Hi, and welcome to the 23rd monthly update to AidanBooth.com!
On the 1st of each month, I release an update about what’s been happening in my business, interesting insights and tips, and sometimes interviews with successful marketers (like today).
There’s never anything to buy here on AidanBooth.com, it’s a promo-free zone! The idea behind this website is simply to give back to the community, and share things I’ve learned by working “in the trenches” as an internet marketer for many years.
Most Satisfying Month Ever…
The past month (February) has been one of the most satisfying I’ve had since I started out as an internet marketer about 8-9 years ago.
Lots of cool things happened, but the thing that REALLY made me happy was that I got to meet the “Blueprint Academy” group face-to-face in Las Vegas.
I’d never done this before, and certainly not in this kind of ‘intimate’ environment.
The Blueprint Academy in Las Vegas
The Blueprint Academy is a Mastermind group we opened up in January, it has 4 face-to-face meetings during the year, as well as “Virtual Meetings” each month.
Over the course of two days I presented information about Facebook Marketing, leveraging White Label products on Amazon, Kindle Marketing, and also the “System” that Steve, Tim and I use to run our business (Steve also spoke about Accounting, Business Setup, Leveraging Crowd Force, Metrics and Adwords).
It was inspiring meeting this group of people, and also humbling knowing that many had traveled the world (literally) to attend (like Amar, who traveled 32 hours from Uganda, the group of people who came all the way from Australia, and everyone else who traveled a long way to attend).
Chris Saved His Business From Extinction…
One of the Blueprint Academy members is Chris Molnar, I’ve known Chris for about 4-5 years now, and he’s always been someone who’s been able to get results from his websites.
After Panda and Penguin hit, Chris’ monthly income plummeted to just $100 in January 2013…in January 2014, he’s at a run-rate of $70,000/year again.
While in Vegas, I asked Chris if he’d be willing to film an interview with me that I could share on AidanBooth.com.
Luckily Chris agreed, and so today you get to hear how Chris re-built his business from scratch, and how his affiliate sites are thriving in the “Post Penguin/Panda” world and getting THOUSANDS of visitors each day from Google.
Check it out below…
How To KILL It With Old-School SEO
Chris gave a presentation to the other Blueprint Academy members to elaborate on what he discussed in this interview.
The Big Take-Aways
The big “take-aways” from Chris’s interview, and his presentation in Las Vegas are:
- SEO can still work… if you do it right.
- Don’t build any optimized anchor text links until you have at least 100 generic URL and name links.
- Make your link profile messy and chaotic – be as random as you can with your links, just like someone who knows nothing about internet marketing would.
- Use your name as your anchor text often (just like someone who is building a “hobby/interest” authority site would).
- Keep adding to your sites over time – fresh content helps show you’re still “active” working on your site.
- Allow comments, and make “artificial” comments from time to time (so that your site looks active to new visitors).
- High PR links still work! Buying aged high PR domains is a good way to push link juice and boost site rankings.
- Focus on VALUE. All of Chris’s best performing sites are made up with good quality content.
- Leverage an email series. Chris makes extra sales by setting up a simple follow up email series and allowing his visitors to subscribe using forms on his sites.
- If you have access to Crowd Force, USE IT! Chris uses Crowd Force to identify traffic opportunities, and drive his SEO link building campaign.
Income Boosters
Chris also spoke about a couple of things he plans to do to earn more from his sites in the coming months:
- Boost his trust and authority by launching a Kindle book in each of his niches (he’ll put this in the sidebar of his websites).
- Split test different pages to boost his conversion rate. Doing this he should be able to double his income on his affiliate sites (from $3,500/month to $7,000/month).
Win An Amazon Voucher
If you’ve connected with me on Facebook, and if you’ve been following my Facebook Page updates, you would have noticed that I’ve been speaking a lot about Kindle, and in particular, sharing my wife’s Kindle results.
Here are a couple of updates we’ve shared in the past few weeks about Kindle income from my wife’s account:
As you can see, our sales have been slowly increasing…
And to make this fun, if you correctly guess the total number of sales we had in February, you’ll win a $30 Amazon voucher!
Click the image below to participate:
To participate you need to:
- Login to your Facebook account
- Make sure you’ve “LIKED” my Facebook page
- Then submit your “sales guess” in the comment box.
On March 2nd, I’ll announce the number of sales we had in February.
What do you think?
Got a question or a comment?
Let us know using the comment box below, and Chris and I will reply!
Great story, thanks for sharing! The picture from your Academy event looks great, I really wanted to be part of that group but missed out!
Hey Aidan, congrats on the Kindle sales, and congrats to Chris on rebuilding his business. I suffered a similar crash after Panda/Penguin, so Chris’s story is particularly inspriring and related to me – thanks a lot for sharing 🙂
Inspiring story… good to hear that SEO still does work. And thanks for sharing those tips – there is such a lot of conflicting info around about SEO & what you need to stay safe re Google. It’s good to hear from someone who has actually done it!
I think one important thing to keep in mind, is that SEO can work, but it’s probably not something you want to “bet your family home” on… Chris is careful with that, in fact, only half his income is SEO related 🙂
Aidan…Good stuff as always…can/will you give us just a little more info about the messy links…I guess you are saying post comments here and there just using your name for the link and maybe not the same name name each time…and have them coming from a diverse areas like blog comments and forum posts…and what else??
I you could add some more sources that we would build links from it would be great also…
Thanks
I’m sure we can work that out, in fact, Chris will probably be able to reply to this comment…
Exactly that. Everything is a “planned mess” in that I track it all in a spreadsheet. For blog comments I use the profile name of my site, so if I’m “John Smith” I’ll leave a comment as John, John Smith, J Smith, etc. Post in your niche, but a very wide range. If you have a health-related site, you can post in anything health, diet, fitness, mommy blogs, recipes, etc.
Same with forums – look for 2 or 3 high-traffic forums in your niche, and participate with useful comments – don’t leave your website address or build your signature file until around the 25th post. This is to show you’re a valuable member of the forum and didn’t just join for spammy links. Your signature file will just have your website address – no keywords.
Submit social links with your website address, set up a FB and G+ page, post random and interesting articles in your niche, and get involved.
Basically, do as somebody who has no SEO experience would do – blog commenting, engaging in forums, on Facebook, Pinterest, press releases with only your website, guest posts (again, with only your website, or even just link to your FB page), etc … yes, it’s a lot of work … but it can also all be outsourced if you train your workers right 😉
I think, as Internet marketers, we’re all phoenixes at some point in our careers. We just have to rise again with our burning desires to be our own boss. Thanks, Aidan, for the interview (and the huge support you’ve given me through the last couple years). Hope I can inspire others!
Chris
Great story Chris. I remember you saying something somewhere (maybe on the forum) that you were embarking on a launch of 10 sites last year. It’s good to hear it worked out.
I like your analogy of the phoenix rising from the ashes. it reminds me of a tune written by Graham Parker and popularized by Dave Edmunds – “Crawling From the Wreckage.”
Crawlin from the wreckage, crawlin from the wreckage
You’d think that by now at least half my brain would get the message
Crawlin from the wreckage, crawlin from the wreckage
And into a brand new car …
Congratulations to you.
Dave C
I appreciate Chris sharing his recent experience.
These 2 questions are for Chris:
-“Use your name as your anchor text often”. I don’t understand exactly what you mean. Are you saying to literally use your actual name, “Chris Smith” or the name of your website such as “www.worldsbestpartyaccessories.com”?
-“Allow comments, and make “artificial” comments from time to time.” Do you or do you have somebody else go in and post comments? If so, how often?
Thanks to Chris and Aidan for sharing these insights. Much food for thought.
Great interview with some good SEO nuggets. SEO changes frequently though. Probably good to take advantage of list building and social media sharing. I think if you can organically build your social networks it could help get your content to rank better as well. Especially on Google+