Thursday, January 3, 2013

New Year, Same Experiment

I am so glad it is a new year. I had many ups and downs in 2012 but I ended the year on a good note. I made almost $200 with Squidoo and nearly the same amount with InfoBarrel in December. My experiment is going well. I currently have 39 lenses in my main Squidoo account and I have 21 written and are waiting to get published. I decided that I am going to write all 500 lenses before I publish the lenses. I hate going back and forth, from one task to another. I want to get all the lenses written, then published and then backlinked.

I still don't know what I'm going to do about backlinking. A couple of my lenses started ranking right away so I added them to a few bookmarking sites and backlinked them on InfoBarrel. I think I made things worse because they fell in rankings after that. I am trying to create diverse anchor texts but it's so hard not to, especially with social bookmarking sites that only let you use the title of the lens for the anchor.

I recently heard about something people have been doing to backlink their niche sites and I think it might work for my lenses. People are buying expired domains with backlinks still pointing at them. When they set up the websites, they still have link juice and Google thinks the site is useful based on the old links. Any links put on the site are deemed high quality by Google. A few backlinks by these previously expired domains goes along ways. All I would need to rank my Squidoo lenses for their keywords is around 5-10 high authority backlinks. I could buy 10 expired domains with high authority and use them to link to my Squidoo lenses. Then I wouldn't have to scramble around finding useful links. I really think this could work.

However, I'm not even close to backlinking the lenses. I've got to get them written and published first. I HATE writing but I love designing and publishing. I want to get the writing out of the way so I can do the fun publishing stuff. It's probably going to take at least a month to get all of the writing done. I wish I could pay someone to do the writing for me but I just don't have the funds to outsource. I don't know how I'm going to get through this. I need to write around 440 lenses still. The most I can write in a day is 12 or 13. Today I wrote 11 and my brain is fried. I just need to keep thinking about the future and how awesome it will be when these lenses are published. I should be making a couple thousand dollars a month which would be so amazing. I could take a month vacation and still make money. I couldn't do that very often because lenses need to be updated once in a while but I think I could leave them for a month or two without anything bad happening to them.

Goals for 2013
  • Write, Publish and Backlink 500 lenses
  • Write 100 InfoBarrel Articles
  • Rank at least 250 lenses in the top 10 in Google for their main keyword