If I started over in SEO today with $1200, how would I get started?

[crushedit]

Hey guys, I'm one of those rare guys who is doing SEO full time, nothing else, and making a very good living off it. I definitely paid my dues though, wasting a lot of money in the beginning and going through a million different frustrations.

Avoid my mistakes! Don't buy anything you don't need or doesn't work!

Here's what I would buy. I've tried most software out there, and these are the ones I would vouch for so far:

1) Article Marketing Robot (AMR) - $97/lifetime license
2) $100 in captchas from decaptcher
3) Scrapebox: $57 (discount through BHW)
4) TheBestSpinner: $84/year
5) Xrumer: $590
6) SEnuke: $129/mo (and soon LinkWheelBandit, which I believe could be much more powerful)
7) Backlink Energizer: $47
8) Tube Toolbox: $10/month
9) TweetAdder.com: $55

For a total price of $1169 startup, with the only recurring monthly fee being SEnuke (and hopefully soon LWB will replace that...)

I think the easiest way to get started in IM is providing SEO services for local customers. How do you find them? The best way is to set up a nice-looking domain targeting a local geographic niche, like "MinnesotaSEOservices.com" or "ScottsdaleSEOservices.com," something like that.

Start by using the tools I listed above (I will follow up with my method in future posts on this thread) and get your site to #1 for your geographic area + SEO and geographic area + SEO services. Even if you don't get a ton of traffic this way, you can at least point out to your customers that you got #1 for your local SEO phrase as proof you know what you're doing.

Create a set of simple videos about SEO either filming yourself or doing a Camtasia screen capture with your voice. Set up an autoresponder at Email Marketing Software, Autoresponder - GetResponse that sends this video series, 1 a day, to people who opt in ("Learn how I got to #1 on Google in 30 days for free!") at your website, Twitter account, or Youtube channel.

Now comes the awesome part. Set up tweetadder to start following people who are following your competitors on Twitter, or have SEO in their profile, or internet marketing, or are in your geographic region. Tweetadder will automatically unfollow anyone who doesn't follow you within 24, 48, or 72 hours. This will get your Twitter followers to a minimum of 100 in your first month.

Even more awesomeness: Use Tube Toolbox to send automated friend requests to people who are subscribed to your competitors, people in IM, people in your geographic region, or whatever your niche happens to be. In the friend request, tell them about your video series and urge them to subscribe to your channel because you will be releasing a ton of free exciting stuff about SEO and traffic generation. This should get you 50 subscribers minimum a month if your videos are good.

Start with a few rock solid clients who will pay you $250 to $1000/mo for SEO services. Tell them you will guarantee they'll get onto the first page Google within 90 days (believe me, you will have plenty of time to figure out how to get there.) Put in the contract that you will give them a refund after 90 days for any keywords they aren't on Page 1 for. If you are going for geographic keywords and use the SEO tools I listed above the right way, you WILL get to first page for all of them.

Don't sign too many customers at once or you will get overwhelmed. If you think people are into your SEO services when you're offering them, just wait and see how into them they get when you tell them you don't have any openings for new clients due to overwhelming customer response. Make sure you follow up with them regularly though and if you're feeling gutsy, go ahead and sign them anyway.

The key is to get your IM income to at least $1000 to $2000/mo so you have money to invest in new software. SEnuke alone is going to be a painful monthly expense at $129/mo, plus you will soon have to invest in proxies, have a budget to buy expiring high PR domains, VPS/dedicated servers, and a million other things.

I'll keep posting on here with my comments on how I use the above tools. Note there are no affiliate links here, I'm new on this forum and appreciate the high level of content so I want to contribute some.

CrushedIt
p.s. If you can't wait to hear more, send me a PM and I can give you some more tips.

p.p.s. If you found this thread helped you in some way, I appreciate your Thanks!

[mitoshthewarrior]

Originally Posted by crushedit

Hey guys, I'm one of those rare guys who is doing SEO full time, nothing else, and making a very good living off it. I definitely paid my dues though, wasting a lot of money in the beginning and going through a million different frustrations.

You can get TBS for 47/Y if you look hard enough. Any toolbox is gimped without Market Samurai. I use a good part of what you have there, I haven't got into xRumer though, been on the fence about using it myself. I do some local SEO for clients, just finished up a really tough one for a friend.

[crushedit]

Nice--don't suppose you could share that magic $47 link with us could you?

Or PM me with it.. if you feel a sudden wave of altruism.

I do about 5,000 to 10,000 spins a day with TBS, so sometimes it chokes. I would buy another couple licenses for $94 if it meant it wouldn't choke on me.

CrushedIt

[Criss Cooper]

Originally Posted by mitoshthewarrior

Any toolbox is gimped without Market Samurai.

Do you find this still to be true even with the new changes to Yahoo's API?

[mailey]

Is it possible for one person to do all the given the long list of tools listed?

[den1231]

Well, that's worth expensive, but it is one of the best way to get visitors and get a page rank in google, yahoo, msn and other search engines. I think there's more plan wherein you will spend an affordable prize.

[mitoshthewarrior]

Originally Posted by RememberTheFallen

Do you find this still to be true even with the new changes to Yahoo's API?

Yes, they now use MagesticSEO as a source as well. Market Samurai adapts very quickly to changes.

[peter gibson]

Originally Posted by mitoshthewarrior

Yes, they now use MagesticSEO as a source as well. Market Samurai adapts very quickly to changes.

I LOVE Market Samurai and it's integral to my research. But I gotta say lately they've really dropped the ball, on many levels. They were just hijacked (servers) and it took quite a time for a proper fix. On top of that their PR during that crisis was abysmal.

Basically they were throwing up ambiguous blog posts saying "it's gonna be fixed soon" and answering forum gripes with what seemed to be a copy/paste response. Add to that it took almost 2 weeks for an actual fix for their problem. And the complaints on their forum were long and serious by then. By paid members of course.

Since then they've done what I consider the stupidest thing in brand authority I've seen in a while, they deleted their forum, stating it was being reworked and upgraded. I know the folks at MS so I know that's actually what they are doing, but by the same token - reworking the forum so soon after a crisis has to be the dumbest PR move in the history of dumb PR moves. There were still tons of folks posting there that needed answers for their skewed results. Just hope they contacted their paid members with email answers.

Anyways, a bit of an MS rant here, but only because I really love the samurai stuff. They are good people and the software has been killing for years. I really hope their switch to Majestic doesn't kill the accuracy of that software. So far the results I'm getting since they switched HAVE been off and my data doesn't match with the search engines, but from my understanding they'll add an option to switch between results from Majestic and Yahoo for as long as site explorer stays up.

My fingers are crossed. Doing manually what MS does for me in seconds is a bloody waste of time.

[crushedit]

Originally Posted by mailey

Is it possible for one person to do all the given the long list of tools listed?

Yes, absolutely--just get your workflow going right. Of course the most time-consuming thing is creating all those spun articles to submit to SEnuke and AMR, but I have an automated method that creates hundreds of submissions with just a few minutes of work.

Which of these are you using now? How are your results?

CrushedIt

[Sarah_Lyle]

Quite right Peter! For the past month MS has been awful and even now with the update my results especially in SEO competition are really bizarre, I don't know what to believe anymore. I am doubtful the Majestic was such a good move, as I've seen no improvements so far.

[junilerick]

Thanks for the very detailed and inspirational post. Wish I could afford all those tools at the moment.. Seriously considering scrapebox, which seems to be the must-have tool these days, although I'm rather unfamiliar with what it does exactly.