Let’s face it – I am scared of the camera – well one that takes moving pictures anyways! I don’t really have an issue with photos of me per se, particularly if they are stored on my computer so I can delete at will. But video has always made me nervous.
I’ve tried it a couple of times – and I dislike the sound of my own voice. A lot. Talking the camera is also perilously close to talking to an audience which is alive. And that gives me stage fright.
The Dog's Keen - Me Not So Much!
But the case for audio and video is becoming a bit overwhelming. For example. No prizes for figuring out that both this blog and Pat’s over at SmartPassiveIncome.com go after the same main keyword. There’s not much in it – at the moment he’s #2 and I’m #4 in the SERPs. But I’ve never been able to figure out one little thing – why the hell does he have so much more traffic than I do? According to SEMRush he doesn’t rank for another huge keyword in this niche – so WTF was going on?
Now there are a dozen ways to game social media figures and subscription numbers, but Pat doesn’t do any of them – his subscription numbers are genuine, you can tell by the genuine conversations going on in his comments. Those numbers are real, and impressive.
Then finally I noticed Pat pointing out that- its his podcasts which bring he traffic from iTunes and videos which bring him traffic from all over including YouTube.
At the same time I have Mark from SEOCobra bending my ear, that he doesn’t get why more people aren’t adding Youtube videos to their posts in the system. Mark has a tendency to call late at night, after I’ve had a gin or two, or early in the morning when I haven’t had enough tea (its a time zone thing) – but finally, today, once the coffee kicked in, I went oh duh!
Its because most of us are idiots and don’t haven’t made youtube videos promoting our sites, or demonstrating the products we are flogging.
Wizzley allows you to add videos so you can demonstrate what you are talking about.
If you do it right – you can submit the audio to iTunes – in fact get yourself an iTunes channel – and the video goes on Youtube.
Do You Do Podcasts / Video – What Tools Do You Use?
I’ve used video once to sell something. I used Picasa to string a bunch of photos together to help sell our previous house. It was a lot quicker than learning how to edit video, and I was running out of time after days spent cleaning! It worked pretty well:
I’ve played a little with Jing – which I quite like. I’m perfectly willing to procrastinate over the technology for a while – so what are you guys using – and please, I’m not buying a Mac – it has to work on Windows!
Have You Signed Up Yet?
Did you sign up for the newsletter yet? If you don’t you’ll miss out on all the inside Z-Blogger tips! And how much money I did or did not make this month.
If you keen to check out SEO Cobra when it re-opens – remember lists are awfully good place to make announcements!
Picture of this C-List Blogger Living The High Life, Ko Samui, Thailand
This stupid MMO blog is a curious thing. It started as my online learning journal/personal diary thing. But its become something a lot more than that.
You see, while publicly, calling out the A-List bloggers – I have somehow become one: a C-lister anyways, woops no, now a Z-List Blogger! I am making money from you guys, that’s the truth of it. Its not what I set out to do – but over the years – its just kinda happened – and an incident over the weekend really highlighted it to me.
I’m sorry – that’s my dirty little secret, it would have been obvious to some of you for some time, but not to others and its always made me feel apologetic and uncomfortable.
I have probably been reading way to much personal devlopement stuff recently – but I’m not happy with my record here – so I’m putting that record straight.
It Started With A Cashflow Crises
My cash flow was ugly in October, and not looking much better for November – HubPages is not playing nicely, and come the new year will be screwing me out of significant Amazon earnings. Late on Friday night I did the Oct figures – and there were as bad as I thought they would be.
I needed cash, not today, but it was getting borderline as to whether my income covered my living expenses. A few years ago I would have checked the job sites.
Now that’s not an even an option for me now – instead I looked a minimizing expenses in my business, sent out some over-due invoices, they all paid within hours. Wow that was easy! I felt a bit better – why the heck do I find it hard to ask for money I’m owed?
By 10pm I was surfing Facebook – I noticed that a new backlinking service that I hadn’t been using much, and that I nearly cancelled last month (but missed the date), opened up for affiliates, several days earlier.
Hmmm – I make $300 or so dollars a month selling Build My Rank – might try promoting the new service a go. By 1am the review was up (including typos in the title and url LMAO – I am too old for late night stuff). I promoted it here, the Pond, Facebook and TKA. Within 48 hours I had signups – by the time the initial offering was sold-out (genuinely – not bullshit false shortage BTW) – I had sold the majority of the memberships available. I had made a lot of money.
I’m ranked #1, 2, 3 AND 4 for “seo cobra review” and similar terms in the search engines. I don’t think I’ve had a single visitor or sign-up from that though (yet – SEO is the long game).
Hmm looks like I’ve turned into one of those scammer A-list bloggers, ie one who make a living selling stuff to their followers. Its hard to ignore the fact that if I recommend stuff on this blog – you guys buy it- and thank me for it…
Shit – I make money from selling make money online services (albeit good ones) to people who follow me online and think that I’m knowledgeable, helpful and probably think I’m successful! Well two outta three ain’t bad, as the old song says.
Knowledgeable: I’ve been doing this since 2007, I’ve been making my income entirely online since March 2009, I’ve followed lots of gurus, several of whom no longer post at all (or rarely) – yes I have some knowledge – I’m the personality type that likes finding out stuff – there’s some Myers-Briggs label for it – I call it analysis paralysis;
Helpful: yeah – I am, its innate, happens in real life too, having found all that information, I like sharing it, I quite like writing too -hence the blog keeps on getting updated (but don’t hold me to a schedule!).
Successful: – now that’s the bit I’m not sure on – that’s what I want to fix up
Is Lis Successful At Online Marketing?
I made a profit of NZ$37,900 in the last 12 months, in the same time the US/NZ exchange rate varied from 74c to 88c in those same 12 months – so in US$ that’s an income of : US$28,000 or US$33,300 depending on the rate on the day (you understand the nightmare then?).
That’s not gross sales – its income less expenses – I claim all the obvious expenses – hosting, domains, memberships, but also my home office (power, rates, ISP) – this is the real money I earn – its what I have to pay tax on.
Is this a successful income? For me its a start – my aim has always been around US$5000/month. At my current earnings level I can pay 1/2 our household expenses, but we own our home (no mortgage), and I only doing minimal retirement savings, we do do a lot of travel and dancing, but we have no children to support, nor an expensive shopping habit; your mileage may vary.
Picture of this C-List Blogger Living The High Life, Chaweng Beach, Ko Samui, Thailand
So if you thought I was making 6-figures and throwing the cash around – if you didn’t realise that rather nice lunch we had just after that photo was taken, cost about $10 and we took a $2 tuk-tuk to get there, not a $25 taxi ride – sorry. Genuinely.
So What the Heck Is Lis’s Problem? That’s Not a Bad Income and She Never Said She Drove a Porsche!
I make about half my income from this site. That’s my issue. I do make money from other sites as well – but this one site is my solid month in, month out, pay-the-bills website. Over the years, through a bit of luck, some great friends, and the fact that I didn’t give up on it, Passive Income Online now makes me half of my income, and the stable 1/2 at that.
I make half of my money from selling stuff to others who are trying for the same lifestyle as I am. Inadvertantly I’m doing what the A-Listers do all too deliberately.
There’s another reason why I have been coy about putting out my detailed income figures recently. I don’t want to encourage the rest of you, particularly the beginners into thinking that THIS is the way to make money, particularly not short-term.
It doesn’t work like that. I’ve developed an online reputation over four years, for longer even than I’ve had this blog. Most of the time I wasn’t doing it deliberately, its sure as hell evolved. In fact until very recently (hmm like this month) – this site has been deliberately only focussed on search traffic, because I was so bloody uncomfortable about the fact that some of you think I know something useful, and I was selling to you.
What’s happened – well basically I’ve playing the old – go with your strengths card – I didn’t expect to make serious money with a MMO blog, its happened despite me. So now I’m going to develop it – it appears this personal relationship stuff works – and I want to develop that – so I can apply it to my other, non-MMO, niches.
But you guys don’t go away – you keep emailing me with nice comments and intelligent questions, you seem to appreciate what I am doing! So really in short – my readers have driven me to it and its not my fault – you asked for it and now:
That’s Me Out in the Open – Welcome to Lissie: the World’s Only C-List Blogger!
Lis Is Embracing Her Spammy C-List Blogger Status – Passive Income Has An E-Mail List!
See you can sign up just below. I’ve always resisted email lists – its the A-listers weapon of choice – but a list will allow me to do what I can’t do with just the blog.
I will use the list to publish my regular monthly income reports. The monthly reports will NOT go on this site . To see them – you will need to sign up, plain up and simple. The WHY – that’s for the list too LOL.
Also the list will allow me to give you heads up on stuff that is happening – but is not worth a post.
Hey I might even throw in a summary of posts – but if that’s all you want – then the feedburner service already does that (email or RSS reader options).
So yeah that’s more than enough soul searching for the day I think! Leave a comment, sign up, or unsubscribe, sorry if you feel pissed off or misled by my little corner of the Interwebs – feel free to leave – and apologies I annoyed.
For the rest of you – well – normal service (or lack thereof) is probably going to be resumed.
And the question on the form? I’m curious as to whether I should be reusing some of my basic stuff and putting it out onto the list on a regular basis?
Had to engage in the conversation here – Leo – says there is no such thing as passive income he argues that we all should be developing businesses not just relying on SEO to climb to the top of the rankings.
Funny how my name has got associated with passive income – as friendspointed out to Leo (and not saying Leo isn’t a friend – merely wrong 🙂 ) I would be in for the argument.
Not Passive Income
OK so lets step back. In the dark times pre-passive income – I used to be a highly overpaid IT consultant – I was paid a nice hourly rate by companies who wanted to upgrade or replace software. I used to work on a salary – a “safe” job right. Yup, it was – I never got fired from a permanent job – but it was huge, huge millstone around my neck. You see turning up 40 hours a week – even if the hours were somewhat flexible – meant that I could only travel in the holidays- I only got 4 weeks annual leave so even with creative use of leave without pay, public holidays and anticipated leave – I could only get away for 6 weeks ever couple of years.
I could afford the travel – but I didn’t have the time – the rules around my presence at work were my definition of hell.
Business or Passive Income ?
I looked at options – buying a franchise is a popular one around here – but it sounded like buying a job to me (told what to do – lots of bosses (clients) and high overheads (franchise fees)) – no thanks. Plus, again – you have to be in the country to run the business.
Starting my own business – I never considered it to be frank – I not only couldn’t sell, I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to risk my capital and the failure rate for small business in New Zealand is pretty high (and usually that takes your house too).
I started to look at other options. When I started researching my options I came across the concept that you could invest now and get paid later. I could buy property and get paid rents, I could buy shares and get paid dividends (rarely in my country but the principal is still there).
Passive Income Take 1
This was promising – I did quite a bit of research. In the end we invested in property (my partner was already in shares) – and its worked for us and continue to do so.
Now some will argue property investment, particularly residential, free-standing, older wooden houses, in earthquake prone countries, is not passive. They will say houses need to be maintained, tenants need to be found, managed and got rid of.
Yup – and you can outsource the lot! Case in point – house we own in small town New Zealand.
Passive Income - New Zealand Style
Here’s the rough figures (all NZ$ – NZ$1 = US$0.75 at the moment – but relatively it doesn’t matter).
Purchase price 2003 – $77,000
Currrent estimated value 2011 $150,000
Unrealised capital gain 6.4% a year
Original tenant left a few weeks ago – yup same tenants for 8+ years – never missed a payment – $140 to $160/week for 8 years.
Gross rental income: $8320 or 10% cash yield
Gross yield 16.4%/year (yup that’s why we don’t focus on shares very much).
Now the property does have expenses, we use a property manager, pay Council rates and insurance, and of course we borrowed the purchase price so there is mortgage interest as well – but time wise its cost us about 2 days when bought the place (one day deciding to buy the place, one day due diligence, signing papers) and now – eight years later we spent 1/2 day, inspecting the property and arranging for someone to give it a good tidy up.
Is that totally passive income? No
Is it bloody close, the way we do it – yes. And even we maintained and managed the properties ourselves (and plenty of larger landlords do) – we would have a business giving a us a ful-time income for a very part-time amount of effort. But we don’t that because between the two of us we are crap at DIY and are too soft to deal with ratbag tenants!
Will this property be passive income for us for the next 10, 20, 30 years? Should be, likely to be, unless there is a major earthquake in the region – when it won’t be a total loss – but we will probably get paid out and have to walk away at that point. Is passive income guaranteed – nope.
So if property investment is so great – why didn’t I stick with it? Well we did – but we stopped buying – why? Risk, to make good money on property you need to gear up (borrow) – to do that you are layering risk on risk – we got to the level of borrowing against asssets that we were comfortable with – and stopped.
Property is an as passive or active income as you design it to be.
Passive Income #2
My second attempt at passive income you are familiar with, as documented right here. I rank websites at the top of the SERPS and make passive income from the advertising on them. Frankly I never started off to build a business online – a wanted a passive, long term income – and I have that now. Some of my income is from fairly new sites, some of my income are from sites and pages that I haven’t touched for three years. Last year I inadvertantly demonstrated that I could do little work for several months have not affect my income.
What’s long-term income though – will my websites still rank in 3 years, 5 years, 10 years? Maybe, maybe not – but every indication to date is that older sites rank and hold their rankings better than new sites. But one of the reason I have many websites is the same I reason I own 5 rental properties in smaller, cheaper places, rather than just 1 or 2 in the fairly expensive city I live in – diversification. If one of my houses is destroyed or untenanted – it hurts but its only part of my portfolio. If one of websites gets out of favour with Google or that particularly niche falls out of fashion – the others are still producing.
Now from what I am seeing – nothing much has changed on the last Google update – my sites are still ranking in the same place more or less, my Hubpages may be a little down – but that could be coincidence/seasonal too. February didn’t match my record January month – but I know my pattern is that once I hit a new income record it takes 3 to 4 months to match it again – in short I am seeing nothing out of the ordinary in my business.
Leo argues that I really should build a business online – a real business with real clients – but nothing has much changed for me – my freedom is still the most important thing for me – and having to be available to clients cuts into that freedom. Having a few clients is fine (and I do) – but ramping it up seems to be just trading freedom for income – a trade I’m not really prepared to make.
Leo argues that SEO will get more and more competitive over the coming years – it could well do – though I wouldn’t overestimate the ability of corporates to adapt – pretty bloody slow in my experience. He argues that I should establish a “real” business which has real followers and therefore not be dependent on search traffic. I know a little about this – because this blog gets “real” visitors not just search traffic. As far as I can tell though -the people who convert are the search traffic.
What I know is that with my silly little sites – I can make a little money – not a huge amount – sometimes $1/day – sometimes more. But even at $1/day lets look at the rate of return:
Initial purchase of site: (all prices US$)
$8 for the domain
$10-$15 for content on the site Ti
Total: $23
Backlink articles at say $1/each – maybe 30 -90 articles – say $90
Annual profit $243 … annual costs say maybe $20…
No mortgages, no property managers, no rates, no insurance, no risk of earthquakes…
Passive Income – Is It For You? Maybe Not If …
If You Want to Make a Difference
If you want to make a difference in the world – then blogging ain’t where its at – go become a health worker, or a volunteer in a country that needs the help. An engineer bringing clean drinking water to kids in Africa, a researcher finding a cure for cancer is making a difference, me – not so much.
If You Need Money Now
As I have advised many people – if you need money this month, or next month – or even in the next 6 to 12 months – this won’t work for you – it may, but for most beginners it won’t work. It didn’t work for me – I got a job – it paid, it was a crappy job but it delivered what I needed at the time – cash.
If You Have Huge Income Requirements
I remember when I wrote about making $1000/month with Adsense – that it seemed like a lot of money (I hit that milestone almost exactly 2 years later) – $1000/month is a lot of money to me – its not enough to live on – but I could live on it if I had to – its pretty much what the NZ government pays as a pension for the over-65’s and most of them seem to do just fine.
About US$5k /month would work just fine for me – but I see people making $10k plus in the TKA forums – frankly that’s nice – but its unlikely to ever be me – because I don’t really need the money I will probably never persue it! If you really need to make a 6-figure salary – again I’d say get a job – just make sure you have the right skills.
Tourist Hoards waiting to go up the Eiffel Tower, Paris, France
Looking for headless chook image – could only find hoards of tourists (close enough I think)! Thought I would do a follow up on my what is a content farm post – as the fall out continues on Google’s recent update – and just point out that human psychology is quite intereting and I am thinking that maybe Google has a number of psyc PhD’s amongst their software geeks.
Tourist Hoards waiting to go up the Eiffel Tower, Paris, France
Google Farmer Update – What Was It?
On or about 1 March in the US results (but will be rolled out worldwide) Google changed their algorithm – they made the unusual step of annoucing what they had done and Matt Cutt’s is quoted as saying:
This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.
Google claimed to affected nearly 12% of the search results – but a number of us found either nothing had changed, or nothing bad had happened to our sites. As I said in my last post – I wasn’t see much evidence that they had succeeded.
The problem is of course the age old question:
What the Fuck is Quality?
Some people think this site is quality – some don’t – but I have no qualifications in making passive income online. In fact I didn’t even make much income when I started this site – but people thought this site was quality – because I was writing about my own experience.
Here’s another site which is really useful: http://www.cure-back-pain.org/ – the site introduces itself with:
I suffered with crippling lower back pain for 18 years of my life. I know what you must endure everyday while living with back problems. I have empathy for you. I understand because I was there myself. I have found my own cure. I now know how wonderful life can be without the huge burden of chronic pain. It is my most sincere wish that you might find lasting relief, as well.
I found the site because Google has started a thread asking people to report if their site has been adversely affected and think this is unfair – the owner of the site above wrote this:
I am so devastated. My main site and my life’s work, cure-back-pain.org was drastically affected. I am not a learned webmaster, I am a back pain patient and someone who writes to help others recover. My site is 5 years old and has often led in the rankings for my topic, back pain and back pain treatment. I was let go from my “dayjob” in the economic decline of 2008 and found a savior in the fact that I could make a living helping those who needed it most, so I turned to my site full time and found it very rewarding. I write all my own content and work my site 80 hours a week+. I do everything myself. I do not syndicate or outsource anything. All one has to do is read the letters in the Q&A section to see how much I am dedicated to my cause… I could not figure out what I did wrong to suffer such a decline in ranking and then started to research what may have happened and found that many excellent sites (and many not so excellent content farms) were affected. Eventually, I found some advice from my webhost and checked my site for stolen content. Guess what? I found TONS of sites stealing my 100% original and self written content! I am shocked and appalled. This probably has something to do with my dismissal as an authority in the topic I know so well…
I double checked the US SERPs for back pain treatment. At position #4 I found a news result – like who gives a shite if you are looking for treatment why would I care if Barcelona’s soccer coach has back pain??? I found results from webmd and emedicinehealth (also webmd I think), I found an about.com page which quoted scientific results. And I found this little gem on a classic Made For Adsense site:
The quest for effective back pain relief has thrown up some challenges in the modern world. As we move through the early years of the new century, the pace of life is becoming ever more frantic. With every passing day, there seems to be more to do than there ever was before. At the same time, there is little doubt that the pressure …
If I was the owner of back pain treatment I wouldn’t just be “devastated” I would be utterly and totally pissed off and disillusioned. Now we could have a debate about the sites not that pretty – its a standard Site Build It! template, but its the guy’s only income – and he has actually been giving Google exactly what they want – and the kick him in the nuts. But all is good – in this self-satisfied interview with Matt Cutts and another Google Engineer apparently:
However, our classifier that we built this time does a very good job of finding low-quality sites. Wired.com
In the words of the Speights Ad – Yeah Right. But of course I wouldn’t want to running off and saying that Google had stuffed up – that wouldn’t be scientific or anything -right? So I went to the home of all in-depth research in things of a darker nature in Internet Marketing – and found that the owner’s of splogs and autoblogs were very, very happy about the latest update.
I could spend hours going through that Google support thread and finding examples – you may have seen that even sites which are quoted as exemplars of Adsense publishers got slammed included Ask The Builder – page 2 of the thread.
On a skim – the sites I saw that were penalised were:
large and generally old (5 + years)
had had consistent rankings for quite a while i.e. their owners were comfortably making an income from them which they were pretty dependent on
some were general sites but most were specialist
most had good original content written by either experts or by someone with a passion for the topic
high PR (5 and above) sites were affected
Now I hope, and this is sincere, that in many cases the sites in this thread will get reinstated – but the state of chaos currently gives us one clear point:
Google still can’t distinguish original content from scrapped content. If you are are an old, well-ranking site with content your content will get scrapped, copied and re-written – as of today – this may well result in your rankings dropping.
If those sites do get reinstated it will be manually – not algorithmically.
Some are already asking whether this Google update mis-fired and Leo points out the winners from the Farmer update are in fact the scrappers (at least short term). I agree with his recommendation though to build niche sites to fill the gaps. But as Griz points out – fly beneath the radar
So can you still make passive income online? I think so – from where I am sitting – actually looking at the facts, rather than the hype, Google is no closer to cleaning up its search results than it ever was. If I was starting today what would I do? Avoid the niches Griz mentions in his post, avoid having one huge site on lots of different topics, I’d build a bunch of niche sites across a range of topics, build back links to them – and see what worked. If I site started producing I would seriously look at taking Adsense off it and finding an alternative monetization strategy.
On the other hand you might just be so scared off by the latest furore in our little corner of the Interwebs – that you decide that you really should go out and get a real job and contribute to society of something – go ahead – but consider this – that’s probably exactly what Google wants you to do …
Matt Cutts has the best job in the world. He writes one little blog post and puts the whole of the Internet Marketing community into a tail spin – and his latest is a good one – in fact when googling “what is a content farm” the first result was a news result – indicating that the term is hot, hot, hot at the moment.
But WTF is Google doing? Are they trying to destroy all of us who want to make a few dollars of passive income a month? Is the era of making a living online gone forever? Google search is failing – and what Google is doing is a public relations exercise in order to recover some credibility – and the evidence is in the results of the above search.
So what is a content farm I thought? I asked Mr Google (using US results via the nifty Chrome Google Extension tool) – and Google told me –
News results: according to joisic.com:
The term “content farm” is commonly used to describe these sites that add pages and pages of unoriginal, useless information to the search engines database.
and gigaom.com thinks that:
Companies that do this have come to be known — somewhat disparagingly — as “content farms” because of the low rates they pay the people producing their content and because of the factory-style atmosphere of some ventures.
They then go on to quote examples of such companies as including:
Demand Media, Associated Content, AOL (with Patch and Seed), About.com, HubPages, Examiner.com and Suite 101.
Odd list – hubpages.com doesn’t pay me a cent – I get paid from a share of revenue from articles on their site- my biggest payout comes from Google’s Adsense… BTW I never heard of either of these sites I was thinking maybe LATimes or TechCrunch – its not like the discussion is not being had…
But getting on to the very, very best results for my query:
wikipedia: the entry is somewhat shorter than the list of references and says precisely – nothing …
seotheory.com asks What is a content farm and offers an opinion based on personal experience – rather than rehashed content – odd how its coming in at #4 behind the nonsense in front of it.
Next we have the site called – yup – “The Content Farm” – and yes you can find really useful stuff like how to talk to a child (hint first check if he is wearing priest’s clothing …) or how to determine the weight of an Oscar (TM) Statuette – hint – first win one … In fact its a lot more amusing than the usual stuff on ehow and good luck to them I say – and it just goes to show the Exact Match Domain (EMD) bonus still works ..
At position #5 we have a 2009 post from readwriteweb.com age and authority will allow you to rank with little effort at all…
Many people know how to rank in Google’s search results – and Google doesn’t like it. If you missed the broadcast mesage – to rank content in the search results it is easiest if:
your domain name matches the search term;
failing that the term you want to be found for is in your url and within your article using the basics of on-page SEO
build links to your site – some of those links should be anchored using your search term or near relatives to it.
Google is trying to rank quality – but frankly – it can’t.
Lets take a topical example. Christchurch New Zealand has suffered 2 damaging earthquakes in the last 6 months. In September 2010 there was a damaging earthquake which didn’t kill anyone, on the 22 February and aftershock of that quake may have killed as many as 240 people (figures still unconfirmed at the time of writing). So I am in NZ and I know that this story is so big that it has played in primetime on CNN, BBC and elsewhere around the world. There was non-stop media coverage (without ads) for the first 48 hours in New Zealand in TV1, TV3 and Radio NZ – my point is that there is an awful lot of information on the topic – a lot of new information – which can’t have been gamed by the clever SEO’s. So what does Google.co.nz come up with when I ask it the question many have asked me (an ex-Geologist) in the last week:
So in order we have:
a bunch of very useful official sites – any query about christchurch and/or earthquake is displaying this in New Zealand at the moment – fair enough but not contextural search.
news results from legit daily newspapers – though it seems a little bit unfair that the UK telegraph showed up an the NZ Herald didn’t – NONE of these results relate to my actual query – the cause of the quake.
now the first actual search results is from – Yahoo Answers – yeah font of all legit qualified opinion that is – at least the answers on this particular listing are not too outrageous – but its hardly at a technical level – or even a good English level.
next we have a pretty awesome photoblog from MSNBC – nice article – nothing to do with the question.
the next two – yup – two results are from suite101 – one of the supposed farms – the first article has a sub heading which matches my query – but it doesn’t relate to the most recent event – thought Google was better than that – the second article – does relate to February’s quake – was written several days ago (I can tell from the estimated death toll) and there is nothing really about the question I asked in my query. These articles are reasonably well-written but obviously not by anyone who is either anywhere near Christchurch or knows much about Earth Science.
Wikipedia is up next – but the link is to the 2010 quake not the 2011
Wikianswers makes it into the top 5 with a little gem – we don’t know in about 300 words.
But maybe that’s the best there is – so I dug a little deeper – here’s a good explanation and another one here and here – of course I only found those because I know that earthquakes are explained by the science of plate tectonics: obviously no one told Google.
Summary for those who skipped the preceding 993 words:
Google can’t make a judgement call about “quality” – all it can try and match search terms with content on a site and the authority of that site. It doesn’t understand even the most basic LSI – plate tectonics goes with earthquakes like cheese goes with wine – go figure.
Google is doing a bit of smoke screen exercise designed to scare the f*k out of some SEOs.
Google can’t even really distinguish between original and copied content – I wish they would because I am bored with the scrapers stealing my content – but I certainly haven’t seen it improve in the last few days.
Google can’t even pick up grammar – not should it – Christchurch’s mayor has been widely quoted as “However it is bad news for one of the city’s key sewage facilities. “Our main sewer truck is seriously munted,” Mayor Bob Parker told TVNZ.” – in my mind the quote of the event and exactly right if you are of a certain age and grew up in New Zealand. So don’t bury it in the results because its not grammatically correct!
Google trusts older sites more than newer sites – and PR has almost nothing to do with it.
They have (almost certainly) temporarily – reduced rankings for some large content sites. Apparently including hubpages – I say apparently because my long-standing well-ranking hubs are still exactly where they were in rankings.
From forum comments it appears those with affiliate sites promoting Amazon/eBay type products have been slapped down and the affiliate site promoted above them. I remember now why I gave up on promoting eBay and Amazon.
From my own figures – niche sites with unique but hardly stellar content are still going strong.
Go read Allyn for his take on Content Farms for Google to Zap
View From Our Hotel Window, Royale Chulan, Kuala Lumpur
The Keyword Academy has this absolutely infantile, ridiculous scheme where you can apply for badges to match your (verified) income – I mean its like pre-primary school right? Except for some odd reason it does seem to matter to me – and today I made it – I made the next badge up – in the last month I earned $2500 in passive online income and I have nice pretty badge to prove it. Half of that was from Adsense and that figure represents a 50% increase over December’s Adsense figures. So how long does it take to make at total of $4000/month of online income? So in answer to the question “Can You Make $1000/month with Adsense” (written almost exactly 2 years ago) – is YES, I DO. And yes at the time, I really didn’t think it would be ME that did!
View From Our Hotel Window, Royale Chulan, Kuala Lumpur
In fact I blame Mark Butler (from the Keyword Academy – yup you can get a personal consult for free within the Academy – its smart move by them – but unbelievable good value for members) – I had a consultation with him a few weeks ago – and I wrote on my white board – make $2500 by April 2011 (my anniversary date with Keyword Academy and my birthday). Oops looks like I will have to revise that LOL. Even my long-time goal of US$5500/month is starting to look reasonable – that would mean about US$4000/month in passive income. I can now see that happening this year – so long as I stop my obsessive stat’s checking and go back to work! Especially when I consider that my income has jumped while I’ve been on holidays – I thought I might resent working while I was travelling but instead
Why that figure – it would cover all our regular household expenses (so long as the US$ doesn’t completely collapse). That’s called freedom – for both my partner and I. Coincidentally it would also be about what I earned as a highly paid, bored, stressed out, IT professional – that would be sweet revenge!
So How Can You Make $2500 / month in Passive Income?
I don’t flipping know – I don’t know you – but I can tell you what has made a difference to me:
understanding I wanted a business not a job. Freelance writing is a job. Developing websites for other people is a job. Developing your own websites which produce more income even when you are on holiday – that’s a business.
outsourcing. Hiring a writer not only freed up my time – it made me become more organised because I had to tell him what to do – like duh!
having a range of sites in totally unrelated niches – sites I thought would be winners – no traffic. Sites I thought no one would EVER buy THAT online – they buy – go figure. I’m too stupid to figure this out in detail – my fool proof method of knowing if there is traffic for a keyword – get to page 1 and see if there is!
learning to believe my own stats – rather than what people are saying about the death of SEO, Google changes, Supersite, niche sites are dead, etc, etc. The best information on how to grow your business will always be found in understanding your own statistics – maybe I should write a post on that!
I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a paid placement – but I really do credit the forum over at TKA for being part of my success – I really don’t think I would have have hung on this long without the help support and I get there. I rarely ask for it – but just seeing people going thru the same stuff as I am is so incredibly useful and encouraging. Lets face it – few of us have anyone in the “real world” who understand why we play on the Interwebs all day – its nice to have some online friends who do.
Thanks for listening – now I have a lot more work to do…
Managing Tax Records Across Two Currencies with GST (VAT)
There was a recent thread in the forum at TKA regarding managing your Internet Marketing income which I added my 2c to. I then got quite a number of PMs from people asking me follow up questions – given the thread wasn’t even mine – I guess my commonsense approach to record keeping and taxes are not so common. So here’s what I think is important – your mileage may vary.
My approach is quite simple – I’m not an accountant – though I did pass ACCY101 a million years ago. I have never found a “system” which manages multiple currencies the way I need to – so I developed my own. I use an OpenOffice spreadsheet – but any spreadsheet program which can sum figures and do the odd bit of multiplication will do just fine. The system has evolved over the years – but I’ve never had to start again. If I didn’t have some complex real estate investments I could do my own taxes off these figures – as it is I give them to my accountant.
Having a system to record your expenses and payments is what’s important – once you have that you can do your taxes – or give the figures to someone else to do. But either way you need to provide the basic figures.
Online Income and Record Keeping
Ignoring taxes to start off with – the first thing you need to have in place is a way to manage your online income. Long before I was making enough to worry about tax – I used to track my monthly income – it kept me sane and motivated. If you don’t know what you are earning how do you know how to improve it?
Tracking Income as You Earn it.
So my first spreadsheet was very simple: each column across the page is a month – and ever row was a source of income. As a I got more sources of income I simply added more rows in.
My Original Earning Income by Month Spreadsheet
I split my income three ways:
truly passive – ie advertising and affiliate sales
not at all passive income – freelancing – one row per a client plus some more general one off stuff I do like hosting other people’s site and generic SEO consultancy.
one-off income – from selling domains or websites – which tend to really be windfall income while the other two groups are more ongoing.
Initially I thought that my three biggest earners would be Adsense, Amazon and eBay and that’s why they are highlighted – its never really worked out that way – I generally suck at eBay and Amazon – but I keep the highlighting …I don’t really know why 🙂
This spreadsheet is dead easy to maintain – near the start of the month I login to all my major affiliates and check what I earned for the previous month – note I won’t have been paid yet by most of them – but I look at the earnings.
Managing Passive Income in a Foreign Currency
American readers can probably skip this section. I don’t live in the US but most of my income is made in US$. I decided early on to manage all my income for planning purposes in US$ – I have my goals in US$ I worry about whether my income is going up or down in US$. Now this is different to whether my income is going up or down in my local currency – but I can’t control the exchange rate so I don’t worry about it to much – I focus on the US dollars. Note my paypal account is in US$ – its my cheap foreign currency account really.
To come back to the currency that matters to me – ie the currencies I pay taxes in and spend money in – I have an conversion line to my local currencies. I use a conversion published by my local tax department to keep thing consistent
Tracking Income as You are Paid It
The above spreadsheet worked for several years. Yes I didn’t track expenses (they were too low to mention, as was my income) and yes I recorded income when I earned it not when I was paid it (again something I couldn’t control). But then I started earning more passive income – and I needed to add a second sheet to my spreadsheet – to record income as I was paid it (this is what the accountants call an cash basis). Certainly in Australia and New Zealand if you are a small business or individual you can chose to pay taxes only on what you have been paid – not what you have earned – that’s what I do.
So I added a second sheet to my spreadsheet it looks like this:
Managing Tax Records Across Two Currencies with GST (VAT)
Although most of my income is earned in US$, Adsense then pays me direct into my local bank account i.e. in NZ dollars – where I get a payment (or make a payment) in NZ$ I account for it as such. The US$ payments and expenses have to be converted to NZ$ for my tax records.
I also do work for local clients – who obviously pay me in NZ$. We have a local tax (GST, like VAT or other sales tax) which I need to apply for local clients but not for overseas income.
My local tax department allows you to chose my own conversion rate – so long as its believable and consistent – they also publish monthly figures for major currencies – I use their’s – fewer room for arguments. Whatever you do – be consistent – for your own sanity if nothing else.
Of course if you are earning enough to earn tax you really need to start tracking your expenses – after all why pay more tax than you have to?
All of my direct business expenses are paid via Paypal in US$ including domain registration, membership site subs, backlink services (Advertising), software etc etc.
However there is also the whole other bunch of expenses which are at “home”. These include both paying my contractors (when its from a local bank account), books I buy locally, electornics and furniture for my home office, a percentage of my ISP expenses, my house insurance, my Council rates, home maintenance, power, parking (for local clients) paper and printer supplies – it adds up – and it all comes off the profit BEFORE I pay tax.
I keep records – well I keep the receipts and throw them in an envelope a month – if I needed them I could prove these expenses. (I do expect to be audited one day by the tax department – my business is so “odd” in terms of amount of overseas income and low local expenses I am sure it will blow an automatic whistle at some point).
At the bottom of the page I do a couple of things – I project my annual profit – I take the last 4 months of my NZ$ profit/loss – divide it by 4 and multiple it by 12 – thus projecting an annnual income – its useful a) to shut up those who still think I just play online and b) it gives me an idea when I will have to start paying provisional tax.
The YTD NZ$ is just my total net profit for the tax year. Our tax year end is 31 March – so at the end of March I use the blue column to total all figures for the year and for the tax return.
Online Income and Tax Residency
Tax residency is not always the same as where you live. Often it is – but not always. For example if I – a New Zealand tax resident – decided to move to somewhere with very low taxes (e.g. most of the oil rich nations) – I may be resident in Saudi or Dubai – but I would still be a tax resident of New Zealand. That’s because New Zealand taxes me on my income – wherever in the world I might live. You can in fact be tax resident in two different countries at the same time – but that’s rare.
The above spreadsheet takes me about an hour a month to maitain. I download the figures from my affiliates, I download the month’s data from PayPal and allocate it to the various expenses/income categories that I use in the spreadsheets. I look up the figures on the household bills and use a separate sheet ot itemise them and work out the % that I am claiming.
Prague Castle, St Vitius, Praha in the Snow, Czeck Republic
Making an online passive income from Internet Marketing is the strangest thing. When I had a job as a geologist few people understood what I did – but no one doubted that I was well-paid for it, when I worked in IT even fewer people understood my job, but they took for granted that I made money. Now I do something really simple – I put up websites, based on topics people search for, I use SEO techniques to rank my sites and I make passive income.
And even now that I make enough passive income to go travelling for 2 months they don’t understand how I make money. That’s OK – I’m used to that. What kinda of amazes me is that – they don’t believe that I make money either! Now frankly I don’t give a shite whether they believe me or not- my partner believes me – he sees me pay the bills, my bank manager is happy, my accountant is advising me to make provision for tax – but the other people – they seem to think I’m delusional.
Prague Castle, Praha in the Snow, Czeck Republic
If you are starting out this game – here’s some advice. Don’t expect anyone to be supportive or believe in your dream. In may be nice to think those closest to you will be your greatest support – in fact from what I see on the Keyword Academy forums – that’s very, very rare. In fact anyone who has a financial interest in you making some money will probably be loudest in their calls for you to get, retain or focus on, your “real job”, Or an education to the one.
I haven’t seen that many people fail in this game – but 95% plus of people who start don’t make more than $10. They don’t fail though because they never put enough work in to have even have tried. I know – I wasted at least a year – not working – at the end of it – I’d acheived very little.
I’ve been around long enough to see who succeed and who fail in this game. This is utterly subjective and totally unscientific – but I am convinced that most people that succeed with making a passive income online – do share some common characteristics:
they are bloody minded;
they don’t give a damme what anyone else thinks of them;
they are out of other options – because of age, skills, location etc they couldn’t get a “real” job even if they wanted one;
If you are worried about what your family/friends/partner thinks of making money online – get a job – this game is not for you.
Now I have some very boring things like goals and objectives and plans to achieve the same. I have business .
This picture is a fake! Its really me, and its really Ko Lipe, Thailand - but there is no way I could use the screen in the glare!
I had actually had doubts about whether having my own passive income business would ruin travelling for me. I have a full-time writer and a number of my sites have suddenly decided to rank just before we left home so I decided to buy a 10″ emachine netbook and keep an eye on rankings and progress while on the road.
I was worried about the practicalities though. I know quite a number of people who do this successfully – for example Kirsty from Nerdy Nomad, Matt from NomadicMatt, and Dave from GoBackpacking – but they all have a common characteristic – they are all single and travelling solo.
This picture is a fake! Its really me, and its really Ko Lipe, Thailand - but there is no way I could use the screen in the glare!
I’m not single – I have a partner, who having just done 10 months of contracting was definitely in holiday mode. So how is it working out – do I resent that I get up early to login while he sleeps on, that I hide out in the aircon room while he scouts out the local town? In a word – no – its working quite well. Just as I’d read that people with kids are more efficient online when they can’t be online 24/7 – I think I’ve become more efficient too. We are travelling more flashpacking style than cheapo backpackers so my need for WIFI seems to match his strong preference for aircon.
The main difference though is that I’ve lost that dreadful “tick-tok” of the count down to go back to work – the feeling that you have just used all your vacation time for the next 2 year, 8 months and 25 days. More I am thinking along the lines of – we could afford to come here for each November and still have change from what we spend at home…
Some tricks for being connected to your business on the road:
Nebooks are the go – the smartphone has proven useless really – but the netbook is easy to connect and much easier to use. Although I think its now impossible to buy a netbook that isn’t auto-sensing for voltage – you will need a plug adapter. I found finding a single plug adapter rather than one for Europe, one for the UK, one for Asia etc quite hard (but your mileage may vary) – finally getting one in duty free on the way out. My little 10″ only has a battery life of 3 hours – ideally I’d want something with twice that and a non-glossy screen (really doesn’t work well anywhere you can see the sea – the glare makes the screen unusable).
Warn banks and paypal that you will logging in from strange IP addresses. In the process of booking this trip I had several calls from credit card providers checking out if I had really been booking flights online to and from countries I didn’t live in. That got me thinking and emailed paypal – saying I was going to be travelling and please don’t freeze my account. They said it may still freeze with their automatic systems – but the would file my email and unfreeze the account if required.
I think this makes it obvious why roll-along luggage is a BAD idea!
Remember you may loose the netbook – it may get stolen, more likely it may go swimming on a speed boat transfer or be bounced from the roof of a tuk-tuk. Losing the netbook would be inconvenient – loosing my work, my passwords, my photos is what would be the really tragedy. I am using SugarSync to backup my files and I am using the portable version of RoboForm on a USB stick for my passwords – so that if I do need to use another computer I have those as well. (They also have an online copy for customers which is a second line of defence).
Yeah I know – there are nearly 2 months left until the end of the year – but I am about to hit the road for a spot of independent travel so I will probably have more important things to do than to consider my business position – like spending the loot! Yeah I now make $1,110,223.21 a month in my sleep – and could too – if you would just sign up …
Total income of around US$3000/month – of which about 1/3 is passive;;
In the last 6 months (May – October) I earned an average of US$3500, the 6 months before that $3200, and the 6 months prior to that US$2156. My all time record was last month, October, where I was just $8 short of US$4000. The individual months bounce around but the general trend is definitely in the right direction. Still short of my US$5000/month goal – but not so far off as to be depressing.
But the really exciting bit is that in the last 6 months I have never had less than 40% of my income from passive sources (Adsense and affiliates) – the percentage jumped to 60% in October.
I’ve taken to looking at a rolling 3-month and 6-month average to predict my income and tax liabilities – it seems a much better indicator than just looking at my monthly income.
But there is downside. I don’t live in the US – I can’t spend $US – I have to convert them into NZ$ – and NZ dollar is now pushing 80c to the US$ – it at around 65c at the start of the year 🙁 . I can’t do anything about my Adsense income which is direct deposited at the day’s rate into my NZ account.
I can use my PayPal account as a US$ account – but I hate leaving too much money in there – I have heard way too many stories about people having PayPal accounts frozen for no good reason and they are not a bank so there is no protection for my money there (and yes there are protections for people’s bank deposits in my country).
Internet Marketing While Traveling or a Full Time Income While Working Two Days a Week
As I mentioned we are going travelling. Now I’ve thinking quite a bit about how I was going to manage the whole thing of working while I am travelling thing. Lets face when faced with a warm beach and cheap eats and booze in Thailand – what would motivate me to be working? Well yesterday I found that motivation.
Every week or so I run Market Samurai to update the rankings on my sites. I also keep an eye on Google Analytics to see what keywords people are using to find my sites. I haven’t put a new site up since April – but I wasn’t getting anywhere ranking most of the sites either. At the start of November I spent half a day finding the sites which were anywhere in the top 100 with a focus on the sites which were showing me nice cost per a clicks or where I was getting traffic but wasn’t in the top three yet.
In October I made record figures (for me) with both Adsense and eBay. Yesterday I ran the same sites – I saw green (meaning rankings had improved) almost everywhere. Now whether the links I build with Postrunner or the more recent links I’ve built with Build My Rank I didn’t really care. The result was I was seeing an awful lot of “nearly there” sites rankings on the 3rd and 4th pages. I couldn’t just assume that the keywords I thought would work – would be OK for over two months. I needed to be more in touch. I needed to be able to run Market Samurai while traveling.
(For size comparison purposes its sitting on top of my HP ProBook 4510s – lovely laptop but way to large and heavy to travel with.)
Seeing all those nearly there keywords meant I suddenly was motivated to factor in working a couple of days a week when on the road. Well that’s the plan – how its actually going to work in practice when travelling with a guy who is definitely in holiday mode because his J.O.B finishes on Friday – not sure, I’ll get back to you on that.
I hadn’t meant to post this today – some other keyword is higher on my priority list – but I found myself, having just reviewed last year’s tax returns from my accountant – sitting there with a big smile on my face. I had just redone my projections for this year – I was in the money – I was going to owe the government so much tax that I’d have to pay provisional tax too – YEAH!
I see people on the Keyword Academy forums asking when? When will I make money? How long will it take? The answer is – it depends – and really you do need to just plain do the work for 6 – 12 months. Then as you start to see the results (and remember making your first affiliate sale or hitting your $100/month Adsense payout amount is absolutely the most difficult part of this whole business).
Carpe Diem
Seize the day for the non-classicists. If you have been thinking about signing up for Build My Rank cause I am not the only person reporting great results from it – you may click thru on this link an then be disappointed to notice that its closed for new sign ups, but you can sign up for the wait-list. The owners seem to be making a genuine effort to keep the quality of the network high my not having too many posts get posted to each site a day. They will reopen again – but whether the price has gone up then (and frankly it should – they could easily be charging at $129 or $149 or limiting the number of domains you can link to) – I don’t know. Sometimes its just not a good idea to hesitate too long – I have a policy of buying fast and canceling/getting a refund fast if it doesn’t work out.
OK short version – BuildMyRank.com is the best thing since sliced bread – will make you millions in your sleep without doing anything – can’t imagine why they are giving it away at the current price – but I am sure it will go up – ACT now to lock in the currently insanely low price, BUY IT now!
SELF SERVING HONKING BIG AFFILIATE LINK HERE!
You still here? Darn – oh you want a real review ? Sorry I can’t actually give that to you – cause I haven’t been using it long enough to give you months and months of stats. But I’ve used it long enough to be hugely excited by it.
UPDATE: May 2011 – buildmyrank still works well – and I am still using – the price has gone up a little – details below.
UPDATE: November 2011 – I’m still using BMR and am happy with it but also check out a Build My Rank alternative that is a new service –SEO Cobra Backlinks
As I wrote recently – I am not 100% happy with Postrunner – mainly because of the percentage of articles which aren’t getting indexed. So when I was checking out Build My Rank – this – from their FAQ – jumped out at me:
Do you build backlinks to my content? Yes, every time a post is distributed we do two things. First, we create an RSS feed mashup and submit to several feed aggregators. This really helps content get indexed super quick. And next we select a random assortment of social bookmark sites such as Delicious, and web 2.0 properties like Twitter, to submit links to. On average each post receives around 50 backlinks.
Not coincidentally I had been playing with ways of getting my Postrunner articles indexed – that involved RSS feeds and automated bookmarking … I knew what I had to do – but I hadn’t managed to automate it entirely and I was deep in the learning curve. And then I’d have to teach my outsourcer to do it… BuildMyRank had got there before me – I was prepared to pay for that!
So rather than doing a straight BuildMyRank review (I haven’t got a hope in hell for ranking for the term basically) – I thought I would do a side-by-side comparison of the two systems: the good the bad the ugly…
Page Rank of the Network’s Sites: BuildMyRank v. Postrunner
BMR has no PR zero sites. Postrunner has a majority of PR0’s. BMR wins on this one. Here is a screen shot from my BMR dashboard after 29 posts had been published …
Is PR absolutely critical? No – but it helps – high PR sites often get better indexing and authority. Its not enough for me to buy a system though.
Distribution to Sites: BuildMyRank v. Postrunner
With Postrunner the writer has to choose the site that they want their article to appear on. With BMR you chose a frequency (or a schedule) for posts to be published at and move on. The sites are selected randomly. I don’t know how many sites are in the system (I know Postrunner has about 800) – but so far I’ve not seen the same site twice.
With Postrunner – I still get a lot of articles returned after 7 days – for no reason except the owner can’t be arsed approving them. I have to resubmit them – its a pain. BMR is a much smoother workflow as far as distribution is concerned.
Also in Postrunner those with high PR sites – get overwhelmed. The value of the page rank is reduced because your post will fall off the front page often instantly or within hours. Often too the page rank is from a dropped domain – it will disappear with the next update.
The automated distribution of BMR means that PR5 sites aren’t hammered – they seem to get the same rate of posting as the PR1 sites – that is good for the long term potential. With the rate of posting it looks like most of my articles will stay on the front page for around about a week – which will also help indexing.
“Quality” of BuildMyRank Sites v. Postrunner
Oh the “quality” debate. Both sites have the same rules: no duplicate content, no spun content. Both sites have human review of every article published. BMR also reviews every site that you are links to before you can build any links to it. BuildMyRank won’t let me submit with typos.
Postrunner allows 2 links per a 300 word article. BuildMyRank allows a link per every 150 words ie. you can publish a 150 word article for one link, a 450 word article for 3 etc. Because I believe the second link is heavily discounted the BMR model allows me to get more links for the same amount of writing.
Diversity of the sites. I would probably give the edge to BMR on this because they are deliberately spreading out their sites across the world – and not just the US. Almost all Postrunner sites are hosted in the US – because its cheaper, and a great deal of them are hosted on Hostgator – because of the affiliate deal…
SEO quality. In Postrunner the owner of the site can mess with the post: they can change the permalink structure, they can add their links above mine in the post, they can additional links (internal and external). With BMR what I write is what its published – fullstop. In Postrunner there are a lot of site owners changing my posts and frankly competing with me for my keywords. In BMR its a service – they are making their money by selling BMR not my running Adsense on the sites (none of the sites have any monetization that I’ve seen) – its therefore in their business interests to make sure that the sites are well looked after from an SEO point of view- if they lose the quality of their sites the service will go down hill (as many have before).
Oh and before you ask – all the BMR sites that I’ve checked are running privacy protection – so no its not suspicious that the one organization owns them all.
Grammatical quality – we are not even going there. Just to say if you own a Postrunner which requests “native English speakers only please” – you will never knowingly get content or a link from me…
Outsourcing with BuildMyRank v. Postrunner
Both sites allow your writer to login to the site on your behalf. I’ve used the same writer on both sites. On Postrunner I have to share my login. With BMR I setup a writer account and give my writer a unique login – I prefer this because if I have more than one writer I can monitor their performance separately.
The economics of using the same writer in both systems:
Postrunner: 8 articles a day, 8 links a day.
NB – I know I am the minority here but I seriously think linking twice from the same article greatly reduces the strength of both links – I prefer one link per an article.
My worklfow: My writer adds the post , tags, link. I log in – I check the grammar – tidy it up to get past the grammar nazi’s, chose a directory, schedule or submit it. It takes about 45minutes- 1 hour of my time. Maybe 2 articles a day are rejected because a) 7 days have elapsed or b) an objection to the quality or content of the article – I have to resubmit it – make that an hour a day in total – worth US$100 to me …
BuildMyRank: 12 articles a day: 12 links a day.
My workflow: None – no article has been rejected yet – 36 posts to date. I set up the rate of article distribution once for each site I am building links to, got the site approved – overhead per a site – about 3 minutes – once.
So between the 2 systems I am getting 50% more links and saving an hour a day using BMR …
Monitoring Backlinks with BuildMyRank v. Postrunner
Monitoring Postrunner Backlinks:
To do the stats on my previous post – I spent several hours: downloading the links built for one site: manually checking each article to see if it was indexed and recording the results
Monitoring BMR Backlinks:
The front page gives you graphs of your most used keywords for the month/year and also the PR distribution diagram I’ve used on this post. The grid of posts will give you where each article is published, its PR and whether its indexed. Effectively its saving me hours and hours of ongoing work with those 2 columns. However I can’t download the details – so I am captured by their system with their great stats…
Quality of Support for BuildMyRank and Postrunner
I have had great level of support from Postrunner for many months. BMR I have tried out with some “dumb” questions and they responded within hours and very professionally. I added a number of new sites for approval to BMR – the response was within an hour – on a weekend (wherever they live in the world!). They appear to approve articles within 12 hours (because of my time zone – they seem to approve overnight for me so they are probably in the US).
Actual Results from BMR v. Postrunner
Well there aren’t any yet from BMR – I’ve only been a member for 5 days! That said I have 29 articles live – of which nearly half, 13, are indexed. I have another 15 articles queued so will have some real results soon. What I am seeing is that several people who have been doing this type of business for a while and have an Internet home business plan – like the network too.
So What’s the Bottom Line
Postrunner Costs
Postrunner is part of Keyword Academy which costs $33/month but the first month is free. Handy affiliate link here. Upfront costs Postrunner is cheaper – but in terms of ongoing costs of getting and keeping links … jury’s out so far …
BuildMyRank Costs
No commitment to join and try it out for 10 free links – which stay up even if you cancel and leave. If you buy within the first 15 days of joining you pay $59/month – if you take longer to decide the price goes up to $129/month. Pricing is now related to how many domains you want to build links 5 domains are $59 and the price goes up from there. Domains can be turned off and on though – so with a bit of planning you can rotate domains in and out of BMR for link building. Handy affiliate link here
In both cases the on-going subscription is via Paypal and to cancel you just cancel the sub in Paypal – no crawling back to the comapanies involved.
Neither system limits the number of sites you can build links to. Both sites limit you to the English language and “Google friendly” topics.
Both system allows you to schedule posts into the future. BMR limits the number of posts for any one of your sites to a maximum of 10 a day.
In both cases these are two of the lowest cost backlink systems out there. I have paid over $120/month for a similar service to BuildMyRank – which offered less in terms of reporting.
Which Am I Going to Use
I am using both going forward – for the moment anyway. The hands off outsourcing is just too good to ignore. There are some sites in Postrunner which are developing authority and I will use them selectively.
You can never have enough diversity in your backlink profile – that much is certain …
What Are My Recommendations
You are making
Stick with Postrunner and the TKA system and get your income up there. Get backlinks from a variety of places: HubPages and ezinearticles still work!
If you are using an outsourcer already:
The ability to have them use BMR “hands off” from you – priceless in my view;
If you are making $500/month and you are building at least 10 links a day
I’d consider buying BMR – but only if I really thought I was going to submit the content – all of these systems require you to actually doing the work.
I will back with some updates on BuildMyRank as the results start to show. I am going to be using it exclusively on quite a competitive term – I’ll be interested to see what it comes up with in a couple of months
(Actually mine has this year’s processor which is slightly faster – but it was as close I could find for my American readers – NZers – head down to Bond&Bond or Noel Lemmings NZ$398)
– lovely laptop but way to large and heavy to travel with.)
