Whitehat guy needs some new link building strategies

[omegax]

Hey guys.. i'm new in the neighborhood. This is my first post asking for assistance, so I figure I should introduce myself first.

I've grown an adsense centered website from the ground up for about the past three years. I'm making decent money now, but I've plateaued in the past year and i'm having a hard time breaking that $100/day mark that I want so badly. I've done everything pretty much the white hat way just grinding quality content out for years, but now I feel like I can't break through without venturing out a little more. I have a ton of links to posts on my site, but my PR2 hasn't moved in years. My traffic is about 95% search driven, with little to no user loyalty.. people come in, find what they want, hopefully click something, and leave.

I'm not looking to go crazy and try to get my site banned from google, however I'm looking for some methods that are more grey-hat I suppose to build more links and raise my PR. I've been reading the forums quite a bit over the past few days, and I've heard of Scrapebox from my readings, is that a legit way of farming some links?

Are there other factors that affect your PR as much as links? Someone mentioned recently that your site stats can effect your PR but I've had a hard time grasping that.

Any other thoughts or suggestions would be helpful.

-omegax-

 

[jdwurn]

I would be careful if you are already making decent money on a site. Maybe you should make a new site to experiment with. Once you have a formula that is working you can apply it to your older site.

Here are some relatively safe ideas:
directory submissions
blog commenting
depending on the niche you are in, there may be opportunities for guest blog postings.
article directories.
social bookmarks
you could try some link exchanges
web 2.0 sites
youtube
a few forum profiles
yahoo answers


stay away from scrapebox and xrummer unless you are pointing it at the pages that link to your site, rather than the site itself.

 

[lancis]

Dont touch your white hat site, 3 years of investment (although wasted ) still count. To break that $100/day mark fast you need to go black hat, grey-hat wouldn't help you much.

Buy 3-4 domains in your niche, make them legit by posting some articles, then link-wheel the shit out of them. Once they rank add more articles with backlink to your white hat site in the body. Make sure the articles with link stay on the main page of the sites.

 

[daveguy]

Try http://www.%3Cstrong%3Ehelpareporter%3C/strong%3E.com - it's a site where reporters post topics that they need sources on. Find articles in your niche - be a source for them - get links on major news sites. I've gotten legit PR 8 & 9's from that site - completly whitehat - and you don't even have to write anything! Most of the time they call you and interview you. You gotta be a legit expert most of the time though.... well as legit as you can look on the Internet ... if you catch my drift.

Oh and PR is not just links anymore. Way to hard to explain, but those that say it is are just reiterating information without doing any real case-studies.

 

[futurestic06]

I am interested. my small company can give you a better result. you can PM me if you really want to get helped.

 

[seodonn]

PM me, we have a team do all the White hat and gray hat SEO works by the way

 

[omegax]

Good stuff, there's a few things in here that I hadn't thought of before.

You guys are right, I'm not gonna risk anything on my current site. I started my first site in the google sandbox era when they were super ban-happy. I was too scared to touch any of it, and that's the mentality I've kept for many years. I've been tossing around new site ideas anyway, so I guess it's time to quit thinking about it and do it.

On the link-wheel strategy, would you suggest original content for them, or just copy some of the content I have and spin it? Will there be a penalty if the big G sees that they're all registered to the same company name?

 

[assphuck]

You should focus on retention so that your traffic builds over time and becomes less reliant on search engine traffic. Otherwise you are like a dog chasing his tail. Considering you put so much work into it, I would deal with the retention factors first and then improved backlink strategies. It does not sound like what you have developed is your typical MFA site and should be treated with greater care. Good luck

 

[Sophomoric]

It's best to change your perspective until black hat techniques ARE white hat, then get busy making money ; )

 

[DrEvil123]

Start chasing some additional keywords related to your site.

 

[markkislich]

Hey Guys, I'm new around here and I'm also a newbie at seo.
Can I just ask you a question here, as the system doesn't allow this a s a new thread...

I think I found a real niche:
very good exact matches, very little competition.

Question is this:

How do I monetize this properly?

Thanks a bunch for any feedback and advice,

Mark

 

[jibjabber]

You should focus on retention so that your traffic builds over time and becomes less reliant on search engine traffic. Otherwise you are like a dog chasing his tail. Considering you put so much work into it, I would deal with the retention factors first and then improved backlink strategies. It does not sound like what you have developed is your typical MFA site and should be treated with greater care. Good luck

I totally agree. If you've already got decent traffic, I'd focus more on retaining the traffic and finding other ways to monetize the traffic. If you haven't already, start working on building an e-mailing list that you can tap into for quick cash.

If you're open to investing a little in linkbuilding, consider running a promotion drawing where inbound links to the post, retweets, FB Shares, etc count an entries. It's a great way to generate a nice organic link structure in a totally white hat way.

 

[Gintoki]

Hey Guys, I'm new around here and I'm also a newbie at seo.
Can I just ask you a question here, as the system doesn't allow this a s a new thread...

I think I found a real niche:
very good exact matches, very little competition.

Question is this:

How do I monetize this properly?

Thanks a bunch for any feedback and advice,

Mark

Well, there are a lot of ways to monetize.... But first you will have to rank for you keyword(s) and/or drive traffic from social media. After that comes monetization. You can use google adsense, but only if your keywords has good CPC (cost per click). Anyway, I have found multiple horros storyes in these boards about people getting banned from adsense, so be careful with that. You can also search for a product related to your niche on clickbank, and promote it on your site. You can provide downloads on you site -> upload your stuff to a site that pays for every download (sharecash, fileice, uploadpay, etc.). One of the best methods in my opinion is content locking. You lock parts of you website, and the users must complete a survey to enter (you get paid after every completed survey). Here are some content locker sites: bee4biz, blamads (?), adscendmedia, and there are many others... If you have ~100$ you can also purchase Content Locker Pro here on the forums, with that, you don't have to worry about getting banne from your content locker site for tricking users... This is all I can think of right now.

 

[jibjabber]

Hey Guys, I'm new around here and I'm also a newbie at seo.
Can I just ask you a question here, as the system doesn't allow this a s a new thread...

I think I found a real niche:
very good exact matches, very little competition.

Question is this:

How do I monetize this properly?

Thanks a bunch for any feedback and advice,

Mark

The best way to monetize depends entirely on the niche. If you can find an CPA that is closely related, they typically tend to have the best eCPM/CPC, but they are also require more creativity than something like Adsense.

If you aren't already part of a good affiliate network, make sure you sign up for one that is big and reputable. Nothing sucks more than generating a ton of sales, then not getting paid out (Adsense/Amazon are also guilty, but we usually know that is risk depending on promotion method).

 

[omegax]

I totally agree. If you've already got decent traffic, I'd focus more on retaining the traffic and finding other ways to monetize the traffic. If you haven't already, start working on building an e-mailing list that you can tap into for quick cash.

If you're open to investing a little in linkbuilding, consider running a promotion drawing where inbound links to the post, retweets, FB Shares, etc count an entries. It's a great way to generate a nice organic link structure in a totally white hat way.

I have tried a lot of retention methods.. email lists, twitter, facebook, but the niche and the type of traffic I get from it doesn't really promote a lot of return visits.. they get the info they want and leave. I may have to re-visit the idea though and see what I can come up with. The tweets and shares promotion method sounds interesting.. I may have to throw that one around.

 

[omegax]

Hey Guys, I'm new around here and I'm also a newbie at seo.
Can I just ask you a question here, as the system doesn't allow this a s a new thread...

I think I found a real niche:
very good exact matches, very little competition.

Question is this:

How do I monetize this properly?

Thanks a bunch for any feedback and advice,

Mark

Like the other guys said basically, it depends on your niche. If it's quality content that you'll be pumping out, use adsense and other click campaigns. Infolinks is a good one you can run with adsense for content ads (the kind that highlight words for ads). I also use other smaller ad networks similar to adsense, like chitika. People will tell you that it's against the adsense TOS to run ads from other networks, but I don't agree. I've been running other network ads for years. The key is to not put them RIGHT next to your adsense ads, because the TOS says something specifically about ads that look exactly like adsense ads, making them to look identical. There are a lot of ways around this. I have also found that these other ads attract different types of clickers.. so they don't really steal from my adsense earnings from all of the tests I've done.

The key here is diversifying, and figuring out what works. If your traffic likes to buy things, go with Amazon and Clickbank type stuff. Even if it's just content and search traffic like I was talking about above, you may still be able to push some affiliate links on certain pages.

Test, test, and test some more. I'm constantly testing my traffic to see what they'll bite on. If something doesn't work, switch it up and try something else.

 

[jibjabber]

I have tried a lot of retention methods.. email lists, twitter, facebook, but the niche and the type of traffic I get from it doesn't really promote a lot of return visits.. they get the info they want and leave. I may have to re-visit the idea though and see what I can come up with. The tweets and shares promotion method sounds interesting.. I may have to throw that one around.

I totally hear you about "one time only" type traffic. Sometimes you have to go for a cross sell. What other things might these visitors be interested and/or have in common? It seems like the most successful affiliate marketers are able to cross sell products via demographic even when a direct lead or sell isn't possible.

 

[stevejones003]

White hat guy building links is a paradox. Get out of the color of hat thing unless you use those words to sell stuff to noobs.

 

[Top1position]

White hat guy connecting is a paradox. Get out of huge of hat aspect unless you use those conditions to provide items to noobs.

 

[super nuver]

Have you tried different ad positions. Different ad colors. Different ad sizes. Different site configurations. Different site colors. Different fonts. Different themes?

You might have reached saturation in your niche so you need to work on better conversions and try for more traffic after conversions increases.

The content locking might work. Try everything geared towards more conversions at this point. Then go for more backlinks/traffic.

Good luck.