Confessions of a Home-based Business Entrepreneur

I want to talk a bit about Google Page Rank.

Now, I know you’ve heard 1,001 different explanations of Page Rank, so we’re not going there. Rather, let’s talk from a completely different angle.

In the last Google update, HomeBusinessOnline.com went from a PR4 to a PR5. This was a significant jump.

Why?

It’s tougher now to get a PR5 than it was just a handful of years ago. Not only this, but a jump from a PR4 to a PR5 is harder than a jump from a PR3 to a PR4 (and so forth). It has an exponential component to each level.

I did a quick search on WebmasterWorld.com to see what people think of achieving a PR5. Here are a few short responses:

“It’s very hard to get a PR5 nowadays. It used to be a lot easier back in 2005-2006.”

“These days PR5 is tough, in past years it was easy , PR5 is more like what a PR6 used to be.”

Years ago, our site had a PR6 and an Alexa ranking of 20,000. We had tons of traffic and great sales volume. Life was good. Then, we did something stupid…

We followed the advice of a friend — a so-called SEO expert. His advice got us de-indexed in Google. When that happened, people were taking their links to us off their sites right and left. They didn’t want to link to a “bad neighborhood” that would hurt their own rankings. The whole thing hurt us pretty badly.

We immediately got rid of the piece of “SEO work” that had hurt us and tried to get Google to re-index us. It didn’t happen until last year (almost five years later).

Pretty pathetic story, huh?

Well, the golden lining is that we did finally get re-indexed and Google is now treating us better with each update.

Here’s the question most people ask about Page Rank:

Is Page Rank really worth it and how can I get good Page Rank?

The short of the first part of the question is “Yes!” It is worth it, at least it has been for us. With the boost in PR, also came a boost in our search engine positioning. The last Google update brought a whole slew of better rankings for competitive keywords. We’re not yet where we were five years ago, but with a little work, we can actually see that it can happen again.

Naysayers will tell you that Page Rank is worth nothing. Well, in and of itself it doesn’t have much value. But, you’ll have a pretty tough time separating Page Rank from SERP’s. The two usually work in tandom.

Yes, you can get good Page Rank by simply getting a link from a site with high Page Rank. Case in point:

http://dynabuildconstruction.com/

This site is currently under construction, has little to no content and has fewer than five backlinks. Every one of those backlinks but one has a pathetic Page Rank. However, one of them is a link from a PR 8 page, with a homepage rank of 9. Bingo!

Even with a decent Page Rank, this site gets very little traffic. But, the key is that because of its good Page Rank, it will take very little work to begin getting some very good traffic through content and keywords. Google already sees this site as having “importance.” That’s how PR and SERP’s work together.

Google itself says:

PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

So, yes, Page Rank is important. You can get good Page Rank by getting links from other sites deemed “important” by Google. Either get a ton of low PR backlinks or a handful of high PR links (better to have both).

I’ve heard it said that you cannot even achieve a PR5 until you’ve had a backlink from a high PR site (PR7 or PR8) for a minimum of six months. I don’t know how true this is. But, I do know that it takes some work to achieve and maintain a PR5.

Some people buy links from high PR sites to get their good PR. They get a quick insurgence of PR juice, and once the Google toolbar says they have a PR4-PR6, they quit paying for the expensive links. The problem is that this kind of PR is weak and short-lived.

It’s also very expensive. Have you seen the going rate for just a single backlink from a PR7 site… for one month?

(source TextLinkAds.com)

It can become an expensive proposition to purchase and hang onto your high PR. It’s not an easy thing to get.

Dave and I have been talking about how we achieved our own PR5. We haven’t purchased a single link. We haven’t done time-consuming reciprocal linking campaigns.

Nope.

Every bit of the PR5 has come from natural linking. People link to us because we offer good content and helpful advice… PERIOD.

Now, we realize we haven’t achieved this alone. Many, many of you have contributed in a number of ways. Either you’ve been an active member of our Home Business Forums, or you’ve linked to one of our pages or posts from another site, or you’ve purchased one of our products, or you’re a subscriber to our Home Business Newsletter. Regardless of where you fit in, we recognize that your activity has contributed to our PR5.

So…

We’re celebrating, and we want to give back!

How?

We’re going to share our PR5 with you.

If you were to purchase a PR5 link through TextLinkAds.com, here are the going rates:

We’ve put together a sweet deal…

During our celebration (through Wednesday, May 21st), purchase any one of the products on our “celebrate” page, and we’ll put your link (with your choice of anchor text) on that same page AND on the permanent “Friends of HomeBusinessOnline.com” page…

…for only $5.

So, you get a high-quality product (real value ranging from $27 to $97) + a backlink from a PR5 site for only $5.

By the way, the link to your site will remain up for a full year — none of this high-priced monthly garbage.

You’re a valued member of our growing community. We just wanted you to know that.

Here’s the link:
http://www.homebusinessonline.com/celebrate/

Dave and Heidi Perry

Well, the last Google update was good to us. We achieved a PR5 — all natural linking — no purchased links — no reciprocal linking campaigns. Just good ole’ content on our site and people linking to it.

Thank you to all who post their comments and forum posts. You are wonderful!

Dave and Heidi Perry

Dave and I went to lunch today with our Genesis Team staff
for a business meeting (away from office interruptions).
During our lunch an executive decision was made.

MORE BONUSES!

“MORE VALUE!”

What are we talking about?

It’s been quite an eventful time as we’ve developed the
“Claim Your Genesis Site” program. What started off as a
simple idea has turned into an exciting project.

http://www.ClaimYourGenesisSite.com

As we’ve developed this new program, we’ve had to make
some pretty major decisions.

- Do we simply provide our customers with a basic Genesis
site using our Genesis System?

or

- Do we take take it over the top and provide you with a
huge value-added system to end all niche opportunities?

From this email, you will be able to figure out the
direction we chose to go.

I can’t go into details here. The plans we have are
powerful. Some smart copycat marketers would love to
get their hands on this.

What I will say is that what’s coming in the Genesis
System over the next few months will blow every niche
website opportunity out of the water.

What’s coming?

We are developing a new module for the Genesis System.
The module is revolutionary (no one yet has developed
anything like it).

What makes this module so great?

It will potentially double, even triple your bottom line
as a Genesis Site owner. Best of all, it automates the
entire process.

It’s that powerful.

It goes without saying that we are very excited about this
new module. Once Round 3 closes, there will be a secret
meeting with all Genesis site owners, and they will be
given the nitty-gritty details.

Genesis site owners will be the first to test the new
module (and the first to make money with it).

But…

In order to put the needed time into this new module, we
have decided to postpone Round 4 until all Genesis site
owners have had a chance to use and test it.

This may take some time.

So…

If you don’t want to miss out on this new module and
haven’t yet claimed a Genesis site, you’ll need to act
quickly. Round 3 closes on Thursday.

It may be quite some time before Round 4 opens. At this
point, we don’t know how long it will take and we cannot
make any promises.

IMPORTANT…

The 48-hour sale we talked about in our last email to get
a Genesis site for only $497 ends Tuesday night. So, if
you want to save $100, go to

http://www.ClaimYourGenesisSite.com

no later than Tuesday at midnight (EST).

Topics are being claimed quickly. If you need a payment
plan, one is provided after you claim a topic and register.

Go claim your Genesis site!

http://www.ClaimYourGenesisSite.com

This is the second part of the story. If you haven’t read the first part yet, you need to read it before reading below in order for it to make sense. So read the 1st part and then come back to this page to read “the rest of the story”:
http://www.homebusinessonline.com/blog/2007/12/27/why-did-the-auction-cause-such-a-ruckus/index.html

The story continues…

When the second bid came in, the first bidder (not one of our subscribers) private messaged us to also express his disappointment that he could not go any higher in his bidding. He asked if we had any other Genesis sites we would sell to him.

Light bulb moment!

We really couldn’t sell an existing money-making Genesis site that already had good traffic and revenue for any less,

BUT…

Perhaps we could build him a new Genesis site from scratch for a lesser amount. We would fill it with content that would grow regularly and naturally without him having to lift a finger for the next 8-12 months. As the site grew each month, his traffic and revenue would increase. The Reader’s Digest version? … He knew it was a great deal, and he paid us $500 on the spot.

Can I tell you how great it felt to come up with a solution for this guy? Man, I love those “light bulb” moments!

But the light bulb gets even brighter in this story.

We still had our struggling, loyal subscriber who was left out in the cold. We could have made the same offer to him, but we knew he needed more. He didn’t have a lot of spare change and needed a huge amount of value for his money. And, after all, he had been a subscriber for some time. We wanted to take good care of him.

So, what did we do?

We gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse - the deal of all deals.

His response?

He said he had to “wipe his eyes” to make sure he was seeing the offer correctly.

The offer is too sensitive to post publicly. However, if you’re a subscriber to our newsletter, watch for our next email entitled “The Offer.”

As a subscriber, you’ll receive all the nitty-gritty details.

Dave and Heidi

If you read our last blog entry, you know we sold a Genesis website last weekend at auction for $1001. We were pleased with the outcome, and the winner got a very good deal. It was a win-win all the way around.

Or so we thought…

The reality is we had no idea this auction would cause such a ruckus.

A ruckus?

Yes, although both the winner of the website and Dave and myself were satisfied, two other groups of people were frustrated and… well… upset.

Who were these two groups?

1) Those who wanted to bid but realized the bidding was out of their league, and
2) The losers of the auction

What exactly happened?

Well, first we received an email from one of our subscribers telling us he would have liked to bid on the website, but even the beginning bid was already out of his league. He went on in a frustrated tone telling us how much we wished he could have afforded such an opportunity.

Point taken.

“What a shame,” we thought. This would have been a perfect way for him to begin making money online. But, how could we possibly have given such a valuable site and script away for anything less. The website and the secret proprietary script (plus a killer domain) were far too valuable. I mean, it was already a good deal as it was.

Nevertheless, Dave and I couldn’t help but feel badly, almost obligatory, toward this struggling but loyal subscriber.

If you’d like to see how this was resolved, stay tuned…

(to be continued in the next entry)

No one has known about our Genesis Network of sites until now. Our genesis sites are run by a proprietary script we built from scratch. It has an incredible array of features and methods for getting indexed and remaining indexed for hundreds of keywords. These are little goldmines. They auto-build naturally, create multiple RSS feeds, and have tagging and pinging built in. It’s a pretty incredible system. Not one of our Genesis sites has every been de-indexed. Cool! You can understand why we have not let anyone in on this little secret.

Until now…

Our accountant informed us that since we have done so well this year (thanks greatly to our Genesis Network), we’re going to have a very nice tax bill to pay the first of the year. Ouch! After some pretty fast and furious brainstorming, we decided to finally let the cat out of the bag. We’re selling a handful of these little goldmines with script that runs and builds them and all. Pretty gutsy!

The good news is that the first site we decided to sell has sold for $1001. Here’s the auction listing at Sitepoint:
http://www.sitepoint.com/marketplace/auction/17608

A good start. We’ll only be selling a handful of these sites. They are far too valuable. If you’d like to have one of these little goldmines with the proprietary script that runs, manages and builds it, join our Home Business Newsletter. We’ll keep you informed as soon as we put another up for auction (very soon).

Heidi

This came up on the forums in a thread on persistence and not giving up in your business. It’s a story I remember reading in Napolean Hill’s excellent Think and Grow Rich.

When people are stressed during the holidays and worrying about their finances, I think it’s a good reminder to keep our business efforts in perspective. Persistence pays off. The following story “Three Feet From Gold” is a good reminder…

— story—

“There was a man who left home to search for a gold mine. He went into the hills and discovered a very rich vein of ore. He had the gold analyzed to confirm his discovery, and, sure enough, he had unearthed one of the purest veins of gold ever discovered. The man returned home to tell his friends and relatives so that he could borrow the necessary funds to cultivate the mine. He raised the necessary capital and returned to the mine to cultivate his fortune.

“The gold began to flow as easily as water, and soon the man had recouped approximately half of his original investment. Then, without warning, the vein ended. The man dug furiously but could not recapture the vein. Finally, he gave up, sold the mine and mining equipment to a junk dealer for scrap, and returned home, broke and a failure.

“Before scrapping the equipment, the junk dealer decided to hire a mining expert to study the mine. The expert, upon a detailed survey of the land, revealed that the vein had not dried up but rather shifted three feet to the left because of a fault in the earth. He advised that if the junk dealer were to continue digging in the new direction, he would soon recapture the vein and become fabulously wealthy.

“The junk dealer acted on the advice of his mining expert, went on to retap the vein of ore, and became one of the richest people in the United States. Meanwhile, the original miner had to live the remainder of his days with the knowledge that he stopped ‘just three feet short’ of the gold.”

—–

When finances are looming and your business just doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. This is not the time to quit. This is the time to re-evalute, and if you determine you need to shift your efforts in your business, DO IT!

Take the attitude that you may be only “three feet from gold.” Don’t give up.

Heidi

It looks like Google finally had a PR update. We are showing PR4 now. Not quite as good as the PR6 we had once upon a time, but we’ll take it! Hey, after going from PR6 to PR5 and then being delisted with no PR at all, a PR4 is a welcome sight.

Actually, from things I’ve been hearing from other online marketers, there is a huge contigency of websites that have dropped in PR. Some have dropped from as high as PR10 to PR6. Ouch! Some that have dropped have gone from PR7 and 8 to PR5 and 6. Most have gone from PR6 to PR4 and 5.

Of course there are also plenty of sites that have had a rise, while others have neither had a drop nor a rise in PR. Quite a few of our sites dropped by one point. A handful rose a point or two.

With that said, it may seem from my posts that I think PR is a big deal, but actually, I really don’t like to pay much attention to it. Because of what happened to HomeBusinessOnline.com, it was more of a curiosity thing for me. However, what DOES mean something to me is the fact that we were re-indexed in Google’s SERPs after having been de-indexed for several years. It made a big impact on our traffic when we were de-indexed. Dropped dramatically. Since we’ve been re-indexed, our traffic has slowly increased again. So, yes, being re-indexed IS a big deal. The PR in and of itself?… Not really that big of an issue.

So, now that my curiosity is placated and this whole re-indexing and re-PRing is done, let’s move on to bigger and better subjects now, shall we? I don’t think I’ll be checking PR for quite some time. Wastes too much time. Too many money-making projects in the works to expend my efforts on PR.

And, after all, I believe it was because we went about our business as if nothing had changed after being de-indexed and continuing the activities on HomeBusinessOnline.com ( putting up new content, etc.) that we were put back in Google’s SERPs.

Regardless… Onward and Upward!

Let me know in the comments how you fared in this recent Google update?

Heidi

related: home business | Google | Google SERPs | PR | PR4

We moved up another notch today on Google… #3 for the keyword home business online (both with and without “quotes”). Our little experiment appears to be working.

Now what?

I’m creating a whole new section on Home Business Online which I believe will do very well for both visitors and search engines. I’ll keep you informed here on this Home Business Blog and in our Home Business Newsletter when the new section opens.

No Google update yet, but we should be due for one anytime. However, I did want to let you know about a small change that took us up a notch within days in Google’s SERPs for the term home business online.

Before the de-indexing some years ago, we used to be #1 for the term home business. Call me demented… Crazy… Stupid… Whatever, for thinking this… But, now that we are re-indexed and Google seems to like our site once again, I’d really like to get back to the front page for that term. I know it’s almost impossible for such a competitive term, but I’d like to try.

Meanwhile, I made a few simple changes to the title tag of the front page of Home Business Online.com. I put in the term “home business” at the beginning, used a separator, then descriptively scattered the terms “home” and “business” a few more times (as well as “home business online”).

The results?

Within just a few days we moved up from position #5 to position #4 for the term home business online. Pretty cool to see results that quickly.

Will keep working on it and let you know what works.

Heidi