Karlonia.com

Earlier today I was doing some keyword research on people phone number searches and noticed that there are still many opportunities for savvy marketers to write articles and get ranked in the search engines for products and services related to this niche. Note that if you are actually here to do a reverse phone directory lookup and not for SEO lessons, you can run your search from the box below or click on the banner to do your search from the main site.

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We had another nice jump in traffic this week, which included both search and referrer sources of traffic. My strategy of targeting “problem + solution” types of keywords (for example, how to fix X, where to buy X, etc.) seems to be paying off, at least in terms of the traffic. My Xbox page has done particularly well with 242 unique visits, edging out even the popular cell phone page which had 240. It remains to be seen whether or not this traffic will convert well; I have been holding off on checking my Clickbank account until I have a large enough sample size of monetized pages and targeted traffic, after which I can start crunching some actionable numbers.

Meanwhile, on the referring site portion of the traffic, an interesting event occurred near the end of the week when one of my relatively obscure pages on nsima in Malawi suddenly received 200 unique hits, almost all of which arrived on a single day. At first I thought that someone had submitted the page to StumbleUpon, but after further investigation I tracked down the referrer to Guardian.co.uk, a major newspaper site from the UK. The idea that a major news organization such as this had linked to me of its own accord sent my heart racing as I pieced together the correct URL from Google Analytics and pasted it into the address bar. It turns out that the news was not quite as good as I hoped, but still favorable nonetheless.

Apparently a commenter under the username of “lukethedrifter” had posted a link to my page as a reference source on one of the Guardian’s blog articles about staple foods from sub-Saharan Africa. The fact that I managed to receive 200 hits just from a link in the comment section surprised me somewhat. I almost never see this much traffic from a single blog comment even though I have many such links placed on other blogs. It seems that I may have discovered another source of backlinks and traffic — leaving comments on major media sites and using my pages as relevant reference sources. Before I embark on another commenting spree, however, let’s see what our searchers were looking for this week.

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In the business world, “piggyback marketing” is a strategy in which one company agrees to allow distribution or advertising of a second company’s products or services free of charge in a type of partnership arrangement. The advantage to the first company is that it benefits from the added content and from being able to offer an expanded range of complementary products or services to its customers. The advantage to the second company is obvious — it can use the (usually larger) distribution network of the first company to gain new leads, sales, or subscribers it otherwise would not have been able to reach.

This piggybacking principle can also be applied to the SEO efforts of webmasters and bloggers like me who need more backlinks in order to have our pages ranked relatively well in the search engines. It works by acquiring links to your site from established authority sites that have already built up trust and are having their content and links indexed regularly.

I picked up on this technique a few months ago when I noticed that a few of my pages had attracted some natural backlinks from forums and Q&A (question and answer) types of sites where people had posted a link to my page as a reference source. Interestingly, these happen to be the same pages where I am now receiving some of my best search engine rankings.

Upon investigating further and drawing from my experience, I noticed that some of these authority sites were actually competing with my pages in the search results for various keywords. I also see them pop up fairly frequently whenever I do keyword research to determine the viability of a keyword — that is, looking at the overall search volume and the number of competing pages for the exact match phrase.

Although one might expect that getting backlinks from them would be difficult (and perhaps expensive, if you decide to go that route), this is not necessarily the case. Many such sites have some type of free registration system and will allow you to post your own links as long as you’re willing to contribute to the site’s content and are not too spammy about it. For the remainder of this article, I will summarize some of these potential backlink sources below so that you can get some ideas about what is possible.

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Traffic from the search engines came back up again last week, thanks in part to more efficient keyword targeting on recently published pages. More importantly, I am actually writing articles around keywords that can be readily linked with a relevant Clickbank product, giving me a much greater chance of effectively monetizing the traffic.

Meanwhile, I am also doing research into various CPA (Cost Per Acquisition) offers and networks. I have been reading reports about people making big money by promoting simple CPA offers like zip or email submits and sending targeted traffic to them via PPC services such as Google AdWords. Depending on the niche, I may be able to do something similar but with organic traffic instead of PPC. This will take some good keyword targeting and market research, but if I can pull it off, the revenue will be almost pure profit because I will not have to pay for the traffic.

Before I return to my research, however, I will review some of the queries that came in last week from our inquisitive searchers.

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Search traffic dropped off significantly this week, beginning on Thanksgiving day and remaining relatively low through the weekend. This is following the same pattern that I noticed last year; traffic is slowest during the holiday season but rebounds after the start of the new year.

Meanwhile, I am trying to focus my efforts on producing more keyword-targeted “money pages” that can actually generate sales or leads in addition to providing useful information. Income from this site is still pitifully low compared to the amount of content that I have, and I am keen to free up more time and money that can be used to expand my operations. My situation has reached the point where I really need to start outsourcing some of my most time-consuming activities, but I want to have enough cash flow in place to justify the additional expenses.

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Although the week’s search traffic levels have not changed much, I managed to get a nice boost of traffic from StumbleUpon when my post on redundant words and phrases was submitted by jpearce01 and received four positive votes. Meanwhile, yesterday I managed to discover a plethora of Xbox-related keywords that show good potential for SEO and affiliate marketing. The popularity of console gaming and related issues is driving lots of traffic through the search engines as expected, but I was surprised at how many niche keywords in this genre still have very few competing pages listed. I wound up compiling such a long list of juicy keywords that I will probably not be able to cover them all with posts here without turning this site into some sort of gaming blog. Therefore, I will probably save most of these for one of my upcoming Blogger mini-projects.

This week’s sample of keywords is as follows:

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This was another ho-hum week for traffic, although I am starting to become more active with Entrecard again. I still need to figure out a way to speed up my keyword research and article writing so that I have more time for gaining backlinks and pursuing other revenue streams; progress in this regard is unacceptably slow. On the bright side, I have been doing more research on trend marketing and how to set up quick Blogspot blogs monetized with AdSense. Some of the tips found in Project Quick Cash are showing promise, especially if I use my accumulated SEO knowledge to speed up the process. Meanwhile, here are some more questions from our curious searchers:

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Today I received a nice little tip from one of my SEO-oriented email newsletters about an informative question-and-answer dialogue that took place on October 22 over at Google Webmaster Help. In this session, Matt Cutts and a few other important figures who work for Google answered questions from people in the webmaster community via live chat. Most of these questions pertained to search engine optimization issues, some of which have been the subject of much debate.

Although Google’s staff did not directly answer all of the questions (which is not surprising because the company is known for vagueness and lack of transparency), there were a few persistent myths debunked along with some additional nuggets of information that one can reasonably infer from the general tone of the answers provided. Since the full text of the conversation is rather long, I have summarized the most useful answers in bullet point format below for those of you who do not want to read through it all.

1. On site age and length of domain registration: Matt Cutts significantly downplayed this as a factor in the rankings, even saying that it doesn’t matter in the majority of cases. Google did not rule it out as a factor completely, however.
2. On submitting your site to directories: Google acknowledges that this suggestion was removed from the Webmaster Guidelines, but says that they have NOT changed the way that links from directories are weighted.

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Overall traffic did not change much last week, but I am beginning to see an increase in the number of article pages receiving visits from search engines and other sites. According to Google Analytics, there were 312 different pages on the site that received traffic with a total of 5,248 page views. Meanwhile, the best news of the week was that I received my first AdSense check from this site’s earnings, which I will probably be posting about in a few days after I do the image scan. I am also beginning to broaden my range of available affiliate programs, which should increase future monetization potential. Meanwhile, here is our usual eclectic mix of questions from the search engines.

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After several weeks of consistent increases, overall traffic actually dropped off slightly last week. Halloween (October 31) was a particularly slow day, with a noticeable decline in search traffic volume across the board. Google seems to have reshuffled the rankings of my pages again, as it has been prone to do every few months. Rankings for some pages have increased, most notably on quote-related pages and my Fair Tax page, which is now at #1 for its main keyword.

At the same time, however, Google has dropped rankings on several other pages, causing a slight recession in my overall statistics. I can probably counteract this by gaining more backlinks to the low traffic pages and getting them re-crawled by the various search engine spiders. However, blog commenting, my most reliable method of getting backlinks, is very time consuming and the motivation for it is increasingly difficult to obtain with so many other things I need to be doing to supplement the revenue from this site until it reaches full-time income status.

Nevertheless, it is still possible to have some occasional fun after doing the keyword research and then watching the search queries and comments come in with so many stories about how people are dropping their cell phones in various liquids and freaking out over frogs. The other long tail queries can be interesting to look at too, such as those in this week’s sample below.

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Search engine traffic continues to increase, both in terms of unique visits and overall share, thanks in part to interest in Microsoft Office Word issues. Renewed interest in the national sales tax idea, possibly related to the upcoming presidential election, is also helping to drive higher traffic to a few of my older pages.

Meanwhile, people are continuing to find creative ways of dropping their cell phones in the water and then worrying about how to fix them. My wet cell phone repair page now has 14 comments, some of which are pretty funny to read. It seems that there is a certain segment of the population that considers cell phones to be an essential part of civilization and cannot imagine what life would be like without them. If I could find a relevant affiliate product or even create my own e-book on cell phone repair, I could probably make a few sales from it after I get the pages set up properly. But before I research this particular issue, we can take a look at some of the other topics that our searchers are asking about before arriving at this site.

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