Well. I have been distracted for days and worked on a NOT SO FASTLANE project and hopefully to create a secondary passive income that will last for a while.

I decide to build a several local niche sites to generate recurring income.

While I was hanging out with my wife on the Cozumel beach and taking photos, I was also making passive income on one of my sites. I did not realize how much I was making until I came back and check my Google AdSense Account. Holy awesome. There are whole bunch clicks on a specific topic that generate $4 to $7 per click. And there are many clicks.

So I dig into a little bid more and realize that there are people paying $7 to generate leads which will generate $60-$300 in return. That is over 500% return.

Although, the market is crowded, there are huge space for me to tab in at local region. Especially I can do much better SEO than those guys. The key is to create the niche directories that get hit a lot. When you have traffic, you can make $ out of your Google AdSense and recurring subscription income.

So I need a good directory script. I thought about writing my own and decided not to. Time is money. Company like Groupon started with WordPress and later move on to proprietary programming. So I download and install the DirectoryPress Theme that is perfect for my current situation.

What makes this theme an awesome one is that it supports multisite WordPress installation. So I can install one theme with multiple layouts once. I can later create unlimited instances (subdomains) with just one codebase. Also, it only costs $79 for unlimited install and upgrade. Isn’t that great? You can get the DirectoryPress Theme now.

Enter the Coupon Code to Save $20.

JUNE2011

After playing with the theme for two days and made some code modification and theme customization, I have 3 directories site created already. With wildcard domain configuration on GoDaddy, I have unlimited potential.

Of course, the downside is this. The more sites I created, the more SEO work and marketing work I need to do. I will also face the chicken and egg question where is no data in the directories. So I have found someone who is interesting in promoting the niche directory and earn 30% commission out of it.

In general, you will need a good understanding about PHP programming language, so you can modify the code to do what you need. Some stuff is just not fully implemented.

Guess what is just happening? I already got one signup with the most expensive package without me doing too much.

Really. If you want to create a niche directory website and earn passive income, DirectoryPress Theme on multisite WordPress setup is what you need. I highly recommend.

If anyone of you are interested in do so and want to know how I use GoDaddy and your my shared webhosting at MidPhase to run these niche directories, I will cover that in the future post.

My goal is to use Google site as an extra source for SEO and to boost exposures to my customers who are listed on my site. This is solely based on the GEO location each business has. So I submit the GEO location data feed to Google map and pull in the Google map into the Google Site. It works like a charm.

The first challenge is to add the site I created on Google sites to Google webmaster tools. I  found the solution. It’s so easy and not a challenge at all!

Once you have verified your site with Google Webmaster tools, Google Sites will auto-generate a sitemap xml file. Your sitemap will be generated at:

• http://sites.google.com/a/(your domain)/(site name)/system/feeds/sitemap for Google Apps.
• http://sites.google.com/site/(site name)/system/feeds/sitemap for sites under sites.google.com/site

Once these Sitemaps have been created, you can submit them to Google using Webmaster Tools.

Please note: your site must be marked as a public site in order for it to be verified.

Under the site setting, I can also submit the site to use Google Analytic and able to add Google AdSense. This can potential become my extra passive income. There is not much to do to maintain the site, since the data is automatically feed from Google map.

The second challenge is that Google Sites don’t take Javascript. So you can’t even install a statcounter or third party flash script. So I am thinking to work around this issue by inserting new Google Doc or presentation, which is updated through API. I need to dig into this further more. It it works, it will be awesome!

I just submit the sitemap to Google Webmaster tools. Let’s see how soon they will index the site and push it to search result. The purpose of this experiment is to see how fast Google index and include the site to search engine. I have had some good luck using Google’s Blogger services to get content indexed in less than few minutes. So I will see how Google sites perform.

That’s for now!

Image Source: Roots – This image has been chopped and enhanced.

Few months ago, I post a way to increase your blog’s Google page ranking with RSS feed at “DIY – Build quality backlinks with RSS Feed on blogger and wordpress.” Just about three months later, two of my blogs are marked PR3 with over 100 backlinks on each blogs. I can roughly say that my RSS FEED building quality backlinks strategy is working.

I did a little research on what page is linking back to my blog on Google. I found that the majority links to my blog are from the RSS Feed I add to the other blogs. The links are all coming from the same resource like the roots of the 1000 years old tree. It’s from ME!

Don’t know what I am talking about?

The idea of using RSS Feed to build quality backlinks and to increase your PR is very simple. Without buying links, asking for linking back or making comments on other blogs, you can simply do all the quality back links on your own with the instruction in “DIY – Build quality backlinks with RSS Feed on blogger and wordpress”

To summarize, I want to get a good PR on two of my related blogs. I want to promote those blogs without going out asking for linking back. So I add RSS Feed from blog A to blog B and RSS Feed from blog B to blog A. The links are directly linking to each other on the side bar on every post on each blogs. So if you have 10 pages post on each blogs. It’s equally to 10×10=100 back links on one blog to other. Of course, Google may only index few of your post every few days, since your blog is not very popular. To make sure you blogs are indexed frequently, you need to update your blogs regularly.

Those two blogs I implemented with RSS Feed are both PR3 in less than 3 months. The majority of links are from each other. If you can add your RSS Feed on more blogs, you know what you will be getting. It’s totally legal, because you are not buying, selling and bribing for linking back. You simplify do that the normal way as a blog owner.

Currently, the RSS Feed backlinks will not work on WordPress.com free blog services. The links will be encrypted by WordPress, which will not give you any credit for page rank.

Good luck on building your backlinks with RSS FEED!

Image Source: And the games have begun The image has been cropped.

Few days ago, I posted that my Google Page Rank dropped from PR4 to PR0 on “TNX.NET – Text link ads may kill your Google Page Rank“. I believed it was caused by the advertisement I put on my blog. It includes the affiliate links from TNX.NET and ReviewMe. I decided to claim my PR back.

Now I can see that my PR is back to PR4. That’s good!

One of the reasons that kill my page ranking is the advertisement links. As many of us know already, Google doesn’t really like web site owner to put up paid-link advertisement. If you really want to make money off your web site, you need to make sure the following things are done right. Otherwise, you will end up getting the same penalty I have.

• Use nofollow in all your advertisement links
• Make you post easy to identify as a paid review post.

So I decided to write a Request reconsideration email to Google. In the email, I claim that I have added the nofollow to all advertisement links. I also claim that I have no intention to do paid review posts without making readers aware of that they are reading a paid review.

Less than 48 hours, I got my page rank back. It’s showing PR4 on my Google tool bar.

Now it’s time to get back in the page ranking game. I will ensure to provide more high quality content and get more readers. I want to move my blog page rank to the next level.

Image Source: Experiment II

Would you like to gain web site traffic and increase SERP by joining The Exponential Linking Program? A reader of min, came from “Steve’s Blog of the Web“, recently sends me an invitation about his greyhat SEO techniques. He starts this free email program that will help you and help all attendee to achieve this.

The catch is that only the first 10 emails will be accepted. I would like to give him a lift to let everyone know about his program. If you are interested in his program, Please visit his contact form page and send him your email.

Well. I think there are less than 9 left.

Would you smile all the way to New Year like the Christmas girls, if you find out you just lost 2/3 revenue in your ultimate sexy online store? I don’t think I will smile tonight, but I am sure will smile again when this problem is fixed.

For those who knows my sexy business for all sexy ladies, I have just lost 2/3 revenue in two days. That’s really bad news. Look at the bright side, I found the problem before it gets worst. I have tried many ways to get my sexy shoes and sexy lingerie store on the Google front page for months. I did it very well. I was able to search “Sexy Shoes” and find my site on #1 Google search engine result page #5 spot. It has been this way for months. It has brought in a lot of business due to the “Sexy shoes” and relevant keywords. Now. I have just lost 2/3 of my business because that my site was no longer on the first page at all. It’s not even on the first 10 pages.

What went wrong?

I have to admit that I am not 100% SEO expert, but I have learned so much since I start programming 10 years ago. When I started my new ultimate sexy store at www.angelsdesire.com early this year, I decided to optimize my store as much as I can without spending a dime. My SEO cost is actually my time and energy on social networking with other web site owners. So far, I have NOT spent a dollar on advertisement.

This site is less than one year old and has generated more revenue than I expected. I tweak and tweak the web site title, Meta tag and description and finally get my site on #5 spot of Sexy shoes keywords. My site was among other high ranking competitors’ web sites, which has generated million dollars annual sales.

Now I just lost the game. I believe I can get in the game in few days. So I changed my title back with minor modification. I totally realized that how important the web site title is!

The web site title was “Sexy Thigh High Boots | Exotic Shoes | Fetish Shoes | Sexy …“, which brings my site to the #5 spot on the first page. Last month, I added new sexy lingerie product line to my site. So I modify the site title to “Sexy Lingerie | Exotic fetish lingerie | Sexy thigh high boots | Exotic Shoes …”

As you can see, the Sexy Shoes is push down to the third keywords. Two days later, I cannot find my site with “Sexy Shoes” keywords on Google. Not ever on the first 10 pages. OMG! My online order suddenly drops to 1/3 of my regular amount.

I have to do the damage control and try to get my site back up on the #5 spot. I don’t know how Google will re-rank my site, but I think it should not take too long to get my site back on the first page. I can only hope!

What lesson have I learned? I hope you learn something from me by avoiding the small mistake, which cost a lot! Make sure your web site keyword is not dramatically changed! Make sure you optimize your web site keywords in the <title> tag.

Don’t make the same mistake I did. It costs me fortune!

We will build the quality backlinks with RSS Feed on blogger and wordpress.

Few days ago, I post a way to submit your blogger blog sitemap to Google webmaster tools. Meanwhile it also allows people to subscribe to your RSS feed through wonderful FeedBurner service. You can read the post at How to add Google sitemap and feedburner for your blogger.com blog.

The idea is to use FeedBurner for subscribers to subscribe to your RSS FEED and use the build-in FEED module on blogger or WordPress RSS Widget to subscribe to your RSS FEED on other blogs. I call it RSS backlinks exchange.

The most important note is to make sure you read the above link. The key is NOT to register your FeedBurner Feed URL in your blogger site feed settings and wordpress FeedSmith plugin. In other words, your default RSS Feed shows your really blog post URL instead of showing FeedBurner redirect URL.

Got the point? Here is the example.

I have two fashion jewelry related blogs. One is on blogger.com and the other one is on WordPress. You can find them here.

http://profashionjewelry.blogspot.com

http://www.profashionjewelry.com/blog/

If you look closely with the default RSS Feed URL, you only see the original post URL.

http://profashionjewelry.blogspot.com/atom.xml

http://www.profashionjewelry.com/blog/feed/?feed=rss2

However, the viewer can still click on the RSS FEED icon and subscribe to the FEED with FeedBurner.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/FashionJewelryBlog

http://feeds.feedburner.com/profashionjewelry

As you can see, those URL are using FeedBurner redirect URL.

Now. Let’s having some fun to add the RSS feed as quality backlinks to our blogs.

For Blogger:

You will need to add element to the blog template. You can see I already have an element

You click on Add a page Element under “Page Elements” control settings.

You now add the Feed Module to the page.

You simply type in your other blogs’ default RSS Feed URL. That’s how we want to build the backlinks to your other blogs, but not the blogger blog itself. So I type in my WordPress blog RSS FEED Default URL.

http://www.profashionjewelry.com/blog/feed/?feed=rss2

Now you see the top 5 post are listed. Mouse over the links and it says the original POST URL in the status bar. That’s what we need. Save changes. And it’s list on your page.

All you have to do the rest is to re-arrange your page elements.

For WordPress:

Under WordPress Presentation section, locate the Widgets settings. Make sure you are running WordPress 2.1 or greater version, which both support RSS Feed widgets.

If you don’t already have the RSS module installed on your side bar, you simply drag and drop it from the bottom widget list.

Now. You simply enter the RSS Feed URL of your blogger blog and close the widget. Remember to save the changes.

Now you have list the post on your WordPress blog.

If you look at both blogs, you see 5 quality backlinks from Blogger to WordPress blog and 10 quality backlinks from WordPress to blogger blog. Use your creative. You should know how to magnify your quality backlinks between many and many of your own blogger blogs and possibly exchange the RSS feed with other bloggers.

I will not tell you how to customize your blog template to show over 20 RSS feed modules. It’s up to your own practice to get your best results. Of course, you will need to keep those blogs alive by post new post every once a while. So search engine knows that blog is an active blog. It will them count all your backlinks a live links.

As you might already know that blogger.com provides the default Atom.xml as the post feed. However, if you try to add the FeedBurner under your blogger control panel (settings -> Site Feed), you will find that all URL of your post are redirected to FeedBurner’s feed URL. In that case, the Atom.xml site map link is no longer working under Google’s webmaster tools.

A viewer posts a comment about the solutions for blogger. You can read post and comment here. JohnMu is very kindly providing us a link to the FeedBurner forum about the solution. There in an instruction on how to set your site map for Google Webmaster tools. Well. It simply uses the following URL as the site map. As you can see it adds a redirect=false at the end of the normal feed URL.

http://terencechang.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?redirect=false. You just change terencechang to your blog name.

Wait. It doesn’t work for me. When you click on the link, you see a FEED page and the URLs are your post URLs. That’s good. However, Google webmaster tools won’t accept the URL.

You can see the snap shot of the error message on Google Webmaster Tools. It’s not acceptable.

So what is the solution?

It’s very simple. You simply use http://terencechang.blogspot.com/atom.xml as your site map on Google Webmaster tools and register your site feed on FeedBurner. So my feedBurner feed URL will look like this.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/terencechangblogspot

The only think you have to do is this. DO NOT put the feedBurner feed URL to your Blogger control panel. Leave the “Post Feed Redirect URL” field empty. That’s it. What that does is to use your original atom.xml as the sitemap while people can still subscribe your FeedBurner RSS feed.

Now. All my blogger blog are using atom.xml as sitemap while people can still click on the big RSS feed icon to subscribe to my feed. I can track all clicks through and many other statistics.

You can find more about those traffic boost tips I have in the related post section.

So how do I do with my Alexa Traffic Ranking now? Is that enough or not enough?

My highest Alexa traffic ranking is 207,742, which went from 5.5 million on June 1st 2007. It’s not bad for a month and half old blog. So does these Alexa traffic ranking number mean a lot to me? You will be disappointed by my answer. My answer is this. “Alexa Traffic Ranking” doesn’t mean a lot to me. It’s just a statistic information about overall traffic to your site. My primary purpose for manipulate Alexa traffic ranking is to boost the traffic to my blog so I can have more readers to view my posts. I did not have any advertisement on my site until few days ago when I post “Should I monetize my blog? It’s never too late to make money online.” Now I only have few small text link ads from AdBrite.com, which makes no profit so far.

This is what my traffic look like on Alexa Traffic Chart. I got no traffic in May 2007. Now I have static traffic from about 500 unique visitors to 2000 unique visitors. It’s up and down, since I stop manipulate the traffic. Is that good enough? Definitely No! Should I continue to manipulate it?

The question should be read as “what should I do to boost my traffic again to the next level?”. Well. As I always believe that “Content is the King.” Without a good quality content, your readers will leave and will never come back. It’s hard to get into top 100K on Alexa Traffic Ranking without a good static traffic. Now my focus will be on the content.

If you are looking for a ways to boost your traffic, you can look around my post and find how I did it. However, I truly recommend you to put up really good quality and unique content for your viewer. I am still learning new things every day. So do you!

Good luck to you all!

The following 10 questions are important questions that most SEO expert will ask them self as well.

For more detail please read Hiring an SEO Consultant by Jon Rognerud on Entrepreneur.com.

Here are the summary of those 10 questions

1. What ranking guarantees do you provide?
2. Are you going to make changes to my website?
3. What is your approach to linking?
4. What reporting and overall communications will I receive?
5. What does your pricing model include and what other services do you offer?
6. Why is your own PageRank low?
7. Who are some of your competitors?
8. What are your qualifications?
9. Can you provide references and successful rankings?
10. How much will the traffic results cost and when can I expect to see them?

Personally, I will add few more questions while I am learning to be a good SEO expert for my own business.

1. Are you using social bookmarking, social network and web site rating system as your SEO tools? There are many social bookmarking and social network such as digg.com, stumbleupon.com, facebook.com and myspace.com are used for link building. It might not be the ideal ways to build the backlinks, but does work well for a lot of small business.
2. How quickly can you adjust your SEO strategies to the search engine market changes? Search Engine company as big as Google constantly change their search engine program and algorithm. Change SEO strategies become important. Without knowing the trend on the search engine market, you might just miss the big opportunities. For example, if AOL change their search engine partners from Google.com to Yahoo.com or Ask.com, can you expect how many potential visitors you will miss or gain? Knowing what region your visitor came from is important. Knowing where your potential visitors came from are important as well.
3. Do you know any other web platform or resources can help you reduce your SEO investment? Do you know blog, image sharing and Wiki sites can also help you increase your backlinks with minimum investment? Knowing what other unique niche resource is important as well.

Personally, I try to optimize my business web site without invest a lot. Some SEO consultants charge a fortune for wrong reasons. At the end, they are the one getting benefits by serving you as SEO expert.