PLR Blog Case Study

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In this case study I took one of the  PLR blogs that I have for sale over at www.nicheplrarticlepacks.com and put it through the paces to get it ranked in the SE’s and earning some money.

Here’s a video that goes over what I did and then below that I have added some specifics about each step.  I used the tools over at IMA to help with the back linking process, but below the video I have added information on how you can do all the same stuff manually without having to buy any tools.

I created the blog around April 15th and today is May 19th so it’s only about a month old but has managed to climb to #13 in Google and make a sale of a $259 espresso machine  and two digital cameras for $229 each which comes out to a total commission of about $42.  Not bad for it’s first month!

Keyword Research / Site Setup

I decided I wanted to use the espresso theme because that’s one of my favorites PLUS espresso machines are expensive so they commissions will be high.

So, the first thing I did was fire up Market Samurai and do some keyword research which yielded a couple of related keywords that I wanted to use on the site.

The keyword I wanted for the homepage was pump espresso machine which is estimated to give me 559 visitors a day if I can get it into the #1 slot and the competition wasn’t so bad, but I couldn’t get an exact match domain, so I added an “s” onto the end of the keyword I was targeting and bought the pumpespressomachines.org domain.

Then, I wrote a review for the homepage, used my keyword phrase a couple of times in the review and linked to 3 of the top espresso machines over at Amazon.  If you look at the site, you can see that I rearranged the homepage a bit so the review would be at the top instead of the links to the articles but I kept the products at the bottom, of course!

I also wrote an article for one of the other keywords that I have targeted for the site and put that in as a post with a link to recommended products, of course!

Then, I set WPRobot to post every 3 or 4 days and moved on to execute my backlinking plan.

The Back Linking Plan

I made a modified version of the spreadsheet for this project (I usually do for every project anyway) and set about getting links – below is exactly what I did:

Week 1:
1.    Social bookmarked the homepage & submitted to Web2.0 sites via LinkJuicer and the social bookmarking tool at IMA.
-    If you don’t have these tools, you could do the same thing by simply going into all your SB accounts and bookmarking the target pages of your site.  You can find out more about this and where to open accounts by reading the Social Bookmarking Going Social Lesson (NOTE:  Link Juicer also submits the site to some document sites as well as web2.0 properties so you might want to also do this manually if you want to emulate these steps exactly)

2.    Create a Squidoo lens and Social Bookmark it.

3.    Submit article to Ezinearticles.com (point resource box link to the homepage plus the Squidoo lens)

4.    Submit an article to Buzzle.com (point link to homepage of site)

5.    Created 5 blog posts that point to inner pages of the site.  Now, for this I am using the IMA blog network (they have a network of high PR blogs that members get to post to as part of the membership.  Not only that, but it automatically imports those posts into their automatic social bookmarking tool which makes the whole process so easy.

- If you don’t belong to a service that has a blog network for you to post to you could emulate this by posting comments on blogs or by submitting articles to one of those article networks that distributes the article to many different site such as UAW or Free

6.  Create 5 blog posts and point to Squidoo lens

7.    Commented on a couple of do follow blogs that have PR – See the Blog Commenting Lesson for more on how to do this.

8.  Social bookmark all the blog posts and comments created in steps 5, 6 and 7.  I used the IMA automated social bookmarking tool, but you could do it manually for similar results.

Week 2

1.    Social bookmark the Ezine article and Buzzle article (I used the IMA tool, but you could just do it manually)

2.    Create a Hubpage and link out to the Squidoo lens plus the homepage of the website

3.    Social bookmark the Hubpage
(NOTE: I actually just discovered that hubpages hubs are “nofollow” until you have a hubber score of over 75.  I’ve been hubbing for along time so my score is over 75 but if you are new or have a low score simply make an article page on Weebly or Wetpaint instead!)

4.    Submit an article to Ezinearticles.com – point resource box links to inner page of website plus the hubpage

5.    5 Blog posts to website homepage – again, I used the IMA system but you could substitute as advised above if you don’t have a membership to IMA.

6.    5 blog posts to Hubpage

7.    5 Blog posts to Ezinearticles article submitted last week

8.    5 blog posts to Buzzle article submitted last week

9.    5 Blog comments on do-follow blogs (pages with PR1-3)

10.    Bookmark all blog posts and comments made in steps 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

11.    Submit an article to article distribution system (resource box links alternate between the homepage of the bog and the Squidoo lens and an inner page of the blog and the Hubpage).  For this step I used the IMA article blueprint system which includes a bunch of high PR blogs that your article automatically gets posted on.  It’s similar to the Linkvana membership.

If you don’t have a membership in either of these, you could use something like isnare.com or one of the article distribution services that will send out your article for free when you add your blog to their system.  The only thing with these systems is that you don’t really get much of a benefit because your article is being distributed on a bunch of low quality blogs whereas with the IMA system the blogs are all high PR and high quality.

12.    Submit one of the articles already approved by Ezinearticle or Buzzle to the following directories (link back to homepage and for the second link, alternate between squidoo lens, ezinearticle articles, buzzle articles and hubpage in the resource box):

http://www.articlestars.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.articleclick.com
http://www.amazines.com
http://www.easyarticles.com
http://www.bharatbhasha.com
http://www.articledashboard.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.articlealley.com

Week 3

Now, if I wasn’t such a slacker, I would have done more of the same things I did in weeks 1 and 2 here.  But I am a slacker so I didn’t really do anything else to promote the site at all!

The Results

I first started tracking the site around the 19th of April and it was already in position 43 in Google – not really getting much traffic but better than being in position 143!

A couple of days later it came out in position 5 in Yahoo and quickly moved to Position 2 where it site today.  Bing didn’t pick it up until May 15th where it’s been in position 9 ever since.

As far as Google goes, it hovered around the #30’s and #40’s until May 9th where it  popped up into position 13.  Since then it’s been a big dance between position 14 and position 20 something.  Today, it’s actually dropped out of site – still indexed but not ranking in the top 100 for the keyword “pump espresso machine”  interestingly enough, it is still getting the same amount of traffic!
(EDIT: It’s back in Position #14 now on May 20th)

Earnings

You might have noticed that I don’t have adsense on the site at all.  That’s because I’m not really that keen on adsense these days and for this blog where the commissions can be high, I figured it was better to focus on getting people over to Amazon.

I think this strategy might have paid off because it’s actually made 3 sales of really expensive items!

So far, it’s sold a Nespresso Espresso machine (a $250 item) and two Cannon Powershot Digital Cameras (for a total of $440)  which will result in about $42 commission for the site this month.  Pretty good!

I think the sale of the Digital Cameras illustrated how important it is just to get the visitor over to Amazon because once they are there they just buy stuff!

Conclusion

OK, so now you know that you can make money with these PLR sites and some of the steps you can take to get them ranking.  As you can see, I didn’t really do all that much work especially since I outsourced the articles (all expect the review for the site – I wrote those myself).

All total I probably have about 5 or 6 hours work into it.  Of course the tools help out a lot so to recreate the work manually and write all the articles yourself  that would probably translate to 20 hours (depending on how fast you write!)

ONE LAST THING: If you already have a domain name and it’snot an exact match for your target keyword don’t panic!  You can still optimize your page and rank even it it’s not a match OR you could make a new page or post with the keyword title and spend your efforts backlinking to that page. Exact match domains do give you an edge, but it’s not that big of a deal if you don’t have one (just do a keyword search on anything and see how many of the top 10 DON”T have an exact match domain).

Feel free to post your comments and questions below!

June 3rd Update: The site still hovers around #13-#20 in Google but it made another sale last night!

July 15th Update: Ok, I’ll admit that I haven’t done much with the site since early June.  I did submit a few more articles in early June and then the blog plummeted to the bottom of the SERPS.  I revived it with some posts to the AU Blogs (my secret weapon) and now it’s been sitting at #11 for about a week.  Oh – and it made 3 more sales!

Dec 15th Update – Since July I have done a little more promotion.  Ordered some press releases and had them distributed to 90 press release sites and also ordered a link package that consisted of 20 web2.0 links, 25 social bookmarks, 20 rss feed dirs, 300 article dir links, 300 blog article links (UAW)  and some profile links.  The results is that the blog is hovering around #2 or #3 and sometimes scoots back down to #9 or #10.

Total sales for 8 months = 26 (it has a 1.5% conversion rate so I guess that could be improved)

Total Commission for 8 months = $106.94

Now that might not sound like a lot, but basically the work has been done to get this to rank.  I could try to push it to #1 but I think I will leave it for now and just let it earn money.  So, hopefully this will earn me $120 a year without any work for years to come.

It isn’t a ton of money for this one blog (I have others that actually earn lots more) BUT, I have’t put a ton of work into it and once the work is done it just keeps earning… Then you can work on another blog, and another, and another…. until you have a whole army of blogs earning you money without you having to put in any effort once you do the initial work.

Now, that’s passive income!

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