How I Got Rich

How to Track your Site’s Rankings

What with all the recent Google Panda and Penguin updates going on at the moment and for the foreseeable future it is becoming increasingly important to be able to track the ranking of your sites in the search engine results pages (SERPS) for all the keywords you are targeting.

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you will know I use a tool called Advanced Web Ranking (AWR) to track how my sites are doing in the search engines. With this application you can create unlimited projects for your websites and then in each project you can enter as many keywords as you like for AWR to look for. You can choose from a massive list of search engines to check. Most of my sites are setup to target the UK and as you can choose local versions of search engines such as Google.co.uk it works well with my current portfolio of sites although since the recent Google updates the results haven’t made very happy reading and although they say ignorance is bliss sometimes its better to know the truth!

New Features in Version 8.9

Now, AWR has been around a while but the recent upgrades have included a lot more ways to keep track of your sites positions and presence on the internet. Ranking in Google is still the best way to get exposure for your website but as social media services like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Google +1 increase in popularity they are becoming great sources of traffic in their own right. To keep up with the times AWR has thankfully included ways to track your sites positioning and mentions on these emerging platforms. You can now do the following:

• Track social shares for your webpages
• Measure the performance of your Facebook Fan pages
• Monitor your Twitter accounts

All this data is monitored over time allowing you to see your social performance as it evolves much as you can do with your keyword tracking.

Competition Analysis in Advanced Web Ranking

Being able to see what competition you are up against in your niche is pretty handy. There are tools dedicated to just this job such as SECockpit, Market Samurai and Long Tail Pro but you can see how weak or strong the top 10 sites in Google are for a particular keyword from inside AWR. Being able to see some in-depth stats on the difficulty of a keyword is an essential ability to have access to. If you fail to do keyword research properly before starting the chances of making you way to page one in Google are pretty slim no matter how good your content or backlinks are.

Link Tracking

You can also use AWR to analyse the links that are pointing at your site using the data from SEOmoz. This is a great way to see how your backlink profile is looking and get a heads up if any of your backlinks have suddenly disappeared as they might have done if you were using Build My Rank before it got de-indexed by Google. You can also see how many times your keywords appears in the anchor text for the links pointing back to you sites. This will become increasingly popular in the months post-Penguin.

Since the updates to AWR the link reports now can help you keep tabs on the following types of data:

• Most Effective Backlinks – see which links are helping your competitors rank
• Anchor Text Diversity – see how your competitors are using their keywords in their link text
• Links Quality – Get an overall view of your competitors’ link profiles and how well they are rated
• Buffer Sites – See which of the sites and domains that link to your competitors’ sites have got lots of backlinks

There is no doubt that Advanced Web Ranking is an essential tool in my internet marketing arsenal. Its good to see how many new features have been added since I started using it such as the social metrics tracking, competition analysis and the keyword research modules and it can now be considered as a complete seo software application. It is a big application that is for sure but it still manages to run OK on my Samsung netbook. You can stick it on a server if you want it to run externally from your main computer and this is something I would like to setup one day. You can schedule AWR to run at set times so you can set it and forget it and just get the reports sent to you. The only problem with this tool is that it does get a bit addictive and you can end up having it constantly running in the background, checking all you sites but at least it is hands off and saves you the time and effort of going into Google and trying to find you site in the SERPS!

Bring the Fresh + Profile Backlinks

Warning: this post turned into a bit of a ramble so if you want to cut to the chase the main questions/points are:

• Is the Bring the Fresh forum any good?
• Can high PR profile backlinks still work?
• Is UAW the last (mass) link building tool still working?

Another month, another WSO. I must be getting soft or something but I just couldn’t resist this WSO (Warrior Forum Special Offer) for a $7 trial at private SEO and affiliate marketing forum Bring the Fresh.

When I first started out in this game I got all my information from a forum.  It was the affiliates4u.com forum which at the time was pretty busy and had enough info on there to get me started and earning a few hundred quid per month within a few months. Unfortunately that forum is pretty much dead now which is a great shame as it was a good way into IM without loads of people trying to sell you crap like they do on Wicked Fire and Warrior Forum to name just two.

Bring the Fresh Forum

I’d not heard of the Bring the Fresh forums until recently when Nate from Strayblogger.com recommended them a few times as they drop some potent SEO knowledge bombs from time to time. I was tempted but the price was very high so decided to give it a miss. Then when I saw the $7 WSO trial I decided to sign up.

My Thoughts on Bring the Fresh

I have to admit I wasn’t that impressed with what I saw.  There were the ubiquitous success stories of people earning $1,000,000 in a year and the like but mainly it was people trying to flog their link building services as is the case on most SEO or internet marketing forums. What suprised me though was that the most popular one was for profile backlinks from high PR sites. I thought this sort of stuff stopped working ages ago but in the sellers thread there were loads of good reports from happy customers. Although most people were raving about the service, upon reading their reviews they were only commenting on the service that they recieved like the quick turnaround time and the reports given rather than any boost in the SERPs. But people kept buying the service so it must work, right….?

• Here is a link to the service: http://profilelinkservices.com/

As I am a sucker for new services and tools I have given it a try especially as nearly all my sites have been pretty much killed off by the latest Google Penguin update (more on that in a future post).  Could such a service work in this day and age?  What do you guys think?

Is Unique Article Wizard Still Working?

The owners of Bring the Fresh were selling their own link building package which appeared to be a Unique Article Wizard submission on their accounts.  Everyone seemed pretty happy with the service and most people seemed to be using UAW in one way or another. I still have UAW and am still using it along with Article Builder but am only linking to my Web 2.0s and other tier 1 sites rather than directly to my actual sites.  Is UAW the last link building tool still standing?

Anyway, have any of you signed up to the Bring the Fresh forum?  I think if you had some spare time it would be worth a look as there is a lot to go through and there are some glowing testimonials in the form of success stories but something about it left a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe it was the high cost of membership, the high price of the in house services or perhaps it was the smell of money in the air.  Who knows…

Link Authority Case Study

About a month ago I started using a fairly new link building tool called Link Authority. I decided to do a little test or case study if you will to try and see how effective this new tool is. You can read the first post here: Link Authority Test.

Alternative to Build My Rank

Link Authority works a bit like Build my Rank in the sense that you write unique 150+ word articles and then submit them into the system. Each article or post of 150 to 300 words can have one link in it and posts over 300 words can have up to three links in them. Your article gets posted to one site and you get one (or three depending on the length of the article) link from a site with Google PageRank of 2 or more back to your site. So as you can see Link Authority is a good alternative to Build My Rank especially now BMR is no longer accepting new members.

Low Starting Costs

It costs nothing to sign up with Link Authority and then you can either add one of your sites with PageRank of two or more to the system which will then get articles posted to it and earn you credits to use for submitting your own articles. Or you can pay for credits. The cheapest option is one credit a day for a month which will let you post one article a day for a month and cost me just $12.

How Did I Do the Test?

So I signed up for one submission a day for $12 and set about writing lots of 150 word articles on my niche topic. It was quite tedious so I decided to write about 10 in one go and then submit them into the system. This meant I would have some breathing space between writing the next set of articles and wouldn’t have to do one each day. If you don’t use your daily credit it gets wasted; you cannot roll them over to the next day so if you don’t have an article in the system you will lose a credit each day until you have an article in there to be posted. I didn’t add any new content to the test site while doing the test or do any other backlinking for it.

Unique Content Only

I did try submitting a few bits of spun content but the system rejected it so I didn’t bother with trying to trick LA. I just wrote the articles myself to begin with but after I while I tried hiring people on Odesk to do the dirty work for me. I hired a few people to write 10 articles for $5 as this seems to be the going rate for Build My Rank articles but the standard wasn’t that great. A few articles were rejected for not being well written and most people took a long time to deliver. I am still looking for writers and checking a few people out but for the most part I write them myself. It only takes about 10 minutes to write and submit a 150 word article. Submitting them takes almost as long as writing them!

Affiliate Programme

While I had those 10 articles in the system I left it for a while and then when I logged back in I saw they had all been posted in a day or two. I was a bit surprised but soon discovered this was because I had managed to get some affiliate sign ups from this blog and they had submitted sites into the system. For each site they submit I get one extra credit per day. This meant I could post up to five articles a day now and this caused all my articles to get posted in two days!

I managed to get quite a few people to sign up using my link but only two people added sites to the network so my daily quota was set at five. Thanks to whoever you are for signing up and adding sites!

Scheduled Posting

After that I made sure I scheduled the posting of the articles so that Link Authority would only post one article a day. This is easy to do by setting the publish date for each article at the point of submission.

Early Signs Looked Good

After a few days I checked the ranking of my site for the two keywords I was targeting and was pleased to see it had moved up the SERPs. This seemed pretty quick but I checked the posts I had submitted into LA and they had been indexed so it seemed plausable. You can see the update post on the test here.

At this point I was happy with the service and decided to start promoting a few of my other sites using this tool. I continued with the test, posting one new article a day for the test site but also started posting one new article a day for four or five other sites.

As time went on I saw the test site was ranking quite well so I decided to target a few other keywords with the aim of ranking for a few more terms and also in the process mix up the anchor text so it didn’t look too spammy to Google.

Link Authority Test Results

Well the 30 days is up and I have posted 30 articles to LA for the test site. The Google PageRank of the site your article has been submitted to is displayed in Link Authority but if you want to find the site itself you have to Google a sentence from your article to find it as it is not made available to you in LA. I guess this is to try and keep the network private. The PR for the test site submissions range from 2-4 and the average was a Google PR of 2.7.

Out of the 104 articles I have submitted into LA so far for this site and the others I am using it on the PR breakdown is this:

• PR 2: 39
• PR 3: 45
• PR 4: 19
• PR 5: 1

I am happy with that for the price I have paid although I’m not holding my breath for a PR7 or higher!

Anyway that is all well and good but what about the ranking of the site?

When I started the test I was just tracking two keywords.
On February 7 2012 my starting stats were:

• Main keyword: #3
• Plural of main keyword: #6

On March 7 2012 my finishing stats are:

• Main keyword: #1
• Plural of main keyword: #1

This is great to see and the site is now getting lots more traffic and making more money. As I mentioned I started adding other keywords into my links to mix things up a bit and overall the site has moved up in the SERPs for those keywords too. The site is now number one for five keywords that it was targeting. You can see a screen shot from the SERP tracker I use, Advanced Web Ranking, to see how the site has moved around during the last 30 days:

Link Authoirty Test Results

Downsides of Link Authority

You have to write unique 150 word articles for each post which can get tedious quickly! This can be outsourced however it isn’t that easy to find good writers in my experience. Search for BMR article writers on Odesk and fiverr.com as they can do articles for LA.

Like other home page link blog networks, once the posts move off the home page you may see a drop in the ranking of your site. This can be counteracted by continually posting links into the system. You will need to weigh up the pros and cons of doing this. If I did this for the test site and was paying $12 to LA for one posting credit a day and paying a writer $15 per month for 30 posts I would still be making money as the site, when at number one makes more than $27 per month.

There isn’t an outsourcers dashboard. With BMR you can give someone access to your account so they can only post articles. This would be great to have in LA as you could totally hand over the reigns and let someone else get on with posting. Otherwise you have to post the articles yourself which although being quick is a task you still need to do. You can still give people access to your account but it could be risky in terms of them having too much access?

You can’t easily set posting rates. I’d love to be able to give each site/project a daily quota limit of its own. That way I could set site #1 to post at a rate of three articles per day and site #2 at a rate of 10 per day and so on. At present this isn’t available and the system just posts as many articles as it can in a day. You can get around this my setting the date of when each article is posted but this is quite tedious.

Update: today I emailed the LA support desk to ask if they planned on adding a way to set the daily posting allowance quota for individual projects and they got back to me in a few hours with this response:

We are currently rebuilding the core engine to release it out of beta. Yes we may introduce this.
In the meantime the way the system works is first in first out – So you can add 2 to a project then another 2 to another project then another 2 to the first project etc

This would stop you from entering dates

That is about it for the negatives. Nothing really substantial there.

Link Authority Positives

My sites movement up the SERPs is good and speaks for its self in my opinion. The service is cheap and if you submit some PR sites into the network it is even cheaper. I’m going to stop posting articles and building links for the test site and see if it remains number one in Google but even if it doesn’t it has been a cost effective process.

If you want to sign up for Link Authority you can do so by clicking here now.

Another Free Pinging Tool

I just got an email from the 24/7 Backlinks people about their new free tool to ping urls to help get backlinks indexed:

• 24/7 Pinger

I’ve not used it yet but it might be worth a shot for getting those dodgy backlinks of your indexed or at least crawled by Google.

Speaking of getting urls indexed can anyone recommend a service that will do it for things like articles from services like Unique Article Wizard? I’d like one that tell you whether a link or url is indexed or not too.

Build My Rank is Closed

As of today Build My Rank is no longer taking new members, at least for the time being. If you were thinking of signing up you can put your name down on the waiting list but in the meantime you might want to sign up for the similar service that is Link Authority. It looks to be a good alternative to BMR.

I’ve been testing Link Authority for a few weeks now and seen good results already. I was initially testing it on one site but as it seemed to have positive results I’ve now signed up to test two more of my sites on it. I will report back with my findings after a month or so but if you want to give it a try click here now. They have packages starting from about $12 per month.

Link Authority Test Update

A few days ago I started a test to find out if new link building service Link Authority is any good.

Well its only been a few days and so far three of my articles have been submitted into the system. Two are on sites with PR2 and one is on a PR3 site.

On February 7 2012 my starting stats were:

• Main keyword: #3
• Plural of main keyword: #6

Today I am pleased to report my current stats as of February 10 2012 are:

• Main keyword: #1
• Plural of main keyword: #5

It could just be coincidence but its an encouraging start and will help me keep motivated to keep writing those 150 word articles.

If you want to sign up for Link Authority click here.

Anyone used Link Authority?

Sorry for all the “anyone using…” posts lately but I’m trying to find some tools to help me automate and outsource as much as possible due to my lack of time and flagging earnings, just check my last monthly report to see where I am coming from!

I just got an email from the people at LinkAuthority.com perhaps because they are linked to Article Ranks and I signed up with AR once?

It’s free to sign up but sounds like Build My Rank in the sense you submit a 150 word article to their network and you get a link from a PR2+ site for your trouble. I think you can buy credits rather than pay a set monthly fee or submit one of your own sites to the network and then get credits in return.

I’m going to try and submit one of my old sites with PR and see what happens but before I go writing lots of 150 word articles has anyone out there tried this service?

For more info go to LinkAuthority.com (yes that’s an affiliate link!).

Anyone use Get Article Pro?

I recently hired a virtual assistant (VA) from the Philippines via Odesk.com. Her main job is to write articles and then submit them to Unique Article Wizard (UAW). This is quite a tedious process and something I found hard to motivate myself to do so I thought that while I am subscribed to UAW I might as well pay someone to use it for me. The VA said it takes her about two hours to write the three articles and then submit them to UAW with the titles and resource box which contains two links back to my sites. This seems like a reasonable amount of time.

Free Articles from The Best Spinner

I thought I could speed this process up a bit when I heard that The Best Spinner now gives it’s users access to pre-spun articles for free (well, as part of the price you pay for TBS). I asked the VA to check it out but she said there weren’t articles on many topics, especially ones related to the niches my sites were in so it turned out to be a no goer. The Best Spinner doesn’t work on my computer, apparently due to my ISP, so I can’t test this myself.

Get Article Pro

However the VA did suggest I sign up for Get Article Pro which scrapes the web for articles which she could then submit to UAW. It costs $77 a year which if it does what it says on the tin then it will be worth it.

But is this a road I want to go down? Scraping articles, submitting them to UAW for backlinks to my sites?

It certainly would be time saving but would it bring any positive results? Unique Article Wizard seems to be working on some of my sites so I think it is worth using but should I give Get Article Pro a try, what do you think?

Unique Article Wizard: First Impressions

Warning: this post is riddled with affiliate links!

Last week I signed up for Unique Article Wizard. For those that don’t know this is a service that lets you post articles to the blogs and article directories in their network. It’s web based so you log into the site and then enter your article and they do the rest of the work. This might sound pretty simple but their interface isn’t that great.

You can paste in an article in spintax form that you have spun somewhere else, perhaps in The Best Spinner or you can submit an article and two rewrites of that article. This is the option I have used so far and is probably the best for people who don’t like spinning or don’t own any spinning software.

What type of Content can you Submit?

When it comes to submitting an article and two rewrites into Unique Article Wizard the articles and rewritten versions need to have the same amount of paragraphs (seven plus). The paragraphs are then interchanged to make lots of different articles. For this reason paragraph one in each article and rewrite must be on the same topic but written differently. Same for paragraph two and so on. You also need to submit lots of unique titles to help improve the submission rates. For one of my articles I ordered two rewrities of an article I had previously ordered from The Content Authority. This was quite expensive so for the second article I hired someone from Odesk who charged $5 to write a 500 word article and then do two rewrites of it. Both articles got accepted so I guess the cheaper one from Odesk was good enough. Unique Article Wizard also offer an article writing service and charge $9.99 for an article and two rewrites. You could always write them yourself though!

Inserting Links

You can put two links in your article with at least one going in the resource box. This means you can put a link in the body of the text but when I tried this I found that some of my articles had this link removed. For this reason I recommend you put both links in the resource box. You can spin the resource box and the links so you can link to lots of sites and/or pages in one submission.

Submission Rates

You can choose how many times a day you want your article to be submitted. The minimum is 20, I’m not sure what the maximum is but for my articles, so far, I have chosen 50. In the future I think I will do 20 to make it look at bit more natural. It takes a few days for the submission to kick in after you have entered your article but then each day you get an email with a list of the submissions that have been made. So far I have only submitted two articles and both have gotten about 160 submission.

Index Rates

I’ve only submitted two articles so far but for the first article it went down like this:

• Submissions: 162
• Indexed: 95

and the other one went like this:

• Submissions: 159
• Indexed: 99

These are only after a few days of the job being completed so there is a chance more could get indexed over the coming days and weeks. You could always put the URLs of the non-indexed articles into a pinger or indexer and speed things up a bit. A good old fashioned Scrapebox or Xrummer blast probably wouldn’t hurt either.

SERP Movement

I used one submission on a new site and linked to a set of Web 2.0 sites that link to my site. Therefore none of these links went directly to the money site. That site hasn’t moved in the SERPs.

For the other submission I used it on different site. I used one link to link directly to the money site and the other link was spun and linked to one of 10 Web 2.0 sites that link back to my money site. This site moved from #7 to #4 in the SERPs. Although until the recent Google update that occurred mid-October it had been #1 for this keyword.

Final Thoughts

So with nearly 100 indexed posts for each article, and as each article contains two links I got 200 new backlinks to my sites for each submission. This sounds pretty good. But looking at the sites the articles are submitted to, they aren’t the best and if you are not writing the articles yourself it could get quite expensive especially when you factor in the $67 per month subscription fee.

If you have already hired a virtual assistant with time on their hands this might be a good way to keep them busy. Or if you have a cheap source of content who is able to do spinning or rewrites then you could make the most of this tool.

Doing it on the Cheap

One approach could be to write and spin/rewrite a load of articles. Sign up for one month and submit all those articles. Get them published then cancel your account. The articles should stay where they were published and you will have gotten your links and only paid up for one month. You might want to check how many articles you can submit a day and what does happen to your articles once you leave the programme.

I’m going to stick with it for a while as I am using it to try and rank my new Adsense sites but I’m not entirely convinced so far. But the proof will be in the pudding and if it gets my sites ranked and they make money then it will have worked. I guess it all comes down to results and if you can make the most of the tools you are using…

• Link to Unique Article Wizard: http://www.uniquearticlewizard.com/

Alternatives to Unique Article Wizard

A cheaper alternative would be the Article Marketing Robot which does a similar job but is installed on your computer and runs from there rather than being web based. It has a much larger list of sites you can submit to but it will take up your machines resources as it does so. It is a one time fee rather than monthly subscription and they do offer a free 5 day trial so go check it out.

Monthly Round-Up: August 2011

My third month as a full-time affiliate has ended and my new role as full-time-stay-at-home-dad has also started as my girlfriend has gone back to work after her maternity leave.

While we were both off work I had plans to try and do five hours of work a day but that never really happened. I’ve now scraped that plan and no longer have a timetable, I just do a bit of work when I can. Some days I do nothing and others I do maybe up to an hour. This probably isn’t enough to help me reach my (current) goal of £2000 per month but its the best I can do at the moment and I prefer this approach as it means I don’t beat myself up when I don’t reach my target hours of work per day. When the baby is a bit older I might hire a baby sitter/nanny for a couple of hours a day so I can pop over the road to Starbucks and do a quick bit of work each day. They only charge 2 quid an hour so its not going to break the bank!

Less is More

So what have I been doing with my limited time? I haven’t got time to write my own content or find good links so now I have to pay for these. I’ve got a couple of content writers which I am using for content to use for links (Web 2.0s & Articles) and to put on my sites. I’d rather write my own stuff for my sites, at least for the important pages but I haven’t got time and this is better than nothing. I’ve heard the term LSI Content be mentioned a few times but am not really sure what it is, anyone know about it?

Backlinks

I’ve bought lots of types of banklink over the past few months and I think I have found out what works for me from the things I’ve tried. Right now blog posts from blogs with PR seems to work. I’ve tried Web 2.0s, social bookmarks and other stuff like that but what seems to work most of them time is a blog post on a blog with PR (3 or 4) with a link to my site. If you can find such blogs who are willing to let you post then good for you but if you can’t you will have to pay for it. Sometimes the boost in the SERPs stick and something it doesn’t and your site drops down again but while the site is number one I make sales so it is worth the money IMO. It gets hard to find new providers though so once I’ve used the couple I know about and need to rank a site for other keywords I don’t have anyone to turn to. If you know anyone selling blog posts or a service that will let you post to blogs/sites with PR please leave a comment.

Social Bookmarking

As I just said blog posts are working for me at the moment. But they don’t always work, as a competitive niche can be hard to crack. It is also worth mentioning that I rarely just use the blog posts on their own. The blog post seems to be the icing on the cake that moves the site but before I use the blog posts I will social bookmark my pages, do a few Web 2.0s and maybe a directory submission. I was buying social bookmarking services but at abou $10 for 100 bookmarks it was getting quite expensive consdierng how many sites I have (40+?). I’d heard good things about Social Demon/Bookmark Demon but it sounded like a fair bit of work to setup it up and as I’m tight on time I thought I’d leave it for now. I then signed up for the trial of Social Adr which is touted as a lazy persons social bookmarker. The trial expired and I didn’t cancel the service so am still using it but can’t say I’ve tested how effective it is but it is very easy to use and does get you bookmarks. Whether they get indexed or not is another matter.

Xrummer and Scrapebox

I’ve not had much luck with buying Xrummer (forum profiles) and Scrapebox (blog comments) blasts that link to the above bookmarks and blog posts. I’m not sure if I’m doing it right but it doesn’t seem to make much difference to my sites ranking when I do it.

Adsense

So far I’ve made all my money promoting physical prodcuts from places like Amazon. But now after reading Trent’s blog, the Online Income Lab I have been persuaded to start making some Adsene sites. Trent has made good progress in a few months so I am following his approach to try and diversify my income a bit. I used a tool called SECockpit to find my niches which made it very easy. Even if you are not making Adsense sites and are just looking for niches in general I highly recommend this tool. I’ve setup one site so far and have registered three more domains which I am setting up now. These sites are quicker to setup than the Amazon type ones I have been doing so far so they could be a better use of my time. My goal is to get 10 setup before the end of September and then see if any of them make any money.

Earnings for August 2011

Last month I earnt £1186 which was quite a drop from a few months ago hwere I made £1840 but this month was a bit better.

My earnings for August 2011 were: £1500

I was pretty pleased with this as its £50 on average per day and movement in the right direction. My goal for September is £1600 and my goal for the end of 2011 is £2000 per month.

How was your August 2011?