Working hard to get found on Google

I am quite frustrated right now as I do not seem to update this blogging diary of mine as frequently as I'd love to.  My self-hosted Wordpress site is really keeping me on my toes. I'm very busy figuring out how to get found on Google a.k.a that painful process called Search Engine Optimization.

I've been hard at work with the Pajama Affiliates' SEO and Keyword Course for beginners.  I keep wondering though why it is referred to as "for beginners" because anyone who needs to polish their site's SEO would benefit tremendously from the site.

=======>Get Keyword Training From Pajama Affiliates

I've been busy for the whole of last week and this one - going through the course. So far my blog has 17 blog posts which I've managed to pull together within a space of a month. My initial reaction to the course was to go back to each post and align it with the lessons learned.   That did not work well for me and got me more confused and frustrated.

My solution then was to write a brand new post (post no. 18) and apply everything I've learned there about blog post SEO, image optimization, interlinking etc.

The process went smoothly, with even a thumbs up from the trainers (quite a huge deal for me).  This helped me to put everything into perspective.  I will go back and clean out the posts as well once I know all that is required off by heart.

I'm also busy working on the analytics on Google Search Console. This is one of those things that I tripped  over and fell on while fiddling and searching the net.

I am jumping for joy because my month-old niche blog is already ranking for 100 keywords (I was not even targeting most of them). One of them is already on Page 1 so yeah!!! I'll jump for joy for this one.  The thing is, I'm not new to keyword research and can only thank what I preceive to be the best keyword tool i.e Jaaxy

=====>Read my Jaaxy Review

Pajama Affiliates is helping me a lot to put everything I mine from Jaaxy into perspective. Getting found on Google is one thing, the question Robin keeps asking her students is "what kind of quality will your readers find when they land on your blog?". Google has become clever and sprinkling and throwing keywords all over one's blog does not work anymore - it is because of these developments that I realized that I will need coaching on SEO and Keyword Research.

I will make an effort to post weekly updates with updates on my traffic stats as well as my affiliate marketing journey in general!

Till next time!

How I use Hubpages for traffic generation

I am on my third week of my experiment and journey and I must say that I have achieved quite a lot, all thanks to Jaaxy, Hubpages, Blogger and Squidoo.

When I started this,  I was mainly exploring the viability of Hubpages as a Squidoo alternative.  After 30 of my lenses were locked, I had to abandon my account and I focused on my offline business.

It occured after a while that Squidoo has been through this locking and warning lensmasters before and surely it will continue existing still, so I decided to give the Web 2.0 sites another go.  Instead of going directly to Squidoo,  I decided to start with Hubpages.

With everything I've learned about keyword research with Jaaxy,  I decided that this time I will go for less competitive keywords as well as niches that are not very crowded.  As we speak, I only have 2 hubs on my targeted niche as well as 3 others that are not niche focused.

My first step though was to build a Blogger blog for my chosen niche.  With the help of the Jaaxy keyword tool I optimized the blog for search engines as well as put in a few keyword focused posts as a start.

I also looked up the competition analysis results on Jaaxy and I realized that no one is using the high ranking free sites to target the keyword i.e Hubpages, Squidoo, Youtube etc. Needless to say that I dived in and created my first keyword focused hub, squidoo lens as well as a blog post.

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It has been 3 weeks and I get daily traffic to my niche hubs, with 50% of the traffic coming from Google, 30% from pinterest and about 10% from other Hubpages users. My hubs are already ranking on the first page of Google.

The cool thing about Hubpages is that they already rank well with Google, hence I managed to do so well with my hubs within a week  or so.  What I learned from +Jennifer Ledbetter is that, your own website or blog takes longer to rank compared to these free sites.

Initially, I was confused as to whether I must spend more time on Hubpages and engage with other users.  I've decided against it because my main aim is to generate search engine traffic to my hubs and then point it to my Blogger niche blog.

The blog is getting some organic traffic already, however Hubpages is still the main traffic source so far.

I've realized though that Hubpages does not allow your own affiliate links in hubs, hence I am focusing on them as a traffic generation method rather than an income generating site.  They do have Amazon and Ebay modules though, as well as Adsense.


Instead of putting my own affiliate links, I used their Amazon modules for product recommendation.  It will be an added benefit if I earn income through those, but right now they are not the main focus.

I'm also starting to see some daily activity on my Adsense account although it is not amounts worth writing home about.  I may share these figures on a monthly basis as well.

To recap, this is what I've done so far (3 weeks):

• Performed a keyword search on Jaaxy
• Created keyword focused posts on Hubpages, blog and Squidoo.
• Pointed Hubpages and Squidoo to my blog.

Beyond sharing the hubs and lenses on social media, I haven't done much promoting on them.
I also intend to look further into Jaaxy's competition analysis and create more posts for my niche keywords.

As for Squidoo, I will write separately about the progress there.  After such a bad experience as having 30 pages of content being deleted, it becomes difficult for me to make a decision to put an effort on the platform.

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