.

One of the members , Rob copied a post he had found somewhere all about how the op took 5 months to optimize his sites for adsense. The whole thread is good but the bit that hit me was..

DISABLE adsense ads for pages which have traffic but bad click rates!

wow..so rather than looking at your ctr on a site by site basis, look at each page on your site..

How?
Easy to say what I think you should do, how to do it is the question. I will share as much as I can here.

I use Google analytics on my sites, I know some people say you shouldn’t as it gives Google to much info about you. I do not hold with this as I think they can find what they need if they want to anyway.

I integrate my analytics and adsense – blog post on it here – thanks to Rob Doyle for finding that post which explains it better than I do.

I use the Google analytics plugin from joost and I click the box that says show advanced settings then I tick on the “track adsense” box.

So now I can see which pages have earned what in my google analytics.

Give it some time to collect the data and if you are just switching sites over to anaytics with adsense integration I advise waiting 2 months before you go and do the stuff I am going to talk about here. Remember we are looking at the long term income here, waiting two months may seem like a lifetime, but you need the data.

If you do not use analytics then you may be able to find out which pages get clicks from your other tracking programs but since I do not use anything else I can not help.

What next
Now you can see what posts get traffic but no clicks, so work with that data. Look on your site not as a site but as a group of posts. If a post has got 50 impressions over the last 2 months and no clicks then remove adsense from it. If you use my wpeasy ads plugin this is as simple as scrolling to the bottom of the post and choosing the “disabled show nothing” option. You can of course show an alternative ad, maybe a clickbank product or insert an amazon widget.

Simple but tedious

That is true of so many things that we do to make money online. So many people will not do anything that is boring, time consuming or difficult then moan that they make no money. Money really does not grow on trees.

Math Stuff
10,000 impressions
500 clicks
5% ctr

8000 impressions
500 clicks
6.25%

So you reduce your impressions, clicks stay the same but your ctr just went up. So if the theories are right you should see an increase in your payment per click.

Is it worth it? Well it is a pain to do if you have a load of sites, so start with the one that gets the most impressions and work out from there.

Do not think about the 8 hours you will spend on this, think about the increase in adsense income you will enjoy over the next few years.

Longest Post Ever
I think this is my longest post ever, I was going to do a video but I could not do one without revealing niches, my adsense or analytics info so I had to do this crazy long post. I actually have another post I am writing about how my wife increased a sites income without moving it up the rankings so look out for that coming soon.

Please do comment
I know it seems crass to ask you to comment but I hate to think that I just spent a hour of my Saturday morning talking to myself.. Oh and of course if you want to tweet about it, facbook it or even print it and post it to your friends that is perfectly acceptable as well.

There are essentially three parts to making money online

1-find a niche

2-add content

3-build links

Sure there are a million small things in each one but that is the large overview. This post and video is just going to cover one tiny part of number 3 but I hope it helps you.

The places I mention in the video include

Blog Spider

Imautomator – The free level is fine for the stuff i mention in the video

Social adr – They have a free level, join at the free level then they offer you a extra account option which is $17 a month and that gives you enough bookmarks to be starting with. As you make more money then increase

You do not need to build loads of links to every single page. What I do is home page first, then category pages, then I run the site through market samurai (another ranking tool would work) to see where the pages rank. I then build links to the pages that have some ranking, even if it is low.

Once they are done I will then just do the rest of the pages if I have nothing else to add to Imautomator . It is easy to lose track of what you have done when you are building links to so many pages and if you have loads of sites.

Which Site Do I Do First?
I have a load of sites so which one do I build links to first?

I know this question will get asked so I will answer it, I choose the sites that are making money already and push them. They are already loved by Google so I will try and get them some more love. I find it easier to take a site from $5 a day to $10 a day than to get from $0 to $5. No idea why I just do.

Comments Please
Please do let me know your thoughts and ideas, I like to think that I am not just talking to myself (which I do a lot)

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