How I Got Rich

This is just a quick heads up to let you know about a new service called Back Blasts that is close to being launched. It is a montly fee service that builds profile and comment links to your URLs so if you are not into that sort of thing look away now!

I think there is a free trial running which you can find out more on their site. So far I have used it on a couple of sites. I have been pointing the links to some blog posts and Web 2.0 properties that link to my main site and I have seen a rise of a few places on page one for the sites after about a week of use.

It is early days so far but I will report back later once I’ve tried it for a bit longer with a proper review.

• http://backblasts.com/

After my month long subscription to IM Automator Pro my appetite for an online directory submission service was well and truly whetted. Although IMA didn’t quite cut if for me it didn’t put me off similar services and after hearing good things about a new service called Linkamotion I’ve decided to give that a try next.

Linkamotion Pricing

I’ve not signed up yet as I’m waiting for my mid monthly payment from Affiliate Window but any day now I will be ready to subscribe. It only costs $47 (£28) per month which is a lot less than other similar services like Linkvanna.

100 Word Submissions

The main thing that caught my eye was that each article you submit only has to be 100 words long. Each submission can only contain one link but as they don’t have to be long it’s not really a problem. How long does it take you to write 100 words on a topic? Your submissions are checked but there is a 24 hour turnaround so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Writing Articles for Linkamotion

I’m quite glad there is a delay for me being able to sign up as it has allowed me to get writing my articles. I am going to write one article for each of my 50 or so sites targeting their main keyword if they are not number one in Google for it or another keyword I am trying to rank for if they are already number one. So far I’ve only done 8 but at only 100 words I don’t think it will take me long to get through the list. Then, once I sign up I will be ready with content to submit meaning no time of my subscription is wasted. After I’ve done that I will start again targeting related keywords. I might even hire someone to write 150 word articles specifically for this service.

Linkamotion Interface

I’m hoping the interface to Linkamotion is as easy to use as IM Automator Pro was. If it is then there should be no reason I can’t get my money’s worth. If it is as fiddly as Article Marketing Robot then it might end up being another tool that sits on my virtual shelf gather dust. Fingers crossed…

Linkamotion Review

Once I’ve signed up and have had some time to use the service I will report back with a Linkamotion review.

For more information head over to the Linkamotion website now.

There are a few sites that are offering free services to help you get a few more links to your sites. So far I’ve tried:

• IM Automator: free social bookmarks
• Social Monkee: another free social bookmarking service
• 24/7 Backlinks: gives you a lump of backlinks each day

You can see the other affiliate marketing tools I use here.

There are some other backlinking services which give you a free trial and Dripable.com is one of them.

Dripable is a new service that has just launched and creates links for your sites from a range of sources such as “blogs, comments, forums, guestbooks, photo galleries, basic comment pages, and everywhere else online”. This is good if you are looking for a diverse backlink profile. You can schedule the number of links to be built each day and it is very easy to setup.

You simply create a new project and then paste in the list of urls you want the links to point at and then in another text box enter the keywords you would like those links to have as anchor text.

As this is a new service which I didn’t know much about I decided to point the links to about 10 Web 2.0 sites which were in turn pointing to my main site. This was instead of pointing them directly to my main site.

I chose two keywords to target. The site I was trying to get a boost in the SERPs was #7 for one keyword and #44 for the second keyword.

Dripable.com Results

Once my 7 day trial was up I was pleased to see my site had moved up one spot for its main keyword to #6 and up 14 spots for the other keyword to #30.

• KW1: #7 to #6
• KW2: #44 to #30

I can’t tell if the links got indexed or stuck at all but I wasn’t really interested in that. I was looking for a movement in the SERPs to show some tangible results that increased my sites rankings and that is what happened.

It is not a massively competitive niche by any means but a jump in the SERPs in seven days is not to be sniffed at. I wish I had longer to test it and see if there will be a further increase but at the moment I am not sure if I can justify the cost, which isn’t loads (from $47 per month), but there are lots of other tools that have caught my attention recently and I’m having a hard time choosing one. When my earning are a bit more consistent I think I will add it to my set of tools but for now I will put it on the wish list.

If you want to try the free 7 day trial of Dripable.com click here today.

If you do try it let me know what results you get as I would like to see some more test data.

Disclaimer: there is a chance I will get an extra 7 days on the trial for writing this piece but what I have written is all true, I swear!

A while ago I signed up for a free tool called IM Automator which lets you bookmark your sites and pages to about 15 social bookmarking sites for free. I liked the interface as it was easy to use, you just paste in the URL and IM Automator extracts the title and description from the page and puts it in the form on their page.

There is a pro version which is $50 a month but when I signed up for the free version it was full as they are limiting the number of people who use the service. But after a few weeks a couple of slots came open on the pro version so I signed up. It was the most expensive tool I have signed up for but it was easy to use so I thought I will probably use it a lot and get my money’s worth.

IM Automator Pro Review

With the paid version you can:

• Submit 25 URLs to 57 social bookmarking sites per day
• Submit 10 RSS feeds to 13 feed sites per day
• Submit 15 articles to 59 article sites per day
• Submit 10 sites to 10 directories per day

So as you can see you can get a lot of links from this if you use it to its potential. Articles must be 500 words or more to qualify for submission to all 59 article sites and can only have two links in a resource box at the end of the article with no links allowed in the actual article.

How Many Links a Day?

If you submitted the maximum amount of 15 articles per day you could be looking at quite a lot of links each day: 15 x 59 x 2 = 1770. You can set the number of articles to be submitted each day so as not to dump 1770 links on a site in one day.

Great for Lazy Affiliates

IM Automator’s main strength is also its weakness in my opinion. The thing I like about it most is that you don’t need to spin or change your articles. You just paste it in and then click submit and the same one gets submitted to all the sites. This is great for lazy affiliates like me but even I would probably rather put in the extra work and do something to make the content a little more unique by doing something like spinning them. Unfortunately this is not yet an option but is something I think they will be adding soon. If you are submitting the same article 59 times will Google count all those links back to your site as unique?

I Can’t Do It 15 Times a Day

I never managed to submit 15 articles in one day but I did submit about 26 in the first month which is less than one day. Told you I was lazy! You don’t get a list of URLS of your submitted articles but it is easy enough to find them by searching on a sentence from your article. From doing a few random checks I found that about 20 of my articles were indexed from each submission. Perhaps more will be indexed over time. Or maybe Google will ignore them as they are duplicate content? Once you’ve gotten the list of URLs from Google you could then blast them with some profiles or blog comments if you are into that sort of thing.

SERP Movement

I’ve not seen any noticeable jumps in SERPS for my sites I’ve tried this on. Some have moved up and some haven’t but nothing that I can directly attribute to this service. I’m sure it helps build a diverse backlink profile if nothing else.

My first month using IM Automator Pro is about to end and I’m thinking of cancelling my subscription. Mainly because I am not using it enough to justify the $50monthly fee and because there is another article service I want to try called Linkamotion which costs about the same.

How to Use IM Automator

In the future when I have a team of outsourced workers or Virtual Assistants as people like to call them I will probably sign up again and have someone writing articles just for this tool and submitting them. But as it stands I don’t have the time or inclination to write 500 word articles on something I’m not sure how effective it is.

Have you used IM Automator Pro or Linkamotion? How do you rate them?

For more details of the pro version click there: http://www.imautomator.com/info/proversion

If you are quick you might be able to catch my slot when I cancel my account.

Check out the other affiliate marketing tools I use

Taking things a bit too far!

My next mission is to start building some Web 2.0 type sites like Sqidoo and WordPress which will link to my sites.

In the recent past I have bought a few jobs from fiverr.com and hired people on Odesk to build my Web 2.0 link wheels and pyramids but they tend to be only one page using spun content.

My plan now is to build 10 or so good Web 2.0 sites with about 5-10 pages on each one. I will add videos and images to make them look a bit more like a real site rather than just a spoke in a wheel. I’ll put a link on each of them to my main site but I won’t interlink them.

Once they are setup I will then get some backlinks for the Web 2.0 sites I’ve just made in the form of forum profiles, blog comments, social bookmarks, article submissions and other Web 2.0 sites.

Hopefully these big Web 2.0s I’ve made will act as buffers so I won’t have to send low quality links directly to my main site.

I think people have been doing this kind of thing for a few years now but I’m hoping it still works to some degree.

It also sounds like something I could hire someone to do for me when I get around to hiring a virtual assistant (as they like to call them).

Any one else doing this? What Web 2.0 sites are you using?

Funny stuff: http://www.cliconomics.com/how-to-suck-at-internet-marketing/

Last month was my best month in affiliate marketing so far and it gave me high hopes for April. As the month started it looked like I would not be disappointed. My daily earnings improved on last month and by the end of the first week I was on target to make over £2000. But then disaster stuck. On about May 8th one of my main sites got struck down by Google and was knocked off the first page for most of its keywords.

Possible Sighting of Google Panda

As I just mentioned up until May 8th I was doing pretty well and then one of my main earners got dumped out of the SERPs. It was an exact match domain which was ranking at number one in Google for the domain and also the plural of the domain. A few of the other pages I had built for this site were on page one and getting some good longer tail traffic. So overnight between May 7th and 8th I went from getting about 150 hits a day to around 30. The main keyword which was in the domain dropped to the bottom of page one and all the rest dropped right out of sight.

I had been working on the site right up to when it went down in the SERPs. I was adding new content and building links so it is possible I did something to upset Google or maybe it was to do with the Panda update. I’ve read there was an update to the Panda rollout around this time so perhaps it was.

I carried on adding content after the drop and managed to eventually get back to the number one spot for the keyword in the domain. The plural of the main keyword brought me the most traffic and after a while it did bounce back to page one for a few days before disappearing again.

The top line is the keyword in the domain and the other main line is the plural. Notice how lots of sites disappear on 6-May and never return. Brutal!

As this was one of my main sites it hit my earnings quite hard but I managed to limp on until the end of the month without going broke. I’m still working on the site and hopefully it will rise from the ashes back to where it once was.

New Tools

I had been using the free version of IM Automator which is a web based bookmarking tool for a while so when a slot came up on their paid-for Pro version I snapped it up. At $50 per month it was more than I’ve spent so far on a monthly subscription but I like the ease of use of the free version and I figured I’d use the extra features of the Pro version. The Pro version includes more bookmarking sites to submit your pages to, an RSS and directory submission service as well as an article submission service. I signed up mainly for the article service. You write one 500 word article with two links in the resource box and it submits it to 60 article sites which should all accept it. It doesn’t need any spinning so you can just write and submit. I wasn’t sure how good this was as how valuable can having links from 60 copies of the same article be? Surely they will all be duplicate content. You can submit about 20 articles a day so could in theory get about 2400 links a day. Writing 20 500 word articles a day isn’t that easy and I never managed more than a few each day. Plus if they are all from the same 60 sites how useful this is I’m not sure.

The sites I tested it on didn’t make any jumps in the SERPs and although I might be judging it too quickly I’m not going to sign up for another month. I guess if you had someone writing content for you each day or you had a backlog of content to get rid of and could take advantage of the maximum number of submissions per day it might worth it but for me at the moment its not. So I’m going to look for something else to spend my hard earned pocket money on. I’ve heard good things about Linkamotion of which you can read a review of here.

Outsourcing Mission

My plan is to outsource as much as possible so I can do other things with my time so I have been thinking of ways to do this. I am a bit nervous of handing over the reigns of my sites just yet so I’m currently looking to hire people to build links for me and write content. Using this template on sitey.net I managed to hire a couple of guys to write 10 articles of 500 words for $10 from Odesk. It’s not the best writing in the world but it is grammatically correct and makes sense. I wouldn’t put it on my main sites as I have another guy who does that but it will be good for building Web 2.0 properties and submitting to services like IM Automator Pro should I go back to it.

Linkbuilding with Web 2.0s

I am always looking for ways to get links but have only recently started doing this so am a bit behind the pack when it comes to link building. People have been using Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo for ages to get links and although the boat might have sailed a bit I’m giving it a go. I’m going to build out 10 or so Web 2.0 sites with multiple pages, images and videos for each of my sites and link to that site. Then I will build smaller Web 2.0s and do lots of other link building things and point those at my 10 big Web 2.0s. At least that’s the plan for now until I get any better ideas.

Things to Do

I really need to get a new laptop. This netbook has done me well for two years but it’s too slow now and I need something with more power. I’d like a mid range 13” one with 4GB of ram and a 500GB hard drive.

Nothing fancy just something that can get things done.

I need a new layout for my site as a lot of them aren’t really converting very well and not even earnings £1 a day even though they get 1000+ hits a month.

Things I Didn’t Do

I didn’t get a VPS due to lack of funds and time. I didn’t try out SEnuke X due to lack of time and a slow netbook. I didn’t use Sick Submitter once, apart from the pinger so think I will cancel this for now.

Earnings:

Well I think that pretty much sums up May 2011. I better post the bit you’ve all been waiting for: how much I earned.

My (gross) earnings for May 2011 were £1840

I am very pleased with this and was only aiming for £1700 this month (which is £100 more than last month) but was very happy to exceed this.

Goals for June 2011:

Last month I said I’m aiming to increase my earnings by £100 a month and I’d love to go for £1900 for June but in the last week or so of May I was lucky to get £50 a day on a good day so I’m not holding my breath. To get £1900 I will need to bring in £63 per day which is pretty hard when one of your main sites has been tanked by Google. To be honest I will be happy for anything over £1500 for June.

Last month I was mainly watching The Shadow Line, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret and Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.

What did you get up to in May?

This one is a bit late but I thought I’d do a quick one as a) I tend to get more hits when I do a monthly round up so there must be some interest and b) there was a fair bit to report. I had my birthday in April but also, more excitingly; it saw the arrival of our first child! This was very exciting and understandably I hardly spent any time on affiliate marketing after she was born. You get a lot more time indoors with a new baby but trying to type or even click a mouse with a baby in one arm is not easy so in this case more time at home doesn’t mean more time to work! Besides who wants to work when they have a new baby to entertain them? Not me!

But even with the new arrival I still managed to do a bit in April before the big day.

New Tools:

In April I signed up for a tool called Sick Submitter. It allows you to create your own forum profiles, social bookmarks and even submit articles. Once you have the tool you need to find scripts or packets that let you do different things like creating profiles etc. A number are given away free each month by the people who make the software and on their forums people make them and give them away for free. They also have the ones you have to pay for which people have made. Each one tends to do a different like great 1000 forum profiles or submit your site to a 100 social bookmarks. When I first got it I had high hopes and plugged away with it but to be honest it took me a lot of time to get to grips with it and the free packets aren’t that great so it’s not had much use of late. For the price it is good ($12 p/m) and I do think it has potential but you probably need to spend a good bit of time to get to grips with it and find some decent packets that let it live up to its potential. I think there is a free trial so give it a shot if it sounds like something you might want to use.

You can see what other affiliate marketing tools I use on this page.

Link Building:

I’ve still been experimenting with link building and trying different things out. Nothing that I’ve tried so far has really jumped out at me as having a decent effect on rankings consistently which is a bit disappointing. I suppose it is hard to compare different methods on different sites as some niches are less competitive so creating some Web 2.0s linking to your site will see it move up in the SERPs whereas on other site 100 Web 2.0s and another 100 blog posts linking to it won’t even see a move of one place. But saying that, some sites have responded well to my efforts but I couldn’t really say what worked and what didn’t!

Outgoings:

So now that I am using a few tools my outgoings are starting to go up a bit. At the moment I have:

• Easy Content Units (£25 per month)
• Hostgator hosting ($10 per month)
• Sick Submitter ($12 per month)

On top of that I am reinvesting a bit of my earnings on link building and content but this is not a fixed outgoing as it’s on a pay as you go basis.

Earnings:

I’m going to continue posting my earnings in gross amounts rather than deducting what I spend as its not that much and it looks better when I don’t!

My earnings for April were £1595

I am happy with this although it would be nice to have gotten that extra fiver to round it off. For next month I am aiming for an increase of £100. A few months ago I was hoping for a 10% increase each month but I think that might get quite tricky. So for May I am aiming for £1700.

Goals:

I think my goal for September 2011 was £2000 per month. It looks like I am heading in the right direction but as most of my sites are seasonal it remains to be seen what happens when the current earners go into hibernation and whether any sites will step up and take their place.

What did you get up to in April?

I’ve just been going over some of my stats and I’ve got a couple of sites that are getting 1000-1300 visitors per month. Nearly all the traffic is from people searching for the main keyword, sometimes on its own and sometimes with other words around it like ‘best red widgets’, ‘cheap red widgets’ or sometimes with a brand for example ‘Sony red widgets’ or ‘Nike red widgets’. So it’s pretty targeted stuff.

But when it comes to sales they are seriously lacking. The main site that caught my attention is promoting one type of product in typical niche fashion. The products range in price from £20 to £100. I compare the prices for each product and most times amazon.co.uk is the cheapest merchant so on a £20 I am likely to earn £1 but could earn up to £5 for the higher priced items.

But this month with 1,333 hits so far I’ve only made about £22 from 20 sales. That looks like a conversion rate of 1.5%. The same story is repeated on a few of my other site (but not all of them thankfully).

Would you be happy with that level of conversion?

To build a site that gets 50 hits a day is quite hard for me as even when I get to number one in a niche I don’t always see hits of 50 a day.

I guess if I was making £10 per sale and making 20 sales a month I wouldn’t be complaining at £200 a month from one site. As it is though, £20 a month from one site is pants (although I do have lots of sites doing worse than this).

I guess if there is anything to take away from this thread it is to go after the big ticket items.

oDesk - Crap Desk more like

Probably not but I do find it a real pain to use. Perhaps it’s just me but I find it very hard to keep track of the communications between me and the people who are applying to or working on my jobs.

When you send a regular message those communications are stored in the inbox area which is fine. But then if you send a message when you hire someone via the form that appears when you actually press the hire button all trace of that message seems to disappear. This is a massive problem as usually when you hire someone you send them the full details of the job. To not be able to see what you have sent later on it can be hard to review exactly what you have ordered.

Also sometimes you get an email notification that a contractor has replied to a message you sent, not a message through the inbox but via the Contracts page. You click on the link in the email and you can see the message which is fine. But if you try to find that message again from within oDesk it is nowhere to be seen. That is unless you go back to your email and click on the link and there it is. This again is a massive pain because often the message will include the piece of work they are sending you. If you delete the notification email you have no way of getting back to that message in oDesk.

I assume ODesk make all their money from the cut they take from the payments that are sent via its website between contractor and job poster but with an interface this poor I’m guessing lots of people, once they have found a contractor they like, chose to leave oDesk and work via email use bank transfer or paypal.

Mansoor recently wrote a post on his thoughts on SEnuke X which alerted me to this SEO tool. It costs a lot (about $150) per month so after reading about it I filed it away as something to look into when I’m rich.

I’m not rich yet but I have been looking more closely at the tool as it can do some of the things I currently pay people to do such as creating social bookmarks and Web 2.0 or Social Network sites such as Suqidoo, Hubpages, etc.

As I am paying for someone to do those tasks for me, and they are probably using SEnuke to do them, I thought I might as well buy the tool and do it myself.

I recently signed up for Sick Submitter which can do this kind of stuff but is a lot cheaper (about $12 a month) but didn’t have much luck with it as there was still a fair bit of faffing about. After watching some videos of SEnuke in action it looks a lot more automated and ready to go out of the box.

These videos give you a good idea of how it works and what it can do:

• http://youtu.be/zJW1FLwN0JE
• http://youtu.be/7CBKcM9TKWM

You can share the cost of SEnuke X between three people so you each pay about $50 a month. I’d be happy to pay this if the tool is as good as it looks and once I’ve tried out the free 14 day trial I will have a better picture of a) if my computer can run it and b) it’s as easy to use as it looks.

Do you use SEnuke X?

Fancy going 3s up on a copy (if I like the trial)?