Taking the next step forward

**acropora** · 30-09-11

I've had a couple of sites set up now for a year. I'm about to receive my first cheque for £29 (I known that is nothing to most people on here).

In terms of going forward, I'm finding it hard to find decent learning sources. There is so much conflicting advice on the Net.

Is it worth paying the $300 a month fee for SEOBook membership (ie gain access to the forum and try to learn from their experience). I'm not expecting anyone to give their advice away for free.

Alternatively, should I just try spending that money each month and get 40/50 articles written and published with backlinks to my site,

**MollyHunter** · 30-09-11

SEOBook is an excellent grounding to SEO whether your new to it or whether your looking to improve a basic knowledge of it, saying that though, would that $300 be better spent pumping into content distribution for link building purposes, I guess it depends how much you already know about SEO / Link building.

There are some fab SEO forums around that don't charge $300 and at the end of the day SEO is really basic if you think of it as:

a). Create unique content that is optimised and focused on specific keywords
b). Build good quality links with those keywords (and similar keywords) varying as the anchor text
C). Get people talking about your products on the social networks - social signals are playing a greater importance in the algorithms and shouldnt be ignored.

With the link building don't just focus on articles, think about press releases, guest blog posts, social bookmarking, etc, etc, it's important to vary the methods you use, it's all about keeping it looking natural and if all your links come from article directories, that isn't natural.

Just some general thoughts, Best of luck with it!

**findlite** · 30-09-11

Reading up on the basics will get you so far but tbh most of what is written is rehashed crap as anyone who has researched something and found the same lines copied from wikipedia on almost every "research site".

If you read the basics, then have a flick through the Google webmaster guidelines you should soon be able to draw some parallels and have a reasonable idea on how to proceed.

After that its just good old fashioned ground work and quantitative results! Something none of these seo guru's would/can give you

Molly is on the right track, infact why not write down her ideas and head over to webmaster guidelines now? Its the best way to learn!

**acropora** · 01-10-11

Thanks for the pointers. I'm going to try doing some more link building before joining up to SEO Book and getting a site review.

I want to get more professional at my affiliate marketing, but realise no-one is going to give secrets away for free.

I do read the official guidelines, but I don't think if I followed them to the letter I would ever end up with a site with a decent backlink profile! I'm more convinced by the attitudes / opinions from the likes of Aaron than I am by SEOMOz (too conservative for my pallet).

I've decided I'm going to allocate $400 to article writing by means of outsourcing. Odesk springs to mind initially.

In the past I have been guilty of building backlinks from pages that I now realize are low quality. I'm using more tools to check out the background on sites, their incoming link profiles, whether they are based on dropped domains etc.

It might even be worth me setting up some of my own anon, decent quality blog sites (on different Class C's) for developing. I appreciate I need to be careful with this type of link structure in order from getting slapped. The more I analyse other successful affiliate sites, the more I realise this goes on.

Press releases is a good idea, its not something I have really considered before. I guess the more diverse and quality driven my backlink profile is, the better?

There is only one way to find out isn't there.

Does anyone have any pointers on how to avoid getting burnt when outsourcing for article writing? I'm not looking for amazing quality articles at this stage of the campaign, I just need them to read well and be unique and relevant.

**MonetiseDave** · 01-10-11

Originally Posted by acropora

Does anyone have any pointers on how to avoid getting burnt when outsourcing for article writing? I'm not looking for amazing quality articles at this stage of the campaign, I just need them to read well and be unique and relevant.

You could try textbroker, where turnaround can be quick but quality can vary.

Also, make sure any articles you buy are run through Copyscape (or similar).

Good luck!

Dave
Monetise.co.uk

**acropora** · 01-10-11

Good point re CopyScape. I'll be sure to mention to potential article writers I will run their work through CopyScape.

Do we think Google uses the CopyScape API? If not, I'm certain they must use something similar.