Tag: postrunner review

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Paid Tools The Keyword Academy

Postrunner V2 Is Coming – Sneak Peak Review from a Beta Tester

Coffee anyone? Nelson, New Zealand

Postrunner is the guest blogging system which has been part of the Keyword Academy for several years.  Now however its being re-launched as a Postrunner V2. 

What’s New With Postrunner V2?

Well the core of Postrunner is the same as I described in my Postrunner review over a year ago. However Postrunner V2 is a complete re-write of the existing functionality – so it works robustly, plus a host of new features. The whole user interface has been greatly improved – its nice and smooth to use compared to the old one. The key functional changes are:

  • site owners can determine how long an article they want and how many links they allow. No more standard 300 word posts with two links!  If you want 1000 words with one link – you specify that at Postrunner will ensure that is all you get. 
  • site owners can add a long blurb introducing their site and saying what you will and will not accept – you can link out to a requirements page so you provide potential contributors detailed instructions 
  • there is now an author score – this is determined by owners who score your articles. Site owners can restrict access to their sites by requiring a minimum author score. If you don’t have high enough score you can’t post to those sites. 
  • on the flip side those selecting a site to publish on will now see the site’s Page Rank and, more importantly in my view, the percentage of posts ignored by the site, i.e. returned within 7 days.  
  • sites can be ranked up to 5 stars by article writers. 

Postrunner is positioning itself as an introduction service between site owners and those that wish to promote their own sites.  Postrunner sites are all owner by individuals, not the people who are running Postrunner. This is guest blogging, not manufactured backlinks. 

The aim is to get many more, quality sites into the system.  You may have noticed, having a few quality links to your site will trump thousands of trashy low quality links any day of the week. Although some, including me, will see it as a Build My Rank alternative, but really this is about legitimate guest blogging. 

Will Google like it? Who the heck knows – but I have NEVER seen or heard of a site being penalised for accepting guest posts, or using them for promotion. 

Coffee anyone? Nelson, New Zealand

Pricing Information: 

Indicated pricing for Postrunner v2 for new subscribers is:

  • free for promotion of one site; 
  • up to 10 sites: $30 per month;
  • up to 25 sites: $50 per month;
  • up to 50 sites : $75 per month;
  • un-limited sites: $199 per month; 

Note you submit as many articles on any plan – but you are limited to how many sites you can promote. 

But if you are amember of Keyword Academy WHEN Postrunner V2 is LAUNCHED you will be grand-fathered in and allowed promotion of unlimited domains. 

When Will Postrunner V2 Launch?

Postrunner is now live for all members of TKA

So what I am trying to say – its a really, really good time to join Keyword Academy – take advantage of the free 30 days look, check out Postrunner V2 – and if you decide to use Postrunner you end up paying $33/month for unlimited domains. Plus you get the other tools and information available for TKA members too. 

Questions, queries, comments? Ask away! 

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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.