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Enjoying MNF Again

My MNF (Micro Niche Finder) is back and working even better than before. Whew, I was almost ready to accept that I’d never see my copy work again. After all, it’s paid off its worth many times over already. I thought I’d lost forever one of my best SEO tricks.

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For the ‘uninitiated’, Micro Niche Finder is a keyword research tool that evaluates the viability of your keywords, giving you an idea as to how easy or difficult it is to use for ‘seo’ purposes. Particularly interesting is the ‘Brainstorm’ feature where with one click you are given several random keywords and the feasibility of each one. This is specifically helpful for someone who doesn’t have any idea for a keyword to start researching for. I owe to this brainstorm feature one site of mine that has garnered some considerable success in the serps. For more information about (MNF) Micro Niche Finder, please check this link out.
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No, the MNF copy in my notebook is still not working, just as the Google adwords keywords tool is still not working when I use IE. I have stopped pestering MNF Support because I had a feeling that the fault is no longer with MNF. This, after they told me to try using the Google Adwords Keywords tool using IE. They said if it doesn’t work, MNF won’t work. Some say it could be due to a Win7 update, etc. Besides, there doesn’t seem to be much discussion about it in the MNF Facebook page. If the problem had affected everyone, it would have become a big issue. Seems like everyone else is sailing smoothly with their mnf, including those who are ‘outside the US’.

MNF Is Back

Last week, my wife got her wish of getting her new Lenovo netbook. It only has a Win7 Starter Edition OS. I installed a second copy of MNF there. Lo and behold, MNF worked and is back in all its glory. All features worked seamlessly. Looks like I’m back in business again. I have yet to inform support about this.

Meanwhile, as I mentioned earlier, the copy on my own notebook is still useless. I’m contemplating on doing a ‘system restore’ back to when it last worked. This would entail some backup work, but I just might get to do it soon when I get the inspiration, or when I get tired of borrowing my wife’s netbook, whichever comes first.

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Presently, I use the tandem of Market Samurai and Micro Niche Finder for my keyword research.
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Now, all I need is to do is schedule and allot a time to get back to keyword hunting.

Try Market Samurai now for free!
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What’s Up With MNF?

How long has it been? A month? Two? Seems like it’s been ages since the last time I saw my MNF work. James Jones has been assuring us that his programmer is hard at work trying to cope up with the sudden changes Google has introduced to its search machinery. And he has sent us 3 (3? or 4?) updates since, the latest being version 5.2.6, but not one of them worked. Well, at least this latest version now has the ‘Brainstorm’ and ‘Hot Trends’ links live, which however still unfortunately comes out empty.

MNF is (was?) an excellent product, an amazing tool for bloggers and online entrepreneurs since it came out years ago. I myself was awed when I first used it. Fact is, I was able to put up a few sites based on the results MNF offered to my seed keywords.

Now, I’m wondering if it can ever rise up again after it fell down to earth. You can’t help but be amazed at the power google has in their hands where it can cripple in one instant those products which depend on it for their sustenance.

I’m not sure, but I think Market Samurai also leans on Google heavily as its source of its output. But I can see that things are cool at MS. The app is still running smoothly. MNF? Each time, you are greeted with a message box that says: “An error occurred while retrieving results from Google’s Keyword Tool”.

Of course, after seeing someone complaining about it in MNF’s facebook page, and seeing James Jones’ reply, I have kept my silence for as long as I can. After all, I also understand how things are going with James’ programmer. I have worked as a programmer sometime ago and I know how it feels to be pressured to come up with a solution to some program glitch or something. With an app like MNF, with thousands of users waiting, I would want to ask the programmer “When was the last time you had a sleep?”.

Try Market Samurai now for free!

UPDATE: My Micro Niche Finder is working again! Yuhoo! Please see my post ‘Enjoying MNF Again‘ to see how I got it to work again.

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My Simple Business Plan: The Prequel

Knowing what I know now so far, I would have started out with the following simple business plan, and I would have earned what I am earning now quite sooner and hopefully a little bit more.

  1. Get MNF or some other keyword research tool e.g. Market Samurai. Again, as I’ve stated in an earlier post (Manual Keyword Research Method), I can still work things out without Micro Niche Finder. But experience dictates that if I want to find profitable keywords faster, I’d have no second thoughts regarding the effectiveness of MNF. I’d estimate that I’m able to find a good keyphrase in a couple of search-focused hours using MNF. This owuld roughly be equivalent to, say, a whole week of focused manual searching using Google Adwords Keywords tool and further manual verification. Sometimes, if I get really lucky, I’d get a good keyphrase in a single click using MNF’s ‘Brainstorm’ feature.
  2. Having found one or more good keyphrases using MNF, I’d further refine my investigation on the profitability of the keyphrase using the free version of Traffic Travis. Using its ‘SEO Analysis’ feature, I’d further see how I’d fare with the competition.
  3. Having made sure my keyphrases are good, I’d proceed to get me webhosting (if I didn’t have one yet) for at least a year. Lunarpages should be good enough, as like a lot of webhosts they also offer unlimited domains and subdomains. Since Lunarpages offers a FREE domain, I’d use one of the keyphrases as my primary domain. Most veteran webmasters would advise limiting oneself to only the .com, .net and .org tld extensions.
  4. If I have more than one good keyphrases to start with, I’d buy these domain names, say, from Godaddy or Moniker.
  5. Collect data for content of each website I’m putting up.
  6. Decide whether to use WordPress or static html/PHP pages. If I foresee that a particular website will have a lot of pages, I’ll go for WordPress. If a website is to contain only one, 2, or 12 pages, I’d use html/PHP. And this is possible only because I already have some knowledge in html/PHP. Otherwise, I’d use wordpress for all websites I put up, one-pager or multi-pager.
  7. Create the websites and the pages it is to contain.
  8. Configure my cPanel in my webhost to hold the websites for each domain.
  9. Install WordPress (if using wordpress) for each domain and input the contents. (Here, I add AdSense codes (once my application gets approved) in the content. Depending on the main keyphrase, I may also add links to Amazon products.*)
  10. Try to get the new websites indexed by Google by creating a backlink to the sites from sites that Google crawls often.
  11. *Apply for Adsense account. Apply for Amazon affiliate account.
  12. Do backlinking work. A lot of people say that the rate of backlinking is to be limited especially in the first few weeks of a website’s existence. It’s got something to do with avoiding getting thrown into Google’s sandbox.

Henceforth, all I’ll be doing is backlinking work and some on site work, e.g. adding additional pages, editting, etc. And, of course, monitoring of my Google serp position. Well, I’m no longer that newbie but I now follow this simple business plan that I concocted out of experience. Note, that this simple business plan is based on earning through adsense and affiliate marketing e.g. amazon. Should I learn about CPA & listbuilding and other income generating ideas, this simple business plan might change with time.

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Using Google News Alerts For Free Targetted Backlinks

I tried using this Google News Alerts technique for my backlink campaign for a couple of my business sites. Essentially it involves adding alerts to your existing google gmail account which you can do by:

using <a href=google alerts video" title="using google alerts video" width="163" height="114" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-1269" />
  1. Signing in to your gmail account, then
  2. Among the left-topmost links, click on ‘more‘ (right next to ‘Web’).
  3. In the dropdown menu, click on ‘even more‘ (the bottom-most menu entry).
  4. In the resulting new page, click on the ‘Alerts‘ link (the one with the bell icon).
  5. In the ‘Create a Google Alert‘ box, enter your keywords.

What is supposed to happen is that as soon as some webpage containing the keywords you asked to be alerted about gets indexed by google, a google news alerts email is sent to you giving you the link to that new page. If it’s a page which allows you to leave a link, e.g. through comments, then your goal of leaving links in pages related to your keywords is served.

The first time I did this, a few google alerts started pouring in within the hour. I expected to be able to instantly make links out of each alert I received but I soon discovered that not all pages returned by google alerts are from blogs on which you can comment on. Pages from commercial sites (e.g. Amazon, Ebay, Insurance companies, etc.) also get scooped up by Google Alerts. But there are numerous alerts that I was able to use effectively for backlinking purposes. And so far, there’s never a day that I don’t get alerts.

First to Comment

Normally, I’d be typing in my keywords in google to search for webpages to leave my links in. These returns existing pages, some of which are old and already have some PR ranks. The use of Google Alerts is an excellent supplement to this method as it allows you to effortlessly discover new opportunites for backlinking as they happen. If you are one who makes a big deal out of being the first to comment in a post, then this might give you a better chance. (But regular readers of a particular blog don’t wait for a post to get indexed before reading it, so they’re most likely to be able to comment first).

Effective?

Having tried it just 3 days ago, I think it is too early for me to evaluate how effective google alerts is for me. I have, however, satisfactorily contributed some entries on time on Yahoo Answers because of Google Alerts. I also found that a particular keyphrase gets repeatedly involved in questions submitted in Yahoo Answers, so you can also repeatedly input the same answers there. I think people submit questions without even bothering to check if the same questions had been thrown before.

Additional Free Traffic

I think Google Alerts is good and will work to gain me more traffic in the long run. My business sites (which I was able to confidently come up with using MNF) already have its share of traffic coming from the search engines. With the kind of links I’m leaving, thanks to Google Alerts, I also tend to draw a percentage of the traffic from competing pages out there.

Right now, I’m only asking to be alerted whenever my keyphrase is encountered by google. They say I can get even more razor sharp targetting by converting my keyphrase into several variations of question phrases instead.

Have you tried Google Alerts? How has it helped you in your SEO work?

Using Google Alerts