Overview

When it comes to Article Submission and Search Engine Optimization, little is more important that rank tracking, except, of course, keyword research. Everything always starts with keyword research before any meaningful can be accomplished, but once the campaign is under way, tracking your progress is crucial to the overall campaign’s success. There are many levels of rank tracking software available, from simple to complete and generally there are two types of software as well, locally run programs or hosted subscription plans. Rank Tracker by SEO Powersuite is the former – a local application.

On the spectrum of simple versus complete solutions, Rank Tracker is certainly at the end of the “complete solution” side of the scale. We have been using Rank Tracker for years and are very glad that we made the investment in it. Rank Tracker is designed for power users or those that have multiple websites, though it is simple enough to use for anyone to get full benefit.

Local Versus Hosted Rank Tracking

There are really two different approaches when it comes to rank tracking software. Either you purchase a program and do it yourself or you can pay a service to track for you and you just login and look at your data. Both approaches have their distinct pluses and minuses. The big advantage of a monthly online service is that it is done for you and automated and also that you can access the data anywhere you have Internet access. The disadvantages are that you are locked into whatever feature set they offer and generally have numerous restrictions on number of projects, domains and keywords – not to mention a recurring monthly fee.

We have always done our own rank tracking and primarily use Rank Tracker for about 95% of our needs. We do occasionally use Market Samurai to handle tracking of double listings and projects which span multiple domains (see below where we talk about what we don’t like). The reasons which we prefer a locally installed program like Rank Tracker are primarily centered around control and flexibility. We track many thousands of keywords for dozens of clients and our own arsenal of sites, doing so with an online solution would be cumbersome for us due to various limitations we’ve encountered with most online solutions. Furthermore, through intelligent configuration and customization of Rank Tracker you can set it up to automate most of the tedious tasks such as emailing reports or updating ranking stats.

Core Features

Rank Tracker works on a domain metaphor, so you start a new project by assigning the domain to be tracked and then adding keywords. Next you simply go out and update your ranking data. It really can be that simple. However, the real power of Rank Tracker is all of the inherent flexibility that is built in and the virtually limitless level of customization available.

To start with, you can view a variety of vital data all at once in a simple to read grid format – keyword, rank, search volume data, change in rankings since last checked, the URL that is ranking and many, many other fields depending upon your current workspace or your personal customizations. Rank Tracker defines many different standard workspaces that you can choose from that will show you different pieces of the puzzle, but the best part is that you can simply define your own as well. In fact, the workspaces can be 100% user definable if you so desire. You can select what data to display, the order of the columns as well as different filtering of data that is applied to the workspace. For example, I use a workspace that I call my “Money Makers” and another one I call “On the Verge”. My money makers workspace uses filters that only look for keywords that meet specific search volume requirements as well as only looking at keywords that are ranked in the top 5. This is a quick and easy way to see the core performing keywords. I also setup a “On the Verge” workspace that shows me keywords that are sitting in positions #11 thru #15 so that I can quickly see good candidates for that little extra effort to bump them onto page #1. Changing these “views” (or Workspaces as Rank Tracker calls them) is super easy and makes using the tool quick and efficient.

At every level you will find that Rank Tracker has been built and designed for a pro. For example, you can select with search engines you want to check rankings for from dozens of countries as well as dozens of different search engines. Little touches really make the difference between simple tools and power tools and Rank Tracker doesn’t let you down. For example, there is a “notes” column that you can add to your workspace and it is user editable so that you can attach any textual data you want at the keyword level. I use this frequently when sorting or grouping keywords, or for prioritizing as well. Across the top of the keyword listing is also a quick filter. This is super easy and lightning fast. You can select what fields you want to filter on and just type in a quick keyword and it will only show you the results that match your filter. This is great for reducing the number of keywords that you’re looking at to just a few tightly grouped or related keywords that all might contain a specific word, for example. Or, as I frequently use it, in conjunction with the user notes which can also be filtered.

Reporting

The first thing to understand is that Rank Tracker will store all of your historical ranking data. This is imperative for any Rank Tracking software so that you can look back and see historical performance data. This data is displayed onscreen and is also, of course, available via reports. The reporting engine of Rank Tracker is exceptional – not just good! First of all reports can be generated in HTML and automatically uploaded to a site if you wish, or created as PDF files and automatically saved locally or emailed. There are tons of options here so that whatever your need, it is likely support.

However, Rank Tracker doesn’t stop there. There are numerous reporting output formats and including my personal favorite, SQL. That’s right, you can directly export your data (and, yes, this can be automated as well) so that it can be easily loaded into your own database. The way that it works is that it creates a big text file of SQL INSERT statements that can be batch executed. With a little creativity you can have Rank Tracker automate the task of updating the rank data, automatically create the SQL for the data and then automatically upload that data to a location of your choice. Then a simple cron job, for example, can automatically batch process all of that information and load it into your own custom database. This is powerful stuff. But don’t worry, if you don’t need all of that functionality, Rank Tracker works just fine in its base configuration as well and provides extreme value no matter what you’re looking for.

Furthermore, the reports themselves can be completely customized and modified via an internal scripting language extension that is built in to Rank Tracker. This is really powerful and a godsend. You can design whatever type of report you can think of using their scripting language and I have created several of them. For example, we expand the reports for our clients and “explain” them more with additional textual information so that they are not quite so overwhelming. We also exclude certain data that we don’t generally report on to keep the reports a little simpler and cleaner. To modify a report its pretty easy, but if you don’t have any scripting or programming background you may be better off opting to just outsource it. What I did was simply copy one of their standard reports and then “modify” if to my liking and got it about 90% to what I wanted. Then I emailed support and they got me the rest of the way. By the way, their support is also exceptional.

Automation Tools

There are several tasks which can be completely automated with Rank Tracker and this is where its power really shines through. For example, you can setup and schedule recurring tasks that will check all of your rankings for a certain project or an entire list of projects. This is very simple and straightforward to do. Simply select the frequency to run the task and assign a time and frequency.

Rank tracking can be automated and so can reporting – the two most time consuming tasks. This means that you can set it up to check your ranks every night and email you a report, for example. The reports, by the way, are also “brandable” so that you can alter their design and branding to reflect your company. Though they do not allow you to seamlessly setup multiple companies, this, unfortunately is a manual process (another item we’ve been working with support to help develop).

Extra Features

There are so many features with Rank Tracker that I am certainly leaving some of them out. However, I wanted to touch upon some more key extra features that Rank Tracker supports. The first of which is support of software proxies. If you’re doing any seriously amount of rank tracking, you’re going to get irritated quickly when you start getting temporary Google IP bans from repetitive searching. There are many things you can do to minimize that and Rank Tracker “knows” all of those tricks. But in the end, if you’re dealing with thousands of keywords, you’re gonna need a software prosy. For those that don’t know a software proxy allows you to simulate like you are coming from a different IP than you actually are. This can be very useful for escaping the temporary IP bans because it makes Google think you are sending in requests from a bunch of different locations. We rotate through about 50 different IPs and can just fly through the ranking updates this way. This is highly recommended if you’re tracking more than a 100 keywords or so.

Another surprising feature (we used the software for months before we even knew this hidden gem existed) is that you can actually use Rank Tracker to help you perform keyword research as well. It will use your existing keywords as seed text and then go out and bring back a ton of suggestions for you if you like. It even has some very diverse sources for keyword data – not just Google. For example, it is currently the only tool I am aware of for keyword research that will allow you to find Google Suggestions keywords. Google Suggestions are those little drop down suggested keywords that show up when you start typing a keyword in the Google search box. These keyword suggestions do not necessarily align with Google search data from the External Keyword Tool and can be a great way to find hidden gems. Think of it this way, if Google feels that the keyword deserves to be on that suggestion list then it is effectively saying it’s one of the 10 most popular alternatives – that’s good to know. This can be especially useful for low traffic keywords where you may not have much, if any, data available.

What We Don’t Like About Rank Tracker

As happy as we are with Rank Tracker, it is not without shortcomings, though for most these will not be significant. There are really two areas that we feel it just doesn’t do well and for both of these features we end up turning to ranking tracking within Market Samurai. The first deficiency is with regards to tracking double listings. Quite simply, Rank Tracker doesn’t have support for it and this is a limitation that frustrates. It will only report on the first match it finds and will not show you if you have another URL also ranking for the same keyword.

The second limitation is that it does not allow you to create a project that spans multiple domains. Each project much be focus around one single domain. Neither of these limitations is severe, but we have been actively working with support to get them addressed and have been told that both will be coming in a future release.

Pricing

Rank Tracker comes in different versions and even a free version so that you can test it out for yourself. There is also a Pro version that is $99 and an Enterprise version at $249 (that’s what we use). Many of the best features are found in the Enterprise versions – such as custom reporting, exporting features, as well as other features. One thing to consider is that the SEO Powersuite can also be purchased as a bundle and will include SEO Spyglass (review coming soon) – another big recommendation of ours. By purchasing the entire suite you can combine pricing and save money.

Rank Tracker Bonus Offer

Rank Tracker Software is by far one of our favorite and most crucial applications that we use. And when you start watching your rankings climb you may require some content for your website to keep things fresh or maybe for distribution to get you some more links. If you purchase Rank Tracker through our link we will send you five (5) FREE 100% custom created articles for whatever keywords you are marketing after. The articles are provided by ArticlesOnTap.com, so you can be assured they are top quality, 100% unique articles between 400-450 words. You will also receive a 10% off coupon code for any future orders of articles from ArticlesOnTap.com. To redeem these bonuses simply click one of the orange buttons to take a tour of Rank Tracker, make your purchase and forward your confirmation email to support@articlesontap.com with the subject of give me my bonus. Once we confirm your purchase was made through our link, you will receive your bonuses.

First of all, what I’m going to talk to you about is the basics. But, to move on to advanced keyword research techniques you must first master the basics. Think of a pro basketball player for a minute. The difference between the amateurs and the pros is that the pros have absolutely perfected the basics so that they can move on to more advanced techniques. You’ve got to walk before you can run, so let’s get started.

We’ll be talking about using Google’s External Keyword Research tool. This is by far the industry standard of free keyword research. Now, personally, we use more advanced tools – Micro Niche Finder and Market Samurai – but everything we’re going to discuss here applies to all three. The biggest mistake most people make when performing keyword research is that they are looking at the wrong numbers. Google provides you with various types of search numbers and, unfortunately, the default is the least useful. The default search numbers will be “Broad Match” results and while we do look at those numbers, if we could only use one, we would only use “Exact Match” search numbers. Let’s talk about that a bit…

We are not fans of the broad match search numbers because we find them to be very inflated and inaccurate. Exact Match numbers and not perfect either, but we have found them to be much more accurate. The first fact that you have to acknowledge is that none of these numbers are accurate. They are all accurate to only some plus or minus 20% threshold – if that good. So for all of you Type A personalities out there, you can’t take the numbers at face value. Instead you need to step back a bit and look at them relatively – comparing one to another with the same set will give you fairly predictable results. However, looking at a number and trying to predict exactly how much traffic you will get by that number is a futile endeavor. Furthermore, the lower the traffic value get, the more distorted the data. We have had many sites whose primary converting keywords show up as “no data” in the Google search tool. Don’t believe that.

But what is the real difference between exact match and broad match? It’s easier to show with an example than to explain. An exact match will match only the exact keywords, without synonym expansion or any phrase matching, whereas a broad match will match that keyword anywhere within the phrase or even synonyms of that keyword. There is also a third match type called phrase match which will match the keyword as a portion of a larger phrase.

Let’s say your keyword is “car insurance”. Exact Match would only return results if a user typed that exact keyword phrase – “car insurance”. Phrase match would match any keyword phrase where “car insurance” was found. For example, “car insurance Omaha” or “Nebraska car insurance”. Broad Match is even more broad than that and will also use synonyms, term expansion and other Google proprietary information to return results.

How Broad is Broad Match?

The bottom line is that no one really knows the exact formula for broad match results and for that very reason it is the least reliable. Furthermore, Google changes that formula from time to time and the search results data will change as well. Awhile back, many people witnessed a phenomenon where long established and successful PPC campaigns just went to hell in a hand basket. What happened was that Google redefined what constituted a match in the broad match algorithm and suddenly people started seeing their highly tuned PPC campaigns producing crappy results over night. Google “loosened” its match criteria in order to bolster ad sale revenue (the more matches meant more potential clicks and Adsense income). This was so widely reported that most accomplished PPC advertisers nowadays don’t even use Broad Match in their advertising strategies.

Our Recommendation

What we do is do all of our primary analysis with Exact Match results. SERPs rankings are always at the exact match keyword level anyway, so it just doesn’t seem to make sense from our standpoint to see these big “glory” numbers. We call them that because it makes people feel good to chase a big number but the reality is that it’s not about the amount of traffic but the nature of that traffic. It’s no good to get 1000 unique users a day to your site if they are not targeted users and you’re not getting solid conversions. We’ve seen many 5 figure a month sites that get less than 10% of that traffic, yet the traffic they do get is extremely targeted and high converting traffic.

Exact match values will be lower, but they will paint a more realistic picture for you. Sometimes the picture can be radically different when comparing Exact Match and Broad Match results. Keyword A may have 3 times the traffic as keyword B when you look at Broad Match results, but when you switch to Exact Match results you might actually see the numbers reverse. Again, this is all because of the MMM Google Broad Match Formula (MMM = mystical magical math – LOL) – no one knows.

Where to Go Next

From here you start to analyze and compare keywords relative to one another based on their estimated traffic values, their commercial intent and your inherent knowledge and educated guess of consumer intent. All of that begins to define the more advanced stages of keyword analysis.

Our process is bottom up, wide to narrow. We start with long tail keyword research and work up – the exact same way we approach SEO. Start by dominating the long tails in your niche and work up from there.

A lot of guides out there will give you certain numeric values and say to not target traffic less than 3000 local exact or 1000 local exact, etc… We really don’t believe that it is that simple and we’re not going to BS you and tell you that it is. The traffic volume of the keywords that you should go after is all just part of a complex analysis of your site, your niche, your existing and desired authority within the niche as well as substantial competitive analysis. I wish there were some simple formula, but I’m here to tell you that there isn’t. And if you purchase some eBook telling you an exact formula, etc… I can guarantee you that it is worthless. The facts are, they write that crap to sell eBooks because it’s what people want to hear. They want an “easy formula”. But the real world doesn’t work that way. Think of it like this: if you could summarize keyword research into a mathematical formula then the entire process could simply be automated. But it’s not and it isn’t. So you’re much better off learning the intricacies of doing it right yourself.

At First…

A new marketer that is not intimately familiar with SEO will likely start with a single tool. The logic is that they’ll start small, see how it goes and then add or change tools or services down the road. So they start off on their article marketing and SEO campaign with the latest and greatest tool.

At first things are slow – that’s pretty much the way it always goes. Then after some consistent effort for a few weeks they start to see some results and become convinced this new tool is working (indeed, it is). Now, positive momentum and their belief in this whole “SEO thing” starts to kick in and they begin aggressively using the tool. If a little was good, then more must be better, right?

The Bomb Drops

This usually continues for a three or four month total time period and then, not always, but often times their site, overnight, drops its rankings 100+ positions. Their rankings that were on page #1 are now on page #12. So, what the heck happened? And why?

This very common problem has been observed by us for numerous clients and members of our coaching program (NOTE: If you’re interested in the coaching program submit a ticket via the helpdesk and we’ll get back to you subject to availability) – it is actually pretty common. Most newbies incorrectly assume that they’ve been manually penalized by Google. But let me tell you, that is extremely rare. Google simply doesn’t have the time or resources to look at very many sites manually. Instead what has likely happened is that you’ve come up across some programmatic threshold and Google has automatically reassessed your sites rankings and found them to be “suspect” so it’s bumped you back and will continue to observe.

You Gotta Pay Attention…

SEO is a long-term iterative process that relies upon observation and adjustment. But if you’re not tracking your results and tracking your rankings you’re really flying blind! For a free resource you can use SEOBook’s Rank Tracker. It is very limited, but for a single site and tracking of a few keywords it’s okay. No reports, no history or bells and whistles, but it will do the trick on a tight budget. However, the moment you can, step up with SEO Powersuite’s Rank Tracker. This is a full fledged Rank Tracking software that can be set to run automatically, generate reports to PDF, automatically email those reports, track thousands of keywords across unlimited domains, directly export to SQL for long term database archiving, and much, much more. I wouldn’t give it up for anything. It even has some powerful keyword research capabilities that other tools can’t touch – like the ability to search for keywords against the Google Suggest keywords (those suggestions that Google throws up when you start to type into the search box).

What to do?

So, what do you do? First of all, relax. After all, if you’re playing in the realm of SEO, you must bow to the Google gods and they’re not always very gracious or receptive – it’s just part of the process. Okay, so now that you’ve “taken a breathe”, here are the things that you need to do. First of all, don’t stop linkbuilding. That’s right, don’t stop. If your site looks “suspicious” and they bump it back and you get disappointed and stop, well you’ve just confirmed their suspicions. Just keep plugging away at about the same pace you’ve been, but you need to shift your strategy around to combat the likely culprit – over-optimization.

Understanding Over-Optimization

So what is over-optimization? In a nutshell it means that your site linkbuilding profile doesn’t look very “natural”. In other words, when a site obtains links organically, they are very, very diversified. They have miss-spellings, they have big long sentences that are all hyper-linked, they have useless anchor text like “click here” and “download this report”. And, most importantly, they have a lot of links to the domain with various flavors of the domain name as the anchor text – www.domain.com, http://www.domain.com, Domain.com, domain com, domain (dot) com, etc… This is what you find when you analyze sites that have a very organic link profile – it’s natural. But newbies often think “I’m spending all of this money on SEO I don’t want to waste it on useless links” and so all of their links are 100% anchor targeted – that’s just not natural. If your site is brand new and has 200 links total and 95% of them are “best weight loss product”, well, that just doesn’t look right.

So, initially your work is paying off and you’re seeing good results, but then suddenly you hit some magic threshold (sorry, you’ll have to consult the Google gods to know what that threshold is) and they flip a switch on your site. More than likely, however, you can recover from this pretty quickly.

Still Indexed?

The first thing that you want to do is to make sure that your site is still in the Google Index. If it has been de-indexed, well, that’s serious and it’s beyond the scope of this post (that means, yes, you can officially be worried now). To check if your site is in the Google Index, just issue this very simple search:

site: yoursitename.com

If it’s still in the index, you should get a bunch of search results back – the pages that are Indexed by Google. If you get no results, then double check you didn’t make a typo somewhere because short of that the very unfortunate news is that you indeed have been de-indexed. If you have been, well, you really need to assess if it’s even worth continuing to work on that domain. Being de-indexed is serious and may take many months to recover from – if ever. Google has essentially “black-listed” your site.

Getting Back on Track

So assuming you’re still indexed, but sitting back in the low 100’s instead of page 1 or 2, here’s what you need to do. The best way to combat this is to immediately change your linkbuilding and shift it in the other direction for awhile before stabilizing on a more natural all around approach. So for a couple of weeks, just do about 80% of your links to the domain as the anchor text as well as other non-relevant anchor text and keep your targeted anchor text to only about 20% or so. The point of this is to shift the total numbers site-wide to be more natural. Since you were exaggerated in one direction at the beginning, we need to overcompensate a bit now to swing the pendulum the other direction. After doing this for a couple of weeks, you should settle down to an overall balanced and appropriate mix for a natural linkbuilding profile.

Spy Your Way to Success…

If you want to do this right, you need to examine the competition in your niche. Each niche is different. Some have 20% non-optmized links – some have 60% – there really is no one size fits all answer. You just need to roll up your sleeves and dive into the analysis of the top 10 sites for your keyword and see what their numbers look like. You can really learn a lot by digging into all of their links and anchor text and “comparing” them to your site. This simple step is probably the most overlooked and easiest method for getting onto page one. All the answers are right there in front of you, you just have to look. There are a couple of ways you can do this. For one is via Yahoo’s link count reporting. It’s free, but you know the old saying “you get what you pay for”. It will likely take you dozens of hours to examine your competitors this way – that’s working harder and not smarter. What we suggest is SEO Powersuite’s SEO Spyglass. Alternatively you can use Market Samurai – it is more limited, but it also has other very useful SEO Competitive Analysis features. We personally use a combination of both. SEO Spyglass is an incredibly powerful SEO analysis tool that will look at all of your competitors links and bring back tons of data for them – the PR of the link, the PR of the domain for the link, the number of links on that page, the strength of the length, the anchor text, etc…

Using this technique we’ve helped many sites bounce right back up into the rankings. Sometimes it takes a few weeks, but we’ve seen it work as quickly as three or four days too – it just all depends. If this does not work then there are other factors going on outside of the over-optimization issues. Likely culprits are that you have a very high bounce rate on the site or very low visitor time on site, etc… – things that lead Google to conclude that your site is simply not very valuable. Another possible culprit is too much linkbuilding relative to the traffic you’re getting. If your site is not getting hardly any traffic, doesn’t have an RSS subscribers, etc… but yet you’re dropping 30 links a day to it, well, again, it just probably doesn’t look right to Google.

One More Thing…

Lastly, there is another three month phenomenon that occurs where instead of dropping abruptly, the rankings just begin to “slowly wither”. You find it odd because you’re doing the same thing you’ve been doing effectively the past three or four months, but suddenly the more you work the less of a difference it seems to make. There are many possible causes of this situation, but one of the most likely culprits for newbie SEO’ers is that they have been using the same tool and nothing else for this period of time. What has likely happened is that you have exhausted the domain diversity of the tool and so the new links that you’re getting just don’t pack as much punch as they did a couple months ago.

Let’s explain that a little further. There is a difference between having 200 links from one domain and 200 links from 200 domains. Each link is essentially a “vote” from that site to yours. Who do you think Google is going to view as being more popular – the guy with 200 friends all voting once for him? Or the other guy with one friend voting 200 times and stuffing the ballet box? This is referred to as domain diversification and it is important in your natural linkbuilding profile. If the tool or service that you are using has a small number of domains that it distributes too, then after a certain period of time you just begin to get a bunch of repeat domains for your postings and thus they begin to lose effectiveness. This is one of the very reasons that we recommend you use various products and services and keep mixing it up.

Good luck!

At the core, both products are designed to help you get articles and content for your site, but the approach is very different. First off, Jon Leger released Instant Article Wizard Pro a while back. This product is mostly a research product or a topical content searcher. We’ve been a bit concerned that people would use it inappropriately because it essentially scrapes small pieces of content from the Internet for the topic you research and generates small snippets or paragraphs of content. Now the problem with this is that the content that is generated is not yours – it’s scraped from other sites. It is good for “research” or to take that and output an article for the sole purpose of rewriting it. For example, use it to create an article that you send to your VA and request a rewrite. It’s very good for that.

Instant Article Factory, however, takes a very different approach. First of all, it does not have anything to do with scraping content from other sites – it is all about generating fresh new content. The problem with writing a bunch of articles, however, is that it can be very time consuming. What Instant Article Factory does is partially “assist” you in this process. How does it do that? Well, it has a whole bunch of templates that are essentially a “fill in the blanks” model of writing. They reduce the time and effort required to write a quality article and will help reduce the cost of your article content creation needs. Now, another thing that Jon, best known for his The Best Spinner product, has done is intelligently incorporate article spinning into the product. Here’s what I mean. Each of the templates is, in fact, a piece of spun content. So when you generate a new article from the template, it will spin the text in that template to give you a substantially new variation. This is really key to the process, because the number of templates is limited, but fortunately via the intelligent use of spinning, they will generate a lot of versions.

Article Spinning: The Secret Sauce

Article spinning, if you’re not familiar with it, is the concept of taking one piece of source content and intelligently varying the text for the purpose of generating various versions of that content that, while they all say basically the same thing, are unique content. Article Spinning is as much as an art as a science and most tools out there flat out suck. Sorry, but it’s true. Most article spinning tools produce crappy results and that has led many people to the false conclusion that article spinning is neither effective nor practical. The reality, however, if quite the contrary. Article spinning can be a huge time and cost saver, but you have to do it properly. We use the best article spinner technology on the market today, coincidentally named The Best Spinner and we highly recommend it to you as well.

So, in summary, one tool is a research tool and the other is a content creation tool. Both have the ability to significantly improve your content creation process, saving both time and money, if used wisely. Our feeling is that both of these really tie in well if you use a VA as part of your business management practices. Offshore VA’s can be very affordable but oftentimes the quality of their writing is sub-par. You could use Instant Article Wizard Pro for very quick research and send your VA a “master article” for them to complete re-write. Or, you could set them up with access to Instant Article Factory and have them use the template based approach to generate lots of unique articles for you. By using either of these approaches you will likely get better results from an overseas VA as well as faster results (thus more affordable) as well. Of course, if you are doing your own article writing, both of these tools can help you in the same manner.

The first principal that is very important is that you must have the right SEO mindset. You must understand that SEO is a long term advertising “investment” in your business. It is not a do it once and forget it solution. Just like advertising in the yellow pages. You don’t run a yellow pages ad for a week – you run it for months, or years – it’s an “on-going” investment in your business’ advertising. SEO, article marketing and article submission should all be thought of the exact same way – a long-term business advertising investment. Okay, off the pulpit now and onto the meat…

Pay Per Click is something that many people are scared of because of the horror stories with the costs associated with it. And to some extent, you are justified in being cautious with Adwords. A couple of years ago it wasn’t such a big deal. Just about anyone could throw up a campaign and have mild to good success. The technical aspects haven’t changed much, but the difference is that today clicks are a lot more expensive than they used to be. So throwing up a quick campaign is still pretty easy to do, however, it may not be very fiscally sound to do so. Many, many tools have come out in the past year to 18 months that do some pretty amazing stuff with Adwords campaigns and they are all geared towards minimizing the costs so that you can get a more profitable campaign setup. That is becoming more and more of a challenge for the average person to do nowadays and you almost have to have specialty software and tools in order to manage profitable campaigns. Personally we use statsjunky to monitor our PPC campaigns and couldn’t make do without it. But this post is not about setting up a profitable Adwords campaign – to the contrary – we’re not even concerned with profitability with this approach. Okay, that got your attention… so let me explain…

Be Smart With Adwords

The easiest way to protect yourself with your adwords spend is to establish a maximum daily budget and monitor your account daily. This way your ad will simply stop showing when you hit that threshold. Remember, however, that this is a daily amount.

One of the great benefits of Adwords is that you get near realtime feedback. You know right away whether you’re getting impressions, clicks, whether you’ve got a good keyword or not – it’s almost instantaneous. Search Engine Optimization, on the other hand, is virtually the opposite. You can take sixty or ninety days of sustained effort to get a keyword onto page #1 or top 5 or whatever, only to find out that it’s a non-converting keyword (ask me how we know – LOL, we’ve done it guys). So what I’m suggesting here is not that you try to create some long term PPC campaign – that is a separate topic altogether. What I am suggesting is that you use the right tool for the job. If you’re trying to figure out what keywords to chase, you’re probably well advised to spend $100 or $200 on an Adwords campaign just for “research”. The purpose of this campaign will be just to find out which keywords are “buy” keywords.

So, the strategy would be to keep the ad text the same for all of the keywords and throw a bunch of different keywords in the campaign that are individually tracked through your buy page via Google Analytics conversion tracking (or a third party tool). You must be doing keyword level tracking for this exercise to be of any value to you. Remember the goal here is to “learn” which keywords convert to sales and which don’t. You may be very surprised at the results and it may dramatically affect your SEO approach for the site. In fact, upon examining the results, you may completely change strategies or even abandon the project altogether. And while you might think that you’ve just wasted $100 or $200, in reality you may have saved yourself months worth of work and expenses.

Before You Start…

Remember that it all starts with keyword research. Whether you’re looking at Adwords to help you or going straight to SEO, you need to thoroughly research the keywords and the competition for those keywords so that you know if you have a chance or not and how much effort will be required. Our strategy is to use two tools: Micro Niche Finder for keyword research and Market Samurai for thorough SEO competitive analysis. The two combined make a great 1-2 punch, but if you can’t get ‘em both, at least go with Samurai – you don’t want to lose out on its SEO Competitive Analysis capabilities. You can read more about them here:

• Micro Niche Finder Review
• Market Samurai Review

This approach is not recommended for everyone. If you don’t have some decent experience with Adwords, you might be better served to contract with an SEO service provider to run a short campaign for you. Keep in mind, most SEO companies really don’t like this – they charge setup fees to avoid one-time campaigns like this. So you’ll have to shop around a bit. But, Adwords is not for the faint of heart. The benefits, however, can be well worth it. By narrowing down your keywords to a select group of “converting” keywords, you will dramatically reduce your SEO costs and the time it takes to get your SEO monthly budget “in the black”. You will be armed with the information of which keywords to invest in and which to run from – that is almost like being able to see the future. Now you just have to get the rankings you need with sustained and consistent SEO and article submission effort.

Overview

We’ve had a review up for Blog Blueprint for awhile now, but just recently the Blueprint guys rolled up a few of these related products into one bundle called the SEO Blueprint – Article Blueprint, Blog Blueprint and Link Blueprint all rolled up into one. For a detailed look at just Blog Blueprint, check it out here: Blog Blueprint Review

We’ve long said that article marketing and article submission is a combination of various tools and various products – that one tool will not be some magic bullet for you. What we like about this product is that it combines some of the pieces into one very affordable solution. You get three tools for one low price that rivals what others are paying for just one of these services. The three included tools, as mentioned above, are Blog Blueprint, Link Blueprint and Article Blueprint. Our favorite of this mix is the Blog Blueprint product, and honestly we recommend this threesome mostly for it alone and consider the other two a “bonus”. The fact is that Blog Blueprint is alone worth the price of this threesome of tools. We’re not going to talk much about Blog Blueprint here since we already have a full review of it on the site. So let’s talk about the other two products.

Article Blueprint is a fairly straightforward article submission program. It is quite similar to Unique Article Wizard in its approach of assembling multiple versions of content that it stitches together and distributes out for you. We have used it a little, but not enough to really comment on its effectiveness. It is fairly straightforward to use with a wizard style interface that walks you through the submission process. We ran a few articles through it but have not used it much as we have several other article submission programs that we use. However for someone who does not already own an article submission tool this would work quite well, at last check we believe they had about 600-800 article directory’s listed.

Link Blueprint is an interesting solution for trading and/or acquiring links. Essentially it works on a credit based system. You add links that you are willing to sell/exchange and then you are awarded credits for them. You then can use those credits to get links for yourself as well. So maybe you have a bunch of low quality links that you want to exchange for a higher quality link. This may be an interesting solution for you. Personally we find it easier to create links with our tools and subscriptions than to trade for them but that is a personal choice. The tool itself appears to be a good approach for those wanting to get into link exchange, and some people swear by these 3 way link exchanges. Personally we are not giving away links from our sites, we are kind of greedy that way when we build links, all take and no give.

Blog Blueprint is really the strength of this trio and what we like the most. It is super easy and a completely minimalist design. You simply input a title, a 100 word blurb with one link and select a category – nothing more. It couldn’t be easier and it is very fast to work with because the interface is also very easy. It does have a 20 link per day maximum, but that’s about 600 links a month and is a pretty good start for your site. The maximum imposed isn’t really a factor unless you’re trying to run a bunch of sites through it and if that’s the case you may just want to buy a couple of subscriptions (they allow that and we do it).

Spin Away

The only tool that would make sense for spinning support here is Blog Blueprint and it does not directly support spin ready content, however unlike others such as Linkvana and Build My Rank they will support you posting spun content to their network. However, we have been using Blog Blueprint for several months now and have submitted thousands of posts to it that we spin away without any issues whatsoever. We use The Best Spinner to spin up a set of spun content blurbs and then publish them out for several days at a time. Although Blog Blueprint restricts you to 20 links per day, there is no restriction on how many you can upload at a time. So we typically upload an entire week or months worth at once and just “let it roll” out at 20 a day. This is the style we like to do things – in batch and on autodrip so to speak.

The Structure

These are three completely separate and standalone products. They are bundled together here in one subscription price, but they are three distinct tools. So you will have three different sites that you go to, three different logins, etc… The one thing that we like most about all of the “Blueprint” products is that they are minimalist. There are no frills, no fancy HTML, no impressive design and graphics – just straightforward tools that do what they advertise. We like the old phrase “say what you mean and mean what you say” – that is exactly what these tools do.

Other Features

As we’ve said above, there really is not a lot of extras. We like this vendor because they don’t play the endless bonus gimmick games. They simple deliver quality tools. For example, their SEM Business Blueprint product is a quality course that shows you how to setup your own SEO business. They also have a quality niche marketing product called Niche Blueprint and their flagship product is Commission Blueprint. We have used and purchased several of their products and they have all been very well put together and informative. So when they came out with Blog Blueprint, we were all over it. We’ve been using it for several months now and have multiple copies of it because we are very impressed with it.

Now, on the topic of other features, there is one thing you may wish to consider. They do have another product that is called The Internet Marketing Advantage or The IM Advantage for short. It is more expensive, but comes with a ton of stuff bundled into the package including all of these tools. The IM Advantage is about twice as expensive, but you also get the following items as well:

• Social Blueprint – This is a social bookmarking tool that allows you to submit urls and have social bookmarking links created for them automatically. The really nice part of this tool is that it integrates with your Blog Blueprint account and automatically builds links for your links (similar to what Linx Boss does). This tool is only available through The IM Advantage package.


• Commission Blueprint 1.0 – Now they have released a new version 2.0 of this program, but this package sold for $497 and is included for free in your subscription. It’s a great resource.


• SEM Business Blueprint – Again, this is a great resource that is still being sold separately for $197 but you get a free copy of it with The IM Advantage.


• Training Videos – You get access to a lot of private training videos and resources exclusive to their members.


• Other Exclusive Items – Want to find out what keywords you can get from Adwords for just a nickel? Or where you can get access to a list of thousands of sites which have do follow commenting available for profile llinks? There are several other tools and resources just like this as well as other free complete courses included.

The IM Advantage is really a separate product, but we’re mentioning it here because it is a natural progression from the SEO Blueprint trio. Since it includes all of these products and adds the Social Component as well, we feel it is a solid product just for those items alone. The other features are just “bonus”. We are a subscriber and user of The IM Advantage so don’t take this as some fluffed up hype promotion. We’re telling you about it because we use it.

The Results

We’ve seen good results in rankings and link counts from the use of Blog Blueprint over the past few months. To us the proof is in the pudding – the rankings – and Blog Blueprint has been one of our weapons in achieving solid rankings. What we like best is that it is simple and produces results. The fact that we can queue up content for a month at a time (or more if you want) and just let it “do its thing” is great. This is especially powerful because of their very spun content friendly stance.

Pricing

Pricing for this trio is just $67 – which in our opinion is a steal. Again, we primarily use Blog Blueprint, but feel that it alone is worth the $67 price point. Many other products similar to Blog Blueprint cost more than twice as much and don’t include these other tools as well.

Bonus Offer

SEO Blueprint is a very potent Linkvana alternative, and we have been using it for months with great results. However it wont do you much good without some content to post to SEO Blueprint. If you purchase SEO Blueprint via our link we will send you ten (10) FREE 100 word Blog Blueprint posts each month you stay subscribed to SB. The posts are provided by ArticlesOnTap.com, so you can be assured they are top quality, 100% unique articles ready to post. You will also receive a 10% off coupon code for any future orders of articles from ArticlesOnTap.com. You wont find a SEO Blueprint coupon here, but the ArticlesOnTap coupon will come in very handy for content. To redeem these bonuses simply click one of the orange buttons to visit SEO Blueprint, make your purchase and forward your confirmation email from SB on to support@articlesontap.com with the subject of give me my bonus. Once we confirm your purchase was made through our link, you will receive your bonuses.

When it comes to rank tracking there are a few things that you should be doing and one very important thing that you should not be doing – obsessing. Tracking your rank for each keyword is vital and you should be doing it as part of a well structured SEO campaign. However, you can easily get obsessed with the numbers and start spending way too much time on them as well land that is not productive.

Here’s a quick list of the do’s and don’ts of rank tracking…

Rank Tracking Do’s…

• Setup Weekly Reports – Weekly is good enough, don’t fall into the trap of wasting time every day on this.


• Archive the Reports – You need to be able to look at historical data, so make sure you save it or are using a program that does that for you.


• Pick 2 Sets Of Keywords – Your primary keywords that you are doing your SEO work on and then a larger set that you periodically monitor as well just to get a sense of the overall direction of the site. We will typically have 4 to 10 keywords in the primary set and maybe 100 to 200 in the secondary. We’re not that concerned with the secondary large set, it is just used to get a feel for the overall direction of rankings on the site as a whole. As authority for the site increases, you’ll see rankings pick up site wide and this larger set is usual for that analysis.


• Re-Evaluate – Go over your keyword strategy every 60 days and reexamine your choices. Make sure to consider other options and to correlate your suspicions and findings with analytical data (Google Analytics, for example).

Rank Tracking Don’ts…

• Track Daily – You will see too many fluctuations and likely get caught up in it too much and waste too much time. If you’ve got a program that does it automatically and you want to, go ahead, but be cautious to not get diverted too much.


• Put On Blinders – Sometimes you have a desire to chase a certain keyword, but it’s just “not happening”. You’ve got to be open to look at what Google is “giving” you and don’t try to force things. If you’re getting placements on other keywords, go with that – or at least look at it. The same is true with URLs. Often times you target one URL but another is ranking. Make sure to reexamine your choices – sometimes those that we covet are not the best keywords to chase and we can easily get tunnel vision and fixate on them.


• Lose Track of the Big Picture – You’ve got to remember that rankings are simply a means to an end which is sales and conversions. So don’t get obsessive about rankings at the cost of conversions.

What We Do

There are lots of rank tracking software programs on the market today. Some are hosted plans that you subscribe to on a monthly fee basis and others are local tools that you purchase and run yourself. We use the latter. A monthly subscription program may suit your needs, but for us we find them far too limiting. They tend to be very restrictive on the number of keywords you can track, etc… and if you go wide open with them they get very expensive on a monthly basis. They also tend to be more controlling about the data and we like to have the data to play with ourselves. Keep in mind, we do SEO for clients as well and so we have tons of keywords we’re tracking and reporting on, so our needs are not necessarily the same as yours.

Rank Tracker Review Coming Soon…

We are preparing an in-depth review of Rank Tracker so that you can see why we like it so much. Stay tuned as we should have it completed and on the site within the next week or so…

We have used many programs but in the end have settled with Rank Tracker by SEO PowerSuite. It has an incredible amount of features and I won’t try to go into all of them here. But here’s the short list of our favorite features:

• It can be scheduled and automated to run one or all of your reports daily, weekly, or whatever other schedule you want to put in place.


• It is extremely simple to administer and, more importantly, customize. You can very easily modify the reports and screens to your own needs.


• Supports “notes” at the keyword level. This is an awesome option that allows us to track certain aspects of a client project via notations and then sort or filter by those notations.


• It support software proxies so you can get fast results and for lots of keywords without getting IP bans from Google. Again, not important for most, but HUGE for us tracking thousands of keywords for all of our sites and client sites.


• Direct data export to TXT, CSV (for Excel) or even SQL statements so that you can directly insert into a database. This is really powerful. They approach this with the mentality that “the data is yours – how can best give it to you” – I love that approach! All of the reports and exports are all user customizable – great stuff.


• Tons of other features, including keyword research that rivals some of the best tools out there. They can even pull in keywords from the Google Suggests lists – very good stuff…

Another tool that we sometimes use is the Rank Tracker module inside of Market Samurai. Now, keep in mind, Market Samurai is not on the same level as Rank Tracker. It is a multi-purpose tool and does many, many other things – primarily keyword research and competitor SEO analysis. However, the Rank Tracking module of Market Samurai has some very nice features that the current version of Rank Tracker does not support (I have spoken with support and they assure me the next version will). For example:

• It allows you to track multiple domains in one project. This is very cool for some of our clients who have many, many domains and feeder sites all tracking after the same keywords. We can put in a list of the keywords and a list of the domains and Market Samurai will track it all.


• Tracking of double listings. Market Samurai will show you multiple returns for the keyword. So if you’ve got a URL ranking at position #6 that you’re trying to get better rankings you may find that you have another URL sitting at position #14 as well that is a potential candidate for a double listing. This is a very nice feature.

Overall, we mostly use Rank Tracker, but we do some supplementary work with Samurai as well. We’ve found, however, that Samurai can be a bit off on the results and miss a lot of stuff. But in general, it’s a solid option.

As always, there are free options that you can use or you can just track in the browser window and log the results yourself. That, however, is not recommended. Google uses personalization settings and can show you better results that everyone else which will be very misleading. You also have to understand that there are many data centers and tracking in a browser window is highly suspect. A better option if you’re going the free route is to look at Rank Tracker by the SEO Book guys. It integrates with their toolbar and is fairly easy to use. The problem with all of the free routes is that they don’t have many options nor do they do a very good job of preserving your data, presenting it via charts, etc…

The most important approach, however, is to keep it simple and be consistent in your tracking so that you can monitor your progress. You will have peaks and valleys. There will be times when despite your work your rankings just go down every day. But you’ve got to keep at it and plow through those times. With historical data that process becomes easier because you can look at the trends in the past and realize that “hey, I’ve seen this before, just gotta keep marching forward”.

The data can “show” you that and it is enlightening. Look, for example, at the growth of this keyword below:

As you can see, there are many “peaks” and “valleys” along the way. Many are actually cut off this chart as it is only showing the past six months of progress and is also only looking at the top 50 positions. But you can see that your results will bounce around – that is common – but with sustained effort you’ll see them continue to climb – even if slowly.

Overview

Well Jon Leger is up to his old bag of tricks again, and out of his bag he is just about to pop out Instant Article Factory. Instant Article Factory is a guided, template based article producing wizard that has a lot of Jon’s signature “spun” tricks thrown in for good measure. While this product has not yet been released, we wanted to give you some quick information about it so you could see what’s on the horizon.

We all know that writing articles can be a pain. It’s laborious, time intensive and not exactly the most fun way to spend your evening. However, many cannot afford to purchase content either and so their article marketing needs suffer. Or worse, they hire someone very cheaply (usually from <name your foreign country here> with a thick written “accent”) to write their articles and wonder why they are full of grammar errors or “odd” wording and structure that we don’t use in the US. The end result is poor quality or that you just give up on article marketing. But the reality is that article marketing is very important to getting lots of links for your site and improving your search engine rankings. Fortunately Jon understands this and seems to be on a mission to make article writing easier.

Jon has already produced market changing software like The Best Spinner, Keyword Snatcher and Instant Article Wizard Pro and now he’s about to release another – Instant Article Factory. The concept behind Instant Article Factory isn’t anything revolutionary – there have been other similar products released before. But the way Jon approaches everything with article marketing is with the “spun” backbone behind it – and that makes for a winning combination.

So, how does Instant Article Factory work? Quite simply it is a “wizard” that walks you through the creation of an article by filling in the blanks to some questions and completing partial sentences on an onscreen form. You start out by picking a pre-defined “template”. For example, a template might be something like “The Top 5 Reasons Why…” (now the last part is left blank on purpose). So, you pick this template and it will walk you through filling in a bunch of questions and completing some sentences and it will use that data to compile an article of approximately 300+ words. The templates themselves are “spun” content, so even if you use the same template, you will get different results. The templates are also organized in such a manner as to minimize the amount of writing you have to do so that you can really crank out an article fast.

So, just how fast is it? Jon walks you through the process (explaining as he goes) and it only takes him 3:38 to complete an article. Now, if you’re a fast typer I can easily see how you could do an article in about 2 minutes or less. That’s pretty darn quick and sure makes the tedious and mundane process of article writing much, much easier.

Spin Away

Instant Article Factory follows Jon Legeder’s The Best Spinner approach and fully integrates spinning into the article creation process. First of all, the templates that you select from are spun templates. This means that there are various versions of the boiler plate text that you are using to seed your article with ensuring you will have more uniqueness in your output article. Secondly, Jon allows you to put spinning into the text of your user-supplied content as well. So, as you fill in the blanks, you’re free to use the standard spinning syntax supported by The Best Spinner within your content. This gives you even more freedom to make the content unique.

The Structure

The way the program works is really pretty straight forward. (check out the images below – click on them to zoom in) After you log in you select Article Templates to select the template you want to base your article on. There are lots of different template variations and, remember, each template is spun as well so it has several inherent different versions already. Jon has expanded the templates quite a bit and I’m sure there will be many more to come. At the time of this writing – July 12th, 2010 – there are 17 different templates. Here are just a few examples:

• 3 Reasons You Should…


• 3 Things to Avoid…


• How To … In 3 Steps


• Product Review


• Pros and Cons…


• The 5 Golden Rules Of…


• Top 3 Tips…


• And several others as well…

As I said, Jon has already updated these a couple of times, so I’m sure that many more will be coming and the list above is just a sampling of the 17 currently provided. Okay, so now you have a template selected. (check out the images below – click on them to zoom in) Next you simply walk through it and fill in the blanks. The text is logically arranged so that this is an extremely straightforward and simple process – not to mention FAST. Jon demos this and shows how he creates an article in under 4 minutes using this software – it really is that fast and easy. Many of the boxes that you need to fill in, will be automatically filled in with “suggested” text that you can either accept or modify or delete entirely – it’s totally up to you. Lastly, you save your article. It is then saved to your account for future use and it also presents you with the final product – both visually as well as in a text box that you can copy/paste easily.

Now, it truly is that simple. However, there are some things you can do to “spice it up” if you want. For example, the program supports spinning of the text you enter. So you can go through and spin some of the words or phrases till your heart’s content. Personally, what we do is just ignore the spinning and save the article. Then we take the output article and run it through Jon’s best invention The Best Spinner and spin the *entire* article. If you spin within Instant Article Factory you will only be spinning part of it and we like to be a bit more thorough. Plus, by using The Best Spinner, you get all of its features and benefits and the process goes much, much faster than trying to manually spin within Instant Article Factory.

Other Features

Another nice feature that is just beginning to take off, is the use of “user templates”. This brings a community aspect to the program and allows users to create their own templates and contribute them to the community. This is a great feature and I’m sure it will help get many more templates going quickly for the entire user base of Instant Article Factory.

Another Neat Idea…

So another great way to use this tool is to have your virtual assistant use it to write articles for you. Give your assistant the topics and let them churn out a few different articles for you. They will likely produce better quality articles and a lot faster as well – a “win-win” for both you and the assistant.

The Results

The results are just as expected – simple, fast and reliable. We are actually pretty impressed with the quality of most of the templates and the results that the generate. At first we thought the product might be a bit of a gimmick, but after using it for a few days now (we got an early release copy for evaluation) we were very pleastantly surprised. The resulting quality of the articles is good and you can make them very good if you just put in a little bit of effort. Take the time to give thorough information and answers in the “fill in the blanks” forms and you will get a much better end result. As always, you will get out of it what you put into it.

What We Don’t Like About Instant Article Factory

Every now and then we found some text that we thought was a “little awkward” in the spun templates. In fact, if you zoom in on the second one of the images above you’ll see an example of what I’m talking about – “so what is the truth right here?”. Probably some sort of spinning artifact that needs to be cleaned up. But these small errors are both infrequent and easily corrected, so while less than perfect, it’s still very, very good. In general most of the templates are pretty clean and robust. The only other thing we don’t like is the annual renewal, but, as software developers we understand the need for that. Programs take a lot of time and effort to develop, so having a recurring annual fee is something that we can accept. Besides, the price is so affordable that it is really a non-issue.

Pricing

The pricing is $77 with an annual rebill. Now, the rebill is not something we’re super fond of, but like we said above – we understand. If you think about it though, that is really dirt cheap. There are no monthly fees or monthly bilings – just a once a year $77 fee and if you divide that out over 12 months it is a rediculously cheap less than $7 per month! Now, you can’t even outsource even ONE quality article per month for that, so again, we feel the price is very affordable.

Instant Article Factory Bonus Offer

Instant Article Factory appears to be yet another amazing tool by Leger who apparently does not sleep. The thing is you can create article an amazing pace with this tool, but we can help you with article creation as well. If you purchase Instant Article Factory through our link we will send you two (2) FREE 100% custom created articles for whatever keywords you are marketing after. The articles are provided by ArticlesOnTap.com, so you can be assured they are top quality, 100% unique articles between 400-500 words. You will also receive a 10% off coupon code for any future orders of articles from ArticlesOnTap.com. To redeem these bonuses simply click one of the orange buttons to visit Instant Article Factory, make your purchase and forward your confirmation email from Instant Article Factory on to support@articlesontap.com with the subject of give me my bonus. Once we confirm your purchase was made through our link, you will receive your bonuses.

Other Related Information

The Best Spinner Review

Instant Article Wizard Pro Review

Comparing Instant Article Factory Versus Instant Article Wizard Pro

Instant Article Wizard Pro is a very simplistic piece of software – but don’t let that fool you. It can really help you produce some great results if you use it properly. Jon Leger has built a solid reputation of no-frills quality software, and Instant Article Wizard Pro fits that bill as well. It has a very singleton purpose – finding you content – and does that very well. The premise is pretty simple – fetch snippets of content and combine them to create new content.

How it Works

You give it a keyword phrase to search on and Instant Article Wizard Pro will go out and find you a bunch of snippets of content related to that keyword phrase. It typically will bring back a couple of congruent sentences from each source and then combine two or three of them to form and an on-the-fly paragraph about your topic. You will get several such paragraphs of content for each keyword. Then you simply read through them and select the ones you want to use and copy them down to your workspace. From there you have assembled a block of content that you can use for the basis of your research for a new article. It really is that simple.

How To Effectively Use Instant Article Wizard Pro

So, now you see how it works – and, like I said, it’s really pretty basic – but how does it fit into the article submission equation? How do we use it? And why do we like it? The fact is that when you are using numerous services for distribution of content, the key becomes acquiring the content. Instant Article Wizard Pro is great for helping out in just that regard. Where we have found it to be extremely useful is in creating spun content blurbs for services such as Linkvana, Blog Blueprint and Backlink Solutions. These services all accept small blurbs of content – 100 to 150 words in size – and include one single link. Now there are a couple of different ways to get or generate that content. You can simply write it yourself (a bore). You can pay someone else to write it for you (a better option) or you can look to repurpose content via an article spinner. We do all of the three because we use all of these services and several others as well in our linkbuilding efforts.

Getting Better Results

If you’re searching on “article submission” for example, don’t just enter article submission as the keyphrase. The trick is to enter a key phrase that could be used to begin a sentence such as “article submission is”. Now if you enter that keyword phrase instead you will get much better search results.

Here is the best way to use Instant Article Wizard Pro – in our opinion – and the way we use it. First of all, this is very, very important. DO NOT copy other peoples content. The purpose of this tool is to find other content and give you ideas for writing, etc… but do not just simply copy that content and re-use it without modification. To do so would be a blatant copyright violation and just plain unethical. So, how do you use it responsibly? Simple. You generate a block of content with Instant Article Wizard Pro of say about 200 words or so. Then load it into our favorite article spinning tool, The Best Spinner. Now, one of the nice features that The Best Spinner has is the ability to rewrite content by replacing the original content rather than just adding additional versions/variations. What we suggest is that you do a couple of things, either rewrite the sentences manually or, at the very least, use The Best Spinner to rewrite them via its rewrite capability. Now, you have a piece of content that is original that you can use as the basis of your blurbs. So, just treat it like you would any other piece of content and spin it appropriately.

Now, what we do is use this in conjunction with The Best Spinner for tools like Backlink Solutions that allow a single stream of content to be uploaded in one fell swoop. This really makes this a quick and effective method for generating a bunch of links with minimal manual work. With Backlink Solutions you can put several versions of content all into one big stream of say 100 posts. Then you can copy and paste those 100 all at once into Backlink Solutions and boom – you’ve got a 100 links going out just like that. And with The Best Spinner it is super easy because when you go to export the versions there is an option that allows you to combine them into one export text stream automatically. Now that is the kind of efficiency and time savings that we like!

Pricing

The pricing for Instant Article Wizard Pro is very affordable at $27 a month. The only downside is that it is a monthly subscription but then again, if you’re not getting $27 worth out of it you shouldn’t use it anyway. Look at the cost of your time – even if you only use a baseline like $10 an hour it doesn’t take much to justify $27 a month. Furthermore the cost of content is also pricey so in our opinion it’s a steal. The thing is, you’ve got to use it for it to be worth the money. Best of all it has a 7 day trial for just $7 so you can try it out yourself and make sure it’s a good fit for you – that’s what we recommend. Give it a shot and see if you find it useful.

Conclusion

While there are other purposes and uses for Instant Article Wizard Pro than what we outlined above, this is our method for using it. For example, you could use it to create a quick article that you send to your VA’s for them to rewrite or to use for research for them to write a quality article about. For us it is well worth the very affordable price. It simplifies some of our content creation and that alone is worth the price of admission.

Instant Article Wizard Pro Bonus Offer

We like this product and while it is quite simplistic, we’re okay with that because it does what it sets out to do. While we normally offer free spun content and articles as bonuses for this product that really doesn’t make much sense. However, if you purchase Instant Article Wizard Pro from our linke we will provide you with 5 of our High Powered Backlinks from our private network. We will create one spun blog post and send it to 5 of our private PR3 or higher blogs to give you a sample of what they can do for you. Each post will have 2 backlinks from the site of your choice – they do not have to be from the same domain, but we can only use the same two URLS for all 5 posts. You will also receive a 10% off coupon code for any content orders from ArticlesOnTap.com in case you have a need for any further content or SEO. To redeem these bonuses simply click one of the orange buttons to visit Instant Article Wizard Pro, make your purchase and forward your confirmation email from Instant Article Wizard Pro on to support@articlesontap.com with the subject of give me my bonus. Once we confirm your purchase was made through our link, you will receive your bonuses.

We get tons of questions like “what is the spin syntax for (unique article wizard or spin distribute or any other tool here)?” or “what is the difference between MyArticleNetwork and SEO Linkvine spin syntax?” So today I thought it would be good to do a quick blog post on the different spinning syntax’s out there and which tools use which.

Nested Spinning Versus Flat Spinning

First of all, we need to talk about the two types of spinning – flat spinning and nested spinning. Flat spinning is also called simple spun format or single level spun or also Jet format – but all of these names mean the same thing. A flat spun article only has one level of spinning, not multiple levels. A nested spun format, like The Best Spinner native format, allows you to spin phrases within phrases or multiple levels of spinning. Now, different tools support different levels of nested spinning as well – you’ll have to consult your individual tool for those numbers, but honestly 2 or 3 levels is all you will normally need.

Let’s describe both nested spun and flat spun with a sample.

Sample sentence.

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Flat spun example:

The {quick|fast} {brown|gray|red} fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Nested spun example:

The {quick {brown|red|gray}|smart} fox jumped over the lazy dog.

Note that in this sample there are 2 levels of spinning and the output would be:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick red fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The quick gray fox jumped over the lazy dog.
The smart fox jumped over the lazy dog.

So you may ask, “What’s the big deal with nested? Why do I need it?”. Well we use it every single day and honestly it’s a pain in the a** when the program we’re dealing with does not accept nested spun content. Fortunately, at our request, Jon Leger modified his The Best Spinner software to directly convert from nested spun to flat spun format. Thanks again Jon! Here is the situation where you will most use the nested format, although there are many others. The way we use article spinners and the way we recommend you use them is a combination of manual and automatic work. The first thing we do is go through and manually rewrite every single sentence two or more times. This produces much more textual variation than simple synonym replacement (the search engines are not as dumb as you might think). Then we go back through and do synonym level spinning as well. Step three is to set a few of the sentences or paragraphs to optional as well for even more variation. If you follow this approach, you will have to have a nested spinner. Here’s what the content would look like:

This would be the first pass, where you would manually rewrite each sentence (two versions in this example):

{The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.|While just taking a siesta the dog was startled by a quick brown fox that leaped right over him.}

And here is what it would look like after a second pass of synonym replacement:

{The {quick|fast|speedy} brown fox {jumped|leaped|hopped} {over|right over|over the top of} the {lazy|sluggish|care-free|relaxing} dog.|{While|Although} just {taking|having} a{| little| quick} {siesta|nap} the dog was {startled|shocked|surprised} by a {quick|fast|speedy} {brown|dark brown|brownish} fox that {leaped|jumped} right {over|over the top of} him.}

Using this technique will produce some pretty good spun content as you have multiple seeded original versions with variations. On top of that, we recommend you always write more than you need and make some of the sentences optional as well. If you look in the above example you will see that there is an optional section of {| little| quick} that precedes “siesta or nap”. Now if you look carefully you will see that the first parameter is blank because immediately after the curly bracket is a pipe sign meaning that the first parameter is “empty”.

Pay Attention To Optional Phrase/Sentence Syntax

Note in the example above the careful use of spaces. When you use optional words, phrases or complete sentences you need to be cognizant of the way the interpreter will handle spaces so that you get the desired end result. Otherwise you will have sentences or words that are crammed together with no spaces in between, too many spaces, etc…

Okay, so now you understand the basics – nested and flat spun syntax. So let’s move on to the specifics. By far the most prevalent format of spinning syntax is the Jet format – both in flat or nested variations. This is what The Best Spinner uses, Magic Article Rewriter uses, Rapid Rewriter ues, Automatic Article Submitter, Unique Article Wizard and many, many others. Quite simply it uses left and right curly brackets to delimit a spinning block and pipe signs to separate versions. So, here’s an example:

The {blue|red|green} balloon.

Or a nested sample…

The attorney was {{|very }{fast|quick}|aggressive} with the settlement.

Spin Distribute uses a little different syntax as it replaces the curly brackets with square brackets and only supports the flat spun format. In essence it is the same as the Jet format, but with square instead of curly brackets.

Example:

The [blue|red|green] balloon.

Lastly are My Article Network, ArticlesRanks and Article Marketing Automation. They both use an odd 2 level nested syntax that is different on each level. The first level uses the curly brackets for the spinning block and tilda’s for version delimiters, the second level uses square brackets for the spinning block and pipe signs for the version delimiters.

Example:

{This is the [first|very first] sentence.~This is [another|yet another] version.}

Most of the programs out there will fit into one of these three categories above.

Summary Table of Article Submission Software Spinning Syntax

NOTE: Backlink Solutions supports spinning, but the blurbs you post in cannot be spun, so you use an article spinner (their’s or The Best Spinner – our recommendation) to create the spun variations and them paste them into Backlink Solutions. However, if you use The Best Spinner, you can directly output all of the versions – up to 250 of them – into one single text stream file that you can simply paste right into BLS and upload all 250 versions at once.

NOTE: It should also be noted that the various article spinning software programs out there – Magic Article Rewriter, Rapid Rewriter, The Best Spinner – while they may work in a native format generally convert to various output formats.

Well, I hope that answers some of your questions about spinning syntax and comparisons between various programs and tools. If not, drop us a comment/question and we’ll expand further!

Enjoy!