Chezfat.com | Business ~ Marketing ~ Publishing ~ Authorship: February 2014

February 13, 2014

American Freelance Article Writer For Hire

Brian Chezfat here and I'm looking for work. :)

For my normal day-to-day readers this may come as a surprise but I an opening a few new doors in my career online. I'm dipping my toes into freelance ghostwriting.

Be it content marketing, SEO articles, or basic blog posting; I'm open and willing to get your job done quickly and professionally.

Background

For people who are new to me and my activities across the web you should know that I've been at this game for a while now, since 2009 to be exact and I make the bulk of my income owning and running a collection of websites monetized by affiliate offers and contextual advertising. I specialize in producing content that draws relevant traffic to websites while also expanding the overall authority of the website for it's target market.

I am not a huge fan of the traditional sales page either. I like to saturate a market with information that users are searching for and then provide short lists of products that can be solutions to their needs or problems. I find this to be a very effective way to make a living.

Having said that writing content for my own websites can get lonely and I do look forward to working with others on joint ventures. I enjoy helping other people out with their projects and find it to be a break from the mundane aspects of my own projects.

You can read more about me on my bio page but to summarize let me say this. I am an American who speaks native English. I write in conversational tone on most websites I run; it's most natural to me and it's how I produce my best content.

Credentials

I hold a Business Degree and I obtained my MBA a few years later after working for almost 10 years in mortgage compliance for a large regional bank. I started dabbling in internet marketing near the end of my tenure at the bank and it is now my full time profession.

I know how to write content for the web and for real human readers. I can SEO a site or a piece of content so that it gets regular search traffic and although I can't ever guarantee results I have a track record of success. I was successfully attaining blog traffic in 2009 and 2010 prior to the implementation of Google Panda & Penguin and I've started successful websites in the post-penguin era that also receive lots of converting search traffic.

One of my most successful sites was created in 2013 and it benefitted greatly with the implementation of Google's Hummingbird update.

My Intentions

Until early 2014 I've never opened up my writing (or skills) for hire. Even now I do not want to become a full time ghostwriter or service provider but I do want to add it to my portfolio as an option to you. To maintain a manageable workflow and to limit orders to people who are serious about quality and results I'll be offering those services for the foreseeable future at a premium rate - something reflective of my level of expertise.

I will work with you on your writing project in all confidence and will treat the project as tactfully and skillfully as I treat my own projects.

For the time being I will be facilitating all of my writing gigs via Fiverr Gigs and Gig Extras.

You can see my gigs through the following links.

Ultra Short Blog Posts: ~100 Words ($5)
http://fiverr.com/chezfat/write-a-100-word-article-or-blog-post

If you need ultra short pieces produced that are unique, interesting, helpful, but mainly "to the point" then this is the gig for you. In fact this is the base gig for all my services. You will have to buy this gig even if you want a 1200 word article - it's the way Fiverr works. Buy the small gig and pay for the gig extras to get what you actually want.

*Introductory Special*
As an introductory offer to my services if you order this gig today I will produce any article you need in any tone you wish up to 800 words in exchange for an honest review on the Fiverr platform.

Yes, the gig states 100 words but for the time being (unless you explicitly state otherwise) I will provide you a longer article based on your topic, desired article title, or set of keywords in the vicinity of 500-800 words. Once the introductory period expires this length of article will cost substantially more. Get it while it's on sale folks!

Notes

As more gigs are setup I will update this page. Please, if you are interested at all in exploring a working relationship with me you can get in connect with me via email. All orders are placed through the Fiverr system unless the order is custom and agreed upon via email.

If you want me to add any specific types of services you can shoot those ideas to me via email and I may add them to my Fiverr portfolio of gigs offered.

Lastly, I'd like to reserve the comment form on this post for reviews or testimonials. If you have questions fire them at me via email and if need be I'll append questions that might have broad appeal to the bottom of this post along with my answers. Thanks.

My email is brian@chezfat.com and I'm looking forward to working with you on your projects.

The Best Keyword Research Tools To Try Out Before Your Next Post

Over the years I've tried a number of keyword research tools but on average I find myself defaulting to Google's auto-complete box on their search page more often than not. Even still there is plenty of value in using tools and even though I don't always use them I do fire some or all of these tools up from time to time... especially the auto-suggest scrapers.

I decided today to list off all the keyword research tools out there that are very popular or very interesting in their own right. In some ways I'm making this pages mostly for my own reference because I tend to forget how I came to know one tool from the next and what is actually different about it from the others.

I've also included below whether each tool is a paid or free model. So have at it. If I missed something then please let me know.

Keyword Revealer

http://www.keywordrevealer.com/home.php

This is a free tool introduced to me by Zeke over on this thread on The Pond. To quote Zeke this tool "gives you relevant suggestions for your keywords and tells you how tough the competition is." It doesn't just list of related terms like Google's keyword Planner or similar tools, it suggests other keywords independently. It's all web based. There's no download but you do need to setup a free account with login.

Google's Keyword Planner

https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home

This is Googles tool for Adwords account holders. It's the keywords from the horses mouth and many tools use this as their foundation for research... as you surely know already.

Keyword Researcher

https://clevergizmos.com/keyword-researcher/

This is another tool made by a friend over in The Pond. It was the first of it's kind when it was released. It's a Google autocomplete scraper with plenty of wildcard options. I love this type of tool. It basically automates a lot of the kind of research I like to do by hand. There is a paid and free version of this and it's a downloadable program that runs straight from an executable file. Not exactly handy for mobile devices but seriously, who really works on a tablet or phone? :/

Jaaxy

http://www.jaaxy.com/

This is a super sweet program that is web based (no download). It is a subscription and has a free trial feature and an affiliate program. I used to use this a lot but wasn't using it enough to keep sunscribing but it is extremely valuable if you are creating tons of content. It was introduced to me by Judy over at the Pond. She is killing it online and she regularly says that this is the only program she uses to find keywords. She also pumps out way more content than I ever have so it's her bread and butter. Like keyword researcher this tool not only mines for keywords but also gives you competition analysis on the fly which can really speed up your work flow.

Long Tail Pro / Platinum

http://www.longtailpro.com/

This is the wildly popular keyword research tool used and abused by every niche marketer/blogger out there. I'm not 100% sure if it's because it's amazing at what it does or that it has a nice affiliate program. :/ Believe it or not I've never used LTP before. Lots of people swear by it so it can't be bad, I'm just not sure it's the best; but then again what do I know having never used it. The software has a one time use fee for limited features and an additional subscription for the added features. It's the priciest tool on this list.

Stealth Keyword Digger

http://www.stealthkeyworddigger.com/

This is a one time fee purchase for downloadable software. It's a lot like LTP but cheaper. It takes a seed keyword and looks at the top closely related keywords then uses those top keywords to scrape lots of search engines to generate tons of long tails. You can then use that info or narrow down the list by important the list into their companion software: Stealth Keyword Competition Analyser (also a reasonable one time fee) to narrow down which keywords are worth going after based on estimated traffic and competition levels. These two programs were first introduced to me by Claire aka Skeffling of SkefflingMakesMoneyOnline.com, also a member of The Pond.

Keyword Optimizer Pro

http://www.keywordoptimizerpro.com/

Yet another free keyword scraper of autocomplete search boxes. This one is a lot like the other scrapes that have few bells and whistles. It's simple and free and can give you a bunch of additional keywords that other scrapers miss. Just another free tool to find a few extra hidden gems.

ProMediaCorp's Suggester

http://suggester.promediacorp.com/

A free no bells and whistles Google autocomplete scraper. It's web-based. This is as basic as it gets which is sometimes all you need. This was introduced to me by Hannah Gold, an avid and long time friend from InfoBarrel. She's active all over the place and runs a girl scout blog.

For now that's it. As I come across other tools I'll add them here or expand on my mini-descriptions. In time maybe I'll even do full fledged reviews but I don't make any promises.

My InfoBarrel January 2014 Income Report

Note To Reader: This page features some affiliate/referral links.

Yeah, I think I’ going to be doing these income reports again. I used to do them a few years back and they were always a good way for me to keep moving forward and at the time everyone seemed to get a lot out of them so here goes nothing.

If you haven’t yet given it a look I first recommend reading my “Graceful Fall” post from a few weeks back. It sets the stage for this income report.

At my peak with InfoBarrel I made just over $1200 but after a ~80% slide in traffic (as outlined here) my earnings for December 2013 were just $160.82.

What About January 2014?

January 2014 saw my about face. I decided to clean up my act. I joined a few social networks that I had been avoiding (Pinterest, LinkedIn, and G+) and started brushing off my Twitter dust. Please feel free to network with me on any of those places - links are in my sidebar.

I also made my appearance again over on IB in the forums and started being up front about my current earnings and the state of my archives over there. I had well over 100 unindexed articles at the start of January and even more that were in really bad shape. Lots of them were crap.

I decided to start cleaning them up as you can see in the thread I started over on the IB forums here.

The goal here was multi-faceted. I wanted to get my “red” unindexed articles indexed again. Without indexation G would never serve them up in search and even if someone did find them they didn’t have any ads on them.

I also wanted to start addressing Panda problems on my lower quality articles. Even those articles that were not red (yellow) were still pretty bad in terms of keyword density, spelling, grammar, and outbound link profiles. The idea is to spruce them up so that the perceived quality (by an algorithm) is improved.

I’ve still got some work to do as I still have about 70 articles that are red and a bunch more yellow but I’m making progress. Eventually I'll tackle the yellow articles but first things first.

Pinterest

In addition to making the articles better and reindexing them I’m also adding pictures to each article – roughly 2-3 in most cases. The pictures get long tail SEO titles and some get paragraph descriptions too so that there is some indexable content on the page.

Sometime soonish I'll post something specific to using Pinterest with Infobarrel to maximize potential. You'll have to check back for that in the future.

In any event, once the pictures are up and the articles republished I then go into each picture page and pin it to a thematically similar board on my Pinterest account. I don’t have many Pinterest followers but I do know from experience in working with other sites that these pins do get found internally on Pinterest and ocassionaly from Google. The pins then get repined, likes, and even more importantly they do drive a bit of traffic back to the website they were pined from.

I've also started using PinWoot to start helping out a few new pins in getting their first repins. You can see my review of PinWoot here to see more about what it does and how it works.

Because media pages tend to convert extremely well I’ve decided to pin the media pages themselves rather than the articles the pictures are uploaded to. Also doing this allows me to pin each picture instead of just choosing one picture from an article to pin. More pins equals more potential traffic.

It will be interesting to see how much extra referral traffic this can drive to my IB pages but for now let’s just look at some stats.

In December my media pages had 283 unique page views compared to 479 in January. My earnings on the media pages were basically flat increasing from $24.31 in December to $24.80 in January but I imagine this will change as we are not comparing against the Christmas shopping season in the months going forward.

Referral traffic from Pinterest in December was 47 visits compared to 69 in January. This is a clear sign that adding pictures and pinning them is a good strategy for the long term. Articles are better with pictures and those pictures are traffic generators at the same time.

Amazon

In December I had 44 items ship for commission $48.59. With the shopping season ending January saw a decline to 7 items shipping for commission of $25.02.

As I started cleaning up articles in my IB library in January I found a number of broken links to Amazon that were coded years ago. I’ll be continuing to fix these links so I expect at least a few more clicks in the coming months.

Shareasale

One of my niche accounts I promote a Shareasale merchant. This isn't a Christmas seasonal item; it’s fairly steady throughout the year. I made $20 on this in December and $25 in January. No action was taken on this during the month. It’s simply on autopilot.

If you've never considered using Shareasale before you might want to at least think about it. Amazon isn't the only affiliate network on the block. One day I may put up some Shareasale guides but for now you can give them a look right here.

My Overall InfoBarrel Income

Overall on IB my earnings declined from December to January predominantly due to declining Amazon sales as Christmas came and went.

Amazon - $25.02
Shareasale - $25.00
IB Ad Program - $85.36
Personal Adsense - $3.87
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Total IB Income - $139.25 (down from $160.82 in Dec ’13)

Of course I don’t make anywhere close to the bulk of my income from InfoBarrel but I did make a lot every month previously. I’d like to see big numbers here again so I hope you’ll follow along with me. I’m not going to get everything right but I’ll get some of it right and I’ll share it all right here on the blog.

Want to try your hand at InfoBarrel? Join right here. But for the love; don't expect to make a ton out of the gate. Try your hardest to get a hundred articles up that are all at least 3 months old before you start expecting anything worth calling home to mom about.

My InfoBarrel Traffic Fell A Ton Last Year: Why?

Alright, I last posted a collection of guides I've put together of the years regarding InfoBarrel content. It is almost all dated material however all of it is on my to-do list to go over and update so that they're a bit more current and helpful in today's environment.

Although I haven't yet updated all my guides and tutorials I have started looking into my InfoBarrel articles, traffic, and earnings trying to understand how, when, and why my portfolio of "stuff" over there got hammered. See this post for a background on the royal hammering my IB library has endured.

First of all I want to be clear up front. I knew very well that my library was declining as it was happening it just wasn't high on my priority list to clean up so I let it slide.

OK, having said that I wanted to give a brief summarized history of the web.

Where'd My Traffic Go?

In 2011 Google released their first Panda updates. These were targeted at low quality and duplicated information pages on websites all over the place. For the most part big sites (IB included) weren't touched very much. Later on however further updates of this algo really started having a detrimental effect on my extensive IB library of less than good articles.

Over the past few weeks I've been going into my archives and cleaning up spelling/grammar/excessive keyword density and adding media to my pages to make them look better. I even posted about this over on the IB forums here.

I also started removing dead links, various links pointing at eHow, and all those links heading out to redirected domains.

I also have been updating my signature boxes on my articles to start pointing them at my social accounts and to my main profile InfoBarrel page. I think this is better for me, IB, and for search engines anyway, you know, instead of linking directly to other articles of mine or other sites of mine.

In short I'm cleaning up all my pages and making them better in the "quality department" to satisfy some of what Panda is looking for and also to get my articles re-indexed again.

Here's a great run down of the kinds of things I'd like to improve to help ensure I don't get labeled "low quality" by the algo: http://searchnewscentral.com/20130807459/General-SEO/10-on-page-optimization-tips-for-a-post-panda-era.html

The De-Indexing Of Low Quality InfoBarrel Posts

Back in early May 2013 InfoBarrel took it into their hands to start de-indexing low scoring articles in an attempt to only showcase high quality articles to search engines. They did this for Panda prevention at the core.

You can see their official announcement of this move here: http://www.infobarrel.com/Blog/Changes_to_Article_Indexing

Looking at my own IB analytics I can plainly see that when the first Panda update hit in February 2011 my traffic started declining. It actually fell by about 29% between January (prior to the update) and May (after the update).

I eventually overcame this by publishing some more stuff, taking advantage of seasonal trends, adding some media pages to articles that were doing well, and by building links en mass via old school PostRunner and BMR networks.

My best month ever for IB traffic was soon thereafter in November 2011. I then started falling due to the end of the Christmas shopping season and because of various updates to the Panda algorithm (which are no doubt still affecting my published pool of articles).

By April of 2012 I was at about the same spot in terms of visitors as I was in May the previous year after Panda hit.

The first Penguin update hit that month in April 2012 causing another big hit on all my articles (which were at the time propped up by lots of low quality backlinks).

From April 2012 to June 2012 my unique visitor traffic dropped by another 29% and then flat-lined at that level until Spring of 2013... when InfoBarrel finally decided to start de-indexing low quality content on the site.

The Great Traffic Decline Of 2013

In early 2013 IB instituted their Direct Payment system for the first time. In March 2013 was when I signed up for it. At this point I was barely active on IB but still contributing a little on some smaller accounts. I figured I might as well sign up for the program for the extra Adsense ad block.

What I didn't see coming was their de-indexing campaign shortly thereafter which really makes sense in hindsight.

Since all the articles were now under a premium Adsense account administered by IB staff they had to takes steps to clean up the article library that they were displaying ads on. I never took the time to clean up my articles a year ago so roughly a third of my library was de-indexed over night.

IB started a thread on the forums discussing the probable action in April of 2013 and then posted an official post announcing the action a couple weeks later in May. I remember watching this happen and I just didn't care to take any steps to clean up my article library.

My IB analytics took another dive because of it.

My traffic fell an additional 62% from March 2013 through June 2013 where it has basically flat-lined since.

To summarize - Panda hit and I didn't clean up my articles so I lost traffic. Then Penguin hit and I lost all the ranking bonus my articles were getting due to links... I didn't clean up my articles or clean up link profiles. Then IB decided to de-index articles that were low quality and I still didn't clean them up so I lost even more traffic.

When all is said and done my InfoBarrel articles had lost almost 80% of their overall traffic from early 2011 to summer 2013.

My Great Cleanup Begins

In late fall 2013 I finally started looking at my article library and decided to slowly start cleaning up a few of the de-indexed articles that used to get pretty good traffic. Then In January of 2014 I really started going to town cleaning them up and getting them re-indexed.

So far I've cleaned up roughly 35 articles in total and I still have a good 75 more to look into on the first sweep.

What I'm doing though is not just clean them up. I'm trying to marginally improve them.

I enter a "red" (low quality) de-indexed article and clean up the formatting first. Then I repair really bad keyword density problems (which takes the most time). Then I add 1-3 pictures per post and an Amazon module if it makes sense near the end of the article and submit. Then I go the the media pages of each article and pin the photos used to my Pinterest account with the expectation of an eventual Pinterest traffic source.

Doing this can easily bring an article from a score of 30 to a score of 60 but it does take time.

This does get the post indexed again so at least it can get readers and earn again but will it be enough to overcome Panda problems? I don't know but i think it's worth a try.

As for the penguin problems a lot of the link sources I used for links no longer exist so many of my heavily linked articles now only have a handful of links pointing still pointing at them. My guess is that as these numbers normalize over time penguin problems will continue to be less and less impactful on my entire library of articles.

Ohh yeah, In January I also decided to flip the G+ profile on for the first time and claim authorship of my entire piss-poor library so the more I clean it up the better it should reflect on my authorship profile.

Circle me here on G+ if you haven't already. I'm pretty new there.

So has it all helped?

Not sure yet but I see potential.

In December 2013 I had roughly 2700 visits to my IB articles while in January 2014 I had ~3200.

January was the best month for me on IB since Spring 2013 before the de-indexing. Some of that could have been due to my own activity over there bumping around my own articles and chiming in on the forums but I'm sure some of it was due to my tinkering - bringing new traffic streams into play (Pinterest) and re-indexing old posts.

I'm anxious to see what February brings. If I can get all my articles indexed again then I can work on adding lots of good pictures and media to my articles to start overcoming panda problems if any exist.

Anyway, this post was more of a scratchpad for me and less of a tool for you but I hope you found some value in it. I just find it cool that I can track all the major web happenings by simply looking at my traffic stats. It all makes sense... and because it makes sense I see no reason why I can't revive this old account and get it earning good again.

I'll make sure to update again when I'm further along and see a better view of the future.