Now perhaps I can concentrate better on my online business which has recently been thrown into turmoil by hackers and Google’s Penguin. The updates have adversely affected most of my sites and there have been times recently when I wonder if it’s worth carrying on. I suppose that I can answer by saying that I was almost at the full time Internet business point and can get there again with effort and adapting.

I intend to use my core skills more and ignore the do SEO and you will get loads of traffic and sales mob. Have you noticed that despite reports of masses of de-indexed pages and sites because of unnatural links there are still many sellers of unnatural links claiming them to be Penguin proof now that Panda proof isn’t the flavour of the month? Nobody can make guarantees like that but they do. I’ve been seeing how to beat Penguin advice in the form of place more backlinks but give them more variety. Can’t they see that all of these backlinks are unnatural and that any type of unnatural backlinking is unwise at the moment and exactly what Google is trying to get rid of.

I was surprised to see a new review on an experienced marketer’s blog for a mass article submitter. It was a cautious yet positive review and the readers comments were all praising that marketer. I left a comment pointing out the problems that I’m having with some of my sites because of previous mass submission of articles and the problems that I’m having with my article directory and said that it wasn’t a good idea to be recommending this software with what has been happening with Google. My comment was ignored for a few days and then deleted, while other people’s comments full of praise for the marketer were accepted. I left another comment questioning the ethics of somebody who makes big claims of being ethical still recommending what worked last year and is dodgy this year to his visitors. Then I unsubscribed from his list. I just don’t want to be on the list of anybody who tries to get his customers to buy something that is unwise.

Another thing that I’ve noticed on the Warrior forum special offers is a rash of Amazon affiliate plugins claiming to increase earnings. I bought some out of curiosity and they don’t do anything for my earnings. There are others that I haven’t bought because deep down I know that they might be a good idea but I can’t see why they would work. Am I being too skeptical by thinking that these and the backlinking packages are acts of desperation to make money in a market that is getting tougher to make money in and that those who buy and use them will be more likely to fail in the long term? I honestly believe that nobody can know how to beat the Penguin apart from complying with what Google want, however this blog is mainly original content and it’s also taken a big hit in traffic.

Google refused my application for reconsideration for my article directory this week. Initially the problem was too many outgoing links. Around 5000 articles and less than 8000 outgoing links – a lot less than most article directories. I nofollowed the links and took over 1000 articles down. Now the problem is quality of content. I’ve been far more stringent with quality than most article directory owners, but that doesn’t cut it with Google. Now I’m going to ignore Google totally and get on with my business.

Today I was checking the directory for broken links and either repair or remove them. That’s something that I’ve been doing on a regular basis because broken links can affect your search engine rankings – that’s what I was told anyway. It’s a bit sad really because you see just how many domains have been given up on by Internet marketers. It also makes me really cynical when I see how many of the broken links are from those who are advising others how to make money online and it tells me just how few are succeeding despite the claims. Sometimes I think that it is a way of finding aged expired domains if I wanted to flip them.

Whilst I was checking for broken links I found that they were broken on one of my sites when they shouldn’t have been. When I went and checked I found that all of the pages and over 400 articles were missing and that they were all in the trash. After previously being hacked, that was worrying because I was on the site only a few days ago and there was nothing wrong with it. I can see signs of hackers trying to get into it, but not that they have actually gotten in. I added a couple of plugins that might help deter them but I don’t really know if it will.

I bought a WSO last month which was a guide to protecting WordPress blogs. There was a list of 12 recommended plugins and instructions how to use them. It took all of one day to set them up on just 2 of my blogs and I’m getting a bit fed up with the alerts which turn out to be false alarms. Maybe they will work, but adding 12 plugins to any blog is going to make it really slow. I’ve looked around for a paid for product but haven’t found anything with enough good customer reviews to tempt me. But I have learned more about what to look for and how to deal with the attacks.

I’ve lost so much time due to hackers recently that I’m seriously considering changing my sites to html rather than WordPress. I use xSitePro and even if an hacker got into any of those sites all I would have to do is delete the old and upload again with the inbuilt ftp, so I would never lose any content and I can give the hackers the finger.

Going Forward

Reading back what I’ve written does all sound a bit negative, maybe that’s because I’m still feeling rundown and tired and finding it hard to see the woods for the trees. It’s going to take time for us to know the full effects of the Penguin and things are still changing. I’ve been having a look at my site stats and there are some positives amongst the negatives. Those sites are the ones that I will concentrate on by adding more fresh content and linking them more to social networking sites. Google isn’t the only place to get traffic and funnily enough the sites that Google are knocking are getting lots of Google Feedburner subscribers – showing that visitors value the content enough to subscribe. That is something to utilise.

My plans right now are that I am going to do more writing myself, fresh content, have some fun with it  and get myself in the zone to create more products of my own. I picked up an interesting WSO about using Public Domain material last week and learned a few things there, you can check it out by clicking here.  It’s still very cheap and in my opinion worth the asking price for what I have learned from it. Admittedly I haven’t done anything except read it and a little research so far, but that’s because I haven’t been well and the hacking has been taking up too much of my time.

There have been a lot of guides released lately about making money with Pinterest. I’ve had an account for a while but I’m building it slowly. Sooner or later the spammy accounts will get closed down and I don’t want mine to be one of them.

Niche Amazon websites – I’ll keep most of them for now but they just don’t do anywhere near as well as they did this time last year. I wonder just how many Amazon affiliate website owners are not telling the truth about sales and traffic dropping, I can’t believe that it’s just mine. One evergreen niche that will probably boom in the UK is dog training after Pudsey the dog winning Britain’s Got Talent this week. You can read my review and see the video if you click here. My grandkids have just got a puppy and 6 year old Issy is already trying to teach him to dance after watching Pudsey. Poor Lion the cat is getting jealous though.

That’s enough for today. As always I welcome feedback in the comments and I promise that I won’t delete any that disagree with my opinions.

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Things were just getting back to normal after a mass hacking attack when I got messages from Google about 3 of my blogs. The first one said:

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links on your site pointing to other sites that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include selling links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

That was supposedly unnatural links from my blog pointing to other sites. As I have never paid for links or taken part in any link schemes it’s a bit odd. The only thing that I could think to do was add a plugin that makes all links nofollow, that way I am showing that I am not trying to pass on pagerank or manipulate the search engines. I then submitted my site for reconsideration.

Unnatural Links Pointing In

The other message that I got about 2 of my sites said:

We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes.

We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results.

If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request.

If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

I haven’t heavily promoted either site. One has lots of content on it and some of it original. I’ve promoted it with article marketing but only about 5 campaigns in 5 years. I checked the backlinks and found that I had a lot of sitewide links from 4 of my older blogs, they should have been counted as one by Google but I still deleted them and I also found that a site had republished one of my articles multiple times giving 70 backlinks, so I left a message asking them to delete the articles. Apart from those links I couldn’t see anything unnatural looking so I submitted that site for reconsideration.

The third blog about magic wands has so called unnatural links pointing to it and when I checked I found that it only has 676 links altogether, not a lot for an 18 month old blog by any standards. The blog was actually an experiment and I only ever submitted 1 article to directories, but I don’t think that’s the problem as the majority are not article directory links.

Mostly they are sites that either syndicated the article or linked back to it – very few of the sites are relevant to mine so that could be the problem. As I haven’t done much with it and the blog hasn’t earned much in over a year I really can’t be bothered spending any more time on it to sort it out so Google can deindex it if it wants.

How Many More Sites Will Be Under Threat?

Those 3 blogs could just be the tip of the iceberg for me and I will be checking my messages in Google Webmaster Tools daily. As I stated I have never paid for links or taken part in link schemes. I have never spammed forums for links or spammed blogs with crappy comments. I haven’t spun articles or paid any spammy SEO companies either.

All I’ve ever done is a very small amount of blog commenting with decent relevant comments and article marketing. Certainly no black hat methods. Like many others I started article marketing several years ago believing that it was a white hat method of promoting myself and my sites, nothing dodgy about it. It was always in the hope that my articles would be syndicated by authority sites in my niches and that has happened.

There shouldn’t be any harm in that, but when I checked the backlinks to the magic wand site I found that few of the sites that had republished my article were in that niche and that would make the backlinks irrelevant. One was a ceiling fan site, another a dog training site, a couple of property sites and so on. I have noticed in recent months that many blog owners were straying away from their niches and adding content about almost anything. The articles imported from article directories and making many irrelevant links.

All we can do now is double check our sites to make sure that they comply with Googles guidelines and sort out any potential problems before Google gets them in their radar.

Removing Links

Because Google have been sending the same message to masses of webmasters there is a growing increase in people panicking and asking for their links to be removed. Some politely and some threatening DMCAs without trying the polite route. I can only see that growing as more and more websites are checked by Google.

As I own 2 article directories I have been getting asked to remove links and don’t mind if I’m asked nicely, but please be aware that it takes time to search out articles and remove links and time is money. I absolutely resent my time being taken up by unnecessary rude and aggressive threats.

Today I was asked to contact a dating site owner that had republished an article from my travel article directory and ask them to remove the link. I couldn’t do that, publishers don’t leave their contact details and I had no other way of contacting the site owner than the article writer had. It was interesting that I wasn’t asked to remove the link from my directory, but that link is from a relevant site whereas the dating site was giving an irrelevant link.

I’ve seen reverse SEO companies springing up, offering to get links removed at a price. I’m also still seeing SEO companies offering thousands of backlinks and some saying Panda friendly. I honestly don’t believe that any of those companies can offer Panda friendly backlinks and Panda was last year, this year it’s more like the Google Gorilla. To me most so called SEO companies are one man bands with link spamming software like xrumor, exactly what will provide unnatural links that Google is fighting against.

I just wonder where we will all be in a years time. I’m very wary of doing any article marketing at the moment or guest blogging. I’m getting requests from guest writers for my blogs but they are backing off when I tell them that at present I can only offer nofollow links. I know that Google are trying to improve the quality of the sites at the top of the search engines, but it seems to me that the only way to get there and keep Google happy is to get boatloads of Google+s or pay them for unnatural adsense links.

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How did they get in? My host said it was probably because I had used easy passwords and not updated WordPress or plugins when I should have. I don’t quite get that because less than a week earlier I had gone around all of my blogs, updated and changed the passwords to more difficult ones. Strange too was that they said that they had found a malicious shell that predated one of my sites by over a year, this is what my host’s report said:

Modify: Tue, 21 Sep 2010 18:47:54 -0500 Change: Tue, 07 Dec 2010 21:18:29 -0600
This time stamp also predates server logs for this account.

The site went online in February so the shell must have either been in the hosting account or spread from one of the other blogs. That’s just me speculating, I don’t really understand all of that stuff.

I had been good and made backups, but I really wasn’t sure what to do with them to restore my blogs. There was also the time factor. I was really busy in the real world and with so many blogs to sort out and prevention needed to stop the threat from spreading to my other blogs I was worried that more irrepareable damage would be done so I called upon Hostgator for help. They were great, it took several days but I finally got my blogs back in good working order.

While this was going on I did a search for the hacker, who had left his name on the defaced site. The git actually has a Facebook account bragging about his hacking feats and claiming to do it in the name of a certain religion. That really cheesed me off. I left a message telling him what I thought about him and the cheeky beggar asked me how much I wanted to pay to remove the malicious files. I told him where to get off whilst hoping that Hostgator would come through.

They did come through for me and the sites are all back to normal. It still took a lot of time to check all of my blogs to make sure that everything was ok. What I found was in some cases they had removed my email address from the admin user profile which meant that I couldn’t use it to change the password to enable me to access the blogs. In other cases they had added a second admin account – always worth checking for every time you visit your blog.

Once everything was sorted I asked if they could recommend a security plugin and was told that no they couldn’t because they give out too many false alarms. The advice was to do the updates and use long, difficult passwords. As I did those things I’m not optimistic about the security of my blogs. One thing that I thought of myself was to remove ’powered by wordpress’ from them. A way that comment spammers find WordPress blogs is by using ‘powered by wordpress’ in their search so I am guessing that hackers might do the same to find their victims.

Despite being told that security plugins aren’t much good I will still invest in better security, plugin or not. Do you have any security tips that you can share?

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The big news was that backlinking company ‘Build My Rank’ were essentially put out of business in their current format. BMR were very popular with Internet marketers. They operated, I believe by submitting spinned articles with their customer’s links to their own private network of blogs.

This week we started to see complaints of thousands of BMR’s customer’s pages deindexed and website rankings falling. This is because the backlinks were created unnaturally as an attempt to game the search engines. This strategy has worked for several years, but now that Google has got the bit between their teeth there is a big backlash and none of us can be sure that our sites won’t be hit.

It was claimed that Build My Rank were getting really good results for their customers and I suspect that there are few Internet marketers who heard about BMR that weren’t tempted to give them a try. I thought about it more than once but was put off by the thought of spinned articles and because caution told me that this type of mass backlinking would leave a footprint that Google would find sooner or later..

So called SEO companies used services like BMR to get higher rankings for their customers websites, with or without their customers knowledge. It’s been a mad time of mass unnatural backlink building in various different ways. New Internet marketers have been taught to build backlinks in the last several years, as the best way to rank high in the search engines, that’s been the thing to do and few of us haven’t done it.There have been rare voices out there, telling us to make the backlinks look more natural. Slow, gradual build up and from lots of different sources. Stop looking for just do follow links, you need a mixture of those and nofollow links to make your backlinking more natural. The same applies to high and low PR pages.

Most people don’t listen to that type of common sense and now the complaints have been coming in thick and fast about Google being the big bad wolf and eating up their backlinks.

Article Marketing

Of course whenever Google does something unpopular with IMers article directories get some flak. Like the forum poster who winged about only crappy sites republishing his articles from Ezinearticles.com. First of all those crappy sites could turn out to be authority sites in the future, and as already said you need a mixture of high and low PR pages to make your backlinking look more natural. Also how good are his articles? Are they good enough to be republished on authority sites … I wonder.

Then there was the guy who complained that his site had dropped in the rankings and when he asked Google why he was told that it was because of unnatural linking. He had thousands of backlinks because of guest blogging he said, but those backlinks hadn’t come from thousands of articles. He never answered any further questions but my guess is that he either submitted his articles to blog networks and called it guest blogging, or submitted the articles that he had used to guest blog to a whole lot more sites afterwards.

That’s a worry for all article marketers. This free form of marketing has been an acceptable white hat way of promoting sites and businesses for years. The problem is that article marketing has been abused by many and in recent years so many difficult to understand or poorly written junk pages have been created by those who couldn’t resist doing whatever they could to get masses of backlinks that it’s hardly surprising that Google have clamped down.

Giving SEO A Bad Name

Trouble is that there will be many caught up in the backlash that didn’t realise that they were doing anything wrong. So called SEO companies seem to spring up at an amazing rate. They offer their marvellous SEO services to punters, promising that they will get high rankings for their customers, but all most of them are doing is link blasting with whatever software is available to them. I find it difficult to understand why they call link spamming SEO.

One form of link spamming is forum or blog commenting with rubbish comments. Basically paying a company to spam your links for you and mostly in places they aren’t wanted and with inane comments that aren’t relevant to the posts they are commenting on be iton  forums or blogs.

Then there are profile links. The ‘SEO’ companies create profiles for you on many forums or other types of interactive sites where you aren’t wanted unless you actually contribute. I see the same thing happening on my article directories, profiles with links created but they never submit articles. I can see a list of users in the dashboard and quite often on the same day you might get lots of accounts opened with variations on an email addresss i.e. jackc@SEOpests.com or maryt@SEOpests.com – those accounts get deleted.

Sometimes they do submit articles – 6 or more copies of the same article, spinned and with just a few word changes or just the titles changed. Not good for directories and deleted from mine.

Then there are services that offer to manually build thousands of backlinks in a short time and for just a few dollars. Absolute BS, it would take years to manually build thousands of backlinks – one was offering 30,000 – impossible to do it manually in a short time without a big workforce that works for the love of it.

What Are Natural Backlinks?

Those are all unnatural forms of backlinks and you could say the same for submitting videos to various download sites with your link in the description, also paying for backlinks, advertising and link exchanges.

When you come to think about it there aren’t many forms of natural backlinking. If you do as Google want you don’t get backlinks yourself, you create amazing relevant content that others will admire and link to on their sites, or vote for it with facebook likes, tweeting, Google Plus and other bookmarking sites. But how do these ‘admirers’ find your content in the first place I wonder if your backlinks aren’t out there and existing sites in your niche already have the top places in the search engines?

Of course there are plenty of ‘SEO’ companies that will offer to get you thousands of tweets, facebook likes etc. but then you will be gaming the search engines there too and sooner or later big G will detect all of those unnatural backlinks and penalise you for them.

Where to Get Traffic

It’s all a bit of a quandary at the moment yet there are still SEO companies bombarding our inboxes with offers of masses of high PR backlinks as if nothing has happened. For myself I’m sitting tight and hoping that my sites will be safe from the changes. Any backlinking I will do will be minimal for now and I will be concentrating on adding fresh content to my sites.

Using my autoresponder and list building has become more important to me and I’ve been testing the waters with paid for and free ads. I’ve got a few more things up my sleeve, but the main thing right now and in the future is diversify and make sure that you do not just rely upon the search engines for traffic and especially big G.

If you have anything to add, disagree or agree your comments are welcome.

P.S. Don’t forget to ’like’ or link to this article!

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Today, being a Sunday I divided my time up at the beginning of the day and alloted so much time to everything that I wanted or needed to do. This is what my schedule looked like:

8.00 – 9.00 – lie in with coffee and good book – I need to relax sometime!

9.00 – 9.30 – Check emails, Saturdays earnings (looking much better, last week was dire) , administer article directories

9.30 – 10.00 – Do some of my neglected housework

10.00 – 11.30 – Check out the Marketing With You forum and listen to 2 parts of the Traffic module making notes as I go. Eat my breakfast cereals while listening.

11.30 – 2.30 – Check out the Kindle Case Study, something I bought several weeks ago and haven’t found or made time for yet. Wish I had now, it’s a really interesting case study of publishing an ebook to Amazon and the soft cover to Createspace and watching it’s progress. It’s on day 38 today and actually a series of password protected blog posts. By the time I finished reading it I was dying to get stuck in and create my own Kindle ebooks, but I had promised to stick to my schedule today and stop jumping around.

2.30 – 3.30 – Some more housework, put the washing out and spend time in the garden with Tuppence the rescue cat. I wrote about her when I got her from the cat rescue centre last year. Back then she hid under the bath most of the time but now she rarely goes back there. She lets me stroke her for a few minutes last thing at night and first thing in the morning but only her head and never any other time. She is too nervous to go out by herself for more than a few seconds so now the weather is getting better I have to get some fresh air too.

3.30 – 4.30 – Add a new article to one of my sites and bookmark it.

4.30 – 5.30 – Listen to the last 2 parts of the Marketing With You traffic module.

5.30 – 6.30 – Make dinner and eat it.

6.30 onwards – Put into practice what I have learned today from Marketing With You. Watch TV while doing some of it!

I’m quite pleased with myself today because I’ve followed the schedule that I set yesterday. Before I go to bed I will set a schedule for tomorrow and try to stick to it. That way I will get far more work done and will be closer to my goals by the end of the day.

I have the same problem as a lot of you other IMers. Start out doing something, attention wanders, never get as much done as planned or needed and never have enough time. If I continue making a schedule and sticking to it I might end up with more free time and earnings!

I learned a lot today and all good… well except for the fact that this blog doesn’t exist according to www.surcentro.com/en/ who reckon to be the epicentre of the web where you can do background checks on sites. Well it does exist and has done for nearly 2 years

During the next week I plan to complete at least 1 more Marketing With You module. Build a sales funnel using my own product. See if I can repurpose my very first 14 year old offline information product for a Kindle ebook and write at least 6 articles.

At the end of the week comes fun. On Friday I’m going to have a go at Lazer Quest with my grandkids in Castleford’s Xscape centre. This is for my daughter’s birthday – crazy but fun!

Do you manage your time? Or do you let your attention wander? Please let us know what you think in the comment section.

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Marketing With You

I’m part way through the fourth module now but I did come to a standstill on the third module. I’d learned about mindmaps and setting up a sales funnel for my list and was ready to give it a go and get earning through it. At the end of the third module you gain access to  a free ‘Profit Pulling Platform’  which consists of a free webinar and squeezepage for people to sign up to your list, an upsell for $97 for 9 videos called Forwards to Basics and the web pages that you would need.

A good product but I hated the Easy Cash Webinar squeeze page and that was why I came to a standstill for a little while. I prefer plain no nonsense squeeze pages and this one just isn’t me. Apart from that I’ve seen it around a fair lot and don’t think it a good idea to be too same as.

I had to laugh when somebody posted the link to his Easy Cash Webinar page on the Warrior forum wingeing about not getting any sign ups with a low amount of traffic. I suspected that he was posting the link to try and get sign ups from the forum, but it backfired because the comments were quite derogatory about the squeeze page including several saying that it was too familiar and that he should use an original squeeze page. My thoughts entirely which was part of the reason that I came to a standstill. The other reason was that I didn’t want to use something that had Easy Cash in the title. For most of us it isn’t easy earning cash on the Internet and I don’t want to do anything to mislead others into thinking that’s the case.

IM Insiders

When I paid for the Marketing With You course I also paid for the upsell which is a monthly fee and for that you get access to the forum, webinars and bonuses. One of the bonuses is a very large package called ‘New Super Affiliate‘. The squeeze page isn’t as plain as I would like but less off putting for me than ECW. So I used that product instead.

It took forever to upload the package to my c panel. The package is so big that I had to keep on increasing the web space to fit it all in. Good job I’ve got a VPS account. The sales funnel is more complex than ECW with a OTO and an upsell, but following the videos provided I managed to get it all working including the autoresponder emails and am quite pleased with myself for that.

Now that I’ve got the sales funnel working I need to drive traffic to the squeeze page to see how well it converts, but I found a training video in the package that was out of date and now have qualms about selling the package at full price. The video points to a web page but the service is no longer there, but there is a link to where the service is on the new site. The rest of the package is very impressive so perhaps I will reduce the price and add a note about that change in the package.

Produce My Own Products

Now that I’ve set up a complicated sales funnel I realise that I will profit more if I have my own products to use throughout. I have one called 7 Virtual Ways To Make Money Online which I give away using a very plain squeeze page. Now I need to create a sales funnel using my own products. Time!!!

I have considered using really good PLR, editing and adding more to make it unique. But, knowing me I would completely change it so I might as well start from scratch. That is unless I just use the PLR for ideas. Coming soon folks!

IM Insiders

Back to IM Insiders. I’m not altogether happy with this purchase. You get access to a forum which might be useful over time. There are videos and webinars, but I hate watching and listening to them. I’m a doer not a viewer and I have no interest in what other people are earning or how many people thy have added to their list. The only videos that I want to watch are actual training videos showing me step by step how to do something. When I try to listen to the webinars I find myself switching off and doing something on my websites. I would prefer them straight to the point instead of all the stories about how successful Alex Jeffreys is.

What is really pissing me off are the daily emails with headlines like ‘You Have (1) New Message’, ‘Re: Urgent’, ‘Re Account Created’, ‘Re Your Download’, CONGRATULATIONS – my email address’, ‘New PRIVATE Message’, ‘Re: Your Request Aproved’, ‘New Ticket’ and so on. I haven’t made a request or a ticket, nor has there been any private messages. Basically those subject lines are BS tricks to get you to open. Some of them remind me of the subject lines you get from scammers promising millions if you help them get money out of Nigeria – tacky.

I stopped opening them because when I did all I found were a link to different squeeze pages where you can get on yet another list and blimey Alex and his team have scoured the Warrior forum every day to find the best special offer just for me. Trouble is once you buy a few WSOs the amount of emails you get multiplies so much that you want to unsubscribe to them all. Alex is just jumping on the bandwagon and this is exactly the sort of thing that has put me off email marketing.

So far the only thing I’ve got of interest out of the monthly membership is the New Super Affiliate package because I’ve been able to use it to learn how to set up a sales funnel. There may be more there on offer that I haven’t found yet, but it is a bit confusing. Perhaps once I’ve finished the Marketing With You course and acted upon it I’ll find more that will benefit me with IM Insiders.

Update April 24th

Today I cancelled my subscription to Marketing with you. I haven’t had time to go through everything and maybe should have before cancelling, but I’ve had enough of the email marketing methods being used. Every day you get an email with a misleading and dishonest subject line trying to flog WSOs, as I described earlier. This is not the type of marketing that I want to learn about. I also found the training videos very boring and unnecessarily lengthy. Too much bragging about success and money made for me. I wanted to learn what I could do not how much success others were having. I gained more from Ed Dale’s Challenge for free than I did with IM Insiders monthly fees.

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WSOs or Warrior Special Offers can be really useful. I’ve bought several myself and saved money on some pretty good products, but I am very discerning in what I buy, never go for the hypy stuff. A bit back Warrior Plus which has nothing to do with the forum itself sprang up where you can pay a small amount every month to promote the WSOs that the creators add to Warrior Plus.

Great, like I said some of the products are pretty good and I would feel happy recommending them but for the fact that there are now too many sending WSO offers to my inbox. They are getting boring and no you are not doing me any favours. I’m fed up with the amount coming in every day and what looks to be list lending that’s going on.

I’m getting emails from people that I’ve never heard of, some mentioning that I am a WSO buyer and they have a line at the bottom saying ‘part of the whatshisname group’. I might have bought one from whatshisname but I know damn well that whatshisname hasn’t got a group and that he or she is letting you mail their list.

I unsubscribe from them but I’m still getting emails from whatshisname and whoever else he or she lends the list to.  Lately I’ve unsubscribed from far more WSO buyer lists than WSOs that I’ve bought. Trouble is most of the WSOs that I’ve bought have been for software or plugins and if I unsubscribe from the main offenders I lose the updates. So I’m stuck with some of them.

Bad Customer Service

One of the things that really bugs me is poor customer service. I know that good customer service is essential to running a successful business, yet there are so many service providers on the Internet that are amateurish and think that it isn’t a problem if their service is poor.

I ran into one of those last month. I was trying a new writer who was advertising quality content on the Warrior forum. Ordered 12  x 800 word articles on February 4th and they were promised within 5 days. Good job I didn’t hold my breath. 12 days later on 16th February I emailed the lady and asked how the articles were coming along.

She apologised and said that she had got a bigger response to the ad than expected, was running a little behind and was switching over to an inexpensive project management software so that she could keep track of things and no one would slip through the cracks, and her goal was to have everyone caught up by the end of the holiday weekend.

Fair enough, I thought at the same time as hoping that the content would be worth the wait. On 1st March, 2 weeks later still nothing. I checked out the advertisement thread in the WF and found that there were other customers who were getting nervous about the no show of their orders and they had ordered after me, so I stated my disatisfaction on that thread and asked which holiday weekend she meant.

I felt bad for doing it because the lady was stating openly that she was going through a troubled time, but if she couldn’t manage to fulfill orders she should have put a hold on the thread and not taken any more orders until she had caught up. I can afford to lose that money, other people may not.

The lady refunded me and said that the holiday was the Martin Luther King weekend. I’m in the UK and it’s something we don’t celebrate, but it was easy enough to find out that the Martin Luther King weekend was mid January not February so that lady’s credibility is totally gone as far as I’m concerned.

I might have felt differently and given her more of a chance if she had kept in contact and explained what was going on.

Good Customer Service

Because that writer was so tardy I tried another service out that was advertising on the WF that promises articles within 24 hours. Having been burnt by the previous 2 services that I’d tried I only ordered 2 articles. They turned up within 24 hours. A decent quality, passed copyscape and my own checks and accepted by ezine articles.

I ordered 4 articles next and 3 days later was starting to think that the super fast service had slowed down. There was egg on my face when I found the 4 articles in my inbox, hidden amongst the dozens of emails that I’d received 3 days earlier. The quality was even better than the first 2 so hopefully this excellent service will continue.

Facebook Changes

I’m hearing that Facebook are changing their policy and landing pages won’t be allowed on there. No calls to action or money off offers. Some internet marketers are complaining about it saying that Facebook are trying to force them to pay for advertising rather than get it free as they have been doing.

What BS, I’m only surprised that Facebook have waited so long to make these changes. The site doesn’t belong to the wingeing IMers so why should they expect to make money from it and in some cases spoil user experience without giving something back.

Apart from that it should also be a warning to those who build their businesses around free sites like Facebook, Twitter and Blogger. You don’t have control, your business could go down the pan just like that.

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This week I spotted a great offer on the Warrior forum of $27 only for Alex Jeffrey’s Marketing With You – claimed to be the most successful IM coaching programme ever created and previously priced at $997. I didn’t hesitate to buy in and also took up the OTO of $27 for monthly membership to IM Mastermind.

My initial reaction once I logged into the coaching site was that it’s an awful lot to take in, have I got time etc. Then I told myself that I must make time and that apart from being able to make a really good case study for the readers of this blog I might just benefit from the coaching. Get myself out of the day job and become a full time IMer.

I’ve almost been there but last year Panda knocked me back a lot. Not as you might expect the article directories – they actually benefited from Google’s changes, but they have never earned much (most article directories don’t and are time consuming to run properly), no it was my top earning niche sites that got clobbered and now I want to give Google the finger in return!

I’ve found it frustrating sitting through the first 2 modules of Marketing With You. That’s 41/2 hours of video to watch altogether and I find it difficult to sit still, watch and listen and do nothing else. I’m not sure how much I took in but I realised something that I should be doing in the first module and wondered why on earth I hadn’t.

I also learned that I should write to do lists the day before, allow times for each job and stick to it. Then when it’s all crossed off it’s a did list. I did try it.. honestly. Thing was I’d worked a late shift the night before and fell asleep half way through my to do list so it ended up half a did list. No wonder I need to quit the day job!

In the first module we were told to make ourselves accountable in three areas, and these are my promises to myself:

Personal

Early Retirement

Travel wherever and whenever I want

Spend more time with my family

Buy my mother a bungalow

Pay off my daughter’s mortgage

Move to the Yorkshire coast and buy a second home in the Canaries

Business

Scale up what is working

Drop what is not

Outsource more and free up my time to be creative

Automate things more

Stop being prissy about mailing my list

Entrepreneural

Release more products of my own

Write and sell ebooks on Kindle

Party with the IM Gurus

The second module is called the Automated Infrastructure Process. Being honest I got befuddled at Alex’s crappy hand drawn back end graphs. I sorta knew what he meant but it looked and sounded complicated. The next module should make it a whole lot clearer.

What do I think of Marketing With You so far?

I know that I got massive value for my money and the revelation that I had in the first part will I am absolutely sure earn me far more than I paid. I’m looking forward to learning more and I’ve got a feeling that this course will bring massive changes to my business and hopefully my life. Just wish that I could sit still long enough to enjoy it more!

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Crap Customer Service

We’ll get the rant out of the way first. A couple of weeks ago I saw a writer offering his services on the Warrior forum. Cheap, only $5 per article, I know …. It looked to be a new service from a guy in the UK so I was an ass and assumed that he was trying to start up and offering his articles at a discount (as often happens on the WF), then once he had built up a customer base of satisfied customers put the price up. I can dig that, and if the articles are quality and working for me and the customer service is good I would happily go along with price increases.

Anyway I put a trial order in for 6 articles, not many but I order more when I know that the service is ok. 4 of those articles were to go on and then be reused to promote an electronic cigarette site. This is what I specified when I made the order:

‘To comply with the current UK law ecigs cannot be referred to as stop smoking aids, so it’s best to concentrate on what they are and the positives.’

Three of the articles that came back were totally about stopping smoking and ecigs being quit smoking aids. The fourth was about after stopping smoking and using an ecig rather than start again, with a fair bit of editing I managed to make that article comply with the UK and US laws – I hope!

Two of the articles were also invented stories from imaginary people who used ecigs to quit. I objected to using fakery to promote a product and I’ve got a darned good idea that’s illegal too. In this day and age with the Internet being policed more it isn’t worth risking your sites and business by telling lies or not complying with the laws in the country that you live in and the countries that you are targeting. I did actually use ecigs to help me stop smoking nearly 3 years ago but I am not allowed to try and sell them as a quit smoking aid.

Anyway I asked for 3 of the articles to be rewritten and explained why. I heard nothing for 3 days and then got the revised articles emailed to me with no apology for initially ignoring my instructions. I checked the articles and although different they were still about using ecigs for stopping smoking grrr. Again I asked for a rewrite and the articles came back the next day and they were what I asked for, but again no apology.

However, 2 of them were so poorly written and factually incorrect that it wasn’t even worth wasting time editing them. I couldn’t be bothered asking for further rewrites, the writer clearly wasn’t up to the task, nor did he understand the topic.

Two days later I saw the service provider – it was obvious from the articles that it was an English guy outsourcing to Asian writers – complaining in a thread on the forum about not getting many customers at his price point. This is what I would have posted if I wasn’t so nice

‘C…. the reason that you don’t have many customers is because your customer service stinks!

• You don’t ensure that the articles written by your outsource workers follow the instructions given by your customers.
•  Unbelievable that you did not reply to a customer complaint for 3 days, yet you were looking for more customers and answering questions about your ad on the forum.
• If you valued your customers you would apologise when mistakes are made and make sure that it doesn’t happen again as it did with me.
• The articles needed a lot of editing and 2 were unusable even after the third attempt. They were not worth any more than your $5 price point so stop whining.

Ok I got what I paid for in the end, but I could have gone straight to any number of Asian writers and got the same or a better standard for less aggro. I expected more of a UK service proveder, but maybe that was wrong of me. Suffice it to say that I’m not using that service again and ordered my next batch of outsourced articles at much higher rate and from a better writer, whose customer service  is far superior.

What Is Good Customer Service?

In my book good customer service is always being prompt. You should follow customer’s instructions, over deliver rather than under deliver. Apologise for mistakes or any lateness, your customer will be a lot more forgiving – and communicate. Good customer service = happy, repeat customers and recommendations from your customers = less or even no more advertising because you have a great customer base who want to throw lots of work and money at you.

Wow Free Articles

Also on the WF I saw a WSO offering free PLR articles, all new and several niches. I sometimes rewrite PLR for content so I thought I’d take advantage of the offer. I got 10 packs of 5 articles in different niches and most were suitable for my sites. The quality was good, better than the $5 articles that’s for sure. As always I checked to see how many had used them so far and came up with zilch. I checked again and again and found that they were absolutely unique.

In this day and age of Google wanting quality and uniqueness I was gobsmacked to find that I had got 50 good quality  articles free and nobody else had used them. Of course I took advantage of those articles, they were indexed on my sites first so no matter what my sites had the unique content first and that’s what’s important as far as Google is concerned.

What surprised me was that of all of those forum members who downloaded the articles not one of them took action and it’s the same story 2 weeks later. This early bird got the big fat worm.

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What Is Linxbot For?

Blog commenting, or should I say searching for high ranking blog pages to leave comments on.

Why Do That?

To help my sites rank well in the search engines. Backlinks count towards that and the higher the relevancy and Page Rank the better. I leave a comment that gets approved I get a backlink.

Isn’t Blog Commenting Spam?

Yes and no. Like many of you I get cheesed off with the huge amounts of crappy comment spam left on my blogs, but whenever somebody leaves an intelligent, relevant comment I’m pleased enough to visit their site and give it a Facebook like or tweet once I’ve approved it.

When I comment on blogs I read the post that I’m commenting on and think about what I’m going to say. If I can’t think of a decent quality comment that will add value I click away without leaving a comment.

Why Use Software?

I can find plenty of blogs to leave comments on by using a bit of code in the search engines, but when I check the blogs out I find that the cruddy spammers have got there before me. There is also the Page rank aspect. Many blogs have high ranking home pages, but the posts can be low or zero ranking and the link juice from those isn’t so great. What Linxbot finds is actual pages that have a high PR and the backlinks from thos are more valuable.

How Does Linxbot Work?

It’s really simple. You enter your keyword, select the tld from a drop down box. You can choose from .com, .edu, .gov, .co.uk, .com.au, .de, .nl and .ca then click on search. The software uses Google to search the Internet and find high PR pages. When it’s finished you click on ‘export to file’ and you can save the list wherever you want on your computer and open it up in notepad when you need to use it.

Is The List Of High PR Pages Any Good?

Yes it is, but not all of them. Some of the pages have closed comments, some have so much spam that I don’t want to go there. However, at least half of the pages are usable and there are far less spammed to death pages in a Linxbot search than when you just use the search engines.

Does The Software Get Results?

Yes it does. When I first bought it I kept a record of the high PR pages that I’d left comments on. I checked through them last week and found that every single one of my comments had been approved. That is because Linxbot quickly helped me to find good spam free pages and because I didn’t leave crap comments.

One result that I’m very pleased with is getting first place in the UK Google rankings for one of my niche blogs. For over 3 years it floated between 2nd and 8th for several keywords and I never thought I’d top that. I got comments accepted on 2 high PR .edu pages and within a few weeks another 13 .edu blogs linked to mine and suddenly it was ranking 1st for the 2 main keywords.

Any Downside?

Yes. I’ve run Linxbot whilst writing this and have now got a massive lists of high PR blog pages to check out for one of my new sites, no rest for the wicked!!

If you want to buy or watch the video showing you how it works just click on Linxbot – that is my affiliate link but if you don’t want to click on it type Linxbot into the search engines.

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