Being interested in Search Engine Optimization and spotting trends has always been a passion for me and about 2 months ago, I started to say that someone should take the time to write a number of quality articles on the iPhone 3G based on the fact that it’s about to arrive in South Africa and the number of search requests for iPhone and Apple iPhone are going to boom.
It was unfortunate that I didn’t, personally, have the time to do so, because this is a small jackpot waiting to be hit! I’ve written a couple iPhone related articles on iMod and read some great articles around the Internet, but there are very few (Ok, just 1, hehe) team that is pushing forwards as hard as possible to optimize their website to rank right up top for the iPhone.
Ok, so for those of you wanting to make some money, these are the first 5 steps I would do to acheive it:
1. Register a domain with iPhone in the name
2. Write at least 10 quality articles about the iPhone
3. Create a YouTube video about the iPhone
4. Get at least 10 friends to link to the site using iPhone as the anchor text
5. Make sure each post has an image which is named correctly, such as: iphone-south-africa.jpg – this will inject the images into Google Image searches
I really hope some people jump onto my advice here and give it a bash, it would be incredibly cool to see, what I had envisioned months ago, actually happen!
Not sure if you’ve seen it yet but I saw yesterday that Charl Norman has recently launched a blog with the domain iphonefan.co.za
“but there are very few (Ok, just 1, hehe) team” *wink*
It’s only one person though, the gap is wide open, it would take 1 week to rank right up there, trust me, I’ve done my research :)
true true ;) … I missed that bit – oops! lol
Skim reading :P
Not really knowledgeable about making money online but thought I would take the challenge and register iphonenews.co.za. Will use your five steps and see what happens in the coming weeks.
Thanks for the idea Chris!
Great one SaulK, the challenge is on, I know a few other people giving it a bash as well :)
Yeah sounds great, im ganna take a bash at it 2 yeah!
just registered ipod2iphone.co.za hows that for SEO. lol
:p
what exactly is the challenge though.
Yo Mills I think a prize should be up for grabs! heheh.. Maybe an iPhone!!! hint hint
Hehe, I know a couple people doing this now, stoked to see that my readers are taking my advice!
Uhm, the prize is the knowledge I’ve given here :)
heheh .Sounds good enough!:p
http://www.iphoneplanet.co.za – There’s another one :)
As of right now, there are only 41 .co.za domains containing “iphone” – it won’t take too much work to register the daylight out of the brand. Pity that I wouldn’t have time to take on another project – I have 12 outstanding ones as it is :/
Hehe, correct, it will be a huge mission, but I can see a few that are standing out infront of the rest already :)
You coulda titled this post “1 Step to be kept out of the loop, imod style”
WOulda done just as much the same thing.
Nice post Mr UCT
Uhm, Rafiq, why has this annoyed you? Is it because now things aren’t so easy for you? Come on, to take offense to a post like this is somewhat sad, you’ve got plenty of SEO skills to stay above the rest anyway, surely? A challenge is a good thing, keeping all these things secret isn’t the answer, otherwise we are never challenged..
Kept out of the loop? Which loop are you referring to exactly?
Come on Rafiq, why the player hating?
That was a demo of how to get a response from Chris via comment and IM in less than 2 minutes ;)
Geek :P
Now here is a classic example of someone whos a true leader in his field.
Bravo chris
No one else in this industry has the guts to take the initiative and educate the massess on how to reap the benefits of the firtile SA websphere.
I must admit I grow weary of the elitist vibe I get when it comes to the SA blogsphere / websphere. These so called “loops” only serve to limit knowledge to a few. If
Its always a breath of fresh air when someone like chris (few and far between) takes the step to spread the knowledge.
The more competitive the SA blogosphere gets the better the quality!
Snap out of this Telkom mentality.
Definition: Guru: A recognized leader in a field.
In the world of IT, inclusive of the www, we are payed for what we know.
What we know may not be worth the wage we charge, but none-the-less, those that pay for it – don’t know that.
There’s nothing wrong with sharing a little knowledge. After all, we all die one day. What’s the point of doing it without helping some people along the way, spreading some knowledge?
CJC
After being flamed about this post, I’m a little anxious to comment on all of this, but I must say.. business is cut throat, whether that means keeping secrets or NOT keep secrets, how do you know where to draw the line anyway?
Keeping secrets is bullshit.
In SA, there’s PLENTY food for thought and PLENTY business for everyone. Show me ONE web developer (that actually applies themselves) that doesn’t have to turn away clients?
The whole idea of the www is a knowledge base. A free, open knowledge base. Loops are for wankers. Any ‘elitist’ that deems themselves (and implicated friends/co-workers/fellow demons of the free world) as part of a ‘loop’ is destroying the vision. They should send CVs to Microsoft..
Its YOUR knowledge, YOU get to decide on what you want to do with it.
There is a difference between leaking Microsoft Windows Vista source code and bloging about an SEO technique.
This is not bout sharing knowledge http://social-media-optimization.com/2008/07/downside-of-sharing/
read that before saying anythign further…
Read it.
My point is this.. there are thousands of websites online which promise to teach people things at minimal costs or even free, and these websites do share knowledge, but this information is nothing until a person has a foundation to play with, I provided some knowledge and a playground. It’s important to educate, nobody shouts down Darren’s back on problogger for sharing all the SEO tips and tricks, in fact, that’s where all of us learnt our stuff anyway. None of the SEO tactics used are fresh tactics, it’s recycled information based on the premise that the secret to creativity is being able to hide ones sources.
At the end of the day, I understand that you might wake up and see that that you’ve done is now gone, but if that’s the case, it’s purely because someone is better at it than you and not that they just took your ideas. This bounces right into all the discussions over Afrigator and Regator, it’s simple, may the best man win, as simple as that.
I respect the whole niche blogging movement, but there was never a complete niche around this keyword, perhaps a slow uptake, but it was never virgin territory.
Challenges simulate learning, see this as a blessing and if you don’t see that angle, see it as a good way to get the bidders to bid more, so the pros can capitalize.
Yeah I read the http://social-media-optimization.com/2008/07/downside-of-sharing/
So the guy had some bad luck bloging about his tactics.
Does this mean that this information should remain the realm of a few?
WHO gets to determin who these few are?
Interesting idea @ Chris.
Pity I don’t have the time or cash to do this.
Thanx for sharing the knowledge though.
Agreed Blade, I think sharing this information is critical for South Africans! Simon.. ye mate, I’d be interested to know if you’re against what I did or are for it.. :)
It is my belief that there is enough free information out there to make a lot of people millions of Dollars. The problem is the average man in the street doesn’t know how to sift through the information. It takes time and time costs money.
People have no problem paying a Doctor R1260/hour (10 minute consultation is R210) but to pay an IT guy? That’s another story. Let alone pay an SEO guy what he’s worth!
And let’s not even get into territorialism. I’m amazed at the number of Web Developers that are highly offended when an SEO guy is brought in to help the company make money.
Then again I think the stuff Chris shares on his blog is enough to pique people’s interest but I hardly think that what he shares is trade secrets.
Of course, Chris and I have reached a happy medium. He won’t show me his, and I won’t show him mine. :-)
“Its YOUR knowledge, YOU get to decide on what you want to do with it.
There is a difference between leaking Microsoft Windows Vista source code and bloging about an SEO technique.”
I think you read my little blurt-out and misinterpreted it..
I’m totally PRO this sharing boeta!
@Simon, dude, cash? It’s gna cost you R50. I’ll even host it for nothing for you! Get hold of me if you’re keen.. I’m always willing to share! As for time.. it’s going to take more time coming back here and reading all our rants, than it is to slap a WP site 2gther about the iPhone ;)
Now… let me go and read this little article.
Hehe, sounds like the competition is going to start heating up! Fantastic!
After reading that, and then the (one) comment. I am still sticking to my guns. Share and share alike.
Agreed! It’s exactly what I said about Darren Rowse, John Chow, Jeremy Shoemoney, they all share and people learn :)
Hey Combrink
I wasn’t commenting on your comments there in that case :)
Hehe, you guys are on the same side of the discussion :)
& P.S. have a look at the Google Ads at the top ;) GURU!
Targetted, I wrote this post to generate discussion and traffic and that’s exactly what I got, that was the aim and it was executed ;)
My Adsense today is on $35 for imod.co.za :D
@ Christopher J Combrink – Thanx for the kind offer dude.
If you really wanna make money with web2.0 lets rather talk about making a cool mobile app, that will be taken up world wide by millions. There is no real money to be made from an iphone blog. Yeah $35 adsence profit may be cool, but I think there are better ways to make alot more cash.
Anyway its a good start, and @Chris I agree, 100% we should all share and share alike. Knowledge is free and it should always be free. Even though I work at a nice hourly rate I often find myself giving of my time and labour freely including to some of the top iPhone blogger guys locally ;-) This is what we do.
Ok so every now and then it counts against me, but in the long run its for the good of the community. Just yesterday @Tyler helped me with code on my website, it wasnt his job but he did it freely, this is what makes our community so great. Thanx @Tyler
This is also what makes sure that we all survive in the future. We all look out for each other and this is what makes the SA Blogosphere special.
Keep it up guys!!
Simon, what a fantastic comment, I’m so glad to hear that you are on my side for this one and not one of these ‘hide the secrets’ guys. South Africa needs to stand together to acheive International recognition, and as much as I agree that we all need to buy bread, it’s important to get the International recognition to aspire as a nation! :)
Ha! Loved this post, even more so I enjoyed the comments. Loads of laughter I must say.
I’ve bought two iphone related domains (this post was the second shove that I needed).
You know I love the way that knowledge is shared online, up until it infringes on people. then it becomes a different story. I think that @rafiq might’ve been pulling your leg Chris!
I am 100% for sharing. Hell, as soon as I have any knowledge worth sharing, I promise I’ll share it!
Rafiq and I have spoken and it’s important that everyone knows that he was NOT being rude or mean, it was just us Internet geeks having some baiting fun :)
Nic, you have plenty of knowledge!
Shortened version:
The ‘kung-fu’ master is the one that is sharing and passing on his knowledge…
All I can say to that is *hiii-ya* ;)
Mmmmm … interesting debate indeed.
The idea of share and share alike is lovely. Up to a point.
But I think it depends a lot on what type of information you’re talking about and who you’re sharing it with.
Sad to say, over the years I have seen many people I’ve trained and shared knowledge with use what I consider to be “inside information” to deliberately target my clients, replicate some of my websites, duplicate my content and poach my contractors, amongst some other underhanded things.
Hells, I’ve even had some clients pry stuff out of me and then get other companies to implement! Not cool …
I’m now VERY careful about sharing information that is not already common knowledge.
This post is not about that though. Chris has merely laid out a strategy for combining a series of already well-known techniques into a method for making some money. It works to his advantage because he’s not really giving much away, he’s stimulating traffic to his site and he’s also making some moola out of this =)
Chris
Even though Ilove the whole sharing thing, I don’t love all the emails comming from your site with comments, Please remove me from auto updates everytime someone leaves a comment or have a button that I can click to receive it if i want it. Lets not be like Vodacom and force me to get it..
Thanx
SimonB ;-)
Ps. dont take this the wrong way, just gettjg a bit frustrated with all the comments.. Glad to see though that u getting loads of comments..
Unfortunately, this conversation might prove pointless in a few years, because most of the tactics mentioned here might cease to function.
That being said, what have we learned today? Bloggers have too much free time on Mondays (lol), and the best way to make decent money out of a trend is to spot it beforehand. Hell, that should be common sense, never mind Secret Black Hat SEO Tactics or whatever.
Now to attempt to respond to these in order, lol.
@Chris – you draw the line where you feel it should be drawn. Some people let morals get in the way, others stop at nothing. It’s all about what you know you can handle.
(Is it just me, or are we getting used to prefixing @people’s names? Damn twitter)
@christine the true master is the teacher that says “stand on my shoulders and reach higher”. Unfortunately this is not possible in the shifting landscape of online marketing :)
@Nic Lol…
Now I have other work to do, like get TwitterSA to the next level … oh boy :|
@justBcoz – Absolutely! I couldn’t agree more with you. I think this is a little off topic though. The main premise was that people were annoyed that I shared SEO tactics, which not many people know about and therefore there is a monopoly in terms of SERP control.
@simonb – I understand mate, you’re able to remove yourself from the list by clicking unsubscribe from the bottom of the email :) No offense taken, some people like it, some don’t!
@Wogan – Common sense.. exactly! The concept of @ as a alias prefix I guess originally comes from operators in mIRC channels, but it certainly wasn’t Twitter that started the trend, that much I know. You’d like to get TwitterSA to the next level, clearly it’s not just us bloggers with “too much free time” *wink*
yeah i rate u should get a post up in a day or 2 to see how the sites have grown! would be great to see what others have come up with!
Laters m8
That’s not a bad idea, I’ll think of something :)
You have the same scenario when it comes to coding – a lot of people are sharing new ideas or improvements of existing ones.
That is one of the reasons why Open Source software is improving by the day (WordPress is but one example), not to mention good web design.
That’s a really good point Johan! It’s the combined effort that has lead to great success in these Open Source frameworks :)
& then those Open Source efforts are translated into “new” & “fresh” ideas from organizations like MS ;) Hmm, that ‘tab feature in IE is AWESOME! I wonder where they got that idea..
Does this damn email comments thing not irritate you?
How much revenue made from this post? ZERO. The types who read these kinda articles don’t click on ads, how many of youreadign this actually clicked ona sponsored link?
-end-
Be thankful that MS did not think about tabs first, they would have patented the idea if they did.
Given the choice between sharing of knowledge and non-sharing, I would prefer the first option any time.
@Does this damn email comments thing not irritate you?
How much revenue made from this post? ZERO. The types who read these kinda articles don’t click on ads, how many of youreadign this actually clicked ona sponsored link?
-end-
Hey dude, I’ve never met you. So i’m not going to judge ;) Having said that. This kid of post does draw traffic.
It does punt google rankings on that ‘oh so sexy’ wp URL. Just LOOK at that Title. “SEO”; “MAKE CASH”; “iPhone”; coupled with a nice little readable (post isn’t going to be a 10, long-winded page how-to guide) “5 steps”.
As for the email comments hack, I have no doubt that that little hack, accounts for 80% of this blog’s success! Not even Mills will argue me on that :) It’s a GREAT idea. I’m pretty sure that facebook does the same thing… & that’s no dig at Chris, this blog was doing that long before the Facebook Phenom.
@Johan, I with you 100%. I’m running this little chat on Ubuntu. Thanks Mark (&the team!!).
CJC
@rafiq – you should be able to unsubscribe??? rafiq, you’d be surprised, I used heat maps to test the traffic to this post and the click areas, it has done damn well mate. Besides, the money doesn’t come from adsense on this site, it’s in a 3rd party site, which saw over 400 unique hits from this post yesterday and adsense revenue of $15..
@johan – sharing is important, without sharing, only the strong get stronger, which isn’t fair, simple.
@CJC – Precisely, hehe!
I ran a poll many months ago asking my readers (who lead me to win the blog awards) whether they wanted the auto emails or not, I remember the result being along the lines of 75% yes, 10% no and the excess wasn’t understanding, so I followed what they asked for.
@rafiq That’s what rss readers are for :)
@ChrisM My time isn’t free, lol. I consider it an investment – so far, it’s being paying all the right dividends. None of them fiscal ;)
Aah, the penny’s dropped! I was wondering how you could make so much through adsense on imod everyday. Are you using the content here for another website?
@Wogan – Is that so, what’s your hourly rate? ;)
Shaun – Most definitely not! But for a few of my keywords that I use, I trickle traffic outwards accordingly to more keyword specific websites.
80% of the revenue is from iMod itself though.
@Chris Too much for most people, unfortunately. I’d go so far as to say “all people”, but I know a few stubborn ones…
I have an entirely different perspective on personal gain – one which is not relevant to this conversation … lol. Suffice it to say I’ve been more than happy with the returns.
@rafiq – Your logic doesn’t make sense and it makes you seem like a chump.
The article you linked to basically says that building knowledge can lead to competitive advantage and that it’s not smart to give that advantage away. That makes sense.
However, if Chris does decide to share his knowledge with the community that is great. Thanks for sharing with us Chris – you get from the community and you give back. Progress is made by all.
Rafiq, you are being petulant because you think that by sharing with us Chris has eroded your advantage – that is true. However, your advantage was not sustainable anyway – you need to keep moving to stay ahead. That is progress.
Your attack is like a graphic designer who flames PhotoShop tutorial sites for giving away knowledge and secrets!
You then threaten to cut Chris ‘out of the loop’ because you want to keep your secrets. How very un-open-source of you. I understand your frustrations but you come across as a nasty bully who takes but isn’t willing to give back. And that is why your comments make you seem like a chump (note that I don’t know you and you probably regret your comments anyway).
@ ChrisM – Legend. Lets face it, you have not listed SEO secrets but rather a few good tips/techniques on how to implement a good idea. I’m not quite sure what Rafiq is on about, perhaps with a little more experience he will realise that SEO is not secrets and magic, but rather time and effort.
@ AL – Well said!
@ Rafiq – Seriously, never mind SEO professionals, most developers are familiar with these techniques! What are you really on about, Chris has not listed out the holy grail of SEO, he has only made a few level headed suggestions?
Also Rafiq, I would love to know more about this circle of yours, do you provide tea and biscuits?
@Al – Wow, it’s really touching to read a comment like yours, I commend you for standing up and sharing your viewpoint in such a formal way, thank you! I love the comparison you make with Photoshop tutorials, that’s exactly it!
@KungFuDev – The aim is to avoid time and effort and that is why my post has affended the said party basically :)
Tea and biscuits, ROFL!
Nice going Chris, keep sharing the love – I’ve just been catching up with about 10 of your posts.
Hi Karen (I presume), thank you for the kind words. I guess it’s all about people muti’ing, stumbling and back linking to the posts, which create awareness and share the love from those :)
Wow you have some trolls here. Anyway. Nice to read some new ways to make a bit more money.
I typed a really long comment here but have you ever done the same? You type a really long comment just to delete it?
Anyway. Happy rest of the weekend.
Ye, I’ve typed many looong comments and then decided against them, I don’t think it’s strange.
It’s been an interesting thread indeed :)
Not to praise myself but I am apparently leader for “apple iphone games” and related gaming keywords both on Google and Yahoo with my free appleiphonegames.blogspot.com, That’s pure SEO I started a year ago even there were no single game available of the gadget :) Now, I watch the natural Google search traffic with pleasure. iPhone microsites are right way to make product conversions. See my upcoming blog as well appleiphonecases.blogspot.com for a real example. Happy blogging to all :) Long live Apple :)
Hi Muratos, good to hear from you and well done on the Google indexing, you think that iPhone gaming is going to be big?
i guess so because iphone touchscreen is great for gaming and there are much efforts and investments on sdk :) actually i bought another domain name for the future. buyiphonesgames.com to grab customers with that exact search. but there are not yet high quality games to be sold widely. let’s wait and see. as a tip, i can say that blogspot sub domain names are prioritized by google. so it is not always better to have a top domain name. there were a turkish man who grabbed appleiphone.blogspot.com months ago before the real shipment of the phone and made a great bunch of money just from google search.
Interesting, I guess we’ll have to wait for the phones to arrive here and then see what the public decides is most important :)
Getting flamed for this is stupid, we live in a world where everyone is moving to open source technologies yet no one seems to understand or want to embrace the ideology behind open source in that information is meant to be free.
Keep up the posting Chris.
Thanks for the comment blake, don’t you worry, I will continue updating :)