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Guest Blogging For Backlinks & Content

 Author: admin Feb 04

I’ve not mentioned this site before, but I’ve been using MyBlogGuest quite a lot recently. Its basically a site where paid users ($20 per month) can submit articles into a gallery, then any user (including free users) can make an offer for the article to put it on their site.

Backlinks From MyBlogGuest

For those looking to get backlinks, you’ll need a paid account. For $20 per month you get a pro account which allows you to submit unlimited articles to the gallery (maximum of 4 at a time). Other users will then offer to put your article on their site for you. The difference between MyBlogGuest and many of the automated blog networks is that you will have to write a decent quality article and it must be 100% unique – no spun rubbish here! Whats the benefit? You get your article on high quality sites with real visitors! I submitted 4 articles a few weeks back and these ended up on the following sites:

site 1: 9k alexa rank, PR 5
site 2: 29k alexa rank, PR 3
site 3: 431k alexa rank, PR3
site 4: 447k alexa rank, PR3

As well as getting high quality links (2 of which are still on the homepage nearly a month later) from relevent sites, I’ve actually received quite a bit of traffic (around 300 visitors) from these articles as well.

Certain areas niches perform better on MyBlogGuest. For example, tech and SEO articles will get 10-20 offers in the first day, while a food and drink article may only get a couple a day.

MyBlogGuest also has an automated checker to ensure that your articles remain unchanged! Every so often you get an email from them listing all your articles and whether there are any problems with any of them – ie links being changed etc.

Free Content From MyBlogGuest

The other side of MyBlogGuest is that you can use it to get free content for your website! As I mentioned, you can only submit high quality content, which means that when you take content from the system you only get high quality content! The articles will normally include 2 links to a relevent site. There are certain members putting links to non relevent sites in articles at the minute, although that is being clamped down on and you are able to refuse the article if you dont like it for any reason. I currently have 6 sites which I pull content from MyBlogGuest for. I’ve found that adding the content has helped to increase my traffic (and sales) quite a bit, with one site going up by over 100%! Fair enough, it was quite a niche site (outdoor cooking) and was only receiving around 500 uniques per month and making a couple of sales per month, but its now receiving around 1200 uniques per month and making a sale every few days.

MyBlogGuest Summary

Guest blogging has normally involved you spending hours contacting potential sites and waiting even longer to get a reply (if you ever got one). MyBlogGuest turns this on its head by allowing you to write an article and interested sites come to you!

While I was talking to a fellow affiliate about MyBlogGuest, they said “yeah but its free to email them, that costs $20″. Im sorry, but if thats the attitude anyone has, they arent going to get far! Fair enough, you dont have to spend money to send an email, but it does take YOUR TIME! Before MyBlogGuest I would quite easily spend a couple of days (ie 10-15 hours) researching sites and emailing the owners each month. From that I would normally receive around 5-10 responses allowing me to do a guest blog for “free”. Some others replied but wanted me to pay for it. So it was probably 1 hour per guest blog. In one month on MyBlogGuest, I posted over 40 guest posts. That would have taken me around 40 hours – ie a full week to do manually! $20 to save 40 hours worth or work? You do the math!

Do I recommend MyBlogGuest? Well I’ve just renewed for the 4th month :) If you dont have a lot of sites to build links to, I recommend you write around 40 articles, then sign up for a pro account, submit all 40 over the month and then cancel.

So I guess your looking for the affiliate link now? There is no affiliate program! I dont benefit at all if you sign up.

Category: Design/Hosting/SEO  | Leave a Comment

Do me.uk domains rank as well as org.uk and co.uk? RESULTS

 Author: admin Dec 17

In a post a few months back, I asked if me.uk domains rank as well as org.uk or co.uk domains. In fact, it was 8 months back!

After 3 weeks, my .co.uk sites where ranking higher than the .org.uk and .co.uk alternatives, as follows:

Keyword 1:  me.uk: 22nd  |  .org.uk:  58th  |  .co.uk: 152nd

Keyword 2:  me.uk: 43rd  |  .org.uk:  64th  |  .co.uk: NOT RANKING

Now, after 8 months, the ranks are as follow:

Keyword 1:  me.uk: 7th  |  .org.uk:  44th  |  .co.uk: NOT RANKING

Keyword 2:  me.uk: 10th  |  .org.uk:  133rd  |  .co.uk: NOT RANKING

First page rankings for 2 me.uk domains! These sites have been sat there for around 6 months now (Keyword 1 actually peaked at 5th for a couple of weeks), I’ve only just got around to writing this post though! At the minute both sites are still simply 1 page, 500 word sites using the standard wordpress theme!

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Category: Design/Hosting/SEO  | Leave a Comment

One Year On!

 Author: admin Dec 14

In a post in January 2011, I mentioned I had become a self employed affiliate marketer, after quiting my safe and well paid job! Some people said I was stupid to do it in the recession, others said go for it and good luck, others didn’t have a clue what I was talking about so just kept quiet!

Anyway, in the past year quite a few things have changed. The good news is that I am still self employed! Over the last few months, my home office has evolved quite a bit, from a single computer with 2 mismatched monitors into 2 computers, both with nice 2 x 22″ monitors and nice Logitech Trackball monitors (I have an ongoing problem with my elbow from using “normal” mice), a HP MicroServer, 17″ Dell laptop, 7″ Acer netbook and HP TouchPad – fair enough, the last 3 bits are for use around the house rather than the office. I’ve also bought a Three MiWi for 3G internet access due to our BT line being useless and going down at least once a month for a few days. The annoying thing is I can get a 6mb connection through that and only 2mb through BT. Hopefully Three will introduce some higher useage packages soon as 15GB isnt enough for me to switch totally.

I’ve continued with my affiliate sites, although havent built quite as many as I would have liked over the year. I’ve also expanded into different niches which I had previously decided not to touch (health and beauty products which pay $40+ per sale) which are doing well. I’ve also bought a few sites along the way at decent prices to add to my income.I have purchased Price Tapestry and used it on my gold locket site and several others. It certainly makes handling those type of sites a lot easier and is well worth the £200 price tag. Infact, it paid for itself in 3 months (ie the 2 sites it was used on in those 3 months, made over £200 more than they had in the previous 3 months). I’ve also finished my own price scraper which allows me to maintain a database of up to date prices for certain products. My sites can then pull the information that they need from the database which is perfect for small sites which only sell a couple of products.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I’ve also dabbled with a bit more domaining this year which has provided a nice little side income. The biggest drain on my time at the minute though is helping other companies with their SEO. It started off with one company, however has soon spread via word of mouth and I’m now looking after quite a few. Still, its more money in the bank each month, so shouldn’t complain.
The biggest change this year though, is the fact I am going to be a dad! He is now 30 weeks and due in February! I can’t wait. It does mean that a few things will need to change, such as not working 5am through to 9pm with a few small breaks for food on certain days, or being able to put in big chunks of time without being disturbed. As a result I’ll be looking to outsource more of the work such as article writing (I still do some myself). While it means I wont have as much of the money to myself, I’ll have more time to spend with my son, which, at least to me, is worth more than any amount of money!
So, what will the next year hold…only time will tell I guess! As long as my little boy is born fit and healthy and I dont have to go back to working for someone else, I’ll be more than happy through!

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Category: Personal Life  | One Comment

Domaining – Increasing Domain Sales & Value!

 Author: admin Dec 14

As well as affiliate marketing, I dabble in a bit of domaining. The two kind of go hand in hand, you reg a domain and plan to develop it, but then decide you dont have time to develop it so try and sell the domain.

This post is about a recent experience with one of my domains. I bought the domain after seeing it on a drop list. It was a two word .org.uk domain. The exact match only got around 200 searches per month, however if you swapped the first word for a very similar word (along the lines of “motorcycle” to “motorbike” the number of searches went up to around 3,000 per month. After a quick search, I saw that Google was using the two first words as pretty much meaning the same. If you searched for the one in my domain, the more searched term appeared and vice versa.

After a few months on my “development list”, I decided not to bother developing it and get rid instead. I offered it to several people who where looking to buy similar domains on various forums. Nobody was interested, even at £20. After offering it to a few people I gave up with it and put it on a “drop list”.

As with all of my domains, I had installed wordpress and put up a couple of pages of content when I bought it, but not done any backlinks to it. Last month, I received an email offering £100 for the domain! First thought was to sell it – however I then checked the rankings and saw it was ranking 6th for the exact match term and 13th for the higher searched term. I did a little bit of link building with Article Marketing Robot and within a week I was ranking number 1 for the main term and top 3 for the other term. Now I had a domain which may be worth something! I emailed the person back who made the original offer and asked them to make a new offer – no response!

I then spent a few minutes to pull off contact details for all of the companies using AdWords on both terms and write an email to them all, asking for offers. Within 30 minutes I received an email back saying they where interested! I sent an email back saying open to offers, but I had contacted other companies and would be taking the highest first bid, or the first bid I was happy with. No response again. Again I was starting to get a bit annoyed (even though I had only sent the original emails out less than an hour ago!), so popped out for a take away. Got back to a response from them offering mid £xxx! Great, a domain I couldn’t sell for £20 was now going to sell for mid £xxx. However, before I had chance to reply, another company emailed back asking for a price. I sent them the same email as the previous company and within minutes had a response offering very high £xxx which I immediatly accepted and have now sold!

So a domain which I bought for £7 and had decided wasnt worth the £7 after not being able to sell for £20, suddenly became worth over 100 times more than I paid for it with literally a few minute work (a couple of Article Marketing Robot blasts which could have been outsourced on Fiverr for $10 or so). This is my second big domain sale so far, with a dozen or so smaller sales in between. I have around 70 domains (mixture of extensions), although most are now developed and only around 10-15 are ones I would sell, with my total expenditure on domains so far being around £400. So far from selling domains, I have made over £3k in profit in the last year or so.

Category: General  | Leave a Comment

Gold Locket Update

 Author: admin Aug 13

Many of you may remember my entry into the A4U competition last year. The last update was in September and the site had just moved into profit (assuming I had worked for free!). The site made a few more sales but nothing too impressive – mainly due to the fact that most of the lockets were showing as the wrong price or no longer stocked at all!

It hadn’t been update because the competition thread kind of died off, I stopped going to A4U (and started actually working!) and it wasn’t making enough to warrant me putting the time in. Rather than leave the site to rot, I decided to start looking into price comparison scripts again.

I have a very basic script I have put together which works very well for sites which promote one product. It keep all the prices up to date, but it is not really suitable for sites with more than 1 or 2 products. The most obvious choice was of course Price Tapestry as everyone seems to like it and after a few emails back and fourth to David (the creator), I decided to buy it.

I started playing around with it this morning, now the site has been totally transferred over to Price Tapestry! The theme is still the same and most people would struggle to tell the difference between the old site and the new site – agoldlocket.co.uk. I just need to go through and add some unique descriptions into each of the products now and the site will be fully functional and self updating! While it has taken me a day to get the gold locket site switched to Price Tapestry, most of that was learning my way around Price Tapestry and getting the required modifications for it from David. I’m pretty sure I could do the whole thing again in under an hour.

I’ll post up a more detailed Price Tapestry review once I’ve had chance to play with it a little more – its looking good so far though!

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Category: A4U Gold Jewellery Competition, Affiliate Marketing, Design/Hosting/SEO  | 2 Comments

Funky Pigeon Review

 Author: admin Jul 12

I dont normally post reviews of non affiliate/seo sites on here, however thought I would share this site here.

Unless you have been living under a rock you will know that personalised cards are being advertised everywhere. First it was Moonpig. I received a code for a free card from them one year so thought I would try it out – however the card never turned up. Suprisingly I never used them again. Since then though, everyone seems to be jumping on the personalised cards idea and sites such as “Funky Pigeon” popping up everywhere.

Anyway, I was away on holiday for two weeks in June this year, which ran over Fathers day. As usual I forgot to buy a Fathers day card! Fortunately I was checking my emails while away on holiday and noticed an email from Funky Pigeon for a free fathers day card. I didn’t have anything to lose even if it didnt turn up as I hadn’t got a card already and had no way of getting one. A few clicks later and I had picked a card from the huge range available, personalised the text on the front and inside and told them to send it straight to my dad – done! I was amazed when I got a text message from my dad on Fathers day saying thanks for the card!

A few weeks later it was my girlfriend’s sisters 18th birthday so I decided to give Funky Pigeon another go, this time using a photo on the card and changing all the text again. This time I had the card sent to me so we could give it her with her presents. The next day the card came! It looked great, the photo was great and everything looked as it should. Everyone at the party commented on the card and it was by far her favourite.

Then today I realised that I hadn’t bought a card for my niece’s Christening. Im not religious at all, I feel like a hypocrite even going to the Christening. When I was looking around the shops, each one had a handful of cards, but they were all very religious – after all its a Christening! I didn’t feel comfortable giving any of them so decided to try Funky Pigeon. I got home, went to the site and searched for “Christening”. 62 cards – perfect! Within a couple of minutes I had picked a card which I liked the look of, wasn’t too religious, added my niece’s name and customised the message inside a little and placed the order.

It is so much easier buying cards online, especially when you are out of the country and need to send a card (Fathers day), you want something a little special (like the 18th birthday card) or when you want the freedom to change the text (the christening card). Add to that the fact the prices are quite reasonable and there always seems to be a discount voucher available and it is not only convenient, but cheap as well. The Fathers day card was free, 18th birthday card was £1.49 and the Christening card was £1.24 – all including free deliver to you or direct to the recipient – which from my experience is the next day!

If you are interested in signing up with Funky Pigeon at http://www.funkypigeon.com then by using my account number (776595) when you sign up, you will automatically get 50% off your first order! On top of this if you preload your account with £10, you get £2.50 free which makes everything even cheaper! Oh and I get £3 account credit if you sign up with my account number.

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Category: General, Personal Life  | 4 Comments

Time To Ditch EzineArticles?

 Author: admin May 24

Despite all of the over hype around the Google Panda update I am still getting good results from article marketing – both in the form of direct traffic from the articles and in terms of increased SERPs. Just thought I would get that out the way before anyone chirps up with “Article marketing is dead”.

Anyway, as part of my article marketing campaigns I would normally submit an article to EzineArticles as its thought of by many as being the most authorative article directory and does bring in some good direct traffic. I have one site that gets around 50% of its traffic from article directories, of which EzineArticles counts for around half of that. So that’s why I have always started with EzineArticles.

However, since the Google Panda update EzineArticles seem to be running scared. I’m guessing a lot of the crap that they have on their site has stopped ranking now – unlike my articles which are still bringing in just as much traffic from them, so now they are trying to get people to push the quality of the content up. In doing so though they have become extremely picky over what they will and will not accept into the site.

I have 3 accounts with EzineArticles and I will normally submit 8 articles on one account, 6 on another account and then a varying amount on the final one – usually around 5 or 6 per month. I’ve only ever had one article declined and that was due to fact I had copied and pasted the article in and missed out the first few letters of the first word. Between all 3 accounts I have over 100 articles published so I would say that is pretty good going. However this month I submitted all my articles, 8 to one account and 6 to another and waited a few days. Out of the 14, 9 of them where declined!

The articles were all written by myself and spell checked before listing, yet 7 of them were declined for “spelling or grammar issues”. The other 2 (both from the same account) were declined due to “bad author name”?!?! I’ve published around 40 articles with the account all under the same author name. 2 other articles I published at the same time were accepted yet these two were declined because the author name was in the format “firstname initial surname” which apparently isn’t acceptable. It is nice of them to tell me after publishing 40+ articles with that name.

Anyway, I’ve changed the name but now need to wait for them to approve that. I then checked the ones that were declined for grammar and spelling issues. There were a couple of UK spellings so I changed these to US versions and also made a few grammatical changes to make it read a bit better. From the 9 resubmitted, 7 were declined again.

I would not class myself as a great writer, but I’ve never really had any of my content declined by any directory or site before now. I’ve decided now that I’m not going to bother with EzineArticles – it just doesn’t seem worth the hassle.

Has anyone else had any issues with EzineArticles recently? What other decent directories are people using?

 

Category: Design/Hosting/SEO  | Leave a Comment

Sandboxie – Recommended Free Tool!

 Author: admin Apr 16

So last week my machine was working away with a few programs, doing some “automated SEO” and all of a sudden my firewall and antivirus shut themselves down and some magical piece of software popped up telling me about all these hundreds of problems with my computer. Some nasty Malware had infected one of the sites that one of my programs had gone to and then managed to infect my machine! It was something along the lines of “Internet Security 2011″ or some other spammy fake antivirus name that tries to force you into paying for the software, in order to remove these fake problems. I spent a while removing it (about 3 hours total to remove every trace of it!) and then decided I would upgrade to Windows 7 from XP anyway.

So I ordered Windows 7 from Scan and as usual it arrived the next – just as I finished backing everything up to an external disk! Right – I wasnt getting this nasty Malware again so started looking into VMware and similar programs, at which point I found Sandboxie. This little program works similar to a virtual machine – but its a lot quicker and easier to use! Simply install it and it adds a “Open with Sandboxie” option to any programs when you try and right click them. When you open any programs with Sandboxie it uses an isolated part of your hard drive so that any nasties do not harm your computer. This means that even if your running any automated software and it visits an infected site – your computer isnt harmed. When you have finished running the software simply delete the sandbox and all the nasties are gone!

You can copy selected files from the sandbox to your main machine if you want to (ie any created files) or you can tell Sandboxie to punch a whole in the sandbox for selected folders/files so that changes are made to the original file rather than the sandboxed version.

You can even use Sandboxie for your normal internet browsing to help protect you from any sites that have been infected. It is free software with no restrictions. They do have a paid version at 29 euros which allows you to set certain programs to always open with Sandboxie so you dont have to remember.

If you are using any automated software – or even if you just want an extra level of security when browsing the net, I suggest you head over to Sandboxie and download it now. As I said, its free (and no affiliate program so reason for me to promote other than its a good piece of software) and I have noticed no slow down in my computer or the software running within Sandboxie.

And just to give you an extra reason to download it – from the Malware I got infected with, all of the FTP details for all of my sites was stolen and most of my sites infected! Luckily Im with TSOHost who restored all my sites back to before the infection and I deleted all my FTP accounts. Security tip 2 – Once you have finished with FTP access, delete the profile!

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Category: Design/Hosting/SEO, Product / Service Reviews  | Leave a Comment

Do me.uk domains rank as well as org.uk and co.uk?

 Author: admin Apr 11

I’ve always tended to “follow the croud” with this one, sticking to .co.uk and .org.uk domains for my affiliates sites (and one .net which is an experiment at ranking for USA rather than UK), however after spending a bit of time looking at a few keywords I noticed a couple of .me.uk domains still available. Every other extension for these had gone, including .info, .me, .co, .tv etc etc however the me.uk was still available.

First thing I thought was “thats because their rubbish”. Second thing I thought was “says who?”. I snapped up both of the domains, chucked them on my hosting with a quick wordpress install and 500 words of unique content. Each site is still using the standard wordpress theme, no plugins, no pages, just a 500 word post on each domain. I had originally planned on doing a bit of split testing with a couple of different networks with these 2 domains, but instead decided to use the same network for each.

Site 1 gets 9,800 searches per month according to Google and site 2 gets around 12,100 searches per month. I have a site in a similar area and know these are about right (maybe a little on the high side). Each site would have an average order value of around £100 giving an average commission of £10-15.

I submitted a spun unique article for each of the sites to the network and let it start syndicating. The next day both the sites where indexed in Google, Site 1 ranking 185th and site 2 at 199th. I left it for another 2 weeks before checking again. Site 1 moved up to 54th and site 2 moved up to 92nd. I then submitted another 2 articles to the same network and left it for another week, which brings us to today.

The current ranks are site 1 at 22nd and site 2 and 43rd. Thats pretty good considering these are brand new domains, with extensions that appearently “dont work” and no real link building or content. I then thought it would be interesting to see where the .org.uk and .co.uk domains where ranking. I have checked and all were developed when I bought the .me.uk domains.

Keyword1.co.uk – 12 years old – 67 Links – PR 0

Keyword1.org.uk – 2 years old – 36 Links – PR 0

Keyword1.me.uk – 3 weeks old – 18 Links – PR NA

 

Keyword2.co.uk – - 13 years old – 3 Links – PR 0 (has since had the site deleted from it, so no longer developed)

Keyword2.org.uk – 5 years old – 160 Links – PR1

Keyword3.me.uk – 3 weeks old – 12 Links – PR NA

And the rankings for each of the keywords is as follows:

Keyword 1:  me.uk: 22nd  |  .org.uk:  58th  |  .co.uk: 152nd

Keyword 2:  me.uk: 43rd  |  .org.uk:  64th  |  .co.uk: NOT RANKING

So my 3 week old me.uk domains are outranking aged domains with more (granted, not many more) backlinks and higher page rank on supposedly “better” domains.

Next time you are looking for a domain and you want an exact match domain, dont forget to check for a me.uk if the org.uk and co.uk are both gone!

EDIT – The sites are still climbing in the rankings. Just the day after posting this post Site 1 is now 16th and site 2 is now 35th!

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Category: Design/Hosting/SEO  | Leave a Comment

Moving From A Small Niche Site To A Large Affiliate Site?

 Author: admin Apr 06

Recently I have started looking into ways of improving each of my affiliate sites, how I can get as much traffic to them as possible and how to convert as much of that traffic as possible. The main thing this has involved is actually putting affiliate links on some of my domains! Believe it or not, I have a handful of sites which are ranking number 1 for a selection of terms and are receiving traffic, but they do not have any affiliate links on them! My plan has always been, buy domain, add 1 piece of content, throw it up, drop another article into a blog network to get some backlinks and then leave it until its ready for me to develop properly. This means that when I come to develop them they have normally settled on the first page and have a little age in Google. The problem is I have too many domains :)

Anyway, yesterday I was looking through Analytics tyring to pick the next site to beef up a bit and noticed one of my sites stats had flat lined…nothing…dead for the last week. Straight away I went to the site and noticed the site was down as I had changed a password on a MySQL database. The database powered 2 sites and I changed it on one but not the other! I fixed that within a few minutes and the site was live again. The site doesn’t receive much traffic (around 150-200 uniques per month) as it was one of the very first sites I made before I started researching keywords properly, however it makes a sale every month or two of around £50 commission so I’ve been happy just leaving it for now.

While I was on the site I decided to check the page rank and alexa rank as well. As I said, this was one of the first sites I made and the only link building I did was 1 x 30 Angelas profile links – all done by me, by hand…OUCH! and link exchanges so I wasnt expecting anything special. Unsuprisingly the Alexa rank was 11million, however the thing that did suprise me was the page rank! PR3!! The site only has 3 pages to it (hand coded HTML site!) – each one has around 500 words of unique content. The other two pages are both PR2! The best thing is that according to Google I have no links to the site and according to Yahoo I have 11 links – most from website stat sites (how much is your site worth etc)

The site targets one product range within a large market. According to Google there are two larger keywords which cover my product range and also a range of similar products. Think along the lines of a site selling socks and then changing to selling clothes. According to the GKT the phrase I am number 1 for gets 390 searches per month (matches with my Analytics results), the other two terms receive 3,900 and 34,000!

Looking at the front page I could take the 3,900 page quite easily, 2 authority sites ranking on 1 & 2 – neither mentions the full term anywhere, 3rd is a keyword.org domain which is poorly optimised, everything below that is also poorly optimised. The 34,000 keyword looks more difficult. The top 8 slots are taken by retailers and are also the companies I will be promoting on the site! The bottom 2 are quite poor though. One is an retailer who has hired someone who doesnt really know what they are doing to do the SEO – Onsite SEO is poor and offsite SEO appears to be just profile links. Most of the sites are PR2 with the top one being PR4 and the second being PR3. Again, Im pretty sure I can get at least half way up this page quite easily.

As most of you know, most of my sites are exact match domains, however I have been working on some sites for other people using their brand name websites and had good results for them all, so Im pretty sure I can transfer this small niche site into a large affiliate site! Im planning on leaving the content largely the same, just adding the extra 2 keywords into the title and then another 500 words of text to cover the extra keywords. That way hopefully wont notice the site’s purpose has changed. Anyway, Im not in the top 200 for either of the terms Im targetting at the minute, so I’ll keep you updated!

Has anyone else tried anything similar? Any tips? Anybody have any recommendations for building sites with RSS feeds from multiple retailers?

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Category: Affiliate Marketing  | Leave a Comment

Finding Link Opportunities With Scrapebox & Spammers

 Author: admin Mar 21

While looking through one of my blogs this morning and deleting all the spam comments I decided to try and do a little reverse engineering on them. This quick post will run through what I did with the spam comments and how I managed to find over 500 PR3+ blog posts for me to comment on (on topic, non spammy comments of course). Most of these posts have low outbound links (I chose under 30), will automatically approve your comments or approve them within a few days (they approved the spammy crap we are tracking!) and have PR on the pages your comments will be on.

1) Look through your wordpress comments that are being held for approval and copy all the URLS that are being used as backlinks into a notepad file. You could alternatively use a highly spammed blog and extract a handful of links from the comments. You want to find links which point to a domain which could be owned by the spammer, ignore all the web 2.0/bookmarking/article directory sites. I took 5 URLS in this example.

2) Add those URL’s into Ccrapebox and then load up the “Scrapebox Backlink Checker”. This part will load the URLs you pasted in and then find all the links that point to those sites using YSE. Once its finished it will save them all to a text file.

3) Load that test file into the Scrapebox harvester and remove duplicate domains, at this stage we only need one page from each domain.

4) Now run the “Scrapebox Blog Analyzer”. This will check each URL and see if it is a blog and tell you if the comments are open, spam protected etc. Once this has finished remove everything which isn’t a blog from the harvester. You can skip this stage if you are looking for sites other than blogs, however as Im only looking for blog comments this will remove all the blogroll links, social bookmarks etc.

5) You should now have a list of domains which are blogs and have approved a spammy comment recently. I now manually check each of those links, ensure they are “clean” sites and then leave a comment (either without any links, or a random site relevent to the comment). Dont put too much effort in on these posts as they are probably highly spammed. You are just checking the comments work, if they dont, remove them from your list.

6) In Scrapebox you now want to harvest as many URLs from each site as you can. This will normally involve putting the footprint as “site:http://www.example.com”. If the site is large then you may want to use various footprints such as “site:http://www.example.com/2007/”, “site:http://www.example.com/2008/”, “site:http://www.example.com/2009/” etc as this will scape as many as possible. This step takes a while as it needs to be done manually for each URL in your list.

7) Now you need to run the “Scrapebox Outbound Link Checker”. This will check how many links are on each of those pages and allow you to remove pages with links over a certain figure. Some people dont believe the outbound links matter, others like under 100, I personally try and keep them under 30 or so.

7) Now you have a list of pages which are indexed in Google, allow you to comment on them, have under XX comments on them and are likely to be auto approve or have all the comments approved manually. Now you can either comment on all of them, however as I like to do my comments by hand and leave genuine comments rather than spamming the hell out of blogs, I dont want to spend ages commenting on blog posts from 2007 which do not have any PR. At this point I will “Get URL Pagerank”. Once this has finished you can sort by PR, remove the URLs which are lower than your desired PR (3 in this case).

From the 5 URLs I looked at I received over 500 PR3+ (there is even PR7-PR4) URLs from a total of 62 domains, all of which are indexed in Google, have posts on the site which automated spam has been approved on (so my comments are likely to be approved) and have less than 30 outbound links for me to comment on (manually).

Despite being thought of as an “Automated Comment Spam” program, which it CAN be used as (and is good at), Scrapebox is far more! It is pretty much a swiss army knife when it comes to any sort of link building, and a tool that everyone should have. Its that good – Im promoting it and they dont even have an affiliate program!

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Category: Design/Hosting/SEO  | One Comment

Google Farmer Update?

 Author: admin Mar 19

Ok, so a few weeks ago now there was the news of the new Google algo update which was supposed to drop content farms in the rankings. I’ve not really done any research and my sites havent really bit hit, but they all have unique content so just assumed I must be lucky.

However for a term which I am trying to get a site to rank for I decided today to look through the first 10 results (Im already 12th) and see where I could grab some backlinks from. Much to my suprise, in the top 10 results for them medium competition keyword there where the following sites:

1st – Ezinearticles.com
2nd – ehow.com
4th – Reference.com
7th – bookmarking.villebiz.info – Bookmarking site, the page indexed was a bookmark pointing to my site!
10th – A blogspot blog which is full of crap (looks like its used for indexing backlinks), but I cant give the URL as there are a few genuine articles on there which link to a similar site.

The other 5 of the 10 where taken up by a forum post, newspaper and 3 merchants.

I thought this Google algo update was supposed to weed these type of sites out – or have I missed the point? Its a faily commerce orientated keyword (ie most people would be looking to buy). Im also confused/amazed that villebiz.info is on there! The page is one bookmark with the keyword linking to my site, a 16 word description which mentions the keyword once and the keyword in the URL. No backlinks to it, the site is PR0…I just dont get it though…why is it on the first page. Dont get me wrong – Im happy for the link to my site to be on the first page, I just done understand why.

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Category: Design/Hosting/SEO  | Leave a Comment

Let Somebody Else Do The SEO For You…

 Author: admin Feb 26

Wouldn’t it be great if you could create a page for your product, targetting your selected keywords and instantly go into Google on the first page without doing any/much SEO on it?

This technique isn’t anything ground breaking and most people that do SEO will already know about it (as I did), however I had never thought of using it in this way before, but its not to say others arent doing it.

Firstly, I have been pushing a few clickbank products recently just to see what sort of money I could make from it and I noticed that a lot of the pages ranking for keywords relating to the products I wanted to promote were articles or web 2.0 pages hosted on third party sites. Obviously someone had created an article, thrown loads of links at it and got it ranking for the keywords they wanted. Thinking it would be easy to outrank them I started creating lists of keywords and looking for possible domains. I created a list of 10 keywords for each of the 5 products I had found on clickbank, searched for each keyword and on every single set of results – at least one of the top 5 (in most cases top 3) terms was an article or web 2.0 site.

This got me thinking…Google will automatically “pair up” 2 results from the same site on the same page, so if I created my articles on the same site, made the content even more targetted to the selected keyword and then managed to get it onto the front page, Google will automatically lift it up to (hopefully above) the existing article.

I set away creating 5 test articles, one for each product and created web 2.0 accounts on the relevent sites and submitted articles to the same sites as the highest ranking site for that term. After a few days when everything was live I dropped a handful of links to each article, then waited a few more days. I didnt even bother checking the rankings, I just has dropped a few more links and waited a few more days.

I then decided to check where my articles were ranking…

Article 1: I checked the first article and found it was ranking 16th – not the best start to my cunning plan, but it was the most competitive term and worth the most.

Article 2: 3rd! I couldnt believe it – my article had gone in at 3rd – above the article I wanted to leech off which was now 4th!

Article 3: 5th! Again, straight onto the first page. This time I was below the leech article but still top half!

Article 4: 27th :( For some reason this one didnt shift! Not sure why. Maybe its the site I was hosting it on. It wasnt an article site so wasnt linked to by “similar articles” etc like some of the other sites

Article 5: 6th! This one kind of worked. The site I wanted to leech off dropped from 3rd to 5th, but I still managed to jump up to 6th!

As you can see – there are some good results there, and I think with a few more links I can make it so that each of the articles jumps above the original article I wanted to “leech” off. All of the articles where on article sites except number 4 which had the most disappointing results.

Now the question on everyones minds…did it make me any money…YES! This is what caused me to create this post. The articles have now be live for just over 3 weeks and I have made 2 sales! 1 @ $15 and one at $40! Not a massive amount, but $55 (£35) in 3 weeks for articles that have taken very little work is pretty good! The articles also have links in them to sites of mine so not only have they made me money but I have extra links to my sites! I’ll definately be doing some more!

###UPDATE###
Just a quick update to say that all, except 1, of the articles have now disappeared from the rankings (well first 2 pages – couldnt be bothered to check any further). As I said, I would have written and submitted these articles anyway for the links, so the fact they made a little cash is a bonus, but it looks like you would need to do some work to keep them on the first page. Im not sure if this is part of the new Google update, or the article just dropping back the ranks on the article directories.

###UPDATE###
All of my articles have now disappeared from the front pages.

Category: Affiliate Marketing  | 2 Comments

TSOHost Review

 Author: admin Feb 24

I’ve just had me renewal bill through a few weeks back for my hosting which is done through TSOHost, so thought I would post up a quick TSOHost review now I have been with them for just over 1 year.

Firstly, if you want to take a look at what TSOHost have to offer before reading the rest of the review – click here to go to TSOHost.co.uk.

Firstly, I use TSOHost clustered hosting, which I was lucky enough to join before the price increase. This gives me hosting for up to 100 sites (each can be either windows or linux based) and I can add extra sites at the cost of 10p per site per month if/when I go over the 100 mark, 100GB of space and 1000GB of bandwidth. I ordered this package when it was £9.99 per month/£99.99 per year, however it is now £19.99 per month/£199.99 per year which is still a bargain!

In the last year, I have had NO noticable downtime (other than 1 scheduled downtime for a couple of hours). The monitoring software I have pointing at some of my sites has reported around 5 or 6 periods of downtime – each for no more than 5 minutes so this may have been due to problems other than the host (ie DNS problems). Now, by far the best thing about TSOHost that I want to cover in this review is their customer service!

All of my sites run really fast (40ms ping response time) compared to other hosts I have used and hosts other affiliates use (AffiliateMusketeer.com = 146ms & HowIGotRich.net = 144ms) and I have had no problem with sites running slow or falling over when they get more than a handful of visitors.

Whenever I have had a problem with anything I have emailed them and always had a response within a couple of minutes! Most of the problems were my fault – however they still helped out! I had a PHP script which stopped working on one of my sites (I later found out somebody else had edited it and make a mistake!). Obviously the first thing I did was email TSOHost and ask them to sort it out. Within a couple of minutes they emailed me back telling me exactly what the problem was and how to fix it even though it had nothing to do with them!

On top of the amazing customer services – one of the most important features for me – BACKUPS! Backups are done every 15 minutes with a 1 month retention – and you have access to them all online!!! This has saved me so many times when I have broke one of my own sites and not had a backup myself!

The only “negative” is that TSOHost do not use CPanel, but instead their own custom control panel which works really well! Why a negative then? Becuase when you first transfer your sites to them you can not simply import your cpanel accounts. I needed to import all my sites manually. The good news is that I wont need to worry about exporting them as I have no intentions of leaving TSOHost any time soon!

So to conclude my TSOHost Review, Its the best host I have ever used, I have no intention of leaving them, and would have no problem recommending anyone to them.

If there is anything I have missed from my TSOHost review, feel free to drop a comment below and I’ll try my best to answer it for you.

Click here to go to TSOHost now!

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Category: Design/Hosting/SEO  | 11 Comments

An Overdue Update…

 Author: admin Jan 24

So, its been the best part 3 months since my last update – mainly because I have been so busy, but also not really had much to say!

My last posted ended with me saying I was off to see Al Murray. The show was good, but not as good as last year, however the warm up guy (Chris Ramsey) was great. Better than Al Murray! Hopefully we’ll be seeing more of him in the future! Next gig is Russell Howard – centre front row seats. Not sure if that was a brave or stupid purchase!

As some of you know, I am now a full time affiliate! I quit my job and after a few days training my replacement (who has already left) after Christmas, started to settle into life as a self employed full time affiliate. I now have my home office set up, I just need a decent new mouse now and possibly a couple of new monitors. I currently have a 19″ and 17″ which was fine for a few hours a day, however I would now like 2 x 22″ monitors.

Anyway, on with some affiliate stuff! I’ve not built many (any actually!) new sites over the last few months, but I have been making lots of lists of ideas and creating content etc. November was quite good for me, however December was AMAZING! A couple of my sites made loads of sales, making me plenty of money. January has died down a bit, although I’m still earning more than the average for last year.

Several of my sites only sell one product from one retailer. This had worked well for me through the year, however during the first week of December I decided to try something different on one of my sites. I changed the site to list 4 different retailers, with the prices from each one. The next day my sales more than doubled, with plenty of people buying from the more expensive retailers!

On top of that Im finishing off my script which checks prices and stock on websites for my sites. I currently have this running on a few sites, however each site runs a different version of the script and there is no central system. My new script will run from a central domain and check the prices/stock on the products from across all of my sites each day. Each site can then pull their prices from a central database. I have also set up email alerts so if the script can not find the price/product/page for any reason it emails me. This way when products are removed or the websites layout changes I can jump on it straight away and correct the problems.

Anyway…back to work!

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Category: Affiliate Marketing, General  | 3 Comments
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