Backlinks: The Backlinks Black Belt Report

At the outset of this analysis of George Brown’s “Google Sniper” system, I want to clarify a few points.

Firstly, I don’t know George, have never met him or corresponded with him – though I will notify him of this post as a courtesy.

Having gone through the “Google Sniper” content, George strikes me as a guy in Internet Marketing for the long haul and he works pretty hard to deliver plenty of value for his buyers and monthly subscribers.

Late last year, while still fumbling around looking for a solid IM business model with consistent results, which I wasn’t getting at the time, I came across IPK (Info Product Killer) which uses many similar principles to “Google Sniper” (GS). There are obvious differences too, of course. IPK is geared towards Amazon, GS is generally targeting ClickBank, though both systems could be directed at any product.

Without giving away George’s approach (it’s the details that matter anyway), both his system and IPK focus on a single, low-competition keyword with a minisite; WordPress in the case of GS.

The reason that I keep discussing these two systems together is because they both share a fundamental approach and in both cases, I view that common principle as a limitation without which both would work much better. That commonality is an over-reliance on On-Page SEO (OPSEO as Craig from IPK called it).

Now in offering these thoughts, I am not ‘sniping’ (get it?) at George’s success, far from it. In fact, nothing would please me more than to see it working even more powerfully than it seems to be now.

In the case of IPK and GS, both creators are generally of the view that the On Page SEO is all you need to worry about and that will be enough to deliver high rankings. In my experience with IPK, that was very hit-and-miss. Stupidly, in November 2008, I didn’t yet understand the power of good backlinking campaigns and just went on building site after site after site. I made some money with some sites but overall my success was relatively disappointing. And, with some decent backlinking, those sites could have made me a small fortune. To be fair, George does detail some backlinking in his training videos but it’s fairly basic and is presented as a less desirable ‘Plan B’.

With my other IM models, I love to join together ‘bits’ or chunks of different systems and add them together to create ugly ‘Frankenstein’ models that work really well.

Here, I feel that this is what GS is crying out for – more ‘bits’ from other systems to ramp up its power.

Let me explain what I mean.

George has certain numbers that he recommends in terms of competition levels for a successful GS site. I’m not going to reveal those here. The problem here – and this has come up on George’s webinars in his monthly support program – is that it can be pretty hard to:

[a] find any keywords with competition that low and with enough monthly searches to make it worthwhile; and,

[b] think of actual keywords that haven’t been saturated yet.

Here’s my solution to both of those problems. If you have a backlink routine set up with outsourcers – I use 5 at the moment – it’s nothing to add another URL and keyword into that cycle and be building hundreds, possibly thousands of backlinks to your new GS site in the normal business of monthly backlinking.

For example, from 3-4 months of solid backlinking, my site at backlinksblackbelt.com is between #9 on Page 1 and #11 on Page 2 for the term ‘backlinks’ and – using George’s ‘sniff test’ measure of “in quotes” competition as an initial starting point – my competitors are around 2.7 million.

And that’s up against plenty of backlinking gurus? It will be much easier in other niches!

If Google Snipers embraced serious backlinking, they could massively raise the number of terms they could go after and open up hundreds of thousands of new niche keyword possibilities. Trying to look for those with the low competition numbers that George suggests is pretty frustrating – trust me, I’ve tried. Especially for anything resembling a buying keyword with some traffic that justifies building a site.

The second big problem is thinking up actual words to try in the heavily saturated niches that George talks about. The single best tool to use here is Google’s own Wonder Wheel which suggests related groups of words where new possibilities are continually opened up with. For example, if you use the free Wonder Wheel (video below) on the Search term, “approaching women” it suggests many other great possibilities like “fear of rejection” (which you can click on and get related phrases from) which then leads to a bunch of other terms like “overcoming shyness” e.g.

Google Wonder Wheel

Google Wonder Wheel Video

Here is a page with screen pics showing exactly how to use the Wonder Wheel for Google Sniper research

In my view, the Google Wonder Wheel is almost the best ever IM tool invented – and it’s perfect for frustrated Google Snipers! Type in “weight loss”, and go down through a few spokes of the wheel and you’ll have keywords galore to then check with Keyword Elite.

So let’s assume that you’re a Google Sniper and you’ve embraced backlinking to go after much bigger fish, competition-wise and you’re using the Google Wonder Wheel to get loads of ideas.

But what about speeding up the Site Creation?

What I would do is use some additional WordPress plugins like WPUnique (or Content Blender), WP Sticky (modified to make one post stay on the front page permanently) and Analyticator.

WP Unique does some weird coding stuff that overcomes duplicate content issues. Therefore, every single post on your WP blog can be PLR on that issue EXCEPT your sales letter story/review which should be taken almost word for word from one of your other successful Google Sniper sites with slight alterations to suit the new product. WP Unique means there will be no duplicate content penalty.

If you have a proven sales letter, the Google Wonder Wheel will show you dozens/hundreds of other places to create GS sites for those terms – and with WP Unique, you can use the same sales letter and PLR! Send me 25% of all the money you make from this approach.

Can you imagine how much faster it would be to create a GS site this way. You could even put all the PLR articles in at once but set their publication on a staggered pattern over the coming month. Once a blog is noticed by Google publishing daily, I find the bots pick up a new post in under 30 minutes.

The solution to making the sales letter stick to the front page isn’t to make the sales letter a Page instead of a Post. In my experience, Google likes Posts more than Pages and I would ONLY backlink the inner post page with the sales letter – nothing else. Incidentally, the backlinks blog where you are probably reading this had only 1 post, no contact details, no Privacy policy, no LSI optimisation. Nada. Just a ton of backlinks coming into that original post.

One other caveat is to be wary of registering trademarked names in domains – that could be trouble later with a C & D letter, or worse.

So, if anyone thinks I’ve been unfair or mean to George in the above critique, let me say this.

GS is excellent in forcing marketers to embrace WordPress and it is about as simple a system as you will find for newbies – even with the add-ons recommended here: PLR, WP Unique, WP Sticky, loads of Backlinking and – if it were me – other backlinked Web 2.0 sites such as Articlesbase, Metacafe video and Squidoo (the slap is over apparently) etc to lock up more of the Page 1 real estate on a term that your GS site is bringing in money on.

GS is also pretty good on learning the art of preselling.

There’s more I could talk about but that’s enough in one meal. If you found this analysis useful let me know in the comments box below or by emailing (and don’t forget my 25% cut!).

Oh and great work George – I really was trying to help!

Best regards
Terry Kyle
The Backlinks Black Belt Report

NOTE: Soon I will post Part 2 of my thoughts on enhancing Google Sniper and answer all comments and questions. To be notified when that’s available, enter your email on my free SEO Notes Diary subscription here. Enter any questions below and I will address them in Part 2.