After watching the video, it looks to me like the hyphen in the domain name is not an issue, so it is a good time to run an experiment and see which type of site works best. I will be careful to build the sites on the same theme and point the same number of links at each site. I will also put the same amount of content on each site (not duplicate content), and I will link to both sites as Miami Skydiving and Skydiving Miami. If the site with the hyphen works for SEO, this will be very helpful when there are not good domain names available for building new sites in competitive keyword areas. I will be building these sites over the next few weeks and will start monitoring their progress. When I have some initial data I will post it here on Blog Consulting.

Obviously, no one is going to get real excited over $1.23, but the point is that you get to see the process at work. If you were able to get a site that produced enough traffic and enough clicks, you could end up with a pretty decent income stream. What if the site stays about the same and starts getting a steady $1 or $2 dollars a day? Is it worth having? It might be if it doesn’t take a lot of time to maintain. If the site made $45 dollars a month and only took about an hour to maintain every month, it might be worth having. It would take about a month and a half to cover the cost of the domain name and hosting, but then you would have 10 and half months of income or about $500 a year profit for about 10 hours of work. What if you had a hundred sites that produced a $500 dollar a year profit? As long as the 100 sites only needed an hour or less of work a month, then you could effectively make $50,000 a year for about 1000 hours of work. That would be about twenty hours a week, at about fifty dollars an hour. However, there are a lot of ifs, and most people are not willing to do the hard work that would be required to get something like this established. Well, there you go, that will end the Free Blog Consulting series of articles. I hope you find the information useful.

I always get a little wave of nostalgia when I see the default Wordpress theme on a brand new site. It is a whole new beginning and I am looking forward to see how the site ends up. What I will be doing on this site is installing some plugins and a new theme. I will then gather some Bio’s and pictures of individual members of the band to put on a page called Bio’s. Then I will add a video page and get a nice video site to work with, either YouTube or Vimeo. I have been using Vimeo primarily because they allow larger video files than YouTube. I will then suggest that the band starts a FaceBook page and I will connect the two so that every time an article is published it will also show up on Facebook. Since a band needs to really work the whole Social Network thing, I will also suggest a Twitter account and I will connect the blog to the Twitter Account so that when the band tweets it will show up on the blog. I will also install a nice little podcast player where the band can post some of their songs and people can either play them on the site or download them into their Ipod or Iphone. I will also be putting up some sort of calender to allow the band to post their schedule so that their fans can see where they are playing.

Underneath all of that, I will lay the SEO foundation for the site so that it will show up for keyword searches for bands in the Florida Keys, bands for hire in the Florida Keys, Florida Keys local bands, etc. Once that is done, the giants of Reachnor should be good to go! Check out the site at www.thebandreach.com and see how this Optimizer Man Adventure in SEO ended up.

As a temporary solution, we are going to take advantage of some short cuts available to us on the Internet. The first thing I will add are some on topic news feed videos. There is a service called The Voxant News Room that will provide you with an embed code for different news streams. They have a science and technology news feed that will work well on the Cool New Inventions site. I will create a page called Science and Technology and paste the embed code there. I will then temporarily set this new page as the default page for the site. Once I start writing articles I will change the front page back to showing the articles. I am also going to grab a video news feed about technology press releases and put it in the right sidebar. This news video service could actually provide you with a little income if you had a lot of people watch the videos. For most sites, you will never see any income from Voxant but it is a great page filler.

I am also going to take advantage of an RSS feed from another site about new inventions. I will take the RSS feed and put it in the left sidebar. With the videos and the RSS feed in place, I am providing useful information to anyone who visits the site. I am also able to place Google Adesnse ads on the site. I am allowed to have three different Google ads on one page. I am going to put a 468 x 60 image ad up in the right side of the header, a 300 x 250 text ad at the top of the right sidebar, and a 120 x 600 text ad at the top of the left sidebar. Take some time with your Adsense text ads to get them to color match the rest of your site. You want them to be visible but you don’t want them to look like they don’t belong there. Our hope is that visitors will click on the ads when they visit the site. You can’t ask people to click on the ads on your site as that is a violation of your agreement with Google, so you need to try and place your ads in such a way that people are drawn to them naturally. There is a lot of information on the Internet about how to work with Adsense, but if you get frustrated you might want to hire me for a little blog consulting on how the process works.

These additions to the site took about 20 minutes, and you can see that our new site has taken on the look of a well established site:

Now that there is some information on the site I can begin working on the initial link building. In a few weeks I will start working on the articles for the site. When I do I will write another article here about article marketing.

Let’s start by doing a little keyword research on the potential topic of our site. I was thinking that there might be some interest in a blog about green inventions since everyone is all about being green these days. I will use the Google Keyword tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal to find the information I am looking for to see if the site will be able to generate any traffic from the search engines.

Go to the Google keyword tool and type in the captcha code that you are presented with. Once you are in, there is a place on the upper right side of the page that says “previous interface”. I still use the previous interface because I am used to it. I am sure you can do the same thing with the new interface. Now type in the keyword phrase you want to search for, in my case green inventions. The result will look something like this: (click on the image to get a larger view)

We need to change a couple of settings on the Keyword tool to get more accurate information. First, you need to change the Match Type from broad to exact. Secondly, you need to gp to the choose columns to hide/display and select Show Estimated Avg. CPC. The result will look something like this: (click on the image to get a larger view)

Two things I can see right away from this information. First, 720 global visitors with no data available for local search volume means that there isn’t enough traffic. Second, the .05 average CPC means that the site will not generate any money from Google Adsense. So, I need to look for something that is a little more attractive. By scrolling down the page and looking at additional keywords to consider I might find a workable alternative. I would like a keyword phrase that gets good traffic and has a reasonable Average. CPC. Of course, that is what everyone wants. As I scroll down the page I find one keyword that I think we will work with. There are some other more attractive keywords but they already have a lot of competition and for the sake of this exercise I want to use a keyword that we can get ranked fairly simply. The keyword that I will use for this series of articles is “cool inventions”. Check it out on the keyword tool with the exact match and Avg. CPC still selected: (click on the image to get a larger view)

This information tells me that “cool inventions” gets 9900 searches a month in the United States (my local search) and that advertisers are bidding 1.73 to place their ads for that keyword phrase. Does that mean that I can get 9900 times $1.73 every month for my site? Wouldn’t that be great? Unfortunately, the reality is not even close. First, we have to be able to get our site ranked number 1 on Google. Coming in second or third will get some traffic but not as much. First position should get you about 40% of that 9900, or 3960 visitors a month. Of that number only about 2 % will actually click on an ad on your site, so you might get 80 clicks a month. You don’t get all of the $1.73 either. Google gets a bunch of it and not all of the ads on your site will be worth that much, so you might get about fifty cents per click on average. So, 80 clicks at fifty cents would get you about $40 dollars a month. There might be some affiliate marketing money that can be made for this keyword phrase but that will have to be seen. Normally, I would say that a $40 a month return is not really enough to justify the work and cost involved but for this series of articles it should be an interesting exercise. The next thing to do is check out the competition. We will do that in Part 2.

Then I spent about thirty minutes doing a little keyword research for the site. What I discovered was what I expected, there really isn’t any steady generic search engine traffic for this narrow of a keyword. The only keyword that was even close with any measurable traffic was “Florida keys spas” which gets about 1000 searches a month. Of course, that keyword already has quite a bit of competition and is really not all that practical to pursue. Our focus will be to figure out what people will be typing in to the search engines when they are looking for the services my client provides. This will require a little research by asking some people what they might type in and then building a keyword response for those searches. I am guessing people will type in things like “manicures in florida keys” or “pedicures in florida keys” or “body wrapping in florida keys”. Keyword research is made possible by a handy little tool that Google provides for people trying to figure out how to best use adwords. Fortunately, for those of us who work to get our sites to respond to the search engines the tool works just as well for us. You can find the tool at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. To use the tool, type in the keyword or keyword phrase you are looking for and Google will tell you how many times it gets searched for in a month. You can define and filter your searches to give you very detailed information.

One last little note, I mentioned in one of the previous articles in this series on the Blog Consulting site that I had made some changes in the code of the theme. This is pretty common in order to get a theme to work the way you want it to. If you are going to be tweaking the code on a theme or a plugin there is one thing you should always do first. That one thing is to make a copy of the code and paste it into Notepad. That way if you mess something up, you can just copy the original code back in and try something else. From project start to where we are now, we have nine hours and thirty minutes into the project, which leaves us thirty minutes to finish the last little content update and still be within the ten hours we estimated for this phase. Since we have covered all the information that I think will be helpful to you, this will be the end for this series of articles. I hope you find them useful.

In the post I wrote yesterday I talked about pointing a couple of links at the site in order to get the site indexed. This morning, Google had come through and the site is now indexed. Check it out:

That page 1 position 1 return won’t last through the day, but at least I know that Google knows where the site is. The client was happy to see the return as well, but I had to tell her it wouldn’t keep showing up there right away. I would expect, however, to be on page 1 and position 1 for “Florida Keys Facials” pretty quickly, maybe in the first six or eight weeks of the site. To complete this project I still need to do some keyword research which I will probably spend one hour on tomorrow. I will write an article about the process and include it in this series on blog consulting. That will leave me one hour to get the rest of content uploaded on the site when it comes in from the client.

This is the result that is returning today:

I also took a few minutes today and added a location page with Google maps to both of the clients locations, I added a contact page, and I did an initial about page. I spoke with the client, made sure she was good with the new look and gave her the specifics of what I would need for content on the front page (always keeping SEO in mind with keywords) as well as for the services pages that we have uploaded into the glider. Here is what the site looks like on day three:

I will spend time working on my other blog consulting projects until I receive the initial content from the client to add to the site.

Good content is one of the most important factors for a healthy blog. If you don’t write regular articles with some useful information in them, your blog will tend to be lethargic and not respond very well with the search engines.

Good links are developed mostly by a lot of hard work. There are a lot of shortcuts available, but they usually result in getting links that are subject to penalties from Google. One of the methods I use for link building is article marketing. Write some original articles on topics related to your blog and then publish them on various sites on the web. You can usually get at least two links back to your site every time the article is published. Using a service like Ezine makes the publishing process easy and you can often have one article published hundreds of times resulting in hundreds of links to your site.

Time is the one element that makes most people give up before they see their blog get really healthy. When I introduce the time element to my clients, they often think that things should happen much faster. Depending on how competitive a keyword is, the more time it takes to get ranked.