Exposed seo and internet marketing

They say you can’t buy your friends but you certainly can buy some fans for your site. Buying Facebook likes is something that can be done quickly and easily but should you do it for your site? Yes and no. I purchased some fans to see what would happen and here’s my results.

WHY WOULD YOU BUY FANS?

The big question is why? Obviously it’s better to have natural fans, people who find your content through whatever means and then become fans because they actually like it but that’s not always possible initially. The big reason to buy Facebook fans or Twitter followers is if you have a new site or are just starting out in the social networking arena for your site. People like to go with a crowd- nobody wants to be the first to do something. If people come to your site and see you already have a few hundred Twitter or Facebook followers, they will want to follow you too. Same with RSS, it’s not recommended to show your feedcount if it’s low but once you hit 100 or so, definitely put it on your site.

WHERE TO BUY FANS:

Now you’re probably wondering where can I buy Facebook or Twitter fans? If you frequent any of the webmaster forums like Digitalpoint, Warrior Forum or others there are frequently offers there. I used Fiverr, a site where people will do various tasks for $5. The advantages there was that it’s only $5 and there are actually many reviews of some sellers so I could find an appropriate seller.

Looking through the seller reviews I found someone willing to recommend my site to 5000 of their Facebook followers. A lot of the seller reviews mentioned that the people who fanned their sites were foreign based or other less desirable (to me) factors. I found someone who seemed like his followers would be relatively compatible with my site. $5 and a few days later, the likes started coming in.

MY RESULTS
I tried this with two of my sites. The first one is quite popular and although relatively new to Facebook, had a decent following. You can see those results above- note the bump in August of about 100 fans. Since that time the rate of new fans joining has increased but really this bump did nothing other than pad my stats a little bit. My second experiment was with an established site I purchased that did not have a Facebook presence. Here’s the chart:

I put up a post inviting the readers to become a fan of the site. After about a week with virtually no signups I decided to buy the fans to give it a little push. As you can see in the chart, within 2 days I got about 100 signups. Since that time the rate of new fans has been slow and steady- nothing major but still better than it was before I bought the likes.

CONCLUSION: SHOULD YOU BUY FANS?

In summary the new fans I purchased have not really interacted or recommended the site to others. They mostly just “liked” the site and then moved on. Looking at some of their profiles, I can see they have hundreds of “likes”, so my site is just one more on their list. The only reason you should buy followers is to make your site appear to be more established than it is. This is useful if you are just starting out or if you are prepping your site for a future sale. It’s a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy there; to get popular you should already look like you are popular. And buying fans can help you look popular.

You may have seen article spinners and content generators that take existing web content and twist the words around to create “new” content. Often these autoblogging products (which you may have paid quite a penny for) simply run your text through a series of foreign language translators and then back into English where it looks like a bizarrely written article with all sorts of weird phrases. It’s not meant for people to read but for the search engines. Typically I would advocate that you write strictly for humans and not use article spinners for search engine targeted content BUT I know a lot people do use these and here’s a free alternative.

A new Google Labs product called Google Scribe let’s you effectively do the same thing but totally free. What Scribe does is suggest the next word of your sentence as you type. You can see the results of my experiment below, I created two sentences using Google Scribe; the only words I type were the first two phrases “search engine optimization” and “google results” to steer the content slightly. I picked the first word it offered in my cases.

Search engine optimization is an important part of the products named in this section are primarily provided directly by the companies appearing or PR agencies which are solely responsible for the content of their press releases once per week for their annual meeting in San Francisco and then to their children and grandchildren of these two types of information that is not appropriate for all users of the catalogue should also be noted.

Google results for these two groups of subjects were studied in these experiments was to determine the effectiveness of their advertisements and determine which ads are effective and safe in their homes and their lives.

I’d say it worked ok. Scribe sort of took me on a rollercoaster of content, away from the subject I was originally writing about. I think that if I actually typed a few keywords as I go along, it would work better. Let me try that out right now:

Affiliate marketing is the most important thing in the world of making money online without spending anything on the internet. Effective ranking in search engines is the key to successfully implementing a website that makes you money. Earning commissions for every sale made through your affiliate link will be added to the amount of money that you can earn online with affiliate programs.

That worked slightly better. I typed the occasional keyword and selected more appropriate choices from the list. Obviously none of these auto-generated content sentences read like true human generated content but it is a quick easy, free way to generate unique keyword related content that can help you with SEO. That last paragraph took me about 2 minutes to create. It’s not truly automated, it’s almost like a hybrid, but it’s definitely unique content.

I’ve been using Kontera for the last few years as an additional revenue source on some of my sites. What Kontera provides is in-content links. I’m sure you’ve seen sites that use them or a similar service- generic words within your content will have a double underlined link. When you hover over those links a small javascript pop-up shows up in the same window with an ad, often a video ad. But after considering it for about a month, I’m dropping them from my site. Here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »

You can make money online with Google Adsense by writing less content. The key is having the right amount of content. Content is still king but sometimes it’s better to be the queen. Here’s a case study in which I am making money off a site with minimal content.

I came across a coupon for $1 .com’s at Godaddy (limit one). These coupons turn up once in a while and I never hesitate to buy a site because it’s almost impossible to not make your $1 back even with minimal content. At the very least I could sell the site for 20 times that based on a solid domain name alone. I quickly created the site in WordPress and set up the theme and the 15 pages I wanted for the site. I knew based on the subject of the site that 15 would cover all possible topics and I would go into detail on subtopics on each page.

I set up each page with the headings and page title so I had a basic framework for what I would be doing with the site. I threw some general keywords around in the sidebar and footer (things like “review”, “buy”, “where to buy”, etc). Then I wrote the content for the first page. I linked to it from some of my other sites and did a few directory and search engine submissions- very minimal link building. Then a few things came up with some of my other sites and I had no time/interest to complete the site. But something interestingly unexpected started to happen.
Read the rest of this entry »