#1 for 110,000 Search Keyword! Going for 1.2 mill keyword, Details inside

I am number #1 for one of my blogs for a very competitive keyword with 110,000 searches and 4.1 million competing sites (exact quotes). It took me about 6 months to achieve this and a lot of hard work.

I wrote articles, press releases, used backlinks from Paul and Angela, a couple guest blog posts, and was able to become friends with others in my niche and jumped on several blog rolls.

I have recently been able to make good money from adsense and clickbank products that are embedded on my blog. It's been a long journey, I've been frustrated, I've thought about giving up on it, but in the end it paid off. Sure I am #1 for many other keywords but they are low comp and much lower searches. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it and compete with the big dogs.

So to anyone new out there who is looking to get into IM, anything is possible if you develop a plan and work hard at it. There is NO magic bullet.

I have decided to try and go for a very tough keyword in my niche, and no it isn't a money making/IM niche, that has 1.2 million searches and 3.9 competing sites. I think it is going to be brutal since the top 5 are huge sites with hundreds of backlinks but If I can pull it off it will be a serious gold mine.

Some tips I'd like to share that I use,
1. Use Press Releases! I've had one get into google news for huge traffic!
2. Guest Posts can bring serious traffic! (I've had an extra 2000+ visitors in one day)
3. Just a few articles to Ezine or GoArticles can go a long way.
4. Forum Posting in your niche can help build rep and traffic.
5. I've heard others bad mouth using forum profile's for backlinks but they have been a large part of my success.
6. Don't fear making videos, just a couple videos on youtube can send good traffic to your site.

As far as a backlinking strategy, getting your backlinks indexed can be the hardest part of ranking up sites. The method I use is create an RSS feed of all your backlinks and articles (There is many sites where you can make these, I personally use IceRocket) then put that RSS feed into RSS aggregators. I bookmark the RSS feed with social bookmarks then use ping-o-matic on the feed. This will typically get google to index all of my backlinks allowing my sites to rank up quickly.

I hope this information can help others out there trying to rank up sites, I wanted to give back to this forum because I have learned so much here and it has really jump started my entire IM business.

Thank you all.