The challenge is coming to a close and to be honest that’s good news for me. I’ve really struggled to blog for this many days straight and do my IM work at the same time. I’m looking forward to a small break!
After yesterdays whinge about expectations I now know that:
- I need to work on one thing at a time
- If the competition is very weak it will take about 30 days to crack the first page of Google
- I need to dedicate about 2 hours a night on IM work
- I cannot expect to rank on page one ever, this is simply because I don’t know the exact requirements. But I’m getting closer to understanding the effort required, which is a lot!
This brings me to…..
Competition
I’ve selected my keyword phrases based on very low competition numbers. The one factor I consider in the competition equation is number of backlinks. If this number is below 30 I’ve got a chance of seeing some action in 30 days. Why 30?
50 looks like the magical number of backlinks I can “kick off” per week. I say “kick off” because guess what, not all backlinks ever get found. In fact only about 10% wow! So every week I can create 5 actual backlinks that take about a week to get “discovered”. If I start backlinking on day 0, by day 7 I am creating about a backlink per day. In 30 days I can create about 20 backlinks and so on. Confused? Basically I can create a real backlink per day. Neatly this translates into the level of competition I can go after.
To understand if a phrase is any good I need to rank well in Google. To rank well in Google I need backlinks. At the moment, it looks like I can create 1 link per day, so to test a phrase based on a competition of 20 backlinks will take 30 days, a site with 300 links will take me 310 days. So it will take over 1000 days to attempt to compete with a site that’s got something like a 1000 links. That’s too long a period for me so I need very low competition.
Multiple Sites
This brings me back to my struggle with multiple sites. I think I struggled for a few reasons, but the biggest one was that fact I was trying to compress 10 sites, or 300 days of effort into 30 days, the reason for the fail is in a word, obvious.
There is of course another way and that’s paying people to do various parts of the process which is something I’ll need to revisit. I just won’t get them to write articles……
