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  Instead of doing my usual   marketing blog challenge   weekly update I have decided to review my first month with my marketing blog and analyze what was good and what wasn’t. So here we go. During my first month I had 797 unique visitors, that means 25 unique visitors per day which is kind of frustrating. The number is steady and it doesn’t grow but I’m confident that it will one day. I still haven’t used any ads and I won’t until I get a bigger number of uniques. There were a couple of good things that made January very fun month for me. First of them were the comments from David Temple and David Meerman Scott. They really gave a motivation to continue working on my  marketing blog . Others have gave their contribution with comments and I want to thank all of you guys and gals. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, I’ve managed to verify my paypal account with a debit visa card and now I’m very happy because I can finally buy things I always wanted. First of the things that I...

  The day came, sooner than I expected I have to admit, werebu.com got into top 1000 at Google for a key phrase “ marketing blog ”. When I started my   marketing blog challenge   I never hoped that I could get into top 1000 so fast. Ok, it is not that fast and it is not that incredible but you have to realize that I didn’t buy any links; I didn’t pay for my content. Everything here is the product of my work so getting into top 1000 really means something to me. To be precise my blog is at position 744. I have only checked one data center since it is very time consuming to go through all 1000 results manually. If you enter “ marketing blog challenge ” at Google you will see that my marketing blog is at position number seven which is good but not good enough for me. I still believe that I deserve to be on position number one. I have mentioned links earlier; I believe that it is possible to make a good rank without buying links so I’m not going to buy any unless I make money...

  I was checking Google again today and I have noticed that my marketing blog went from position number seven for a key phrase “ marketing blog challenge ” to position number three which is more acceptable if you ask me. Still, I’m not number one. What is more important is that I moved rapidly to position number 380 for a key phrase “ marketing blog ”. This fact made me very happy today. Here is the   screen shot   to prove it. Webinknow.com was the first site I compared my blog with and to be honest, if David hadn’t written any posts named “ Marketing blog challenge ” I would have beaten him already. His website is currently at the position number 192 for a key phrase “ marketing blog ”. When I first did a seo analysis of his site I thought it would be easy to get into top 1000 and that it would be easy to beat him. Because webinknow was at the position number 551 back then I believe that I have already beaten David. But to keep things fair I will continue working on my ...

  Well my rankings are moving too fast so I need to write every 12 hours to keep up with this situation. Not that I’m complaining about that   I think that this is the real thing now since my  marketing blog  reached a position 176. Since the key phrase “ marketing blog ” returns between 150,000,000 and 221,000,000 results I believe that my current rankings are pretty good. One thing that worries me are the supplemental results. Many of my pages return supplemental results and I really need to deal with this… Any suggestions are welcome. I think that more “quality” links will do the trick together with some on site changes. To keep things fair here is another  screen shot . So the marketing blog challenge continues. I have to find a new competitor whose site I’m going to analyze but I’m not going to do that until I get some stable rankings. That means that all of you who are reading this blog will have to wait a day or two for Google to put me somewhere they thi...

  I just wanted to inform you that my   marketing bog challenge   is now getting really serious. I one week went from being nowhere to near top 100. Right now my   marketing blog   holds positions between 121 and 130 at Google for a key phrase “ marketing blog ” while it is number 2 or three if you enter “ marketing blog challenge “. I will give  Google  some time to decide where should I rank since my positions change day after day and I’m constantly getting better rankings at  SERPs . I hope that this trend will continue and that my  marketing blog challenge  will be a success. Wish me luck until my next update. Thanks

  I was doing a little bit of back link checking and I found out that a couple of sites linked to some of my articles which made me pretty happy. Since werebu is still in development it would be foolish of me to think that it is going to rank high for “bigger” keywords but it is doing fine in Google right now, it has been indexed and reindexed. I’m not surprised by that because googlebot visits werebu couple of times per day but indexing isn’t happening that fast. Reindex occurred couple of days before the first indexing so my conclusion is that you need to be patient with seo. That is the truth actually, seo is a long term game and you don’t get to see results fast. I guess that people who do seo for money are well paid because these days they are the only ones who have enough patience to wait for results to happen and then tweak a site which will of course bring even more waiting hours, days and weeks. That is it for today, thank you for your time.

  Today I was thinking about my blog and I realized that advertising new directories every day is not good as I thought it would be so I’m not going to do that. Those who got listed will stay where they are but they are the only ones. I figured that it would be better to announce a couple of hundred directories but only when I submit my   marketing blog   to all of them. I know that new directory owners will hate me because of this, sorry guys. As you can see I have added a little horizontal menu right under my header. I know it is ugly right now but since I’m at work and I don’t have time to make it better it will stay like that at least for a day. While browsing this marketing blog I’ve noticed that I don’t have a “Home” link so there it is first one in my new menu. I’ve added sections like “Tools” where you will find marketing and seo tools that I use, “Services” where you will find services that I offer (this will be empty for a month or two), “Links” where you can fi...

  Those of you who have been reading my marketing blog from day one know that I try to write something new every day. I believe that fresh, unique content is a food for crawlers and they must be fed every day. Last two days were an exception because I wanted to see how many visits I can bring only from Digital Point Forums. Since the last article was about making money at the same forums I thought it would bring more visitors than usual. Today I have checked my stats and noticed that I got around 50 visits from DP only in the last two days. It is not a revolution I know but for a new blog like mine it is very good. However, I don’t believe that it was the title of the article what got those new visits; it is the number of new posts that I wrote there. There are ~50 new posts with my nickname above them so you can say that I got one new visit per post. You must be asking yourself, what if I could write 1,000 posts per day, would that create 1,000 new visits? Probably not because of ...

  Instead of doing my usual   marketing blog challenge   weekly update I have decided to review my first month with my marketing blog and analyze what was good and what wasn’t. So here we go. During my first month I had 797 unique visitors, that means 25 unique visitors per day which is kind of frustrating. The number is steady and it doesn’t grow but I’m confident that it will one day. I still haven’t used any ads and I won’t until I get a bigger number of uniques. There were a couple of good things that made January very fun month for me. First of them were the comments from David Temple and David Meerman Scott. They really gave a motivation to continue working on my  marketing blog . Others have gave their contribution with comments and I want to thank all of you guys and gals. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, I’ve managed to verify my paypal account with a debit visa card and now I’m very happy because I can finally buy things I always wanted. First of the things that I...

  1) Title tag Title tag is the most important search engine optimization factor and you as a webmaster have a power to change it. Title tag should contain your primary keyword or key phrase not the name of your business because you already rank well for your business name. 2) Anchor text Anchor text is by far the most important off site ranking factor and most of the time you can control it. You can’t however control anchor text on pages that link to you if somebody decided to put a link to you on his own. The best thing you could do is sending an email to such webmaster and ask him to change anchor text to your keyword, maybe he’ll say yes, you never know. I would do it if you asked me. I believe that is not necessary to tell you that anchor text should be your key phrase. 3) Keywords in content If you want to rank well for a certain term you have to use that term in your content, if you rely only on anchor text your competition could outrank you. You don’t, however, want to spam...

  Today we are going to talk about Google Page Rank. Page Rank is Google’s way to tell you how valuable your website is. Actually it is better to say how valuable your web page is since all pages within your website have a PR (Page Rank.) So how does it actually work? (Taken from official Google explanation) “Page Rank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Important, high-quality sites receive a higher Page Rank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google com...

  Yesterday we talked about PR in general, we defined it (thanks to Google) and we ended the article with me telling you that you will have something to read about today. So here we are, today I am going to talk about how to recognize valuable link partners, how to buy links and does PR really matter to you. Link partners When I talk about link partners I mean those people that you exchange links with. You should always try to exchange links with web sites that are similar to yours (etc. same niche) but not with your direct competition. So what does it have to do with PR? As we said yesterday PR is a result of web sites “voting” for you site. More votes, more PR. Very simple, but not that simple. Since Google realized that webmasters could “cheat” by doing massive link exchange they don’t put too much weight on reciprocal links. I said, not much, I didn’t say any weight! army officer Buying links There will be a time when you will realize that all of your efforts in marketing your ...

  If you are like me and you live in a country where paypal isn’t supported then you find yourself stuck because even though you could make money you just can’t receive it. I must correct myself, my country is supported by paypal but only for sending money, receiving isn’t supported yet and I can only hope that it will be soon. So are we all that stuck that we can’t do business online? No, there are other payment processing companies out there so it would be a good idea to check them out and find one that suits your needs. I’m going to name a few and you can see for yourself if they are good for you and the most important factor in this story, you check if your country is supported or not. My favorite and maybe the best payment processing company besides paypal is  Moneybookers  (affliate link). They offer personal and merchant accounts. With merchant account you can receive money from other Moneybookers account holders and you can also accept major credit cards with a fe...

Last few days I have a problem with writing content. I just can’t seem to find any good subjects to write about. Maybe it is the lack of free time that prevents me from writing or maybe I’m just too lazy these days, I’m not sure. If you think about it, writing about one single topic can be really hard. In my case writing only about blog marketing is really hard. I know that I write about marketing in general and search engine marketing, not only blog marketing but these subjects are related so I think about them as one. Optimizing your content for certain keywords (marketing blog in my case) is another thing that keeps you away from writing because you get the feeling that everything you write looks like something you have written before… I hope that I will find something good to write about tomorrow. Thank you for your time. p.s. I’m still mad at Google for not being number one for the term marketing blog challenge but at least I got from page three (21-30) to page two and now I’m at ...

When I got interested in SEO and marketing,  Digital Point Forums  was the best place to find information and being there a couple of months I can say that it still is. DP is a large forum with many sub forums and around 35,000 registered users. It has Buy/Sell/Trade section where you can find many great things like links, templates etc. The best thing about DP is that it is allowed to sell signature space. What this means is that people actually pay you for putting their website in your signature. Forum rules allow you to have no more than 4 links and no more than 3 lines of signature. You must be wondering how much can you really make? Here is a little price list according to my observations, these prices are not fixed, actually you can probably get more then I have guessed. 100 posts -> 1$ per link/month 500 posts -> 5$ per link/month 1000 posts -> 10$ per link/month 2000 posts -> 20$ per link/month 5000 posts -> 50$ per link/month 10000 posts -> 100$ per ...

  Three days ago I announced my   marketing blog challenge  and analyzed   www.webinknow.com   because I thought it would be interesting to compare my rankings with someone else. David Meerman Scott responded with a post about my challenge and he immediately realized that by doing so he would tweak his ranking for the term   marketing blog . Since I don’t have a tool that can check first 1000 results I had to do it manually. While doing my painful research I’ve discovered that David’s blog moved from position 551 to 243 for  marketing blog  which is good for him but not so good for me. My marketing blog is nowhere near top 1000 yet but I guess it is ok because I don’t have a lot of incoming links, my domain name is new and it doesn’t contain any of my key words. Why did I say “stupid things” in the title? Because I think that the age of domain and some other factors like PR shouldn’t matter to search engines that much. I believe that quality of in...

  Today I have checked position www.webinknow.com for the term   marketing blog   and David has moved down the to position number 443. I guess that has something to do with the fact that his post about my marketing blog challenge has moved down in his content. I don’t believe that more than 200 of our competitors have worked on their content and links to move David so many places down in SERPS. So today’s conclusion is that position of the content (maybe it is better to say position of keywords) definitely influences your position for high competitive terms and marketing blog sure falls under this category. Of course my  marketing blog  is nowhere near top 1000 but I’m working on it. I’ve decided to let it get older so that people link to me without me telling them to do so. I only hope that this will be the case in the next 6 months. I’m going to update my “Tools” section today so no more talk. Thank you for your time.

  When I first posted about my   marketing blog challenge   (and that was yesterday) I never thought that I will get comments from guys like David Temple or David Meerman Scott who both have great blogs and who have been doing online business certainly longer then me. I feel really happy right now because not only that they took time to read my blog but also took more time to post a comment or two. I also shouldn’t forget links from their blogs, thank you guys. Do I have to take my  marketing blog  challenge more seriously then I thought I should? To be honest I don’t really know since I’m quite surprised right now about the reactions that sorund this challenge… If you are wondering if I’m going to buy links to get my rankings better I must tell you that I’m not going to do that because I believe that good things (like my  marketing blog challenge ) deserve to get links naturally. If I don’t get links naturally I will fail at my challenge, nothing bad reall...

Couple of days ago I mentioned that I want to challenge my marketing (SEO) skills on this blog. I picked a very competitive term and I wasn’t really sure if it is smart to tell what it is but since I have nothing to hide here it is: “marketing blog”. This key phrase returns 199,000,000 at Google so it won’t be easy even to be in the top 1000. So my first marketing challenge is to get into top 1000. To do that I had to check how and why some of the pages are ranking well. I didn’t want to compare myself with number 1000; instead I’ve typed  marketing blog  again in Google and selected site positioned at 551. The URL of the site is:  www.webinknow.com  The site is quite famous but I didn’t see what it had to do with the term marketing blog. I took a quick look around the site and noticed that the word marketing is used a lot which is good since site talks about marketing an links to marketing blogs and sites. However, term  marketing blog  is mentioned only o...

Three days ago I announced my  marketing blog challenge  and analyzed  www.webinknow.com  because I thought it would be interesting to compare my rankings with someone else. David Meerman Scott responded with a post about my challenge and he immediately realized that by doing so he would tweak his ranking for the term  marketing blog . Since I don’t have a tool that can check first 1000 results I had to do it manually. While doing my painful research I’ve discovered that David’s blog moved from position 551 to 243 for  marketing blog  which is good for him but not so good for me. My marketing blog is nowhere near top 1000 yet but I guess it is ok because I don’t have a lot of incoming links, my domain name is new and it doesn’t contain any of my key words. Why did I say “stupid things” in the title? Because I think that the age of domain and some other factors like PR shouldn’t matter to search engines that much. I believe that quality of information (...

Today I have checked position www.webinknow.com for the term  marketing blog  and David has moved down the to position number 443. I guess that has something to do with the fact that his post about my marketing blog challenge has moved down in his content. I don’t believe that more than 200 of our competitors have worked on their content and links to move David so many places down in SERPS. So today’s conclusion is that position of the content (maybe it is better to say position of keywords) definitely influences your position for high competitive terms and marketing blog sure falls under this category. Of course my  marketing blog  is nowhere near top 1000 but I’m working on it. I’ve decided to let it get older so that people link to me without me telling them to do so. I only hope that this will be the case in the next 6 months. I’m going to update my “Tools” section today so no more talk. Thank you for your time.

  So here we are, four weeks have passed since I have started   marketing blog challenge . During this time I learned many things about SEO and blog marketing but there are many more things to learn, that is for sure. I also found people who were nice enough to help me out with their advices and some of them found me. Thank you guys for all your help, you know who you are. So what’s up with the  marketing blog challenge ? Nothing special, I’m still not in top 1000 for a key phrase  marketing blog  but I got to page one for  marketing blog challenge  after being on page three and two for a long time. Currently I’m number eight but I still think that I deserve position number one since marketing blog challenge is my challenge… I believe that eventually my marketing blog will get to number one and I would be happy if it happens in the next three months. I also wish to be in top 1000 for the term marketing blog in the next three months but we will see. Rig...

  As promised yesterday I did a quick research about link selling/buying so that people who are not familiar with the subject get some idea of current prices, what things you should avoid and what things you should look for. To do a research I went to one of my favorite forums, Digital Point Forums, and looked around link selling section picking couple of most recent link offers, pretty random if you ask me. So here they are, I will explain more below. PR Type of link Price 7 Site wide 25$ per month 6 Homepage 25$ per month 5 Site wide 50$ permanent 5 Homepage 30$ per month (high traffic) 5 Site wide 10$ per month 4 Site wide 15$ permanent 4 Homepage 5$ per month 0 -> 4 Homepage 5$ permanent To explain things a little bit. First column shows the PR (Page Rank) of a link. Second column describes the type of a link, is it site wide (a link across the whole site) or just a single link on a homepage. Last column shows the price asked for a link and payment period. You will notice th...

  Many   webmasters   and   online marketing experts   used to put small images next to Google Adsense ads. This little trick improved their click trough rate (CTR) because it misguided visitors who thought that images have to do something with links (ads) next to them and in most cases this is not true. I have heard that people used to send emails to Google Adsense team regarding this issue and that the response was to put a border or in other way distinguish images from ads. Well, the problem is now gone since Google announced at their official Adsense blog that they do not approve images next to ads in any form and again they said that you shouldn’t trick your visitors in clicking on ads. Looking at this situation from webmaster view you are probably not very happy but if you take a second to look from publisher’s point of view then you have to realize that they are happy since the worst thing that can happen to a publisher is a large number of clicks that do...

When I first planned this website I knew that it will be hard to find related keywords that don’t have too many competing website out there. Well, things got even worse when I took some time to do some keyword research; all of the keywords I considered to be good for me, were actually very bad since the competition is big. And to make things worse werebu is blog which means that my homepage changes every day and that is not good since I can’t focus your homepage to one or two selected keywords. Given that my key topics are online marketing, online business, search engine marketing etc. it would be extremely stupid of me to try and optimize werebu for any of these topics because there are a lot of sites that have done that before me. So how do you find the best keywords? The best thing you could do is to take one whole day to do the keyword research properly. You need to find keywords that are related to your website’s content. If you have bad luck like me then you will have a lot of co...

When you got your first pc you were very excited, I know that I was. Day by day you learned new stuff about it and at certain time in your life you started to wonder if you could sell your knowledge about computers. Besides your friends who is going to pay for your services? If you were smart then you have joined some marketing forums and started to learn how to market stuff (and stuff includes yourself too). But joining forums and reading won’t help you much, you have to make yourself stand out, your posts need to be well written with perfect grammar and spelling. You must show that your knowledge isn’t questionable, and you must prove that you are very good at what you do. Marketing yourself is very hard, harder than trying to market you product, because every mistake will get you one step backwards and we all know that forward steps are not so easy to accomplish especially in online marketing so be careful, don’t mess up what you have worked for. I have already mentioned that you mu...

1)Google will penalize you for “wrong” incoming links FALSE I have selected this as a first myth because I keep seeing it all over internet marketing forums and websites. Google will not penalize you and your site if you have low quality incoming links or links from link farms, they will simply ignore those links because for Google they don’t carry any weight. So you can be sure that your site is safe if someone tries to Google Bomb you… 2)Google will penalize you for “wrong” outgoing links? TRUE and FALSE Big search engine like Google and Yahoo don’t like to be tricked so they found a way to discover what we today call a link farm. So be careful who you link to and how many outgoing links per page you have, don’t let your website become a link farm because then you will get penalized. You will not however, get penalized if you have 10 outgoing links to your favorite forums like I do 3)Google will penalize you for cloaking? TRUE Yet again, search engines don’t like to be tricked so the...

I was browsing one of my favorite forums and found a thread with marketing lections from famous (or less famous) marketing experts. One that was most impressing (and most fun) for me is Seth Godin, very good lecture and you can check it out  here . Take a look and you will get a different view on some of the marketing principles by examining other people’s errors. Thank you for your time.