Being a Financially Wise Business Owner
I recently read an article for ESPN Sports that had a statistic: 80% of all NBA players file for bankruptcy within five years of joining the team and getting a huge multi-million dollar salary. While there is no exact statistic for rappers, the number is probably close to 50%. Some of the biggest names in the game have gone totally broke and don’t even make records anymore due to financial issues.
Aside from the NBA and the music industry, another place you see this trend is lottery winners. Roughly 80% of lottery winners are completely broke within five years. It’s interesting that the amount of time for both lottery winners and NBA players is five years, and also that the vast majority are effected by this.
It goes to show that being financially savvy is extremely important to the overall long term success of your business, even if you happened to stumble upon a few million dollars out of nowhere (which is unlikely as it is). But one cool thing about finances is that you can hold a small nut and feel rich while at the same time you can be given millions and be broke just a few short years later without anything to show for it.
You can make just $3,000 a month and feel rich, though, if you’re financially stable. Let’s say all together your bills, including groceries and household expenses, end up being around $1,500 per month. At that rate, you have an extra $1,500 to spend every month to spend and if you put half of that into your savings and spend the rest, you’ll find you have plenty of money to go around.
The trick with financing though is to take into consideration every single thing you pay for. If you write out a budgeting plan and haven’t included monthly expenses such as tooth paste, mouth wash, deodorant and other household items, then you aren’t financing properly.
At the same time if you don’t include investment money every month for your business, then you will find that you don’t have nearly the same amount of success in your financial future than if you did. Sometimes living with your parents for a few months while you get your business off the ground is even acceptable, as long as you end up succeeding and working ten hours a day to make it happen.
This is exactly how I started my business. I turned 18 and had basically no job and no money except for the “side money” I earned here and there from my website. I say “website” because I certainly was not a business owner yet, I hadn’t had a business license and I wasn’t pulling in any more than $100-$300 a month on average. This isn’t enough to live off of and certainly not enough to continue paying the bills.
At 18 years old my dad basically told me I better get a job, get in school or get out of the house. Pretty typical parental advice I think once one has turned the golden age of 18. But I wasn’t quite ready to start my business off yet and I knew that. I needed just a little bit more time, because let’s face it I had just got out of high school and I FINALLY could invest all of my energy and time into the business… But I wouldn’t be able to do that if I immediately was in college of working a 9-5.
So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I decided to call my mom and move in with her, even though she lived on the other side of the country in Miami, FL. I did this because I saw it at my final chance. I told her I wanted to live there for half a year (6 months) and she was working at the time so I didn’t need to worry about paying bills. That gave me six months to come up with a plan, engage and succeed.
I used the first two months figuring out my plan and trying to come up with a budget for how much money I would need to make this happen. After doing my budget on paper I realized that, realistically, I needed about $1,000 to begin. So I held a sale on beats for exclusive rights at only $50 or 5 for $200 to earn the money necessary. Using just a single Twitter account and software I was able to land myself the sales I needed to earn the $1,000 in 2 months. I kept every bit of that money and didn’t spend it on anything, I hoarded it.
Finally on the third month, I started spending. Now, a full six years later, my business is still going strong, I own a car and a house and have a family I am proud of. This is the commitment I made to my finances. Lately I’ve been cracking down on finances even more to enable my business to progress faster. Roughly I’ve been able to spend twice as much money per month on investments for the business and it’s showing in my constantly rising Google rankings and sales.
Be sure to support our website if you liked this blog post by purchasing one of our courses in the sidebar (or down below if you’re on mobile devices).
Tax Season for Small Business Owners
Today I wanted to talk about tax season as a business owner. It’s not nearly as glorious as a tax season for a non-business owner who works a 9-5, let me tell you. The reason is because not only are there way more things to consider and write off, but also in the end you’re going to be forced to pay taxes instead of collect them.
There are ways to get your tax payment down by writing off certain things, though, and if you’re not profiting then writing off a loss can actually get a payment back through your taxes for the things you wrote off. That’s only the case if your business did not make enough money the previous year, though.
So without further a due, here’s a list of some of the best tax write-offs to take advantage of as a small business owner getting ready to fork up a payment to Uncle Sam.
1. The studio write-off
The first write-off worth mentioning is the studio write off. Whatever area you consider your work area, with all your equipment and paperwork in it, can be written off of your total tax payment. Let’s say you have 15% of your apartment or house dedicated to your work equipment. This would mean that you can write off 15% of your total mortgage or rent for the whole year. To my knowledge the maximum amount of space to write off is 15%, with the exception of if your entire place is used specifically for business and nothing else. This is only the case if you don’t live where you work, for instance if you have a studio you pay separate rent for. This is one of the greatest write-offs you can make for your business.
2. Advertising and business expenses
This comes in at number two, and it’s going to take a lot of effort to get all of this information. Where did you spend? Try to write off every cent, but realize that if you don’t have receipts for such payments made then you might reconsider even writing them off. You don’t want to face an audit or some other kind of tax problem. Having said that, do your best to round up as many payments as possible. If you’ve been investing in yourself all year you will find that you can write off thousands upon thousands of dollars from the year’s work.
3. Vehicle expenses
This one is pretty cool, too. Did you buy a vehicle for use with your business? Even if not, you can still write off all the miles and gas used when driving your vehicle for work. In this case you might be writing off a lot of miles if you’ve been doing a lot of meeting .
4. Food and entertainment
This is one of my favorite things to write off because any business meeting of any kind can be written off completely. So if you met somebody for lunch to discuss business, you get to write off the entire bill from that lunch visit. Entertainment includes other things as well.
5. PayPal fees and other fees
Fees can be written off. You may not think it is a big write off but when you put the numbers together, that 3% that PayPal takes from each payment can end up being a multi thousand dollar write-off. Those 3% tickets add up throughout the year and hundreds of payments later you might be looking at quite the hefty PayPal fee for the year. This is an excellent tax write-off and should not be overlooked.
6. 401k retirement plan
This is a really good way to keep money in your pocket while also writing off as much as possible. If you set up a 401k retirement plan for yourself (since you’re your own employee), you get to write it off. So if you want to convert some of your savings into a 401k retirement plan, you can write off the full amount you put into that retirement plan. This is pretty awesome considering the money stays in your pocket and yet you don’t have to pay taxes on it.
7. Cell phone bill
In most cases you can write off your cell phone bill as long as it is primarily used for marketing and business. Try to avoid long phone calls to mom on this phone if you expect to write it off. Sometimes it’s a better idea to have a second prepaid phone just for family, and to keep your main business line open only for business so you can write the bill off entirely without worrying about audit or issue.
8. Other write-offs
While we didn’t cover every single write-off you can make, there are a couple more worth mentioning. If you worked a 9-5 over the course of the year, you get a little bit taken off of your tax payment. If you worked and made more money from your 9-5 than your business, you might find you actually receive a tax return instead of having to pay into business taxes. Writing off any W9 form from work is a good idea and practice. Aside from that other practices include writing off the interest paid on mortgage. For me this is going to be a massive $8,000 write-off for myself, but being that a lot of people reading this aren’t home owners, we’ll not go into detail. You can also write off repairs done to your work vehicle, medical expenses for your family (which are personal write-offs, not business write-offs) and education. Writing off these things can easily bring you a better tax payment in the end.
If you enjoyed this article, visit the sidebar on this site (or scroll down if you’re on a mobile device) and support us by purchasing a course and further increase your knowledge.
Note: This is not to be considered as financial advice.
Easy Tips to Becoming Successful
Today since we’re starting the new year I thought it would be worthwhile to create a blog post listing some really easy tips to becoming successful with your business. There’s no easy way to create success no matter what you’re trying to achieve in life, especially when it comes to running a business. There’s no easy way into making money off of your business and investments and no matter what it’s going to take some risks. But there are ways to increase your overall chances of success and that’s what we’re going to cover here today.
Hire out to other professionals
When it comes to making your business successful, there’s no easier way than to hire or have employees. Now while having employees can be difficult to maintain and expensive, there are less expensive, less complicated options as well. For instance if you outsource and hire freelancers to complete individualized tasks then you can make things happen in your business faster than almost any other method. It’s a certain feeling you get knowing that a project is being worked on and making progress while you can focus your time on other things.
Time is more valuable than anything in business, and it’s certainly more precious and valuable than money. It makes more sense to save yourself a hundred hours of work by hiring three or four other people, perhaps from other countries for cheaper wages, to do specific tasks. This is the power of outsourcing and freelancing. Myself I’m a freelancer as well, but only for certain jobs. I will do web design and 1 on 1 consultation for good prices. Aside from that I generally don’t like to do other kinds of freelance work because my time is too valuable to me.
This morning just a few minutes ago I actually submitted a payment for an outsourced project I’m having done by a man who lives in another country. While some people may consider it to be bad ethics to outsource, which is the process of hiring out to other countries, the fact is in America you get less for your money. The only thing you get more of, in general, is attitude and cockiness. That’s just coming from my own personal experiences.
You can get equally good work for small tasks from other countries, however let me warn you: when it comes to spending BIG on outsourcing, you want to seriously watch your tail. Always, always pay small amounts at a time if hiring out to another country. Never spend more than maybe $50 or $100. If you try to hire some guy from India to design your website and he quotes you at $2,000, the fact is you’re probably taking a wrong step. Especially when we do web design through our company for a much lower price and probably with higher quality.
Actually spending time working on your business
This is a funny little thing that most people are terrible at. People talk a big game about how they’re going to make endless amounts of money through their business and how nothing will stop them from doing so. But when you ask them how much they actually do work for their business, the answer is usually pretty much zilch. That’s not going to help you achieve the dreams you’re trying to achieve.
You need to actually find yourself working on your business for hours and hours a day. If you are making all the beats for your company, then making beats should NOT count as “work time”. While it can help you market your stuff by coming out with new material, in reality that’s not going to do the job for you. You need to also be using email marketing, Twitter marketing and Facebook marketing plus other sources to make as much money as possible.
If you are not actually spending hours per day writing ideas in your notebook (if you don’t have a notebook or use any kind of note taking yet, step your game up), brainstorm, and once you’ve come up with ideas, actually physically pursue those ideas. You need to be able to spend the time to try to achieve tasks based on your research and knowledge.
Our eBook “Power” actually covers this really well. That is our best eBook and it’s worth double it’s price, being cheap at $25. Don’t miss out on that one.
Carrying yourself and your business professionally
Carrying your brand starts with the person, honestly. If you’re not carrying yourself and your business with professionalism then you’re not doing your job. Remember that. It’s up to you to carry your business forward and you can’t do that acting like an unprofessional moron. Seriously. This isn’t child’s play this is adult conversation, talking about starting a business or keeping it running and growing.
You can’t put half of your energy into it, you have to be willing to do more.
Building a Vast Music Network
This is one of the most prominent ways to make a living off of your beats is to build a vast music network. There are so many opportunities in the beat selling market it’s completely insane. For anybody not involved in licensing out beats for high prices, this is for you.
The fact is the possibilities are endless in this vast world of entertainment. Think about how every movie, commercial and song needs an instrumental. Independent artists to high quality movies with famous actors in them, everything needs beats and music.
So the best way to actually drive this fact home is to expand over several different areas of music money. This includes licensing music to commercials, movies and TV shows as well as licensing your beats online. Aside from this there is actually one more way to make money from music and it’s an important factor to your success… I’m talking about selling beats and recording, mixing and mastering services to local artists.
Just don’t turn into the guy who has a studio and has low life’s over all the time recording for free. Unless you really truly believe in their music, don’t bother wasting your time. The fact is the only reason you would ever do that is to actually make money off of the artists. So if there isn’t a clear project in mind, and all the beats aren’t custom and made without samples, then they’re pretty much useless to you.
An album can be a great way to make money, don’t get me wrong. But you have to get everybody on a contract allowing you to put their music out for licensing. If you’re not doing that then you’re wasting tons of possible income by ignoring this stream.
At the same time, your beats alone can also be licensed. High energy beats especially do well for commercials and such. There’s no such thing as selling out in the music industry, making beats for commercials is not something to be ashamed of. There’s great money in it and the monthly royalties are a lot higher than what most people receive licensing their beats.
But the local market is one big exception. You can make big bucks offline because there are clients willing to pay much higher for beats. In most cases this is because you can use your studio to your advantage. If your studio is nice, you can easily convince people you’re worth the money. Having a space for your studio is essential for this to work, and having a high quality studio is necessary.
You need to present yourself correctly, whether it be online or offline. You need a fantastic website and a proper studio to present yourself correctly to your audiences.
Things About Google to Know in 2015
Today’s subject is all about Google. I’ve been doing SEO and Google marketing for some years now, and I have enough websites ranking that I actually have a diverse experience with Google and the search engines. If you want to raise your position in the charts on these engines you’ll need to understand a few of the changes that have happened to the SEO platform in the past few years.
Recently the entire algorithm has changed completely for Google. This means that the old methods of marketing yourself to gain higher rankings no longer work, but that’s not all it means. One of the biggest (and most annoying) factors that has changed in the recent algorithm is that old bad links now count against you long term.
While before you could just keep the back links coming in and not worry too much about oldies, now Google has a system that puts bias on those old links and will inevitably keep your rankings from proceeding upwards.
While experimenting with the new algorithm, we’ve taken this site (which used to rank #1 on Google for keywords like “sell beats”, “sell beats online” and “how to sell beats”) and brought it back up significantly in the charts. However for a time we couldn’t get past the fifth and sixth pages on Google, which anyone can tell you will bring you virtually no traffic to your website.
No matter how we did back linking, or how we proceeded with our SEO efforts, we were always in a losing battle with the big G. To overcome this we started looking at our old links instead of creating new ones. By focusing on using the disavow tool and also deleting old back links that were causing us harm, we saw the first true jump in our SEO in over a year. We flew overnight from the fifth and sixth page all the way up to the second and third for these same keywords.
That’s a LOT of movement for a single night. So from there we started thinking a little harder and trying to figure out how we can further improve our rankings. Since then we’ve done several tests and research experiments on our website’s backlink profile. We’ve found that there are still links which we have yet to disavow which are hurting our rankings by using reverse algorithms to test.
In the next week or two we’re going to be disavowing the remaining back links, and we expect to see another large jump in the charts. Perhaps back to the first page since we’re already on the second or third page for these keywords at this point. It’s not unrealistic to think that this will bring us back to the first page as there are still lots of backlinks hurting our rankings currently.
So all in all, when it comes to Google, it’s not just about ranking using backlinks anymore. It’s about looking at what is actually holding you back from rising in the charts. If you’ve experienced falling in the charts then you must know of these simple basics to be able to rank yourself again.
Also you should keep in mind that whitehat back links are the only ones Google wants to see these days. There are ways to do manual link building successfully by using proxies and uploading material from different IP addresses. Then sharing that material on social networks is pretty much enough to make it happen.
We’ll keep you updated with our rankings and how this continues to play out, but one thing is for sure: we are on our way up, and you can be too.
Do You Have What it Takes?
Today I have a very simple question for everybody reading this blog post. The question is, do you really have what it takes to make an income online selling beats? The fact is you’re not going to have an easy time making a living off of music.
It’s not for everybody because the fact is most people don’t put their money and their hard work where there mouth is. Anybody can say they’re going to make it and that running a business is their dream, but very few are going to actually succeed with making a full time supplemental income.
The question I like to ask people is this: if you were out in the wilderness and you got your leg caught in a bear trap, are you the type of person who would die where they were? Or if you knew that rescue wasn’t coming and nobody was hearing your cries, would you instead chew through your leg or break it off using a nearby rock than letting yourself secede to your untimely death?
If you answered, “I’ll do whatever it takes to survive, and in that situation I would definitely try smashing the trap, crying for help and eventually, chewing through my leg if necessary,” then congratulations! You’ve got what it takes to actually take a business to the top!
Now this is sort of talking in metaphor. Maybe it’s a joke but I’m only half kidding. The fact is you need to be willing to actually put tooth to nail and build up a legitimate business which is not easy.
While people look at me on my computer, working just three to five hours a day to achieve success in my business, sometimes they get the wrong impression. Running a business is not easy, and it takes serious time to get it to a point of automation that requires as few hours per day as I put in.
There are two reasons why I am able to automate my business to such an extent currently. Firstly, I worked literally ten hours a day for about half a year straight before even getting paid a dollar. That was unpaid work that is NOW paying off in the form of automated business.
My time went into building relationships, creating plans, researching like crazy, building up income by selling my beats for super cheap to anyone who would buy them back when making money was incredibly difficult for me with my limited resources and power, and more.
Preparing my Soundclick with the right graphics, having a layout professionally made, creating my websites, building my mailing list and more. I was a man with a sophisticated and well researched plan. When I began investing into advertising I was immediately profiting. There was no question as to whether my plans were going to succeed because I was fully prepared.
Now to put it in perspective, when I came up using SEO methods, I wrote roughly 300 articles by hand. So literally each of those articles was about 500 words. These are the types of vigorous tasks you have to be willing to undertake as a business person.
So now this is a question I ask you… Do you have what it takes?
If you do then be sure to pick up one of our info courses on the home page, buy all products for a steep discount or pick up Web Design for Marketers from our sister website, WebDesignMarketer.com (linked to earlier in this sentence).
Enjoy! Thanks for your support! 🙂
Steps to Running your Own Website
A lot of people have questions about the process of setting up your very own website. I wanted to clear this up for everybody and try my best to show the different steps necessary to get your own website up and running.
1. Getting a domain name.
The domain name is a separate cost than your hosting. Usually you pay once per year for a domain and the cost is going to be roughly $10-$15 for the entire year. Anything more than that is suspicious. The payment goes towards securing the domain name, for instance “SellBeatsNow.com”. You need to pay for the domain name yearly or obviously having hosting isn’t going to do you much good.
You need a domain name so people can easily find your website by simply typing your URL into the web browser of their choice. You can actually get the domain name through the same website you pay for hosting with, in this case I definitely suggest picking up BlueHost.
2. Getting hosting.
This is one of those steps that drives people crazy. Hosting can be extremely complicated because there are seemingly endless options and keeping a website up and running is obviously a top priority for anybody.
BlueHost is a great company for hosting. They are inexpensive and honestly a lot of the biggest companies around are actually just re-sellers of BlueHost. They are well trusted and the set up process is actually pretty easy.
Choosing the right kind of hosting is actually a simple process. For the most part, cheap hosting is your best bet especially when you’re first starting out. Using WordPress optimized hosting, like the one available at the link below for $12.95/mo, is going to last you a long time and likely be the only thing you need for years to come.
Once your website starts getting more traffic on a daily basis you may notice that your hosting needs to be upgraded. But the thing about hosting is you constantly need to upgrade as your site grows and grows, though for the first year it will probably not be getting enough traffic to spiral you towards needing to upgrade.
Once you do need to upgrade, however (for instance if you notice your website is starting to slow down or load worse), all you need to do is use a standard VPS server for the most part. I use a much more complicated server solution but a VPS is just as powerful. It’ll cost you $30 per month or so for a good VPS but it will deliver you the upgrade necessary to keep your site running smooth and healthy.
3. Installing your CMS (I suggest using WordPress)
Installing WordPress onto your site is a good way to skip thousands of hours of coding a custom CMS. Honestly you don’t want to make an HTML website because you want more easy control over your website. To gain this control you need to be able to put up blog posts easily, change your content and edit the HTML side of your site easily.
This is best done using a CMS, which stands for Content Management System. It is simply a framework for you to build your website up with. It doesn’t necessarily make the job easier, but it definitely makes it more of a simple process. WordPress is the best CMS out there and I like to use it for the majority of my websites.
4. Installing your theme
There are themes online you can pay for, but realistically having a totally custom theme is your best bet. You want something that sticks out and keeps you at the forefront of your business. Anything pre-made or sold for cheap online, it’s sort of like you get what you pay for. You will have a limited website with much less options.
Building a theme yourself isn’t very difficult, but obviously requires some good knowledge of HTML, CSS and general coding. These days you also want to make sure your website is mobile friendly and responsive. It should automatically adjust it’s own size to fit whatever screen the site is being viewed at.
5. Setting up a Marketing Strategy
Once you’ve gotten your website theme up you need to start installing all the different marketing strategies onto your site. This should include things like Share to Unlock features for viral back linking, email marketing strategies such as Aweber which is a service that enables you to have opt-in forms on your website, and to set up automated email follow-ups to people who join your website.
Having sign up forms, social media links, and all sorts of other features is how you’re going to make your site stand out from the rest. For instance having a pop-up on your website for people to join your website’s email list can be extremely powerful. That’s just one of the possibilities.
On-site marketing is the most important factor of all. In fact SEO (search engine optimization) happens on your website as well. It’s very difficult to rank on Google without having your website properly optimized from the bottom up, not just for the content you’re using but also for the actual optimization on your website.
Remember that optimization does NOT just refer to search engine strategy, though. You want to be able to rank on Google and other search engines, sure, but the fact is you need to also optimize your website for sales. Having your offers clearly outlined on the correct pages and places is a good start. Using powerful headlines is another way to make it work.
Here is a link to Aweber, below:
6. For best results, hire US to design your website.
I have no shame bringing up the fact that I am a web designer, owner of Web Design Marketer, where you can find our entire portfolio and pricing sheet. We also do $200-$300 basic websites for clients.
The reason I bring it up with no shame is because you get what you pay for, and having somebody who is a professional build your website for your is an extraordinarily powerful thing. Your on page marketing has to be as high quality as possible and you’re simply not going to make that happen without the proper SEO, sales optimization, social media integration and customized, mobile friendly theme.
Visit WebDesignMarketer.com/wdmportfolio to check out our portfolio, and contact us for a quote or to speak to us about getting your website started. We accept 1/2 down payments.
How to Sell Beats on Soundcloud
Today I thought it would be worth while to present an article about how to sell beats on Soundcloud. It’s a fact that today’s beat selling industry has changed dramatically with the invention of the internet. No longer do you need big radio connections or record label friends to make your dreams a reality.
Music production itself used to be much more expensive because you needed quite the expensive studio to be able to make the kind of music you needed to. Now it’s much easier with the invention of software such as Reason (my personal favorite), Fruity Loops, Ableton and Logic.
There was a time when it was impossible to become a music producer without spending tens of thousands of dollars on equipment. Nowadays a couple thousand is enough to get everything you need including a brand new computer, software, a keyboard and even a microphone set up.
Obviously spending more will get you a better studio but the point is it’s not necessary anymore. You need very little to get by. So the world of music production is extremely competitive compared to how it used to be.
Luckily, with the invention of new technology came the invention of the internet. Websites such as Soundcloud have become a pristine place to sell beats online. It’s easy to get a hold of people on this website and it works just like a social network, so there’s even sharing capabilities, messaging and comments.
The great thing about Soundcloud is it’s free for all to use and you can get paid promotion for very cheap. Just a few dollars a month buys you extraordinary access. Posting in groups and sharing your tracks in them as well is a smart way to make some extra cash.
Treating it just like Facebook is a good way to get started. Start following people and adding new friends and you will find that others add and follow you back. The rough percentage at which people will follow you back is around 14%, and that goes for just about any social network.
So really a strong strategy is just to post up new tracks and follow/unfollow new leads found in groups.
Personally I like to do this using the Soundcloud Manager software, but you can also do it by hand. I easily brought my new account up to 485 followers in just a month or two from only 130 followers just using this method. Targeted follows on this website are extremely powerful because you can add new music and people on your follow list will absolutely listen.
Soundcloud isn’t like other social networks where your posts go unseen. If you post new music chances are you’re going to get a good amount of comments, likes, shares and listens. You won’t get the same respect every time you post on Twitter, for instance, where the rate at which people like, share or favorite your posts is much lower.
So Soundcloud is a great social network for sharing, especially because you can easily connect with other musicians. There’s nothing to stop you from doing so and selling beats on Soundcloud is made easy because of this fact. There are so many methods of getting in touch with rappers and artists on this website that it is actually made easy.
Today I want to encourage you to visit our main page and select a course from our list. I think the best courses to purchase currently are Beat Selling Monster and Nuclear Traffic Meltdown.
Results Rising on Google Easily
Last time I sent an email blast to my mailing list I was speaking of trying a new Google trick to raise my rankings. A while back I actually fell dramatically because Google’s algorithm’s changed. I went from being #1 in every single keyword for my market to being on the 5th page for the same keywords.
What ended up happening was Google decided it was going to start harshly positioning sites based on very old back links. Before this time Google cared more about incoming back links and the on going links which came in. But the second Google decided to highly emphasize past links, a lot changed.
One particular thing that I did to increase my rankings was to do a background check on the links I already had up. I found that there were around 700 links that were pointing to broken links or other similar problems. Simply having those links to broken pages or pages that no longer exist was enough to significantly lower my rankings.
Without adding any new links, all I did was go through and create a disavow file exactly as I explained in the last blog post that would serve to disavow those broken links.
The Results were Instant Google Rankings, Moving up Dramatically, Nearly Doubling Our Positions in a Week
This is the power of the disavow tool if used correctly. You can find yourself ranking a lot higher without actually doing any more work. If you don’t have any back links currently then all you have to do is focus on actually getting the right kinds of back links from the start. However if you were ranking highly and after the Penguin and Panda updates you find it impossible to rise up from your current positions on Google, then consider this method.
If you want to sell beats on the internet then you will need traffic. Ranking on Google is an easy way to do that. I hope this article helped!
Buy one of our courses in the sidebar or the home page to support us and also to learn more about this wonderful beat selling game! Sell more beats now.
What You Need to Know About Google in 2014
The process of recovering from Google rankings can be a tedious one, and it’s something we’ve been focusing on in the last week. You see we used to be #1 across every major search engine including Yahoo, Google and Bing. We had the #1 spot for over three years and with Beats4Legends we had top 10 positions across the board. Not just for one or two keywords either, but hundreds of them.
This was a good way to get traffic to our business and we soaked up a few thousand email opt-ins from these sources and thousands of dollars in sales. Google is a great place to advertise yourself because it is some of the most targeted traffic you can imagine. People go onto Google and specifically search for something like “how to sell beats” or “selling beats”, or in the case of Beats4Legends it’s more like keywords such as “buy beats” and “beats for sale”.
However Google has seriously reconsidered what it wants in terms of link building, and there then became something known as the Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird algorithm updates. Google actually completely changed the way they choose to rank material from the bottom up. By completely remaking their algorithms, hundreds of thousands of websites were hit in a negative way.
The problem is if you’ve gotten links in the past from sources that Google no longer agrees with, it will actually effect your current rankings today. That means that even doing great, white-hat Google friendly back links isn’t enough to get you ranked unless you have a brand new domain name. If you have an old domain name it could take up to six full months and a lot of work to get your rankings back.
The good thing is you can do it, and there are definitely still back linking campaigns you can use to rank easily. For instance, check out these awesome recovery rankings we had for our domain Beats4Legends. We flew back up in the rankings and all was back to normal for several months, but then Google came out with an update which made it so old links heavily effect your current rankings. Even though these new links were making us fly up in the charts, the old links we had from years ago were still effecting us.
This is an interesting position to find yourself in because the new links coming in were giving us an incredible boost in rankings that ended up flying us up in just a few days back to the top ten. Here’s an image taken from the sales page of Viral Google Domination, where we explain the whitehat Google friendly backlinking techniques we used to rise in our rankings even after new Google updates.
Photos from Viral Google Domination Sales Page
Top 10 Positions Came Flying Back
Again though, this is not enough. A new update came along from the dreaded Penguin that made it so old links were weighed heavily. We haven’t worked on our SEO this year at all as we’ve focused on making other moves to grow our business as quickly as possible regardless of Google.
But now we are back to using Google marketing techniques and we’ve learned a lot about how to recover from Google penalties. Huge amounts of time and research has been put in and one thing we’ve learned is that old backlinks can sometimes be toxic.
After performing several analysis gigs we found that we have thousands of backlinks from domains which are hurting our rankings and keeping us down no matter how many viral, good backlinks we seem to get. We found thousands upon thousands of back links that were coming up as toxic. We used top SEO tools in the industry to come to this conclusion and realized there was a lot of work to do.
While we still have plenty of rankings on the third page of Google, we are looking to get those bad links going away so we can come back to the first page.
We created a disavow notepad file and uploaded it to the Disavow Tool in Google. This tool can be extremely helpful specifically to people who have old links holding them back. It allows users to actually tell Google not to pay attention to links coming from certain domains and that can be a game changer.
One problem though is that it will take a full six months in some cases for the disavow tool to take any effect after a file is uploaded. You also want to be absolutely sure that the links you are disavowing are the right ones. In some cases disavowing the wrong links can hurt your rankings rather then help them.
The real way to rank on Google in 2014 has to do with getting truly viral back links and using the power of other people to gain rankings.
Buy a Product in the Sidebar or Hire us for Consulting or Web Design!
Support us and get top quality service and products.