Yes! It is!

I recently spent a little time reading a great long post on an IM type forum and the vast majority of people on there were saying that its now not possible to rank their webages quickly enough in Google to make it a viable business any longer. That means, that if you don’t rank your new domain’s webpages within a certain period of time, then your return on investment will take so long that its just not worth the risk.

Well this is certainly not the case.

However, if you are keen on backlinking to a fresh domain at a pace, then you will suffer for it – or the chances are high that you will. If you are penalized by Google (sandboxed) then it can change what could have been a profitable campaign into being a waste of time and resources.

Here’s the thing. You need to start off very slow indeed – or at least that’s what I’m finding. And even then, at times, some of my new sites are not ranking in Google (not in top 20 anyhow) for about 3 or 4 weeks after I’ve purchased the domain name and added content, and then stared to backlink. Where other new domains I’ve purchased are appearing within 7 days – normally top 20 and quite often a few pages are ranking too. Of course, in this instance, I’m not aiming for some kwd phrase that has a great amount of monthly search volume. That’s not in my game plan any longer. If I were able to rank those high enders within a few weeks on a new domain, I would be known as Joseph the Magician!

Not too long ago, when I first started this IM and SEO game, I was told time and again by those who knew what they were talking about, that I had to be targetting great big search terms with great huge search volume – never any less than 5,000 global searches a month. And far better to be going for those with 10k plus search a month.

Now I don’t know about you, but I feel this is utterly and plain wrong! If you do that, you will never see any results (rankings in top ten) for many months, by which time you’ve probably given up trying and have thus lost a lot of your own time, and/or a lot of money too due to investment in SEO tools and/or investment in outsourcing.

Fact is that this “high end” technique is well suited to folks who work a day job and can afford to take their time or to invest fairly heavily in outsourcing to a good team. Or, folks who have already become successful online and can afford to invest good money and not see any returns for months to come.

And add to that – these folks are not working in the trenches day in and day out. They are not the ones who are working on their backlinking campaign and the creation of content for the site. Thus, its easier for them. They don’t have to worry when they don’t achieve fast rankings. They are quite happy to persevere for months and months, fairly safe with the knowledge that they will in time see a great return on investments made.

For everyone else though, this in my opinion is a bad move indeed!

Let’s look at it this way…

If I am building a house, I start off from the foundations and I build them strong. Of course, previous to the foundations, I want to ensure that the land I am building on is good land and is not prone to flooding, or is not sitting on some previously mined coal seam or something like that. Then I work on building the walls and the interior supports. So on so forth. Bit by bit.

In terms of creating a “property” online, I would do something similar. I’d build out a small site to begin – perhaps 5 to 10 pages of content. I would then start to very gently backlink to it for the first few weeks – maybe with a single link a day for the first week, then moving on up as the days and weeks pass. Perhaps by week ten I’m now achieving 20 backlinks a day to this new site. Is that going to rank me top ten for anything that is particularly competitive? Nope!

But, I would very possibly get some good rankings – top ten, top five even, within this ten week period, if I had spent time on my keyword research and assessed my competition well enough. I may be targetting keyword terms that only receive 200 to 800 searches a month, and I may achieve top ten rankings for all of those within 8 weeks.

What does this mean?

It means that if I have researched my kwds well enough, I would now be making a return on my investment – within 2 months of purchasing my domain. If I sense then that this domain has true potential, what am I going to do now?

I’m going to do some more kwd research. I will then write up some more content based around the kwds that I find are do-able in terms of ranking top ten/top five. And I’ll start hitting them with backlinks too. But this time, my chosen kwds may be a bit higher in terms of search volume, and thus also in terms of competitition too.

But here’s the thing. I already have a strong foundation for my website. Sure, its only 10 to 12 weeks old, but already I’m hitting it with around 15 to 25 backlinks per day. Thus if I start hitting my new kwd phrases fairly hard, and build up on that in the weeks and months to come, I’ll surely be ranking those kwd terms too in the weeks and months to come, and thus my return on investment potentially is going to be nearing profitability, if not already nicely profitable.

All I am doing now is re-investing a part of my income from the site in outsourcing and in necessary SEO type tools. And at the same time, I’m now focusing on a couple of other sites that are fairly new, and I’m doing exactly the same thing.

Furthermore, the chances of being penalized by Google (sandboxed) are thoroughly minimal, thus my ROI is going to happen all the sooner.

Its a case of being patient, patient, patient.

For sure, you are not always going to hit on a profitable niche and mistakes will still be made. But the more you do this, the more often you get the winners, and thus your ROI goes up.

What’s even more. Imagine you find that you are making a good income from your early rankings. Let’s just say for example you are monetizing with AdSense. You are getting a few visitors in the early weeks to your new site because you’ve managed to achieve some nice rankings within a few weeks for some lowly searched kwd phrases that are not overly bouyant with competition.

As you build the site out with content – maybe just a page of content a week – that’s perfectly fine. As you gain more and more backlinks to the site while the weeks turn to months, you are strengthening out the site.

Now, let’s say we are 6 months further on and we’ve been keeping up the backlinking and the building of the site. We can now hit the site with 200 backlinks per day and Google will not bat an eyelid simply because this is normal for your site. Do you think that now you can really begin to focus on some high end search volumed keyword phrases and get them ranking in the top ten within a few months time? You bet you can!

After all, is this not what your competitors have done also? The only difference being that they started working in this niche a year or two before you. But what’s to say you cannot catch up with them and then overtake them? I bet you can! Providing you have carried out your kwd research well and you are not trying to rank for some niche that is totally dominated by huge branded sites with countless backlinks already in place.

Thus in a sense, we are looking to achieve something of a plateau effect.

The early weeks and months you see a small amount of daily traffic to your site and thus a small amount of income. Around month three let’s say – you reach a new level in terms of traffic and income because you’ve just managed to get a more competive keyword phrase ranking in top ten. Thus your traffic pops up a bit and income in tandem.

As you push that ranking higher – into top 5, and you begin to achieve a number of long tail rankings and a couple more competitive top ten rankings, that plateau goes to the next level.

By month 12, you can look back on your traffic levels and your income levels and see a definite trail here. You can see the plateaus you’ve reached in, say – month 3, month 5, month 7 and so on…

This is what I do with all my sites now – all my new projects are based on this approach. I never used to. It was more a case of head in the sand and let’s just go for it all guns blazing. Not a good way to progress!

As mentioned, of course I have some that flunk. That’s the learning process that even someone who’s been doing this IM stuff for ten years still goes through. But the person who is at the ten year level in their business have a number of huge sites behind them – those that started off teeny weeny and turned out in time to show real good profit potential. The other ones that turned out to flop – well, that’s just part of the game – its a never-ending learning process.

Fact is, if you are not making mistakes no matter how long you’ve been in this business, you are not working hard enough!

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So, what am I working on now?

Well, as you may know, the work with Chris, my young protege in Texas, is going from strength to strength. He saw the best ever income day the other day from his main site – $52.86 I believe it was, from a site that is merely a few months old. Not all days are as magical as this though, and some days you still wonder if you want to get out of bed to carry on. But you have to, or else you may as well have a day job.

Otherwise, I’m doing some coaching, which is good fun and I hope that everyone involved in that is really making progress with their own thinking in terms of seeing this as a business and also seeing it in terms of how I just described it.

Furthermore, I’ve very recently started a niche site based on where I live. This has been something I’ve been wanting to do for a long while now, but just not found what looks to be the right idea – the right niche for me. I wanted to get more involved in the local community, but at the same time, base the whole concept around a website.

Well, I’m happy to say that I’ve now got a joint venture going with people who live here in Kuching. I take on the building and ranking of the website, while they take care of the other side of the business. If you want to know what niche this site is in – its not based on AdSense, not on affiliate products either. Its based on tourism. And the potential I see for it is very good indeed.

I did my keyword research and my competition is generally fairly easy going. Nothing to write home about, put it that way. So basically, its a case of building out the site with lots of lovely images of sunsets and dolphins and stuff, and adding in lots of articles describing what there is to see and do in this part of the world. Then slowly but surely backlinking the site to achieve the rankings and thus (inevitably) make some very good profits. I say inevitably because I know full well that this niche is a guaranteed income maker. If you can rank top in Google for nicely related terms to the niche, its merely a case of sitting back and enjoying the income.

Add to that – its a niche that I really enjoy, so working to gain the rankings and build the site out is going to be a pleasure to do – and that for me is very important!