SUPER EMD – Can You SEO Rank a New TLD Domain Extension Case Study? .Toys

*Update. Website was Manually Penalized for “Thin Content” Shortly After Tactics Revealed. Coincidence?* Ranking dozens of other websites now using same methods as discussed; have to keep them private apparently.

WTF is a Super EMD? We all know .coms rule the internet world, but a few others such as .org, .net, and .co are gainining popularity as the amount of available virtual real estate begins to dwindle.

.info, .biz and a few other domain extensions have been penalized over the years for their spamminess, and people hoping to jump on the EMD (exact match domain) band wagon.

Many years ago web2.0backlinks.com ranked very well for the phrase web2.0 backlinks; it was penalized through aggressive link building (but the principle of why it ranked when it did is sound). It was an EMD subdomain. The actual domain name is/was 0backlinks, and web2 was simply appended to form the exact match phrase.

Exact match domains still work extremely well, but sometimes they can get you into trouble, but what about a Super EMD? A super EMD is an exact match domain that incorporate the actual tld extension as part of the phrase.

.life, .website, .guru, .photography, and for this example .toys

Can see a full list of available TLDs here:

The logic:

Register a TLD that would form a natural EMD phrase.

Ensure it gets monthly searches (Google Adword Keyword planner tool)

Create a quality end user experience (so searcher doesn’t bounce)

The setup:

Register http://wolverine.toys

According to Google Wolverine Toys gets roughly 3600 searches per month. This is not including the categories created on the site.

Since this search has an Ecommerce expectation level, we used this Amazon plugin to create the store in less than a day.

Proper ONpage SEO for homepage, and categories. No index/no follow the product pages in Woocommerce since they are duplicate content (didn’t want to bother spinning or rewriting).

Offpage SEO:

http://socialnetworksignals.com

http://bookmarkingbeast.com

http://highprlinks.com

some other strategies that are part of http://saferankbacklinks.com

Currently Ranking around #12 in Google for Wolverine Toys. Other category keywords ranking in top 50, but nothing significant.

Considerations:

http://wolverinetoys.com was not available at the time, but looks to be now, starting at $100 (maybe an auction?). While the EMD.com might be able to rank better, longterm a Super EMD should prove more brandable and “safe” from updates, unless Google/Yahoo/Bing decide to not rank the newest TLDs (in that case they mine as well throw them out). Google is the only one ranking this website decently, while Yahoo and Bing seem to favor .coms, .net, .org, .co. The search engines need to play ball with the new TLD extensions or they are going to be a huge bust.

Also, a top level TLD still might be king in regards to trust and rankability as we can see jeangrey.co is ranking on page 1 for jean grey actress which gets approximately 4,400 searches a month, so we know it’s actually more competitive, but we did run a Crowd Search Me campaign for it months ago which may be the difference.

Traffic/Earnings Report:

0/0

Snake Eyes

Traffic is currently 1 hit a day or less (negligible); hoping this turns around once on page 1. Monetizing through adsense and amazon affiliate program; no $ yet. The purpose of this case study is to see if a Super EMD can rank for a low/medium competition phrase with commercial intent; earning back money and time invested would be a nice bonus, but knowing for certainty if these “premium” random domain TLDs can rank in a search engine driven digital world is more important.

Have an Opinion on why this will be an Epic Fail or Epic Win? We need experts like you in the discussion on our Facebook, Twitter, or Google+

* July 10th 2015 Update*

We are now earning! Making money with both Adsense and Amazon each day

Currently ranking #3 in Google

In order to push from #10 to #3 we implemented a technique as old as the internet itself, but in the SEO space it’s extremely new. You’ll want to bookmark this page for the next update.

 

$3200 Yearly Niche Website Passive Income Case Study – Earning with Adsense / Affiliate Marketing

website passive income adsense

You are about to learn the secret behind earning hundreds and thousands of dollars a month passively. Passive income. Many people worship it, others shun it, but few know the true principle behind it, systems. Successful investors and businessmen know principles and systems endure. Certain criteria need to be met: measurable, repeatable, scalable and profitable. All will be revealed. The genesis of this case study started with: How to rank an adsense / amazon affiliate website

**Note** Even if you do not run adsense websites, and run a marketing agency or lead generation services, your ROI is most likely actually much higher, allowing you to earn even more following the principles in this case study.

Earnings:

On pace to earn $3,200 passively. This is broken down between adsense and amazon.

164.53 adsense

102.16 amazon

266.69 total for 30 days, extrapolated over 12 months (266.69 x 12) = $3200.28

adsense earnings

 

amazon affiliate commissions

Analysis – Why this is an amazing investment:

In the earlier case study you can see expenses were north of $2,000. Even if our expenses increased (assuming we weren’t ranking as good as we would like/needed to) all the way to $4k, this is still a very strong investment based on the numbers.

On average it may take up to 5 months to start earning from an investment website such as this. This means by month 24 (19 months of earning x 266.69) you would have earned $5067.11, or a profit of $1067.11. By month 36 you would have profited $4,267.11. That’s a 133% return on investment within 3 years. If only I could get my mutual funds, real estate, and 401k to pay this type of return.

Potential Pitfalls:

Rankings could slip / site penalized

This is mitigated by providing Native English written reviews and providing a relevant Youtube video. Give the end user value and there shouldn’t be a problem. Our average time spent on page is very high (minutes long) whereas bounce rate is a healthy level.

Adsense could get banned

Again, don’t do something shady like encourage ad clicks or use blackhat spun content to rank. You have to either write the content yourself or invest in an expert in this area. You can also diversify by using multiple ad networks such as Yahoo/Bing contextual ads, and a few others but we view as adsense as the best and you shouldn’t muzzle the ox considering our traffic is mostly from big G.

Amazon could get banned

Stay within TOS and this shouldn’t happen. Website is not misleading users and has a clear Amazon image graphic to check out deals or buy now if interested. Don’t forget there is also Walmart, Target, and other major retailers that are opening up their online affiliate stores if you wish to further diversify.

I would label something like this a calculated risk, whereas we are not speculating on the price of gold, or future markets. It’s moderately risky to assume you can rank for phrases, but if you build solid content and offpage promotions the results should be measurable, repeatable, scalable and profitable. The end user wins, Google delivers awesome relevant results, and consumers have a chance to buy through the most trusted platform online, Amazon. Time to scale this operation!

How to rank an Adsense / Amazon affiliate website

Case study on how to rank an adsense / amazon affiliate based website in the search engines.

Areas covered:

  • How to pick a niche for adsense / amazon
  • Keyword Research
  • Domain Registration
  • Onpage Optimizations
  • Content generation
  • Offpage Promotions
  • – Link Building and Social Network Signals
  • Monetization
  • Ranking Results
  • $$ Earned

This is a 100% transparent guide on the exact system used.

Picking a niche:

We are going to promote physical products on Amazon, so we should choose a vertical that offers a good amount of choices, but not something that is too broad where it’s overwhelming, i.e instead of choosing Vacuums (extremely large niche), we chose a subset which is Robot Vacuums (moderately large niche).

Even though we could safely assume there is a large market for Robot Vacuums we want to ensure there is a good amount of searches, and a High level of bidding competition (which means you get more per click from adsense as advertisers are willing to pay more).

Keyword Research:

Google’s Adword Keyword tool is an often overlooked yet extremely powerful tool to assess potential and find related keywords for both onpage content and offpage anchor text usage.

The search volumes are high for the main phrases as well as ancillary ones, while the earnings per click look to be very healthy with suggested bids around $1.00. Chances are if a product is being sold on Amazon there was a good amount of market research already performed (no one creates robot vacuums, investing millions of dollars if there isn’t a market for it, so it’s a safe bet to assume a popular vertical on Amazon will yield adsense/affiliate earnings).

Choosing a Domain:

Should pick a domain name with the keyword phrase in it, but not necessarily an EMD (exact match domain) as they were penalized. We went with

http://robotvacuumhut.com

Onpage Optimizations:

We installed a random wordpress theme (can probably find better ones) and began the onpage optimization process. This meant having a keyword rich title that didn’t repeat itself, but had complimentary phrases / synonyms and singular / plural instances. Also, uploading logos/images with alt text. The h1 tag is a reiteration of the title, Vacuum Reviews, vs focusing too heavily on robot vacuums which could lead to penalties.

Content Generation:

Since this website is review based, we wanted to give the reader the features/benefits of each robot vacuum, along with a relevant Youtube video embedded. This is enough value to justify driving traffic to this website, as the end user learns more about each robot vacuum, can compare its price, ratings, and watch it in action on Youtube.

*Big mistake*

Thinking we could throw almost any content on the website was a costly mistake. We outsourced the writing to a non-native English writer. While his writing is good enough for article marketing, it lacks the nuiances to help convert a visitor into clicking through to Amazon and purchasing, or staying on the site long enough to find a relevant adsense ad unit and click through. Our bounce rate was very high with this low quality content.

We then rewrote all the reviews using only native English writers.

Offpage Promotions:

Link Building: We view this website as an investment. We wanted to rank, but didn’t want to take huge shortcuts and risk getting penalized by a Google update. This is the exact services we used to rank for long term results:

Social Network Signals

Web2.0backlinks

BookmarkingBeast

High Pr Blog Comments

Manual Forum Posting

Authority Site Links

High PR Links

Total Investment: Around $2000 retail price (not including content creation)

Monetization:

The website uses Google adsense for relevant ads on the review pages, along with a buy now button that takes the visitor to the respective Amazon page

Here are the Keyword Rankings for the main 3 phrases tracked:

Tracking with Rank Tracker (free version)

Our offpage efforts have built a stable amount of organic Social Network Signals along with diverse backlinks. We are still creating links using the above techniques and are now using 400 related phrases based on Google keyword tool to avoid any over anchor text optimization penalties and cast a wide net of possible search engine traffic. Ahrefs.com shows our Offpage efforts increasing in addition to the obvioius rank improvements.

link-building-for-adsense-affiliate-webpage

And Piwik to track our website visitors.

adsense amazon affiliate website keyword rankings

Over the last few months our organic search engine traffic has gradually increased. The amount of keywords have also increased, with hundreds of different ones (not all shown) were used, also known as longtail phrases. To uncover keywords not provided and understand the greatest potential keywords, i.e. ones ranking on page 2 but get good search volume we use a really solid tool – Traffic Analysis by Swiss Made Marketing.

traffic analysis keyword potential adwords search volume

 $$$$ Earned:

We have just recently added Google adsense (still need to optimize our placements/colors) and are starting to get a good amount of Click Throughs to Amazon. We will either update this post or create a new one to notify you. Any predictions on earnings?