Position 229 stinks. That is a drop of 226 positions. It is really not great considering keeping websites on page 1 of Google is what I get paid to do. What about Yahoo and Bing?

Number three on Yahoo and number one on Bing. So what happened to Google? Here is what I think happened. I had a little lull in business about two months ago so I took the time and spent it on my own badly neglected blog (it is like an electrician who never changes a light bulb because they are too busy fixing stuff for everyone else). I wrote new articles, updated the site, did some article marketing, commented on some peers blogs and in a very short time my links shot up from 2000 to 7000. They were all good links, but it was a little too many a little too fast. So, somewhere in the Google algorithm, Google says, “we better pull that site out and make sure it is legitimate”. Since all of the links were good, the site will come back in the near future. In the meantime, I have gotten real busy again (look for new Optimizer Man adventures with Structural Engineering Services, Florida Keys Homes for Sale, Skydiving in Florida, and Miami Skydiving), so it will give the site a chance to move back to page one. What does this mean to you? Don’t freak out if your site moves off of page 1 for a season. As long as you are using solid SEO practices it will find its way back.

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 also did a check on what the traffic to the site has been over the last week:

In eighteen days the site came from no where and moved to the number 1 Google return. It is very likely that this is temporary, but it is a good sign that over time the site can become the number one return for that search. Our hope from the beginning was to have the site be the number one return for the Google search cool inventions. The site has been showing up in position five for that search. but over time it should be able to work its way up to number one. What it is left for the Cool New Inventions site? We have to build links and add content. One of the ways we will build links is to use article marketing. For our article marketing campaign we will start by writing five articles over the next couple of months that we will distribute for publication on the Internet. I use a service for this provided by Distribute Your Articles. Once I write an article, I submit it to Distribute Your Articles, they check it out for any problems it might have, and they in turn submit the article to hundreds of sites around the Internet. As each of these sites publishes the article, our site gets two links. The potential is for each of these articles to produce hundreds of links for the site. What about duplicate content? I am careful not to post the articles I use for article marketing on my own sites, so any problems that might happen with duplicate content are not my problems. Duplicate content would be an issue for the sites who publish the articles to deal with, but it doesn’t seem to be an issue for those types of sites.

I will continue to add content to the site over the next couple of months to see if I can secure the number one spot on Google for all of our intended keywords. The process that we have followed is the process that many people try and use to make money on the Internet. If you can get the right keyword that pays enough money per click and develop a strong flow of traffic then you could potentially make some money. If you had a bunch of sites like that, you could potentially make a living. The people making the most money are the ones that are selling this information to people who are looking to make money. You, however, found the information for free here on Blog Consulting.

I started out by doing some extensive keyword research. I was looking for keywords that would generate some traffic, and also be within our reach in a short period of time. All of the major keyword phrases encompassing fish farms and fish farming are highly competitive and already well represented by websites with high page ranks. I eventually settled on a keyword phrase that received about 1000 exact requests on Google every month and that I believed we could compete in within a few months of getting started. The keyword phrase I selected was Aquaculture Tanks.

My next step was to purchase a suitable domain name and I found that www.aquaculturetanks.net was available, so we purchased it. I then hosted the website (we used Good News Domains for both purchasing the domain name and hosting) and installed WordPress. Since the old website would not be helpful in our online marketing strategies, we simply pointed the old domain name (in case people still used it from old literature, etc.) at the new site.

I added a theme that would allow us to build an attractive site and provide information about aquaculture farming and the services our client can provide. The theme that we are using is in effect a blog, but I set up the blog with a static front page which gives it the appearance of a more traditional website. Here is a look at the final product:

Here is a look at the Google ranking after one month:

Here is a look at the traffic generated over the last six months:

It is also showing up in position 9 on page 1 for a Google search of cool inventions:

These search results are temporary but they are providing us with a few visitors everyday. No one has actually clicked on an Adsense link on the site yet, but the site is still really new. I did post the first article on the site and made the post page the front page of the site. The temporary front page that was on the site, (which I wrote about in part 6 of this series) is now just a useful information filler page on the site. As we continue building links we should slowly see our traffic increase. The other thing that often happens to a new site like this is that it will spend some time in the Google sandbox. It is not uncommon for new sites to just disappear for a while from the search results. Sometimes it is for a few days, some times for a few week, sometimes for a few months, and then one day, its back. If your new site gets sandboxed, don’t worry. Take advantage of the time to write articles and build links so that when the site comes out of the sandbox it moves quickly forward in position on Google. Here is a snapshot of the traffic that the Cool New Inventions site received over the last week (the sites second week in existence):

Today (Thursday) the site has had 26 unique visitors. Not a landslide but a good start for a new site.

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.

On this site we have added a premium WordPress theme, then we added some affiliate links, we added five public domain articles about alternative energy stocks, and we added Google Adsense.  If you look at the site you can see that we take time to keep the sites attractive.  The Adsesne is carefully color coordinated to match the text and links on the rest of the site and the ads are placed carefully.  We added a stock market ticker to give a more professional feel to the site as well.  We want our content to be valuable, but the reality is that the best outcome for the site is that someone clicks on one of the Google ads or on one of the affiliate ads.  If the site doesn’t look professional, the chances are that people will just move away from the site without clicking anything.  This site presents well, and as we begin to see some traffic people should start to click on the ads.

A fairly normal click rate on Google is about 2 or 3 percent.  That means that if hundred people visit the site, two of them will click on an ad.  If the click is worth fifty cents or more than you can make a dollar for every hundred visitors.  If the site is only costing you one dollar a year, it doesn’t take long to break even.  It could take a while to get the first hundred visitors.  We will discuss how to start getting traffic in future articles on Blog Consulting.

Another strategy is to think about other things that people might search for to bring them to your site. For example, if someone needed help with their blog, they may not know to search for a blog consultant. They may however simply type in to a Google search “I need help with my blog”. In order to potentially capitalize on this, I wrote a series of articles called “I Need Help With My Blog”. If you were to do a Google search for that string of words today, this is what comes up:

This site shows up on Page 1 in position 10. Any time you can get your site as a page 1 return on Google it will increase your traffic flow. I am writing these articles called “How Do I Get Traffic to My Blog” with the same idea. A google search with these keywords gives the following result:

This return is currently in the middle of page 3. Over time there is the possibility that the position will improve. Each time we start a new series of articles it will be with the idea of attracting visitors to the site. This is a strategy you might want to consider for your own blog.