After a week or so of not being in the SERP’s again, my Gold locket site is back again, at number 1 this time! How long it will stay there for I dont know, but each time it has come back it has been higher than the previous. Hopefully within the next month it will stabalise at the number 1 position and generate a few sales over Christmas.

I’ve not done any more link building or added any more products to the site since the last update, which makes me think it may have been the blog comments which generated 2,000 links to the site in a couple of minutes. The number of links has now dropped to around 600.

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Despite my A4U competition entry bouncing around the SERPS, I am please to see it is still climbing! I havent done any work on the site for a while, yet the rankings are still climbing! Heres a few of the positions I have recorded over the last couple of weeks

15th July – NOT RANKED
16th July – 12th (Backlinks dropped from 2000, to around 1500)
22nd July – NOT RANKED
24th July – 10th
26th July – NOT RANKED
28th July – 6th (Backlinks dropped from 1500, to just over 1000)

So at the minute it is sitting nicely at 6th, although Im guessing it wil drop again over the next couple of days, and hopefully come back a bit stronger again! I have also noticed that as the number of backlinks drop, the rank seems to be jumping up…the only thing I can think is that the massive influx of 2000 backlinks in a couple of hours caused me some sort of penalty, and now as they are dieing off the penalty is slowly being reduced.

This is the first site where I have had a problem with the SERPS jumping around, however I cant pin point what has caused it as I have tried a few different things with this site which I havent used on any other sites. Im still confident that once its settled in place, with a little more work and adding the final products I can take the top position.

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Since outsourcing backlinks last week I haven’t done anything else on my gold locket website. Their are a couple of reasons for this, first being the amount of work I have on developing other domains and second being the weather! It has been really nice each recently (for the UK anyway) so I have been spending as much time outside, either chilling in the sun, messing around in our plunge pool or painting the decking/fence, to make the most of the weather.

In my previous post I said that I had outsourced 120 profiles, 240 links. Out of the 240, 60 of them where “Gold Locket” links. The site was ranking at around the 120 mark (very disappointing – havent had chance to tweak it at all yet). After the Angelas Backlinks, the site now ranks 14th – not a bad improvement! Im going to try and add a few more products this week, take a look at the onsite seo and add the search function. I’ll probably throw another 60 backlinks at it once I’ve added a bit more content, and possibly some “white gold locket” links as well as I have got an even cheaper supplier through oDesk now, $8.89 (£5.90) for 12 profiles!

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Total Time Spent: 8.5 Hours

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Earnings: -£1.75

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I had hit a bit of a stumbling block with my A4U competition site, I had the design in place, I had a decent chunk of writing, but I had no products! Luckily I was accepted to F Hinds programme yesterday so last night I spent an hour selecting the products I wanted from their feed and adding them to wordpress. For now I had copied the feed descriptions in, but these will all be rewritten at some point.

I had previously written a script which checks product prices by scraping the web pages (ideal for sites without feeds!), however as most of the jewellery merchants have feeds I figured I may as well use them so started writing a script for that. So far it reads the in the feed file from AWin, unzip’s it and updates all the prices for the products in wordpress with the new prices. When I get a spare few minutes I will put a little bit of code in which will check the feed for any products with the word “gold” and “locket” in, if it finds any emails me the details for me to add them to wordpress.

One problem I have at the minute is that one of the categories on the site is price. If a locket changes from say £55 to £45, it would need to change the category it is in. Now I can code this so that when it updates the price it updates the categories table as well, but it would be easier if I could create a custom page which rather than showing all the products in a certain category, shows all products with a price custom field value of between £x and £y. If anyone knows a way of doing that it would be much appreciated.

I have also got quite a long list of longtail keywords which I will be trying to cram into product descriptions and write a few blog posts for. Im still confident that I’ll get the whole site built from scratch, including adding all the products, writing quite a bit of content and a little bit of link building in under 10 hours. Im trying to get to the point where I can knock a site like this out in a day including some basic offsite SEO. I know people that are outputting a handful in a day, but I like to create custom themes for each and every site and write decent unique content for it.

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Total Time Spent: 4 Hours

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Earnings: £0.00

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In my previous A4u Gold Jewellery Competition, I covered the process I went through to select the niche and domain name. In the same night I created a design for the site, converted it to HTML and wrote an article, including at least 2 variations of each sentence for spinning.

Design & HTML Creation – 1 Hour

Firstly when creating a design I like to look at other sites in a similar niche and see what I like and dont like. Usually I will find 2 or 3 designs which I like and will create a mashup of them in Photoshop, taking the best parts from each design. I dont like to use existing themes, this is just my personal preference, I like to buid everything from the ground up (although the theme for this site is one that I found on the net, I’ve done a few tweaks to the source code here and there to optomise it a bit more, however once I get time I will redesign it from scratch!). By designing it myself I dont need to make any compromises on content or layout, and by coding it myself I can make sure the SEO is effective as possible. Once I have the design created in Photoshop, I’ll create it all by hand in dreamweaver as a standard HTML page. Once I have the complete HTML page I then chop it up into a wordpress theme – job done! The whole thing so far, except turning it into a wordpress theme has taken me 1 hour, and I imagine it will take another 15 minutes to convert it to wordpress.

Copy Writing – 1 hour 15 minutes

I had to take my car for its MOT this morning so thought this was the ideal time for me to put my new netbook to use! I grabbed a few articles and resources from around the net, saved them on my USB key and off I went. While I was waiting for the car to have its MOT (it passed by the way ) I managed to get a 600 word article written out in just under 45 minutes. When I got back I copied it over into The Best Spinner and set about rewriting each sentence, one at a time, at least two variations of each. This took another 30 minutes and now I have my original 600 word article, and 2 variations which can be spun together and combined with the auto feature in The Best Spinner to give me plenty of unique articles for publishing elsewhere and article submissions.

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Total Time Spent: 2 Hours 30 Minutes

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Earnings: £0.00

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After missing out on the previous A4U competition, several affiliates including myself have decided to start a new competition.

This time the niche is Gold Jewellery and at the minute there are 11 of us taking part, although as the competition doesnt start until the 15th June feel free to join in! There’s no prize, just a bit of friendly competition. The winner is whoever has made the most profit by the end of the year.

Unlike all my previous websites and domains, I will be blogging about the site in detail and (hopefully) how much it has earnt! So, the first step in entering the competition…picking a niche!

Im not sure how everybody else goes about selecting a niche, personally for me I loaded up a few jewellery merchants with a decent conversion and commission rate and had a quick browse through each for product ranges of items with an average value of £100+. First one I found was gold lockets. Prices start at around £50 and go up to £350+, most costing around £100+.  So with a 10-15% comission rate that most jewellers offer I should be able to earn an average of £10 per order quite easily.

The next step for me is checking the search volume with the Google Keyword tool, “Gold Locket” gets 9,900 exacts per month, with “Gold Lockets” bringing in about 4,600 exacts. Now normally I would do a bit more digging on exact traffic, including setting up a PPC campaign to see how many impressions I get for the selected keywords, but I dont have time to do that for this competition.

The penultimate step is competition, looking at the existing SERPs, the top spot is taken by a large site which is fairly well optimised and has quite a few backlinks to that individualy page, however all the links come from 2 different domains which are part of the same network. In second place its ebay! That sold it for me, and looking down the rest of the results there was no real competition at all. Im confident that I can get second easily, it will take a little bit more work to topple the top spot, but it shouldnt be a problem.

Now the final step, the domain name! Obviously goldlocket . co.uk was gone, hmmm, where from here, solidgoldlocket, whitegoldlocket, then the other half chirped up with, “why dont you just get ‘agoldlocket.co.uk’”, a few minutes later it was registered

Next step, the design…

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Total Time Spent: 15 Minutes

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Earnings: £0.00

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