How did my bet pop up on Google's home page? I smell a challenge.. ;)

Hey Warriors,

Im going to cut this long story short so here are the basics. I was talking to a friend of mine who is a marketing 'genius' (he says) because he's the VP of Marketing at his company.

He and I were talking and online marketing came up. I told him that I did a bit of SEO back in the days before Google started to ban people for everything. To sum up the rest of the conversation, he bet me I couldn't even get on Google's 2ND page for a topic of his choice.

His topic ended up being the cost of wedding flowers. He's dealing with wedding plans.

I didn't do anything innovative and this isn't bringing returns, yet. If I push this project though, I think it could.

Anyway, I did the same old techniques that alot of people do, took about an hour and then basically forgot about it.

I found a couple of days ago that I was on the 1st page of results.

So, here's the breakdown of what I did. Again, easy. You can do it today:

1. I went to Google Adwords Suggestion tool
2. I typed in "wedding flowers cost"
3. I saw that there were roughly 5,000 searches for this term.
4. I checked to see if that exact domain name was available. This is key as the domain name gets some weight added to it. Lucky for me, it was, since its kind of a useless product or company name.
5. I have an existing hosting account with GoDaddy, so I registered the domain name and added it as a hosted domain under my main account.
6. Since GoDaddy has a good wizard to install WordPress, I set up WordPress for the domain.
7. I downloaded a free theme that looked somewhat decent.
8. I grabbed a free stock photo with no usage restrictions and designed a quick header for the theme.
9. I headed over to EzineArticles and looked for some good articles.
This is the part where creativity can really help. I thought that most people who were looking for the cost of wedding flowers might be looking for a deal (nothing genius there), so I looked for articles in that vein and grabbed about 5-6.
10. It's important to try to find an article with your keyword in the TITLE or get as close to it as you can.
11. Post them to your WordPress blog. If you know how, you can stagger the dates so its more natural.
12. Add Google Analytics to your blog, log in to your GA account and start tracking. Google will run out and grab data.

That's it. It took about an hour and in maybe 2 days I am now in the number 8 spot on the home page of Google.

The other day, I went in to my WordPress setup and added another technique that I am testing to see what happens. That may come in another post.

I can continue to build this site up, re-design it to look more professional and start marketing some services or affiliate programs, or I could flip it. I wasn't really thinking that far ahead on this one.

Either way, I won the bet!

I'll post an update when I figure out how to leverage this site and start to see some returns.

Anyway, thought that might be useful.