I’ve not done any more link building or added any more products to the site since the last update, which makes me think it may have been the blog comments which generated 2,000 links to the site in a couple of minutes. The number of links has now dropped to around 600.

I was recommended Advanced Web Ranking keyword research tool by 2 different people so decided to give it a go. They offer a 30 day trial, which unlike a lot of sites, you do not have to register to download! A couple of clicks and the 70MB download begins without giving out any contact details, so you know you’re not going to get loads of spam from them.

Once you have installed Advanced Web Ranking, you are greeted with some sample data. Where several news sites rank for different key phrases. This immediately gives an idea of the power of the software. Select a keyword and the sites you want to monitor and Advanced Web Ranking will take care of the rest. It gives you the current website ranking position, previous position, change and their best rank, which is exactly what I needed! You can have the data displayed in a graph, which is good for a handful of sites, although I would imagine that as soon as you end up with more than 5 or 6 sites it starts to get messy.

The other section of the software that looks like it could be very helpful is the “Visibility” report. This takes the information from the main report and lists each website, along with how many keywords the site is ranking number 1 for, how many in the top 5, 10, 20 & 30, how many have moved up/down and a whole host of other data, including a “Visibility Score” and “Visibility Percent”.

With both reports you have the option to select the dates that you want to compare the new search engine ranking data against. So you can show the increase over the last day, week, month, year – any time period you want!

Each time I open the software I find more and more new features. The latest one I have just found is a “Triggers” function. This allows you to set up triggers (kind of obvious huh?) when certain events occur. For example you can set a trigger so that when any of your keywords enter the top 10 it lets you know, or you can set an alert so that if your term “widgets” ranks for number 1, you get alerted, or even to monitor when your competitions keywords drop!

My only slight niggle is that the logo looks too much like the Firefox one and I have already opened it twice by accident, although that’s easy enough to change.

So overall this piece of software seems like a lifesaver, it does everything I need, and more, in a fraction of the time any other software I have tried can do it! Once my 30 day trial is up I’ll be buying the $399 (about £250) enterprise version. The only benefit of the $599 version over the enterprise version is that if you have multiple users, you can all share the same database so probably not any use to any/many of us affiliates.

As many of you know I stopped subscribing to Angelas backlinks as I thought it would be more beneficial for me to find my own backlinks, which I had been doing for a couple of weeks before deciding to outsource backlinks through oDesk.

Now this isn’t the only form of backlink building I do, this is only a part of my backlink strategy so do not think that these links will magically send your thin affiliate site from not ranking in Google to number 1. It wont work! There is no magical golden bullet with SEO (feel free to prove me wrong ).

However, that said, the profile links found in Angelas & Pauls backlink packets are useful and from my personal experience, provide good results. At the weekend I ordered another 120 backlinks, split into 4 sets of 30. Each set of 30 had a few lines of text, with 2 different links in, to 2 difference sites. So altogether 240 links, which I had set to 6 difference sites (60 links to 2 sites, 30 links to the other 4 sites) which cost me a grand total of £4!

As for results. One of the sites I had links pointing to is the site I mentioned in this post, which has since moved up from 5th to 4th, a couple of my older sites which had been floating around at 6th-7th which have both moved up to 5th, and my gold jewellery site which had disappeared from Google again, which is now back and sitting at 6th.

As you can see, the links appear to have a good effect on my SERPS, but I wouldn’t use them as your only form of link building. As for the reader who emailed me the question below…

“How many of angelas links should I make so that my website is number 1 and make my page rank 3? I need to make it number 1 this week, can these do it.”

…I think you might be better off trying something other than SEO.

Hopefully things will start picking up now though! I’m currently working on my first PPC site which will also be my largest site so far (hence the reason for developing the Adwords Keyword Tracking Tool), The average commission value will be anything from around high £x, up to low £xxx, although I think the average will be around £15.

The site I completed at the start of the week is still sending an average of 10 clicks to the merchant each day, so im hopeful that it will turn at least a couple of sales this month, which will give me a decent chunk of commission. The problem is that the landing page I am sending them to had a handful of links to different products, around 40% of the links are broken! I told the merchant a week ago now, but they just dont seem interested in fixing it. One of my single product sites is due to get some TV coverage within the next week so hopefully that will give me a push in commission as well.

Oh well, onwards and upwards…

To make sure I have all the right stats I’ve written a wordpress plugin which will allows me to keep a close eye on my PPC efficiency.

As I’ve been helped out by so many fellow affiliates I have decided to give something back and upload the plugin for everyone to use. You can download the Keyword Tracking Tool 1.0 here. Its really easy to use, simply upload the plugin and activate it. Now you need to add “?kw=YOURKEYWORD” to the links pointing to your site, for example:

http://shanebrown.co.uk/what-a-difference-a-theme-makes/?kw=bluewidgets

If you are using this with adwords which it was designed for you can use:

http://shanebrown.co.uk/what-a-difference-a-theme-makes/?kw=[keyword]

This will automatically attach the EXACT keyword that the user searched for to the URL. When the user hits the site it adds the keyword to the database and gives it a unique ID, which is then attached to all tagged out going links. To tag a url with the tracking ID, replace the standard tracking ID with nokw, for example:

http://www.awin1.com/cread.php?awinmid=123&awinaffid=123456&clickref=nokw&p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.7dayshop.com%2Fcatalog%2Fproduct_info.php%3Fproducts_id%3D102843

Now if the user has clicked a URL with the “?kw=KEYWORD” on the end, the nokw will automatically be replaced with the unique ID. If the user hasnt gone through a tagged URL, the nokw will be replaced with “nokw”.

You can now check with the merchant and see what tracking ID’s have converted to orders and lookup the tracking ID from the admin section.

The admin section also shows you the 20 most clicked keywords and the most recent 20 clicked keywords.

So there you go, a simple easy to use plugin that will give you full control of your PPC campaign. It’s the first plugin I’ve made so if you notice any problems, or have any suggestions how the plugin can be improved please drop me a comment and I’ll try and sort it. If the plugin helps you out and saves you a few quid, feel free to send me some using the donation button below.

Although there shouldn’t be any problems with the plugin, I recommend you make sure you have a backip of any data and I accept no responsibility for any lost or damaged data.

I managed to design the site and create a new wordpress theme in a couple of hours on Monday night with the hope of pushing the website up the rankings over this month and creating a few sales from it. This morning I checked the ranking for the main keyword again…5th! It may have been a coincidence, but I like to think its more to do with the onsite SEO of the new custom theme compared to the standard theme

Unsuprisingly when I loaded Analytics up there was a ‘massive’ spike in traffic yesterday. The site had averages around 8 uniques per day during the week and 14 uniques per day at the weekend over the last month, yesterday there was 25 uniques, all from Google. I’m hoping this will translate to around 800-900 uniques per month at 5th, and I had originally guessed at around 2000 uniques per month once I hit first, although Im starting to think this may be even higher.

So by changing the theme, I’ve (hopefully) trippled the traffic to the site! I also managed to push 17 clicks to the merchant! According to the affiliate network, this merchant has around a 9% conversion rate, however Im hoping to convert 1% of the traffic I send them as they are high priced items. Providing I can reach the top commission tier (which would only require 3 sales per month), I’ll be making high £xx per sale. Combined with the fact the site could realistically get 2000+ visitors per month (from which I would expect at least 10-15 orders) without spending a penny on PPC, and this little niche starts to look like it might be worth expanding on!

15th July – NOT RANKED
16th July – 12th (Backlinks dropped from 2000, to around 1500)
22nd July – NOT RANKED
24th July – 10th
26th July – NOT RANKED
28th July – 6th (Backlinks dropped from 1500, to just over 1000)

So at the minute it is sitting nicely at 6th, although Im guessing it wil drop again over the next couple of days, and hopefully come back a bit stronger again! I have also noticed that as the number of backlinks drop, the rank seems to be jumping up…the only thing I can think is that the massive influx of 2000 backlinks in a couple of hours caused me some sort of penalty, and now as they are dieing off the penalty is slowly being reduced.

This is the first site where I have had a problem with the SERPS jumping around, however I cant pin point what has caused it as I have tried a few different things with this site which I havent used on any other sites. Im still confident that once its settled in place, with a little more work and adding the final products I can take the top position.

Since posting the original outsourcing backlinks article, I have had several PM’s, emails and comments asking me to give the names of the users I outsourced my backlinks to, or an example of the advert I had posted. Now, Im not going to give out the names of the users I outsourced to – I’m keeping them for me, but I will give an example of how to advertise on oDesk for backlinks.

—————-START OF ADVERT—————-

Title: 120 Profiles with backlinks from Angelas Packets.

Descriptions:

I need 120 profiles creating on websites from Angelas or Pauls Packets.You MUST already have the backlink packets.

You will need to create an email address (either Yahoo, Gmail or Hotmail) and to create all the profiles with. I will supply you with a username and 2 links to put in each profile.

You will need to supply me a spreadsheet with the URL of the backlinks and the username and password of the profile.

All the backlinks must be created within 48 hours of the job being accepted. All backlinks must be created by hand, no automated software.

—————-END OF ADVERT—————-

Thats it, simple and to the point. Remember that a lot of the people applying the job wont speak fluent English so try and keep it as easy to understand as possible. Obviously you can specify other things such as only to use page rank 7 sites, or only use sites from packets from 2009 – just remember to keep it as easy to understand as possible.

My other piece of advice would be that when you give the job to someone DO NOT close the job. There are some people on oDesk that will mess you around and not bother working – just cancel the job (you dont pay them), and select someone else. If you close the job you have to mess around creating a new advert and waiting for more users to apply for it.

So now you know how to outsource backlinks, head over to oDesk and started!

I know Affiliate marketing will have peaks and dips, which is why Im not too bothered about it, however what is a bit concerning is that out of the 4 sites that regularly make sales (plus the A4U compeition), not one of them made a sale in an entire week!

The reason why the Gold Locket site didnt make any sales, was because it didnt have any traffic. Google decided to drop me for a week. I THINK the reason this happened was a massive surge in backlinks. I had done around 10-15 blog comments, however on 3 of the sites I ended up with site wide links due to “recent comment” blocks, resulting in around 2000 backlinks in a couple of hours! The day after placing these comments, guess what…the site dropped from the rankings! Last night I removed some of the duplicate content and replaced with unique content, and removed some of the keyword stuffing I had done. Today the number of backlinks dropped from 2000 to 1500 as the site wide links start to disappear and as if by magic, the site is now ranking back at 12th!

As for why the other sites have made no sales, I have no idea! One sites had the best month ever (again) traffic wise – but dropped from a 10% conversion rate over the last couple of months to 0% for a whole week. Normally the amount of traffic I sent the merchant would have resulted in around 20-25 sales, and a nice low £xxx in commission for me, but it didnt make a single sale, or penny in commission! The other sites are the same, decent traffic, but no sales!

Today however, the site mentioned above has made 2 sales from 3 clicks, another site has made a decent sale, my Gold Locket site is now back in the rankings and I have the next week off work – everything is looking up…again…for now!

Other than JC making a few pence (13p if I remeber correctly) from an adsense click (which only puts him around $600 down after buying a domain names and content), nobody has made any money…until today! I just checked my AffiliateWindow account and there it is, the first sale of the competition! The order was for £175 through F Hinds, who unfortunately do now allow you to see the exact products sold, which got me a decent £21 commission!

The sites still not ranking first page for any of the main keywords, and still needs quite a bit of onsite SEO work doing to it as well, plus around 50-60 more products adding, so hopefully, especially in the run up to christmas this site could turn out to be a little gold mine (no pun intended).

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Total Time Spent: 8.5 Hours

A4U Gold Jewellery Competition Earnings: £19.25