My 4 Hour Workweek

It’s no secret that I’ve had some trouble with my authority sites so far.  I’ve crafted an attractive design (in my opinion), I’ve written a lot of high quality, original content, and I’ve done a fair amount of work to attract real backlinks.

Nevertheless, Google doesn’t seem to like my site.  At least, not yet.

Maybe you’re in the same boat as me, with your site.  A lot of work, not a lot of results.  I think it’s the most common scenario, despite all the success stories you read online (simply because the people who fail usually don’t write about it).

Anyway, I’ve been playing around with this awesome tool lately that has given me a lot of great insight, and the good news is, you can use it almost to its full potential without ever paying anything.  I’ll explain…

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October was a fun month, mainly because I was on vacation for over a week (more on that below) and tax season (the 10/15 deadline) ended.

As far as income goes, things were pretty stagnant – as I expected, my income level returned to where it was at prior to last month (when I made a decent amount from an e-mail I sent out).

With the end of the year fast approaching, it’s time to make that last big push to make sure 2012 ends on a high note.

Anyway, let’s get into the specifics of October…

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As you might recall, I wrote about when I was banned from AdSense nearly 8 months ago.  It’s been my most popular blog post in terms of comments (200+), and ranks #2 in Google for the commonly searched phrase “Adsense account disabled“, right below Google’s own page regarding the issue.

It was a hot topic then, for me and many others.  It ended the monetization of my niche sites, and combined with Panda/Penguin algorithm updates, basically set me back to ground zero.

The title of this blog post gives you a pretty good idea of what I’m going to discuss here today, but keep reading anyway.

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Sometimes SEO works in mysterious ways.  With all of Google’s algorithm changes, and the basic fact that no one really understands all the components of Google’s algorithm, strange things can happen.

People tend to focus on the negative observations, but sure enough, positive ones occur probably just as frequently.

I was faced with one of these positive occurrences, something I came back to after my 8 day vacation overseas (which is why I haven’t been able to respond to your comment or e-mail lately, in case you’re wondering).

This actually blew my mind when I saw it - one of the most competitive keyword phrases, and I’m ranking on page 1 (without even trying to).  I decided to turn this startling observation into a case study to see if there’s something we can learn.

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If you’ve read about and learned the basics of SEO, you know that backlinks are important for the ranking of your site. More important, however, is the fact that backlinks can range widely in quality.

Generally, the easier it is to obtain a backlink, the lower quality it is (there are exceptions, of course). I don’t ever claim to be an expert on SEO, but I wanted to share with you a very simple strategy that I tried recently, that helped me get a real backlink without having to spend any money.

When I say “real”, I mean that it isn’t a backlink I manually built for myself with content on an article directory or Web 2.0 site, and it isn’t something auto-generated by software.  Also, I didn’t have to write any content (i.e. it wasn’t a guest post).

This is an old, simple, and proven tactic, but I just wanted to show that it still works. Click to continue…

September is over and so is summer, unfortunately.  It was fun while it lasted. Hopefully, the cold months ahead will mean more productive times indoors…we’ll see.

From an earnings standpoint, September was actually awesome for me, as I saw a big jump over August.

Before I (or you) get excited though, it’s important to understand why earnings were unusual, and evaluate the likelihood of repeating these results in the following month.

Let’s get right to it.

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