Earning Online | Growing Your Site

By admin, on May 24th, 2010

Hello again, and welcome to another installment of the Internet Business Guide, Earning Online Blogging series. This is our 7^th in the series. If you are not yet up to date, you can find them all of the lessons, in order, listed in the sidebar where is says “Earning Online Blogging Course”.

In our last installment, we discussed getting the first links to your site, and to the fist “real” post that focused on your site’s main keyword. We also went through some of the strategies that I use and recommend for boosting your links (getting backlinks to the articles you posted to the directories). In this installment, we will discuss where we go from here. The two main areas we will be covering are:

Using your cousin keywords
Getting more backlinks

So, if you remember, in our early post about Earning Online with WordPress, we talked about the main keyword for your site and the cousin keywords. Your cousin keywords are typically lower valued keywords than your main keyword, but are easier to rank for (easier competing websites in the top 4 SE positions). You have already created a nice, long post that focused on your main keyword, and got a few backlinks to it and to your site. Now it is time to work on one of your cousins.

Let’s say your main site is using “internet home business” as the main keyword. You have the keyword in the URL and in the title of your first post. You found a few cousin keywords, and decide to first work on “data entry at home” (BTW, that keyword has a $40/month potential and very low difficulty if you want to grab it). You will want to tie the “data entry at home” keyword to your site’s main keyword and write an article about it.

An example title might be, “Data Entry at Home as an Internet Business”. “Internet business is very similar to your main site keyword, but not exact. I could have used the full “internet home business” in the title, but to me it reads a little spammy, and it is really not necessary here. Now, using that title, it is pretty obvious what I am going to write the article about, right? Here are some rules you will want to follow:

Use your cousin keyword (in this case “data entry from home”) AND your main site keyword within the first 160 characters. Usually you can do that by simply adding a word to the title in the form of a question – “Is it really possibly to develop a data entry from home job into an internet home business?”
Use you cousin KW in the last sentence.
Use your cousin a few more times within the article, but no more than read naturally and never more than once per 150 words.
Link the first occurrence of your cousin KW to the article permalink.
Use your main site keyword once more in the middle of your article somewhere.
Link that occurrence of your main site keyword to your home page.

Remember, although we are optimizing these articles for the search engines, we are writing them for our readers! Do some research and come up with some quality content. You are in the business of providing information, so do a good job of it. Here is what I do, that might make it easier for you:

Come up with the topic based on the keyword I am looking to write about.
Write the first couple of sentences of my article.
Take the dog for a walk, or go get some coffee or something, making sure I forget the keyword.
Come back and reread what I wrote.
Write the best article I can about the topic, while not even thinking about the keywords.
Reread the entire article, inserting the keywords where they naturally fit

This will keep the articles you write of a high quality, while still making sure that you are including the keywords in the content. I learned this trick from some very successful article marketers, and it turns out a lot of the best bloggers do this.

Okay, on to getting more backlinks.

What you want to do after this post is basically the same thing you did with the last post (this article). The only difference is that you want to widen your available directories. Look for article directories with high PR that offer at least 2 anchored “dofollow” backlinks back to your site. If you are not sure if the site offers dofollow or nofollow links, go to a couple of the articles within the directories and check the links. The SEO for Firefox toolbar has a button you can click that will highlight all of the nofollow links on a page.

Right now, your site is still young, so you should be focusing on getting backlinks from articles pretty much exclusively. We want to build links slowly at this point, so as to begin to establish some authority with Google, without taking a chance that something might look a little fishy. Stay away from “blogroll” exchanges for the first 30 days, unless they are with smaller sites. A blogroll link from a big site can cause you to go from 0-50 or 100 or 1,000 links over night. That can actually hurt a new site. Be patient.

Here is what we are looking for with this site. You started the site with an introductory post. You followed that up with a post that focused on your main site keyword. Then you promoted that article (and your site’s home page). Next, you posted an article based on one of your cousin keywords and promoted it (current lesson).

Your next task is to repeat these steps for another article for your main keyword and another for a cousin keyword. This will be followed by another post for your main keyword, and another for a cousin. Keep doing this until you run out of cousins. Then we are going to let the site age a little and see how we are doing in preparation for the next phase.

Well, that’s about it for this article. We will discuss additional link building strategies that you will be using to promote your site and articles in our next installment. Until then, focus, write, and promote.

Remember, if you want better lessons than these, AND in video format, together with the tools I use for keyword research and a lot of my backlinks, you can get it all >>HERE<<