Mission Impossible? I wanna be on PAGE 1 for my keyword

[mookinman]

Hi everybody... I've not been around the WF for a while, because I've been busy with my t-shirt business, which has included developing a new online shop to sell t-shirts.

I'm now in a fantastic position where I no longer have to make the t-shirts. This means I can concentrate all of my time on developing and marketing my website, paying a third party (my friends' t-shirt print shop) to fulfil my orders (i.e make and post the t-shirts).

I'm already making enough money to pay my rent and bills, but now I want to send the site into overdrive. I've found a very cheap/good quality printing company to print 5,000 full colour A6 flyers which I'll personally distribute around my city (Birmingham UK), as part of a "launch campaign". So there's a little bit of offline advertising going on.

I've never seen any of the top ranking competiting sites advertised on TV (not that I watch much) or in the national press (again I don't read every magazine and newspaper, so I'm not sure).

What I really want to achieve seems pretty impossible to me, but here it is. I want to reach google page one for the search terms "funny t-shirts" or even "t-shirts". The competition is absolutely huge, I know, but I have the time and a fair amount of knowledge to really get stuck in and try to achieve this goal.

The site is built in wordpress using marketheme (which I've butchered heavily). I'm restricted in many ways, for example it only allows 1 payment gateway (paypal). But I chose wordress because of its' search engine friendliness.

Here is the plan I'm currently working to:

- Write & submit unique articles (2 or 3 per day) to ezine & articles base, with backlinks containing anchor text "funny t-shirts" and "t-shirts"
- Add new content to the site each day (since it's a wordpress blog, this is nice n easy) - I write anything from restaurant reviews to reviews of t-shirts I've just added, tv show reviews, whatever really - I just create content and put it up in the hope it draws in traffic and people see that there are t-shirts available from the site as well as the article.
- Add around 15 new designs to the site each week
- Setup autoresponder (not quite sure what plan of attack to use with that one just yet).
- Lots of on-page SEO (in-linking, keywords, header tags etc)
- Contacting blog owners and asking for links
- Commenting on blog posts around the net (could do with some strategy tips for this one!)
- Sign up to forums that interest me - local issues, guitar, comedy, food etc, use signature link - this one is really tricky and time consuming!

I don't want to pay for links, I want all my online marketing efforts to be as free, just taking up my time. I can put in 9-12 hours per day, 5 days per week (basically full time hours).

Can anyone offer any advice or tips? I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post a link to the site on here, and I'm pretty sure I'm not allowed to ask those of you who keep a blog to link to my site. But if anyone has similar experience of trying to achieve this type of thing, while up against so much competition, please pipe up!

[Steve Crooks]

Good luck with this.. The first thing I noticed is that nearly all the current top 10 for the phrase t shirts has thousands of backlinks coming into them. The best thing you can do is reverse engineer all your competitor's backlink strategy and seeing where they are getting their links from, then see if you can emulate that. Secondly, just make sure your site is better in terms of content and relevance to the phrase t shirts and eventually you will reap the rewards.

[MelissaChurch]

I think contacting blog owners and using paid advertising on humor blogs is going to be your best bet. I don't see forum marketing or article marketing being as effective in this market....but it's worth a shot! Good luck.

[mookinman]

Well, about 1 week later, I've found that I can get 500-800 visitors to my site per day just from posting a few links on Facebook. I've sold quite a lot of t-shirts from it so far!

[GuruGazette]

I can see funny t-shirts doing well on social networking sites actually. Try adding MySpace and others like it to your Facebook efforts.

As for ranking well in a really competitive market, it takes time and consistent effort. I've been working a couple of super competitive phrases since March and I'm currently bouncing around the 3rd - 5th page on Google, up from 7-10 a few weeks ago and rising incrementally. So it can happen, it just takes time and work

[4morereferrals]

I understand being on a budget and or wanting things for loswest cost or having more time than expendable income ...

However; your lost opportunity cost on a backlink building campaign using the methods your are trying to deploy ... are very HUGE.

Angelas packets might as well be free they are soo low cost.

Are you doing a test for a future WSO ?

Otherwise, I find the idea of limiting a backliniing strategy solely to spending hours and hours begging - pleading scrounging and searching for decent backlinks rather interesting. Is there a specific reason for this tactic?

I don't want to pay for links, I want all my online marketing efforts to be as free, just taking up my time. I can put in 9-12 hours per day, 5 days per week (basically full time hours).

[Pepper23]

Nothing is impossible, it is just that some things are harder than others. With enough Time and dedication you can get to page one.

Now it would be a lot harder to get result #1, but you could even do that in time.

Granted, you might need to fight to keep your positioning :P

[Daniel McGonagle]

If your competition has thousands of backlinks start with a good KW-rich domain name like:

tshirtshumor.net AVAILABLE tshirtshumor.org AVAILABLE
After that it's easy, no matter how many backlinks the other sites have

[Jenie0109]

That's a lot of work. But since you want to do it full time. Then good luck bro! Just keep your motivation intact

[mookinman]

Ok I'm now on page 3 on google.co.uk for my keyword "funny t-shirts" and I seem to be gaining rankings almost daily. Woo-hoo!

[Terry Kyle]

Hi David,

Interesting thread.

Did you put links on your own Facebook profile or somewhere else specifically?

Good luck!

[mookinman]

Hi Terry - I posted links on fan pages

[Jayson L]

How do you post on fan pages? This would more then likely work for my business as well. Any tips are appreciated!

[mookinman]

Simple - become a fan of a page, then post a link in the comments box. Not all fan pages allow links.

Try to find "hot" pages such as current crazes (tv shows, celebrities etc)

[Liam Hamer]

How is your ranking now?