SEO and Marketing

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PS: You will see your $20 appear in credits straight after being assigned an account manager.

-edit- You are too late now.

As a regular Digg user i have noticed a large number of 5min.com videos making it to the front page. In fact most of the videos would get Dugg within certain time intervals. You could almost predict when the next video is going to appear. It was not just me who noticed this trend. I have seen a number of users make comments such as this one that were buried in the matter of seconds. A bit strange don’t you think? So i decided to investigate further.

5min is a place to find short video solutions for every practical question and is also a place for people who want to share their knowledge.

Pretty much a collection of various instructional videos Youtube style. 5min.com is a young website. Less than one year old. If you have a look at its Alexa traffic graph you will see how popular it has become.

Surprise surprise… Early July was when their Digg campaign took off.

Now lets take a closer look at some of the videos that have been Dugg. Crazy roller coaster crash for example. Submitted by missysupafly. This user joined Digg and quickly voted on 4 Dugg stories in the raw. 14 days later submission is made that makes it to the front page. Similar to every other users submitting 5min.com videos. Another thing that i have noticed is that all those users that have submitted 5min.com videos (I checked 6 or so) joined Digg after the launch of 5min.com. If this was not enough, here is another one for you. People tend to use the same username with every website they register. If you were to look up my nickname/username you would find my footprints all over the internet. What is very strange is that “missysupafly” only exists on Digg. Just like most other users submitting 5min.com videos.

Lets have a look at 5min.com now. The guy (Judging by the name) who uploaded the rollecoaster video to 5min.com RedFred surely has a wide taste. Have a look at the range of videos he has uploaded. He covered almost every category. Not only that, none of the videos are actually his. I have seen a number of them on youtube before 5min.com even existed. His about me reads: “These videos are for all you ladies out there who want to know what’s going on inside a guys head.”. What, like “How to get a guy to notice you”? If you have a look around almost every single user (Uploader) on 5min.com just sits there uploading random how to videos borrowed from other websites. Why would a genuine user do that?

My theory: After realising the viral power of instructional videos a bunch of clever guys decided to launch a startup in this particular niche. The next logical step would be to populate their website with content that has been proven to do well on other website. If a video does incredibly well on one video site it should also do well on another providing that both websites have similar demographics. Then its a matter of creating a fake community, submitting videos to social websites such as Digg and giving them a slight kick start with a few votes. In most cases Digg community would then take over the voting and get that video to the front page. That’s a lot of free traffic!

Disclaimer: This is only my theory. I may well be wrong and the users/sites i have mentioned may well be genuine.

So you are thinking about starting a website and then monetizing it in one way or another. But what should this website be about? You are better off picking a narrow niche. Especially if you are new to Internet marketing.

Lets me just define “niche” for you before we carry on. What is a niche? A lot of beginner webmasters tend to think “niche” is a target market/subject for your website such as cars or shopping. They are almost right, however a major part is left out. “Niche” is a narrow and specialized target market characterized by a particular product, interest or service. For example car spoilers or even Porsche 911 spoilers.

So why niches are so important?

This is logical. You come up with a good idea and then you try and think of some ways to promote it. Why not do it the other way around?

For example the other day i was doing a bit of backlink research for a number of competitive websites. After following one link after another i stumbled upon this PR7 veterinary resources page. It was free to submit to. It looked like it was getting a lot of traffic too. The only problem is that i did not have a vet website. $5 later i had myself a vet related page. I emailed the person with the list and he was quick to add my site. Now my little page makes me $2-4 a day. Might not seem like much but for 20 minute effort its not bad is it?

Have a look at a busy directory with a bunch of categories. Most of these would be quite packed with links. But other narrow niches such as: “Car parts in London” and “Prostate cancer research” will probably be quite dead. Make yourself a quick page about prostate cancer research and skim some of the traffic from that directory. Also a lot of academic websites provide links to related resources. Use this free advertising opportunity by making a website to fit the criteria. These are just a few examples.

So you want to make some “easy” money? Everyone does. But how? In general you need 3 main things. Content, traffic and advertiser. The old fashioned method would be to spend hours a day writing or creating your own content. Then spending the rest of the day submitting or uploading it (Ok, i might have exaggerated a bit). I have met a few people who actually enjoy doing this but most of us simply can’t be bothered. After submitting your content you would go on a search for traffic. Whether you would submit to 1000s of directories, write 100s of articles or go around spamming on forums and blogs; you must admit that generating traffic for your website is not that easy. SEO takes a long time to kick in, instant traffic quickly fades away and at the end of they day you simply can’t think of another thing to do to improve your traffic situation. I wont even mention your bandwidth costs, poor traffic conversion and bellow average CTR/sales. Sounds familiar?

Things become much easier with web 2.0. Let me explicate. Revver for example is a video sharing website similar to YouTube. Just look at it! It screams at you: “Use my content!!!”. They even provide developers with various widgets, rss, API and more. So what you may ask? Well there are other websites that scream the opposite: “Feed us content!!!”. Take a look at Digg for example. Can you see it now?

The reason why i used Revver as an example is because it actually pays you to share videos. Its a simple setup… I take the videos from Revver. I put them on my own website. I then submit these videos to websites such as digg. The whole process takes a few minutes a day. I have content, i have traffic and 20% of the revenue each video view generates. Then i took it one step further. I uploaded my own watermarked videos to Revver (Now i get extra exposure). I then filled up my website with 3rd party ads from Adult friend finder and finally made it easy for my users to digg and share these videos on my own website. 3rd stage was to turn my website into something a bit more user powered.

End result:

Conclusion: You don’t have to work 56 hours a week now days to make a quick quid. You just need to have a look around. Think… Ideas will follow.

Check out this video i have found on website interlinking and SEO; and make me some money while you are at it

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