Blogger FTP Migration - Success!

Whew! I have to tell you that I really sweated this one out.  I wasn't sure that this migration from my own hosting center back to Blogger / Google hosting was really going to work with the upcoming FTP shutdown occurring on May 1st.  The Agile Marketer has been around for about 4 years now - slowly climbing the SEO organic ladder (yes, I remember being one of the first guys to post on John Chow's site when he started it) nearing the top 10 list.  I've been using this site for my personal opinions and learnings on how to make money online -  making this site's Google ranking very, very important to me.

What I wasn't sure about was that the ranking would drop and/or the migration would fail miserably.  So, let's go through what I learned along the way and how easy or difficult this migration turned out to be.

Let me backup a bit and describe my particular migration problem. The Agile Marketer site consists of a Blogger blog posts as the default landing pages with some ASP.NET scripts as side pages (for dynamic content such as the Free Affiliate Link Cloaker).  In this case Blogger FTP's all of the files to the root path of the domain (www.agilemarketer.com).  Most people have a site blog that they publish to such as (www.agilemarketer.com/blog/) - but that was not my case.

Just When You're Making Money Online - Google Cancels Blogger FTP

Ugh! Yes it is tax time and Blogger time. You've probably noticed over the last few years that The Agile Marketer is a Blogger blog - something I've enjoyed using for a number of years for my core site (this one) and many other profitable affiliate and AdSense sites.

The bad news is that on May 1st Google is pulling the plug on posting your Blogger blog on an externally hosted website. This is tough news for those of us who have many blogs - and, if you haven't guessed, something I've been working on for the last four weeks.

What really bothers me, however, is the fact that The Agile Marketer has reached #26 in Google for the exact search term 'Learn How to Make Money Online ' and #52 for the unquoted term - a very, very competitive keyword phrase (125M results).  This site has been slowly and surely moving up the Google ladder over the last 2 years with a significant amount of effort.

The rub now is that moving this site back to being Google hosted is going to cause a number of problems:

IM101 Step 7: Using Blogger to Build Your Affiliate Site

I've talked about Blogger many times before on The Agile Marketer. It is, in my mind, the easiest way to get a site online that can generate revenue for you quickly. With built-in RSS feeds, Adsense and the ability to customize using Javascript or HTML additions you can actually build a fully functional website.

However, your goal is not to get too wrapped up in site design - remember, the key to your success is getting content out there quickly and to notify blog search engines that content is being updated.

I'm not going to go into the details of how to sign into Blogger and set up your account - you can find many tutorials out there on how to do this - here's a great one if you need it: Vance's Blogger Tutorial

Make sure you choose a more vanilla, or sparse template. The reason for this is that you can make things stand out much better - the colors of a header or inline page photos really stand out when the template is mostly white. In case you haven't noticed, The Agile Marketer is a Blogger blog (highly customized, though).

I realize it has been a while since my last tutorial - but, part of the reason was to show you how this Blogger affiliate site I was building, namely, The Diet Solution Program, is doing in Google!!

Take a look at: The Diet Solution Program

I completed the first part of the blog in October and submitted only some free press releases and one, single article. Over time I added some more blog posts, submitted my site to a few social sites such as Spicypage and Blogcatalog, submitted the single article to some more directories and pinged some blog search services. Actually, not much work overall - I didn't do some of the standard traffic building techniques such as YouTube or a load of article submissions.

So, in two and half months - how are we doing with our keywords?
1. 'The Diet Solution Program' - now ranked 42nd in Google (534,000 results)
2. 'Isabel De Los Rios' - now ranked 22nd in Google (361,000 results)
3. 'healthy diet plan' and 'natural weight loss' - (524,000 and 2,640,000 Google results) no ranking yet for those specific phrases (but indexed by Google if the search is refined)

I haven't spent any time on optimizing the keyword phrases in #3 yet - just letting organic growth work with these. However, my future approach will be to add keyword density in my Blogger posts as well as articles that focus on these.

Not bad for the small amount of work I've put into the site - I would guess I've put in about 8-16 hours of work. With only a single article, six submissions to article sites, three press releases, about seven social site networks I'm generating some traffic, getting Adsense revenue and a few Clickbank sales.

The key with Blogger was getting my content posts out there so that they will be searched by Google right away. Keywords make the difference - you can see how just a little work can get a site moving up the organic search result ladder. Just image if you have 5 to 10 of these Blogger affiliate sites working over time....