Momentum is one of the hardest things to gain in SEM if you’re starting with nothing. You have no sister sites to uplink with, nor any other networks you can drop a link on. You’re forced to do everything manually (or pay someone else obviously) without any head start what so ever. How exactly should [...]

Momentum is one of the hardest things to gain in SEM if you’re starting with nothing. You have no sister sites to uplink with, nor any other networks you can drop a link on. You’re forced to do everything manually (or pay someone else obviously) without any head start what so ever. How exactly should you get started? What should your first move be? How can you keep it going?

There’s a few things you can do. Let’s start on the free (and legal) side.

• Submit your site to Social Bookmarking sites
• Submit your site to Directories.
• Find sites to request a link for, this takes a lot of time usually.
• Write or obtain a free tool to link spam with
• Spam sites yourself.
• Leave comments on blogs and/or forums.

Now on the slightly paid side, I highly highly suggest the following:

• Social Bookmarking submissions (Personally I use Red_Virus) Price: 100 submits / ~$25
• Directory Submissions (same) Price: 500 submits/~$35 – 1000 submits/~$65
• Blog Commenting
• Purchasing Stumbles
• Purchasing Diggs
• etc…

Each of these can help you get started on your momentum, but let’s talk about how this will help you in the future once you start rollin’ down the hill.

The whole goal of getting the momentum going is that when you have your first site that achieves what I call “eagle eye” is when you start spreading it out. Eagle eye is a term that I use when I can go to a site or blog, post some content and in about 30 minutes it’s already updated on the Google index. The term derived from the fact that Google watches your site like an eagle to his prey.

The best way to get a site started on it’s journey is to do the linking properly. Usually I drop a link to my new site from Stumble & Digg. That alone should get it indexed (main page) within 24 hours, and if you have a lot of dynamic pages make sure you have a sitemap configured to have it be respidered every day or every week. I have another theory that this will help for another reason, but we’ll get to that another day.

The linking should get you indexed, but now you need some good strong backlinks. Go out and find some places to leave comments. Make sure you don’t BS them … write a good constructive comment and leave your URL with your name as the anchor you want to rank for.

The main thing you need to do is set yourself goals and set a plan of attack for outranking your competition. Start with gauging what their typical increase in links is per day. If they get 150 links a month roughly and you have a base of 500 links right now and you’d like to catch them in 2 months, you need more than 800 links within those two months. Always get a goal is a tad bit out of reach so that you push yourself to excel above and beyond what you think you’ll achieve.

Setting yourself a goal for top 5 is great, but trying for top 5 and achieving 2nd place is a whole other ballgame. I know that personally I set myself a goal of increasing my profit per month by 20%. So far I’ve hit it every time, and some months even gotten 300% extra. It’s all about momentum. If done properly you’ll not only surprise yourself but push yourself higher than ever before. Always keep yourself focused on a goal and then don’t just try to meet it, but exceed it.

Always try to surprise yourself and hit goals you never hit before. That’s how you’ll get to the place you’re going, except much faster.

One of the concepts that I keep telling people when they talk to me is links aren’t everything. Don’t get me wrong though, links are a very important factor in ranking for terms. The main point that I try to stress (and Whitehat’s always stress this obviously) is that content is king. So I did [...]

One of the concepts that I keep telling people when they talk to me is links aren’t everything. Don’t get me wrong though, links are a very important factor in ranking for terms. The main point that I try to stress (and Whitehat’s always stress this obviously) is that content is king. So I did a few case studies and did some attempts. Let’s go over some figures and see what really makes sense based on a case study I did this month. I ran 5 spam blogs with not one ounce of hand written content, and added 30 links to each. The content is all generated via keyword scraping & reposting using EPN (eBay partner network). I also had a friend do a regular phpBay site. At the end of the month he made $300 and a few hours of work (including domain, redesign, content, and linking). He paid $20 for social submissions & $8 for the domain, I paid $8 per domain for 5 domains for $40, but made $600 by the end of the month from 1 hour worth of work.

I could have made almost the same using one domain and just using orphaned sub-domains, but I decided separate domains were a good way to study it. So, what was the difference and how did I make more? Was it the links? Was it the multiple sites? Or was it the fact that for every page of content on his phpBay site I had 1000 pages of my own?

It was a mix of everything, but links was not one of the factors. I was raking in on longtails across 150-300 different unique terms every day while he got 100-150 uniques a day from one term (and that’s not bad for only $20 worth of social submissions!). He targeted one niche, I targeted thousands. As important as content is, so is redundancy and dedication. One main factor that plays a big role in long term blackhat income with this method is the fact that all 5 of my sites were sandboxed down and almost banned after the month, but are still getting traffic today. But now instead of each site getting 150-300 a piece, they get that combined. It’s still not bad, but it’s not near the same amount of income anymore.

The life expectancy of his phpBay site is certainly longer than my little 5 site network, however if I did the same amount of time put into mine as he did, I would have actually had 25 sites by the time his 1 was finished – and earned roughly $3000 (theoretically). Just keep in mind that your content and terms are what makes the income, not necessarily just links.

Going to do another few case studies over the next two or three weeks, I’ll post the results to see what you all think. As always the Request a Post page is up, leave a comment if you have any requests or questions regarding something I haven’t mentioned yet.