Source Code Blowout 2 - warning!

Private Label rights to products are a great way to make money, especially if you pick them up fast.

The last Soruce Code Blowout package just 2 months ago sold out extremely fast.

Since that time I have seen multiple offers for the products, everything from special deals where you select 2 or 3 products from the original package for a good price, all the way to a few of them being offered for free in various "Giveaway" deals - well not for free, in exchange for your email address.

The thing is even if you didn't sell the products to anyone, they represented good value.

The last package many of the applications were complicated to install and a little buggy. The private label ebooks however were of very good quality. Not just 30 page special reports compiled from public domain sites, but original content.


There is a major (but subtle) change in the terms

This time around they have changed the wording of their terms and conditions. I know some very savvy people who have already overlooked this. You will be limited in what you can do with these products more than last time around.

Read this very carefully

You and anyone you resell these products to may NOT bundle more than any 3
products from this offer together to be sold or given away free in any other one
offer or website. This includes placing more than any 3 products into any one
membership website!

Last time round you were limited to 3 as above, but you didn't have to pass on those restrictions to those people you sold the product to. This resulted in people selling the product to someone else, or giving it away, and then those people being able to do what they like with the product, even listing the whole package in a membership site.

It isn't going to happen this time around.

You are still going to have massive price gouging. You are seriously not going to be able to sell most of these products for $97 each.

What I advised last time, and advise this time is that you take a "sell 3 and it is free" attitude. Thus you are going to want to earn $66 for a total of 10 products. Effectively you will want a retail price of $10 for a single item, or $20 - $30 for multiple items.

I personally think that asking any more than that you will upset your customers in a couple of weeks when they start seeing other people dropping the price, or they see the product for free in a membership site.

You still can make some money from this... if you are quick

Just take it easy, don't expect this to be you oneway ticket to riches.

I have no idea how the terms apply to people who purchased the rights to Source Code Blowout in advance, under the OLD terms. Yep there are still loopholes I doubt they thought about, the terms and conditions were obviously not drafted by a lawyer.

No affiliate links for me on this one, they deleted all the JV information from the last Source Code Blowout, and I know my old affiliate link no longer works.
Up until yesterday I had been expecting a little "windfall" from people I signed up last time round, but this was knocked on the head when I tested my link whilst writing this little piece.

If you do buy it, make sure you make use of your rights VERY FAST.

I expect to pick them all up free over the next couple of months in various member sites, and some of the main products are not very interesting. The Membership Site script will be good, if it works and is secure.


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niche website

Black Hat Search Engine Optimization the White Hat Way

What a week!

You see just over 1 week ago, I received an "Affiliate News" letter from Ken Nadreau who is in charge of sales and marketing for Article Submitter Pro.

Here is a little quote

The affiliate with the highest conversion rate (4.55%) has only 47 raw hits, and
44 unique hits.

This wasn't strictly true, because he was quoting figures from the end of last month. Whilst I haven't asked him, I know these were probably my figures.

Actually my conversion rate is about 5.5%

Article Submitter Pro is a damn good product and anyone who buys it will be very happy using it.

But it is all down to pre-sales which I learned a lot about from Ken Evoy. I have actually been doing sales for 15 years, so it isn't too hard for me to pre-sell, but I believe the concept is very valid.

Ken Nadreau actually went on to say

What the puzzle tells us is that "Quality" and not "Quantity" is the key to good
sales. If we were to take the stats above, and compare it to some of the
campaigns we've seen, we'd have to come to the conclusion that the most
effective and highest quality marketing efforts come from those pages that are
reviews of Article Submitter Pro. And of those review pages, the most effective
would be those that are comparisons of Article Submitter Pro and other
submission software and services. When you compare usefulness, over all
performance, cost,and customer service, and lay it all down in black and white,
it's easy to see the value of Article SubmitterPro.

Now what Ken doesn't mention, and actually doesn't know is that the same piece of copywriting also converted tons of Article Marketer subscribers, and my first ever sale of Article Automator.

Here is the post: Submit Articles - 3 killer products

You don't have to be negative about one product when comparing it to another to try and force a sale of the "best" product.

Whilst many would argue that a straight sales letter for a single product works better, my own experience is that I have achieved more sales of all thress products from minimal traffic by giving an honest review, than I would have achieved sending traffic to the sales pages with no "qualifying" of the traffic.

I am aiming for some landing pages with well laid out reviews in the future on various product lines.

Obviously you have to know something about the results of article marketing to be able to pre-sell, but you only have to read my blog and maybe a few forums for the information. Learn from others, I have even heard Willie Crawford say that expert information doesn't have to be your own, just your own words. or something similar.


Here is a little article I put out about a week ago to the article directories. Currently there are 120 references, but I also noticed that different sites picked it up, including DevShed which is great. I don't know whether that is due to Article Marketer, or a manual submission I made to Add Me.

(and before you ask, this is all based on MY research, not someone elses)


Black Hat Search Engine Optimization the White Hat Way

Black Hat SEO

A fairly common black hat search engine optimization tactic is to build multiple websites on a general theme. The sites are then cross-linked to other sites in the same network, and would also include one-way links to the primary site with varying anchor text. The whole aim is to give one or more sites a huge boost in search engine results pages (SERPs), and for it to also benefit from additional traffic flowing from the various network sites.
People undertaking such methods generally create the websites with automated tools, use scraped content from other peoples websites, and most of the sites have no purpose other than to drive traffic to the primary site.

White Hat SEO

First it is important to understand a little about linking structure. I am not going to go into excessive details.

It is widely understood that internal linking on any website can represent as much as 50% of the page rank attributed to any single page within a site. How your pages are linked together, for which terms, and whether links are reciprocated all play an import role in the calculation.

If I told you that there are hundreds of websites on the internet, with very high page rank on multiple terms themselves, who would be willing to create a niche portal within their pages, highly optimized for your website, niche and keywords, it is something you would probably be willing to pay for.

We are not talking about a simple directory site. We are talking about high quality content pages, that will pass on pagerank to your site, plus a central hub, similar to a home page, that benfits from all the content pages linking to it, and that in turn also points directly to your website.

Of course:-

• You will have complete control over the content of each of these sites
  
• You will be provided with an interface for managing the site's contents
  
• You will be able to add content whenever you like, on almost any subject
  
• They will even act as brokers to encourage other people to create hubs which will also point directly to your website
  
• Most of these sites have powerful linking structures, that magnify the value of your content, and the links both to your website, and to the central hub.
  

This is all "white hat". You will never be penalised for using this tactic by the search engines, and it is permanent! Your traffic hubs will be a permanent fixture. Some of these hubs will disappear, but many more will appear to replace them.

Is this something you would pay for?
You can get this highly powerful promotion of your website for free!



Simply write and submit articles to article directories

Every day I see questions on multiple marketing forums along the lines of:-

"Does article marketing really work?"
"I submitted an article 2 weeks ago and my search engine results have stayed the same, why?"
"When I submit an article, how long until I will see traffic to my website?"

Describing exactly how this all works in words is very difficult, but lets look at a very simple math formula.

1x1x1x1x1=1

It is not very impressive is it?

You have to remember however that an individual article you publish gains incoming links in a number of ways.

• Snippets from your article will appear on the pages of other articles in the same niche
• You will have a link in the main topic
• You will most likely have a link for some time in the RSS feed
• If a website uses that RSS feed for content, the article on the directory site would gain at least a temporary link, but quite often a permanent one.

So we may be looking at more like

1.3x1.3x1.3x1.3x1.3=3.71

Some of the numbers however are going to be bigger or smaller, depending on the authority of the page linking to the article, the number of links from that page etc.

You might well have to use addition rather than multiplication when regarding many aspects of a real formula.

What is important however is that not only is each individual article you publish gaining in pagerank, but also your author profile.

Lets take some examples

These are the current top 5 article authors listed at Ezine Articles

Lance Winslow 2029 Articles
Jeff Herring 340 Articles
Tim Gorman 306 Articles
John Mussi 303 Articles
Dennis Siluk 286 Articles

Now do a search for any of those author names in Google.

Every single result has a reference to their Ezine Articles profile within the top 3 positions.

This isn't true in every case. Well known (and popular for good reason) internet marketer Willie Crawford's profile only appears at the bottom of the first page, but he has hundreds of links pointing to his popular websites, and has a baseball player competing for ranking.

Profile pages concentrate and magnify the linking benefit of every article you publish, thus the links from a profile page carry a lot of weight.
Some author bio pages allow a lot of customization. Most allow you to have some text (which can be keyword targeted), along with website links. A few even allow you to set anchor text for every link in your profile.

Thus to answer all the questions I see every day on various marketing forums.

• Yes, article marketing does work.
  
• The more articles you submit, the more effect you will have from using articles as one form of marketing. A hub with a single page has very little weighting. A hub with 10, 20 or even 100 articles will carry an immense amount of weight, and having lots of hubs pointing to your websites will have a massive effect on search engine results.
  
• You might see an immediate burst of traffic within a few days of when you submit an article, however article marketing is a short, medium and long-term solution.
  

Short term it can be a fast route to having a website spidered by search engines.

Medium term, you will gain some exposure within your niche as other sites and ezines publish your content. Many of them don't write about your topic every day.

Long term is really up to you. The more quality articles you write, the larger your hubs will become. Large article hubs pick up traffic from a larger variety of search engine traffic, but also make your author bio more prominent, thus magnifying the value of external links placed there.


Andy Beard has worked in Sales, Marketing and Localization for the last 15 years, primarily in the computer games industry.
He publishes his articles with the services of Article Marketer



Technorati Keywords
niche website , seo , keyword optimization , Search Engine Optimization , submit article tool , submit article software , article submission software , article distribution , article service , submit article , article submission

Submit Articles like never before

Submit Articles like never before

Don't you just love emails headed "Confidential Information for Affiliates"

I have just received one from Chris Ellington, owner of Article Marketer

Now I keep my ear pretty close to the ground. I have picked up on a few of the developments coming down the pipeline just by being observant, and asking a couple of questions.

The contents of the email I just received

Blew Me Away!

Yes that is an overused expression. I have seen it used on so many sub par resale rights and private label products recently, the true meaning is starting to fade into the background.

Imagine you have a dog

You tell it to sit down infront of you for a reward, an huge juicy bone!

You place the bone infront of the dog, and tell it not to touch the bone.

So the dog is sitting there, mouth drooling, whining, sniffing... maybe it even barks or yaps a few times.

If it is well trained it won't touch the bone, but if you just ignore it for 10 minutes, there are very few dogs that would keep totally quiet, not a sound, waiting for instructions to be allowed to eat the bone.

This is something I know from experience. I am not a dog trainer, but I can get my little old Dachshund to sit infront of a food bowl (full) for up to 10 minutes, not silently, but I can go into another room.

It is like that with Article Marketer, right now, for me

I am sitting here writing this and I am shaking

I am quivering!

The power features that are soon going to be available will take article publishing to a new level.

But I can't reveal the secrets. I am sworn to confidentiality.

Chris is only revealing the secrets to affiliates, who get to read about them as soon as they log into their affiliate section on Article Marketer.

So here is a compromise ;)

Sign up as an affiliate now

Article Marketer

Nothing is going to compare

p.s signing up as an affiliate is totally free and without obligation. The affiliate program is well worth joining. This is a high quality service, that is just getting better and better. The future of article distribution is defined by Artcile Marketer. Nothing else comes close.

Sign up as an affiliate now with Article Marketer


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niche website , seo , keyword optimization , Search Engine Optimization , keyword research tool

Michel Fortin: "Scientific Advertising" by Claude C. Hopkins

Michel Fortin is one of the greatest copywriters of the mordern era, but much of what he teaches and uses as reference is timeless. He has just posted a classic on his blog that we can all learn from (for free)

The Michel Fortin Blog: This Ageless Classic Is A Must-Read: "I posted the old yet ageless classic 'Scientific Advertising' by Claude C. Hopkins on my website. For free. It's the copywriter's 'bible.' As Olgilvy once said:

'Nobody, at any level, should be allowed to have anything to do with advertising until he has read this book seven times'
-- David Ogilvy"

Article submission - massive growing feature set

Article submission - massive growing feature set

Article submission is definately one of the best ways to promote any site, not just because of the benfit of growing a massive amount of targetted backlinks on highly regarded websites, but also because they in themselves bring in traffic. People do read articles, and do follow the links which you include in your resource box. This is especially important for a niche website.

As I have discussed before in my Submit articles - 3 killer products review, efficient article distribution is very important. If it takes more time to distribute your article than it took you to write it in the first place, you would be better spending the time writing another article than manually logging into article distribution sites.

What I also pointed out in a follow-on article, publishing articles in your own name is essential for branding. If you are serious about internet marketing, articles should always be submitted to article directories in the name you are trying to brand, whether that is your own, or your penname. Not all article submission services offer this ability.

As I have mentioned previously, I have had great support from the owners of the 2 article submission product I highly recommend, Article Marketer and Article Submitter Pro.

They are different products, aimed at different user or different uses (yes it is worth using both), as I described in my review.


New features coming soon

Both Article Marketer and Article Submitter Pro are in serious active development, based on feedback from users. Unfortunately my hands are a little bit tied as to what I can reveal will be available soon on both products.







Article Marketer - article submission service

There are some major changes coming, that will broaden the distribution of articles by this excellent service. I stumbled upon this when they were testing something ;)
Also expect a lot more control in the future.

I just love the way I can submit articles while I sleep with Article Marketer, and when I go on holiday, they keep working, even submitting my previously submitted articles to all the new directories that are being brought online.

If you are an affiliate, they are a great program to promote. Lifetime recurring payments are extremely attractive. They have a 2-tier affiliate program paying 50% & 5% controlled by what I believe is one of the best affiliate program scripts.

The Free article submission system is extremely effective, and you will absolutely love the upsell (it is almost impossible to resist)

Article Submitter Pro - article submission software

As I have mentioned previously, Ken and Hubert who are the powerhouse behind Article Submitter Pro are extremely pro-active. They have even popped by this humble blog to help out one of their new customers in distress.

I have exchanged emails with them frequently, and they are always looking to help me, and their other customers.
Ken wrote me an email yesterday with an update of what is to come for owners of Article Submitter Pro. Rather than reword it, I will let you have it, "from the horses mouth".

Hubert just informed me that the next update is going to be something
special once again.

This past update brought us the DIY tab which it seems everyone loves. And
well they should because the DIY tab came about due to many user requests for
it.

The next update will come about pretty much in the same way.

People wanted to be able to add as many author names and email addresses as
they'd like and so, once the user is done with the Set Up screen and has Article
Submitter Proregistered, the Set Up button is replaced by the Author Button. The
Author button will allow for different names, email address, and website URLs
which can be chosen along with the article selection. So this will allow for an
infinite number of variations to any given article submission.

Also, there will be a new set of icons on the main screen for back up and
restore. When a new registration happens, the info will be automatically backed
up, so in case of a glitch, a click on the restore button will bring the program
back to its registered state. Then the user will be able to back up all their
input after they set their first article in the system.

With the next update, hopefully the title rotations will be in place as
well.

So there's a lot of good promotional items to talk about in your next
campaigns!

I think after this update, Article Submitter Pro will become the most universal article submission software on the market.



Technorati Keywords
niche website , seo , keyword optimization , Search Engine Optimization , submit article tool , submit article software , article submission software , article distribution , article service

Blog Submitter Pro - Traffic and ranking for niche website

Traffic and ranking for niche website

Niche website promotion can be very time consuming, but equally there is no point building a niche website, either because it is your passion, or to make money, unless someone sees it.

I have already discussed promoting websites using article submission, but the benefits of article submission are fairly longterm. Despite lots of claims by people promoting article submission as the ultimate form of site promotion, it is just one activity you should undertake.

Now I am guilty of not doing enough on other promotion activities. Most of my sites are blogs, and blogs are ideal for cross promotion and sharing traffic with related websites.

If you post an interesting, thought provoking and relevant comment on a blog in a similar niche, you are going to get some visitors, mostly short term, but some might become subscribers.

Not long ago I made a single post regarding another bloggers 31days promotion, and also commented on his blog. He reciprocated the following day by mentioning my post and the comment I made. I gained over 150 visitor over 2 days from that, and over 100 downloads of a viral ebook that I include in my Essential Niche Marketing Library.

That is a completely "white hat" way of operating. It is encouraged by other Bloggers. It was however for this blog, I am not sure I could achieve the same results for a blog in a smaller niche which received far less visitors.

Even though you have a relevant blog, would the effort be worthwhile?

There are only so many hours in a day after all.

So how could you automate this?

Well first of all you could search for all the blogs within your niche. It wouldn't take too long, maybe spend a few hours.
Then produce a text file with various pre-prepared messages that might address the concerns of people who read the other blogs, and also be relevant to the page you are linking back to.
Once a week (more frequently when you first start your blog), you could visit all the blogs in your list, see if they have something interesting, and make a comment. A lot of the time you would be able to use your pre-prepared comments. Sometimes you might find something also worth writing about on your own blog. If you do, great, you can blog about their post, and include a trackback.

Up until very recently, I wasn't doing this.

Why you might ask, it is much easier to do this than ask people for backlinks from link exchanges, the links from this method are much more relevant, not on linkfarms.

Here is what I thought was the crunch. Not long ago the major search engines announced that they were introducing support for an HTML tag, NO FOLLOW. This would mean that blogs using this tag for links within their comments, would not pass on any linking benefit, just traffic.

Then a product was recently introduced

Blog Submitter Pro

The use of this program is controversial. Some claim it is "blackhat", meaning it is cheating the search engines, and using it could get you dropped in search engines.

The problem with this arguement is that the program isn't using "dirty tricks". All it is doing is automating the process I have already described, that of writing some pre-prepared comments, visiting a list of pre-selected blogs to participate in, and making a few comments.

It also can benefit the blog owners - you are adding content, and the blog is being "pinged" for them, meaning their entries are always kept fresh.

But Does It Work?

This is where things get tricky, and a little bit technical.

The answer is... yes and no

I have seen proven results from people I respect using this software.

The results are extremely significant on Yahoo. Some results can be obtained with MSN and Google, but it is not going to be quite as dramatic.

I am not going to go into the reasons why the results differ in too great a detail. I invested a lot of time in the research, and it benefits me whether I choose to use this software or not. It is something I will only release to my mailing list (yes there are benefits in signing up ;) )

So is this Splogging ?

No - splogging is a term made from the words "spam" and "blog"

SPAM+BLOG=Splogging

Splogging is much more to do with blog & ping, which is a technique of rapidly getting all of a new website indexed in the search engines. It can have some benefit for SEO too if done correctly. I am not going to go into Blog & Ping too much with this post, but using BSP is not splogging.

Is this the same as spamming via email?

This gets complicated

If you were posting comments to blogs manually, making relevant comments that were interesting and informative, and including a link back to your own website, it wouldn't be looked on as spamming.

In addition, Blogger provide the ability to limit who can post comments to your blog, and provide this information extremely clearly. It might slightly slow down manual posting, but not to any great extent. If you don't want automatic posting to your blog you can stop it. If you add custom features to your blog, it is not down to Blogger.

The creators of BSP have deliberately only supported Blogger blogs because of the choice they give their users to accept comments automatically if they want it.

So BSP can automate this process, but that doesn't mean that every post you could possibly make with it is spam. You could use this tool for spam, in fact there are already tools that true "black hat" SEO fans already use that not only spam Blogger blogs, they spam all blogs, plus many forums.

BSP isn't as automated as people first assume. It will frequently request you to click system requestors that appear, so it cannot just be left running 24 hours a day unattended, spamming every blog under the sun, with comments regarding casios and sex sites. It is not that kind of tool.

BSP is a tool - how you use it is important

Towards the start of this post I described a manual process that you could undertake, prepreparing a number of highly relevant comments before you go visiting another persons blog.

Let us take a highly topical subject at the moment, and how you could use BSP in a legitimate way.

That isn't a real comment, and it isn't a real website

Imagine the following comment:-

My heart goes out to the poor people in New Orleans, not to mention the
people in smaller towns up and down the coast who were hit extremely hard by the
Hurricane.
I have already made a large donation to the Red Cross, but am
unable to help in many other ways because I live in Europe.

What I have decided to do is to create a dedicated blog listing all the
websites I find that are raising money to help Hurricane victims. This blog can
be found at http://hurricane-victims-help.notreal.com/

If you know of any pages that are raising money, please visit the blog, check
to see if the page is listed, and if it is not, please use the easy method to
add a new site to the growing list.

I wish I could help more

That isn't a real comment, and it isn't a real website

Now imagine how much work it would be finding websites that were helping such a powerful cause, and the amount of time it would take to comment to them all.

If on the other hand you used the power of a tool like BSP to find relevant blogs discussing raising funds for Hurricane victims, or even collecting money for hurricane victims, such a comment WOULD NOT BE SPAM.

I have taken an extreme example, but I felt that was needed. Nothing in using BSP is black or white. It is not even "grey".

Everything comes down to how the tool (and it is just a tool) is used. The effectivelness of this tool is in the hands of the user too.

Making it effective

How effective BSP will be is down to the user. If you spam blogs with casio adverts, sure some might stick on deserted blogs, but a lot will just get deleted, and you will give yourself a bad name, and create hostility to your own site. Be rest assured, bloggers can be very vocal if you upset them.

If however you make legitimate comments that are highly targetted, you are actually doing something good, providing worthwhile information, but in an automated way.

Blog Submitter Pro was created so that average users could increase the number of visitors to their websites, either through the search engines, or from people clicking on links in comments. It is for people who don't approve of "black hat" techniques, where you are not adding to the content, and often are fooling search engines. It is for people who do not have time to compete with "white hat" SEO experts, who live and breath search engine optimization.

Do not buy Blog Submitter Pro for spamming

If you buy Blog Submitter Pro to automate the commenting you might perform naturally in a non-automated way if you only had a little more time, I can certainly see the legitimacy and usefulness of the product.

P.S. This is a big PS

The price is going up on Blog Submitter Pro within a few days, and they are upgrading it with a mass of new features that will make it easier to use, and more effective. They have an insanely good guarantee with it, so if it doesn't work for you, for whatever reason, you can get a full refund.

If you have made a decision that you might take a look, DO NOT SIT ON THE FENCE

Technorati Keywords
niche website , seo , keyword optimization , Search Engine Optimization , keyword research tool blog submitter pro , splogging , blog spam , blogging , blogger

Linking Strategies

Have you noticed how so many sites have "link to us" pages full of junk links.

If I am exchanging links with someone I write something quickly about their site, and include it in a blog post. The link is permanent, it gets front page exposure for a while, and it adds to my content.

When exchaging link of course I have to be careful, my content has to be relevant to my core subjects. On Blogger I don't get the opportunity to change my metatags dynamically.

As an example this post is a "link exchange" attempt with MakeAChange.com. It is a PR4 site with relatively good traffic, so I am making an effort to write a post with lots of good keywords in it that relate to their site.

Make a change is actually quite a nice resource site. I certainly picked up a few tips.

Drive Traffic to Your Site at MakeAChange.com with Programs that Really Work - Linking Strategies, Google Marketing, List Building and Blog Techniques to Increase Your Internet Income


Technorati Keywords
niche website , seo , keyword optimization , Search Engine Optimization , keyword research tool

Rapid Keyword

I am doing some research into additional keyword research tools and thought I would include a few here...

First up is Rapid Keyword!

Keyword Brainstorming Tools:

Built-in Overture Keyword Suggestion tool
Meta Tag Parser, finds already carefully researched keywords in web pages
Find potential keywords on hundreds of relevant webpages
Powerful typo generator based on 7 different typo formulas

Research Competition:

Quickly find out how many ads are running on Adwords for your keywords
Research Competition on Overture and FindWhat
Know how popular your keywords are


Manage Keywords Lists:
Merge and Split- Eliminate duplicates
Quickly Wrap your keywords for desired match type
Combine word lists for possible keywords
Filter out keywords that contain undesired words
Remove a list of keywords from your master keyword list

Rapid Keyword! offer a free trial version


Technorati Keywords
niche website , seo , keyword optimization , Search Engine Optimization , keyword research tool

keyword analyzer

Find profitable keywords, analyze competition on pay-per-click engines, manage your keyword lists. Download a Free Trial now.