Internet Marketing Magpies Anonymous » XFactor

Adsense 101 Bootcamp Week 2 – Are my Xfactor sites dead in the water?

Clare — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:52:13 +0000

This week in the Adsense 101 Bootcamp we moved onto keyword research and site structure. Steve did a great job of walking us through the keyword research from seed keywords through to the long tail and how to find the gold nugget keywords that would not only bring in money but also be relatively easy to rank for. He then showed us how to use those keywords to build a website structure.

My keyword tool of choice has always been Micro Niche Finder – but Steve uses Market Samurai. Now this piece of keyword research software has been around for a long time, and I have used a demo version before but never really gave it much attention. I decided to download the latest demo version so that I could follow Steve’s videos step by step – and boy have I had a revelation!

Market Samurai looks quite amazing – it has so many modules, from keyword research to SEO competition analysis to backlink reviews and promotional tools – oh and a rank checker.

So I plugged in some keywords and started to investigate the competition levels and numbers of daily searches. It’s really hard to find those gold nugget keywords!

Today I decided to feed in my Xfactor keywords… and now I wish that I hadn’t! Of the ten sites that I built based on MNF results let’s say only a handful of keywords are even worth trying to compete for and a couple of the sites appear to be dead in the water. Goes to show that you have to invest almost as much time into the keyword research as you do into building the sites.

So where do I go from here? I don’t really want to try and build backlinks to sites that are not worth trying to rank for – so I’ve dug up some fresh keywords for six of the ten sites and for now I’m going to just abandon the other four. I’ll concentrate on these six and then see what happens.

As I type this MS is running in the background processing keywords for the other domains I have lying around and I’ve come up with a few decent finds.

I want to test some things out in MS – like whether I should concentrate on SEOCTRs with low percentages and ignore the number of results, or whether I should limit the number of results too. I’ve picked a range of keywords to target and I’ll monitor them to help really whittle down the filters to find the easy to rank keywords for future sites and pages.

I think I’m going to raid my PayPal account again and invest in this software – it’s currently selling for $147 but if you sign up within six days of downloading the trial then it’s just $97 – which given the power of this tool looks like a bit of a steal!

Here’s the link if you’re interested in the free trial: http://www.marketsamurai.com/

Even if you’re not interested in the software the Keyword Research videos are definitely worth watching http://www.noblesamurai.com/dojo

Do you use Market Samurai? If you have any tips to share I’d love to hear them!

Xfactor update – one week on

Clare — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:06:12 +0000

Well my flurry of activity early on in the week on my Xfactor sites had to be relaced by some activity on my authority sites. Having said that I did get 5 sites live so I thought I’d have a look back over the week and see how they did.

Site 1 -

Static site
Published 05.02.10
EZA submissions – 3
Site now indexed
31 article views – no CTR
3 unique visitors
$0 adsense
Keywords in domain are ranking at number 12 in google.com and number 5 in google.co.uk – shame that I didn’t buy the keyword for the exact keyword I’m targetting!

Site 2 -

WP site
Published 05.02.10
EZA submissions – 2
Site now indexed
19 article views – 1 click
2 unique visitors
$0 adsense
Keywords in domain are ranking at number 1 in google.com and number in google.co.uk – again I couldn’t get the exact keyword phrase though

Site 3 -

WP site
Published 08.02.10
EZA submissions – 3
Site now indexed
46 article views – 0 clicks
1 article published by another site
2 unique visitors
$0 adsense
Keywords in domain are ranking at number 2 in google.com and number 14 in google.co.uk

Site 4 -

WP site
Published 08.02.10
EZA submissions – 3
Site now indexed
34 article views – 0 clicks
4 article published by another site
0 unique visitors
$0 adsense
Keywords in domain are ranking at number 4 in google.com and number 8 in google.co.uk – again no exact keyword

Site 5 -

WP site
Published 09.02.10
EZA submissions – 3
Site not yet indexed
335 article views – 6 clicks
2 article published by another site
7 unique visitors
$0 adsense
No keywords ranking yet

Four out of five sites being indexed isn’t bad off the back of three ezine articles and an RSS submission. The articles I wrote for site 5 were about Valentine’s Day so I think that is the reason behind the much higher volume of views. CTR is very low but I’m quite pleased by the number of articles that have been published by other sites. I’ve not see those kind of numbers for my other articles and I think this is because of the low key bio boxes and the quality of the articles.

I didn’t follow Xfactor to a tee in that I wrote my articles in a related niche rather than something completely different. I just think it looks odd to have an article about Valentine’s Day and then links to breadmaker website! I have made sure not to use my keyword in the main article though to prevent EZA becoming my competition when the sites finally start ranking!

Interestingly I set up two brand new wordpress sites as an experiment with another strategy and both have their homepages indexed despite no promotion other than submitted the RSS feed to feedagg.com. Both are ranked at number 1 in Google for the domain keywords which are the keywords I want to rank for – trust me though the competition for these will be minimal!

I hope to get Site 6 built this week. The images are all ready to go so it’s just a case of writing the first article for the site and then three more for Ezine. The product is a bit of an odd one though so I’m not too sure what to write about!

How did you get on in your online activities this week?

Xfactor Site 5 goes live and EZA articles published

Clare — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:40:53 +0000

I’m struggling at the moment with an awful cough which is presenting me sleeping. Since I was up so early this morning I thought I’d try and get another Xfactor site live before work. An hour and a half later and I have Site Number 5 live with two keyword posts published and three articles freshly written and submitted to EZA.

Yesterday I was quite surprised to see that EZA published all of my articles from Sunday and Monday morning. I’m a platinum member so the SLA is 48 hours; they turned the last few around in about 12!

Despite the new backlinks from EZA Google is still refusing to index the sites as yet so I’m going to need to rely on EZA for traffic for now.

I’ll just keep plugging away getting the other five sites uploaded and then go from there.

Xfactor sites 3 and 4 go live

Clare — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:44:55 +0000

Well today marks day four of my Adsense Xfactor journey and I have just published Sites 3 and 4.

I’ve submitted three articles for each of the sites to EZA and added the homepage content to each site. It’s taken just over four hours to get both sites up and running and the articles written and submitted. At that rate it could become a Saturday morning task to publish new sites each week.

I’m slightly moving away from John’s plan at this stage because you’re supposed to work on two sites for a whole week submitting articles to EZA. Because I found 10 sets of keywords on my keyword finding day I’ve decided to just repeat the Day 1 activities until all ten sites are up and running. Then I’ll go back and submit the other backlink building articles. I figured this way they have time to settle in and hopfully for Google to index them all.

Sites 1 and 2 are still waiting to be indexed but I hope EZA will publish the article set I submitted for them at some point tomorrow and then I should hopefully start seeing some traffic.

Getting started with the XFactor adsense strategy

Clare — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:42:04 +0000

I first heard about John’s Xfactor Adsense strategy last year but I’d spent so much money on ebooks and courses that I never actually took any action with that i decided I should skip it.

Fast forward to last week and some of my IM friends were talking about this great Adsense strategy that they thought was one worth investing some time and money in. Of course it was Xfactor strategy! This time I decided that since some trusted friends had recommended it I would take the plunge.

The eBook runs to just over 90 pages and let me say that I think it’s 90 plus pages of gold nuggets. It took me a few days to get through as I was quite busy but as soon as I’d read the last page I fired up Micro Niche Finder and was ready to take action.

After a few hours of keyword research I came up with ten keywords that I thought fitted the bill. I couldn’t buy the exact keyword domains so I took John’s advice and added some words to the end in order to secure the dotcoms. I’ve just invested my January Adsense income into twn new domains so let’s hope that it was a good investment!

On Friday afternoon I spent a few hours building the first site (Site Number 1) following John’s instructions to the letter. I don’t have any software for building HTML sites so I had to hand code it in NotePad. I added another $25 to my expenses buying some credits from a stock image site; I could have spent hours searching for some free images but the ones I saw look professional and that is what I’m going for here.

When the site was all built I suddenly realised that I couldn’t use my usual instant backlink building trick to get it indexed as static sites don’t have RSS feeds. I settled instead for tweeting the link (which has so far had no effect) and submitting the sitemap to Google.

On Saturday I decided that a WordPress theme was in order – my CMS of choice for all of my sites – so I spent about 4 hours learning how to code a WordPress Theme from scratch. It was hard work but at the end of it I have a theme that I think looks great, a better understanding of CSS and PHP, and I can now build a site and have the initial content up and running in less than half an hour. That’s how long it took to build Site Number 2 anyway!

This morning I set about writing articles to submit to Ezine Articles for backlinks. I managed to write each article in about 15 minutes so I’ve proved that if I put my mind to it article marketing isn’t really that hard to action. John suggests that you submit the articles purely for backlinks, but I’m sort of hoping that I’ll get some traffic that way too. We’ll see.

I’m off now to submit my first batch to ezine and then to start loading content into Site Number 3.

If you’re following the Xfactor strategy I’d love to hear how you are finding the action plan and whether you’ve had any success so far.

2010 is the year for taking action