Is SEO for me?

I'm 20 and just had some general questions and would like to get some opinions on whether or not I should continue. SEO is really a secondary thing for me and I enjoy my career in IT Security as well as the pretty good pay, however, the money people were talking about bringing in with SEO was just too hard to bypass.

That being said, I found crashed's challenge on this site and went ahead and followed it. I set up my blog and I've picked a niche in IT. I provide a lot of local services for clients and figured it'd be a good idea to start writing some ideas on how to solve their own PCs across the globe instead of just locally. I've done some good backlinking (I believe) on yahoo answers, and maybe 2-3 IT support forums. I have around 100-120 answers on yahoo with my blog in the sources and over 300 posts in one IT forum (when I edited my signature, it updated all of my posts), and about 20 on another forum.

Since I've started manual backlinking, I've been getting about 120-130 UVs a day. About 30 clicks so far since I've set it up on July 21st, but almost a month later I haven't earned anything.

I'm wondering if I should just buy scrapebox and see some good results or should I just leave it alone. I see a lot of topics in the "making money" thread about lieing to people and responding to emails and trying to convince people, etc. Not really my thing. I'm more interested in writing good content and getting hits for it. I'd say my keyword research is about 50/50 and I haven't fully put everything into it but I definitely know my content is good.

Should I just go the white hat method and just do good keyword research and keep posting my unique contents? I've been posting 1 post a day and currently have 19 posts with 5 more scheduled up until next Friday. My ultimate goal is posting good content and keyword research (if thats what its going to take) and not going out looking for people or sites to lie to.

Any of you started this off as secondary and only doing it a few hours a day and find that your time spent increasing ways to make profit is becoming more and more?

I'm not trolling or anything, just getting advice. My first source of income has much more potential being that it's my primary and a great career, so SEO is just something I wanted to take a stab at but def not interested in investing 5-6 hours a day with it, despite the income.

Just keep at your current site/s and see what happens, if they eventually take off then invest any money made into your venture and eventually you might see some results.

Well,

Actually, there is this one thing i've learned here.

I started like you a year ago with all those questions about SEO and its magic.

But, actually SEO is worthless ! Doesn't worth a tiny single penny without its priceless twin concept : internet marketing !!

SEO is a mean to Internet Marketing but it isn't a end itself

So basically, you're traffic seems not bad, it seems targeted enough to make some sales.

To me, if you have under 1/1000 sales with targeted traffic, there is something wrong. You should have at least on sales each 10 days at the very least.


I don't know your product enough to tell you better statistic, it is just an opinion.

I'd suggest you to review your website, your offer, how you introduce it, study your traffic, what do they do on your website ? and so on

For exemple if you see that they have a look to your price grid and leave, obviously you may want to change something.


1 big point for you --> you take action
1 another point -> you've discovered the magic word SEO, keep digging more and more

Be patient, and keep doing what you are doing, you'll be succesful very soon!

GL

PS Last boring Tip : Play with Mass Traffic point of view AND Unique visitor point of view

You have a blog and you actually have the knowledge and skills to update it with knowledge that you personally know.

You can have a moneymaker in your hands.

BigMarcusStud said:

You have a blog and you actually have the knowledge and skills to update it with knowledge that you personally know.

You can have a moneymaker in your hands.

Click to expand...

Agreed, but I'm wondering if I need to do more heavy keyword searching or what's next in line to bring on more traffic. I'm doing pretty good with backlinking on Yahoo Answers and 2 forums, but I don't know if I should continue with just these two or leave them alone and go to another forum for backlinking. Forums seem pretty good since they come up in search result quite often.

abysse said:

Well,

Actually, there is this one thing i've learned here.

I started like you a year ago with all those questions about SEO and its magic.

But, actually SEO is worthless ! Doesn't worth a tiny single penny without its priceless twin concept : internet marketing !!

SEO is a mean to Internet Marketing but it isn't a end itself

So basically, you're traffic seems not bad, it seems targeted enough to make some sales.

To me, if you have under 1/1000 sales with targeted traffic, there is something wrong. You should have at least on sales each 10 days at the very least.


I don't know your product enough to tell you better statistic, it is just an opinion.

I'd suggest you to review your website, your offer, how you introduce it, study your traffic, what do they do on your website ? and so on

For exemple if you see that they have a look to your price grid and leave, obviously you may want to change something.


1 big point for you --> you take action
1 another point -> you've discovered the magic word SEO, keep digging more and more

Be patient, and keep doing what you are doing, you'll be succesful very soon!

GL

PS Last boring Tip : Play with Mass Traffic point of view AND Unique visitor point of view

Click to expand...

Thanks. I've looked at StatPressV and honestly, a lot of the traffic comes in normally goes through at least 5 pages of articles out of the 19. The audience I'm targeting is pretty much everyone because everyone can benefit off the information. Based off the calls I get and the questions I see in Yahoo Answers, people can save themselves a lot of time from going out and paying computer companies and just read the blog for tips. Out of like 120 unique visitors I had yesterday, I had 467 page views. I write my articles as if I'm talking to someone face to face, which I hope makes it much more interesting than trying to be too professional. Some of the titles are my keywords with low competition and high monthly searches (some are 3k, 6k, and even 16k with low competition). I personally think a lot of the article titles are very tempting too.

I've done some YouTube videos to demonstrate some of the things and wanted to go ahead with some screenshots, but after I seen 19 posts, I was thinking I may be doing something wrong.

Also, my blog is a separate site that I have from my local IT services site, so no prices are there. Just tips, advice, and guides. I personally wouldn't mind PMing anyone to give a link to my blog. I don't have to go out and find information to post on my blog being that I do this stuff very often.

hist0ry said:

Just keep at your current site/s and see what happens, if they eventually take off then invest any money made into your venture and eventually you might see some results.

Click to expand...

Thanks. Does it necessarily mean I'm doing something wrong, or just not giving it enough time? My traffic increase has been much better since I've started with Yahoo Answers.

Someone started reporting all of my answers until I used the privacy feature to block out my answers.

Thanks for all the replies, very informative. I haven't responded earlier because I haven't gotten my subscription email. Not sure why.

One thing that makes me a bit hesitant about going further is the fact that my information is SO beneficial, that I feel like I'm giving away free fixes and not getting anything in return, lol. I'm constantly reading here though ^_^. Regarding the "money making" thread, is there anything in there that's not about lieing or going out looking for people to trick? Wondering if I should be in the WF looking for more white hat methods.

I suggest that you do white hat first. If you do black hat, make sure to use buffer sites.

Write a Squidoo lens and a Hub! Then link your site to them. I would also continue doing Yahoo Answers and forum posting.

If I were you, I'd look for the most authoritative IT blogs. Apply to have a guest post written with a back link to your site. You get a high authority back link and you also get traffic.

Then I'd look for a niche by doing keyword research. Your traffic is not bad considering that it's a new site. But targeting a niche market may be better. Sorry I can't give any suggestions on the niche since I suck at IT.

Did you say you have been building links on only two forums and yahoo answers? Having a bunch of links from the same forums is going to be much less effective than having dozens of different forums. It is the number of links from different domains which really counts... along with the page rank (PR) of those domains and the page your link is on, do-follow vs. no-follow, etc not just the number of links when they are all from the same site.

About scrapebox... be careful... with the recent (more drastic than usual) changes to Google's algorithm (panda update)... scrapebox can be dangerous. You more than likely don't want to even blast to your main site at all but rather to web 2.0 properties.

Sorry if you mentioned it and I am just not seeing it, but how are you monetizing your site?

BigMarcusStud said:

I suggest that you do white hat first. If you do black hat, make sure to use buffer sites.

Write a Squidoo lens and a Hub! Then link your site to them. I would also continue doing Yahoo Answers and forum posting.

If I were you, I'd look for the most authoritative IT blogs. Apply to have a guest post written with a back link to your site. You get a high authority back link and you also get traffic.

Then I'd look for a niche by doing keyword research. Your traffic is not bad considering that it's a new site. But targeting a niche market may be better. Sorry I can't give any suggestions on the niche since I suck at IT.

Click to expand...

Thanks, it's ok. I'm glad to have read your response.

raybes said:

Did you say you have been building links on only two forums and yahoo answers? Having a bunch of links from the same forums is going to be much less effective than having dozens of different forums. It is the number of links from different domains which really counts... along with the page rank (PR) of those domains and the page your link is on, do-follow vs. no-follow, etc not just the number of links when they are all from the same site.

About scrapebox... be careful... with the recent (more drastic than usual) changes to Google's algorithm (panda update)... scrapebox can be dangerous. You more than likely don't want to even blast to your main site at all but rather to web 2.0 properties.

Sorry if you mentioned it and I am just not seeing it, but how are you monetizing your site?

Click to expand...

So far I have a 468x60 peerfly banner on top of my articles, a 125x125 maxbounty banner on the sidebar, another 125x125 adsense banner on the side of it, and my domain's banner under it (maybe one day someone will sign up and give me free 6 months). I have a click bank page with a few products as well as a downloads section with a CPA lead content locker.

The thing is too that if I don't do any backlinking on the same day, I probably won't reach 50 UVs. The minute I go on yahoo answers for example I'd get about 120-130 UVs a day. The forums that I post on are pretty active and they're PR5 and PR6 forums. My blog is a PR 2 right now.

Do you think it's possibly my keyword research that's causing the problem I'm having with getting traffic? One of the forums I couldn't even find my name by doing a yahoo search with the forum, but I got results from google.c

Scrapebox blast it mate ...

richieboy69 said:

Scrapebox blast it mate ...

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I hear you dude, lol. Manual backlinking like they say is "white hat" but takes toooooooooooooooooooo damn long. Gonna wait for pay period and take a shot with Scrapebox cautiously. =p

Haha I'm a newbie with scrapebox but if you want any basic advice, will be happy to help! Buffer websites looks interesting?

Thanks man. Should add me on AIM if you use it =p

Well as far as for a living, I don't plan to quit my career any time for SEO, but I just wanted to shoot for the extra side income.

How long did it take for you to earn your first $20 at least? And how much time do you put into it every day to maintain that monthly income?

forgot to mention I use All in One Adsense and YPN on wordpress to setup adsense easily as described.

raybes said:

Did you say you have been building links on only two forums and yahoo answers? Having a bunch of links from the same forums is going to be much less effective than having dozens of different forums. It is the number of links from different domains which really counts... along with the page rank (PR) of those domains and the page your link is on, do-follow vs. no-follow, etc not just the number of links when they are all from the same site.

About scrapebox... be careful... with the recent (more drastic than usual) changes to Google's algorithm (panda update)... scrapebox can be dangerous. You more than likely don't want to even blast to your main site at all but rather to web 2.0 properties.

Sorry if you mentioned it and I am just not seeing it, but how are you monetizing your site?

Click to expand...

I'm curious to know something though. One of the forums I post a lot of responses, I can't even find any of my posts if I Yahoo search the forum and thread, or forum and my username or signature. Is that a problem? Or should I just pay attention to Google's results? It appears that my backlinks aren't even showing up in Yahoo Site Explorer from that forum.

Wow, never mind. Signatures on the forums don't even show up unless you're viewing it as a member and not a guest.

I'm confused. I'll just go to my manual backlinking thread because now I'm confused as to where I should leave backlinks, since some show up in google/yahoo and some don't.

The good thing about SEO is that it can be outsourced if you have the right investment. But it's still a good idea to learn the ropes as you'll find a lot of the niches you enter you'll be able to dominate on your own given the right tools and knowledge.

Give it a go and see how you get on.

im not sure if yahoo answers backlinks help as its nofollow but im not 100% sure on that one, but it seems like you are doing a good job so far so keep at it as it seems you have a good mind for Internet marketing

Thanks! I've taken a break for quite awhile to study for another certification prior to eligibility for promotion, so I've been holding off on it quite a bit. Bought scrapebox but a little clueless even watching the usage guides. I know how to harvest, get proxies, etc, but finding dofllow blogs seems almost impossible for some reason.