Not Big On Reading? You Can Find The Solution I’m Using Here

In the past rank tracking was done using their cloud infrastructure but it looks like this can no longer happen, nor is it likely that this functionality will be back anytime soon either. The workaround of using your local internet connection works OK if you’re only checking a few keywords but it soon baulks if you have more than a couple of websites. Then there is the problem of if you do go over a limit you’re going to end up with your Google access temporarily suspended, not a disaster from home but imagine doing that from a work network!

My Market Samurai Rank Tracking Solution

What I’m thinking is you need something that makes you anonymous to Google (people worry about being associated with certain search phrases and having their sites penalised), has enough bandwidth to handle the requests in as speedy a fashion as possible and eliminates the possibility of getting Google’s suspended service notice. The answer is a VPN (Virtual Private Network). So I did a bit of research and found a company that offers an anonymous VPN service. It basically encrypts any data and uses one of over 23,000 IPs for requests (all traffic really), that “should” be a viable solution then. I’ve only been testing for a day but all seems OK, you don’t even need to configure anything in Market Samurai to use it, and at less than $80 a year for unlimited access it is very affordable for anybody looking at checking lots of rankings. I’ll let you know if anything changes but it looks like I’ll be sticking with it. If you want to give it a go you can find them here, it’s only $12 for a 1 month subscription to try it out.

The Other MS Ranking Solution I Looked At

The only other thing I could think off was looking at alternative software and the one that keeps on cropping up is something called Rank Tracker. It’s only $99.75 and it works well but my grudge with this is that in order to keep up to date with search engine format changes there is a subscription model for updates. If I was going to do that I could go back to WebCEO which offers the same. What I love about Market Samurai and what makes me so loyal to them has been the enormous amount of regular updates they’ve made to their software, it’s obviously a passion of theirs, being a software developer I can appreciate that. The added bonus of what I’m doing is that I can use the VPN service with other things as well so in terms of value for money I think I prefer my solution that lets me still use Market Samurai.

Bluehost are definitely removed from my list of recommended hosts (just ask if you want to know who I do recommend, this post isn’t about cashing in). I’ve recommended them to loads of mates in the past becuase they were 1. Cheap 2. Easy to setup new WordPress websites with. They were an ideal beginners host. Except lately I seem to be getting asked to help out a lot with people who are seeing their WordPress websites hacked on Bluehost. “My websites out of Google”. “They’ve suspended my account”. “Adwords won’t accept my ads”.

It’s always the same story, somebody sets up a WordPress website using the CPanel tool for doing it quickly and within a couple of months it’s hacked. I can’t tell you why this is and why it’s only Bluehost but in my experience it is. I don’t get any of the people who I’ve recommended over to Midphase firing e-mails to me shouting “HELLPPP!!”. So what is it? Permissions, probably. Other users on their shared servers, maybe. A total lack of responsibility on their behalf, hmmmmmm.

Do yourself a favour and avoid them until they can sort out why it’s always them, surely it can’t be coincidence?

Once you get the big secret out of the way what you’re actually left with is a couple of programs for creating and automatically submitting files to document sharing websites. At best these are 2 amateurish programs, as much as I love the .net framework it hasn’t half increased the amount of knock it up and flog it for $x7 merchants out there. Whenever a guru gets a brain fart you can guarantee there will be something for you to pay for and download in a matter of weeks. Anyhoo, I’m going off topic here.

Better Alternative To Commission Autopilot

First of all, did you know that you can get free add-ons for Microsoft office that allow you to save files in PDF format? You can, here is an example for Office 2007. There are also 1001 other free ways of creating PDF files. OK so that and you searching article websites for relevant content just about does away with your PDF creation, the first of the 2 pieces of software in Commission Autopilot. If you wanted to do things a better way you may want to consider submitting unique quality content but heh that’s just me, and not what Commission Autopilot is about.

Now for the submission part. Buy Magic Submitter. NO really, buy Magic Submitter instead of Commission Autopilot. In terms of service count CA comes out on top of MS for the time being (18 versus 8 ) BUT Magic Submitter is being constantly updated and you can easily add the extra 10,20 or even 50 (if you find them) document storage services yourself. More importantly not only will Magic Submitter handle the whole signing up with each service process automatically (CA doesn’t) but it also allows you to spin titles and descriptions for your file submissions. Add in the fact you can submit using random profiles (it literally takes 2 minutes to create a whole new set of profiles for each service) and proxy support and you can see that what you’re left with is a very quick way of submitting PDFs without any sort of a foot print. Don’t like manually completing Captcha’s? Commission Autopilot offers support for Decaptcher, Magic Submitter on the other hand supports 3 seperate services. I haven’t even mentioned that Magic Submitter isn’t just for PDF submission to document storage websites, it’ll also let you automatically submit content to Article Directories, WordPress Blogs, Bookmarking Services, RSS sites, Video sites, Press Release websites and about half a dozen other things some of which I’m not even sure what they are!

New Doesn’t Mean Better

Here is the internet marketing timeline :-

New Product Comes Out > Everybody (Affiliates) Says It’s The Best Thing Ever > 1 Month Later It’s Never Mentioned Again > New Product Comes Out > Everybody (Affiliates) Says It’s The Best Thing Ever etc etc etc

New doesn’t always mean best or even good for that matter. There is very little software out there that stands the test of time. There are 2 I swear by and they are Market Samuari and Magic Submitter. Almost everything else I’ve tried since has just been a rehashed, cheapo, outsourced to god only knows where version of them made by marketers to cash in on an idea. Don’t fall for it.

I’ve fallen victim of this, as has just about everybody I know who does any sort of volume with the Amazon Associates program. In the last 3 months and (since October really) people have been seeing that they’re earning less money from approximately the same amount of traffic. In my case at least this isn’t because of any Amazon commission changes, it just seems that the sales aren’t there, which is strange. I’m not suggesting for one minute that there’s anything dodgy going on in the background here, if anything maybe the popularity of Amazon as peoples all in one stop for online retailing is waining?

What it does show once again is that people shouldn’t rely on only one source of income if they are looking to make a living online. Like I’ve said previously there are other online retailers who offer better terms than Amazon and it’s very rare these days not to be able to find a product on one of several alternative sites running affiliate programs. It’s just a bit of a pain to have to swap out all those links

7Search PPC Affiliate Marketing

Is it really nearly 3 years since I wrote this post about making your first money with affiliate marketing, wow!

Being totally honest it’s been a long time since I’ve done anything much with paid traffic, I hated the way that so many rules were introduced regarding landing pages, then just when you got your head around that you’d find offers being taken down all the time. The industry has gone through some large changes and it appears as if it’s finally starting to settle down again. So when I got my usual account balance reminder from 7Search (I’ve had $100+ sat in it for ages doing nothing) I decided why not give one of the old methods another blast and see how I got on. The short story is that it still works fine.

To start off with I went in to Peerfly and picked an E-mail/Zip Submit offer at random. I literally just picked the first one that was at the top of the list for that day, it ended up being something to do with Scrapbooking. Once I had the offer I went into Market Samurai, put in the keyword “scrapbooking” and created a list of keyword possibilities, these were then filtered to create the list (100-150) with the most traffic.

Once I had my offer and my keywords I created a simple campaign in 7Search, the actual ad itself came courtesy of mish mashing a couple of Adwords ads, I direct linked to the offers landing page and other than 3 more competitive phrases I left every keyword at the default $0.05 bid. All of this work in total took a lot less than 20 minutes. So how did I get on?

Drum roll please….well I’ve made $10.80

from a total advertising spend of $6.03

That’s a healthy 55% profit margin. Yeah I know the figures are small but you have to remember I put virtually no work into this. There are people who spend thousands of dollars and dozens of hours of their time and never see a single dollars PROFIT from running PPC campaigns. In this case there are over 200 similar E-mail/Zip Submit offers I could have (and may) promote doing this on Peerfly alone. I haven’t even looked at slpit testing ad copy, or optimising bid amounts, or looking for better paying similar offers or anything in fact. I just chucked it up as quickly as possible to see if it still works and to get rid of some of my balance with 7Search. If PPC was your thing you could easily adapt this to making significant amounts of money.

LinxBoss Still Works As Of January 2012

Have you noticed plenty of movement with the search results lately? Have you noticed the traffic tanking on your blogs? It seems that Google is mixing things up again but the good news is that LinxBoss has been just as effective for me in the last 2 months as it always has. The great joy with LinxBoss is it either absolutely works for what you’re targetting or it doesn’t, for the vast majority of keywords I’ve been after it has worked. When it works you just see a relentless march up the search results.

You’ll see from that image (click for larger version) that I’ve broadened the number of keywords I’m targetting using LinxBoss for that domain, you’ll also see that I’m not exactly cherry picking low competition keywords. It’s not cheap but it works, and when you can rank for decent traffic keywords that are attracting $5+ Adwords bids it doesn’t take long to get your money back and then some.

I have learnt a very valuable lesson here, you just never know how other people are managing their websites (or who they may have pissed off) so buying one is always going to be a hell of a risk. It’s a risk that has to be factored into what you are prepared to pay for something. It’s the brick and mortar equivalent of buying a business only to discover that there’s scummers coming around and breaking the windows once a month. Anyhoo….never again.

The first signs something wasn’t right was when I got an e-mail from the host I’d moved the domain onto telling me that the domain was consuming massive resources. It made no sense for a site which was getting at most 50 visitors a day but I put it down to a dodgy script somewhere and moved it onto its own hosting account. This didn’t work, within a week I was noticing how slow the site was and even complained to Bluehost about it, their response was that they have a policy of throttling the CPU for sites that eat resources, that’ll be my domain then!

This was only the start of the problems. How many times have you ever had a website attacked or exploited? If the answer is none then it would be the same as mine as well, until I bought this domain that was. Within 2 months it had been hacked twice and over the last 12 months I’ve lost count of the number of times it’s been put on the Google malicious code black list. It gets really boring clearing out shitty iframe inserts. Eventually I gave up and swapped out the theme to one I knew I had greater control off and removed every single plugin the previous owner had added and only put back what I needed, I spent a whole day making sure the permissions were right and everything was “good to go”. This worked and it’s been clean since but when I think of the amount of time I’ve wasted on this it gets me fucking annoyed. The hacking didn’t end there though, in order to get better value from the hosting I added 2 other domains onto it as add-ons. Within a month they’d both been hacked, despite never being touched in the last EIGHT years. I own 4 bluehost accounts and this one was the only one I’d ever had trouble with. I run sites that get in excess of 2000 unique visitors a day on Bluehost and have never had a problem. The extra domains on this problem account were also incredibly slow to the point where they were useless and I’ve since moved them to a different host. The throttling effects every domain under that account. All this is hassle and non productive work, it’s eating up my time when I have much better things to be doing.

But the story still doesn’t end there. No matter what host I move the domain I bought to it will always get penalised. I have no idea what sort of dodgy neighbourhoods the site has been submitted too but it’s getting anywhere between 1000 and 5000 server requests an HOUR (from the raw log). Remember this is a site that thanks to speed penalties is now averaging less than 20 visitors a day. There’s nothing I can do about it either, these are straight forward requests on the server from multiple IPs, lots are bots trying to login to wordpress, many are from attempted requests to post content using the xml-rpc protocol but it’s worked to render that domain totally useless. Even if I move it off the WordPress platform it’s just going to be generating thousands of errors and hosts will go apeshit about it, I wouldn’t blame them one bit.

To be honest the only possible use for that domain is as a redirect for traffic to a related domain. Unfortunately I don’t own or am planning on owning any more poker websites so from now on it’s going to be left to rot as a parked domain. Like I said I’ve never seen anything even remotely like this from any website I’ve ever setup. And that endeth my experience of buying websites, from now on I’ll stick to building my own.

InfoLinks To The Rescue

I’d tried several alternatives including writing my own code to offer up links to various affiliate programs I was associated with but none of them could give a fraction of the return that Adsense Link Units were giving me. The main problem was one of targetting, relevancy is everything when it comes to contextually targetting visitors with ads and even though I made sure what I was serving up was relevant to the page it just didn’t seem to be effective enough to convert. I really needed a PPC source of income for those ad spots.

Example:-

Fortunately for me I lucked out, one day when checking my InfoLinks account I noticed that they offered something called Related Tags (Doesn’t sound very Link Unity I know). To the lamen they looked like lists of links that had a striking similarity to the Adsense Link Units. Integration only required very simple code changes and I was testing in less than an hour,even on a manually created website and even using the manual placement option instead of the automatic checkbox. It took about a week for me to realise that these were giving by far and away the closest performance to Link Units of everything I’d tried.

If you jump forward to today they are still as effective. All things considered I’m probably getting somewhere around a 50%-60% return from them compared to what I was with Adsense but to be honest that’s about as good as I think it’s going to get. Nobody has the advertisers that Adsense has. If anybody has an Adsense Link Unit alternative that they think is better than that then I’d love to here about it? Until then though I’m sticking with Infolinks Related Tags as my best alternative to Adsense Link Units.

“I was just like you a few years ago search (sic) for something
legit online that was going to bring me an extra stream
of dough….”

1. I can promise you that you have never been anything like me, if you were you wouldn’t need to resort to spamming MMO crap to make a living.

2. I have NEVER seen anything “legit online that was going to make me an extra stream of dough” delivered via my inbox. Never ever ever. I’m prepared to wager £10 that I never will either.

And where does this amazing piece of e-mail marketing take you? To a page that tries to sell you with “All you need…is basic typing skills and internet access to start your own successful online business!” – Remember the affiliate spamming this crap says it’s legit!!! They are either thick or can’t grasp the concept of legit. You possibly could make “some” money (see Swagbucks or writing articles) but to stretch that to “your own successful online business” is a bit of a step too far.

It’s about as legit as my next business opportunity. “All you need is a white coat and sharpe knife and you too can make money by being a brain surgeon.” (You can’t by the way, but don’t let that stop me selling you your sharpe knife for the bargain price of just $197)

The really annoying thing is that there are still large numbers of people falling for this rubbish, every single MMO “expert” has pushed a concept in that last 12-18 months that revolves around building a mailing list then sending offers to them as a great way of making money. In order for this to work there have to be enough suckers out there who do actually give in on the 3rd or 4th or whatever e-mail.

Don’t get me wrong, there are legitimate uses for list marketing, I was list marketing in-house for one of the large online bookmakers before people like Shoemoney and John Chow had made their first dollar online. A long time before companies like Aweber and Constant Contact even existed. More recently a real estate friend has had great success utilizing a mailing list. But these were legitimate businesses. They didn’t entice people onto their e-mail list by giving away free (it took me 5 minutes to write) reports or other gimmicks just so that they could spam them endless links. Nor did they get into a circle jerk and start mutually masturbating offers to each others lists. You see there is nothing wrong with keeping in touch with a list of people that choose to let you contact them, however this is a world away from the “legitimate” online business that so many MMO gurus are trying to get people involved in right now by flogging $997 courses on how to build a list. I have no doubt that the cock-knocker who sent me the original quote in this post is a student of one such course and actually believes they are running a legitimate online business. You’re not, you’re sending junk to peoples inboxes.