martinos74

Streamlining your Content Creation Process

13th April 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

This month I have managed to refine my content creation process so that it is a lot more efficient than previously. This is particularly useful when I’m writing articles for things that I know nothing or very little about, which will be a common occurrence for a lot of niche site builders.

For each article that I am writing I find it helps enormously to run through these following logical steps:

STEP 1 – CREATE A LIST OF ARTICLE TOPICS

I’ve got a spreadsheet where I list out all of the potential ideas that I may have for articles in my niche. Whenever an idea pops into my head I just collate the ideas into this spreadsheet.I’ll usually then do a bit of keyword research using Long Tail Pro and list out the Keyword Competitiveness and the Monthly Search volume next to the article.

STEP 2 – PICK AN ARTICLE

Whenever, I have a bit of free time I’ll go to this list and pick out an article topic, that I feel like writing at the time. Some articles are going to be harder to write than others so it’s best to have a range of articles for me to choose from depending on how I feel.

STEP 3 – CREATE SUB HEADINGS

Before I start writing the article I’ll do a 10 minute brainstorm to flesh out some ideas for things that I could write about in the article. Then I’ll try and place these in a logical structure, thinking about the best way to make the content flow.

What I usually find is that the items that I list out here, become the sub-headings on my actual article.

STEP 4 – RESEARCH IN GOOGLE

I’ll simply type the keyword, the sub-heading or the article topic into Google and scan through the results. Any articles that I think look interesting I’ll open in a new tab.

STEP 5 – REVIEW OPEN TABS

Next I’ll simply work through the tabs one by one, discarding the ones with low value or unrelated content and copying the info from pages that I think contain useful information into a new Word document.

STEP 6 – ORGANISE CONTENT

At this stage I’ll have a massive 20 page word document, full of all the source content in different fonts and styles, which will look and feel like a complete mess, so lets get organised!I simply start to cut up the content and group relevant bits from each article into the sub-headers that I had written at the start. During this process you’ll find that you start to discard some more unrelated content and end up with a pretty big document still, with the benefit that it is now grouped into related content items

STEP 7 – REWRITE THE CONTENT

I usually just make a copy of the word document then work my way through the different sections of content, taking the key points, facts and figures from the source content and rewriting in my own style. This has the benefit that it applies your own voice to the content and you won’t get into any trouble with plagiarising content!

STEP 8 – TOP AND TAIL

Make sure you write a good introduction to the topic, and if it’s a long article add jump links to the relevant sections.At the end of the article try to write a summary of what you have found and pull out some of the key learnings. Both of these places are good locations to bring in your keywords.

STEP 9 – WRITE A KILLER HEADLINE

It’s always good to try and get your keyword into your headline, but creating a title that sticks out can also make the difference. Remember that your site will be sitting in the search results competing against many other sites, so if you can make a heading that stands out and are position 9 on the page, you could end up getting more click throughs than position 3 if their title is written poorly.

There is a great free tool that you can use to help you ensure that your title is up to scratch : http://coschedule.com/headline-analyzer

STEP 10 – REVIEW YOUR ARTICLE

Leave the article for a day or so, before you come back to it, and you’ll be surprised at the things you spot with a fresh pair of eyes. I usually then try to read the article out loud to myself and make final edits to the content, before preparing this for publication on my site.

Of course after these steps, there are another series of things you need to go for before publishing you article such as:

Make sure your content has been properly optimised for SEO
Format your content correctly
Add in a decent amount of outbound and internal links
Check how this will look on Social accounts

However, I’ve found that running through these 10 steps has made my approach to content a lot more systematic, logical and of course time saving.

My Website Dream: Chapter 5 – Content Writing Process

13th April 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

The overall progress on my niche website has been a little slower than I had hoped this month as I’d mainly been distracted with my matched betting updates instead, given the Cheltenham Festival and the fact that I recently purchased the Accumulator Generator software.

I’m also finding it hard again to know what is best to focus on as I need to work on the moment as there are lots of things that I need to work on, but don’t have the hours in the day to look at everything.

Anyway, enough whinging, so what did I achieve this month:

MY NICHE WEBSITE

The good news is that I did manage to write another 3 articles, so I have a total of 8 written now and I finished compiling the details of the London listings page.

However, I’m struggling a bit to find additional content to write for the site to be honest. There are definitely more articles out there that I can write, but they are likely to be smaller articles than I have written so far, and I need to figure out how I can bring them into the site and make the site hang together well.

Realistically I have enough content already to launch the site, so I think that logically that should be my next step. Once I have the site up and running it will be a lot easier for me to see how the content fits together and where the holes are.

Content Writing Process

I found that I could distill this technique down into a number of repeatable steps that would help me speed up this process in the future. You can read about these in more detail in my post on Streamlining your Content Creation, which covers the following steps:

Create a List of Article Topics

pick an article

Create sub headings

research in google

review open tabs

organise the content

rewrite the content

top and tail

write a killer headline

review your article

However, I’ve found that running through these 10 steps has made my approach to content a lot more systematic, logical and of course time saving.

AUTHORITY HACKER PRO MEMBERSHIP

This month I’ve been hot on the learning trail again and one of my key resources recently has been the Authority Hacker website. This is a site run by Gael and Mark, who are 2 entrepreneurs and experienced Digital Marketers who give you really solid and actionable advice in building up authority sites.

I attended a webinar where they pretty much gave step by step instructions on how to build up a niche and authority site so that it brings in a steady passive income stream. At the end of the webinar was a Q&A session and then they offered a discount membership plan to attendees (a pretty standard marketing tactic)

The webinar was really useful and they both provide valuable insight into building out your business so I decided to sign up for the annual membership, for just over £350.

This might sound like a lot of money but for this price you get:• A 30 minute 1 on 1 call with Gael• Access to a private Facebook Group• 2 x monthly webinars and Q&A sessions• Access to all of their blue prints

For me this seemed like a solid investment, especially as I am currently in the process of building out my niche site so I went ahead and made the purchase.

There is a bunch of really useful content available in the ‘Blueprints’ section. Each blueprint is made up of a series of lessons with a video and step by step instructions of what you need to do.

Some of the themes covered were:

Affiliate Marketing
Content Upgrades and Promotion
Email Marketing
Guest Posting
Lead Magnets

Outreach Process
Pinterest
Creating effective Pop Ups
Producing & Outsourcing Top Content

The content creation and the outreach blueprints were particularly relevant to me at the moment and I definitely learnt some things from these, however, overall the area is pitched at people who are a bit further downstream with their websites than I am.

Most of the blueprints are for larger Authority sites, that already have a decent amount of content on them and to a certain extent already have some kind of following / social presence.

In the end I decided to ask for my 30 day refund as I think this will be more useful to me in the future and I’m pretty sure that I’ll pick up a membership with these guys again in the future.

If anything, the most beneficial thing is access to the Facebook group and the bi-monthly webinars, where you can ask all of those questions that crop up from time to time. I think I would find this hugely beneficial as a lot of the time it feels like there is no one to ask, and is always great to bounce a few questions and ideas off of other people.

You can sign up for the Pro Membership from as little as $39 per month if you sign up to a yearly membership and I would definitely recommend this service.

If that’s too steep for you at the moment, then they have loads of invaluable information on both their website: http://www.authorityhacker.com/

And also in their podcasts : http://www.authorityhacker.com/podcast-2/

LAST MONTH’s GOAL

Complete the London listings page for my niche site : COMPLETE
Write 5 more articles for niche site : INCOMPLETE
Stretch goal – look at the Thrive Content Builder : INCOMPLETE

NEXT MONTH’s GOAL

Write 5 smaller blog posts of max 1500 words
Set up the site in Word Press
Buy a domain
Stretch goal – look at the Thrive Content Builder

TOOLS AND SITES USED

http://www.authorityhacker.com/

Cheltenham Festival : A Matched Betting Paradise!

23rd March 2016 By martinos74 2 Comments

The turf has settled back down again, the fences repaired, the jockey’s cuts and bruises patched up and the matched better’s stress levels have fallen by a few hundred percent, but did YOU make the most out of the hundreds of Cheltenham Festival betting offers available?

Yes, that’s right, we’ve just witnessed the world famous Cheltenham Festival, alternatively known as a Matched Betting Paradise, where the average punter was losing thousands and the matched bettor was making hundreds each day.

The Cheltenham Festival

The Cheltenham festival has grown in popularity since its initiation at Prestbury Park in 1911, and since 2005 has expanded out into a massive 4 day long horse racing celebration. This year 70,000 people came to watch the 7 races each day of the festival, which gave out over £4 million pounds of prize money, and like most matched bettors I wanted to make a bit of money myself.

I must admit that after the stress of the last few days I’m actually glad the Cheltenham festival is over and I can return to a life of normality. This was the first horse racing festival that I’ve ever been involved in where I’ve had any knowledge of matched betting and I have to say it was an eye opening experience.

From what I have picked up on the various social networks a lot of the more experienced matched bettors have earned anywhere between £1 to 2.5k over the past 4 days of racing using various matched betting techniques, which is pretty good going, especially as this is tax free income.

Personally, I was nowhere near that amount and the money that I did make was more from luck than judgement. I’m sure that I could have made more money, but wanted to focus on a restricted number of bookies and also stick to offers that I could understand.

The Cheltenham Festival Betting Offers

In general there were 4 types of betting offers that I opted for:

Money Back on 2nd place

Money Back if you pick a winner

Money Back if the Favourite Wins

Money Back if you Lose

There were lots of other offers available such as price boosts and bookies offering an extra place for each way bets, but I thought if I focused on these offers first of all then I’d be better off.

My Strategy

For each race if there was a decent back/lay match available I would try to do the following:

Favourite – Use the BFSB and Bet365
2nd favourite – Use Will Hill or Ladbrokes
3rd favourite – Use Will Hill or Ladbrokes
4th favourite – Use Betstars if available

My rules were that if the qualifying loss was over 10% of the free bet, then I wouldn’t take the bet, so on the William Hill offer for example there was a £25 free bet, so I wouldn’t go over a £2.50 qualifying loss.

Getting Organised

Each day I became more and more organised so by Day 4, I was pretty much in the groove of what I was doing, and had developed a really handy spreadsheet to keep track of what the heck I was doing. You can get a copy of it here: Cheltenham Festival Betting Tracker

In preparation for each day I would:

Fill out the spreadsheet with the details of the offers that I was likely to go for – See ‘Day 1’ Tab
List each race in turn, and underneath each race, I would list out the different bookies that I would bet on
For each of the bookies I would simply pre-populate the stake and the basic terms of the offer (ie back a winner over 4.0) so that it would be easier for me to fill out on the day of the race.

The next step was to try and find decent matches and in this case I found there was no point in using the odds matcher as the odds were changing so quickly and the site only gets updated every 30 minutes, so I had to check for back/lay matches manually.

In one browser I would open smarkets, and in the other browser I would have all the different bookies sites loaded on different tabs. Then I would simply go through each race and compare the top 5 horses on Smarkets against the bookies. If there was a good match then I would take it and record it in my spreadsheet, adding the odds and the horses name.

I would repeat this process about 5 times a day:

The evening before at 10pm
Race day morning 8am
Race day afternoon 12pm
Race day 1.30 onwards

This basically meant that my spreadsheet gradually got filled up with matches and I could even do a lot of this whilst at work. It also meant that I could clearly see where I had placed my bets and which races I still had holes in. Check the ‘Day 4’ Tab to see an example of the workings.

The Results

I ended up spending a lot longer on this than I thought I would do, and was constantly going back to the bookies and looking for decent matches. It also wasn’t that easy to find decent matches for the top few horses on each race, so some times I either had to skip the match, or go over my 10% qualifying loss to cover it.

On top of this I found that, especially on Day 3 and 4, most of the 2nd places were going out to horses with a lot higher odds than I had anticipated. There were lots of cases of 33/1 shots coming in 2nd and due to the large fields, it kind of ruined my overall approach, and meant that I suffered because in a lot of cases I was making a 5 – 10% loss on my qualifying bet.

When you consider the number of bets that I put on, these qualifying losses add up and start to cancel out any winnings you may get on the refunds or free bets.

My Numbers

Total bets placed: 97 back / lay pairs
Total money wagered: £4773
Total bonuses won: £475

BFSB – Bets Place 11 – Refunds 3
Bet365 – Bets Place 10 – Refunds 0
Ladbrokes – Bets Place 17 – Refunds 2
William Hill Bets Place 19 – Refunds 6
Betstars Bets Place 5 – Refunds 1
Skybet – Bets Place 4 – Refunds 4

On top of these refunds I made:

Betway – £20 free bets
Netbet – £25 deposit bonus
Stan James – £10 free bets

I’m not sure how accurate my calculations are but by the time I have extracted the money from the free bets I think I will have made in total about £350 – 400.

Now, this isn’t exactly ground breaking and involved an incredible amount of stress, however, I learnt a lot from it and can use this knowledge in future festivals.

What Did I Learn?

So overall what did I learn from these 4 days?

Make sure you have a good strategy

Looking in the forums a lot of people would use their free bets on punts instead of laying them. A lot of people would try to cover the whole field to make money out of each way bets, others used the price boosts to make good money, and other people were underlaying or overlaying bets. To be honest I’m not sure I follow a lot of the strategies and some of them starting verging more towards the gambling side of things, which is something I want to avoid

Be organised

On the first day I wasn’t very well prepared, had no strategy and wasn’t really sure what I was doing. By the fourth day I had a much more measured approach and was going through clear steps with each bet I was placing, so that I was less prone to errors

Keep your exchanges well stocked

Having a big enough balance to play with is key if you want to make decent amounts of money. Of course, you can go from one race to the next, so that the bets get settled and hopefully go back into the exchanges, but if like me you wanted to try and place as many bets in advance as possible, then you are going to need a good float. In the end I needed nearly £2k in my Smarkets account

Make Sure you have the Right Bookies

It goes without saying but make sure that before the festival you have accounts open with the leading bookies. This year most of the decent offers came from these guys:

Skybet
Betfair SB
Apollobet
William Hill
Ladbrokes
Bet365
Paddy Power
138.com
Betbright
Fun88,
12Bet
Betstars
Betway
Netbets

Don’t be greedy

There is so much going on during these 4 days, with offers and changes in prices flying around everywhere, that it is easy to try and jump on every offer. The problem with this is that you start to lose control a little and if you are trying to place bets too quickly this will often lead to mistakes. For example, on Day 3, I suddenly thought that it would be a good idea to place the £100 bets on the favourite for the 188bet refund offer. At the time, I was thinking the offer was that you get refunded if you get a first place, but the offer was actually for a second place refund, so I lost out lots in my qualifying losses.

Try to Relax

As a relative newbie, I found this almost impossible to do and was constantly checking the odds. Probably a better idea is to do this in short bursts so you don’t end up getting totally stressed out

What Didn’t I Enjoy?

Stress

Without a doubt #1 on the list was the amount of stress this caused me over the past few days. Maybe this is because I’m a newbie, maybe it was the stress of trying to find a decent match, maybe it was the stress of keeping track of everything, maybe it was the stress on not really knowing what strategy to follow, maybe it was the stress of trying not to get caught doing some of this at work, whatever it was, this was definitely an extremely stressful week and by the end of Day 4 I was glad it was over!

Paperwork

Even though I’m a project manager by trade, I certainly did not enjoy having to track all of the bets and offers and then at the end of the evening having to go through all of the exchanges and bookies to check where all the money had gone to and check that I had made no mistakes. It was also key to do this at the end of each day so you know where the bonuses would end up

Reading the T’s and C’s

Luckily most of the offers were repeated for each day of the festival so after you had done them once they were pretty easy to repeat. What I didn’t enjoy, however, was reading the T’s and C’s to ensure that I knew all of the rules and things like when my bonuses would expire

Addictiveness

Maybe it’s something to do with my character where when I see an opportunity I want to make the most out of it, maybe it’s just because I’m greedy, but I really didn’t like the fact that once I’d got into this, I found it hard to pull myself away from it and wanted to find more and more offers to play with. It felt a little bit too like I was getting involved in gambling, although of course I knew that I was actually winning overall. Maybe it was because the 2nd place offers also have an element of gambling to them and are not guaranteed profit, unlike a lot of the football offers that I am used to

What did I enjoy?

Learning new ways to make money with matched betting

These last 4 days have certainly inducted me well into matched betting for horse racing and I feel that I now have a much better understanding of these kind of bets. Am looking forward to doing this at a more leisurely pace over the weekends in the future and hopefully some of the stress I have had this week will put me in good stead for future offers

My Winnings

Even though I didn’t make a fortune out of it, I still made an overall profit, which always goes down well. Judging by other peoples earnings i will be able to increase this a lot more in the future with a bit more experience as well

The Matched Betting Communities

I found that the members of the different Matched Betting communities were a great bunch, always willing to help each other out, provide tips and resolve problems.

These were also the best source of information to go to each day where they’d usually have a list of offers :

In particular I found these groups most useful:
• Matched Betting 101
• Matched Betting for Free

Summary

After 4 really intense days of matched betting, I was absolutely exhausted. I think that was mainly because I’m a newbie and wanted to make the most out of the occasion that I could do. I made a few mistakes along the way, but now that the dust has settled I think overall it was a good experience.

I certainly learned a lot and managed to get my stripes as a matched bettor, which should help me in the future. Making nearly £400 over the 4 days from the various Cheltenham Festival Betting Offers, will come in handy but I think in the future I’d try not to do this whilst at work, and would try to be a little bit more prepared before the Festival started.

My Social Trading Dream : Chapter 3 : eToro Bonuses

28th February 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Ok, so as you know from the previous chapter I’ve been watching a number of eToro traders over the past couple of months and have added them to my watchlist.

Up until now I’ve been using my Virtual Portfolio to invest and was just about breaking even overall. This isn’t too bad to be honest, because I’d invested $1000 of fake money in each of 20 different eToro traders, some of whom were a lot higher risk than I would usually invest in.

So, this month I finally took the plunge and decided to make my investment. eToro do a great offer of giving you a really large bonus on your deposit, which varies depending on the amount you invest.

If you invest:

$300 – $999 they will give you $100
$1,000 to $2,499 they give you $300
$2500 and over and they give you $1,000 bonus

This is given in eToro points. Basically the eToro points means that you can use this money to invest in other traders, however, you will not be able to withdraw it all until you have made a certain number of trades, over a certain value. Basically, with each trade you make, you chip off of the total.

I’m not 100% sure how long it will take for this to be knocked down, but I’m in this for the medium to long term so figured I will be ok.

Originally I only wanted to invest $200 in 5 to 10 investors, however, the more I looked at this offer the more I was tempted by the $1,000 bonus and in the end I was suckered in investing $2,5000, which meant immediately my account was credited with a total of $3,5000 to invest in eToro traders.

How Did I Choose Traders to Invest in?

Well, I explained most of the process I went through in my blog post https://mylifestyledream.com/best-eToro-traders I wrote on choosing the best eToro traders and featured in this video:

I used these same techniques and then simply sent messages out to a number of the traders on my shortlist to see how responsive they were and getting a feel for whether they thought it was a good time to invest…. Of course all of them said it was, because they get a commission if I start following them!!!

So, the burning question on all of your lips is “Who did I invest in?”

Which Traders did I Invest in?

I decided to invest an initial sum of $350 in each of the traders below, keeping my Stop Loss at 70% and for most of the traders I didn’t copy their open trades.

The reasons I chose each of these were:

Sameerah786 – Seems like a consistent performer and has a good overall knowledge
Dimitirios1 – I like his investment style of only jumping in when he sees an opportunity
AnnaSerafini – Solid performance in the pasty and comes with good recommendations
Doew85 – Hard to resist with the consistent returns he is making
NoasNoas – Has a lot of experience and a lot of followers
HugoOchoa – Has had a bad few months but am confident he will pick up and balance this out
Misterg23 – Has had a really bad start to the year, but seems to be very knowledgeable and is a social trading expert

This leaves me with about $1,050 left to invest, so I’m going to keep my eyes peeled for some more potential investors. Am also tempted to take a punt on the markets myself, especially as the stock market is so beaten, however, I want this to be an experiment in Social Trading rather than my own investments.

Last Month’s Goals

Make the initial investment – COMPLETE
Understand eToro points – COMPLETE

Next Month’s Goals:

Find 3 more traders to invest in
Start to look into Zulutrade

Balance Sheet

+ $984 – Includes the eToro bonus

Chapter 4 : Reloads and My First Gubbing

28th February 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

I feel that this month I really picked up the momentum with matched betting and am pretty confident in what I’m doing now. I’ve really moved on from just the sign up offers, to looking at taking on any of the offers related to football, primarily at the weekends.

I’ve been doing a lot of in-play betting this month making the most out of the William Hill and Paddy Power offers: “Place £20 on qualifying match and get £10 in-play on another match”. To be honest I’m starting to think whether it is worthwhile pursuing these smaller bets or not. For example out of the £10 free bet I’m probably only managing to extract 60 – 70% back into my account and the whole In-Play betting experience can be quite stressful.

I’ve had a few occasions when I’ve been trying to add the in-play bets on my Iphone 4S, which was a bit of a nightmare to be honest. The best time to put your bets on is at half time, because the odds don’t fluctuate so much, but if you miss this window it gets a little bit more tricky.

The other thing that you need to consider is that because the games are spread out over the course of the day / weekend now, you will need to structure your weekend around these games, which is not really what I want to be doing for a few quid here and there. However, at the moment, I am still learning my trade, so it is all good knowledge to pull in.

Bet365 Risk Free Bet

This month also completed the Bet365 risk free bet offer twice, we gave me a massive £35 for each match, which was well worth the small amount of time involved.

The offer was basically, place up to £50 pre match and up to £50 in-play and if your in-play bet loses then they will refund this bet to you. You simply need to calculate this as a risk free bet, and lay this off at one of the exchanges, then sit back and count the cash.

Risk Free Bets

I ventured a little bit further forward in my matched betting career this month, when Paddy Power gave a price boost on both Watford and Everton winning in the cup.

Thanks to the matched betting blog, I followed the advice of laying this off at Smarkets booking exchange: http://matchedbettingblog.com/football/paddy-power-price-boost-watford-everton/#.VtCRIvmLTZ4

Basically this was a risk-free bet, where if the event happened ie Watford and Everton both won, then I would earn £27, but if they didn’t win then I break even. This was a pretty good deal, took 5 minutes to add the bets on, and ended up netting me £27.60… GOLA!

There are a lot of these types of offers out there that I haven’t really started looking at yet, but will try and progress on these next month.

Horse Racing

I made my first venture into horse racing as well this month, which I’ve wanted to avoid initially as I believe it can be a little more complex than a standard football match back and lay scenario.

However, there were 2 particularly good offers, for the upcoming Cheltenham festival.

Coral were offering to match your bets of up to £20 per bet that you put on, as long you place a bet each weekend for the 4 weekends leading up to the festival and Betway are offering a similar offer for up to £50, so I added a couple of bets this weekend.

GUBBED

All was going so well until yesterday I got this lovely email from Coral:

Now, I’m not really sure how this had happened as I hadn’t placed too many bets with them and my history didn’t seem abnormal:

stake	odds	date	game
5	2.2	24/10/15	Ajaccio GFCO v Nice
20	7.6	28/10/15	Liverpool vs Bournemouth
20	3	30/01/16	Ang v Serena
10	5	31/01/16	3 – 1 Djok
20	3	20/02/16	Ars v Hull draw
20	3.25	20/02/16	14:05 Haydock One track mind
10	3.9	20/02/16	Bourn v Eve

However, they had been on a bit of a gubbing spree and lots of members in the Matched Betting Facebook groups experienced similar things.

My theory is slightly different, however, as I had been a bit stupid. My plan for this site was that as I go through the offers with different bookmakers I would also add affiliate links to these offers so other readers could sign up as well, and I’d earn a small commission.

I tried applying for affiliate accounts with 5 of the main bookmakers, however, as part of the application process they check out your website and see that I am promoting Matched Betting, which they’re probably not to keen on, so 3 of them refused my application. One of those was Coral, so my suspicions are that they put two and two together and linked my personal account with the application for the affiliate account. Oh well, lesson learned!!!

More Sign Up Offers

So, this month I added 3 more accounts to my name and signed up to Matchbook (Betting exchange), Net Bet and Betsafe

Last Month’s Goal

Sign up to 3 more offers – COMPLETE
Continue In-Play betting – COMPLETE

Next Month’s Goal

I really want to start looking at Accumulator’s as this seems like another solid way to keep generating income, without having to place in-play bets, however, this would require moving up to the next level of matched betting expertise and I don’t think that I’m quite ready for that yet. I’ll research it a bit more if I have time, but think I will keep this month’s goals quite simple to:

Overall Earnings to Date

I have finally managed to get a grip on what I have earned so far and am pleased to announce the grand total of :

£732.00

My Website Dream : Chapter 4 : Content Creation and Optimisation

28th February 2016 By martinos74 Leave a Comment

Niche Content Creation

This last month has been all about content creation and organisation for both my niche site and www.mylifestyledream.com

My target was to write 3 articles for my chosen niche site, but luckily enough I’ve had quite a quiet time at work this month and I’ve tried to use every spare hour I could get for writing. This meant that I managed to create 5 pillar content articles for my niche site, totalling more than 12,000 words of pretty decent content.

I think that with another 5 pillar articles and 5 smaller articles I should have enough content on the site to be able to launch it. On top of this I have also collated a list of all the businesses in London that are qualified to provide the service in the niche that I am focusing on. I’ve captured their addresses, services provided and am writing a paragraph of SEO focused introductory text for each of these businesses. My plan is that I will then create one big listings page that targets the keyword ‘[myniche] service in London’.

Failed Survey

One of the keywords that I want to go after as well is ‘[myniche] service prices’ or ‘how much does an [myniche] cost’ so I decided that I’d put a survey together and reach out to a number of businesses in the UK who offer this service and find out what their price list is.

I set up a Survey Monkey survey and wrote an email to 20 different businesses, pretending that I was a student doing a study on regional diversity and was interested in finding out how prices in the industry differ across the country.

Out of the 20 businesses I surveyed, guess how many responded? Yes, that’s right, a big fat 0. Looking back even though the email was nicely worded and the survey would only take 5 minutes to complete, it did look a little complicated and there was no real reason why they would participate as they weren’t getting anything out of it. I think I’m going to put this on hold now, until the site takes off and then do a proper survey offering the businesses a page to promote their business on my site in return for their participation. I’ll then create a nice infographic out of the results, which would be a useful piece of information as no one really has this information readily available on the internet.

Alexa Submission

Another thing that I did this month is submitted my site to Alexa as this sounds like another useful place to list your site to enhance your search rankings.

A couple of quick tips to help boost your Alexa rank are to install the Alexa toolbar in your browser, and the Alexa widget to your site. The word on the street is that this will boost your Alexa rank, although I am still showing as having no data! I think it just takes a month or so until you get listed though.

Optimisation

I thought it was about time this month to take stock of where I’ve got to with building www.mylifestyledream.com. I wanted to check how the site was performing and see if there were any issues with how I was creating the content and the structure of the site and also check my SEO rankings.

As I was looking into this I came across 2 really useful tools:

Onpage.org

This is a really handy tool that checks your site for 3 key areas:

SEO Aspects
Technical Aspects
Content Aspects

Onpage.org allows you to generate a report where it will check against a multitude of criteria in these categories and list out any errors for you. It takes a while to generate the report, and you are limited to creation of 1 report a month, however, this gives you some really great pointers into potential issues on your site.

Moz

Moz in general is a pretty amazing must have tool for anyone interested in SEO. They have a free toolbar that you can install on your site that looks a bit like this:

This helps you tell at a glance useful SEO metrics such as the domain authority or page authority of pages in the search results so you can see how easily you could rank for that keyword. You can find out the full feature set here : https://moz.com/tools/seo-toolbar

On top of this if you can afford it then I’d recommend getting a Moz Pro account, which has some really useful features such as doing an indepth SEO analysis of each page on your site. Based on the tips that it gave me, I went back and re-worked all of my pages so there were no issues showing with Moz.

Fiverr Gigs

Welcome to the world of fiverr.com. If you haven’t heard of this before then this is basically a marketplace where people offer all different kinds of services for a maximum of $5. You can source everything from logos to software subscriptions so there are a number of things that can come in useful if you are just setting up a website.

Because I am researching niches at the moment I used it to get a 1 month subscription to SEMrush and it worked perfectly. To be honest, it is a little bit dodgy so I wouldn’t use it in the long term, and you are sharing your account with other users, so if you want to keep your niche close to your chest, this may not be the best bet.

There are a lot of gigs on Fiverr offering traffic and backlinks as well but you should definitely stay clear of them as this will do more damage than good to your site.

Podcasts

Amongst all of the content that I’ve been creating I’ve also been making the most of every second I can get to listen to Podcasts from some of the key influencers in the internet marketing / niche website markets.

The best of the bunch are listed below:

Smart Passive Income

This podcast from guru Pat Flynn gives you all kinds of hints, tips and motivation to get your online business up and running. His goal has been to set up businesses with a bit of hard work to start with that free up time in the longer term and generate passive income for you. Great listening, but takes a while to get used to Pat’s fast, squeaky voice!!!

Ask Pat

This is another podcast from Pat Flynn but comprises of shorter 10 minute podcasts, where he responods to a listener’s questions. A wide range of topics discussed but he provides useful, digestable information

Authority Hacker

My personal favourite site and podcast at the moment. The duo of Gael and Mark give you no nonsense tips about creating your authority website based on their real experiences running Health Ambition and Authority Hacker. They ran an agency together but the podcasts are usually full of actionable information about SEO, content marketing and anything you need to know about running a site.

Niche Pursuits

Spencer Hawe and Co-host Perrin Carrel focus on creating niche websites, and are now branching out into the Amazon FBA programme. These guys are behind the Niche Site 3 project, where they are mentoring 3 differetn listeners as they help them to set up and develop their websites. Essential listening.

WP Elevation

This blog is more focused on how you can use the power of WordPress to elevate your blog and improve your business and features interviews with a range of eminent online entrepreneurs and internet marketers.

Pro Blogger

Darren Rowse is the goto man for blogging on the internet and has many years of experience. His podcasts tend to offer writing tips and anything blog related. Worthwhile listening, although the nuggets of information are a little hidden amongst the waffle, and he does sound a little bit preacher-like. Still, he’s been there and done it, so you should listen!

Last Month’s Goal

Write 3 articles for the niche site – COMPLETE
Create a list of the niche services in London – COMPLETE

Next Month’s Goal

Complete the London listings page for my niche site
Write 5 more articles for niche site
Stretch goal – look at the Thrive Content Builder

Tools and Sites Used

« Previous Page