How I Got Rich

New Backlink Service

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/

Getting Ready for Linkamotion

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.

IM Automator Pro Review

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

Web 2.0s for Link Building

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/

Monthly Round-up: May 2011

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?

Article Ranks Review

I while ago I bought Article Marketing Robot which is a tool that lets you ‘automatically’ submit an article to 1,000s of article directories. Stick a couple of links in each article and you soon start racking up 100s of backlinks to your sites.

It’s not quite that simple but with a bit of work it can be done. To try the Article Marketing Robot free trial click here now.

An alternative article marketing tool or service is Article Ranks. The main difference is that you enter your article through their web site and then let them do the submissions. Your article then gets submitted to the blogs in their network and other people’s blogs who have signed up to their service and have opted to have the articles submitted to their sites.

The nice thing about the Article Marketing Robot is that whilst its not free (after the trial) it is just a one off payment. Article Ranks however, While it is free to sign up to, to fully use their service it costs $40 per month. But don’t let that put you off, there are other ways to use it for less!

As I touched on briefly you can earn credits by signing up one or some of your sites for which they will offer you people’s submitted articles. As you accept the articles you get credits which can be used to allow you to submit your own articles to the system.

If you don’t fancy doing this you can also buy credits for as little as $2 and get submitting your articles.

At $2 a pop you can’t really complain and if you just want to use this once for each of your sites it should be a nice way to give them a little boost alongside your other link building activities. It is also a quick and cheap way to diversify your backlink profile and hopefully make it look more natural to Google.

If you use this Article Ranks coupon when you sign up you will get $10 credit which is enough to submit a couple of articles and get the links rolling in: 6140549c6d6ad47e914f02f16ef41aea

My verdict on Articles Ranks? Give it a try, its free and what’ve you got to loose?

www.ArticleRanks.com

Anyone else use using it?

Another Backlink Checker

Recently I posted about the Majestic SEO backlink checking service. Here is another one that is slightly different and might be of use to you.

The main difference is you add a list of domains and it will check them all rather than adding a new domain for each of your sites. It then gives you the number of links pointing to each of your sites. With the free version you can’t do much investigation into where the links are from but its nice to see a number.

Anyone paid up to SEO Moz to see their full reports? Its about $99 a month I think.

Once you’ve got your number of links for each site you could then copy and paste these numbers into a spreadsheet and do the check each week or month and see how your number of backlinks are changing.

• http://www.backlinks.in

More Free Links

Thanks to a comment from Lee I am now aware of another free linking service called IM Automator.

Once signed up you can submit up to 10 sites a day which each get 15 links.

Like Social Monkee I think this will be a good tool to help get sites indexed and mix up your back link profile a bit.

Its free so is worth a look I think.

Any more sites like this I don’t know about?

Article Ranks

Recently I looked at Build My Rank which is a paid service for which you submit some content and it publishes it for you and in turn you get some backlinks. I mainly got negative feedback on it from my readers so decided not to sign up.

Another tool which could be classed as similar was recommended to me by link building maestro Shane. This tool is called Article Ranks. It has a free package and a $40 a month package and does look quite good but is it? Anyone tried this service out? I’m quite keen to sign up for something that will get me some (good) backlinks but don’t want to waste my time or money.

At the moment I am still bashing away with Article Marketing Robot and submitting my articles to 100s of article directories at the click of a button (and the filling in of 100s of Captcha forms) but I wouldn’t mind a few more tools up my link building sleeve.

• Article Ranks
• Article Marketing Robot

PS You will be pleased to know I finally got my 12 sign-ups for Social Monkee so won’t be promoting it so hard any more. I still recommend it though.

Majestic SEO Backlink Checker

If the reports that the Yahoo Site Explorer will shortly be no more I can imagine a few affiliates will be looking for a new way to keep an eye on their backlinks.

One service I’ve found that looks like an even better replacement is Majestic SEO. To check your own sites it is free but to find out what links other people’s sites have got I think you have to pay.

I think its better than the Yahoo Site Explorer as you can add your site to it and then when you login they are all there rather than entering the URLs like you do with Yahoo.

I’m not sure where it gets its data from, hopefully not Yahoo!

It’s free so if you’ve been looking for a way to keep an eye on your back links then I’d say sign up.

If you know of any other services offering something similar then leave a comment.

And if you want 25 free Social Bookmarks a day don’t forget to sign up for Social Monkee. It’s free and when I get 5 more of you guys to sign up I get an upgrade (and I can stop promoting it so hard )