Panda Schmanda, Penguin Schmenguin. Let's get POSITIVE!!!

Hey Everyone,

To start off my post, I wanted to say that I haven't been to the Warriors Forum in soooo long! I still love it here and thing there are TONS of great posts by great people, but man, I see so much despair and negative outlooks towards IM.

I understand frustrations, but dang...if I were a newbie and came in here, I'd be scared to death of Internet Marketing and even giving it a go! The state of Internet Marketing is NOT as bad as some of the posts in here make it out to be.

I personally think that the old school rules of business still apply. Give people good quality stuff, that they are asking for, and you will do well

Anyways, onto my post: Here's some INSPIRING information for you, if you prefer that type of stuff.

I recently in the past 4/5 months starting really trying my hand at niche blogging/SEO with blogs and good keyword research.

I've built 5 blogs now in that time period.

Each blog I built, I learned from my mistakes, and improved on the next one.

Some of the mistakes I made were:
- picking a poor keyword
- picked a non-buying keyword
- chose my domain name poorly for my keyword
- failed to execute my backlinking strategy well
- not optimizing a single page for a single keyword

Some of the lessons I learned were:
- how to analyze competitiveness for a keyword
- phrase or exact match info and what it really means
- good plugins to use
- tracking traffic
- proper ON Page SEO

I struggled with the first 4 blogs to get ranked well into Google. I was there, just on page 3 or 4 or worse. No traffic at all. Once in a while I'd get a hit.

Then on one domain (that was actually about to expire) I decided to build it even though it was quite a bit more competitive than what I should have been going after. About 5 to 7 times more competitive than what was suggested I take on.

I chose to try it because the keyword was a good keyword, and in my competition analysis, I thought that even tho my "phrase match" competition was high, that I could beat the actual pages that were on Page 1.

Fast forward 2 months on building that domain, and I'm ranking #5 and #6 for my two main keywords which in 'exact' match scenario's Google Keyword tools says traffic levels monthly are 12,000+ for keyword 1 and 3600+ for keyword 2.

I currentl get between 50 - 60 unique hits per day from search engines and my traffic graph is growing and growing! I haven't made a single sale yet, but I don't care.

I'm extatic. Why?

Because I know exactly what I did right, and what I did wrong to get it there. I am breaking down my benchmarks into a checkmark style system and the sale comes last.

- learn to build a blog (check)
- learn on/off page SEO (check)
- get into serps (CHECK)
- get onto page 1 (CHECK)
- convert traffic (working on it)

All I have to do is LEARN how to convert that traffic now! Once I do, I'm going to make a steady stream of income from my site. But more importantly..

It's not having the blogs on Page 1 that matters.

It's having the KNOWLEDGE from EXPERIENCE of what works and what doesn't that matters.


Ian

PS. I'm tweaking and applying those lessons to my other blogs and guess what? I have 2 of the other blogs now on Page 1 of Google as well!

PPS. This is in SPITE of these big scary Panda, Pengion, Lions, Tigers & Bears (oh my) updates.