Money-Code » tools

Bookmarking Demon 5 is out!

admin — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 16:16:54 +0000

Just got the email today that Bookmarking Demon 5 is official out and available. This is absolutely great news since BMD4 was having all sorts of trouble as of late. I’ll post a follow up post on my thoughts of the new features, and how the migration of accounts went (basically, I’ll put together a full review of Bookmarking Demon 5). I’m particular excited about the scheduler feature where you can drip submit to bookmarking sites, and the inclusion of phpDug sites.

If you’re unfamiliar with Bookmarking Demon, it’s a great piece of software where you create social bookmarking accounts and submit sites to them. You can create many accounts, and also submit ‘filler’ RSS feeds to make your bookmarking submissions seem more natural. By creating a level of bookmark backlinks you can help increase your rank in the SERPs and eventually gain more traffic. Granted this quality of traffic seems pretty poor in general, but the SERP position is the greatest benefit of the tool… and that’s the traffic you want in the long run.

A word of warning, if you do not make this look natural and are clearly self-promoting your ‘money sites’, then you could be de-indexed from Google or have specific social bookmarking accounts banned. The trick is to promote pages relating to your site, not your sites directly.

The bottom line, it’s a great tool for generating backlinks and search traffic to your sites. It’s awesome tool for the fact that it saves you a ton of time by doing things for you vs. manually doing it by hand. You should really check out the promotional video.. since is shows some of the features.

- Browser mode. You get to see what is happening right in front of you.
- Multi-threading for both account creation and bookmarking.
- New open source bookmarking script PHPDug added.
- Added a Scheduler.
- Email verification system added.
- A better project management system.
- Visual aid (coming soon)

If you already have a licensed version of BMD4, this is a free download.

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If I had to start again today….

admin — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:37:53 +0000

I read “If You Had To Start Over With $0 Budget” at Deneil Merritt‘s blog (great blog by the way), and it got me thinking about how I would start again. I don’t think I would start with a $0 budget, and if you’re interested in affiliate or internet marketing, you should try with a hearty effort, or don’t try at all and save yourself the misery of making $0 on your $0 budget. I think I do have some different opinions now for starting in internet or affiliate marketing.

Start with what you know..?

Seems like the common suggestion is to pick a niche that you’re familiar with. It definitely makes sense, and that is definitely the direction I started a few years ago. If I was to start over now, I would through that logic out the window. I think you should start with what can earn can earn decent commissions. It’s easy to be comforted with areas of interest and feel there is a level of knowledge or expertise related there, but reality says.. it doesn’t matter. It can be helpful, it can make things easier, but not worth the lost commissions.

I would start with products, services and/or niches that earn and learn about them. Spend a few hours understanding categories, trends and values and grow from there. The energy and time devoted here will reward you more in the end.

One site or many sites?

I see this question often, and there really isn’t a ‘right’ answer here. Is it better to have a few or one great site vs. many mediocre sites? Initially, I started with one ‘community’ site, then started branching out from there, tweaking, waiting, tweaking, waiting, etc. If I was to do it again, I would start with my current regiment of a minimum of 2 sites per month. Either creating new ‘test’ sites in new niches, or using the 10 degree separation with sites that are earning. All other down time is spent in blog posts, or tweaking and improving existing sites. I really believe creating new sites is the key to success to finding what you’re good at, what sites produce earnings and enhancing new traffic strategies.

What types of sites?

I’ve always broken down my earning sites into three basic categories. Community Sites, Store Fronts and Blogs. Each are good for different things, but it’s somewhat important to generate all three types, especially when starting out.

Community Sites are sites that are based on a common interest to a group of individuals. Once the site starts and grows, it will basically grow from the content provided by the community itself. Forums is a good example of a community site. These sites are great, once they go, it’s basically set-it-and-forget-it since the content is always evolving and growing without your involvement. You’ll still need to admin the site, etc. These sites are great for AdSense, product placement, etc. But the hard thing is developing a site and getting users and achieving that momentum needed for it to grow itself. Lots of time, lots of effort with very little return in the beginning.

Store Fronts are basically product stores utilizing product feeds. EPN sites and CJ sites using categorization is a example of store fronts. To me, these are by far the most successful. You’ll be targeting buyers vs. readers and conversion is much much higher. I like to promote these sites with PPC to even target better traffic than organic search traffic.

Blogs are blogs. You can blog about products, news, etc. I’ve always been ‘down’ on blogs, thinking the work is to high vs. the return and they’re hard to maintain over the long haul. I’ve changed my opinion on this.

So, if I was to start today, I would focus on getting a network of store fronts initially, maybe start a community site, but a site that I have good confidence that I can gain interested users. I would then work on a few product oriented blogs or review blogs and associate all these types of sites with Twitter. Once I saw some earnings, I would begin light PPC campaigns on the store fronts. Then work on building more sites and diversifying across affiliate networks.

Use Twitter?

Wow, Twitter. This is one of the biggest things that have changed my position in affiliate marketing over the last 6 months. I would DEFINITELY get Twitter accounts for my sites if I was to start today, and I would definitely buy Bird Feeder to grow those Twitter accounts. I cannot believe how useful Twitter is for getting consistent traffic to my product blogs or store fronts. Using Twitter Tools in my WordPress blogs to auto-Tweet posts is a must, and using the TweetMeme plugin for others to re-tweet posts is another fantastic way to get traffic back to your site.

Initially when creating new sites, I would do the normal, submission to search engines, do a few backlinks, post to a few directories, then wait. If I think it’s a hot site, I’ll fire up a PPC campaign, but overall the initial launch is slow going. Now with Twitter, I can get immediate traffic to the site, and traffic that seems to convert. Not super great like PPC traffic, but WAY better than low organic traffic or Stumble traffic.

Use Tools?

This is something I was a little behind on. For some reason, I could never justify the expense for buying tools. I’m also a web developer by day, so I always felt I could write some of these things. Now, I’m starting to value my time more. The time it would take me to write a plugin costs more than purchasing the plugin itself. The time I would be spending writing a plugin or platform, I could have spent on writing new sites, reviews, researched new niches, etc.

I’m a total believer of software tools now. The amount of time these tools save and the amount of work these tools accomplish throughout the day is incredible. If I was to start over again, and after getting some earnings coming in first (I like to roll my earnings back into the pot for tools, domains, etc initially). I would buy the following tools for sure:

ReviewAZON product review plugin for Amazon products
WPReviewSite Review plugin for ranking across your blog
BirdFeeder awesome tool for getting targeted Twitter followers
SEO Elite excellent suite of tools for determining where you rank, find backlinks, research competition, etc.
Blog Comment Demon excellent tool for finding WordPress blogs related to keyword search. Great way to find quality sites for potential comment backlinks

In conclusion, I think the most important thing is consistency when it comes to production. Make sites, keep making sites, keep improving sites, keep moving forward. The earnings will trickle and drizzle in, but it’s important to create the foundation of sites where you can always research with analytics and determine what sites work for you. The other item to pay attention to is diversification, remember to diversify across different niches, affiliate networks and sites. Things change ALL the time so you want to make sure your eggs are not all in one basket. Lastly, remember to be flexible and learn to adapt to situation. Don’t let your network crumble because of a ‘change’ to policy or TOS, learn to take the punches and adapt with the new trend, and be ‘okay’ with letting something go if you need to.

Well, I hope this was useful to someone. I really wish I could have a time machine, I would definitely do some things differently, but at the same time, the path I took gave me the experience I needed for where I’m at today.

Take advantage of automating your daily tasks with tools

admin — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 17:41:31 +0000

One of the big things I’ve been learning about over the last few months, is how important it is to use tools to automate processes related to affiliate marketing or internet marketing. There are two concepts I wanted to address.

“Think bigger” and “Takes money to make money”

When I say “thinking bigger” I’m not talking about your marketing hopes and dreams, but rather, expanding your technique on how earn commissions or earnings, and how to reach out to people. Many of us have the mindset of creating a site, put some content in it, put some ads on it and wait for money to start falling from the site into your pocket. Next, when reality hits that you’re not going to get rich you either quit or you figure out what’s wrong. Usually the problem is traffic, so you start tuning the site and begin promoting it, either via SEO (Search Engine Optimization) or PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising or both. Traffic increases, but you’re still not seeing your income rise.

To think big is to think about your process larger. Increase your sites, increase your backlinks, increase your promotion and the ability to contact more and more people to encourage them to your site. To do this manually can be extremely tedious and time consuming. Time is money, and it’s important to focus your time on things that will benefit you the most. Submitting sites to directories is a poor use of time, but spending your time creating new sites or content is time well spent. Why? Because one can be automated and the other can not (unless subcontracted).

I wanted to describe some of the things are that I would consider vital to my operation.

I’ve been creating Twitter accounts for my support hub blogs. These hub blogs are ways I can promote sales/products, talk about news or information about niche, while connecting to some of my store fronts. My store fronts are good and produce, but it’s hard to create the sense of community to attract repeat visitors. That’s the primary reason why I wanted to create a hub blog within a primary category. To me the best way to attract new visitors and to keep existing visitors engaged is to use Twitter. Having a Twitter account is one thing, but gaining followers is a whole other ball of wax. This is where one of my favorite tools come in, which is Bird Feeder. With Bird Feeder, I can search based on niche related keyword and follow a set amount of users. I can also set unfollows based on time and protect my mutual followers (don’t unfollow if they’re following me). Every morning while I make my pot of coffee, Bird Feeder is doing it’s thing following many people and unfollowing many people. Eventually your counts will rise and rise depending on your Tweet quality. The amount of Twitter traffic I get to my hub blogs illustrates the importance of these Twitter accounts, and not manually following or unfollowing people saves a ton of time!

Research is a time sucker in itself, and it sucked so much time in the past, that I ended up doing very little, which is bad. Research is the key in finding quality niches, and understanding the competition. I’ve been pushing hard with SEO trying to gain more organic, yet targeted traffic to my web sites on top of my PPC efforts. A tool that I’m absolutely loving for this is SEO Elite. Here is a tool that can do many things for you while you work on building sites, etc. It does an excellent job finding backlinks, showing where you’re ranking, finding backlinks of competition, etc. To do this by hand via Google is painful, speaking from experience. It’s very nice to create a query, and let it run while I do other things. When it’s done I review the results and store the information and formulate plans based off of the data. To me, SEO Elite is the best SEO research tool out there and I wish I purchased it years ago.

With SEO, one of the critical pieces is creating backlinks to your sites with proper anchor link/titles along with relating content. I use two tools to help with this. The first is Blog Comment Demon. This is a blog discovery tool. It’ll search for blogs based off of keyword supplied. It will return a listing of sites, their PR, number of comments, number of outbound links, etc. It’ll also let you know what type of blog it is (WordPress, TypePad, etc). Clicking on the URL it will open a browser window inside the software where you can contribute a useful post. It records when you submitted a comment. The other nice thing is the ability to create ‘projects’, which helps organize your backlinking efforts.

The other tool I like to use, made by the same developer (EdWin Soft) is Book Marking Demon. Basically this will help submit sites to various book mark directories on the web, but in a way that is automated. You create a account that Book Marking Demon creates accounts at those directories and submits your sites as that user into those directories.

This is where I go back to the next ‘concept’ mentioned above – “Takes money to make money”. These tools are not free, but the amount of time it frees up is amazing, and are worth their weight in gold. You need to think bigger, figuring out how to reach more and more people, and I don’t think it’s possible, or extremely difficult without the use of tools and services.

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SEO Elite Review

admin — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 15:22:50 +0000

Some of you following along with the blog are aware that I’ve been on a buying spree lately for internet marketing tools. I’m a strong believer of “it takes money to make money”, and I’ve been trying to find ways to maximize my time and efforts, and tools are vital to this. Lately, I’ve been on a big SEO (Search Engine Optimization) kick, and finding ways to drive organic, targeted traffic to my sites.

I recently purchased Blog Comment Demon which is fantastic and Bird Feeder for Twitter followers, but I also needed a tool to help gauge and provide as much information about how my sites ranks with various keywords. This is where SEO Elite comes in. After several recommendations from friends/associates as well as reading some posts on Digital Point, I figured this was the next tool in my tool box I needed.

I’m currently using SEO Elite for two large purposes, while I discover and maximize other features. I’m primarily using SEO Elite to determine how my site ranks with the keywords I have chosen with Google’s keyword tool. The second area I use is to view other sites that compete with me and see how they rank on similar keywords. By doing so, I can potentially find where they’re backlinked.

SEO Elite also has some great tools similar to Blog Comment Demon for finding blogs and other potential linking sites.

Another key feature, but I haven’t worked on this yet, is to be able to submit articles to article directories with a centralized tool. Part of streamlining things is staying organized, and that’s my goal for July is to establish a ‘process’ and work a ‘plan’ for SEO to my sites. By using tools to help organize, centralize and optimize I feel this will help in the big picture of my internet marketing ventures.

I would highly recommend purchasing SEO Elite. It’s a quality product with tons of video and audio tutorials. I’m just scratching the surface and I’m thoroughly impressed with this piece of software by Brad Callen. If you purchase this, and have any questions, I’ll be more than happy to try to help you out.

Blog Comment Demon Review

admin — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 15:03:17 +0000

The last few weeks I’ve been doing some heavy research on how to increase my backlinks and to improve my overall organic traffic to various hub blogs and store fronts. In the past, I would Google my keyword and see if there were opportunities to submit a backlink, etc. The problem with this technique is that it takes so much time to find these sites, track these sites and to submit comments. I’ve been on a real kick lately on how to automate process and be more productive with my time.

To address this problem, I recently purchased Blog Comment Demon by EdwinSoft. I’ve read a few sites / markters that use this. They were all impressed, so I thought I would give it a shot. I have to say, it’s pretty dang awesome. THIS IS NOT A BLACKHAT TOOL, but a simple blog discovery and management tool. This will not automatically post gibberish across the internet spewing your backlinks, but it’s a tool where you can do keyword searches and find blogs related to your search.

The program searches for blogs related to your keyword(s) and returns you a list of blogs to choose from. It provides you great information such as dofollow vs. nofollow sites, page rank, outbound links, etc. There is a built in browser in the tool, so simply double clicking one of the results will open the site in the browser below where you can read the post and contribute to the discussion (while providing a backlink).

One thing that I liked immediately, is that you can create ‘projects’. Meaning if I do a search for a keyword, I can store that search result and add to it later down the road. This speeds the process of finding niche type blogs immensely. It will record the ‘submit’ date of your comment. You can also check to see if blogs approved your comments. By setting up projects you can create category / project groups for your niche sites and add this to your daily schedule. I can’t wait till I can get a assistant to start working this tool (I can dream can’t I?).

Below is a screen shot of the search result screen showing ‘DoFollow’ blogs. This screen shot also shows additional column headings (Type of blog, TLD Page Rank, Tag, Number of Comments and Outgoing links). All useful information when finding great blogs.

Blog Comment Demon in my opinion is a fantastic tool and a must have. The cost is only $47.00 for the tool. The software interface is well written and is easy to use. Definitely my hats off to EdwinSoft for producing a slick program. If you’re into increasing your backlink counts, this is the tool for you. I also have a eBook that describes in great detail all the features about Blog Comment Demon, please download it and give it a look. If you purchase this program, and have any questions, I’ll be more than happy to help if I can.

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Website Grader

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 02:14:27 +0000

Wow, another new tool site discovered today. This was mentioned at DigitalPoint, and it’s a great site to check the health of your website. WebsiteGrader does handy things like check backlinks and ratings, as well as check for proper 301 Moved Permanently handling with your www and non-www domain. I think this along with a validator would really get your pages dialed in for bots scanning the site. I’ll definitely be using this service!

Use Live HTTP Headers to verify your EPN links are working

admin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 01:52:38 +0000

I’ve been seeing a lot of complaining, specifically on the EPN forum about impressions and clicks not tracking. Lots of whining and basically ill feelings directed towards eBay’s programmers. Being a programmer, I feel for them. I do however agree with some of the issues, specifically the lack of validation of input fields. This lack of validation is allowing users to input incorrect data for their widgets. Though, I feel for the people that are missing clicks and impressions because of this… I have to say, “Why don’t you inspect your links after you’ve built them?????” It’s really easy to double check your work and verify that it looks correct.

One tool that’s been essential for me is Live HTTP Headers plugin for FireFox. Basically, it’s a packet sniffer for your browser. It will display the requests and responses between the browser and the server. This is really useful if you mask your links and want to ensure that they’re going to the right place AND passing the correct data.

Just turn this plugin on and start clicking your Editor Kits and direct links. Look for GET /rover/ requests, make sure your campid is NOT a word, and is a 10 digit numeric value, compare that value with your campaign list at EPN. Make sure you see customid and toolid variables WITH values next to them. Simple tests with this should ensure that the link is built correct. Next make a note of when you clicked this link, and watch for it in your reports or dashboard.

Paying attention and being thorough with your link work will go a long long way. I’ve been seeing lots of invalid campids out there (ie: campid=JOHN SMITH). If you’re campid is bad, you won’t track and you won’t make any commissions on them.

Also, pay attention to your CJ account, and watch clicks in there. If you see clicks for eBay on sites you converted, that means you’ve missed a link somewhere.

Hope this helps!
hanji