August 8th, 2008 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

I’ve been using this a couple of weeks now and so have formed a fairly good opinion on what you are getting for your $99 a month. I’ll go through the tools one at a time and let you know what I think, remember though that it is still in Beta so what you get could change in the future (I know the price certainly will):-

SEO Tools

Domain Marketplace – Shoe has a constantly growing list of expired domain names that come with a number of back links. Besides general links this tools helps you to pick out the real gems that have .edu .gov and .mil authority back links. When you purchase you are sent an e-mail giving you the domain name so you can go away and register it. Annoyingly the entire domain name is crossed out so an issue here is knowing if a domain is in anyway relevant (Google importance) to what you already do. I bought a couple of domain names and 301′d them, time will tell if they were worth it or not.

Keyword Density Tool – Analyses a page of your choice for a given keyword and reports on its vital on-the-page stats. Where this tool comes into its own is that it also gives you the same stats for your top competition in Google so you can compare and contrast. Whilst this is all great info I actually get exactly the same information, if maybe perhaps a little more detailed from some other software I run.

Keyword Tracker – Track the URL of your choice for a search phrase of your choice. This tool tracks the changes in the SERPs for all the major search engines on a day to day basis. It’s nice to see but it’s not going to make you any money. I use a weekly ranking checker that does pretty much the same thing.

Most Linked – Find the best pages in a domain of your choosing in terms of back links. This ones a cracker for analysing your competition. Unfortunately again, I already run something similar.

PPC Tools

Ad Generator – An excellent time saving tool for generating PPC ads from a set of parameters. It basically bases your adverts on what is already out there. If you’re into your PPC then this really will save you an absolute ton of time. It’s not quite fire and forget but it does appear to work really well.

Keyword Generator – My favourite tool of the lot. Produces some excellent long tail keywords, no really! I use and have used a lot of keyword generators but this one was throwing up variations that I’d never seen before. I like this a lot.

Local Keyword Generator and Local Trademark Bidding Tools – I didn’t try these I’m afraid, I don’t live in the US so tend not to target PPC at city level (lack of zip code knowledge for a start). If you did I could see how they could be very powerful.

Link Building Tools

Find Backlinks – Find out who is linking to the top sites for any given search. It looks like this tool relies on Google because it is suffering from the Google “starve” at the moment. Once again I already have a very similar desktop tool that is just that little bit easier to drill down and pivot data in.

Get Anchor Text – Find out what text is being used to link to any domain. Does what it says on the tin and works well. Do I have something similar? …..

Related Blog Posts – Finds blog posts related to any search phrase so that you can send a ping-back from your post. I’m not really sure how valid this is as a way of getting back links though. In order not to appear spammy you need to link to that post in your post, creating a reciprocal link. Whilst it might bring some traffic I don’t think you’ll get a whole lot of SEO benefit from it.

Shoemoney Tools Conclusion

So overall. In terms of the SEO and link building tools a lot of them have limited value to me because they are very similar to tools that I already own. But that’s just me, I’ve invested hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars into buying webmaster tools over the years. The domain marketplace is a great idea, but without being able to find out what the domains relate to I’d struggle to justify buying them. It didn’t seem to worry other people though as it looked like hundreds were being sold each day (People who obviously have way more money than me to spend). Buying them and redirected them should work. I just resorted to writing my own tool that does a similar job, giving me high authority niche specific expired domains. I’ve had instant traffic results with 3 of them so far. If you don’t have a nice selection of webmaster tools sitting on your desktop though then there is just about everything here that you need.

The real ROI value in Shoemoney Tools has to be the PPC though. If you are heavily into PPC affiliate marketing then no doubt these tools will save you time and make you even more money. This is where my main problem is. No matter what I do I can’t get a decent, worth the effort PPC campaign going. It’s no reflection on Shoemoney Tools, it’s just me. I’m really crap at leveraging PPC into affiliate sales. My own products, no problem, I can get a great, huge, enormous ROI. As soon as I touch affiliate stuff it just goes wrong. Hell, if there are any gurus out there looking for a student to teach then I’d be the ultimate challenge, I’ve got the money : ) If PPC affiliate arbitrage is what you do then the Shoemoney Tools are probably worth $200-$300 a month easy What I’ve learnt is that these aren’t for the beginner, you really need a fairly solid grounding in what you are doing before you start playing with them (even I can see just how valuable the localised tools could be). For now I’m going to duck out of PPC Affiliate arbitrage and stick to what I know best.

On a personal level I’d love to keep it going for a few more months until it comes out of beta and then have another go. The trouble is that I just can’t justify $99 a month when in all likelihood I’m only going to use the Keyword Tool on a regular basis, so I’ll be bowing out. If on the other hand you don’t have access to a comprehensive selection of webmaster tools and have had some success with PPC marketing then it’s got to be worth $99 of your money.

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