Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

I hate to break this to you, I’m not sure how to say it nicely so I’ll just come out with it….BEING A TOP COMMENTER ON A WELL KNOWN BLOG HAS NO SEO BENEFIT AT ALL!

When I first started this blog I spent a lot of time commenting on other blogs to get that “valued” followed link. I’ve since stopped. What affect did you think losing all these links would have on my Google rankings? It’s made no difference, sweet FA. My rankings have held steady, many months with no negative effect, if anything I noticed an increase in my positions when I stopped commenting.

So what this tells me is that if you’ve got a blog with the top commenter plug-in enabled that it’s very easy for Google to identify it and discount outbound links. Lets face facts here, it’s hardly the greatest algorithmic challenge in the world to identify blogs that have the plug-in installed. If you can do a Google search to find blogs that have it do you really think that Google would let this simple gaming of their system continue? The fact that it’s a followed link that the page author hasn’t approved means that it’s ripe for Google penalisation.

Of course there are some benefits, you might get a little bit of referral traffic (if your comments are interesting enough) but is it an efficient way of using your time? I don’t think so. If you’re the sort of sad bast…. that spends hours replying to every comment on every post then this is a wake up call for you. Stop commenting on other people’s blogs and spend a little time writing GOOD content for your own instead.

The voice of the rich bloggers has spoken…..YOU MUST ALL BUY STOCK NOW!!! BUY BUY BUY!!!

What a bunch of fucking muppets. But prices must go back up right? Well no actually, the company can go under and then you lose whatever you put in. It happens, it’s happening right now! Companies going under. Even if a company survives the current financial crisis there is nothing that says that share prices have to go back up again to anything like old levels. Recent prices have been off the back of a hugely inflated economy thanks to the western attitude of borrow till you drop. We’ve all been writing cheques that the economy couldn’t cover and now it’s pay back time. You want to know a growth industry at the moment? Bookmakers. They are doing roaring trade as people who have been made unemployed put their last pay cheque on a nag. You may think that by buying stocks you’re making a long term can’t loose investment. In reality you’re no different to the man in the street nipping down the bookies to spend his wages.

Don’t ever expect things to ever be allowed to get this bad again, borrowing wil be under much stricter regulation. Our economies will and should never be allowed to get this far out of hand so the inflated share prices that we’ve all enjoyed over the last 5-6 years may actually never return. The global economy will be a much different place when all the dust settles from this. Dickheads who can barely afford the cash to buy a packet of crisps will never be allowed again to borrow 5 times their salary to buy a car! This all means a much calmer, levelled and realistic economy.

At the moment there are very few assets actually worth anything. Cash and gold. If you must spend your money spend it on gold. Stocks and property as investments have had their time and if I was you I’d leave the likes of Brown and Bush to provide the rescue packages, it’s not your job. Of course if you’re raking it in via blogs then you can probably afford to be stupid with your money. Good luck to you. It’s not great advice to advise others to do the same though is it?

I’ve now had a good chance to test ping backs and see if they are a valid way of gaining links and visitors. The theory is to link to other posts from your post in the hope of getting links back and visitors.

My conclusion – It’s a crock of shit.

I’ve spent time adding “related links” section to both old and new blog posts. All in I created over 1700 outbound followed links to other blog posts in the hope of getting links back. Out of those I actually got links back from less than 5%! Of all those links I can count the number of visitors (in a month) on 2 hands. In reality all I’ve done is provided votes for a huge number of sites and in return got back a few no-followed links and a couple of visitors.

So why do so many experts push this as an awesome link building strategy? My theory is that because it’s so easy to do. It takes no time to knock up a bit of software that uses the blog search engines/directories to find blog posts by keyword that accept ping backs. Auto generate a bit of HTML to copy into your post and you’re done, Wordpress/Blogger takes care of the rest. Unfortunately most ping-backs have to be approved for a start. Have enough people think that what you’re doing is junk and you’ll find yourself in the Akismet auto spam category, trust me, I know!!! In the meantime you’re damaging your link profile by linking out to all and sundry. It’s very hard to damage your link profile by gaining “bad” links (because that’s out of your control), however it’s very easy to damage it by linking to bad sites. The ping-back method encourages this.

Overall this is a rubbish method for gaining links and traffic, don’t use it if you value your site. I’ve now got the fun job of going back through removing those links, oh joy.

Chrome is Google’s new web browser, direct competition for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. I operate a number of websites and so have been able to monitor Chrome usage since day, it started of very quickly accounting for almost 5% of visitors within 1 week. However since that time the figures have held steady.

Over that same time though something has started to happen to the Google backed Firefox product (still my web browser of choice). With each new update it seems to become more and more unreliable. From it being slow to it just plain crashing, it never use to have these problems but now all of a sudden it’s become much less reliable. What’s going on with Firefox?

I have a theory. Google makes its money from ad revenue but with the other browsers there are plug-ins that disable those adverts. If Google can control enough of the browser market then they also control people’s ability to block their adverts. Making sure that Firefox becomes an anti-Chrome (fast and reliable) is one way of building market share, quickly.

So to get the ball rolling we’ll start with something very easy. The problem:- You want to know where you website is ranking for certain search words/phrases. Ideally you want this information over time so you can see how your rankings are changing but you really don’t want the hassle of manually trawling through result pages looking for your website.

The great news is that there is a tool that lets you do this 100% for free, it’s called WebCEO. Once you’ve got WebCEO downloaded and installed your first job is to “Add New Site”, it’s all really simple stuff. Add your URL and a name for your website. Now your site is added you can start the “Check Rankings” tool. You’ll be greeted with a screen that looks like this:-

As you can see there are 3 things that you have to do. Decide what search engines you want to check for rankings, what keywords/phrases you are looking to rank for and finally how deep to scan each search engine. I normally scan to a depth of 4 pages, any deeper than that and you’re not “really” ranking.

WebCEO has a huge list of search engines and directories that you can check your rankings in. One of the features that I really like is that it allows you to see where you are in the various regional varieties of Google. Not being based in America this is very important to me.

Once you’re setup you can run it for the first time, WebCEO will go away and try and find your site for each phrase/keyword. Once it’s finished you can check your positions in a variety of ways (e.g. by search engine, keyword etc) There is also very comprehensive history reporting allowing you to see how things have changed.

So that’s your ranking check setup, however ideally you don’t want to have to run this manually. More good news. WebCEO has a built in scheduler, now you’ve configured your Check Ranking task you can automatically run it using the scheduler at whatever interval you choose. To be honest I tend not to check mine any more frequently than every 2 weeks – 1 month because rankings bob up and down all the time. Checking this stuff daily could drive you insane! It’s much easier to look for and try to react to trends.

The WebCEO ranking checker is actually a very powerful tool and there can be a lot more to it than what I’ve shown here. My goal was just to show you a very simple of way of monitoring your search rankings for free. Experience tells me at this point a bunch of Mac users will start whinging “what about me?” There are probably programs out there that will do the same or a similar job job but the harsh truth is that as a Mac user you are in a minority, a huge majority of software is written for the Windows platform so I’d suggest you get yourself a good emulator. Alternatively think about maybe getting some cheap Windows VPS hosting. There are a number of services out there that offer a Windows VPS for considerably less than $99 a month that you can install your own software on.

Next in the series:- I’m going to show you how to find your own valuable expired domain names so that you’ve no need for the Domain Marketplace.

Networking, it’s very important. Go to a conference, get together with link minded individuals and it could lead you virtually anywhere. Especially if your “friends” will go along with anything for a quick buck.

Don’t mind me, I’m just rambling.

Isn’t it amazing how popular Shoemoney Tools have become recently? All of a sudden every big name blogger has been using them and they’re great. Oh and by the way you get access for less than $20 for 1 month only. Take John Chow for example, he made more than $2000 in affiliate commissions last month by bigging up Shoemoney Tools. I have a question though, if he’s been using them since the TAC how come his PPC spend hasn’t changed that much? The main point of these tools is to help you profit from PPC, if they work for you then your PPC spend would go up, a lot?! His link profile hasn’t altered that much and he’s certainly not using the ping back method. What part of Shoemoney Tools is he using exactly? Doesn’t matter though cos it’s much easier to make money by writing a blog post for your mate and getting affiliate commissions instead. $2000 plus for next to nothing, awesome work! Especially when you’re helping out a “friend”.

This sort of ring leading gets on my tits. It’s aimed at the lowest common affiliate marketer. Somebody who can’t afford to spend $100 (no sign of that $250 a month price increase yet, shock, horror) a month but because his favourite bloggers are recommending something (entirely non biased and nothing to do with any recent networking at a convention or the affiliate commissions) they will throw a bit of money at it just to give it a go. Market research will probably show you that most people will take a punt up to around $20?

Here’s a tip for you, if you can’t afford $100 a month for Shoemoney tools then they’re not really going to benefit you. You NEED a budget to get anything of any value out of PPC, if $100 is too much forget it. Is there value in Shoemoney Tools? Certainly. But only for certain types of marketers. Do I believe that all of a sudden they are the greatest set of marketing tools on the planet because there is an affiliate commission in it? Do I bollocks! I get the impression that if one of the top bloggers took a dump in a plastic bag and tried to sell it you’d suddenly see a deluge of “shit-in-a-bag made me money” blog posts.

I can’t really do anything about all this, it’s just the way the wanky blogosphere works. What I will do though is a series of posts about free alternatives to the various elements of Shoemoney Tools. I was one of the early paid users so I’ve got a good idea of what was available. Over the next few days, weeks, months or whenever I get around to it I’ll offer up some free alternatives. There is nothing magic about Shoemoney Tools, just a bit of text parsing and hooking up to some APIs. The information is out there for free, you just need to know where to look.