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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.

28 replies on “Keyword Academy Case Study – PostRunner Tutorial”

Lissie,

I recently put 2 sites on Postrunner. I just did it to give something back to the community. One is a niche site, so far got 0 posts and it’s been in there for about a week. Another is a general directory and I’m getting about 1-2 posts a day on a PR 1 site that I dusted off. It took me a boat load of time to set up and I’ve been backlinking to the posts, link netting keywords I know I have 0 chance of ranking (loans and cancer :P) and trying to improve the indexing time. Frankly, it’s been sucking a lot more of my time than I want because I feel personal responsibility towards the site. Even though other people say “fast indexing” in their site title, it isn’t when you really look at when their site was last indexed.

What I want to know is if you have been able to make any money? Unless it’s niche, I just find that it’s way too hard and I have better things to do with my time. I’m trying to keep an open mind about this but truthfully, I’m not seeing this as a money maker but a community project thing.

Ah I was going to talk about the other side of Postrunner – ie being the site owner – in another post. But seeing you asked. I’ve recently added 2 sites – one was a pre-owned PR3 in a niche – the other was a new general site. Neither is monetized yet. The niche site is getting instant indexing and lots of older links are showing up again – like the new posting to the site has made google check out old links the site had (before I owned it). Its had 15 posts in the last month and I’ve done nothing with it but approve them.

The newer general site is a PR0 and has had 11 posts in a similar time frame. I have built links for the posts to get them indexed.

I haven’t really built link nets except running automated related posts plugins on both sites.

I am waiting to see if any start getting a bit of trickle traffic to see whether its worth going to the effort and to monetize the sites.

I know people do make money from support sites like these – but I haven’t done it yet – so these are both a bit of an experiment – they certainly arent’ a community project – though.

My gut feel is that its easier to make money from the niche sites – but we’ll see.

Wow Lis you sure do a fair bit of screening of post runner sites, but I guess that is important to avoid wasted effort. I imagine some of the checks you do will be built into future releases of postrunner hopefully.

I will say though, postrunner alone is worth the cost of a TKA membership even now at $67/mth.

it doesnt take very long in practice – took me longer to write it all down in the post 🙂 I just hate writing articles for links and then having to work on getting the articles indexed – by building more links to them – so I do try to find a site which should get me indexed with no further effort on my part

Hey Lissie

Thanks for the link. How about a nice keyword link i.e The Best Article Directory? You know the game.

On a side note, although the article site takes a little time each day to approve posts it was certainly worth doing. I can create backlinks for myself as well as making some adsense money and the format was very easy to do. Nothing better than having a backlink that also earns, i.e from the likes of Infobarrel, although Hubpages is a dead end for me as I can’t be doing with all the changes to nofollow/dofollow etc.

With a 75% adsense share for authors on our site many have still not taken me up on that option so we are seeing increased earnings for ourself from others content which is always good. Not a lot mind you as I have not backlinked others content really but a few euros a day all adds to the pot.

Well worth the time to add a new theme and the revenue plugin if anyone is considering building their own article directory. I just wish people would either learn to spin articles better or read the rules before posting.

And would you say if you are not a newbie then money may be better spent with something like backlinksolutions because of the higher authority of the sites?

I think I may actually join to get some extra backlink sources, especially as it is the last day at the lower price. Your persistence has paid off 😉

Ah so nagging people to spend money really does work? Well you could add Olive Articles into the system as well – nothing to stop you accepting articles from both outside Postrunner and inside – something to think about anyways. You have 30 days to see if you like it and cancel – but I think you’ll like it.

Backlinksolutions got themselves slammed by Google in the past – frankly Postrunner has more longevity because of the quality of the sites in it and the fact that the owners actually care about them. And even at $67 its cheap too LOL

I got to say that this is a great post on explaining the postrunner. Guest posting is one of the most important part for many authority blogs. This keeps the content to continue and attract readers. I know someone who own an authority blog and never created her content. Her readers are so passionate about the topic and all she need to do is just approving and get the contents publish on her blog.

Postrunner seems like a very neat tool to build links and traffic. I didn’t know the existence even though I have been a loyal reader to keyword academy. Thanks for sharing. I will like to know more about the tool. If I start to see good results from the tool, I would definitely come over to your blog and thank you.

Hi Lis
Just wanted to add that I just joined the keyword academy mainly to use the Postrunner system and also the niche keywords tool. Postrunner is really easy to use and most of the articles have been approved within a day. It really is well worth the price as you say and I wish I’d joined a long time ago. Nice tutorial especially for those who may not be so used to WordPress and a good list of things to look for when submitting articles. I’ll be adding some sites to the system soon so I’ll keep those points in minds as a site owner.

Lis,

Thanks for the explanation. Even though I read through TKA instructions several times, I didn’t quite understand the procedure. Isn’t posting like this going to reveal your top secret niche(s) with high paying keywords? I know…paranoid as usual.

Yes it will Jim – you have to decide yourself whether you are worried about that or not. Also the directory owners don’t know who has submitted articles either

Getting links from anywhere can give away your niche… having adsense on your site can give away your niche because people can just find one of your sites, and look up by adsense ID and find all of your sites.

Just get more links and win.

Yesterday I left a comment in an earlier part of this thread that I was ready to start guest posting articles for my niche site. Unfortunately I didn’t get around to it, but then again I am very glad that I had the opportunity to read this part of your series before I jumped into PostRunner. I get a lot out of the “classroom,” but am also getting a lot more here studying with the “bright kids.” 😉

Lissie, I’ve been hesitant to sign up for some of these paid linking programs because I always understood that what you really want are links from related sites.

I’ve lost count of the times I’ve signed up for free services, only to find there’s not a single member who writes on anything vaguely related to my niche. Am I worrying too much about that?

Marisa a related site providing just one link to your site (do follow) and with no other external links is the perfect link – but imperfect links work too – honestly! Remember the link is from the single page/post – so long as the page’s title is relevant …

Hi Lis,

I found you a long time ago from Griz’s site. I am very interested in TKA mainly because of the PostRunner tool.
I have 2 sites. One is about 3 years old and the other is 11/2 years old. Neither of them are WordPress. ( One of them is a regular html site.) Will I still be able to use Postrunner to promote those sites? I heard someone commenting on one of your posts about uploading the PostRunner plugin on his WordPress site. This is why I started to think that this tool may not work with my seasoned sites.

Thanks for the response,

Bridget

There are 2 sides to postrunner – you can can submit articles to Postrunner to promote any type of site (well except porn, drugs etc) . However if you want to actually have a site in the Postrunner network and RECEIVE articles the site would need to be on WordPress.

So postrunner will work fine for promoting your sites!

Thanks for the quick response, Lis! This is good news. Because you have provided such good info on your blog, I will be signing up under your affiliate link. I don’t think Griz will miss losing the business!

Thanks Bridget- Griz needs a better paying affiliate to pay for his aircraft carrier anyways LOL

This sounds to me like it is similar to Free Traffic System? I have used FTS and it is working fine so far, but the PR of the sites are mostly 0 or 1, but occasionally I do get a PR3 link back.

Sounds nice. I would want to add to my list of things to study about internet marketing and SEO. I’ll browse around. ^^

Thanks for a very thorough explanation of Postrunner! Interesting info on how to use it in the best way 🙂

If I get the one month trial and I decide to cancel do my postrunner links stay? I just don’t want to do a lot of writing for nothing.

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