The Profitmart Experiment

This tweaking has gone on long enough. I’m itching to get this Profitmart page out there.

I wrote some text for the homepage last night. You can check the site at workathomejobs4me if you’d like to see it. I managed to squeeze in most of my keywords. Hopefully I didn’t use the “dog training” keyword too much. Google will consider it keyword spamming if you overdo it.

I did a preliminary keyword analysis at webmaster-toolkit. Here are the results:

I did do a bit of editing that I didn’t mention yesterday. I added the main keywords to the meta description and meta keywords in the Profitmart site admin panel.

When I went back to fix the two suggested points I discovered a couple of things.

The built in rich text editor (that you edit your webpages with) doesn’t allow you to set text as a header! It does allow you to change the size of the text but setting something as a header is critical to SEO on your page. This is what the title text looks like in the html editor:

<P align=center><FONT color=#000099 size=5>Dog Training Solutions for All Dog
Breeds and Sizes</FONT></P>

This is what it should look like (note the difference H1 instead of P):

<H1 align=center>Dog Training Solutions for All Dog Breeds and Sizes</FONT></H1>

Now I don’t know if Google considers these equivalent but the SEO tools sure don’t. When I changed it and ran the analysis again it was good this time.

The “bold text” was another problem. When you make text “bold” in the editor it adds a <strong> tag around it. When I made the text bold and analyzed it again it didn’t recognize the <strong> text as bold. A bold tag looks like <b>. I did a bit of research and the consensus seems to be that Google considers these equivalent but Yahoo doesn’t. That’s enough for me to go through and change the <strong> tags to <b> tags manually. When I did that the analysis said everything was peachy.

Now on to the launch plan.

What’s the best strategy here? There are a number of approaches I could take.

• Pay Per Click advertising. This is my mainstay with other promotions. There is a lot of competition so I will have to be clever about it. This will run up my costs as well and increase the amount that I will have to sell to make a profit. In my experience though it’s usually worth it. One issue here is that I will have to display my target page if I do this through Google and my site is called “workathomejobs4me.com”. Not the ideal name for a dog training site. I could do a subdomain like “dogtraining.workathomejobs4me.com” or an URL redirection service but then I would need to redirect it to the main page and I’m not sure Google will allow that either. They’re not keen on redirection. I’ll probably try it anyway.
• Pay Per Click other than Google. There are a lot of alternatives to Google including specialty ones that would deal with this niche. I don’t usually stray from the big “G” but this might be the time to start.
• Article marketing. Also known as “bum marketing”. This would involve writing (or re-writing) one or more articles and submitting them to article directories. This is a good way to get onto the first page of natural search listings. I could also use a redirected link here without a problem. Requires a bit of writing though …
• Social bookmarking. This is another great way to help get ahead in the natural search. Getting bookmarked on sites like “digg” and “del.icio.us” usually help boost you through the rankings. If I’m lucky I could get some of the followers of this blog to digg my site … did I say that out loud?
• Classified ads. There are a number of free and paid options here. Sometimes these show up in search engines too.
• A submission technique I heard about recently that is supposed to get you onto the first page of Google in as little as 6 minutes. I’ve been meaning to try that one out.
• Forum posting. Find some forums that deal with the niche. Hang around and do a few posts while trying not to sound like someone looking for sales. Put my site in the signature and / or recommend the site in a casual way. This is supposed to work pretty well for getting quick and easy sales. The problem is that you have to keep doing it. I’m too lazy for that.
• Ezine advertising. Haven’t tried this yet but it’s supposed to work pretty well. Would be another cost.
• I will definitely NOT be using safelists or traffic exchanges.
• Blog and ping. Hey - it worked for this blog. It’s getting away from promoting the Profitmart site directly though.
• Print advertising. Too expensive, too slow and I don’t have any experience with it.
• There are longer term strategies as well but I’ve only got 20 days left to turn a profit.

There are 3,380,000 search results for “dog training” in Google so getting ahead in the natural search might be tricky. I could choose a more targeted term like “dog obedience training” which has a mere 291,000 search results.

Alright there are the options what am I going to do? Let’s make plan. This is going to be a two pronged approach.

Prong I: Paid advertising

1. Focus on “dog obedience training” as my initial niche.
2. Register a domain name at an URL redirection service. This will redirect to my Profitmart site.
3. Set up a tracker on the Profitmart site (I already have one - I’ll do a post on this later on)
4. Make some minor changes to the site to ensure that I’m targeting “dog obedience training” exactly
5. Write a PPC ad to test the waters and get the ad up on Google with a limited budget.
6. Analyze and tweak the results

Prong II: Force my way into the natural search listings

1. While the ad is running, do some research and write a 400 word article on dog obedience training. Put a link to my site at the bottom.
2. Submit the article to article directories.
3. Test the “get in the top 10 in 6 minutes” technique
4. Social bookmark the hell out of my site.

That’s it for tonight. I’m bagged. See you tomorrow.

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mike
www.profitmuse.com
:8^)

This entry was posted on Friday, October 26th, 2007 at 11:42 pm and is filed under profitmart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.