Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The 1 Year and 9 Month Long SEO Project

Never give up, no matter what, if you want page one results, never give up. That has been my marching orders for the past year and 9 months while I pursued an aggressive SEO strategy to get my book marketing service to the top page of the most costly keyword term in the niche. Here is the story from start to finish, I hope it inspires you to stick to your SEO plan for as long as it takes to achieve the results you are after.

September 2007-

Realized there was a major void in affordable full package book marketing services. Sure you could pay your publisher outrageously high fees for a press release or a media kit, but nobody was bundling it all as a single package, and certainly not for the prices I wanted to charge. The custom book release concept was born.

October 2007-

After spending a few days at Starbucks writing what was basically a manifesto against overpriced under delivering publisher-based book marketing packages, the site CustomBookRelease.com was built.

November 2007-

After less than a month of analyzing pay per click traffic for high quality SEO keywords (yes, PPC is a great way to learn about good SEO terms to try to rank for organically) I realized the money keyword for my new service was the term book marketing. I acquired BookMarketing.net for $1,400 from an undisclosed source, making it on the list for the top five most expensive domain buys that week for .NET registrations. Moved the CustomBookRelease.com website to BookMarketing.net within days of purchasing the domain.

December 2008 – July 2009-

Marketed the site in a variety of ways, published articles, submitted to directories, swapped links, and did press releases to help boost the SEO value of BookMarketing.net

July 2009-

Started to notice an increase in both sales and leads for our BookMarketing.net service, decided to check the search results for our main term, book marketing, was surprised to learn our site is now page 1 rank 7 in Google.

It took over 20 months to get to page 1, but with something as hard to obtain as that, chances are with good maintenance and some fresh updating to the site it will stay there for a longtime to come.

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