What would happen if you had 90% of ALL the available data for EVERY aspect of your business?  Wouldn’t that be a great competitive advantage?

Let’s say you are in the golf club business – and you could measure the following, and be correct to within 90% certainty:

• What relevant golf terms users typed into search engines?
• Given a set of search results, what links actually received clicks?
• How many competitor’s web sites are out there promoting golf items?
• How many pages do each of your competitor’s sites have?
• How does each of your competitor’s pages rank for a given search term?
• How does your competitors buy ads, how much do they pay, and how do those ads perform?
• What golf topics are most-often emailed by users?
• What are your competitor’s conversion rates?  For organic search?  PPC ads?
• How are your competitor’s customers paying for their items?

Wouldn’t it be great to have all of this intelligence?  If you had all of this information, would you be fair with your competition, or would you use every bit of your power to crush it?  In this intensely competitive marketplace, I know what your answer will be to my question.

But you do have a competitor now that is armed with all the above advantages – that would be Google itself.

You see, Google has ALL of the information I outlined above; and they got it from you and me.  We provided all this data to them freely, by using Google’s services: Adwords, Adsense, Gmail, Webmaster Tools, Analytics, Checkout, Website Optimizer, etc. etc.  They gave this stuff away free for a reason.

And now we see the chickens are coming home to roost.  Read this post from the SEO Book Blog about the shrinking of the SERPS; also read this related post about the latest Panda update.  Google is shrinking the screen real estate once allocated to everyone and is now pushing their own heavily monetized properties over the top of the results.  When it comes to ranking on Google, you are never going to beat Google.

So has Google used it’s Dominion Over All Data to become evil? I think they are clearly headed in that direction.  Google did recently drop their ‘Don’t Be Evil’ motto.

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

What do you think?  Post a comment.

I get questions about link posting rates and numbers of links all the time.  I have answered this question so many times on the support desk, I thought it was time to post on the blog.  So how do you determine how many links Backlink Index Express can post in a day?  Well, it’s pretty simple, you have 2 variables to work with:

1. Cron Job Frequency – how often BIE runs
2. Links per post – a setting in the config.php file.

So let’s do a sample calculation.  Let’s assume that you are running  your cron job every 10 minutes (the recommended frequency) and are adding 5 links per post (the recommended maximum number).  Now we need to do some math here – we are doing a cron job every 10 minutes, so that means we are doing 6 runs per hour (60 minutes):

60  / 10 = 6

Now, we simply multiply 6 x 24 hours = 144 posts per day:

6 x 24 = 144

Now, if we are posting 5 links per post, we just multiply our 144 above by 5:

5 x 144 = 720

So we are posting 720 links per 24 hour period.  Now, if you want to increase the number of links per day, you could speed up the cron job to every 5 minutes, that would effectively double your posting rate, to 1440 links per day.  Increasing the number of links per post has the same effect.

Now you do get diminishing returns on this – your web host will not like it if you cron BIE more than every 5 minutes, and if you attach too many links per post, Google will not likely spider them all when it comes to visit.  So it is better to not push BIE past the limits set out in the Best Practices Guide (included with your BIE purchase).

The best way to scale for more links is to use multiple instances of BIE – run more than one BIE install and post to a large blog network – this works well for large volume linkers, and is the method used by many large backlinking services that utilize Backlink Index Express as part of their service.

We have updated Backlink Index Express to version 10.  New features include:

Integration with The Best Spinner – auto-spin your post and title text for more uniqueness.  This will really improve the indexing rate of your indexer blogs!  Requires you own a copy of The Best Spinner.

Integration with Sick Submitter – allows you to automatically add links you create from Sick into BIE.  The handiest and fastest way yet to build backlinks and get them indexed with BIE.  You need to subscribe to Sick Submitter to use this feature.

Bookmarklet now works with Hostgator!  NOTE: All users must update their bookmarklet, regardless of what host you use.  If you use the bookmarklet feature, you MUST update your bookmarklet.

Fixed minor issues with file linefeeds and BIE’s internal feed generation.

All registered users are entitled to a free upgrade.  If you did not get an email notification please put a ticket into support and I will send you a new link.

I use Social Monkee regularly.  It’s a great service that allows you to build backlinks daily, for free. When I am creating blog posts or doing Article Marketing – I always enter the URL’s of my content into Social Monkee.  The service automatically builds backlinks by submitting to social sites all over the web.  I have found the service effective and recommend it highly.

One feature about Social Monkee that I particularly like is the fact that they provide RSS feeds of all the links they build for you.  You can take these feeds and ping them regularly to the RSS aggregator sites – and that is where PingThingr comes into play.  Watch this short video and see how easy it is to ping your Social Monkee feeds with PingThingr:

Social Monkee is a great deal – it’s free to sign up and you get a premium membership by referring just a few other users – with the premium account, you can get 300 free and easy backlinks per day.  And it’s just as easy to supercharge your Social Monkee efforts with PingThingr.

Everyone who creates content, whether it’s for blogging, article marketing, Web 2.0, Google Places, or any other purpose knows the regular pinging of content URL’s is an important part of any strategy.

There are several free and paid services that you can use to ping your url’s regularly to the important ping sites, and I used them in my own business for several years. One afternoon I thought to myself, “You have auto-pinging technology built in to your product, Backlink Index Express – why not create a handy tool that leverages that technology and make it easy to use” – so I created PingThingr – the easiest Auto-Pinging software ever created.

PingThingr is desiged to be simple to use, quick to set up and is very effective. PingThingr auto-Pings your content; a great way to promote:

• Article Marketing Content
• Backlink URL’s
• Blogs
• Web 2.0 Content like Squidoo Lenses, HubPages, and more
• Google Places
• RSS Feeds From Social Monkee or Other Services
• Or, ANY URL YOU WISH!

Uses Ping-O-Matic

For years, I’ve used Ping-O-Matic – one of the top pinging services. One feature that of Ping-O-Matic that I have always liked is the fact that once you create a URL with Ping-O-Matic, you can bookmark the URL and use it to re-ping the same content over and over again:

So I gave it some thought and created software that generates two custom browser bookmarklets – one to create the Ping-O-Matic links, and then another to store that Ping-O-Matic link in a data file for use later. Then the magic happens when PingThingr processes this data file – and RE-PINGS your Ping-O-Matic URL’s UNATTENDED – AUTOMATICALLY, 24 x 7!

Watch This Video And See How Easy It Is:

Batch Upload A List Of URL’s

Have a big list of URL’s you want to ping and don’t want to go to the trouble of using the bookmarklet for each? No problem – just use the file upload feature of PingThingr. Upload a text file (up to 1 megabyte) of URL’s you wish to ping, one URL per line and PingThingr will add to the queue to be pinged. This opens up PingThingr to be useful for backlinkers who like to ping their backlinks, as well as those who already have a big list of content URL’s they want to ping.

Simple Install

PingThingr is a simple-to-install script that makes this all happen, simply, securely and with very little configuration. Just log into your PingThingr software, drag your bookmarklets, and start submitting content for Pinging – automatically.

PingThingr takes about 10 minutes to set up, and is a true, ‘set and forget’ type of program. As is my custom, I provide complete video training for setup and use. It’s designed to be used by anyone, from beginner article marketers to ‘pro’ bloggers and content creators. I use this utility every day in my own business, and I love it because it’s simple, and it works.   As with all my offers, you have a 30 day, ‘no-quibble’ guarantee.

Requirements: linux/unix web host, curl, PHP5.

The number one problem users have when they try to clone WordPress is that they have incompatible plugins.  Plugins that modify the .htaccess, provide redirection, sitemaps or caching often mess up the WordPress cloning process.  To be safe, I doable plugins like those mentioned before I make my backup – of course, I use BlogZapper, but you can do it by hand, too if you are technically inclined and have lots of patience.

WordPress Cloning Tips

The idea of WordPress cloning is simple: create ONE base site that has all the features you would likely want.  You set up the ‘base’ site with all your desired settings and options – then make your backup.  Here are some other tips:

• Keep your ‘template’ blog up and running – but not visible to the search engines (you can set this in general settings).  This is your ‘test mule’ for new plugins, etc.  Keep all your favorite themes and plugins loaded in this version of WordPress.
• You can add plugins and themes – but you don’t have to make them active.  I like to have my base install with ALL of the themes and plugins that I’m likely to use – that way you don’t have to go back and install them on each blog.  Re-work is a real time-waster, and the more you can do up front to speed your site creation, the better.
• Keep your ‘template’ install up to date:  when you see it’s time for a new WordPress version – update your template – same goes for the plugins.  After you update everything, shoot a new cloned copy and use that for future installs.
• Watch your blog’s security – there is a very good plugin called Ultimate Security Checker, run that plugin and try to get at least the easy security holes fixed on your WordPress cloning base template.  You don’t need to go overboard here, but it’s not a bad idea to get the easy stuff fixed, security-wise.
• Finally, have a system.  Site building can get time-consuming, particularly if you are doing lots of small sites.  That is why I advocate WordPress cloning – it just saves you time and gets your sites out there quicker, so you can make money faster!

WordPress cloning is one way a marketer can save time and trouble when building up a fleet of web sites for affiliate marketing or Adsense.  Take these easy-to-implement steps in advance and save yourself some trouble.

If you don’t have a backlinks program – that is, a strategy to build links to your money site, you are not going to succeed in internet marketing (unless you buy lots of pay-per-click ads!).  You need traffic to profit from your web site – and that traffic can some from three different places:

1. Pay-per click ads; Advantage: you get instant feedback and traffic, Disadvantage: costly.
2. Traffic from other sites: Advantage: targeted and free, Disadvantage: hard to get, time-consuming.
3. Traffic from search engine results: Advantage: again, targeted and free, Disadvantage: a bit harder to get, but the best bang for your buck in terms of time.

Traffic from search engine results is often called ‘Organic’ traffic – it comes from Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines – these visitors are looking for what you are selling, and that is what makes ranking in the search engines so important.

The way you rank is by building links to good content – period.  There is no real shortcut to building an effective backlinks program; you just have to make a commitment to do it.  Sure, you can help the process along by outsourcing, using backlinks software (like Backlink Index Express); but the bottom line is that if you want to build links, you have to get your hands dirty and do some grunt work.

Now if you read this blog regularly, you know I am a big fan of outsourcing.  It’s easy to find willing and talented people to do things like forum link building, social bookmarking and the like – just visit your favorite Internet Marketing forum, or check one of the jobs for hire sites, like ODesk.  Just be sure you  are entrusting your backlinks program to someone you can trust.  This part of your business is just too important to entrust to just anyone.

Four-Step Backlinks Program

1. Choose effective keywords that you can actually rank for – don’t pick keywords that are pie-in-the-sky. (See The Best SEO Backlink Strategy: Tips For Success).
2. Mix and tier your links – don’t blast all of your links to one page on your site with a whole bunch of different keywords.  Make each page represent one keyword and build your link strategy around that page.
3. Insulate your ‘money’ site from spammy links.  If you want to link a bunch of PR 0 forum links, don’t send those links to your valuable money page – use an intermediate page instead – or send them to a well-written E-Zine article that has the real link to your money page.
4. Be consistent – regular link building over time beats large, intermittent blasts any day.  Remember the story of the Tortoise and the Hare.

Your backlinks program is one of your most important activities – make sure you are thoughtful and careful when you start building links; it’s vital to your site’s success.

There are lots of way to build web sites, but most savvy marketers have settled on using WordPress as their platform of choice.  The reasons are many: easy to install, easy to customize and very flexible.  Many marketers who create lots of sites for affiliate marketing or Adsense make their living cloning WordPress blogs.

If you have never worked with WordPress before, at first it is a bit intimidating; there are so many options, so many controls, it’s hard to learn what they are all for!  Turns out for most people, only a few of the myriad of settings in WordPress are ever used.  It’s this flexibility that makes WordPress so popular.

A ‘No Headache’ Cloning WordPress Checklist

Whether it is for small, niche-focused sites, community blogs or even content management, WordPress really shines.  When I start to create a bunch of sites, here is my method: I build ONE site as a base and build the rest by cloning WordPress multiple times.  Here is my checklist:

1. Install the latest version – I don’t bother with the automated install from my web host, it’s usually several versions behind the current WordPress version.

2. Pick several themes that I will use in this group of sites – upload all of them to the base site, so you can pick and choose your themes.

3. I install some basic ‘must-have’ plugins: All In One SEO, Block Bad Queries, Clean SEO Slugs, Google XML Sitemaps, Smart YouTube and RobotsMeta.  If you have favorite plugins that you might use – install them, too.  You don’t have to activate them, but it’s smart to have them available in your base install if you need them.

4. Set the permalinks structure – select Custom Structure and type in /%postname%/ – this will give you search engine friendly urls.

5. In your All In One SEO plugin settings, check Canonical URLs – this forces the search engines to consider the optimal url for each post and avoid duplicate content.  For example, a blog url might look like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/post-title-here.  But another URL to the same page might look like this: http://www.yourdomain.com/post-title-here/comment-page-1/.  Obviously, you want the search engine to consider the first example as the ‘main’ url of this post – and that is what Canonical URLs do.

After all these steps are done I use BlogZapper to clone WordPress, although you can do it by hand- it’s not really recommended.  Use the automated tools to your advantage to save time and headaches.

There is more confusing information about backlinking than perhaps any other area of SEO and internet marketing.  When I created Backlink Index Express, the area of backlinking and backlinks software was just getting started.

Before the ‘modern’ era of back linking strategy, most backlink were of the ‘reciprocal’ variety; that means I link to you, and you in turn back link to me.  It was discovered that these arrangements were not very effective, as it was easy for search engines to smoke them out – particularly since most sites at the time had a backlink resources page – that means just a page full of unrelated links to various other sites.

Now it is accepted that one-way links to your site are best and that has spawned a whole industry of backlink resource providers – including services, software and a plethora of strategies, some simple, some complex – and some even contradictory.

Backlink Resources Ideas:

Here are some ideas you can implement in your linking strategy- so you can come up with your own backlink resource toolkit.

1. Outsource the creation of Forum Profile Backlinks – these are simply accounts on discussion forums – most of the discussion boards allow you to put a profile link on your ‘about me’ page.  Great place to put a link.
2. Comment on relevant blogs – although not as effective as they once were, blog comments do provide link juice and if you find a blog that will take your comment – do everyone a favor and don’t spam the heck out of it, please?  Maybe someone else might benefit – and you’ll benefit too by being able to use the site long-term.
3. Index your backlinks – use software tools to run the url’s you create with your links and post them to some type of blog network or at least bookmark them.
4. Keep track of your progress – many people just blast out link after link and don’t analyze the results.  Use a rank-tracking program to measure the effect of your backlinking efforts.  The SEOBook web site has a good free tool.  If you are going to the trouble to implement a series of backlink resources, it makes sense to track the progress of your time and effort.
5. Finally, don’t neglect other aspects of your strategy just to build backlinks.  You have to have good landing page content, a compelling offer and a good tracking system to have a good, well-rounded marketing system.

In the past, link strategy was simple – you just traded links with other sites.  Today, it’s more complicated and requires the use of more sophistication, software and better tracking of results.  Don’t neglect the other aspects of your business, but really do make an effort to concentrate on building some effective backlink resources you can count on this year; you’ll be very happy with the results.

If you want to make money with affiliate marketing or Adsense websites, you will have to create lots of sites.  In the past, older solutions generated static pages and you used desktop software to create new sites.  Now WordPress has pretty much taken over as the platform of choice for most marketers.  Why?  – There are several good reasons:

1. WordPress blogs are loved by search engines and rank quickly.
2. There are tons of free plugins to aid with ad placement, affiliate links and the like.
3. Themes are easily added to provide variety and make for a very attractive web site.
4. You can manage your site’s features and content from anywhere – using just a web browser.

WordPress requires a database and a fairly large upload of files to create a base installation, and you may wonder if all of that overhead is overkill for a small 10 page web site to promote a simple product – and to a point, you would be right.  But WordPress has become for the web site what Microsoft Word has become for the desktop – it’s large and a bit bloated, but the convenience features make all of the overhead worth it.  Can you imagine writing a document without spell-check?  It’s the same thing with WordPress – I could not live without all the easy-to-implement SEO and other features.

Clone Your WordPress Installation

I recommend that you create a ‘base’ install and then clone the WordPress installation – and use that clone over and over as a template for your new site.  Create a WordPress install – I prefer to install the latest version by hand rather than use my web host’s instant installer as often these installers don’t have the latest version of WordPress.  Then I add all the themes, plugins and set all the options that I’m likely to use for a group of web sites.  Then I clone my WordPress installation for later use.

You can do all of the cloning by hand, but I prefer to clone WordPress with the BlogZapper program – it makes it easy to clone a WordPress installation in just a few clicks.  When I create my clone, I upload all the plugins that I’m going to need, but I don’t actually activate all of them – sometimes plugins need to be activated on a ‘live’ site, particularly plugins that influence the .htaccess file or provide caching services on the blog.  I just enable those manually.

The best way to create web sites rapidly is to clone a base WordPress installation.  It will make you more efficient, and will allow you to create sites faster and be more consistent.