Product Reviews

There are numerous tools and services on the internet that allow you to track your backlinks and keyword position in the search engines. The one I use and like the best is FREE and is from DigitalPoint.

Set up a free account - and you’ll have some options to configure. You’ll need a Google search API key - there is a link in the sign up form - you also have the option of installing an advanced usage script on your own server - this allows daily updates of your data.

The keyword tracker allows you to track multiple keywords by domain, in other words, you can see where you rank for a given key phrase for any number of domains you (or your competitors) own. Simply enter the keyword and domain, and the system will show your rank on Google, MSN, Yahoo - or you can choose ALL to get your rank on all of the engines.

The backlinks tracker is simple - enter your url, and the system tells you how many backlinks you have on Yahoo for the single url, backlinks for the whole domain on Yahoo, and the backlink count on Google. The feature that makes both of these free tools really outstanding is the ability to track and graph your results over time. You simply set up a simple script and cron it daily, and your stats will be updated each day, with your progress, up or down, logged regularly.

The service even has a simple graphing feature so you can get visual graphs of your progress. All of this takes a couple of hours to set up, and then you can just forget about it - until you want to see your data. It’s interesting to watch how your rankings go up as your backlink counts increase - a great way to validate that a linking strategy is working.

Try the DigitalPoint tracker - it’s a great free tool. I’ll be posting a premium video post on how to set all of this up very soon.

Carl Ringwall is the owner of Data SystemsPlus, a web consultancy offering a variety of e-learning offerings, software and tools. Considered one of the top blogs for forming a coherent internet marketing strategy, Carl’s online business blog is a must for anyone running a internet home based business.

Building backlinks should be at the heart of your internet strategy.  I like to use 3 strategies for link building:

1.  Article marketing - time consuming, but rewarding.  My advice:  choose 3 or 4 major article directories. Ezine Articles is a must, ArticleDashboard is good, so is Associated Content.  Don’t spend lots of time and trouble submitting to the hundreds of lesser directories by hand- instead look at services like Article United the distribute to smaller directories.  I’ve used most of the paid article submission services, they work well, too - ArticleMarketer is the best.

2.  Blog Carnivals - in a previous post, I discussed how blog carnivals work.  Don’t neglect this powerful and free method.  I’m currently working on an automation program to submit posts to blog carnivals automatically.  Stay tuned for that - it’s coming soon.

3.  3WayLinks.com this method is absolutely killer.  If you have the time and inclination, I recommend you hop over to the 3WayLinks web site and check it out.  This is not a reciprocal link program - it’s a totally automated 3 way linking systems that automatically will find backlinks for you - you just have to put a small piece of code on your site.  This service builds links slowly, with relevant anchor text - just what the search engines want.

Jon Ledger has a link building guide on the site that is worth the first month’s fee all by itself.  If you sign up for the service, be sure to try the beta of DirLinks - the new, even more powerful service Jon is working on.

Keyword selection is the most important aspect of using 3WayLinks - to use the service properly, you have to concentrate on keywords where the search results for the top 10 have a relatively small number of backlinks, but have adequate search volume.  You want to be able to rank well for keywords that get decent traffic.  Be sure to read all of the excellent documentation on the site - and spend some time reading the posts in the support forum.

This is the paragraph from Jon’s site that got me thinking about the power of this service:

“The niche keywords are where the real money is anyway. It’s a lot easier to get 50 sites ranking for keywords that win you 2,000 uniques a month each than it is to rank one site for keywords that get 100,000 uniques a month — even though the bottom line is the same. Read that sentence again so it soaks in!”

Yes read it again - (Hint: think - Adsense).

I have over 40 sites on 3WayLinks - and my backlinks are slowly, but very surely moving up - so is my traffic and revenue.  Try 3WayLinks - you will not be disappointed.

About The Author:

Carl Ringwall is the owner of Data SystemsPlus, a web consultancy offering a variety of e-learning offerings, software and tools. Considered one of the top blogs for forming a coherent internet marketing strategy, Carl’s online business blog is a must for anyone running a home based internet business.

Sign up for my blog announcement list, for notifications, great offers on my information products, and special premium posts.

Every blogger wants good-looking blog posts.  There are times when you just wish you had the same editing capability in WordPress that you have say, in
MS Word.  No problem - the folks at Microsoft have you covered with some free software.  It’s called Windows Live Writer - and for the average user, I think it’s the best thing to come from Microsoft in a long time.

Basically, you use LiveWriter to create and manage your posts and the software uploads to your blog automatically.  There are dozens of plug-ins available for free, too - that extend the functionality of LiveWriter to the point where you can post about anything effortlessly.  Maps, videos, source code, framed photos, it’s all a breeze with this fine package.  The software has a very handy preview feature, allows drafts, and has a full compliment of the usual Word-Like formatting tools and functions.

In all, this is a great package - and you can’t beat free.  Try it out. 

About The Author:

Carl Ringwall is the owner of Data SystemsPlus, a web consultancy offering a variety of e-learning offerings, software and tools. Considered one of the top blogs for forming a coherent internet marketing strategy, Carl’s online business blog is a must for anyone running a home based internet business.

Another nice backlink method that does not cost a dime - and really takes just a few minutes to set up - is Jon Ledger’s ShareAPost.com site.

The site features posts from blogs covering all categories - and these authors have authorized others to use or syndicate their content.  You can’t change the wording or content of the original posts, and must include all links as the original author intended.  This is great news for those who contribute content - you can get your links, author bio published on other blogs - and that means more backlinks for you.

The ShareAPost service is automated, so contributing posts or incorporating posts into your blog is a snap.  I began offering my blog posts as content, and to date several bloggers have incorporated my content, providing me with valuable backlinks.

Take a few minutes and set up a ShareAPost account - it’s free and if you are posting useful content, you’ll be amazed at the backlinks and traffic.

My friend Robert Phillps teamed up with traffic guru Fred Black for a great 2 hour SEO audio session. I’ve waded through tons of SEO material over the past 2 years, and this interview manages to distill the important stuff down to a manageable plan of action.

Robert does a great interview with Fred, and takes you through their linking stratgegies, along with the tools and services they both used to get to the top of Google for the competitive search term ‘Internet Business’.

If you are new to SEO, or if you’re baffled by all the seemingly contradictory information out there, I highly recommend you purchase Robert’s interview.

Here is an easy recommendation if you want a ‘real-time’ web analytics solution:  StatCounter.com.

It’s free, and has tons of stats - you can even make the counter code invisible on your page.  I use Google Analytics, but I like to add StatCounter’s code to my pages as well, so I can get ‘real time’ stats - Google Analytics only refreshes their stat report daily.

StatCounter has zillions of features:

From: Andy Beard andybeard.eu

I was honestly wondering when someone would come up with a service like Share-A-Post, because it is one of those "no brainer" ideas that I have thought of doing, but never got around to.

When to a huge amount of disbelief I blocked some of my high ranking paid reviews with robots.txt, and hinted that syndication would be a perfect loophole in Google's penalties, no one fully understood what I meant - many SEO experts thought I was bonkers.

This is what I meant - widespread syndication with editorial control

The Limits of Traditional Article Marketing

Article marketing is all well and good, but is extremely limited

• You can only use a fixed number of links in a post
• Article directories are quite inflexible over affiliate links even if you have created
• HTML formatting is frowned upon because the articles are often intended for email use
• You can't use pictures
• Most of the articles end up on very low value sites that have no readers
• Whilst they often use categories, tag support is limited

Jonathan Ledger has come up with what at first glance seems to be the perfect service for submission and syndication of quality blog articles.

Article Submission

• You sign up and add your blog - If you are smart, you will create a new user on your blog with username and password with low level privileges - don't enter your admin username and password - I trust Jonathan, but even large websites get hacked, why take the risk?
• You make sure your blog is posting full content feeds
• You add an entry to your ping list, so that when you update your blog, your article is automatically added to Share-A-Post
• You use Technorati tags as normal, though only the first 5 will be used - that avoids tag spam
• You can add multiple blogs

RSS Article Syndication

When you are short of content for one of your blogs, you can visit Share A Post, search for an appropriate article, and have it posted either as a draft or published article directly to one of your blogs.

The service uses XML-RPC to connect automatically, just like popular blogging software such as Microsoft Windows Live Writer, but that does require a username and password - hence why I suggested precautions when setting up.

The other advantage is that when you are posting a guest article on your blog, because it is posted as a different user, it can be given different emphasis, maybe a different symbol etc.

Duplicate Content

Lots of people will be worried about duplicate content due to syndication

Syndication is a good thing, and Google does a fairly good job of determining the original author, and the link that is being given back to your post will help - it even has good anchor text - at least I think a link is given back to the permalink - to be sure, you should probably use an RSS footer plugin, and maybe even create a smart looking author byline for each article that includes a link.

If you want some assurance that syndication is a good thing, one of the most authoritative I can think of is Vanessa Fox, who until recently was working for Google on Webmaster Central at SEO and Webmaster conferences. If the "book" we follow are Google's webmaster guidelines… guess what? She helped write it!

Recently on her personal blog she wrote a great article on how to rank as the original source for content you syndicate

With Jonathan's system you are not going to be able to ensure that content gets blocked with Robots.txt, and that has a negative aspect as well, because the links wouldn't count… you do want links don't you?
You are also not going to be able to ensure a different version of your article is published, unless you somehow specify in a license that your articles can be modified, such as a Creative Commons License that allows derivative and Commercial use or better.

Hopefully you will always get a link, but just like with article marketing, that can never be guaranteed

You will find situations if you have a new blog with not much authority that Google makes mistakes - that will most often be when a high authority blog picks up your article.

In a situation like that… just be happy, you will get great links, and your content will be exposed to 100s, or 1000s of new readers, and if enough blogs pick the article up, you will get more authority quicker from all the links, and hopefully lots of traffic and new subscribers.

Proof-reading

Just like article marketing, you are going to have to use just a little bit more care before you post, as any errors you make might not be fixable if your articles get syndicated.

Hopefully anyone syndicating an article will check back with the original blog to ensure the article is up-to-date, and I suggest they do that anyway, as you want to always ensure you are promoting content from what is a reputable blog that is well established.

Competitors?

It is so obvious… but none really

• Well ok, I know Stompernet has some kind of content syndication network
• I know Jack Humphrey used to syndicate his clients article content on a network, but not blog posts
• There are various services which syndicate spun articles, but not blog posts
• There are services that have their own blogs, where you post snippets of articles
• Portal feeder has something similar for articles, I am not sure what is in Traffic Kahuna
• There are plugins which feed articles from article banks to WordPress blogs

So whilst the idea is simple, you have to have confidence in content syndication and how duplicate content works before you think of doing something like this, which is why someone probably didn't do it before.

Powertip

If you are using standard tagging plugins, they will probably output tags in alphabetical order. That isn't a huge problem for the 5 tags that will be used to catalogue your post, but it is a factor for your backlink, because the anchortext used will be from your first tag.

The easy answer? Add a manual tag somewhere within your article

If you look closely you will see that I have linked through earlier in this post to my "syndication" tag on my blog, and I have manually added rel="tag" to the link.

Hopefully when this article is posted, the backlink to my blog will be "syndication". That is fairly powerful stuff.

OK Andy, How Much?

Jonathan says the following:-

BETA TESTERS WANTED
===================

This service is now up and running, and I'm looking for beta testers
to create free accounts and try it out. I need folks with blogs
who want to syndicate their content to super-charge their link
building, and I need folks who need top-notch content to post to
their own blogs.

As a beta tester, your account will always be 100% free. Syndicating
other folks content will always be free anyway, but I'm working on
a business model that MAY charge a monthly fee for being able to
have your content syndicated in this way. Or it may stay free
for everyone, I haven't decided.

At any rate, as a beta tester, you'll never pay a dime for the
service.

So why not go give it a try right now?

I hope Jonathan keeps it free

If he doesn't, I am sure there will be competitors who will do it for free, so it is much better keeping it free and advertising supported. If needed, get some VC money to cover operations, but that is unlikely to be needed.

This is beta, I haven't yet tested everything, I am going to see if I can find a guest post on Share A Post to try out.

Another Reason To Applaud Jonathan

I think anyone else who would have launched this, other than maybe myself, would have included some kind of spammy "viral" link back to the blog article syndication directory, in the footer of every article.
I have just seen my first article syndicated on a blog, and there is no link to Share A Post - that is a cool move.

Please don't syndicate posts without minor editing to at least remove all the related posts - whilst I love receiving 10+ links every time one of my articles is syndicated, I am not going to approve 10 pingbacks - I will just flag them as spam to avoid the annoyance in the future.
Single pingbacks are fine (I don't have nofollow on pingback links), or even to each editorial link within an article - you give me a link, you get a link back.

Sign Up!

If you sign up to Share A Post, you will find this article in their library - an easy way to share Share A Post with your readers is just syndicating this article.

Special note from Andy: To add some additional incentive to try out Share A Post, if you have written a very high quality paid review recently that would be suitable for my readers, I will gladly syndicate it on my primary domain as well - oh, and I won't be nofollowing any of the links, as it will be an editorial decision to publish it.

Moodle is great. There, you Moodle fans out there, I’ll give you that- It’s a great platform, full of options and customizability, even some ecommerce potential. I’m developing pay-to-learn sites and am working on a workable platform. But I’m giving up on using Moodle, and here’s why: no control over the user’s progression thru a course. Moodle was designed from the outset to allow students to peruse a course in a non-linear fashion- it’s almost a religious belief with the Moodle-ers on the forums.

One poor Moodle forum newbie posted a message with his desire that he be able to control a user’s linear path through a Moodle course. He was designing courses for a state-sponsored certification exam, and the state agencies want to see an online course where access to Topic B is not possible without first successfully completing Topic A. Not exactly on the cutting edge of current education wisdom, but that is just the way it is.

Our hapless forum newbie was given a set of responses from the Moodle gurus laced with the scorn normally reserved for a Windows user posting a Perl problem on PerlMonks.com. One guru compared a linear learning path to a ‘mindless learning rat maze’. Ugh. So goes the entreprenuer’s voyages into the world of open source. If you want to use open source products for profit, be ready to swim on your own.

There are hacks available to implement ‘content locking’ in Moodle - but the hacks are not supported modules, and tend to break with each Moodle update. I never could get the hack to work with SCORM modules at all.

The other reason we are not going to use Moodle for our learning sites is the spotty support of SCORM offered by Moodle. With Moodle, your only real option if you want to use SCORM with any control over access to content is to post your course as one, big-ass SCO file. Not a workable solution.

In the coming weeks I’ll be reporting on our experiences with Claroline, another open-source learning package. It has a neat feature called ‘Learning Paths’ that can implement locks - as well as very easy and trouble-free SCORM support.

For years, we’ve been using email auto responder services like Aweber to communicate to readers and potential customers. One of the more popular techniques used is the blog announcement - an automated email that goes out every time you create a post. This technique keeps your readers engaged and encourages them to come back to your blog often.

Aweber has a feature that monitors the feed from your blog and when it sees a post - it triggers a pre-formatted email to your list. It’s not hard to configure and is very reliable. But if you are using your auto responder service primarily to send out blog announcements, you are paying for a service that you can get for free - using FeedBurner.

FeedBurner is a free blogger service that takes your rss feed and packages it into many innovative delivery options. If you are new to FeedBurner, it takes a bit to get the hang of what they are really offering. The best way to learn is to simply create an account and start playing with it. It’s free - and the service has been recently acquired by Google.

Burn a feed and sign up for the email service - you’ll get simple code to put on your site that allows readers to opt-in to an email version of your blog - complete with attractive layouts, links, etc. It’s totally double opt-in, and works flawlessly.

Here is what the opt-in form looks like:

Or, include a simple opt-in link: Subscribe to Data SystemsPlus by Email. Feel free to opt in to my blog list!

FeedBurner email is the way to go for blog announcement lists - it’s free, professional - looking and readers know they are not giving their email to be spammed with the one-click unsubscribe.

Membership or subscription web sites offer great advantages to internet marketers weary of selling digital goods that have been commoditized, such as resale rights products and software. You get to control the content, distribution and pricing of your products - and if you implement a generous affiliate program, you’ll free yourself from the tyranny of the Internet giants for traffic and customers.

WordPress works well for most people because it’s easy to set up and offers loads of custom themes and plugins, all for free. I’ve researched WordPress as a membership site and found there are many that are looking for a solution. I’ve discovered one - it’s not what I’d call ‘industrial strength’, but it is adequate for most smaller membership sites.

iDevSpot.com offers a product called iSubscribe. It is a php-based page protection script with a very good PayPal ipn feature. Most commercial scripts I’ve tried have spotty ipn results; not this one. In fact, most of iDevSpot’s products have PayPal payments built in - and they really work.

Now you are not going to be able to run a community behind this script, such as forums, etc. and have the user’s accounts tied to their site access password. This script uses a php include to protect pages - your pages have to be in php (no folder-level protection using .htaccess). But if you just want to provide some premium content in WordPress and have a convenient way for user to pay for it - iSubscribe is the way to go. It is also easy to integrate iSubscribe with NixieAffiliate, iDevSpot’s affiliate script.

This script does have one issue with sending email - it uses the php built-in mail() function and it may behave strangely on some web hosts. It currently does on my install and I’m working on a fix - which I’ll post here. Most commercial php scripts arrive to you encrypted - but IdevSpot’s scripts are not, and are easy to modify as you see fit. The site’s forums are helpful and friendly. Note that this script is not just for WordPress - it will protect any php web page.

Given the very reasonable cost of this script - I recommend you give iDevSpot’s iSubscribe a try.