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Secret To Get On The First Page Of Google

Whew… that’s what I’ve been doing all morning. Moving snow around, a.k.a. shovelling. Here in NJ, we got about 15″ over the past 24 hours. Well, to look at it as an optimist, I can say that it was a ‘great workout’. Who needs the gym when you can shovel snow!

I mentioned in my last entry about Codrut’s book “Niche Site Confessions Revealed”. I finally read through the entire thing. It’s a quick read. But you may have to go through it a couple of times to pick out the golden nuggets.

Here’s what I think. Codrut’s not a big name ‘guru’. But, he’s got Phil Wiley to talk about his ‘minisite’ strategies. There are two other people interviewed in the book who have had success with building niche sites and earning steady monthly incomes from them. But even if only the interview with Phil was all there is, that’s worth the price of the book.

Okay, for those of you who haven’t heard of Phil Wiley, then head over to his marketing forum. It’s one of the most popular ones among internet marketers. Phil has been making his living online for a few years now. Previously, he wrote an ebook about building minisites that consists of 5-10 pages promoting affiliate products.

This strategy is very appealing to me because once the sites are built and get listed in the search engines, it’s practically hands-off. Most of the traffic will be coming from natural search engine results. That’s nice because it’s free.

I’m going to apply some of the strategies mentioned in “Niche Site Confessions Revealed” and build a few sites each month. The bulk of the work actually takes place before the sites are built. Keyword research and finding a viable market are key.

So far, I’ve built two new sites in January. I’m adding more pages each day. I’m working on getting incoming links from relevant sites as well. One of the sites has been completely spidered by Yahoo just yesterday. A quick check of the stats show about 650 hits from the Yahoo spider. I think it’s got about 100 pages so far. Not exactly a minisite. But I figure the more pages I have, the better chance of getting top listings in the search engines.

For that site, I did use the ‘blog and ping’ technique. It seems to work. Actually, it’s a ‘modified’ blog and ping technique. There’s a product out there that’s a bunch of videos teaching you how to do this. I didn’t buy this product, but really, there’s not much to it if you have some basic internet skills.

Here’s what you do. Set up a blog. For example, on Blogger.com. You can just host it on Blogger. You also need to have a ‘my Yahoo!‘ account. In your Yahoo account, you can set it up to pick up RSS feeds just like you can set up various news feeds. Then you pick up your blog feed and everytime you create a new entry, ping the Yahoo RSS feed. Yahoo will then spider your blog.

Here’s the key: in your blog, create a link to the webpage that you want spidered. So once Yahoo spiders your blog, the spider will follow all the links. It will find a new link that’s not indexed and say ‘Hmm…that’s a new link! Let’s follow that link and spider the page.’

It’s supposed to get your page indexed faster. Now, some proponents of the ‘blog and ping’ technique teach you to just create blogs solely for the purpose of getting pages indexed. I think this is a spam tactic. Personally, I think you should blog about something that’s interesting to a human reader first, and a spider second.

All right, I’ve gone off in a tangent. I’ll stop here.

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