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Paid Tools Product Reviews Rants The Keyword Academy Tools

Postrunner Review: The “Quality” Debate

UPDATE: April 2012 – Postrunner V2 Review

If your response to my title was WTF is Postrunner – then check out my earlier post. If you are a member of The Keyword Academy you will know  that Postrunner is system used with TKA in order to create keyword anchored links for your sites.

I’ve compared to BuildMyRank to Postrunner – and Mark is now trying to differentiate Postrunner from BuildMyRank and similar schemes.

His argument is that Postrunner needs to evolve:

  • needs “better quality” sites in Postrunner.
  • the reason more “quality” sites aren’t in Postrunner is because of the “quality” of the articles being sent to them.
  • his proposed solution is an author scoring system which will reward the writers (or buyers) of superior articles.

The Argument About “Quality” Articles

As soon as the thread started in the forum the predictable grammar Nazi’s (Nazis’? Nazis’s ??) were out in force. Too many trailing commas – FAIL. Use of nonstandard spellings FAIL. To be fair to Mark, in the seminar he specifically mentioned that he wasn’t concerned about grammar and spelling problems, he was more worried about the articles being relevant and having a point.

Its all looking like this will be seen, by many, most of whom haven’t hit the $10/month income level yet, in the community, as an opportunity to FAIL all of those authors who use too many commas in a sentence…

I have two sites in Postrunner at the moment – one is a niche, passion quality site, the other one is a general site full of trashy Postrunner articles, which I just put back in during the webinar yesterday – inside 12 hours I have received over 7 articles.

These cars aren't Quality - but tourists now pay a premium to hire them in Berlin!

What I Look For When I Get Postrunner Articles on My Quality Postrunner Site

I put my Independent Travel site into Postrunner – basically to get content when I couldn’t be arsed writing, and to see what keywords people were trying to rank for in the travel niche – a niche that is my passion but pays me very, very poorly. Now it gets about 2/3 posts a week – which is a nice number. I reject at least a third of those. So this is how to get your well-written, gramatically perfect article declined from my site.

  1. The site linked out to – only consists of a “hello world” post (seriously its happened).
  2. If the site linked to is a general postrunner site, or similar article directory – this is a new automatic DECLINE  I picked up from Build My Rank.
  3. The 2 anchored links are in the the last words in the article – normally on separate lines -I don’t know who the hell is teaching this – its certainly not TKA – but please stop it – it looks stupid and its a loser for SEO duh!
  4. The two links are to the exact same page on the site being promoted (less of this seems to be happening these days).
  5. Write about all-inclusive vacations – like duh! The site’s main keyword is not a secret! If you have glanced at the front-page you know I, and my readers, are not interested in all-inclusive vacations!
  6. Write about timeshares – timeshares are IMHO (and its my site so my opinion rules) – an investment scam – not a holiday option.  (Note to Mark – I would explain this to the timeshare peddlers if I could have a longer site requirements description).

Hmm note how I haven’t actually read the article yet -all I looked for was the links and followed them. If I have to actually rate the article for the author score you are adding work for no good purpose here…

Now the following points – won’t get you automatically declined – but a number of them together will:

  1. The article is 301 words with 2 outbound links (doesn’t apply if there is only one link).
  2. Site still has the default header image from the default WordPress theme.
  3. If the site is selling a product but has only Adsense I am likely to reject the article.
  4. If the site is using one of Court’s old SEO themes  that have been done to death and are probably on G’s watch list.
  5. The title and sometimes the entire article is only loosely related to the anchored text of the links. Let’s get real here people – I want to rank your article – its good for you, its good for me! After all I thought you WANTED an authorative link! So don’t give me an article about packing tips and then link to fashion bags for ladies! This is probably the hardest judgement call sometimes I will get an excellent article – but with a bland generic title – frankly I rewrite the title – so we can both benefit.
  6. I rarely reject for grammar and/or spelling – sometimes I lightly edit.  If its embarrassingly bad language which is hard to read I will reject – but I do it very rarely.  Any automated grammar and spelling check would fail many of the perfectly good posts on the site – because some are written by native Englishmen, in fluent English,  some in fluent American, some in fluent English written by non-native speakers – all of the English is acceptable – and the quality can be great – but no automated system will ever deal with the complexity and depth that is English – certainly not Google.

What I Look For On My General Postrunner Site

Within 10 hours of reinstating this site into Postrunner during yesterday’s webinar, I had 8 articles! Hand on heart I do NOT read every article. I scan – if its appears to make some sense, is not badly spun and relates to the anchored text I’ll take it.

I do however check every link – and reject any article whose site fails the first 4 points above! In other words – what the article links to is FAR more important to me  than whether the nouns and adjectives are in agreement. I also reject any site promoting anything to do with owning or using firearms.

I will probably move this site to some other category – its starting to make money and I will focus on the niches that its ranking for.

Which is the Quality Site of These Two.

Well if you want passion and love and age – then midlifetravel.com is it – its my original site – its started off as an html site developed in Dreamweaver in 2007. Its been up in several forms over the years. It ranks #1 for my original keywords “travel over 30s” – unfortunately no one actually searches for the term LOL.  Its a PR0. I keep it, I love it, I post to it and I link to it. However this is a hobby site not a real money making venture.  Most of the content on it was written by me, a genuine expert, and has no outbound links.

The site that accepts practicably everything? Is just over a year old, has had very little link building to it (by me). Well its a PR2 and in the last month (when I published nothing new on it) made about $1/day – its on its way. I’ll start building out the content for which its already ranking for and adding more posts without outbound links on similar topics. In other words I will make it legitimate! Will I go back and fix the grammar and spelling -nope!

Still reading – you must be bored …

I have gotten a little fond of amplify. I started using it – because Griz did but I’ve found a use for it.  I use it to share the stuff I find genuinely interesting (or funny) in the weird and evolving world of making an online income – if you already follow this blog on Facebook (like in the footer) you will get my amplified updates – but otherwise follow Lis Sowerbutts on amplify directly. It also allows me to tweet without ever going anywhere near twitter – all good!

 

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Case Study Lis Recommmends Paid Tools The Keyword Academy

Keyword Academy Case Study 4 Month Update

OK so its been two months since I did the last Keyword Academy Case Study update!

Postrunner Articles Live

Since the 6 May I’ve published another 13 articles – with five sent but not yet published – so yes most of them have been published in the last couple of weeks! However I  now have some regular writers on board so I will hopefully get a more consistent number of articles published this month!

Computer dog?

Rankings As of 2 August 2010

Rankings on (2 June | 30 April ,14 April 2010 in brackets | 8 April 2010)

18 pages indexed in Google (24, 26, 15 |13 pages)

13 backlink recognized in yahoo (13,13 ,6,1, 0)

domain name exact match long-tail: 8 (12, 14, 17 | 17)

main keyword:14 (21, 17, 34 | 61)

main keyword singular: 12 (19 ,19 , 31 | 61)

Sorry I’ve stuffed up the tracking of the cousins – to the point I can’t remember which was which LOL. Suffice to say that they have all improved since 2 June and are now all on page 3 or 2.

Note about the rankings – as I am still only getting trickle traffic – according to scroogle.org I am 14th for my exact match domain name and 22 for my main keyword – or in other  words my rankings are hardly stable.   So more backlink building for me!

So I guess the overall message here – is its hard to stuff this up – if you miss a week or a month – don’t quite, give up, or (shock, horror) look for a job. Just get on with getting more links LOL

What is the Competition Up to?

Tiffany updated about a month ago her Keyword Academy Case Study

Categories
Case Study Lis Recommmends Paid Tools The Keyword Academy Tools

Keyword Academy Case Study 2 Month Update

How was the month – well not very productive – as I have already mentioned.  But I did say I would keep on updating the Keyword Academy Case Study series – so here we go!

Pack me to!

Rankings As of 2 June 2010

Rankings on 2 June ( 30 April ,14 April 2010 in brackets | 8 April 2010)

24 pages indexed in Google (26, 15 |13 pages)

backlink recognized in yahoo 13 (6,1, 0)

domain name exact match long-tail: 12(14, 17 | 17)

main keyword: 21( 17, 34 | 61)

main keyword singular: 19 ( 19 , 31 | 61)

cousin keyword #1 ; 33 (24 ,63 | 47)

cousin keyword #2: 15( 22, 43 | > 100)

cousin keyword #3 90( 82 ,>100 | > 100)

cousin keyword #4  >100 (100, > 100 |>100)

cousin keyword #5:  38, (25 (and 78 double listing),49 | 37)

cousin keyword #6:  50 ( 39, 60 | 71)

cousin keyword #7:  35 (33 , 60 | 71)

Postrunner Articles Live

27 articles are live – and yes I’m slack and haven’t added any more!

So really should go away and right some more articles write now!

How’s the Competition

Alana seems to be the only one left updating her Keyword Academy Experiment

Tiffany has now got her Keyword Academy Case Study update up now!

Categories
Back Links Case Study Lis Recommmends

Keyword Academy Case Study – One Month Update

End of the first month with my little Keyword Academy Case Study with the statistics for my new site after a month of Postrunner submissions. Basically the site seems to be growing naturally with  solid page 2 rankings for both my exact domain match and my main keyword. I have the distinct feel that the exact domain bonus drops siginficantly down if you have more than two words in the domain (this domain has four).

c
Supreme Court, Wellington New Zealand

Rankings as of 30 April 2010

Rankings on 30 April (14 April 2020 in brackets | 8 April 2010)

26 pages indexed in Google (15 |13 pages)

backlink recognised in yahoo 6 (1, 0)

domain name exact match long-tail: 14 (17 | 17)

main keyword: 17 (34 | 61)

main keyword singular: 19 (31 | 61)

cousin keyword #1 ; 24 (63 | 47)

cousin keyword #2: 22 (43 | > 100)

cousin keyword #3 82 (>100 | > 100)

cousin keyword #4 >100 (> 100 |>100)

cousin keyword #5: 25 (and 78 double listing) (49 | 37)

cousin keyword #6: 39 (60 | 71)

cousin keyword #7: 33 (60 | 71)

Postrunner Articles Live

25 articles live 2 still waiting review. Over all iIve had 3 or 4 articles returned after 7 days because the directory owner is asleep at the wheel.   When you schedule posts in Postrunner – they are not  actually sent to the directory you select until the date scheduled so you may have to wait for another 7 days for the article to be approved.

Of the 25 articles live – all but 4 are indexed. One of those has only been live 2 days the others have been live for over two weeks so I may need to build some links to get  them indexed.

Expenses to Date

25 articles @ $3/article from The Content Authority = $75

Income to Date

I haven’t put Adsense on the site – but I may do soon because I am starting to get trickle long-tail traffic. I have an affiliate product which as so far has had a bout 30 clicks (but no sales).

Hows the Competition Doing?

Alana has battled through hardware failures to update us on her Keyword Academy Experiment

Tiffany’s posted her one month’update at Passive Income Goals

Has anyone got an update? Let me know and I’ll link you here!

Categories
Back Links Case Study The Keyword Academy

Keyword Academy Case Study Update – 2 Weeks

This is my 5th post in my Keyword Academy Case Study series.  If you missed the earlier posts you might want to start at the beginning

This is too early to be doing an update – but I thought some of you would find this interesting. BTW I use the excellent rank checker of Market Samurai to check my rankings with a single touch of the button – saves me a lot of time:

Site launched 31 March 2010

Site indexed 1 April 2010

Cape Tribulation, Queensland

Rankings on 8 April 2010 (14 April 2020 in brackets)

15 pages  indexed in Google (13 pages)

1 backlink recognised in yahoo (and its the same directory which got me indexed) (0)

domain name exact match long-tail: 17  (17)

main keyword: 61 (34)

main keyword singular: 61 (31)

cousin keyword #1 ; 47 (63)

cousin keyword #2: > 100(43)

cousin keyword #3 > 100 (>100)

cousin keyword #4 > 100 (>100)

cousin keyword #5: 37 (49)

cousin keyword #6: 71 (60)

cousin keyword #7: 67 (60)

Backlinks Live

Number of postrunner posts live: 7

Number of postrunner posts indexed: 6 one of the most recent ones is not  indexed.

Note all those posts indexed organically i.e. it happened without any effort on my part. Whether the site owners built links to the posts I have no idea – but if you have been around Internet Marketing for more than 5 minutes you should realise that this is a truly awesome result!

So who else has got some results to report? Send me the link to your post and I’ll add here or updated us in the comments!

Loreecee has an update up: Post Runner Case Study

Alana has an update up: Make Money Blogging Keyword Academy Experiment Day 17

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Back Links Lis Recommmends Making Money Online Paid Tools The Keyword Academy

Keyword Academy – Postrunner Tutorial – Adding A Site

I talked about using the Postrunner Guest Posting system in my earlier Postrunner tutorial This time I want to talk about the other side of the coin – adding a WordPress blog into the system and becoming a recipient of others articles.

Why Would You Add a Blog to Postrunner

Have you ever stopped to wonder why sites such as EzineArticles will publish your article for free? Because they love you and really want to help you to promote your latest little acai berry weight loss site? Nope they do it because they make from it – a lot of money. Same as HubPages – they at least share some of the revenue – EzineArticles doesn’t. And neither do the Postrunner directories.

So from an owner’s point of view I am getting a ton of free content which is often focused around an easy (green) keyword – the keyword is often in the title.  How hard would it be to get that article to rank for that keyword? Get search traffic and then I get people who will click on my ads.

How much have I made with my Postrunner sites to date (I have three in the system at the time of writing – one general, two niche). Nothing, nada, ziltch. None of them are monetized, yet. Will they ever be monetized – I have no idea to be honest. One particularly has some nice Adsense CPC payouts potential so its a candidate.  Another one has potential with Amazon affiliate stuff.If someone is making money from an Article Directory or blog would love to hear your experience in the comments!

In the meanwhile I can use the sites for my own back links of course – well hidden within hundreds and hundreds of other links to sites I don’t own.

How many articles have I published on my site?

General site PR0 20 articles since the 26 March

Niche site PR2  – Finance 21 articles since 21 March

Niche site PR1  Home & Garden 18 articles since  7 April

How Do You Add a WordPress Blog to the System

You add the Postrunner Plugin (available in the member’s area) to your blog, follow the instructions upload it and activate it.  When you set the settings makes sure if your site fits in an category other than “General” – that you put it in the specialised category. There are obviously far more blogs in “General” than anything else – so being different helps.

The site name will default to your site’s title but you will probably want to change it something more useful. The site name is the “elevator pitch” for your site – you have to peruade the article writer to chose your site and not another one!. I

f you site is very specialised e.g.. you have a health site but you only want articles on teeth whitening – say so otherwise you will be declining a lot of weight loss articles. The system will automatically pick up what PR that your site has – but if your article is otherwise useful ie. old, fast indexing or if you are doing active link building for the site – SAY SO! (Its called marketing BTW you are competing with over 700 active sites in the system).

Crossing the Finish Line - Mt Panorma, Bathurst, NSW, Australia

How to Make Me Choose Your Postrunner Site to Post To

  1. Have a site which is regularly crawled by Google and which most recent posts are indexed. If you have not yet persuaded Google to setup camp on your site – active link building from other sources should get new posts indexed between Google bot visits. – I use site:postrunnerdirectory and then click the “show options and “latest ” to see recently indexed pages.
  2. Have a theme which gets my post on the front page and keeps it there for a while. Don’t have a static page on the front and expect me to be happy with just a title in the “Recent Articles” list – this just makes it harder to get my article indexed.
  3. A theme which posts only very small snippets or excerpts on the front page – without my link – I want my link on your front  page so I can get Google following and noticing that link.
  4. A site which you only approve once a week but then you approve the 30 or so articles waiting so my article immediately falls off the front page – again I know I am going to have to do manual link building to get my article indexed *sigh*
  5. Bonus points if you take the trouble to do any of the following:
  • add photos to photogenic posts (I use the photodropper plugin – it takes about 2sec to find and add a photo);
  • add links between related posts (you can do this automatically using the “similar posts” plugins)
  • have a editors pick or top posts lists that I might get my post into.
Categories
Back Links Case Study Lis Recommmends Paid Tools The Keyword Academy

Keyword Academy Case Study – Link Building Timeline

This is the fourth  part of the Keyword Academy Case Study series – if you are new here you may want to start with part 1, part 2 and part 3 (Postrunner tutorial)

So now we have the keywords chosen, the site installed – now what? Well first – particularly if this is a brand new domain – which mine is – you need to get the site indexed.  There is a sure fire way to do this – find a site which is being crawled by Google a lot – and get a link from it. I used Postrunner obviously – and many people there will tell you their site  has very fast indexing – most of them don’t lie either. Once I find a site that gets crawled a lot and gets sites indexed easily I carefully document and remember it (i.e. I scribble its name semi-legibly on a post it note and stick it on the white board).

How To Know If  A Site has Quick Indexing

Two types of sites seem to get quick indexing in my experience:

  • authority sites
  • sites whith lots and lots of updating content

This site is an authority site (google  lissowerbutts.com and you will see  a listing with more links in it than normal – that’s an authority site). I don’t post very often here – but when I do I am disappointed if it takes longer than 30 minutes for Google to index the post. BTW that works for posts which include duplicate content as well and posts with hardly any words in them at all.  Though it take several hours for Google to notice a new  Resources page I added.

So once Google loves a site it will love anything you put on it and – for our purposes today – this is the important bit – it will follow any links you add and if the site is not indexed it will get crawled.

To find a site with constantly updating content – just check the cache date in  the google index – is it recent, check when it last indexed new pages and compare that to what is showing new on the site.

Is there a link out there? Nope just the Tasman Sea!

Planning a Backlink Campaign

I used to randomly just get links for sites – this is better than not getting links at all, but these days I am a little more organised – mainly so I know what I need to do next on the site.  You see I may not be back for a month given the number of sites I have. On my spreadsheet I keep a record of the main keywords and the cousins. On another tab I  create a list –  date per a line for a fairly heavily link building time frame like this one. Normally I have  a column for source (Postrunner, ezineatricles, hubpages etc).  Then a note (written, ordered,scheduled), the keyword I’m anchoring on the PR of the site I have sent the article to and the url of the stie (replaced with the article’s url when I have it). With Postrunner is very easy because you can schedule posts to appear on a certain day.

For anchored text I mix it up between the title of the site, the site’s url and cousin keywords. I throw in the odd “click here” and “this site” too – just to keep it looking natural (that’s a Griz tip BTW).

For the sites I chose – I don’t go for just high PR – I used a PR3 to get the site initially indexed – but about 80% of my links are from PR0’s why? Because 80% of the Internet has PR0 sites (a statistic I just made up on the spot).

I decided to go with 25 posts to 25 different Postrunner directories in the first month. I scheduled 9 to be sent out in the first 15 days of the month and the rest to appear at the end of the month. So roughly I went from a post post every 3 days at the start to posts twice a day at the end.

Am I building links too fast – will I get sand boxed (ie thrown down the rankings to live several months in the 100’s) – no idea – I guess you will have to stay tuned to find out!

Oh and before anyone asks – no it doesn’t matter if you only have have the site’s titled used 24.8% of the time not 25% of the time, or you link from 82.3% of PR0 sites! It doesn’t matter if you schedule a post to show up at 4am or 7pm either! Its not that exact guys – ifyou need exact in your life this game with drive you insane.

Articles and Links

Each article I use for these backlinks is a minimum of 300 words, has the main or related keyword in the title and once in the content. I have a single link out to my site – usually in the first couple of the lines of the article. Why so early in the content – two reasons. First the higher  on the page your link is the (slightly) better it is for SEO. Second for many themes they will only publish part fo the post on the front page – if  my link is in that first paragraph then it will probably hit that front page – the one with the PR associated with it.

I only include one link per an article to my site – Postrunner allows two but as I am only promoting a single site with basically a single keyword (and some closely related cousins) I don’t want to dilute the links.

I keep a copy of every article I use for support – I try to keep them somewhere that I can find them again.

Articles and Useful Links

Question: when is a link in an article useless to you? When the article isn’t indexed. About a month after publishing I go back and check that the article (not the site the actual article’s url – that’s why I made a note of it above) is indexed. If its not its a waste of time. I may get it indexed by sending some links to it – usually from another network I’m a member of. If I can’t get it indexed at all – or if the site has disappeared – its happened to me (but not with Postrunner sites yet) – I take the article (you know the copy I kept) and resubmit it to another site – its not duplicate because its never been indexed.

Tracking Your Backlinks

I quite like seeing what Google is seeing so I use Google Alerts to know when pages on my site are indexed (site:mydomain.com} an when Google recognises a link (link:mydomain.com) – far less common than Yahoo recognising links.

That’s about it really – nothing too complex – I have scheduled the articles out for the rest of the month so I am off to focus on another site for a while.

Categories
Article Marketing Back Links Case Study Paid Tools The Keyword Academy

Keyword Academy Case Study – PostRunner Tutorial

UPDATED: April 2012 Check out my Postrunner V2 Review .  I will update this these once the new Postrunner is live

OK I am seeing quite a few questions about Postrunner – The Keyword Academy’s link building tool – so I thought I’d throw an extra post into my  Keyword Academy Case Study series detailing the how and, probably  more importantly the why of using the PostRunner system (formerly the Guest Posting System, GPS). Even if you aren’t a member this might be helpful if you don’t understand why some of us get excited about giving away our content for free!

This post is about Postrunner from an article submitters point-of-view. If you are interested in being a Postrunner Review for  publishers – see my second post about Postrunner– Adding a Site

Wellington Airport from Khandallah
Wellington Airport from Khandallah

What is Guest Posting?

There are lots of ways to get links – but high on most lists  is “guest posting”. You contribute as a guest on another blog and in return get a link back from the site and maybe some traffic as well. Here’s a  guest post I did recently: Building an Online Income.

Now, finding places to contribute  guest posts, if you are in the niche of  freelance writing or make money online or similar, is not really that hard. I don’t accept regular guest posts here – but  many other sites do. Frankly sites like problogger.net would have disappeared long ago – but for the guest posts!

Why? Because the niche is dominated by people who think its important to publish regularly to make your blog popular. Its not – but that’s another post.

But what  if your niche is not make money online?  Have you ever tried finding blogs to guest post articles about college education or health? Now these are popular subjects – but its still hard to find blogs that will accept your free content. What if you write about tap washers or  hair loss in women? Gonna be harder, a lot harder.

Its not impossible – there are a number of sites that I regularly use to post content to – I highly recommend Post Your Own Articles. You can sign up for free – but read the instructions to authors.

Wizzley works too, so does InfoBarrel and other Web2.0 properties, again they all have different rules and you need to be familiar with them all.

Do you see where I am going with this? Every site is run by a different owner – has different rules and you need to be up to speed with each of them. If you don’t find that a pain – you obviously aren’t doing enough guest posting!

The sites I’ve mentioned above are all great but once you have an article link from each of them what’s your next best use of your time – multiple links from the same site – or links from new sites? I think the later which is why I think PostRunner is worth the cost of the Keyword Academy alone.

What is PostRunner?

Technically its an interface  written in WordPress which allows you to submit guest posts to participating blogs. Practically its an enormous time saver.There is exactly one set of rules for PostRunner – here they are:

  • content must be at least 300 words long;
  • content must be unique and written by a human (no article spinners please);
  • no more than two anchored contextual links are allowed per an article

You add articles in a “normal” WordPress interface – which you should be familiar with. You can chose to either publish a post immediately or schedule it  for the future. You then select a  site to publish to and hit submit.

Your article will only appear once the site’s owner has approved the post. This can take up to 7 days. If there has been no response after 7 days the article is returned to you and you can resubmit to another directory. You get an email notification when you article is approved/declined/returned.

You can use the interface to see which articles you have published for which of your sites and where these are published. You can also filter the list by status (not sent, sent, live (published), scheduled). You can export a list of the article titles, urls of where published and site linked to from the article.

Set-by-step adding a Post to PostRunner

  1. Click “Add Post” and cut and paste your article in as you would normally. Don’t forget to add your links! (Sometimes I do). To add a link just select  the text you want to be anchored on e.g. blue widgets click the link button and cut and paste the url of the page you want to link to);
  2. If you don’t want the post to appear as soon as its approved  click “edit” next to “publish immediately” and change it to the date/time you want (I think the dates’ time are on Utah time);
  3. Click “choose publish location”. This will bring up a new screen listing available directories – the default shows all the “General” category directories but you can use the top right drop down to select from other categories (Health, Shopping etc). For each directory you will see PR – a title – which you can click to go the  site, any links you may already have from that site. Use the select button on the right to chose the directory you want.
  4. This will disappear the directory selection screen and you will be back on the basic WordPress post screen.
  5. Now click “check and save draft” – this should come back with a  message saying you have passed all the tests. If you haven’t passed they will tell you what’s wrong.
  6. Once you have passed the checks you click the submit to directory and you are done.

How I Chose a Postrunner Directory

When I am building backlinks for a website I am trying to get as natural a link profile as possible. Most websites are PR0, PR1 at most.  So although I look at PR when I am choosing a directory I am not exclusively interested in high PR – I am just as likely looking for the 80 PR0’s to balance out the PR4 or PR3

I am looking for sites that are indexed. Now all of them should be – but ocasionally we get a bad one – if its a new site I will google site:sitename.com just to check. If you do come up with a site which is not indexed report it to support.

This google  listing will also tell me some other interesting stuff like:

  • how many pages are indexed, less than 10 I move on – its a bit new for my taste, otherwise more is better;
  • click “options” and look at the “latest indexed” option to see if the most recent articles are indexed – if they are that’s good – if they aren’t and the latest article is more than 10 days old that means the site is not being crawled by Google very often;
  • if I am worried about the speed of google crawls I will check the cache (again just google http://sitename.com – and click “cache”). If the cache is more than 2 weeks old and/or shows a completely different site I don’t use it. This tells me regardless of the PR the site has probably just been set up and Google  isn’t visiting regularly so my article won’t get indexed easily, and the PR may well disapear in the next update too;

The site’s front page design. Page rank is all about page not site rank. If your article will never appear on the front page it will be harder for it to get indexed and to get PR. I don’t use sites which have static front pages on which articles don’t appear – I don’t mind a single static post with other articles below but I am not interested in ones that don’t reference articles at all on the front page – not even the title.

I couldn’t care less whether the site has an atrractive design or not – but if they haven’t set the permalink structure to be postname or similar I again move on and find another drectory.  Whether the directory has advertising or not doesn’t matter to me either.

Does that cover most of your PostRunner questions? If you have any other questions about guest posting or Postrunner in particular do please drop me a comment below so I can clarify – I have been using this for so long its hard to remember what confuses initially and what does not.

Categories
Paid Tools Tools

Keyword Academy Price Rise 6 April

UPDATE 21 July. The price has now reverted to $33/month. If you are paying the higher rate contact tka support to have your subscription reduced to the $33/month rate.

I did warn you that The Keyword Academy was increasing their price!  Well the bad news is that I was right – the worse news is that the price is going up on the 6 April – which is also the anniversary as TKA celebrates their first birthday.

New Zealand native kingfisher
Rare NZ bird - Karori Wildlife Sancturary - Wellington

I have told you already why TKA works for so many of us – I’m not going to repeat myself here, again – that and I just got back from a few days away and I was on my way to  bed before I saw this in my in-box. Bottom line – not sure – signup now – it will cost $1 and you lock in the $33/month for life – sign up on the 6th – and you will be at the new higher rate of $67/month. Either way you still have the 30 days to figure out whether the program will work  for you.

HONKING BIG BUY IT NOW OR I WILL EXPLODE LINK

Here’s why the price is going up – in ther own words:

It’s hard to believe that an entire year has passed since we announced the launch of our paid members’ area, and the program has come quite a long way since April ’09.

What started out as a program that offered only guidance and support has become a full blown internet marketing system. We still offer a thorough step by step method for building low maintenance internet income and we still support new members with ongoing webinars and an extremely helpful forum.

But we’ve taken our program beyond information and support, and built tools that save our members huge amounts of time in their pursuit of a bigger online income.
More than Just Guidance and Support

“Tools” is a term that gets thrown around pretty liberally in the internet marketing world, so let me be a little more specific about what you’ll find inside TKA Pro:

First of all, you’ll get unlimited access to the Niche Refinery, a keyword research tool that will allow you to sort through tens of thousands of keywords to find those with plenty of income potential but without overwhelming competition.

Ask our members, and you’ll hear Niche Refinery called “as addictive as drugs.”

Niche Refinery makes the keyword selection process fast and easy. Whether you’re brand new to making money online, or already bringing in a steady income – you need more keywords, you need better keywords.

The only way to get a good look at Niche Refinery is by taking a 30 day trial of TKA Pro.

The second important tool you’ll find inside TKA Pro is PostRunner (called the Guest Posting System until a few days ago; PostRunner was the subject of Court’s most recent post on the blog). PostRunner is a tool that makes it incredibly easy to acquire contextual white hat links that will make a big difference to your search engine rankings.

PostRunner is not a spam tool; we mean it when we say these are white hat links. We’re not going to talk much more about it here; all we’ll say is this: if you want search engine rankings, you need links. PostRunner will let you get the number and quality of links you need to rank well.

The only way to get a good look at PostRunner is by taking a 30 day trial of TKA Pro.
How much has your online income grown in the last 12 months?

If you’re a normal aspiring internet marketer, you’ve read a lot of blog posts in the last 12 months. You’ve probably bought at least a few domain names; maybe you’ve even set up a few websites. But the question isn’t whether you’ve been working on it – the question is how much new income have you created in the last year?

I can make a pretty fair guess about how much you’re earning because I’ve surveyed many of our readers. Here are a couple of interesting stats: over 96% of those responding to the survey were making less than $500 per month online, but over 50% of them had been working at it for more than a year. So you have this relatively big group who’d been working away at it for more than a year, but didn’t even have a few hundred dollars per month to show for the effort.

When you sign up for TKA Pro, I guarantee you’ll see a clear path to consistent income. It takes hard work and patience, but it works.

Every day when you sit down at your computer, do you know what you can and should be doing to increase your income? Do you have a set of proven steps and to follow and the tools to help you follow them?

If you’ve managed to create some income online, do you know exactly how to replicate that success and add zeros to your monthly earnings (or just get your monthly earnings past $0)?

If you can say yes to all those questions, congratulations and more power to you.

If you can’t say yes, and you find yourself wandering around the web for weeks at a time, wondering which of those over-hyped sales letters might actually get you where you want to go…

…do yourself a favor and take a 30 day trial of TKA Pro.

If you register for TKA Pro before Tuesday, April 6th, you’ll get unlimited access to our step by step video instructions, our members’ only forum, and our keyword research and link building tools for 30 days, and it will cost you $1. If you decide to stay subscribed beyond the 30 days your subscription will cost $33 per month – and never increase.

I’d strongly recommend getting off the fence and taking us up on this offer, because Court and I are giving ourselves a nice birthday gift as TKA Pro turns one year old:
We’re Doubling the Price

As of April 6th, ongoing Premium Membership to TKA Pro will run you $67 per month. We still believe the program will be a great deal relative to its value at $67 per month, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s more than double the current cost of a monthly subscription.

We’re not increasing the price so drastically just for kicks; this isn’t the same program we launched with a subscription of $33 per month. By adding Niche Refinery and PostRunner, we’ve put TKA Pro in a position to take the place of other keyword analysis and link building tools whose combined cost would be a few hundred bucks a month.

This is the bottom line: our members love the program, and it’s working for them. We now have over 1,200 active members, and every week we get more reports of big gains to their income. If you were ever going to take TKA Pro for a test drive, I’d do it now before it gets a little more pricey.

Oh, and just one thought about the whole subscription thing. I know you hate subscriptions. I hate them, too. I won’t keep a single subscription to a tool or a program that doesn’t absolutely justify itself and give a great return on investment.

So if you take a trial membership and decide it’s not for you, canceling is as easy as logging into Paypal and clicking one button. Or, you could just send our student support an email and we’ll cancel the subscription for you without hassle or hesitation. And if you forget to cancel your subscription and we charge you $33 accidentally, a quick refund is just one email away. We won’t bug you about it at all. With over 1,200 happy members, we don’t have to fight with anybody over a $33 refund, so don’t hesitate to ask.

Hope to get to know you better on the inside.

– Mark

Categories
Case Study

Case Study: Choosing Keywords – Installing a Niche Site

This is the second part  of my Keyword Academy  Case Study series  – if you missed the initial post you can check it out here.

Keywords are everything in this business – start with the wrong keywords you will fail – I can prove that – been there done that – either failed to rank the site at all – or got to #1 – only to discover no money in the keyword!

I have my own take on keywords – the Keyword Academy videos focus on looking for products – but personally I prefer services.

Wellington on an unusually still day!

Will I reveal the niche or the site. No – sorry not going to happen. The reasons why are quite simple:

  • if I reveal the site people will help by sending me links – invalidating the experiment;
  • if I actually start making bucket loads of cash from this site – I will suddenly have a whole lot more competition!

So no hard feelings – I will tell you this about the niche:

  • its a 3 word phrase describing a business need;
  • its a service that  businesses pay good money for;
  • its nothing at all to do with Internet Marketing or Making Money Online
  • its not something  I know a whole lot about – yet – but its something I have some interest in – I will become absolutely fascinated in it if starts making me a regular income!

According to the Keyword Academy tools:

  • it has 3600 exact searchs a month
  • an Adsense cost per click of $11.35
  • a “difficulty” of 200
  • potential income $204 (month) from Adsense – but more on that later…
  • and the top four sites are all PR3 – they consist of a double listing from a relevant directory, and 2 relevant businesse neither of which use my keyword phrase in their ranked urls.

According to Lissie’s approach to keyword approach

  • the top 4 sites are all old 10 years plus. In fact the only site on page 1 which is younger than 4 years old –  keywordphrase.org – which is a few months old.
  • sites in position 3 and 4  may like to buy my site for a tidy sum if it starts to affect their own ratings – I could also offer advertising to them if I was  outranking them – cut out the middle man of Adsense (Google) and save them money and make me more.  With a CPC of $11.35 I  should be getting as an Adsense publisher about 1/3 of that – so there is quite a lot of potential upside to direct  sell to the advertiser.
  • there are a bunch of very,very low (definition ezinearticles or hubpages in the first 4 positions) low tails related to this keyword. Google claims there is not traffic but I don’t believe it – the phrases make sense – this site has a lot more potential for $204 “official” estimate.

Registering the Right Domain

My preferred domains are gone:

  • mykeywords.com – is parked at godaddy.com
  • mykeywords.net are parked at godaddy.com
  • mykeywords.org is ranking #7 as noted above – with 14 Yahoo backlinks, no PR, 14 pages indexed.

Exact matches aren’t part of the TKA approach but in my experience they work wonderfully – unfortunately this not finding the exact match available is a common situation. The ranking of the dot org also however  tells me having some keywords in the domain is going to help a fair bit.

Because I am looking  in future at maybe either selling the site or selling advertising direct on the site I am avoiding all other domain TLDS (biz, info etc) – credibility is key here and com has it in spades. Because most of the money appears to be in the US for this business I am looking for a US domain name

I am not doing hyphens for the same reasons as above.

Looking at extra words to add I found I could register prefixmykeywords.com – where the prefix is also part of a long-tail – think if I was after green widgets and new green widgets was a related keyword I got the domain which is newgreenwidgets.com

Costs: $7.67 – domain registration (Godaddy using discount code emma30 )

Hosting: free as I already have a Hostgator reseller ($5-$7 for others)

For more on choosing the right domain name check out this video from the Market Samurai people

Next time I am going to talk about the details of getting links with Postrunner.

Categories
Case Study Lis Recommmends

Passive Income Online’s Keyword Academy Case Study

OK you horrible lot. This is it I am going to prove that this works.  You can build websites – rank them in the search engines and retire to the beach to live off the earnings.

I’ve been reading for ages that people love case studies – I know I love reading about case studies to – it sure beats working –  but I have resisted doing them because basically I saw them as a lot of work – they are in the discipine that I have any qualifications in – science. In science a case study is an experiment and you learn with experiments whether they prove or disprove the hypothesis.

Internet marketing case studies are different.

If an Internet Marketing case study fails – I make no money But there is really no downside in this experiment – I seriously doubt that I am going to fail to make money. I know that I can rank a site from ziltch to a page 1 in Google within 6 months if I chose the right keywords. If I do that I know I will make money from it (also sadly lacking in many science experiments). So what’s to lose? I will need to be slightly more organised than usual – but that wouldn’t be bad anyways!

So this is what I am goingto do:

  • start a  niche site  on a new domain using the Keyword Academy method.
  • rank it by ONLY using the keyword academy’s guest posting system. Now this is NOT the currently recommended approach in their core videos – but I have a hunch and I know that Mark, one of the guys behind TKA is trying the same thing. I am going to acquire around 25 links/month for the site from GPS.

Report back here every month or so on progress.

So how we are going to measure progress –  scientist hiding in my back brain somewhere! Lets try this

  • number of pages in Google
  • number of backlinks showing in Yahoo
  • ranking for main keyword in Google
  • ranking of  related keywords in Google
  • passive income earned
  • expenses incurred

It may vary depending what I forget to record from month to month!

The site will start off as a bog standard WordPress site set up as a niche site with arount 5-10 pages of content – I’ll probably launch it on the last day of the month just to keep the figures neat. Well my last day – I’m normally a day ahead on account of the time different and given that I will be away over  Easter that will have to be close enough.

In my next post in the Keyword Academy case study series I’ll talk about chosing the right keywords and domain.

Here’s my challenge to you. You can read my every world, hang out on this blog waiting for the next episode – or you could build your own site. No matter how many mistakes you make chosing your keywords and setting up your site  and promoting it – you will probably still make more money than if you just read my posts…

The difficulty with these types of case studies is that the biggest variable is niche – its just plain harder to rank in some niches than others. I am only covering one niche in this study. You could cover a different niche. Why not start your own new site (or indeed kickstart an old one you have been ignoring). If you want to report your progress regularly on your blog – drop a comment here and  I will link to your posts. Or if you don’t have an appropriate blog – just drop a regular comment here with your  progress. What’s the worst that can happen – you make money?

Update: Check out my competition!

Loreecee from Postrunner Review

Tiffany from Passive Income Goals

Alana from Beginner Blogger

Hospitalera from Making Money Online