Based on the reaction I got in the comments to said post, as well as in my inbox, I was inspired to dive a little deeper into the topic of success and failure for self-made entrepreneurs (or any kind of entrepreneur, for that matter).

Rough Terrain

What made 2011 a successful year for me was in no way the absence of failure, but rather the fact that the successes outweighed the failures, once it was all said and done. When we look at a successful business or a successful individual, we tend to do so through rose-tinted glasses, taking much greater notice of their successes than their failures. That’s just the way the brain works: a few days after a match, no one remembers any of the missed shots anymore, but everyone remembers that one amazing slam-dunk.

It’s important to remember that everyone misses shots, everyone stumbles and falls and everyone fails. Watch the video below to see why this is such an important thing to realize:

Download Video

What About Positive Thinking?

My suggestion to expect and accept failure might rub you the wrong way (and if it does, I understand). It certainly goes against everything many motivational speakers and Tony Robbins types make their living with. Haven’t we all learned the importance of keeping a positive attitude and visualizing success?

Well, the truth is that positive thinking is not useful when it’s delusional. I completely agree that being overly pessimistic won’t help you in any way, neither in business nor in life. But expecting and preparing for high failure rates as an entrepreneur is simply being realistic and I don’t see why you can’t be realistic and still have a positive outlook. Be positive, but don’t be rainbows-and-unicorns positive by dreaming about effortless success and fancy cars. Instead positive and optimistic about your ability to work hard, to work persistently and to overcome adversity.

Mr. Coolidge says it better than I can:

Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

- Calvin Coolidge

All the best,

Read this review to see what this product is all about and to learn whether or not it’s worth investing in.

Overview

The main selling points for No-Hands SEO are that it’s supposed to be very highly automated and extremely easy to use and that it comes at a one-time cost. Both are attractive selling points, since SEO software often comes with a considerable learning curve and most tools in a link-builder’s arsenal, such as automation tools, blog networks and private networks, come with a monthly cost.

There are many different types of SEO and link-building tasks, so let’s begin by taking a look at what exactly No-Hands SEO actually does for you.

What it Actually Does

Here’s a short list of the functions No-Hands SEO can perform, followed by some more detailed descriptions below:

• Post your site to whois and statistics sites to get it indexed quickly.
• Find keyword-relevant pages, where comments can be left.
• Spam blog comments with links to your site.
• Spam trackbacks with your link.
• Ping pages where links were created.

You begin by starting the program and creating profiles for one or several websites. You do this by entering the URL of each site, keywords that will be used to find commentable pages on relevant sites and your desired anchor texts for the links that the software will create.

Here’s what the user interface looks like, for creating profiles:

No-Hands SEO then crawls your site’s pages and starts scraping for blogs and other pages where comments can be left, based on the keywords you entered.

After this simple setup step, the program is quite true to it’s “No-Hands” name, since you can now simply click the play-button and it will automatically start posting to whois-sites and attempt to leave comments and trackbacks with your links inside. It will also notify various pinging services of any successfully created links. At this point you can basically walk away and just let it do it’s thing.

If you want to, there are also more options to play with and the program does allow for a certain degree of fine-tuning. For example, you can set it to search for pages with a minimum PageRank before attempting to leave a comment or trackback. You can also add your own footprint searches for both trackbacks an comments:

Since it’s a spamming tool, it’s also quite prudent of the creators to include proxy-support. With heavy use, having sets of proxies to rotate through will significantly increase your success rates, as you’ll end up “burning out” IP addresses by getting them blacklisted in anti-spam services.

Conclusion

No-Hands SEO really is very easy to use, at least, as long as you don’t get into all of the more advanced options. Despite this, I can’t recommend it and there are two main reasons for this:

1. It’s a spamming tool and all of the links it can create for you are of the high-volume, high-failure-rate, low-impact variety. In fact, everything it does is high-volume and extremely low-impact.
2. If you’re going to spam (which I don’t recommend), then you might want to consider going all-out and investing in the equally priced and much more fully-featured ScrapeBox.

Expanding on the first point, there’s also something of an issue with over-promising and under-delivering, when it comes to No-Hands SEO. The promise is that it will do all of the tedious SEO tasks for you, but the reality is that it only does tasks that are so low-yield, you probably wouldn’t do them manually, anyway. If you want to get pages ranked for anything but the lowest-competition keywords, you’ll still have to go and build some higher-quality links, using some other method.

Bottom line: I don’t recommend this product.

Without further ado, here are the top lessons learned in 2011:

Change of Objectives

At the beginning of the year, my plan was to focus on product launches. It’s a common model, especially with information marketing. Create a product, put together a launch with as many affiliates as possible and (hopefully) make lots of sales in very little time. Then, start working on the next product.

SECockpit, the keyword research/SEO tool that I spent probably most of my time working on in 2011, changed this plan. Originally Sam (the developer of SECockpit) and I were planning to do a big launch for SECockpit. We wanted to create a course on niche marketing as a front-end product, offer it at a low price and integrate SECockpit as a back-end product. A low-priced front end product like this would have mass appeal and would get more potential customers on board for SECockpit.

As we were working on this plan, we soon realized that if we actually did put together a big, successful launch like this, it would likely only hurt us. SECockpit is a cloud-based application and it’s very resource intensive. More users equal higher demand on our servers. A typical “big launch” would lead to a huge spike in usage and required resources. High costs and technical difficulties would be almost inevitable and could lead to long-lasting damage to the brand. This kind of thing has happened before, in the IM space, when products were launched only to be followed by a slew of complaints and refund requests because neither the technical team nor the support team can keep up with the sudden surge of new users.

What we need for SECockpit is not a massive launch, what we need is steady growth. That way, the resources can gradually grow with the user base and we can continually keep adding new features, refining the existing features and quite simply keep making a better and better product.

This experience made me realize that the product launch doesn’t suit every business model and it opened my eyes to a longer-term view of creating and delivering a service. This long-term view is one that I now apply to all branches of my business.

Stunted Growth

For SECockpit, the plan of gradually growing the user base has been working out and it is the most successful product I’ve ever worked on. For my own projects, including products, niche sites and this blog, things didn’t go so smoothly.

At the beginning of the year, my income was increasing rapidly and I was hoping I could keep that momentum going. I couldn’t. In fact, it’s almost as if my income hit an invisible ceiling at some point and wouldn’t progress from there.

The reason is simple: I was doing everything myself. I was writing all the content, creating all the graphics, building all the links, making all the videos,… I was a one-man-show. I need to learn how to keep increasing the scale of a project and take myself out of the equation. I need to learn about outsourcing and team management and I need to learn to say no to new projects, at least once in a while. And I’m still working on all of that.

It’s fair to say that I’ve mostly failed at my attempts to scale up my various business projects. Sure, there were some successes, most notably my “throw money at it” case study, but there was also a lot of time and money lost on attempts at scaling that simply didn’t work out.

Even if you are an avid follower of this blog and my newsletter, there’s always a bias towards noticing success only. After all, you’ll never see a product that I invest thousands of dollars and countless hours in, but failed to ever complete (yes, that happened). And if I publish a boring blog post that nobody pays any attention to, then… well, you probably didn’t pay attention to it.

The reason I mention this is just as a simple reminder: even in a successful business, it’s often a matter of “failing forward”.

The Year Ahead

I have many plans for 2012 and just like last year, I expect many of them to change or fall by the wayside, as time progresses. That’s a good thing. My outlook on marketing and my career a year ago was much less mature than it is now and I hope to be able to say the same thing again, one year from now. What I know for sure is that I will keep working hard, I will keep experimenting and pushing myself to grow and I will keep sharing as much of what I learn as possible, as directly as possible, through blog posts, emails and webinars.

I will keep biting off more than I can chew and then do my best to chew it. If you’ve been following my progress for a while, you know that can get messy sometimes, but it ends up working out.

Most Important Posts

Finally, here are the most important blog post published on im impact in 2011:

• By far the most important must-read post on this site is this one about how to start with online marketing. If there’s only one thing of mine you ever read, it should be this.
• This blog network roundup review is the biggest, most comprehensive review project I ever did and it’s also the most popular post of the year.
• This early post about the meaning of Google Panda still rings very true and covers something I’ll keep focusing on, going forward.
• And finally, this post contains everything you need to know about speeding up your WordPress sites.

This may seem like a really bad deal, at first glance, but the key is that a System like BuildMyRank puts the emphasis on qality rather than quality: BMR only has blogs with pagerank (ranging from PR1 to PR6) in their network and they make an effort to get every single post indexed.

Is it worth the trouble writing unique posts (or outsourcing the task) or should you stick to more automated link-building solutions? Read on to find out.

BuildMyRank Overview

Once you’ve subscribed to the BuildMyRank service, you can log in and access their online dashboard. Your link-building campaigns can be organized by domains and projects and you can save specific link and anchor-text combinations for each domain you are promoting.

Check out the following video to get a quick look at what the BuildMyRank user interface looks like:

BuildMyRank Video

Results With BuildMyRank

As I think is apparent from the video, BMR has a very nice and user-friendly interface. What’s far more important however, is whether or not this service is actually useful and there’s only one measure of that: the Google rankings of sites being promoted with BMR.

I picked one of the pages I am running an SEO campaign for and paused all link-building to it. I waited for the rankings of that page to settle and it did so in position number 12. Then, over the course of a few days I built 8 BuildMyRank links to this page (no other link-building was done). The page started moving in the ranking results, then disappeared completely for two days, only to re-emerge in position number 2.

After some more movement, it settled down to position number 4.

So, overall, in this test, a page went from position 12 to position 4 with just 8 links built. Pretty impressive, as this is for a keyword with some SEO savvy competition fighting for the top spot.

I invited my subscribers to test BMR (they offer a free test-run of ten links to their system) and got feedback from a few of them. Here are their results:

Of course, I did not ask anyone to reveal their keywords, so I don’t know about competition strength for the examples above. What’s clear, however, is that BMR does move rank, at least in most cases.

I’ve also tested BMR in conjunction with other link-building methods like blog networks, article submissions etc. The results are positive across the board and every single terms I’ve been using BMR to promote is moving upwards in the SERP. On that note: The page I did my initial experiment on is now in position number 1 for it’s target keyword.

PageRank Distribution

Here’s a screenshot so you can take a closer look at the PR distribution I’ve been getting, so far:

Here’s my only small gripe with BMR: Too many PageRank 1′s and 2′s. The fact that the distribution is random, makes it a bit of a crapshoot. Believe me, on the rare occasion that your post goes to a PR6 blog, you’ll notice! A link from a PR6 blog is probably about 100x more valuable than one from a PR1 blog, so it’s always slightly disappointing when your posts go out to the lower-quality blogs.

Having said that, it’s clear from the outset that the range is PR1 to PR6, so it’s not like anything deceptive is going on here. And even the worst BMR link is still far better than the best links you can get out of many other link-building services, so don’t take this little complaint of mine the wrong way. As you may know, I always have something to nag about.

It’s also important to note that the posts go out to domains with PageRank. The posts themselves won’t have PageRank, of course. But they’ll be getting link-juice from the homepage and they will appear among the new posts on the homepage for a while. On that note:

Conclusion

I wouldn’t use it just on it’s own, but BuildMyRank is currently pretty much my favourite link-building tool. Something that never fails for me is building a large mount of low-quality links (think: bookmarks, blog-network submissions, article directories, profile links,…) and then adding a few high-quality links into the mix. BuildMyRank is a great source for those high-quality links. It shows that they make sure to get as many posts as possible indexed and the automatic bookmarking they do must be passing lots of link-juice into the network, because these links tend to be stronger than expected.

If you can either afford to have someone write posts and submit them to BMR for you or you can take even as little as 30 minutes a day to write a few posts yourself, I’ve no doubt you’ll see great results with BMR. Even better: They offer a free trial for 10 links to their system. So you can sign up, build those 10 links and see for yourself, what you can get out of them.

Click Here to Sign Up for Your Free Trial!

The question is: which ones of the many available networks should you join? Which ones are worth the investment and which ones should you avoid? And of course, the most important question: which networks provide the most and best backlinks?

That’s what we’re going to find out in this roundup review.

Blog Networks in this Review

Here are the candidates that I’m going to compare in this review:

Each of these blog networks are basically the same: you submit articles (usually spun articles) and they get posted out to a whole bunch of blogs in the respective network. I will probably create separate posts with reviews/videos showing the different control-panels and looking at things like user-friendliness for each candidate, but in this post, it’s all about the backlinks!

Test Setup

Let me get one thing out of the way: this test will not be a comparison of ranking results. Even though the ultimate goal is to find the networks that are best at increasing the rankings of your web-pages, it’s not possible to compare the candidates objectively by measuring rankings increases – there are simply too many variables involved, as soon as you compare two different URLs, even if they target the same keyword.

Instead, I will attempt to measure how many backlinks you can get from each of the networks and what the overall quality of the sites in each network is like, as objectively as possible. Here’s an illustration of the test setup:

In the graphic, there are only four blog networks, to save space. In the actual test, a total of eight networks are being compared. I submit 20 highly spun articles to each blog network, each article containing one link. I have also assigned one unique URL to each blog network. What this means is that the 20 article submitted to the first network all contain a link to one specific URL. The 20 articles submitted to the second network all link to a different URL and so on.

I am building no other backlinks and doing no other promotions to any of the unique URLs. The articles will be the same articles submitted to each network, choosing the same categories or categories matching each other as closely as possible. The reason for this is that there are probably certain categories with more matching blogs in a network and other categories with fewer matching blogs. By submitting identical articles to each network, I’m eliminating any unfair bias based on article categories.

Test Criteria

For this experiment, I will monitor the following criteria:

• Number of Publishes
  I’ll keep track of how many articles are officially published to blogs in each network. This gives us an initial idea of which networks provide the most links.
• Number of Links Picked up by ahrefs
  ahrefs is a backlink analysis service. I will be checking in on all the unique URLs to see how many of the published posts are crawled by ahrefs.
• Number of Links Picked up by Majestic
  Majestic SEO is another backlink analysis service, with a different index than ahrefs. I’ll also be measuring how many links are crawled by Majestic, just to get a “second opinion”, so to speak.
• Number of Pings
  The URLs I’ll be promoting are all from WordPress based websites. As another measure of how many links are being built, I will count the number of pingbacks received for each individual URL.
• PageRank (?) of Blogs in the Networks
  Finally, I’ll gather as many of the sites that articles were published to as possible and analyze their link-value. I’ll probably jut check the PageRank of the homepages for each site. Maybe I’ll come up with something else. The point is just to get an idea of how valuable all those links from a network actually are.

This was a long-term test, so below you’ll find data gathered during 90 days after the initial submissions. Some networks do a number of submissions all at once and then stop, others drip out the articles slowly, over time. By keeping track of the links created over a longer period of time, we don’t only see which networks provide the best short-term article “blasts”, but also which networks have the best long-term distribution rates.

Article Directories vs. Blogs

Some of the networks submit articles to both article directories and blogs. There are two major differences between these two types of sites:

1. Resource Boxes
   Article directories generally allow you to post an article without any links, followed by a “resource box” or “author box”, which is where you can add your backlinks. This is a technical detail and I doubt it makes a significant difference whether your links appear in the middle of the content or towards the end.
2. Broad vs. Narrow
   The bigger difference is that article directories usually cover a huge range of topics, while blogs accept articles on a specific topic. Articles are usually sent to all article directories in a network, but only to some blogs in a blog network. This means that you can get more links from one submission, from article directories, but your next article will be posted to the exact same set of sites again. With blogs, each submission might reach different blogs in the network, especially if they are on different topics.

Finally, note that blogs have a better chance to provide quality links than article directories, especially since the Panda update, part of which was a “slap” against article directories. Although, realistically, most sites in a network tend to be very low value. One of the goals of this review is to find out which networks are the best maintained, with the highest quality and highest value sites in them.

Ranking Results (After 30 Days)

First, let me address one simple question, which is: do blog networks work? In other words, are the types of backlinks you get from these networks any good and will they help you get your sites/pages ranked? To answer this question, let’s take a look at the rankings of the eight unique URLs promoted in this roundup. At the beginning of the experiment, none of these pages were ranking within the top 100 spots in Google for their target keywords. Here’s how the rankings progressed over 30 days:

You can see that a few days after the articles were added to each network, each of the pages popped up somewhere in the top 30 for it’s target keyword. Most of the pages maintained an upwards trend ever since, five out of the eight pages in the test reached a top-10 position within 30 days and one page reached the top spot for it’s keyword. Only one page is currently still dancing and was not in the top 100 at the end of 30 days (that’s the pale pink line).

Remember that we can’t make a fair comparison and conclude that the highest ranking pages must have been promoted by the best blog networks, because each page has a different target keyword with a different competition level. But I think these results very clearly show that blog network links do indeed help in increasing the ranking position of a page.

Network Reach (30/90 Days)

Next, let’s look at the most straight-forward piece of data, 30 days and 90 days after the articles were fed into each of the networks, which answers the question: how widely is an article distributed in each of the networks?

The second column shows the number of total article publishes for each network according to the network’s own stats. The first number shows the number of publishes during the first 30 day period, the number after the forward-slash shows how many additional publishes happened in the following 60 day period. The third row gives an indication of how many publishes per submitted article you can expect and the final row indicates within what time-frame the submissions stopped.

At first glance, this is pretty simple: more publishes mean more backlinks and the more backlinks, the better. With this in mind, it seems clear that SpinDistribute, Unique Article Wizard and DistributeYourArticles are the big winners, wile Authority Link Network and SEOLinkVine are lagging behind. It’s also clear that article distribution slows down after an initial “burst” on all of the networks.

However, there are a few factors that change this picture. On the one hand, the three networks with the widest submissions all submit to many directories and not just to blogs. This means, for example, that while an article sent to SpinDistribute gets published on over 800 sites, your next article submitted will go out to over 700 of the same sites that your first article was published on already. So, in terms of getting backlinks from unique websites, it’s not as powerful as it may seem.

On the other hand, backlinks are governed by a very strong “quality over quantity” principle. Sure, getting both quality and a large quantity of backlinks is always preferable but the fact is that a single link from a valuable site can do far more for your rankings than thousands or even hundreds of thousands of “crap-links” (e.g. forum profile spam links).

Network Quality (90 Days)

To find out about the actual value of the backlinks provided by each network, let’s get an idea of how many unique sites are in each network, how “indexable” those sites are and how many of the linking sites have some authority of their own. Since most blog networks don’t publish lists of exactly where your articles are posted (to protect the network), we’re left to our own devices.

The following table gives an indication of the amount of links from unique domains created by each network (after 90 days) as well as the “indexability” of those domains:

The second column (Pings) indicates how many pingbacks from unique domains were picked up by WordPress, for each of the test-pages. The “ahrefs Backlinks” column shows how many total links to each of the pages were picked up by ahrefs, a backlink analysis service. The next column shows how many total links to each of the pages were found by Majestic SEO, also a backlink analysis service. And the final column shows how many unique domains Majestic SEO found, linking back to the respective page.

These numbers are somewhat relevant as indicators of the quality of each network, since both ahrefs and Majestic SEO crawl the web in a similar fashion as a Google-bot would. As an example, you can see that Majestic only picked up links from 27 individual sites, out of the thousands of articles published through SpinDistribute, but it found 144 individual linking sites from only 300 articles published through Authority Link Network. This indicates that the websites in the ALN network are far more visible and more “indexable”. Crawler bots find these pages easily, which means that there are probably some higher-value sites involved. On the other hand, it seems that SpinDistribute is sending massive amounts of articles to “junk-yard-websites” that have no visibility on the web.
Next, I wanted to check for the quality of the linking sites more directly. I did this by looking at two criteria:

1. The number of inbound links to each linking domain, according to Majestic SEO.
2. The homepage PageRank of each of the linking sites.

It will come as no big surprise that these two factors are highly correlated. The more inbound links a site has, the higher it’s PageRank tends to be. Getting backlinks from a website that itself has many backlinks pointing to it is better than getting backlinks from a site with no backlinks of it’s own. That’s the logic behind this analysis.

Results After 30 Days:

Results After 90 Days:

Each bar indicates how many domains with that respective PageRank were found linking to the test pages for each network. Domains with no PageRank are not included in this graph. In this comparison, the clear winners are Traffic Kaboom, with a record number of PR4 and even PR5 domains, Authority Link network with lots of PR sites and ArticleRanks, which also boasts a decent number of PR domains. In the short term (first diagram), Authority Link Network provides the largest number of higher-quality links and in the longer-term (second diagram), Traffic Kaboom completely trounces the competition in terms of network quality.

Note that this test inherently favors those sites that already did well in the previous test, since the analyzed URLs are those picked up by Majestic SEO. So, if a network is not capable of producing links that get noticed by the Majestic SEO crawlers, it’s automatically disadvantaged in this comparison as well.

Conclusions

Here’s my rundown and recommendations for each of the tested networks:

ArticleRanks – Recommended!
ArticleRanks has a good user interface a very reasonable price and produces a decent number of quality backlinks. They keep a close eye on the quality of their network, make sure it’s not over-burdened with spam content and have a credit-system that incentivises users to add sites with PageRank to the network. Overall, a good system that delivers good results.

Authority Link Network – Recommended!
Authority Link Network is free to use (although subsciption plan are also available). By adding domains with PageRank to the network, you earn the right to submit articles of your own. There’s a strict limit to how many articles can be submitted and how often they are published and this is a very good thing, because it keeps the network’s quality in check. ALN rocks and you should use it.

DistributeYourArticles – Not Recommended!
DistributeYourArticles makes it unnecessarily difficult to submit articles. The interface is not great and they reject articles with long paragraphs as well as articles with a double line-space. The problem is that while they seem to care about these irrelevant details, they don’t care about the quality of their network, as indicated by the fact that almost none of the links are to be found.

My Article Network – Not Recommended!
My Article Network is lukewarm in every regard. The user interface is okay but not great, the distribution rate is okay but not great and the quality of the backlinks is below average. It’s not downright bad, but there are better systems to invest in.

SEOLinkVine – Not Recommended!
SEOLinkVine has an extremely slow distribution rate. On average, each article was published only nine times over the course of 30 days. However, they claim that the distributions keep going indefinitely, so we’ll have to see if this network manages to catch up with the others, over time. My worry is that indefinite distribution will deteriorate the quality of the network, as there will be an ever growing number of articles flooding a network that probably isn’t growing that quickly…

Traffic Kaboom – Recommended!
Traffic Kaboom is the clear winner, since it delivers a quality level comparable to Authority Link Network, but has fewer limitation attached (e.g. you can submit up to 10 articles per day without having to add any sites of your own) and it delivers more links in the long-run. It’s user interface is not brilliant, but gets the job done. As an added bonus, Traffic Kaboom also serves as a video distribution platform.

SpinDistribute – Not Recommended!
SpinDistribute allegedly creates massive amounts of backlinks. Unfortunately, it seems that they have pretty much “killed” their network by flooding it with too much content. Neither Majestic SEO nor ahrefs managed to find even one percent of all the links SpinDistribute is supposed to build. The big upside to this network is the “pay as you go” model and since it still managed to increase the rankings of it’s test page, maybe it’s worth using once for each website.

Unique Article Wizard – Not Recommended!
UAW has a terrible user interface. Just wanted to get that out there. Apart from that, I think it has a similar issue as SpinDistribute and DYA: the network consists of too many article directories (a.k.a. content farms) that get flooded with too much content and basically have no visibility on the web. Having said that, it definitely has more punch than either SD or DYA, but it still can’t keep up with the better contestants in this roundup.

Even at the best of times, one of the most grating things about PayPal is their impossibly sluggish website. It can take minutes (and feel like it’s taking hours) to get from the login page to the detailed view of one specific transaction. This is a problem that Putler, a desktop-based PayPal management app, attempts to solve. And it brings a few other perks along with it.

Overview

Putler Video

Here’s a quick video overview over what Putler is and what it does:

Download Video

Summary of the features:

• Easily and quickly find transactions.
• Detailed overview of sales trends.
• Sales trends by product.
• Sales trends by customer.
• Quickly and easily issue refunds.
• Support for multiple PayPal accounts.
• Support for multiple currencies.
• Easy performance comparison between accounts, products and more.

Using Putler

Putler is an Adobe Air based application, which means that it’s compatible with both Mac and PC. In order to use it, you need a PayPal business account, from which you can set up API access. Putler accesses and downloads PayPal data through the API. From a security standpoint, this is safer than remote access by adding username and password to an application, since only a limited number of actions can be done via API (e.g. it’s not possible to make payments or send money through the API).

The first time you run the program, you can tell it how far back it should go, when fetching historical data. Depending on how much data needs to be downloaded, it can take quite a long time, but you’ll only have to wait once. After that, Putler refreshed the data every five minutes (if you leave it running) or every time you start it up and when it fetches new data, this usually only takes a few seconds. Everything else in Putler is pretty much instant, whether you are checking sales-trends, searching for transactions or issuing a refund. This is a huge improvement over the crawlingly slow PayPal online interface.

Conclusion

For my current business, Putler is nice to have (and I will continue using it), but it’s not absolutely crucial. It saves me some time and it gives me a much better way of measuring and keeping the overview over my business’ success. And of course, it also makes refund processing a lot easier. In other words: it’s nice, but nothing mind blowing.

A few years ago, I was running an e-commerce store and more than half of all the payments were made using PayPal. For that particular business, I had to manually look up PayPal orders far more often than I do now and because of this, Putler would have been absolutely priceless. It would have literally saved me hours upon hours of time (time spent mostly staring at PayPal’s “loading” spinner) and I wish I had known about it, back then (assuming it already existed).

In conclusion: depending on your business model and on how much time you spend managing PayPal payments, Putler can either be a neat little management and tracking tool or a heaven-sent time saver.

Did the sites make a profit? Is the project a success or have I just found a way to waste money?
Read on to get the full details.

Bad News

I want to tell you about the bad news first, as there are two big factors that lead to some disappointment during this project:

1. Decreased Profit
   One of the sites involved in this project had already seen steadily increasing profits from one product promotion and for two months before the project started, it made more than $400 per month. I was assuming (and hoping) that this level of income would keep going or further increase, but for unknown reasons (rankings and traffic stayed the same), the earnings from that product promotion dropped to around $150-$200/month.
2. Low Conversions
   The second disappointment is that my conversions are very low, for some of the products I’m promoting. There are two products involved, for which I’ve already sent a decent amount of traffic, but where I have to send 300 or more visitors through my link before I see a single conversion. I’m targeting “product name” and “product name review” keywords, where conversions are usually pretty decent and I was hoping for 1% and higher conversion rates.

Traffic and Rankings

In terms of traffic and rankings, I’m quite pleased with the results I’ve gotten so far. Here’s how traffic has developed for the three sites involved:

Site #1

Site #2

For both of these sites, it looks like traffic started at zero and then shot up quite dramatically. Don’t let that distract you. The reason for that is simply that I only moved these sites over to the current analytics (Clicky) on August 3rd, so no traffic shows up for the first two days of August. Both sites were already seeing a bit of traffic before the experiment (although not much).

Site #3 (AdSense)

Site #3 was built from scratch and started with absolutely no traffic. It was also built on a brand new domain and as you can see, Google gave it no love for a good month. After that, rankings and traffic suddenly shot upwards and now the site is seeing more than 100 unique visitors most weekdays.

Rankings are secondary to traffic*, so here’s just a quick summary: for site #1, 6 out of 12 target keywords are ranking on the first page of Google. For site #2, 13 out of 14 target keywords are ranking on page one and for site #3, 3 out of 7 target keywords are ranking on the first page. Clearly, this SEO niche-site thing is still working. As I’ve stated previously, I believe the right kind of on-page content has a lot to do with getting good rankings, for post-Panda SEO.

How were these rankings achieved? I simply tested many different link building services offered on forums and on the web. I look for a good diversity of non-spammy links, good communication and good reporting from the service provider. And, of course, I keep track of rankings to figure out which services work and which ones aren’t worth the money. It’s a simple process of trial and error.

*Rankings are a very important thing to keep track of, to measure the effectiveness of SEO methods used. In terms of SEO-performance, they are the most important metric. In terms of site-performance, they are secondary.

Show Me the Money!

What this whole project really comes down to is one simple question: can I make more money with these sites than I spend on them? Can I successfully “throw money” at niche site projects and end up with more money than I started out with? To find out, here’s the breakdown of how much I’ve spent and how much the sites have generated in commissions/earnings, during the first two months.

The third row, “Asset Worth” is a guesstimate of how much each site would be worth if I sold it, based on September’s earnings multiplied by twelve. Another way of looking at it, is that it’s an estimate of how much the site will make in one year, if earnings go neither down nor up.

As you can see, I have not yet made an absolute profit, because the income generated by the sites is still only about half of what i invested. However, the income has been increasing since the beginning and almost $800 for the month of September. Assuming this level of income will remain or increase without further investments (and I made all of those investments within the first three weeks of starting the project), we’re looking at a very encouraging result: spend $2,500 to get an $800/month income stream after two months.

Perhaps even more importantly, I’ve created some very valuable assets. I started out with one site worth around $2,000 (although I thought it was worth more, at the time) and two sites worth $0, invested $2,500 and now have three sites worth a total of about $9,000. This is very encouraging, to say the least, and you can bet that I’m already looking for more keywords and products and replicating what I did with these three sites.

Conclusion

I’m very happy that I started this project. Not only was it a great learning experience for me (and hopefully it was useful for you too), but it also added a nice little revenue stream to my portfolio. Of course, I hope to increase the income all of the sites are producing significantly and there is still room for improvement, since I don’t have the top spot for all of my target keywords yet.

One big take-away is that despite Panda and various other alleged Google crackdowns, the niche marketing model is clearly still viable. As long as you focus on good, well-optimized on-site content, the rules have not really changed: create relevant content and build backlinks and you’ll see results.

Finally, I want to highlight the two reasons why I spent $2,5K at the beginning of the project and then pretty much let things take their course: one reason is that SEO simply takes time. Get a bunch of quality links today and you can expect them to affect your rankings sometime in the next couple of weeks. It’s absolutely no cause for worry, if nothing at all happens for quite some time (see traffic stats for site #3).

The second reason is that this amount of money is what’s often charged for “Guru” info-products. In fact, some time ago, when an SEO themed product was being sold for $2,5K, I stated that this money would probably be better invested in actual site-building and SEO work. Well, I’ve put my money where my mouth is and look at the results.

What would you rather have: a product “revealing the secrets” to SEO or three complete websites generating about $800/month, for the same price?

All Posts in the “Throw Money At It” Project:

1. Part 1: The Project
2. Part 2: Outsourcing Content
3. Part 3: Real-World On-Page SEO
4. Part 4: Results After Two Months – currently viewing

From the technical aspects of uploading and displaying optimized and compatible videos online, creating professional-level screencast videos or live videos to effective video marketing and traffic-generating techniques, Dave’s the man to talk to.

Here are some of the things we talk about:

• How Dave got started and how he built up his brand to the level of prominence it has today.
• How Dave uses videos for his own businesses.
• One simple thing you can do to make sure you keep your viewer’s attention and not have them click away and get distracted before your video has finished playing.
• Why he created a video-player platform and how it’s different from competing products.

Listen to the interview here or use the link below to download it (mp3 format):

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Download the audio file

Links:

• Video Rebel
• Web Video University Membership
• Dave Kaminski’s Blog

I hope you enjoyed this interview! If you have any questions or would like to add something, please leave a comment below!

Cheers,

I always find it quite difficult to answer these questions, because there is no simple, one-size-fits-all answer. In this post, I want to give answers that cover as many bases as possible.

If you’re on square one or feel stuck with your online marketing ventures, here’s everything you need to know to get started in the right direction.

Want to “Make Money Online?” Watch This First!

If you don’t relate to the phrase “make money online”, because you own a business or want to build a business, feel free to skip down to the next video. If, however, you somehow found your way here from the “Internet Marketing”, “Make Money Online”, “Get Rich Quick” type of angle, please watch the video below:

Download Video

What it Takes to Succeed

This video contains the most important message on this page and perhaps on this entire blog. This is what you need to know if you want to build a successful online business.

Download Video

Startup Business vs. Online Marketing

If you have a specific business idea along the lines of: “I want to sell the best blue widgets through an online store!” or “I’m creating this awesome online service for blue widget owners!”, then you will have to focus on branding, awesome customer service and utilizing some of the methods outlined below to get more customers.

If, on the other hand, you don’t have such an idea, if there isn’t something like an “invention” at the start of your business, your focus can be entirely set on one of the methods listed below. In many cases, you will be able to use a specific online marketing skill to work together with people who have an “invention”-based business and offer them services.

A Path to Take

There is no “best” way or method to start earning online. There’s no absolutely superior business model and there is no “easiest” way to get started. Instead, there are many ways and many things you can do to build a business around. And that’s a good thing, because it means you can find something that suits your personality and your interests.

I believe there are two factors that need to be in place for your business venture to succeed:

1. What you do must suit you personally, otherwise you’ll never get truly good at it.
2.  You must be sure that there’s a business in it. The easiest way to make sure is to check if there are already other people/other businesses doing the same thing or something very similar successfully.

Quite simply: find something that’s already working for someone and that you like doing. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of options available to aspiring online marketers (the list is sorted alphabetically and doesn’t reflect any preference or hierarchy):

Affiliate Marketing

Technically, anyone making affiliate commissions is an affiliate marketer, but the term is most commonly used to describe someone who is sending paid traffic from various sources to CPA and lead-gen offers. There are many advertising networks such as Neverblue, Copeac or EWA, that you can quite easily join as an individual and that have many offers in many different niches that you can start promoting right away.

Essentially, affiliate marketing is about traffic arbitrage. You get traffic in whichever way possible, from whatever sources you can get your hands on and you make sure that the traffic is costing you less than the payouts at the end of the offer are bringing back in. The reason this is typically done with paid traffic sources such as facebook ads, banner ads and popover/popunder ads is that many CPA offers are seasonal or depend on trends. Paid traffic sources give the affiliate the flexibility to react quickly.

Tracking, testing, tweaking and more testing on your campaigns is crucial to successful affiliate marketing. Find the perfect traffic source matching the target demographic of your offer, then test and tweak until you have a winner.

Blogging / Creating an Authority Site

Successful blogging hinges on creating highly remarkable content and building a strong community. The same is true if you intend to build a true authority site. Good, original content is not good enough. You need to have a unique voice and you need to brand yourself or your site.

As a blogger, you also need to be a social marketer to some extent, reaching out to your readers on twitter, facebook and perhaps further channels. Most bloggers end up also selling some type of product or service and many authority sites are monetized with display ads and affiliate offers.

Content Creation

There’s always demand for good online content and offering a content-writing service is a fairly easy way to start generating some income. The challenge is to scale it upwards. It is possible to scale such a business, of course, as several million-dollar content providing services attest to.

If you have a more-than-basic understanding of Google and can create content that’s optimized beyond “we repeat your keyword a lot”, you could establish yourself as a premium source and set yourself apart from the competition.

Conversion Rate Optimization

There are many great split-testing tools available, but not as many people who actually know how to use them properly. Conversion rate optimization is complex, as soon as it’s taken beyond “test different headlines”, but it also has the potential to make a huge difference for an online business.

With a good understanding of marketing psychology and knowledge of as many successful and unsuccessful split-testing case-studies as you can get your hands on, you can start building your own expertise through simple trial and error.

Copywriting

If you can write copy that makes sales, you’ll be very popular. Copywriting is a very complex art and science and everyone who sells anything needs good copy. Also: most people hate writing sales-copy.

There are many underlying principles to copywriting and even more possible applications, ranging from writing product-descriptions for e-commerce stores to creating all of the content for an online service provider. While the skills necessary to be a good copywriter aren’t easy to acquire, putting in the necessary work can put you in a great position. You’ll be able to offer a service that makes people more money than it costs them to hire you. This is a great position to be in.

Email Marketing

There are two aspects to email marketing. The first is list building a.k.a. getting people onto your mailing list and wanting to receive emails from you. The second is sending out emails that people actually pay attention to.

From my personal experience I can say that the vast majority of businesses have no idea what they’re doing with their email marketing. There is clearly not an abundance of email marketing experts around. Since follow-up marketing can be insanely profitable, there’s a lot of potential here. Teach yourself effective email marketing (through lots of trial and error) and you’ll be in a position to transform someone’s online business. Or you can just run your own mailing list(s).

Information Marketing

Selling your own information products can make for a very lucrative online business. A business that encompasses many of the methods and elements discussed here, such as email marketing, SEO, video marketing and more.

Be aware that not every niche is suitable for information products. You need to find a niche that’s suitable to you personally and where there are willing buyers spending money on information products already. A lot of your success with info marketing hinges on starting with the right idea. Also make sure that you understand the basics of online product delivery and memberships, as well as follow-up marketing. Whether you build many small info-products or one single product or membership that you continually grow or promote is up to you. Both methods can be lucrative.

Media Buying / Display Advertising

Online media buys (= banner ads, in most cases) can be incredibly fruitful traffic sources, if you know how to utilize them. A key to making them work is to understand the demographic of the people visiting the sites you are advertising on and the demographics of the people most likely to buy your offer.

You can either monetize your media buys directly, via affiliate, CPA or lead-gen offers, or build a media buying service for online businesses.

Mobile Marketing

More and more people are accessing the web through a variety of mobile devices. On the one hand, many businesses could use some help with mobile-optimization for their sites and on the other hand, there’s a whole world of mobile advertising and mobile follow-up that lacks real experts, because it’s all so new. New territory = big opportunity for pioneers (along with big risks, of course).

Of all the methods listed here, mobile marketing is the one I know least about myself, but it’s clear that many opportunities await.

Niche Site Building

A very popular and well known form of online marketing that goes something like this: find good, profitable keywords, build sites optimized for those keywords, get them ranked in Google and monetize them with contextual ads, affiliate offers or anything else you can think of.

To make this work, you need a very good understanding of keyword research as well as some expertise in search engine optimization. Many aspects like split-testing, understanding market psychology and even site speed optimization can be important, but they take a back seat to finding the right keywords and being able to get pages ranked for them.

Offline Marketing / Consulting

What’s often called “offline marketing” is actually online marketing consulting for small businesses. You work together with a business owner and help them search engine optimize their sites, help them get better conversions, show them how to follow up with their customers, start, run and tweak marketing campaigns with them etc.

There’s still a big demand for this kind of service as many business owners are clueless about online marketing and a good consultant can be the best thing that’s ever happend to their business. Plus, since there was an “offline marketing is easy” fad in IM not too long ago, there are probably a lot of incompetent amateurs shilling their services. Build some real skills and you can easily establish yourself as a company that stands out from the rabble.

SEO Service

Most people don’t like building links, which is why link-building services are so popular. The same can be said for other, “deeper” aspects of SEO, such as on-page, on-site and speed optimization. The latter belong mostly into the category of “consulting” above, but even with a backlinking service along, you can build a highly profitable business.

There’s a large range going from “tons of very cheap crap-links” to “a few super-backlinks that cost you an arm and a leg” and services all along this range seem to be prospering. You could do anything from to running some link building tools 24/7 on a VPS to build links for your customers all the way to building your own network of high-quality, aged, PageRank websites to sell individual links from. Chances are, you’ll find eager customers, provided you offer a good service.

Social Media Marketing

Disclaimer: I am the opposite of a social media expert. Nonetheless, I know that such a thing as social media experts exist and it’s clear to see that for some businesses, social media is a big deal.

As with many examples here, you can build your own business around social media, or you can offer services to business owners. With social media, it’s all about building a brand that people like to identify with and creating buzz by giving your followers things to talk about and share. One of the reasons I’m not a social media expert is because doing this right demands a significant time investment. Business owners may not be able to make that investment themselves, so there’s demand for people who could do it for them.

Despite the “soft-skill” nature of social media, don’t neglect the importance of testing and analysis in this field. Even a social media marketer is a performance marketer.

Video Creation / Video Marketing

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, online video is becoming increasingly important. Videos are useful marketing tools all along a funnel: they can help you build a brand, get more exposure and get more traffic, they can help you engage users on your website, educate them about your brand or business or product, they can be used as sales-videos to turn visitors into customers and they can be part of your support, in the form of tutorial videos.

You can build a whole business of your own, based on videos, or you can offer a valuable service to businesses, by offering video creation for them and/or by offering to help them out with the technical aspects of setting up video delivery and analytics. As with email marketing, there’s a lot of potential in the field of online video marketing, because it’s new and not many experts exist. Not many businesses are split-testing conversion-videos and properly utilizing video-analytics, because those things are complicated and time-consuming. They’re also potentially very profitable.

You Are Fortunate

You are fortunate to be alive now and to be part of the world’s population that has Internet access in some way or another. While it’s not easy to create a successful online business, it’s also not nearly as hard as it could be. The great thing about online business is that with all of the examples above, you can get started by investing mostly time and keep spending to a minimum.

You can get all of this started with a minimum of risk and almost no start-up capital necessary. You can buy a domain for less than $10, get hosting for less than $10/month and start building a website or a blog using only free resources. You can do all of your SEO and link-building manually, to get started with. You can use free screen recording software and the webcam on your notebook, start making videos and generate traffic from YouTube. You can use a free HTML editor to create simple landing pages, start off with small amounts of paid traffic and run split-tests using free software. You can get in touch with small businesses of all sorts and offer to write sales-copy for them, create videos for them, run split-tests for them or provide any number of other services for them, for free, just to gain experience and many will be glad to take you up on that offer.

And even starting with so little and with no formal business experience, it’s not unlikely to start earning some income within a few months and maybe even generate a full-time income within a year.

If you have that entrepreneurial spark and you are not afraid to challenge yourself, to see how far you can go and how much effort you can make in the face of (inevitable) adversity, now is the best time to get started.

That was a lot of text. Congratulations for making it this far. Here are the two things you need to remember:

1. Provide an insanely useful product or service to a specific audience.
2. Become really good at what you do, through repetition.

All the best,

This post is not about declaring the death of anything, but it’s also not a post to reassure you about the future of online business. Instead, I want to talk about the reality of online marketing and the big mistakes that come with too much optimism as well as too much pessimism about it.

A Step Back

There are many reasons to fear the end of various kinds of online business practices. Google algorithm changes are a favorite,but there’s also twitter banning tons of accounts, Amazon no longer allowing affiliates from certain states, rebill-scam offers being legislated out of existence, heavily funded “big fish” companies stomping all over your niche,… the list goes on.

However, it’s too easy to get caught up in self-pity and panic about whatever the latest change is that has affected or might somehow in the future affect online marketers. If you take a step back, you’ll quickly realize that there’s always something to complain about. And there have always been people complaining. When I first started with online marketing, there were already people whining about some Google update or other and there were already people declaring that it was all over for the “little guy”.

I’m sure this kind of thing has been going on since approximately the second day of the Internet’s existence.

The Arms Race

It’s getting harder every day. It used to be that you could buy 1-cent clicks on Google AdWords for super-valuable keywords and send the traffic directly to an affiliate offer. Those were the days! It used to be that if you created a blog promoting a ClickBank product, you’d immediately get top-listings in Google, because no one else was promoting those products, so your site ranked by default. At least, that’s what I’ve been told (I haven’t been around very long).

On the other hand, it used to be that you had to go through a lot of trouble just to register a domain, let alone build a website! It used to be that people were very cautious about buying anything online. It used to be that not many people were online to begin with. It used to be that you had to do everything yourself, when now you can use an enormous range of tools and services that make a marketer’s life easier (content management systems, shopping carts, affiliate systems, payment processors…).

It’s like an arms race. While the opportunities for making a quick buck are shrinking, the tools and systems that can help you build an online business are becoming better, easier to use and more affordable.

Distractions and Excuses

I’m not blindly optimistic about online marketing, even though I do think it’s still a great opportunity, even if you’re completely new to it all. I assume that online marketing and the Internet will keep changing rapidly and maybe everything we do now will no longer be useful or valid in five year’s time. I also believe it’s likely that a global crisis of some sort will thoroughly mess with us and our businesses, within my lifetime.

But that doesn’t stop me from keeping on working on my business. Here’s what you need to realize: while some are complaining, other’s are profiting. Some people are busy writing forum- and blog-posts about how Google has shut small players out of the search results and at the very same time, other people are getting their small sites ranked for lucrative keywords. I can guarantee you that right now, someone with little to no funding and no connections is working on a website, a service or an idea that will make him or her a billionaire in the near future. They aren’t complaining on forums. They’re too busy making stuff happen.

As an entrepreneur, you are constantly faced with a changing environment and there’s always a new challenge around the corner. And yes, sometimes changes happen that pull the rug from under your feet. It’s good to be cautious. But don’t ever buy into the panic and don’t ever let “the death of online marketing” become a distraction for you – a justification to complain and moan instead of work.

And if you do need a pinch of optimism, think about this: while we don’t know what the future holds, at least we know that people who declare the end of online/affiliate/niche marketing have historically been incorrect 100% of the time. Don’t listen to anyone with a track-record like that.

All the best,