If you have read this site for any amount of time, you probably know that I am a big fan of Jonathan Leger and his products. Both The Best Spinner and Article Builder are some of my favorite tools in my internet marketing toolbox.

Jon’s next product is an interesting keyword research tool called Keyword Canine. I’ll be writing an in-depth Keyword Canine review when it actually comes out, but for now I’m going to do a quick and dirty preview.

Keyword Canine, will be a web-based service and it currently has 3 main selling points: Keyword research, Niche Discovery and Backlink Reporting. Lets take a closer look at these 3 features.

Keyword Canine Keyword Research

Keyword Canine will allow you to do a search for any particular keyword and return you various metrics that allow you to judge the ranking difficulty of your chosen keyword, provides you with the keyword traffic stats, and a look at the SEO competition for that keyword.

Some of the metrics it will show you are:

• Average Page Rank of Top Results
• Number of Page Backlinks
• Number of Site Backlinks
• A single Difficulty Ranking score
• Availability of exact match domains
• Top 10 ranking sites in Google

Keyword Canine Niche Discovery

If you don’t have a keyword in mind, you can also take advantage of the niche discovery feature to help you find keywords to target. In the background, Keyword Canine will be continually analyzing its database of millions of keywords to find specific keywords that you can build niche sites around.

There will also be various filters that you can use to make it easier to sort through the list of keywords that it presents.

Keyword Canine Backlink Reporting

Finally, Keyword Canine will include a backlinks report capability. This will be integrated with the keyword research reports, or you can just type in any url you want to bring up a backlink report.

The backlink report will include a breakdown of the anchor text, page rank, nofollow/dofollow, and alive status of each of the links to the page. Blekko is currently being used as the backlink data source.

Initial Thoughts

While none of the Keyword Canine features are particularly groundbreaking, the service looks pretty interesting and I will definitely be testing out. Accuracy is the key, particular with the Difficulty ranking score and the Niche Discovery feature. If these work as promised, then Keyword Canine has the potential to be really useful for us marketers.

I have not seen any release date or pricing info yet. From looking at the feature set, I’m guessing that it will use a monthly subscription based model. As I learn more, I will be continually updating this post.

I am always skeptical when I read about the various make money online systems that appear in my inbox every day. But one program that caught my eye is called the Empower Network, by David Wood and David Sharpe. This is because it was recommended to me by someone I trust, so I decided to sign up and check it out it for myself.

On a basic level, the Empower Network is a viral blogging platform. But if you dig down deeper, it is actually more than that. And if you have the ability to promote it properly, it really has the potential to make you a lot of money. Of course you are still pretty skeptical about what I am talking about, so let me explain how it all works in my Empower Network review.

What Is The Empower Network

The Empower Network launched on October 31, 2011 and in the 53 days since it launched it has attracted over 13,000 paying members and paid out over $2 million in commissions. According to Alexa, Empowernetwork.com is already the 324th largest site in the US. Pretty impressive, right? You will see why after I explain the setup.

A basic membership to the Empower Network gets you access to the viral blogging platform and it will cost you $25 a month. Essentially, it is a hosted platform for you to blog on, similar to WordPress.com or Hubpages.com. It fact it uses WordPress on the backend, so it should be familiar to most of you already.

To see it in action, you can take a look at my own Empower Network blog here:
http://empowernetwork.com/joshkotsay

How Will Empower Network Make You Money?

To see why it is considered a viral blogging platform, check out my Empower Network blog more closely. Notice the ad in the header, the sidebar ad, and the banner ad on the bottom of the page. It utilizes the Facebook comments system (which is viral in nature) and it has social sharing button everywhere. So if anyone clicks through any of the ads on the page, they get sent through the sales funnel and your affiliate id is cookie’d.

Ok, that’s great. But why should you care?

Because if anyone signs up via your link, you get 100% commissions, sent instantly and directly to your bank account. So if someone you refer purchases a basic membership you will get $25 a month recurring commissions.

Not only that, but the Empower Network uses a tiered commission structure.

You see, the first sale you make goes to you, but the 2nd, 4th, 6th and every 5th sale after that goes to your Empower Network sponsor (the person who referred you). As you recruit more people to join under you, and these people recruit their own people, you will continually be taking a cut from all the people under you. Over time, this means a lot of money for you.

And it actually gets better…

There are also a couple of upsell products that people can buy. First, there is the Empower Network Inner Circle, which is a set of audio interviews from members who are already making 6 figures a year. This is a $100 a month. Then there is the Costa Rica intensive training program which is a $3000 seminar that David Wood presented this year. This is an additional $500 one time fee.

If someone you refer purchases all these upsells, then you can potentially earn $625 up front, and $125 a month recurring commissions. And that’s just the products they offer now. There are other products in the pipeline as well which will only increase your commissions.

Now here’s the ingenious part of the system.

You can only get those upsell commissions if you purchase those products yourself. If you haven’t bought the product yet and someone buys it through your link then that commission goes up to your sponsor. So essentially you are heavily incentivised to buy all the upsells yourself for maximum commissions.

Empower Network Blogging Platform

That’s all well and good, but if the blogging platform doesn’t work, then everything else don’t matter.

What really made me interested in joining the Empower Network was the possibility of using it as a powerful Web 2.0 link building property ala Hubpages.com.

Not too long ago, Hubpages was my favorite Web 2.0 property because I could write articles on it with a link back to my site. Google loved these hubs, and I had several hubs ranking #1 for several keywords.

Now post Google Panda, Hubpages.com is no longer very affiliate friendly. They discourage the use of affiliate links and some of my hubs were taken down because they talked about topics they didn’t like anymore (like article spinning for example).

With my EmpowerNetwork blog, I think I have found my replacement. It is completely affiliate friendly and you can pretty much post whatever you like on your blog. You can promote other products or just use the link juice it provides to help your other sites rank better as well.

I mentioned earlier that Empowernetwork.com already ranks as the 324th most visited site according to Alexa. By the same measure, Hubpages.com is ranked #207. In less than 2 months, EmpowerNetwork.com has quickly climbed up to become one of the most powerful sites on the internet.

Empower Network Blogging Results

I’ve only been a member for a short period of time now, but I am already encouraged by the results I have seen so far.

Here is an example of one post I have written:

http://www.empowernetwork.com/joshkotsay/blog/articleranks-vs-traffickaboom/

Almost immediately after posting, it ranks #1 in Google for the keywords:

ArticleRanks vs TrafficKaboom
TrafficKaboom vs ArticleRanks

Sure, it’s not the most competitive keyword, but they are targeted, buying keywords that will help me earn some additional commissions. But more importantly it tells me that Google already sees EmpowerNetwork.com as an authority site. And it’s easy to see why.

In the Empower Network training, they tell you, you have write a post to your blog every day. So in theory, every member is doing this and building links to their content and trying to get their posts ranked higher. And as more and more links are being built, the EmpowerNetwork.com becomes more and more of an authority site.

As I continue to write more posts on my blog, I will be sure to keep this Empower Network review updated with my latest results.

Empower Network Quick Tip

Here’s a quick tip for you to try. Before even joining, take one of the Empower Network banners and stick it on any of the sites you own and track how many people click on it. If you are seeing a decent number of clicks per day, then there is a good possibility you can make money with it.

Empower Network Final Thoughts

With all the hype you see written about it, you may think that the Empower Network is a scam. But from what I’ve seen so far, I think it seems legit to me. The blogging platform is good, the training is useful and the system as I understand it appears viable.

While I am still a new member of the Empower Network, I am pretty excited about the possibilities. If you already are an influential person, with a loyal following already then I can see you making a ton of money with it right away. Just show people how you make money with it, and you can easily get your followers excited to sign up under you.

If you are just a regular guy like myself, then seeing results might take a little more time. But I think with a little bit of work, the Empower Network has the potential to make you some serious money if you can promote it right.

I’ve also put together a nice Empower Network bonus package for anyone who joins our team. Not only will I personally help you to learn my link building system, you will get a bunch of other exclusive goodies as well.

Ready to get started with the Empower Network?

1. Watch the sales video and pay close attention to how well their sales funnel works.
2. Check out my Empower Network Bonus.
3. Join my team and start your blog.
4. Receive your bonuses and let me help you start making money.

If you have any questions about the Empower Network, please leave your comments below.

One of the blog networks I have been using for a long time now is ArticleRanks. At first glance, it may seem similar to other public blog networks out there, but it does have a couple unique features that make it worth using. Not only that, but I’ve done some case studies with it that show I can get results with it. So in this ArticleRanks review, I am going to share with you what makes it one of the more effective blog networks you can start using.

ArticleRanks 2.0 relaunched in June, 2011 and it featured a newly revamped interface and some significant changes to it’s membership plans. Like other public blog networks, Article Ranks allows you to submit spun articles and add links back to your sites (up to 3 links per submission).

ArticleRanks Membership Options

ArticleRanks now has 3 different membership options and it is still one of the few blog networks left that allow you to make submissions for free. There is a catch though. You have to add your own sites to the ArticleRanks network to receive content. Depending on the page rank of the blogs you add, you will build up credits which you can use in turn can be used to submit your own articles.

Until very recently, I had been using the ArticleRanks free plan and it is still quite effective. The downside of the free plan is that you are limited to promoting only 5 sites at a time. Article syndication rates also seem lower on the free plan than the paid plans. So with the free plan I was typically getting my articles sent out to about 20-30 blogs per submission.

If you decide to go with a paid plan, you can choose between the Starter and Pro Plans. The Starter Plan is a very reasonable at only $39.99/month. This allows you to promote up to 10 different sites at a time. The Pro Plan is quite a bit more expensive at $89.99/month. However, this plan allows you to promote unlimited sites and send out unlimited articles. So which plan you choose, depends on your link building needs.

If you only have a couple sites to promote, then the free and Starter plans are perfectly fine. If you have a lot of sites like I do, then you may want to opt for the Pro plan.

Using ArticleRanks

ArticleRanks uses the standard { ~ } syntax for its submissions. It does include its own internal spinner, but I normally use Vita Vee’s Ultra Spinnable Articles or the Super Spun articles generated by Article Builder and there are no problems directly submitting either one. If you are trying to use your spun articles across multiple networks, I would suggest you use this SpinnerTools site to help you convert your articles to the appropriate ArticleRanks syntax.

ArticleRanks has a fairly standard submission interface, but I’ve always felt it’s slightly inefficient. For example, trying to preview your article is a multi-step process that is hampered by the fact that the ArticleRanks server seems to be consistently sluggish and slow.

The interface is also pretty quirky with certain browsers. For example, when using Google Chrome, it messes up the formatting of your articles until you save it and re-edit again. This is not a show-stopper, but you will probably save yourself some grief by using Firefox instead.

ArticleRanks Results

ArticleRanks does have a large established network of blogs. It is mostly a mix of user contributed blogs and blogs added by the ArticleRanks owners themselves. The PageRank of the blogs are not particularly high and I have found that the average PR of sites in the network is less than 1. However the IP diversity of the network is pretty good which means you will be getting backlinks from a wide range of IP addresses which is very important for good rankings.

For a more in-depth analysis, you can check out the ArticleRanks case study we did over at the Link Building Lab. I even show how I was able to rank a site I built from scratch just using ArticleRanks submissions.

One nice feature that ArticleRanks has recently introduced is the fact that it now build backlinks to your submitted articles. That’s right, backlinks to your backlinks. It uses social bookmarking sites to do this, and it is certainly something that does improve the indexing rate of your articles. This is a nice advantage that ArticleRanks offers that many other blog networks don’t.

ArticleRanks Pros

• Use for free if you submit sites to network.
• Good network IP diversity.
• Automatically builds backlinks to backlinks.

ArticleRanks Cons

• Buggy when using with Google Chrome.
• Slow and quirky submission interface.

ArticleRanks Final Thoughts

I have been using ArticleRanks for a long time now, and I am still quite happy with it. It is a reliable blog network that consistently delivers good results. I do wish they could somehow fix the general slowness of their server, but for now it’s just something to deal with.

If you are just starting out with building backlinks using blog networks, then ArticleRanks is certainly one of the first networks you should try. Start yourself out with the free plan, and then upgrade from there when you need to.

I just got an email from Brad Callen, talking about the upcoming launch of his new product, SEO Link Monster. This new sevice is a collaboration between Brad, his brother Matt Callen and Dori Friend.

I honestly don’t know much about Dori, but I have bought many of Brad and Matt’s products in the past. Two of them that I have used quite a bit are SEOLinkVine and My Article Network. Both are popular blog networks that have done a good job in the past of increasing the Google rankings of many of my own sites.

As everyone who reads this blog knows, I pretty much test every link building system or service that comes out. So even though the details about SEO Link Monster are scarce, I am now eagerly anticipating the launch when it comes out on February 7th, 2012.

I will probably be first in line to fork over my money for it, sight unseen.

What Do We Know About SEO Link Monster?

Not much really.

So far, I have just heard that it is going to be some sort of automated link building system combined with a huge link building network. Is it going to be a brand new network or will it be a part of SEOLV or MAN? That will be interesting to find out when it launches.

Brad has also mentioned that SEO Link Monster will be scalable, meaning that the more members join, the better results everyone will see. I’m also very curious to see what this means.

Price-wise, it looks like the service will cost $47 for the first 30 days, and then $147 a month after. This puts it in the same pricing range as SENuke X and LinkVana.

As more details come out, I will keep this SEO Link Monster review updated with the latest info. And of course when I get a chance to test out the system myself, I will put together my full, in-depth review as well.

How Does SEO Link Monster Compare?

In the meantime, have you checked out the Link Building Lab yet? If you are reading this review then I’m guessing you are interested in various link building services as well.

Inside, you will find private case studies we have done where we drill-down and give you an in-depth analysis of the different link building services we have personally used. This data is unavailable anywhere else, and it is only accessible to subscribers. Signup for free here.

You can be sure that we will add our own SEO Link Monster case study here one we have done some tests with it.

SEO Link Monster Review – First Impressions

*** Feb 7, 2012 Update ***

Well, I just signed up for my account a few minutes after launch. After purchasing, got hit with several upsells, downsells and OTO’s which I just skipped over.

The SEO Link Monster interface looks pretty familiar and they seemed to have taken a lot of elements from SEO Link Vine. It comes with a built in article spinner and you also get access to a desktop software app called Rankerizer to help check your keyword rankings.

Submitting your articles is extremely streamlined. All you need to do is input your spun article title and spun article content. No need to select any categories or any other options which is actually pretty nice.

The one obvious thing that is missing is a preview function so you can see how your articles will look. The workaround is to Save and Publish your article first. Then you have the option to view your article and edit it again if you find any mistakes.

Of course I’ve only just started to use SEO Link Monster and I don’t have any hard data on it at the moment. But here are some of the things I know about it so far.

• It’s a private blog network.
• Mix of PR0-PR3 blogs
• Will distribute to a max of 14 submissions per day
• Gives you access to all your posted urls

If you want to play around with it yourself, $47 for the first month seems like a pretty good deal. Whether it’s worth $147 a month after that is hard to say, but at least you will have a good opportunity to see if it works for you, before you make the decision.

SEO Link Monster Bonus

My partner in crime Chris has put together a really nice looking SEO Link Monster Bonus package for anyone who buys through his link.

Unlike other bonuses that are sure to be out there, it’s not the same, old junk that everyone else is offering. Check it out if you want to make the most out of your SEO Link Monster subscription.

Article Builder is a new software tool developed by Jonathan Leger that will help you generate unlimited amounts of articles with a click of a button.

How does it do this? Well Jon has created a massive database of categorized titles, introductory paragraphs and tips and snippets that have been extracted from a huge library of PLR content.

All these elements are combined to create a highly readable article that can be used for a wide variety of purposes.

How Article Builder Works

Article Builder is an online tool, so you can pretty much access it from anywhere. The interface is pretty plain, but that’s because it’s so simple to use.

To request an article, you first need to select from one of the available categories. Currently, there are 52 different categories ranging from Internet Marketing to Dog Training to Nutrition.

Content gets added to the Article Builder database weekly, and if enough people request a category, it will get added into the system. At launch there were only 23 categories, but a month later it has more than doubled.

Next you can input in an optional list of subtopic categories and choose your minimum word count. Article Builder can generate articles from 300 to 1000 words long.

Finally specify how many articles you want it to generate and press the button to spit out your new piece of content.

There are a couple of Advanced Options you can also set that I wanted to highlight as well. If you want to use Article Builder to generate articles you can use for blog networks like Traffic Kaboom and Authority Link Network, you can check the ‘Spin articles together’ option that combines all the article intros, body snippets, and conclusions together using spin formatted text. There is also the option to generate articles with the same number of paragraphs, which is perfect for Unique Article Wizard users.

How I Will Use Article Builder

When I saw the email about Article Builder, my first thought was that it would be the perfect source of content for a link building networks like Build My Rank or Linkamotion. Instead of paying around $3 for each 300 word article, why not use Article Builder to provide the content?

To put Article Builder to the test, I decided to test it out with Build My Rank. This is a good case study for Article Builder, because BMR is quite strict about accepting unique content. For the purposes of this review, I submitted a total of 16 articles generated by Article Builder. I also did make sure to proofread each article thoroughly and made appropriate edits to ensure that the articles read well.

Did they get approved?

Yes, all 16 articles were approved by Build My Rank. Not only that, but all 16 of the articles were indexed by Google too.

Pretty good, right?

What I’m really looking forward to however, is the next update to the tool which promises to be amazing. Basically, Jon is making some changes to the Article Builder system so that every article generated will be guaranteed 75% unique. This will be an incredible feat if he manages to pull this off, and I really hope he can do this. If he can, there is no doubt in my mind that Article Builder will be the ultimate link building tool.

The only downside to Article Builder right now is the amount of categories available. As I mentioned, they the number of categories is available is growing, but at the time of this review, there are still some categories that are not available that I would really like to see.

Final Thoughts

I have some high hopes for Article Builder, which is why I went out and bought it right away. Jon always releases great products (The Best Spinner, Instant Article Wizard), and he does a great job of keeping them updated too.

While $297 a year doesn’t sound cheap at first, you have to understand that writing content yourself is time consuming and paying for it will cost you way, way more. Lets say you use it to generate 5 articles a day and 1825 articles a year. That comes out to about 16 cents per article which is an amazing deal if you think about it.

So, if you really want to boost your link building by providing yourself with an unlimited source of content, give Article Builder a shot. It is certainly a product that is worth investing in.

Easy WP SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps you optimize your posts for on-page SEO. If you want to rank well in the search engines, then you probably know that on-page SEO is an important factor to consider. In my experience, a well optimized site will have a much easier time ranking for competitive keywords than one that is not.

One of the major reasons to use Easy WP SEO is that it will grade each of your posts for a variety of common on-page SEO factors and give you an easy to read SEO score. By highlighting the important factors that you are missing, you can easily improve your content structure quickly and painlessly.

There are quite a few of these types of WordPress plugins out there, including Scribe SEO, SEOPressor, and others. The Easy WP SEO WSO has been getting some rave reviews though, which is why I decided to try it out.

In this Easy WP SEO review, I’ll take you through what the plugin can do, and how it’s going to help you out.

How It Works

After installing the plugin, you will notice the new Easy WP SEO panel on your Edit Post page. Here is where you can see the SEO Score and Keyword Density of your post.

Nothing displays here though until you specify the primary keyword you are trying to rank for and then Save Draft or Publish your post. You can refresh your scores whenever you update an existing post as well.

Once your post is analyzed, you can look at the various on-page SEO factors that the plugin is checking for. A green check means that you passed, while a red check means you failed.

Easy WP SEO doesn’t just work with new posts. You can also use it to grade the existing posts on your site.

This can be done by using the Manage Keywords settings page. Basically it lists all your posts and gives you a field next to each to input your primary keyword. If you have a lot of existing posts, like I did for JoshKotsay.com, the process can take you awhile. But it’s not too bad, and it’s really a one-time thing.

What Makes Up the SEO Score?

Easy WP SEO looks at 23 different on-page SEO factors to analyze. Some of the important ones include.

• Keyword in title, permalink url, meta description, headings and image ALT attributes.
• Minimum content length, keyword density.

Most of the on-page SEO factors I agree with and I’ve already been incorporating into my posts for years now.

However, there are a few that I don’t think matter like, like Keywords meta tag contains keyword.

What’s nice is that I can turn off these specific factors I don’t like if I want. And when I do that, they are no longer counted toward my SEO score.

I can also modify other factors like keyword density and minimum word count. So instead of the default setting of 300 words, I could change it to 500 if I thought it was a better threshold to use based on my own experience.

This flexibility is extremely important, and one of the things I like best about the plugin. The SEO landscape is constantly changing, so being able to adapt the plugin to what’s currently working is extremely important.

Other Easy WP SEO Features

Easy WP SEO can also do some other cool things.

You can have it automatically bold, italic, and underline your primary keywords. And have it automatically add your keyword to the ALT tag of any images you add to your post.

The plugin can also generate LSI keywords for you. These are basically related keywords and sprinkling them throughout your site can also give your on-page SEO a boost and help your content appear natural to the search engines.

Final Thoughts

After installing Easy WP SEO on this site, I found that in general, my on-page SEO is pretty good as I usually follow most of the guidelines that Easy WP SEO looks for.

But still, the plugin makes it easy to identify posts where I did not do such a good job so I can go in and change them.

Probably the most useful feature for me, is identifying the keyword density of each post. Now, I don’t normally subscribe to the theory that there is an optimal keyword density value that you should always follow.

But I do like to know if my keyword density falls in one of the two extremes. Too low or too high. Easy WP SEO helps me do this really easily.

So all in all, I really like Easy WP SEO. It is super flexible, and it does a good job doing what it’s supposed to do. If you have never given much thought to on-page SEO before, then I think you will really benefit from installing this plugin on your sites.

Unlike Scribe SEO which requires you to pay a monthly fee, Easy WP SEO is only $37 for an unlimited site license. That is a really good deal, and I think it will definitely help your search engine rankings if you use it.

I just saw the announcement by David Ford he’s rebranding PPVPlaybook and changing its name to AffPlaybook.

PPVPlaybook has been one of my favorite membership sites since it started around January 2010. It’s been the best source of PPV information since it launched, and it has really grown in the almost 2 years since then. Some of the case studies and follow along campaigns on the forums are the best I’ve seen anywhere.

Over time, the site has really evolved quite a bit. As the site has grown, new sections have been added for PPC, SEO, Media Buys, Email Marketing and Mobile. That’s why the new AffPlaybook name makes a lot of sense and I think it has the potential to become the premier paid forum for affiliate marketing in general.

Along with the name change, it looks like David is planning to bring some awesome new changes to the forums. Once the switch is made, I will update this post with a fully updated and revised AffPlaybook review.

Traffic Kaboom (TK) is a backlink blog network started by Jason Potash and Jason Katzenback. It launched in its current form in March 2011 but many of the blogs in the network have themselves existed in some form since 2006.

I’ve been using Traffic Kaboom regularly since it first opened up, so in this review I’ll share with you how it works and how it stacks up with other blog networks.

How Traffic Kaboom Works

Traffic Kaboom is a public backlink network and it claims to have several thousand sites in its network. Blogs can be added to their network through their Auto Blog Buddy Pro plugin. To build links, you submit articles in spintax format and TK will drip-feed your articles across its network of blogs. In fact, it uses the exact format as Authority Link Network does, so you can submit one article to both services very quickly.

Traffic Kaboom uses a 8-step wizard to submit your articles. Once you get used to it, it’s pretty easy to navigate, although I would prefer a more streamlined process of submitting my articles.

The article dashboard is pretty informative as it lists each of the articles you have submitted along with the status of each article, and how many times it has been posted so far. It will even track your Google rankings over time for your primary keyword which is very cool.

Traffic Kaboom has moderators which will look over each submission before approving it to go live. The moderators are relatively strict, and I’ve had articles rejected for reasons like including “irrelevant” links in my article. There also is an automatic duplicate content filter which seems to do the job well.

All in all, I consider these good features as it prevents blogs on the network from being overrun by crappy articles, and ensuring the links you do build maintain their value.

Traffic Kaboom Results

As I mentioned above, I’ve been using Traffic Kaboom for a long time. The biggest advantage that it has over other link building services is the amount of number of different blogs each submission gets distributed to. In my experience, many of my submissions get submitted to over 100 blogs. Just for comparison, Authority Link Network only goes out to 15 blogs per submission.

There are a couple of things I don’t like about Traffic Kaboom though.

First, I’ve noticed that posts sometime get submitted to the SAME blog multiple times. In one instance, I was able to locate 7 different versions of my same article on one blog.

Second, the blog network itself is not particularly strong. I’ve found the majority of blogs in its network are PR 0 and PR 1. Although, this is a general problem you will find with any blog network that allows anyone to submit blogs without restrictions.

Does Traffic Kaboom work?

With that said, I’ve experienced really nice results with Traffic Kaboom and it gives some credence to the “more links is better” camp. I actually did a Traffic Kaboom case study over at the Link Building Lab where I took a brand new site, and got it ranking in the first page of Google for two keywords…using only links built with Traffic Kaboom.

I started this case study back in March, and the rankings have held relatively steady more than 7 months later… without any further submissions beyond the initial case study.

Final Thoughts

Traffic Kaboom cost $147 per 3 months which comes out to $49 a month. This is right in line with other popular backlink networks like SEOLinkVine and My Article Network.

All in all, I’m happy with my investment in Traffic Kaboom, and I will continue to use it as a regular part of my link building efforts.

Authority Link Network (ALN) is a powerful and easy to use backlink blog network that has quickly become one of my favorites networks to use. ALN was created by Maulana T, who is probably best known for his Link Builder Pro/Rank Builder SEO software.

I first joined Authority Link Network many months back when it was completely free to join. However, in September 2011, Maulana transitioned ALN to a paid model. There are now 3 different paid membership options, with the Basic Membership starting at $14.95. While initially disappointing, the move was understandable and I still think ALN provides tremendous value for its membership cost.

How Authority Link Network Works

Authority Link Network operates a little differently than other blog networks you may be familiar with. First of all, it uses a points system which determines how many submissions you can make per day. The basic membership gives you 1 point per day where 1 point = 1 submission.

However, you can still add your own wordpress blogs into the network and you will get points depending on the PR of the site. The point system is as follows:

PR1 blog - 0.5 points
PR2 blog - 1 point
PR3 blog - 1.5 points
PR4 blog - 3 points
PR5+ blog - 6 points

Blog page rank is checked regularly so the points you have available can fluctuate if your blogs gain or lose Page Rank at any time.

I really like this system quite a bit, as it helps keep the network strong with high PR blogs.

Authority Link Network allows you to submit articles in spintax format. You can either spin articles yourself using a software like The Best Spinner or use an article service like Vita Vee’s Ultra Spinnable Articles.

Articles need to be a minimum of 300 words long, and you can insert up to 3 links per post. I like the fact that you can link out to any external site, not just your own sites. This is important to do as it makes your articles appear more natural.

Each submission will get submitted to exactly 15 different sites on the network at a rate of 5 per day. Authority Link Network archive your submissions. Once your 15 submissions are complete, the article will disappear from your dashboard.

Authority Link Network Results

There’s a lot to like about Authority Link Network. First of all, it has one of the strongest blog networks I’ve seen, especially for a service that allow user submitted blogs. Other public blog networks are filled with PR 0 blogs. ALN has a good mix of PR 1 to PR 4 blogs in it.

I also appreciate the fact that ALN is very easy to use. Other networks require you to go through multiple pages and steps to submit an article. With Authority Link Network the whole submission process is done on a single page. Building backlinks can often be a time consuming process, so little things like this can make a big difference in using a service like this regularly or not.

If you want a more in-depth look at ALN, make sure to check out the Authority Link Network case study I contributed to over at the Link Building Lab. It will give you a much better idea at how ALN stacks up against the other backlink networks.

Conclusion

Should you use Authority Link Network? Well, if you are serious about your link building, then yes. At $14.95 for a basic membership, ALN gives you some serious value for your money. Go buy yourself some high PR domains and start building more backlinks.

SEOmoz is one of the best known brands when it comes to SEO. Started by Rand Fishkin, it has become the premier membership site for learning SEO. Not only that, but they have developed an impressive set of online SEO tools that are some of the best in the business.

What’s nice about SEOmoz, is the amount of free SEO information they give you access to. Both the SEOmoz and YOUmoz blogs are both in my RSS reader, and I’m always finding cool SEO tips and case studies on there, with Whiteboard Friday being one of my favorite series of course.

SEOmoz offers a paid membership option called SEOmoz Pro. The PRO membership gives you full access to the SEOmoz suite of tools, plus all their advanced SEO training as well.

Since they offer a full free 30 day trial of SEOmoz PRO, I decided to sign up, play around with it and write a review.

What Is SEOmoz Pro?

The tagline on the SEOmoz homepage is, “Effectively Manage Your SEO”. To manage your SEO, it allows you to create campaigns for the different sites you own. With a PRO account, you can create up to 5 campaigns.

Let me highlight some of the ways creating a campaign will help your SEO.

Rank Tracking

To improve your search engine rankings, you need to know where your pages rank for your various keywords. And by tracking your rankings over time, you can see how your various SEO efforts affect your keyword rankings.

SEOmoz Pro gives you the ability to track your keyword rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing and view your rankings over time with some nice looking charts.

Once nice feature of SEOmoz Pro is that you can hook up your Google Analytics account to it. This allows you to get traffic stats for your different keywords. I use this feature to identify keywords I don’t necessarily rank high for, but still get some traffic. Then by focusing my SEO efforts, I can really boost my traffic quite a bit once I improve my rankings for these keywords.

The only downside is your rankings are only updated once a week. Personally, I would prefer daily rank updates.

On Page SEO Reports

The On-Page SEO Reports are really quite useful, especially if you are new to SEO. Essentially, you can run a report and see how well optimized your pages are for a particular keyword. The report gives you a letter grade from A to F, plus it displays all the factors it uses to determine your grade.

These factors are categorized by importance, and if fixing the most egregious errors will no doubt help improve your search engine rankings.

Crawl Diagnostics

When you setup a campaign for your site, the SEOmoz crawler (Rogerbot) will crawl your site and look for different SEO related issues. It then displays the issues it finds, by grouping them into 3 categories: Errors, Warnings, and Notices.

Some of the things it finds are quite important to fix, like duplicate content issues, broken links and more. When Rogerbot first crawled JoshKotsay.com, it was able to identify 6 broken affiliate link redirects on the site which I was immediately able to fix. That’s potential lost revenue that I had been missing out on for a long time!

Link Analysis

One of the tools I played around with a lot was the Link Analysis feature. This is also available as a standalone tool via OpenSiteExplorer and it is powered by SEOmoz’s impressive Linkscape database of crawled urls which has over 1.2 trillion urls in its database!

The Link Analysis tool allows you to compare your own domain with up to 3 different competitors using a variety of metrics. It displays SEOmoz’s proprietary metrics like Domain Authority, Page Authority, MozRank, and MozTrust.

It also displays some other important metrics like how many total links you have, number of linking root domains, and number of class C blocks that are linking to you.

Not only that, but you also check the backlinks to your site and your competitor’s sites. By studying the external links you can do a comprehensive competitive analysis on your competitor’s linking profile. This will allow you to see where your competitors are getting links from, and find sources of links that you can use as well.

For example, different linking strategies have a distinct profile. If I see someone with tons of Web 2.0 links and social bookmarking sites, I can tell they are probably using some software like SENuke X.

If they’re getting links back from a lot of different generic blogs, then they are probably using a blog network like Unique Article Wizard. By identifying the link strategies that work best for your own site (or your competitors), you can make changes and adapt your link building strategy accordingly.

What Else Does SEOmoz Pro Offer?

I actually just touched on just the surface of what SEOmoz Pro offers. But that’s just a small sampling of the tools that you have access to.

There’s also a SEOmoz PRO Q&A forum where you can get answers to your questions. The best thing about SEOmoz is that it has an extremely large and active community full of SEO professionals.

You can either ask your own questions, or just search through the forum and read what others have asked in the past. The forums are packed with info so you are definitely going to learn a lot here.

Another nice feature are the SEOmoz Pro webinars. They usually host a couple of PRO webinars each month about a specific SEO or marketing topic. Webinars are usually 90 minutes long with Q&A at the end. And if you can’t make the webinars live, they are archived on the site for later viewing.

SEOmoz Final Thoughts

So is SEOmoz Pro worth it? The tools are definitely high quality, but whether the membership is worth it really depends on how often you are going to be using the tools.

If you provide SEO services or consulting, then I definitely think that SEOmoz Pro has the potential to provide you with a ton of value as you’re going to be getting a lot of use out of it. If you are a growing or established brand, I am sure you will find SEOmoz to be very helpful as well.

So will I continue my SEOmoz Pro free trial into a monthly membership? Probably not. I just don’t think I personally would use the tools often enough to justify the cost of a monthly subscription.

Especially since I already own several products that do many of the same things. For rank tracking, I’m already using a tool like Rank Tracker and for SEO Competition analysis I already use Market Samurai, which is quite good in its own right.

But the good thing is, SEOmoz Pro has a free 30 day trial of it’s services. So really, just try out the membership for yourself, and see if it provides enough value for your business.