My name is Tarik and thank you for stopping by.
I started Backlink Insider to help people like you rank their websites on the top of search engines and fulfill their dreams with the power of the internet.
My Story
I’m approaching 8 years of working online so I have a pretty unique story to tell. Here’s how I got started in internet marketing and SEO:
My First Website
I built my first ever website back in 2006 while attending Dartmouth College. I studied Economics and always enjoyed investing in the stock market and making huge returns. Investor Trip was born and I blogged mostly about stocks, mutual funds and retirement investing. The website grew quite fast before blogging became a popular way to make money online.
Back then, you could get #1 Google rankings by just publishing an article with just a main keyword in the headline. If you’re new to SEO, you have no idea how easy it was just 5-6 years ago.
Making $8k per month
In just 1 year, I was making around $8,000 per month online and paid off all my credit card and student loans in just 12 months. My biggest income sources were Google Adsense and discount online stock broker affiliate accounts. You can earn between $40 to $60 per account referred, and I was referring around 200 accounts per month.
SEO was fairly a level playing field, and I used social bookmarking backlinks, article submission and blog comments to get top Google rankings. Unfortunately, I also hired a very suspect link builder who created thousands of forum backlinks using SEnuke. You could send thousands of links to a website and get top rankings pretty easily.
Google didn’t have a good spam penalty yet and lots of low quality pages achieved #1 rankings for all types of keywords. All kinds of stuff like viagra and pill pages ranked really high.
At the same time, internet marketers started buildings fake blogs (flogs) and spammed a heck out of Google to make easy affiliate sales.
The Google Panda Update
April 11, 2011 was one of the most frightening days of my life. Google introduced the Panda update, which lower the rankings of any website using spammy link techniques. Although my authority site had plenty of trusted backlinks from PR5+ sites, I simply built too many cheap backlinks to rank for high converting affiliate keywords like “review” “promotion code” and “discount code”.
My main authority website went from over 1k visitors per day to around 50. I lost 85% of my website traffic and my affiliate income tanked. Google Adsense revenue are fell and they started banning accounts left and right. It didn’t matter because my Adsense income was so low anyway.
Google favored authority websites and I couldn’t complete on the same level as bigger financial sites like SeekingAlpha, The Street, etc. The only solution is to hire writers and turn into an authority website. It’s something I’ve considered and may work on later this year.
The Change in SEO
I hate to say it, but SEO is now more about having deep pockets than true quality of content. First time bloggers and business owners must understand how critical it is to have a decent SEO budget and pay for results upfront. You can no longer be passive and get top rankings. Competition is super high and unless you are targeting low traffic local niches, you will get drowned by the competition.
High PR backlinks gained lots of attention and proved that they protected websites against a Google slap, improved rankings quickly, and increase page rank in the next Google PR update.
I switched my main SEO strategy from mass backlinking using web 2.0, article submissions, forum backlinks, blog commenting, and other free mosted to building authority domains on high PR expired domains. It’s a slower and more expensive process, but it’s the only way to build income generating assets and rank for any keyword you like in the long run.
SEO in 2014 and Beyond
2014 is the year of authority websites and you cannot compete using the same strategies in the past. I recommend having a solid content creation strategy, a decent SEO budget to pay for backlinks, and an subscriber email list (Aweber $1 trial) to build a relationship with your target market.
The internet has more FREE content than ever. It’s becoming harder and harder to have your voice heard. The only way to get backlinks and traffic is to offer more value to your target niche and build your own valuable high PR authority domains around your main website. Huffington Post, Mashable, and ESPN all use this strategy to attract millions of visitors and pass authority between a network of websites. Trust me, it works.
How Can I Help You?
Whether you are a complete online beginner or manage a portfolio of several websites, we can help you get more exposure for your websites, increase your rankings in Google, become 10x easier to find online and make more money without spending a fortune on advertising.
You can apply many of our strategies on your own or hire me to complete the SEO methods for you. I’m looking forward to speaking with you and helping you become more visible online and increase your sales. Contact me to find out how I can assist you in your online SEO goals.