If you’re making any kind of money through your websites either through affiliate marketing, advertising, selling your own products or whatever else, you really need to think carefully about your hosting choices. You have to remember that your all your income is in the hands of your hosting company and there are some real cowboys out there so watch out.

I’ll start by warning you against one particular hosting provider that is probably the worst on the web. JustHost have some great deals but their whole setup is terrible and unreliable. I used them for a few months when I was starting out and was oblivious to the dangers of unreliable webhosting.

The first problem was that almost every week I would have at least one website that would be suspended for using too many resources on their shared hosting. I’d email them and tell them that I had fixed the problem (but really I had done nothing) and then they would reinstate it and it would be fine. It would then happen to another site and so on…

That was nothing though compared to the biggest problem I had with them.

Normally the rank tracker plugin is sending me emails about my rankings every couple of minutes when someone finds one of my sites in Google. When everything went quiet for a couple of hours I knew something was wrong. I began checking each one only to find that Firefox couldn’t find any of my sites. I began to panic and checked them through a proxy and still couldn’t see them so it was obvious that it wasn’t a problem at my end.

I contacted their non-native-English speaking staff only for them to email back and reassure me that there was nothing wrong! I tried phoning them and was put on hold for 40 minutes!! When I eventually got through I was told again that there was no problem!! I was beginning to pull my hair out at this point so I started transferring my sites to other hosting.

I since found out that JustHost are considered the WORST hosting company on the Internet!! I can’t believe I actually entrusted them to look after by online business!! Lesson learned!

Good Hosting For Affiliate Marketers?

First of all I’ll point out that you’ll find some bad reviews for every hosting company (you’ll find thousands for JustHost) because that is just the nature of web hosting.

BlueHost is my first recommendation. I’ve hosted over 50 sites on Bluehost before without any problems. All my sites load really quickly including this one which is hosted on my BlueHost account. Their technical support is really competent and quick to respond to any questions.

They also backup your sites so they can restore them if you accidentally delete something! They give you a free domain when you sign up as well. You have to pay for the full 12 months in advance but they will refund that if you cancel at any time. So it’s easy to get your money back. I fully recommend BlueHost as I’m very happy with them.

My second recommendation is Host Gator. I’ve got quite a few of my sites hosted there and haven’t has any problems yet! They are also really cheap. You can start out with a baby croc account and upgrade it if you need to. I’ve got friends hosting about 40 sites on a single baby croc account so it’s good value for money. You can also pay monthly so there’s no initial expense.

Host Gator is cheaper but Bluehost has better support. They are both highly recommended but if you are just starting out and are not making any money yet, Hostgator is a better choice because it’s cheaper and you can pay monthly. With Bluehost you have to pay 12 months up front although you do get a refund if you cancel.

Go to the BlueHost website or the HostGator website for more information

The Best Web Hosting For You? is a post from: Affiliate Marketing Review

For those that don’t know, PostRunner is a network of blogs belonging to the Keyword Academy. If you’re a member of the Keyword Academy you get free access to this tool. The blogs in PostRunner are owned by members of  the KWA, I’ve got 2 myself and there are hundreds in the network all on unique IP addresses scattered around the Internet.

To use PostRunner you have to submit a 300 word article in which you can put 2 backlinks that link back to your sites. I’ve been using it for a while now and it is unbeatable for getting quality backlinks. Having 2 PostRunner sites myself I notice that a lot of people aren’t using it to it’s full advantage.

The Right Way to Use PostRunner

Link to Different URLs

Within each article you submit to a PostRunner blog you can have 2 backlinks. Now, there’s a common thought among SEO experts that 2 links linking back to the same page are no better than a single link. Essentially, you should be linking back to 2 separate URLs to really take full advantage of your 300 word article.

Not All Blogs Are the Same

I know that Court and Mark will tell you not to bother looking to see what page rank is of the blog you are submitting to. However, there are PR0 up to PR6 blogs in the network. You’re much better off getting links from the higher PR blogs first. You can see the PR by clicking on the blog which then opens up in a new window. If you’re using Firefox or Chrome you can install a plug-in to easily see the PR of that particular blog before submitting to it. If you’re using Internet Explorer you should probably read How to Start Earning Money Online because you’re obviously a bit behind on the game!

There are some blogs in the PostRunner network that don’t have any PR but should still be on your list of ‘submit to these blogs first’. These are blogs that are on aged domains. Normally blog owners will state in the description if it’s an aged domain. The rule is older the better! The links you get from these sites will be much more valuable.

It’s Worth The Time and Effort

It’s good to have a mixture of backlinks and PostRunner is where you get the quality backlinks that will stop your sites from bouncing around. If you’ve been into IM for any length of time you should be able to type pretty quickly. Knocking out a 300 word article in exchange for 2 quality backlinks from a unique IP is well worth the time and effort.

PostRunner is part of the Keyword Academy

Using PostRunner for Back Links is a post from: Affiliate Marketing Review

Social ADR gets around this because it’s the members of social ADR who will be bookmarking your URLs from their own unique accounts on unique IP addresses.

If you sign up for a free social ADR account you will have to spend a little bit of time setting up a few accounts and then bookmarking URLs from other members. When you do this you will earn credits which will enable your own URLs to be bookmarked by other social ADR members.

When you setup your URLs that you want bookmarked you can use spin-tax for the title and description to give your bookmarks some uniqueness. I usually just look at my rank tracker plug-in and see what keywords I’m starting to rank for and then use these for the bookmark titles as it’s the title that will be the actual hyperlinked keyword back to your site.

There are various levels of paid membership. This just means that you get a certain number of credits each day that will enable URLs in your bookmark queue to be bookmarked. By paying you won’t have to spend your time bookmarking other peoples URLs.

If you’re making little or no money online yet then just go for the free option. Once you have some money to reinvest in your Internet marketing you can upgrade to one of the paid memberships.

Whichever way you use it, social ADR is a fantastic way to get some good back links to your site from lots of different unique IPs.

Go to the socialADR website for more details.

Social Bookmarking Made Easy With SocialADR is a post from: Affiliate Marketing Review

Ezarticlelink

Out of all of the link building tools out there, this one is my favourite. They have a free and a paid version, so it’s suitable for almost everyone. The only slight drawback is that it might be a little bit complicated for beginners.

So how does Ezarticlelink work?

Like most decent link building techniques, Ezarticlelink involves spinning an article. You then submit your spun article  containing your back linked keywords to a network of blogs. If you use the free version, your article gets submitted to 300 different directories. With the paid version, once your article reaches 300 submissions it continues to be submitted at a slower rate forever giving you an endless trickle of backlinks.

For every site that you promote you have to add an article website into the network. This can be any site you own, all you need to do is upload a folder to your website containing a php file and the rest is setup for you. You just need to make sure you have  link from your homepage to the directory.

You’re free to alter the look and feel of the directory and also add AdSense to it to if you want. They provide an online WYSIWYG editor so it’s pretty easy to customize it.

Once you have that site setup you can submit spun articles into the network promoting any page on that site.

Also for each site that you add an article directory to, you get to add another website into the network that doesn’t require an article directory. Ideally these will be your more important money sites.

Within each spun article you submit you can choose three keyword phrases that will be hyperlinked back to the website you are promoting. Keyword phrase 1 will be used 40%, keyword 2 20% and keyword 3 20%. The remaining 20% will be your article title which will be hyperlinked back. This randomization makes your link building look natural in the eye s of google. You can also choose how many links are posted each day, further increasing the organic look to your link building.

Your articles need to be very well spun and they will have to pass some quality tests to pass the submission process. Ezarticlelink provides it’s own browser based spinner which does a pretty good job although if you’re doing a lot of spinning, The Best Spinner is unbeatable.

What makes Ezarticlelink really effective is that they actually promote the article directories that you’ve put into to the back end of your some of your sites. This has a double effect. The first is that it ensures all your links get indexed (unlike the link juicer, the free traffic system and others) the second is that the sites that you put an article directory on will automatically start to perform better in the SERPS.

I generally put the article directories on sites that aren’t performing very well. More often than not they start to perform better thanks to the unique content that is being published regularly and combined with the automatic links that the system will point at your site.

One other advantage with the paid version you also get 100 bonus back links for each article you submit. You can use these links for any URL that you want. If you have hubs, squids or EzineArticles then you can easily backlink to them with these bonus links.

To make good use of the backlinks, a good strategy that I’ve found is to go through all the data that the ranktracker plug-in gives you and actually find some of the long tailed keywords that are bringing traffic to your site and then target them with the bonus links.

Overall Ezarticlelink is my favorite way to build links. If I had to rely on only one source of backlinks, this would be it! I used the free version for quite some time before I upgraded to the paid version. The best thing about the paid version is the bonus links that you get for each article. Submit 10 articles and you’ve got 1000 backlinks ready to target any keyword phrase you like. This in itself is very powerful!

Try the free version and then when you get to grips with it, go for the paid version. If you use it properly it more than pays for itself.

Like i said before, it can be a little complicated when you begin. I started setting it up and then lost interest but came back to it when I kept hearing how effective it is. Persist with it because it’s worth it. Currently for me, this is easily the best backlinking system out there based upon on own results.

WordPress goldmine has some great videos about how to setup your directories and get the most out of it. So if you’ve already joined WordPress goldmine, just search for Ezarticlelink for videos and advice.

Start using Ezarticlelink for FREE

Ezarticlelink – Easily the Best Free Link Building Tool is a post from: Affiliate Marketing Review

I’ve had this bad boy for a couple of months now. I actually picked it up while it was still in the development stage and have been using it a lot. Today however, the Automatic Backlink Creator V2 went live which means it’s time for a review!

The ABC Plugin Review

Automatic Backlink Creator is a bit of a mouthful so I’ll be calling it the ABC plugin for the rest of this review. It was actually called the ABC plugin when I first heard about it and I think most people will be referring to it as the ABC plugin anyway.

So What is The ABC Plugin?

The ABC plugin is a plugin for WordPress. So, if you’re not using WordPress then you can stop reading now and maybe go and Google the benefits of using WordPress instead! For the other 99.9% of Internet marketers that are using WordPress then this plugin is definitely of use to you.

Once you’ve got it installed can choose up to 500 different URLs that you want to send links to. These can be on any of your sites or you can even send links to your HubPages, Squidoo Lenses, EzineArticles or any other URL you can think of!

The links will appear in the sidebar of any site that has the ABC widget showing on their site. You can also have the ABC widget showing on your site if you wish but that is optional. You can choose as many different anchor text variations as you want and you also select which category of sites to show the links.

For example if I wanted to promote the URL of this page I would choose some anchor text variations like {ABC Review|Automatic Backlink Creator Review|ABC plugin}. I would then select the Interent marketing category so that the links would only be displayed on IM related websites.

The plugin will gradually build up your backlinks at a normal rate. So you’ll be getting related links back to your website but you’ll also be getting real visitors too! At the moment the number of sites in the network is in the tens of thousands and you can expect that to rize now that the official version is out! That means a lot of backlinks from a lot of unique IPs.

It gets even better though!

You can also submit spun articles into the network which will be posted on related sites. You can include up to 3 anchor text links. You can also spin your anchor text as well!! I’ve been using this feature a lot and the number of pingbacks I’m getting is amazing!

That means that Google is indexing my backlinks and counting them. And in my opinion you can’t get a better link than a contextual related backlink!

You can also have other peoples spun articles automatically submitted to your own sites if you want! That will give you a lot of free unique content. Plus it’s possible to track where every article has been submitted which means you can build backlinks to the articles that you’ve submitted AND if you are accepting articles on your own sites then the chances are the owners of those articles will be building backlinks to your sites as well which means even more backlinks!

This is an excellent link building plugin! It has actually become one of my main link building tools now! That’s how good it is! The downside is that it’s not cheap and that it’s also a monthly fee as well. At least the god thing about monthly subscriptions is that the program keeps getting updates.

In my opinion, it’s worth every penny though! The rankings on my money sites are continuing to improve for loads more keywords than I ever imagined! Bargain! If you have WordPress and you want quality automatic backlinks, then you need this plugin.

Go to the Automatic Backlink Creator Website For More Details

Automatic Backlink Creator Review is a post from: Affiliate Marketing Review

There have been quite a few article submission software tools over the last few years, but I’ll tell you right off the bat that none of them come close to Article Marketing Robot. In this Article Marketing Review I’ll be explaining exactly what makes this article submission software the best yet. Incidentally it’s a bit of a mouthful so I’ll be referring to it as AMR from now on.

The first thing you’ll notice about AMR is the sheer volume of article directories that it will submit your site too. At the last count it was over 3000! Now if you know anything about article submission software you’ll know that you will never get a 100% success rate, you can however expect to get your article out to over 2000 directories every time! That’s a lot of backlinks!

The next great feature of AMR is that it will create accounts at all of these directories for you instantly. That’s actually a bit of a relief because manually signing up to 3000 directories would be a nightmare! Another great feature of AMR is that it has it’s spinner. This is really a great feature if you don’t own your own spinning software.

In case you don’t know, a spinner is a program which will help you to spin all the words in your article to make them unique for example: Article Marketing Robot is a {great|fantastic|good} program. When your articles are submitted one variation will be chosen for each article. If you spin all the words in your articles Google will think they are unique articles and your back links will carry much more value. The Spinner in AMR is great and does it’s job. It’s nothing compared to ‘The Best Spinner’ however if you don’t have that then the free one included in AMR is OK to get you started.

                                                    Article Marketing Robot 5 Day Free Trial

The whole process of submitting articles with AMR is quick and painless. The program gets updated regularly so you can expect new article directories and new features to be added regularly. All this is great but I still haven’t talked about the best feature of Article Marketing Robot.. After you’ve run your article submission you get a report containing a list of all the URLS where your articles have been submitted! This is fantastic and no other article submitter does this. Why is it so good? Because you can see exactly where your articles have been submitted and then go and use something like SocialADR to go and bookmark all your links and add even more link juice to your back links. Just this feature alone is worth the money in my opinion.

All in all, Article Marketing Robot is easily the best submission software on the market and provides you with thousands of back links.

At the moment there’s a 5 day free trial available so you can see how powerful it is before you part with your money

Go to the Article Marketing Robot website for more information.

Article Marketing Robot – Review is a post from: Affiliate Marketing Review

I first joined the Keyword Academy for the PostRunner feature. At that point I didn’t even know it that the Keyword Academy was actually a really good learning resource with loads of training videos, webinars, PDFs and an excellent forum with hundreds of very useful active members.

PostRunner

Like I said, I originally joined for PostRunner, so let me explain what that is first. PostRunner is a network of high PR blogs that are exclusive to the Keyword Academy. You can submit articles to any of the blogs and get 2 contextual back links to any website of your choice.

To get your websites ranking well in Google, you need a variety of backlinks from a variety of places. Hundreds and more often than not, thousands of low quality backlinks will be required to get your websites ranking well. Apart from the many low value backlinks that you will need, a few high PR links will do wonders to your rankings as well. This is where PostRunner comes in.

Just select one of the high PR blogs and submit an article and you’ll get 2 backlinks from a high PR website. A few of these and Google will start ranking your sites much higher in the SERPS.

For such a worthwhile backlinking service I was a happy to pay the $33 monthly charge, that’s before I even knew about the other stuff you get at the Keyword Academy.

Keyword Academy

The training they offer is excellent and covers most things from the basics up to pretty advanced techniques. It’s delivered in a series of PDFs, videos and over 20 hours of MP3 webinars.

The forum is also very cool. The thing I really like about the forum is that if you can prove your online income you get a badge next to your avatar displaying the amount of money you are earning each month. This is really good because you can easily know whose advice to follow because it is backed up by their earnings.

Conclusion

The forum is a great learning tool in itself and worthy of the $33 monthly subscription. The best thing is though, you can try all of this for one month for FREE! If after the first month you don’t think it’s worth the money you leave without having to spend anything!

The Keyword Academy is a great resource and is up there with WordPress Goldmine as essential places to hang out to learn affiliate marketing. (Plus you get access to PostRunner, an excellent source of high PR backlinks)!

You can try The Keyword Academy and PostRunner for free so you’ve got nothing to lose (unlike Wealthy Affiliate)!!

Try The Keyword Academy & PostRunner 1 month Free Trial

The Keyword Academy and PostRunner Review is a post from: Affiliate Marketing Review

Rank tracker WordPress Plugin – Do You Need it?

The Rank Tracker plugin is strictly for people who use WordPress. There’s a good chance that includes you seeing as though 99% of affiliate marketers use WordPress! So what exactly does the Rank Tracker plugin do and should you invest in it?

There’s nothing fancy or cutting edge about the Rank Tracker plugin, but that doesn’t mean it’s not absolutely fantastic and essential, because it is!

Once installed, you just choose which Google locality you want to track (Google.com, Google.co.uk etc) and then put in your email address and your done. That’s it.

So what happens next?? Well you get sent an email every time someone finds a page of your website through a Google search. It tells you the exact term they used to find that specific web page and also the ranking of that page in Google.

Essentially you get sent keywords that people are using to find your website and where that keyword is ranking in Google.

This is vital information that you can use to your advantage. For example if I see that someone found this page about Rank Tracker by typing in the term ‘information about Rank Tracker’ and that that term was ranking at no.5 in Google I could use some of my link building techniques and shoot some links at this page with the anchor text ‘information about Rank Tracker’ thus making it rise in the Google rankings.

Sometimes however, you will notice that a webpage is ranking for a related term you never even thought about. You then have all the information you need to add another post or page to your website knowing that it will rank and increase traffic to your site.

The beauty is that this information is emailed to you as it happens. Every morning I check my emails to find tens to hundreds of emails from all of my websites showing me what keywords people are using to find my websites. This gives me plenty of ideas for new content, new ways to make money and what web pages I should promote with the exact search terms that people are using.

I love the Rank Tracker plugin!

One word of advice is to set up a filter on your email so that all the rank tracker plugins go directly into a separate folder because depending on how many websites and how much traffic you have, you could be getting a lot of these emails!

Conclusion

Rank Tracker won’t do anything for you on it’s own, but if you use the information it gives you for improving SEO, adding new content and promoting your sites, then you’ll soon see an increase in your traffic and profits.

At $27 Rank Tracker is an absolutely essential tool for all affiliate marketers. Without it,  it’s like stumbling around in the dark!

Go to the Rank Tracker website for more information.

Rank Tracker Plugin – Review is a post from: Affiliate Marketing Review

Times are changing. While article marketing remains the cornerstone of affiliate marketing, video marketing is becoming more and more popular. The amount of traffic that goes through YouTube is staggering and has begun to dwarf that of popular article directories such as EzineArticles.com.

So how do you begin creating videos to market your products? This is where Video Creation Mastery comes in.

Video Creation Mastery takes you through every different aspect of video marketing from creating standard slide show videos, animoto videos talking head videos and product review videos.

It’s produced by Mark Thompson of WordPress Goldmine fame. If you know anything about WordPress Goldmine and Mark Thompson, you’ll know what to expect.. A quality product that does what it says and without any hype!

The thing I like best about this product is that Mark doesn’t really have an amazing speaking voice and confesses himself that he hates the sound of his own voice. What this demonstrates is that anyone can make videos and you don’t have to be a radio DJ or TV presenter to come across well.

There are loads of tutorials that show you how to make a number of different videos and how to use them to drive traffic to your affiliate offers.

I really like Video Creation Mastery. It’s opened my eyes up to the many ways in which video can be used to market affiliate products. One of my favourites is Animoto which I had nerver actually heard of before taking the Video Creation Mastery course. For making slide-show videos, Animoto is excellent and Video Creation Mastery takes you through the step by step process of making videos using Animoto.

After completing the Video Creation Mastery module on Animoto, I whipped up the following video, putting to use what I’d just learned:

Notice I put the ‘Click The Link Below’ part because I’ve uploaded it to YouTube where with a bit of luck, after some promotion, it will drive some traffic this way as well as serve as an example for this review. After all that’s the whole point of video marketing.

One thing that a lot of people forget when making videos is ‘the call to action’. You wouldn’t write an article without a resource box and call to action, so why make a video without a call to action telling the viewer what to do next!

Video Creation Mastery is a lot of fun and comes highly recommended. Video marketing is still brand new and learning how to capatalize on it before everyone is doing it!

VCM shows you how to make the most of video for your Internet and affiliate marketing. While I don’t think article marketing will ever die, video marketing really is becoming a big part of affiliate marketing. In this day and age people’s attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter which is why video is becoming more popular.

I find making videos a lot more fun than writing articles too!

The best thing about VCM is that it’s a one off fee rather than a monthly subscription like some of the other ‘video marketing’ tutorials out there. That also included future videos that are constantly being added. As I understand, after a certain amount of people have joined it will become a monthly subscription, but right now it’s great value for money.

There’s a special discount for WordPress Goldmine members so if you arnen’t a member there yet, you might want to join first and save even more money!

There is no sales page for Video Creation Mastery, instead Mark Thompson has decided to provide lots of free information to whet your appetite including a great affiliate marketing crash course which consists of about 8 videos (All for Free)!

Go and check it out, you may learn something without even spending any money!

Video Creation Mastery

Video Creation Mastery – Review is a post from: Affiliate Marketing Review

I’m sure you already know that backlinks are what makes your websites rank, so the more incoming links from various different sources that you get, the higher your website will rank. There are many different link building programs reviewed here, but right now, its Jonathon Ledger’s 3 Way Links that we are going to look at right now.

What is The 3 Way Link System?

Three way links are different to reciprocal links. Reciprocal links between 2 websites have very little SEO value anymore. 3 way links however, where website A links to website B and website B links back to A have more SEO value and can easily rank your niche sites in not too competitive niches.

The system works by you adding an extra page to your website that will eventually contain many links to other websites. In return your link is placed on other websites in a A-B-C pattern. All you do is setup the page and the program will do the rest.

You can have up to 50 websites in the system and each website will get 250 in bound links from 250 unique websites.

It costs $47 per month and has a $7 trial for the first month.

The links are added at a rate of something like 8-15 per day so that it doesn’t raise any alarm bells with Google and the link building looks natural. You can choose three different keyword phrases for your anchor text. Keyword 1 will be used 60% of the time, Keyword 2 will be used 30% of the time and Keyword 3 will used 10% of the time.

You can also spin the site description which provides uniqueness to the links.

All of this makes your link building look very natural.

Does it Work?

Yes it does. I used it personally for a few months. It easily got many of my websites to the first page of Google in semi-competitive niches. It takes between 2-4 weeks before you see the results, after which time you should be on page one of Google depending on the competitiveness of your niche.

Conclusion

Although I used the service for some time and had some impressive results, I wouldn’t recommend 3 Way Links to everyone. The first reason is that the extra page you need to add must look like the rest of your website and would be tedious to do for every website. If you use WordPress then this isn’t a problem because there’s a free plugin which you install and it does all of that for you.

There’s a 50 site limit which is the reason I canceled in the end as the number of sites I had became too much and I decided to spend my $47 on other services instead.

If you are just beginning building your empire of websites and have less than 50 and you are using WordPress then I recommend this system to you. If you have 50 sites in the system then you’re paying less than $1 for 250 unique links. If you only have a couple of websites then 3 way links definitely is not for you!

Overall I liked 3 Way Links. Once each site was setup, I could leave it and move on the next. I also like the fact that the links came from othe websites and not just article directories or forum links. In the end though the 50 website limit was the reason I quit. If that doesn’t effect you then you should definitely try 3 Way Links.

3 Way Links $7 Trial Offer

3 Way Links – Review is a post from: Affiliate Marketing Review