A new warrior has been born.. bonk! ouch!

Greetings, fellow warriors! What a treasure to find this place!

I hope I don't scare away the locals, but I feel like I'm in the creation phase of a new pheonix rising from the ashes to be reborn again.

The following is my story, I hope it provides enough detail to allow others to learn from my journey as well as provide enough background for others to perhaps offer criticism or suggestions on how to do things better.

I always find myself going the extra mile for friends & family, but strive to be as self-sufficient as possible. While I tend to become pretty good at whatever I focus on, I always keep an open mind to wisdom I can learn from others. By landing on this forum, it appears I may have found a home of like-minded great people!

I helped a neighbor about a year ago, by putting up a basic web site for their business. I did some quick research on how to publish and index new web sites and submitted the web site to all the major search engines and then used some free web service which was suppose to publish it to something like 350+ search engines. In addition, to help with ranking I used some type of "Link Ring" which I think is non-existant today.

This seemed to do the trick, so I closed my folder and told the neighbor to look me up if they ever wanted to do anything else with the web site.

Fast forward a year later, I received an email from the domain host that the billing cycle failed on the credit card they had on file. I talked to the neighbor about it and they want to re-activate the account and domain. However, in talking about this they mentioned they searched on some words expecting to find their web site and never could find it.

The business is an automotive garage for semi-trucks. They typed in (without quotes) "truck repair" and expected to see the web site show up on Yahoo. I'm not an SEO expert, but I know enough about search terms in general knowing it was a far cry for getting the results desired.

This started me down a new path, research.. and more research. How to rank your web sites for key words, etc.

Not having any background on SEO, I think this is where I started drinking and my head started pounding! j/k.

So now I'm pouring my heart and soul into helping my neighbor again, but I figure it's a win win situation. I can learn about something I had no prior knowledge of and come out better in the end.

At some point I stumbled across some money making blog site by a person who goes by the nickname Grizzly, which was talking about how to drive search engine traffic by using anchored keywords, writing and publishing articles to article web sites, etc.

I probably spent a good 3 weeks reading most of his blog entries, some really juicy (knowledge) articles that exposed search engines for what they were and how to take advantage of them. One thing I noticed was his main blog articles started in 2007 and over time he seemed to be refining his methods, doing new tests to test theories and practices, etc. I found myself rewriting notes to keep up with the latest trends he talked about in the blog entries. A blog entry in Jan or Feb of 2009 included a screen shot of just 1 of his many sites, and it reflected Adsense revenues of about $4,000 for that month. What I found impressive was all his Adsense sights were blogs, hosted for free by Blogspot.

I had heard about people making a killing in Adsense in the past ($100k/month), but then those articles went on to talk about how Google fixed the black-hat techniques people were using to exploit the system in the early infancy stages.

When I read how Grizzly was able to capitalize off free blog hosting, I figured I had nothing to lose. The only expense I would have would be my time it would take to create the blogs, write and publish articles and have a little bit of patience to see results and figure out what I might need to re-tune or tweak.

As I've read in many posts on this forum, Grizzly mentioned most people fail to take action which is why they fail to monetize off Adsense. I was only half way through reading blog entries by Grizzly when I leaped off the couch and started my first blog. I continued to read, I realized some mistakes I made, I continued to create 2 more blogs putting into practice what I had been reading.

While Grizzly started off doing everything manually, it seems like he gravited to some 3rd party applications over time. I think the latest tool he was using is SEO Elite, but he never advertised it other than me picking it up in some screen shots published. Grizzly was initially all about making money off the internet with no out of pocket expense to the person, but it is only human nature to try new things and improve if the options are available and it makes sense.

When I realized Grizzly was using 3rd party applications, I started researching what was available in the market. I have run across other tools people seem to promote all over the place, but the 2 that seem to be talked about all the time are Micro Niche Finder (MNF) and Market Samuarai (MS). I'm sure any tools which are maintained and kept updated are valuable in the right hands, but a) these tools also cost money; b) a person new to IM could easily blow a fortune buying ebooks and tools.

Researching SEO tools / IM / Adsense is what lead me to the Warrior Forum, and information here seems to be endless. There are the occasional plugs for people selling their ebooks on success, but a ton of information is also available on the forums if you can sift through it and pick out the gold nuggets. As has already been covered in a few posts though, there is always more than 1 path to take to the destination we all seek and this is where I'm at today. I'm standing in the middle of the road which has about a billion paths leading to the next bus stop.

This is what I've done so far:

1. People say to pick a niche you are passionate about, so I did.
2. I created a free blog on blogspot using my keyword phrase as the blog name
3. I published my main article there, 400+ words, used my keyword in the blog name, post title, and a few times in the blog post ; based on the formula Grizzly talks about
4. I rewrote the article
5. I created anchored keyword backlinks in the changed article to the blog
6. I created a GoArticles.com account, articledashboard.com account, ezinearticles.com account and published the changed article to all 3

After some more reading, about 2 weeks later I created another blog. Articles I had been reading said to target what people want to read about. Instead of writing just 1 blog post, I wrote 2 blog posts and published them per the same method used on the first blog.

It was about this time when I started to read more about using the Google Keyword Tool and other 3rd party applications which analyze search traffic, average CPC, etc. and realized I had focused on the wrong things if I understood what I was reading.

My first blog competes with 220,000 other sites using the keyword phrase without quotes, 120,000 with quotes
The second blog competes with 2,690,000 sites without quotes, 334,000 with quotes

Oof! Ok.. well, in order to succeed you first have to go through enough failures. More experience under the belt.

Terms such as Strenth of Competition (SOC) started flashing in front of my eyes, it seems the preferred method is using "exact match" in keyword research and finding phrases that have minimum of 2,500 or better on search volume. I've seen all sorts of ranges for the max though, but most say to try to keep the results somewhere in the 20k to 50k as long as the SOC is low.

I have yet to see an exact formula posted for SOC, but research has led me to those numbers being based on an equasion that deals with the "InAnchor", "InTitle" and "InUrl" results of queries in search engines. The only tools that seem to display this that most people rely on are MNF and MS, but again those cost $$$.

I'm not opposed to buying tools to help make this easier, but I'm not buying anything until I make the cash from Adsense to make those purchases of tools or ebooks which seem to be highly recommended here on the Warrior forums.

Which leads me to my next set of questions.

I'm sure some ebooks are worth their weight in gold, but it seems like Google and other search engines are evolving so fast that what is published today may be outdated tomorrow and making all those techniques obsolete so it's really hard to justify buying those ebooks based on all the research I've done to date. The same thing with 3rd party tools.

In an article posted here on the Warrior Forums, clickbump talks about his latest techniques which some people claim to work for them.

In a nut shell,
1. Develop passion for Niche research
2. only work with exact match, top level domains
3. Seek niches that have a minimum of 2500 EXACT match monthly searches
4. Look for three PR- or PR-0 sites in the top ten results
5. Launch a tightly focused, insanely optimized, seo savvy, css based site

If I'm not mistaken I think clickbump uses the stats provided by "seo4firefox", so I installed firefox and the add-on for this.

Now, based on this technique you could totally skew this though. Common sense goes along with research, but it's not hard to find a niche that didn't have a minimum of 2500 exact match searches. Take for example, "high definition camcorders". The 1st page meets the requirements of finding at least 3 sites which match his step #4. However, that keyword phrase is really highly competitive but based on clickbump's formula it should be a sure winner.

Which leads to another question.

It seems all articles on the Warrior forums (at least the ones I've read) talk about finding and creating a domain name based on your keywords, but again you're talking about shelling out cash up front for this. When you start rolling in checks from Google, I'm sure this becomes less of an issue. One of my goals is to make enough at the entry level to cover the expense of moving forward to these more risky investments.

However, let's say for the sake of this example you purchase a domain called "highdefinitioncamcorders.com". Let's also say you optimize it based on step #5 for clickbump's formula. Let's also say for the sake of argument, after the page gets indexed it lands somewhere on the first page of google results.

What rank can you expect this new domain to have? If it would be a PR- or PR-0 because it's a new domain, what would stop someone from bumping you right out of the 1st page?

Some talk about writing and publishing unique articles with backlinks to bump your page rank.

I've also read page rank is pretty irrelevant now days, and it's more about having tons of anchored keyword backlinks.
Then again, people say not to use this technique because higher page ranking sites may steal your site location in results.
I've also read articles that talk about how a page/site will rank better if it has links from relevant sites to the niche.
Google supposedly frowns on 2 way links, 1 way links are king.

While looking into MNF I found a video on youtube that demo'd the latest build and was posted about a week ago. In their example, they used a keyword phrase which had a local search volume of 880 and a really low SOC and I think something like an average CPC of $1.68 so it would be considered an ideal canidate. Just for fun I created a new blog based on this demo, wrote an article, published it to 3 sites and now I'm waiting to see the results. However, regular search results without quotes show 289,000 competing sites. With quotes, 5,520. A few articles talk about how your real competition is keyword phrases using quotes.

So here is another question.. blogs or web sites? I understand the possible benefit of a web site would be a resell value if it becomes desired by an interested party, but is there any benefit vs. having a blog with targetted keywords?

I've seen a lot of people reference hosting with Hosting Gator for web sites, using the "reseller" account to host an unlimited number of domains for their Adword campaigns. So let me see if I understand this right, you get a reseller account and then you only need to pay for each domain you want and simply add that domain to your reseller account. I read some places will give you a discount for multiple domains, but for someone who is knew to this I'm sure they won't start pumping out keyword domains until you start getting some form of return on your investment.

Which brings me to my final question (whew! eh?). I'm a very patient person, I understand it may take up to 2 months before search engines index your site(s) or blog(s)? to prevent people from figuring out their formulas. I also have read some sites have been sandboxed for up to 6 months. Most search engines favor old sites, noted for long term planning.

I have also read some posts by people using clickbump's latest technique, creating a domain, posting an article, getting the site indexed and throwing Adsense on there and 3 days later they're getting $6/day traffic.

My original blog is over a month old, I installed Google Analytics on all my blogs to monitor sources of traffic, etc. and all 3 blogs only have traffic from within blogspot itself. Just the other day I noticed one of my articles from GoArticles was referenced as a backlink to the original blog though, but no search engine traffic or referral traffic. I understand my first 2 blogs are probably in a market that is too competitive, but those were lessons learned.

Which reminds me, (too much research I guess!) I think it was XFactor that said to just keep submitting articles every day until your page starts ranking in the search engines. Sometimes it may take no articles, sometimes 1, 4 or 5, some sites maybe 10 or more.

Then you have clickbump's method, which requires no article writing and publishing. Just build the sites and go, which I guess is ok if you have investment capital to work with. I imagine if you find your new sites ranking within a week, you could try to secure them by publishing articles with backlinks or something. However, I defer the remainder of this to my prior question about possibly losing the search position for the new sites using this technique.

What started off as helping my neighbor has started a new crusade, wanting to be able to help my neighbor and then next be able to help my spouse by creating a lead capture page--but in a very competitive market. So anything I can learn will not only help my neighbor but will help our family and many others in the long run.

I know I probably appear to be jumping around a lot, but just trying to do my research and find out what works and what doesn't.

Once I master Adsense, I'll probably extend to other forms of monetization but wanted to focus on this first as I believe it will pave the road for later.

I'm not putting down any systems or 3rd party applications people use or have used, just trying to do my homework and find a way to get this thing off the ground using free resources initially and paid/purchased systems later if it makes sense.

I may need to stop focusing on old systems which may be obsolete and hopefully a tip or 2 might be just what myself or someone else may need to fill in the blanks we have or give us better direction.

Goal 1, drive search engine traffic to free blogs
Goal 2, to have 150+ unique visitors a day to a free blog and get Adsense to start working for a stream of income
Goal 3, be able to have my neighbors web site show up on first page for desired keywords / phrases

I'm sure others may benefit by any answers and solutions to follow in replies, I greatly appreciate any feedback provided.

--CryoCrispy