Tag: Keyword Academy

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Back Links Case Study Lis Recommmends Paid Tools Product Reviews

Keyword Academy Case Study: Does Postrunner Work?

Wellington Harbour Entrance - looking towards Pencarrow
Wellington Harbour Entrance - in Good Southerly

OK this is my last Keyword Academy Case Study post – its a review of where I got a new site to in the rankings by solely using Postrunner for back links and some thoughts about the quality of the Postrunner system.

Wellington Harbour Entrance - looking towards Pencarrow
Wellington Harbour Entrance - in a good Southerly

As of  27 September – my postrunner promoted site had the following statistics:

Rankings on 27 September  (2 August, 2 June | 30 April ,14 April 2010 in brackets | 8 April 2010)

  • 15 pages indexed in Google (18, 24, 26, 15 |13 pages)
  • 23  backlink recognized in yahoo (15, 13,13 ,6,1, 0)
  • domain name exact match long-tail: 5 (8, 12, 14, 17 | 17)
  • main keyword: 9 (14, 21, 17, 34 | 61)
  • main keyword singular: 1 (12, 19 ,19 , 31 | 61)
  • 4 other cousins are on page 1 and the other 2 are on page 2.

A qualified success I think – but only qualified. Why only qualified? I have published 69 posts in Postrunner to support this site the most recent went live on the 23 August 2010. However of those 69 fully 22 are not indexed.  Now each and every one of those posts went to a different site in Postrunner – so I downloaded the list of backlinked articles and looked at each and everyone of them – this is what I found:

  • one site had moved every post over to a new domain – and left a message on the old domain- friendly but useless for SEO – my post isn’t indexed and it wouldn’t be unless I put some effort it;
  • one site had completely deleted all of the Postrunner articles it had and had become a Bulgarian ecommerce site (I think – my Bulgarian is rubbish);
  • 3 or 4 sites had decided to change their permalink structure and then redirect the original post to the top level domain – thanks for nothing guys – I think this should be against the TOS (though I don’t think it is at the moment);
  • one site seems to have removed my article entirely (or maybe they just screwed up the permalink structure as above – anyway it was indexed so I couldn’t find it on a site search);
  • several sites that are or have been in Postrunner are now selling links on a popular link selling forum
  • in several cases my post wasn’t indexed but the content was indexed on category, author and tag pages – good for the site owner – useless for me;
  • although I only link once in an article (I could do it twice) – and I always link in the first paragraph – some owners still manage to get links in above my link – that’s mean spirited in my view.

Now I was about to embark on a campaign of bookmarking to get these other links indexed – but  frankly some of them are going to be difficult – once the content is indexed on other pages on the site is going to be quite hard to “correct” Google.

Of  the 47  backlinked articles which are indexed – Yahoo is only counting 23 – so I looked harder at those 23. They were an interesting set:

  • one was a scrapper site which had taken one of the other blog’s content – it was indexed with a do-follow link – don’t tell me that duplicate content doesn’t work 🙂 ;
  • in 10 cases the link counted wasn’t to the post – but to tags, categories etc, As most people use excerpts on these pages I’m not really getting a do-follow link that counts;
  • in several cases the post wasn’t indexed in Google but was being counted as a link in Yahoo. Because all any of care about is rankings in Google this means these links are probably not really in the count either.

What’s Good About Postrunner

  • There is a wide diversity of hosting and IP addresses.
  • Diversity of ownership of the sites in Postrunner.
  • If ALL you got for your Keyword Academy membership was Postrunner – it would be the cheapest deal I know for access to this amount of link diversity.
  • Unique content – duplicate content can rank – but it takes more effort – usually.

What’s Not So Good About Postrunner

  • I get no notification when articles are removed – this I think would be relatively easy to program and should be done ASAP.
  • I have to manually check whether links are indexed or not. If they aren’t indexed I have to do something about it.
  • Most owners don’t understand how to avoid diluting the power of links (read Leo’s blog on this) – I think that so few of even the indexed links are being counted relfect this.
  • Some of the site’s owners don’t know what they are doing – mucking  with the permalink structures is the obvious one.
  • Quite a number of the PR3 or higher sites are pre-owned domains which will likely lose their PR when the next update comes along (due anytime now actually).  These sites particularly likely to disappear from the system with your post, or just not get indexed at all (partly because so many posts are being approved on them). I’ve had better luck with PR0 and PR1 sites.

Do I still recommend Postrunner? Yes I do for $33/month its pretty low cost – but I am investigating another similar scheme which may be more effective – stay tuned. And if you are using Postrunner – do a periodic check of your articles and follow up the ones that have disappeared (by getting them returned via support) and those that aren’t indexed (by building more links to get them indexed).

I’d be interested in knowing  similar stats people have for Postrunner or similar program which involve the publication of unique content.

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

Keyword Academy – Postrunner Tutorial – Adding A Site

Crossing the Finsh Line - Mt Panorma, Bathurst, NSW, Austalia

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

Keyword Academy Case Study – PostRunner Tutorial

Wellington Airport from Khandallah
Wellington Airport from Khandallah

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.

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Paid Tools Tools

Keyword Academy Price Rise 6 April

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

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
Online Business Paid Tools Passive Income Product Reviews Tools

Shameless Advertisement for The Keyword Academy! Hurry Time Running Out!

Living the Dream? Western Australia, Cape le Grand

Are you reading this because you are tired of working for the “man”, never seeing your kids until late at night, juggling bills and worrying about where the next car repayment is coming from? Would you like to be younger, sexier, attract fast cars and pretty women? Well I have the answer for you – but you have to ACT NOW!

Living the Dream? Western Australia, Cape le Grand

Sorry – thought that might get your attention! Look lets me honest here – I make money from this blog and the most successful marketing I do is for the The Keyword Academy. Why is it successful ? Well I manage to con people into signing up for the $1 free trial by offering to refund their dollar if they don’t like it – and then people find its a great program and they keep on paying the monthly membership for the site. I get a commission on those monthly subscriptions.  All affiliates work the same Third Tribe Marketing, Scribe SEO – the lot. The difference is that most affiliates people cancel after a few months – which is crap for your passive online income!

You see people who enrol in TKA stay enrolled for months and months and months. Long past the initial keyword video course – much longer than can be justified just on a montly webinar or two – so why is the Keyword Academy membership so “sticky”? They stay enrolled quite simply because they consider themselves to be getting value for money – and those that are doing the work are getting far more actual real measurable value from the program than the $33/month they pay for it.

Long Term Value of The Keyword Academy

Well I don’t know about the others who are long-time members of TKA – but I’d welcome your comments below. But my reasons for staying has come down to:

  • their guest posting system which allows me to easily get links for my sites;
  • their guest posting system which allows me to receive free unique content to some of my sites;
  • their niche refinary tool which allows me to easily analyse keyword income potential and competition;
  • the forum allows me to compare results and react to changes in the Google world – more heads are definitely better than one sometimes.

Cost to Start a Passive Income Business Using The Keyword Academy

So what are the chances of making money actually using the TKA “system”?. What will it cost you to start a niche site using the TKA system?

Enrol in TKA – cost $1 free

Research keywords using TKA tools – free

Buy a domain at Godaddy.com (use the code emma30 to get 30% off dot coms) $8.99

Buy Hosting – I still recommend Hostgator (around $7/month for unlimited domain hosting)

Setup WordPress (free) as recommended on TKA and start writing keyword focussed articles for your site. (5 to 10 say). (BTW if this scares you the TKA guys will help you set up the first site as well).

Write and submit an article a day to the TKA guest posting system continue for 3/4 months

In around 5/6 months you should be ranking on page 1 and getting passive income from Adsense or whatever other approach you have taken to making money on the site.

Lets say the your site has the potential to make $50/month in Adsense.

If it takes you 6 months to rank in first place for your main keyword – that will  have cost you:

Domain registration 50% x $7.99 = $4

Hosting: $7 x 6 months = $56

TKA $1 plus 5x$33 = $166

Total costs: $226

Total revenue – if you follow the TKA model you should be looking at least $50/month from your site – so it will take less than 5 month’s earnings to cover the  sunk costs.

The figures for your second and subsequent sites are even better. For you next site:

Domain 50% x $7.99 = $4

Hosting – paid already

TKA – paid already

Total costs (per 6 months ) – $4 – around the cost of cake and a coffee in my part of the world – your mileage may vary.

So After a Year Your Business May Look Like

If you start 10 sites and after 12 months you are earning $50/site the figures are:

Revenue: 10 x $50 x 12 = $6000

Less domain registration  10 x $7.99 = $79

Less Hosting 12 months x $7 = $84

Less TKA membership 11 months x $33 = $363

Profit: $5390

Time commitment:

  • initial site setup  -takes me about an hour – it will take you longer the first time
  • then an  ongoing requirement – write and post an article a day for each site: 10x 300 words about 2.5 hours a day at my fairly rapid typing speed – probably just time you spend watching rubbish on TV now.

You don’t have to do this forever for a site – only until its solidly in the top position – that may take 6 months, more or less – this is a business not a job – its not guaranteed – but you’d have to agree there is a fair margin of error in the above figures..

Could You Use an Extra $5000 ?

It took me over 2 years to learn the stuff I just wrote in this post. Before TKA the information was scattered. Before the guest posting system in TKA it was a considerable struggle to find places to post backlinks.  There was always the doubt that what you were doing may or may not work. This works – its not exciting or sexy or even very interesting, but it will earn you money. And you know what? I have sites ranking at #1 for which I haven’t touched in months and months, which I haven’t built a link for in months. They still earn me the same amount of money …

I could rave on about how TKA has changed my life – its true – but frankly it would sound too much like one of those cheesy sales letters that I hate! Frankly you just read over 900 words about making money online – you obviously have some interest. The real question is are you ready to stop dreaming and take some action? Dreaming is great – but it won’t make you money.

So click the  bloody affiliate link NOW and signup –  and stop dreaming and reading about making money online and actually <<<<make some money>>>>> (that’s the link!)!

Categories
Making Money Online Online Business Paid Tools Passive Income Product Reviews Tools

The Keyword Academy Video Course – A Scam?

Another update – in 2011 The Keyword Academy have released version two: check out my most recent  Keyword Academy review.

UPDATE: A year later this post still gets traffic and sign ups so I thought it might be time to update it! Short answer is that TKA just keeps on getting better – that’s why I am still subscribed to it! Updates in bold below

Now I can teach you some stuff but I prefer to send you on to an expert – and my experts were letting me down!

I have two main mentors that I have mentioned over and over. Grizz provides great information for free – but even he admits that his sites are designed to bring in search traffic – not necessarily with sound coaching and teaching principles in mind! The information is there but you have to dig – and some people don’t learn like that. UNFORTUNATELY GRIZ NO LONGER POSTS BUT HIS ARCHIVES ARE WELL WORTH READING

Vic – is not everyone’s cup of tea – some people can’t get past the foul-mouthed persona – which is really their problem not mine or his. But more importantly Vic has closed is private forum until further notice as he is busy on a new business venture – which meant I couldn’t refer people to the place I get a lot of my information from.

Now – today – finally- I have a solution. The third person who has provided me decent, quality information is Courtney Tuttle. He started off with a free site – discovered that people don’t appreciate free and went to a coaching/mentoring pricing monitoring. Now to be honest mentoring is not really for me – I just don’t learn that way very well, and of course the time zone difference didn’t make life any easier. Mark Butler, Court’s business partner, now runs the Keyword Academy.

Now Court has, I am pretty sure, a background in consulting and/or coaching in the real world, and he and his partner Mark take a much more formalised approach to teaching the business of making passive income online than either Griz or Vic.

But, and this is the important thing, they are all basically telling the beginner the same thing in terms of doing keyword research, setting up websites, building back links and making money. Its all very professionally laid out, there is no bad language involved, and more importantly the information is good.

The Keyword Academy Membership Site

Court and his partner Mark have launched a new payment membership site: Keyword Crash Course Video Series . The site is new and the main information currently available are 10 videos taking the beginner step by step from doing keyword research, setting up a site with WordPress, adding content, getting backlinks, article marketing, Adsense setup and statistical analysis of your site visitors. Each video is around 40 minutes long. There is also Q+A associated with each video and a full transcript so you can find the bit you want again!

Now this set of videos by themselves could easily be sold for hundreds of dollars. But they aren’t charging hundreds of dollars, or even $100 dollars.  Now its free for the first month – insane!

UPDATE: When TKA launched that was all there was – a course and a forum – but over the next year they added a tool to further automate the finding of keywords (NicheRefinary) and a way to make Guest Posting waaaay easier (Postrunner)

What’s the Catch?

Is there a catch – of course there is! After the first month you get charged an ongoing rate of $33/ month (premium includes access to the forums – only way to go in my opinion). Ahhh you say – so how many months does it take to get access to the videos – 3, 6 or 9? No the initial 10 videos are available to you immediately – as  soon as you confirm your subscription – yup you have full access for 30 days before you pay anything!

What about the subscription – yes you sign up for an ongoing subscription – can you cancel it? Yes as soon as you gain access if you want – though I wouldn’t recommend it. If you use paypal to subscribe all you do is go to Paypal and cancel the subscription – you don’t have to contact Court and Mark at all.

Why do I say you shouldn’t cancel immediately? Well because the Internet is a dynamic place – the business model that worked 5 years ago or even one year ago may not work now – having access to updated information and support is one of the most important things you need to have to go forward in this business. What I do say – is leave yourself a note and evaluate whether the product is working for you after 25 days and decide whether to continue on with the subscription.

Ahh you say, having been scammed one to many times, you can’t follow the videos without the fancy software right? No, really, the main software used in the videos are:

Keyword research: Google’s free adwords tool

Excel – but you can use OpenOffice – its free

Competitor analysis – SEO for Firefox – free

Statistical analysis of visitors to your site – Statcounter – free and highly recommended by me!

Setting up the site: you will need hosting and your own domain name using the Keyword Academy approach, you can do it for free – but if you are completely new to this I’d advise not to mix and match.

Hosting Hostgator $5/month if you only want one site, $8/month for unlimited.

WordPress – free, recommended themes and plugins – free

Domain name: $0.99c for an info $7.49 for a .com (from godaddy) -cost per a year.

Link building. They mention a bunch of free methods but also recommend that you use Unique Article Wizard  for article distribution – this costs $67/month.

With the addition of Postrunner – the additional UWA product is no longer really needed

Will Keyword Academy Work For Me?

I don’t know where to start – I don’t know how to create a website – will Keyword Academy work for me?

If you are a beginner looking for a step-by-step approach to building an online business, if you are prepared to put the work in (Court recommends 8-10 hours /week) – then this will work for you.  The program will teach you how to develop sites optimized for Adsense.

I have information over-load – I don’t know where to start – I need to start reading and take action.

Know how you feel – if you are looking for a step-by-step program – check this out and ignore all the other sites for a month or two.  Don’t just watch the videos do your homework and create your first site, or first money-making one, and move forward.

I don’t do Google Adsense – I want to sell affiliate products or my own products – is there any value here for me?

Regardless of what you want to sell you need organic traffic to your site. The Keyword Academy will teach you how to do keyword research which will work regardless of your monetization method.

I’m an experienced Internet Marketer – will I learn anything?

Grizz, Vic, Court all have slightly different approaches to making money online – but all work for them. What works for you may be an exact copy of one their models- or a mash-up of your own – but these guys won’t put you wrong.

I learnt several things that were either new to me or I had been muddled on by skipping through the videos. The final video on how to flip websites was all new to me and well worth the $1  in my opinion!

Anyway you are already probably paying for link distribution services – TKA will probably save you money with the Postrunner system!

Bottom Line: Is Keyword Academy a Scam?

No its not. You are committing nothing to signing up for the video marketing course.

Try the videos and forums for a month- you may find they don’t work for you, you don’t want to make money this way, you don’t have the time – whatever  – you have lost nothing. Sign up for the forums options so that you can ask questions for a month – you may not like the answers – you can can cancel it cost you  nothing.

Will following the videos guarantee that you will make money – no it won’t! Nothing in life is free – and free money doesn’t exist. You will have to do some work. Most of us value our time so this is going to cost you some time. It is going to cost you some money for domains and hosting. But if you are flat broke you could still try this out by developing a site on blogger.com for fre e…

Why Am I Recommending Keyword Academy Video Series and Membership Site

  1. It will work for people who want a structured learning environment -the cost is reasonable, there is no long-term contract the pricing model is transparent and fair.
  2. The principles taught make me money – they work.
  3. They will make you money if you put the effort in.  I am strongly recommending that you sign up with the premium version because most people need access to a forum for on-going support.
  4. There is an affiliate program – if you click on a link to sign up with the Keyword Crash Course Video Series for free I will get a commission. I will happily take Mark”s money for introducing you.  Oh and you already have to be a member to be approved as an affiliate so anyone promoting the product has seen what they are selling.