Making Money

For the past two or three weeks I’ve been obsessed with testing and tweaking one of my free site (well, it’s a Squidoo lens actually). Of course, ultimately I aim to make more profit online through promoting an affiliate program within that lens but what more important is I want to know how different would it be if I can just tweak a bit here and there on the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) parts.

Now, I’m not being obssesed with Lensrank or things like that. I’m more interested to find out the result from my SEO effort. I just want to ‘outrank’ a competitors for a certain keywords (Hmm, being a bit secretive over here am I not?).

Ah heck! I want to outrank a Squidoo lens for the term ‘ultimate supertips’ which I’m not on the radar of Google at all. I gather if I can get on to a better positon, at least top 3, the eyeballs I can get from that alone hopefully, can change my conversion i.e. more eyeballs > more clicks > more conversion.

And I want to achieve that using free SEO method. How?

Before I go down to the details, let me give you a little bit of background about all these search engine result pages (SERPs) and my obsession that is building up.

You know that I consider myself as one ever curious being. I want to know almost everything that caught my attention particularly the one that can make profit. Now, don’t get me wrong. This is not ‘materialistic’ talks but profit or revenue or numbers or whatever you like to call it add juices to my motivation and mos importantly; that’s how I keep myself on track.

How do you know something is working well unless you have a way of telling it or mesuring it.

And money or online profit IS my way of telling things.

For you it can be visitors, pagerank, page view, hits, etc. but to me I simply like the sound of the cash register (can you hear it ‘kaching’! ‘kaching’!)

If you don’t have a way of telling or measuring the effectiveness of your effort, why don’t you? You know that people paid thousands just to listen to this timely wisdom again and again, “Things to be managed must first be measured.”

Same goes with your online marketing campaign. And that easily explains why many of us beginners stop halfway on our track because we simply ‘burned’ by the amount of marketing effort we have to put in especially online marketing.

Testing, tracking and tweaking alone can wear you down faster than the wheels of your vehicle which you use to commute hundreds of kilometres everyday.

And speaking of beginners, most beginners have too little time and or too little money to test, track and tweak an online marketing campaign.

So, how do we expect them to polish their seo strategy and make more profit online?

Unless there are simple ways to put everything in one place, and cost beginners little or no money (i.e. free) polishing an online marketing campaign to them will become just a matter of finding a strong enough purpose and desire or simply put; MOTIVATION.

And that’s where Squidoo and its mighty lenses come in.

Squidoo offers a beginer the ability to setup a lens, test it, track it with built in stat fascility, and finally tweak it to boot. All these will result in one thing better outcome towards a desired online marketing campaign goal.

And the goal of every marketing campaign online was to move closer to another goal.

Maybe it’s more visitors.
Maybe it’s more click through.
Maybe it’s better conversion…

And it makes a lot of sense to beginners or experts alike that to be able to move somewhere else, we need to know where we are now hence the need for test, track and tweak. Simple.

So this is just the background. On the ‘body’ of this story…

I’m squeezing more SEO juices into my Squidoo lens to outrank my fellow Squidooet, Squid, whatever for the search term ‘ultimate supertips’.

I did a bit of study on my competitors lens and it seems that all I need now is to add more ‘backlink’ to my lens. Backlink, preferably one-way-backlink is what I need more of now. So how do I get them?

Building more lens and rank with each other is one of it but I need something more ‘dramatic’, something faster than a speeding bullet… Guess what?

I put a text side bar widget on this blog and write something in it and then put a link in an anchor text back to my lens. And the result?

Shocking! I got an extra 15 ‘Inlinks’ (you can check ‘Inlinks’ by typing link:http://www.yoursite.com’ in Yahoo!) in the next 3 days. “Wow! That was fast,” I thought to myself.

What did the Inlinks do to my lensrank and position on search engine page results?

Happily I outrank my competitors in less than a week. Less than one week and I was excited to say the least. And the Inlink keeps growing day by day (I have 123 as of today) BUT (here comes the butt)…

My position only last for a few days? Why?

I thought of Google dance. I thought of revised algorithm…Sandbox…link spam…etc… I really don’t know. I thought I have done greatly in this but I got short term result. Is Google cheating or is there something I don’t yet understand?

Who do I think I am? Of course Google’s not cheating. It’s me. And here’s what I think:

Getting one way backlink is good in this case especially since my website has been around for more than a few years. But I forgot to consider one crucial thing – quality link and its amount.

Now, most of my Inlink comes from this blog tags. I guess since I put the text on the sidebar, it’s shown everytime this blog upload is the search engines. And that’s how it got so many Inlinks faster than a speeding bullet.

It’s more like Digging (you know, submit story on Digg). It’s fast but short lived. Um, it almost resembles buying textlink which results in huge Google Slaps issue a few years ago. Poor Squid lens of mine. It’ll never find out what hit it.

The scary thing is, they said, if you’ve been Sandbox, you’ll need 6 to 8 weeks to recover

I’m talking too much am I not? I apologize if what I’m talking here you find it hard to understand. I was in your shoes not long ago but like everything else, I learned fast. You could too. Just stick with me and keep exploring this blog.

Losing good SERPs position to lens with fewer backlink hurts. It hurts the ego more than anything else. But hey, looking back, I’ve had my glory, even if it’s short lived. And most important of all, I now know what it takes for me to polish my seo to make more profit online.

It’s not techy at all. It’s just basic.

What will happen to my lens and my SERPS and SEO juices now? You’ll soon find out (6 to 8 weeks?…phew…).

UPDATE: If you are a Lensmaster or using Squidoo to promote affiliate offer, your own product or simply to get traffic by ranking well in SE (just like me), here are something that about policy changes in lensmaking that you WANT to know…

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Pick up your free copy of the hit book that will help you build lenses
Death Of Squidoo Marketing

Avoid The Squidoo Slap…

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The Lensmaster Slap

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Squidoo Myths Exposed

Avoid The Squidoo Slap…

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Pick up your free copy of the hit book that will help you build lenses
My First Lens

Avoid The Squidoo Slap…

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Take note of these and may you be MORE profitable online!

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