By now, everyone should be intimately aware of the recent Google smackdown. A few blog networks have been completely nuked, while others have shut their doors to new members.

Many are now struggling with unnatural link warnings, big ranking drops, and the new possibilities for negative SEO.

Face it. The SEO landscape is constantly changing. The first Google Panda updates hit sites more than a year ago. And there were plenty of algorithm changes, big and small, before that. Google is constantly changing its algorithms and if you want to keep ahead of the curve, then you need to start adapting.

So that got me thinking…

If blog networks aren’t working anymore, then what is?

My New Project

About that time when all these changes were starting to happen, I read this really great post by Eppie Vojt called How Garbage Ranks in the SERPs: a Case Study. It was a really fascinating post that generated a ton of positive (and negative) buzz.

What interested me most from the article though was the Link Detective tool he developed to analyze a website’s backlink profile and categorize the types of links that were pointing to it. It can identify many different types of backlinks, from footer and sidebar links, to comments links, profile links and even blog post links.

Although you can sign up for free, I didn’t like the fact that it would only work with backlinks download from Open Site Explorer.

Inspired by his idea, I decided to build my own version that incorporated my own custom link types and would work with any set of backlinks I could throw at it. I had my programmer work on this project, and a week later I had my own Link Classifier tool to experiment with.

The Case Study

While the tool is still a work in progress, I wanted to test it out with a simple case study and look at a couple of sites in niches I was very familiar with. More specifically, I looked at two high value keywords I saw ranking drops with on my own sites and examined the backlinks profiles of the sites that had replaced them.

My two favorite sources for downloading backlinks are Ahrefs and Majestic SEO. By combining the results from both services, I am able to build a more extensive backlink profile and get more complete results.

Keep in mind that my goal here is not to out any particular sites, so I won’t be sharing any of the urls. I am mainly interested in taking a more in-depth look at my competition’s backlink profiles to see what link building techniques they are using and see what’s currently working at this point in time.

Site 1

Currently ranks #3 for a very popular IM product name keyword.

Link Types

I was already quite familiar with Site 1 as I have observed this site on the first page of the Google search results for a long time now. While my own targeted post dropped down to the 3rd page of the SERPs, Site 1 has taken hold of the #3 spot for this very lucrative keyword in the IM space.

Site 1 is your classic sniper product review site with an exact match domain. Objectively, the content on the site is average at best, with no screenshots or video. There is no social engagement either. (0 Tweets, 1 FB share)

Site 1′s link profile is quite interesting to look at. As I take a deeper at the In-Post links, it is quite obvious that they certainly have used blog networks as a main component of their backlinking strategy. I was able to identify Authority Link Network and Article Ranks as two networks that were used for sure.

What is funny is that their In-Post links were definitely affected by the Google’s recent updates as all but 6 of them (94%) were de-indexed.

So what’s keeping the site at the top? If you look at the linking profile it looks like the blog comments are doing the trick. These are not your normal hand-written, thoughtful comments though…

Instead, it’s obvious from examining the comments themselves that Site 1 is using Scrapebox (or similar program) to find auto approve blogs to post their comments on. All of the comments I looked at were short, nonsensical blurbs of text. However, each one of them contained 2 or 3 anchor text keywords links in the comment body.

I was a bit surprised at the effectiveness of these types of links, but there doesn’t seem to be any question that they do work.

Site 2

Currently ranking #2 for a generic web hosting related keyword.

Link Types

Site 2 is your standard web hosting review site. Web hosting is an extremely lucrative niche because of the high affiliate commissions you can earn from each web hosting sale. It is also one of the most competitive niches for SEO.

Site 2 really shows the linking power of relevant, paid links. Looking at the site’s backlink profile, I see a handful of paid sidebar and footer links combined with a large amount of paid In-Post links. They have also done a good job mixing up their link profile by throwing in some forum signature links, web 2.0 blog posts on their own WordPress.com created blogs and a few legitimate blog comments as well.

Drilling down into the In-Post links is rather enlightening. First of all, I see some really nice contextual links on real, legitimate websites. These are paid text links of course, but they’ve done a good job of making them blend in.

I also noticed some blog network post type links. Not paid blog networks mind you. But a private blog network only used by Site 2 and a few of their other sites. I can tell this because these blogs aren’t filled with thousands of posts covering random topics. Instead each blog has a handful of relevant blog posts that only link to a select number of sites.

Lessons Learned

Obviously, it’s hard to make any concrete declarations by cherry picking the results of a couple of sites.

Still, a few observations:

1) Blog comment spam works. I am actually quite surprised by this fact, as I thought this would be the first type of “unnatural link building” eliminated. Does that mean I’m going to start doing it myself? No. because even if Google hasn’t targeted these types of links yet, they can easily do so in the future. I’d rather focus on something more long-term.

2) Paid links are king. Google went to war against paid links long before the blog networks. But they still work, and they will always work as long as Google continues to place a heavy emphasis on link building. With blog networks losing steam, paid links are still the most effective “black/grey” hat links you can get.

3) Are Private blog networks the future? Will private blog networks become more and more popular? I’ve heard lots of chatter about people building up their own private blog networks. It’s an expensive, and potentially time consuming process to do it right so it will be interesting to see how effective they become in the future.

Got any thoughts on my experiment? What do you think the most effective links will be in the future?

Image source: mushroom-cloud-300×225 By Whatsername?

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As a marketer who relies on SEO, I am always looking for every edge I can get. If I can automate some aspect of my link building or add a little bit of link juice to each of my links then it would be smart to take it right?

Today I want to introduce Smart Pingbacks, my newest WordPress plugin. I developed it for anyone who builds backlinks and wants to add a little more juice to their link building efforts by taking advantage of the pingbacks that you have on your site.

What Is a Pingback?

If anyone links back to a post on your site from another WordPress blog then you will receive a notification on your site about it. This is recorded on your blog as a pingback. The crucial component of the pingback that we are interested in is that it contains the url of the blog that linked to you (the pingback url).

For us link builders, this gives us access to the the backlinks that we are building, especially if you are using blog networks to help you build your links. Now, it doesn’t capture every single link, but it does get enough of them in general to be useful.

What Does It Do?

Smart Pingbacks will do two things for you.

First, it allows you to export your pingback urls to a text file on your local computer. But if you want more control, it will also allow you to filter your pingbacks by individual posts, pages or even time period.

While you can normally see your pingbacks in your WordPress admin comments page, there is no easy way to get these pingback urls easily. But with Smart Pingbacks, you can get all these urls with a click of a button.

Second, Smart Pingbacks automatically creates RSS feeds containing your pingback urls. You will get a global rss feed that contains the most recent pingbacks for your site. Plus each post or page gets its own feed as well that contains the most recent pingbacks for the post or page.

These pingback RSS feeds are dynamic, and get updated each time your site receives a new pingback.

How Is It Going To Help You?

In isolation, Smart Pingbacks won’t do much. But in combination with some other tools and services it will allow you to do some creative things to get more of your links indexed and increase the power of your link building efforts. To give you some ideas, here are some ways that I’ve been using Smart Pingbacks myself.

• Submit your pingback urls to a backlink indexing service. My favorites include Backlink Energizer and Backlink Index Express. These services will build additional links to your backlinks automatically and help get them indexed more easily.
• Submit your pingback RSS feed to RSS directories. Feedagg, Feedage, and Zimbio are ones I like to use myself. But there are hundreds of free RSS directories to submit your feed to. Each submission will build an additional link back to your backlinks. And since your feed is dynamically updated when new pingbacks come in, each new link you build will get backlinked automatically!
• Automated social network and microblog posting. This is another great way to build backlinks to your backlinks automatically. Hootsuite has a free service which will allow you to submit your pingback RSS feed and it will automatically post each pingback url to Twitter, Facebook as they come in.
• Perform link analysis of your backlinks. This is what I’ve been using for my Link Building Lab case studies to analyze various backlink sources I’ve been using to test their effectiveness. Most backlink sources hide where your backlinks are coming from, so this gives me an easy way to find them.

These are just some of the ways I am using Smart Pingbacks myself. But I’m certain that many of you guys will think of other creative ways to use the plugin that I would never have thought of myself.

I’m even taking advantage of the pingback RSS feed in my upcoming product called Smart Link Indexer which will be a service that allows you to index your backlinks automatically. Other indexing products should be able to take advantage of this feature as well, if they choose.

How Do I Get It?

Smart Pingbacks is on sale now for $12. This gets you an unlimited site license and free updates for life. I even back up my plugin with a full lifetime guarantee.

That’s right. If you don’t like the plugin for whatever reason, just email me and I will refund your money right away.

So really, there is no excuse not to grab yourself a copy and start getting more of your links indexed right away.

Got any questions about my new plugin? Feel free to leave a comment and I will reply as quickly as possible.

Everyone wants more traffic to their site. So which traffic sources are the the best to use? Today, I want to take an in-depth look at Drop My Link, and share how it grew from no traffic at all to nearly 10,000 visitors a month. With very little effort on my part, I might add.

DropMyLink is a site I created back in December 2009 that helps you find free do-follow backlinks. It does this by performing specific Google queries that will find all sorts of backlink friendly sites, like CommentLuv Premium blogs, KeywordLuv blogs, and more.

What is interesting though, is that I ended up never really doing too much promotion of the site myself. I did initially make a couple of forum posts on WarriorForum and DigitalPoint forums to try and publicize it. But I was never able to generate a ton of buzz at the time, so DropMyLink became more of an afterthought as I moved onto new and better things.

Then six months ago, seemingly by itself, the site’s traffic took off. It steadily grew from 20 to 80 to 150 to now 350 visitors a day. It essentially went viral as people started spreading word about it on their own.

So where is all this traffic coming from?

I thought it would be interesting to share in this post what the site’s biggest traffic sources are and share some real stats about how much traffic each one has sent. Plus, it gives me an opportunity to give a shout out to some of the people who were responsible for helping the site grow as fast as it has.

1. Product Traffic

DropMyLink really exploded traffic wise when it was featured in a product called Fast Attack Links by Anthony Devine and Craig Mako.

This is the 3rd in the popular series of Fast Attack Reports, with Fast Attack SEO and Fast Attack Traffic being the other two. According to WarriorPlus, each of these 3 reports are in the Top 10 best selling WSOs of all time.

DropMyLink was the first tool featured in the Fast Attack Links report and this resulted in a massive increase in traffic to the site. My traffic stats are a little in-exact since click-throughs via the ebook don’t pass the referrer data. But when Fast Attack Links launched, I estimate it sent over 2,000 visitors in the first week, and it has more than doubled the site’s daily traffic since that time.

2. Site/Blog Traffic

Once a site reaches a certain level of visibility, and it offers some compelling value, other marketers and bloggers will take notice and start writing about it. That is what happened with DropMyLink.

The most traffic DropMyLink has received from any one site so far was after it was featured on DotComSecrets.com. This is the official company site of well known IM guru Russell Brunson.

Russell actually mentioned Drop My Link in a video that he did during the Halloween Episode of his Daily Sketch series.

Check it out: (Starts at 5:18)

Pretty cool, right? This one video alone brought in 450 visitors to the site in the first week.

That isn’t the only site to talk about DropMyLink. Here are three other examples of blog posts that have sent hundreds more visitors to the site:

• 8 Completely Free Tools That Will Catapult Your Link Building Efforts (AlexWhalley.com)
• Fast Way To Find DoFollow Blogs & .edu Sites That Accept Comments (NicksTrafficTricks)
• Find Blogs to Comment On with Drop My Link now with Livefyre Search (DragonBlogger)

3. Guest Posting

Guest posting is probably the best way that anyone can get more traffic to their site. But you definitely need to choose wisely as not every site will send you the amount of traffic that you expect.

In the IM/blogging market, ProBlogger is probably the holy grail of guest posting opportunities. With over 161k RSS subscribers, ProBlogger has the biggest reach of any IM blog I know.

Lucky for me, Ben Jackson from SEODiscovery wrote a completely unsolicited and fantastic guest post featuring Drop My Link titled White-Hat SEO + Social Media = Link Bait Magic.

This particular guest post on ProBlogger sent over 210 visitors the first day and more than 500 visitors overall.

I also got Ben to write another guest post on the ComLuv blog network called 3 New Ways to Rank & Succeed with Blog Commenting. This an excellent site for guest posting (PR 6) and this post has brought me almost a 100 new visitors since it went live.

Ana Hoffman from Traffic Generation Cafe also wrote a terrific guest post on Kikolani.com called 10 Dreadful Mistakes That Kill Your Comments that mentions DropMyLink. Currently, it has attracted 88 Comments, 128 Tweets, and 95 Facebook Likes which is way better than I could ever do myself. If you ever are looking to create a great guest post yourself, then this is certainly one to model yours after.

4. Forum Marketing

Forum marketing is a very powerful traffic source and frankly quite underrated as well. While blog traffic and guest posting can often send more visitors at one time, the amount of traffic will decrease over time as posts drop off the front page.

Forum traffic on the other hand is generally more consistent over the long haul as threads get bumped up and new posters are exposed to your threads.

At this time, there are 18 threads on the WarriorForum, and 17 threads over on DigitalPoint which mention DropMyLink. And how much traffic have these forum threads sent overall? According to the stats, more than 1,000 visitors each, and growing by the day.

And those are just two of the major internet marketing forums. It also gets traffic from a quite a few other forums as well, along with some paid forums like WPGoldmine, Adsense100kBlueprint, and Bring the Fresh that I can’t even access myself!

5. Social Traffic

I’m not really a big into social media myself. But DropMyLink still gets quite a bit of social traffic as well, with StumbleUpon being the major source. Stumbleupon has sent over 3,000 visitors over the lifetime of the site. And I don’t even have a StumbleUpon button on the site!

StumbleUpon only works if you have something good to share, but if you do, don’t forget to take advantage of it. Following some of these social marketing tips is a good idea too.

I also get quite a bit of Twitter and Facebook traffic as well. Mostly as a result of the guest posting that’s been done I’m guessing. Unfortunately, the exact sources from each are harder to pinpoint since they don’t pass the referrer information in my analytics.

Final Thoughts

Here are a few takeaways from this post.

First, create content and products that fill a need. A site like DropMyLink isn’t hard to create, but it has become successful because it does something that people are always looking for (free ways to help their site rank better). All it takes is to be observant, and find ways to solve some real problems that people in your market are experiencing.

Second, target as many different traffic sources as you can. The more exposure you get, the more chance you have of going viral. Take advantage of traffic source ones you can control like guest posting and forum posting. This will enable you to plant some seeds and build some buzz around your site or product. Sometimes that all it takes for whatever you are promoting to take off.

And finally, don’t be as passive about promoting your stuff as I was. If you have something you know is good, then promote it as hard as you can. While DropMyLink became popular despite the lack of my own marketing efforts, who knows how much bigger it could be if I had spent more time promoting it myself?

Now let me pose a question to you. Which traffic sources have worked best for you? Leave a comment below and let me know.

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Regular users of my free Spinner Tools site may have been suprised recently to see a pretty drastic change to the Unique Article Wizard converter.

I’ve been receiving a lot of emails lately about what happened to it, so I decided to write a blog post explaining the changes.

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working on my latest Unique Article Wizard case study for the Link Building Lab. So I’ve been doing a lot of submissions and using the UAW converter a lot myself. Consequently, it’s made me think of different ways to improve it.

With the old version of the converter, it would spit out 3 unspun articles of the same length. With the minimum of 5 paragraphs, that’s 3*3*3*3*3 = 243 different combinations. However, it could be even less than that because you may get duplicate paragraphs in the 3 output articles.

Currently UAW will submit your articles to around 200-300 blogs at a time (depending on your categories), so it would be nice to get a little more uniqueness across your submissions.

Plus, if you use Ultra Spinnable Articles like I do, the converter was not taking advantage of the number of variations each article can potentially provide. So based on some feedback I received, I decided to rework how the Unique Article Wizard converter works.

What the tool now does is take your spun article, and generate as many 6+ paragraph variations as it can. It then combines each variation together using spin syntax. So all 1st paragraphs are combined, 2nd paragraphs are combined, and so on. The result is a new 1-level spun article that will output the same number of paragraphs.

Now you can generate 3 of these combined articles and submit them as 3 different versions in the UAW One Step Wizard.

The Unique Article Wizard algorithm now has a lot more paragraph variations to mix and match with and as a result, you should get more varied submissions as your article gets distributed across their network.

I’ve tested this with both the Premium Ultra Spinnable Articles and the USA Minis. With the premium USAs, since the number of paragraphs can vary, the converter will typically generate an article that has 3-7 variations per paragraph.

The minis always have the same number of paragraphs, so you will always get 15 variations per paragraph.

If you regularly use Spinner Tools and the Unique Article Wizard converter, I’d love to hear your feedback about this change. I personally think it’s a big improvement, and you should see better results when submitting your articles to Unique Article Wizard.

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Often times, you will find that want to highlight an event on your site that lasts for a limited amount of time. It could be the launch of a product, a contest you’re running, or just a special sale that’s going on.

What most people do in this situation is to create a static text message for the offer and place it on their. The problem is, when the offer expires, it’s way too easy to forget about it for days or weeks at a time. And while it remains up, it looks really bad for your site to be promoting something that’s long expired.

This came to mind recently with the recent The Best Spinner 3.0 launch. There was a special 45% off sale going on during the launch which I wanted to highlight on a site of mine. However, the sale was only going to last a week.

So I thought about the problem a bit, and came up with my solution for a time sensitive ad.

If you don’t mind modifying some PHP on your site, it’s actually pretty simple to implement yourself.

Ad Placement

The first thing you need to do is decide where to place your ad.

Since I use Thesis Theme for all my sites, I like to put this sort of ad in the Feature Box. The Feature Box appears above the fold above my content, which makes it a good place to show an eye-catching ad.

Other good places include your sidebar or the top or bottom of a particular post.

Once you’ve decided on your placement, you will need to open up the appropriate php file for your WordPress Theme (ex. sidebar.php). Or, you have widgetized areas in your theme you can install the PHP Code Widget and place the code in there.

The Code

Here’s the code you need to add to your site. It’s just a mixture of PHP and HTML.

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<?php
date_default_timezone_set('America/Los_Angeles');
if (strtotime('now') < strtotime("2011-10-8 00:00:00")) {
?>
  <div class="time-sensitive-ad">
 
     <h2>The Best Spinner 3.0 Limited Time Launch Special!</h2>
 
     <p>You can now purchase <a href="http://thebestspinner.com">The Best Spinner 3.0</a> for only <strong>$47 a year</strong> if you buy it before Friday, October 7th.</p> <p>You save $47 upfront, and $30 per year after off the regular price.</p>
  </div>
<?php
}

There are basically 3 important parts the code.

Line 2 sets the default timezone that is used by all the date/time function in the code snippet. Here, I’m specifying Pacific Standard Time. You can use any timezone identifier listed here.

Line 3 says, “If the current time is before the deadline time, then show the ad. If it’s after, then don’t do anything.”

In this example, I’m using midnight on Oct 8, 2011 as the date and time I want my ad to expire. Change this value to match your own deadline.

Lastly, I display my message inside a DIV tag. You can include any html code you want here. It’s up to you.

Just make sure to use some CSS to style your ad properly so it looks good and catches the eye of your reader.

Final Thoughts

Without figuring out how to implement this code, I would not have bothered to promote The Best Spinner 3.0 sale to my visitors. However I’m glad I did, because this particular ad actually tripled my normal affiliate commissions during this week long sales period.

What do you think? Can you find a good use for time-sensitive ads on your own sites?

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Ever notice that the most successful blogs have a ton of comments on every post?

Well if you’re just starting out you’ll soon find out that attracting lots of comments on your blog can take a very long time.

If you’re in this boat, one way to jumpstart the process is to install the free CommentLuv WordPress plugin. It allows your commenters to leave links to their own blog posts when they comment.

It’s a great way to increase engagement on your site by giving an incentive for your readers to comment. (with free backlinks!)

This has been a CommentLuv enabled blog for a few months now and I’ve noticed a big jump in my comments since I started using it.

Introducing CommentLuv Premium

Well today, I got an email from CommentLuv creator Andy Bailey announcing the release of CommentLuv Premium. I’ve been been looking forward to this new version for since I learned about it and I immediately installed it on this blog.

So why should you care if this is now a CommentLuv premium enabled blog?

… Because it’s going to help your link building efforts if you take advantage of it.

Here’s how:

First, if you comment on any post you will get a free noFollow link to one of your latest 10 posts. Sure it’s no follow, but it still holds some minimal SEO value and you’ll probably get a handful of clicks on your link as well.

But wouldn’t a juicier doFollow link be even better?

This is where CommentLuv Premium lets me to provide you with an even stronger incentive to comment.

If you now have more than 5 approved comments on this blog, your link automatically becomes doFollow. This rewards all my active commenters with some extra link juice for their efforts.

And that’s not all!

CommentLuv Premium also includes the same feature found in the popular KeywordLuv plugin.

Now when you have 8 approved comments, you can then add a second doFollow link to your comment, this time with your chosen anchor text.

When you reach this level, just add @ your keyword after your Name and your second link will look like this:

How To Use It

Taking advantage of CommentLuv on this blog is easy.

When leaving your comment, enter your name, email address, and url like you normally do.

As soon as you put your cursor in the comments box, you’ll see CommentLuv do it’s thing and retrieve the latest 10 blog posts from your chosen url which it will display below the comment box.

Select the post you want to use, and then leave your comment. Easy!

Final Thoughts

I’m quite excited to try CommentLuv Premium on this blog to see if it works out. As I see it, I’m giving all you guys an opportunity to get a do-follow link, with your keywords on a PR2 (and growing) blog.

In exchange I’ll get more discussion for each post that I write. Win-win for me and you!

I’m not going to approve any spammy comments though. So please don’t bother trying to abuse this if you’re not going to provide any additional value.

What do you think? With this blog becoming CommentLuv Premium enabled provide you with enough incentive to comment?

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The initial Google Panda update hit at the end of February and it took out tons of websites. Luckily, my websites escaped unscathed, and I breathed a huge sign of relief.

Unfortunately, this was just the first of many Google Panda updates. In April, when Panda Update 2.0 struck, I was not so lucky. One of my most profitable sites got hit hard, which put a big dent in my earnings.

Which was surprising, since it was an aged site, with all unique and quality content. Plus, it had good user engagement with lots of real, blog comments.

Take a look my Clicky traffic stats from that time period:

April 10th: 508 visitors
April 11th: 181 visitors
April 12th: 69 visitors

Basically, I had just lost 86% of my traffic overnight. The site was earning around $200-$250 a day so it really hurt to lose a good chunk of this income. I was still ranked decently for quite a few of my keywords. It was just that the keywords that were driving the majority of traffic to my site had dropped out of the top 100 completely.

I did a variety of things to attempt to recover from the loss. I started added new content to the site, I removed my Google Adsense Ads, and I tried fixing broken links on the site.

And it worked…kind of. My four highest traffic keywords had returned to their original rankings, and traffic increased accordingly. (Note: I now attribute most of this to the newly added content as I later put back my Adsense ads with no negative effect)

Unfortunately, my two most important money keywords did not return. So while my traffic was almost back to normal, my earnings from the site were still way lower than before.

I went into link building mode and built hundreds of additional backlinks for these keywords, but nothing seemed to help. After a couple of weeks, these two keywords continued to remain outside of the Top 100 search results.

I felt defeated by Google Panda, and I pretty much gave up. Why keep building backlinks if I wasn’t seeing any results?

Here were my rankings for keyword 1 from January till the beginning of August. My rankings for this keyword ranged from a high of #4 to a low of #12 before dropping out of the top 100. You’ll notice that it did randomly return for a week or so before it dropped off again for good.

And here were the rankings for keyword 2 from the same time period. For this keyword, my rankings ranged from #5 to #15 before disappearing.

Panda Update Recovery

Fast forward to a month ago, when I decided to rekindle my efforts and try to get these two keywords ranking again. I did some research on some other Google Panda articles to see if there were any Panda update recovery strategies I could try. One common theme that I got from my research was that Google was placing an increasing emphasis on ranking quality content.

Of course, the term quality content is pretty subjective. But Google did publish their guidelines awhile back on building high quality sites. So I took some notes from this article, and started evaluating of my own content.

If you look at the two pages that I was trying to rank for, they were pretty decent quality wise. Both were review articles about major brands in my niche’s space. Each had around 500 words of original content and written by a native English speaker.

But, there was definitely room for improvement.

First I started with keyword 1. I went back and revised my review article and updated it to be more current. This resulted in the addition of a couple of new paragraphs to the article and bumped up the word count to 750 words or so. I’m not talking about fluff content to pad my word count either, but good high quality work that added value to my review.

In addition, I added 3-4 screenshots to my review, while also making sure to include my keyword in the ALT tag of each image. Adding these extra images really helped I think. Not only does Google love content like images (and video), but your readers will as well. Win-win, right?

Lastly, I spent a couple of days doing some link building to my new, improved content.

And guess what? Just 2 weeks later, my rankings for keyword 1 reappeared.

With the added confidence that I might be on to something, I repeated the same process for keyword 2 and improved the quality of the second review article as well. This time I saw results even faster as it took only 3 days for my rankings to reappear after my changes.

After more than 3 months out of the top 100, both keywords are now back in top 20. So far the rankings have held steady for now, so I’m reasonably confident at this point they are back to stay. And most importantly, my income from these keywords has returned as well.

Final Thoughts

While it’s hard to draw conclusions from a small sample size like this, I hope you guys got some value out of this case study. Personally, I’m very excited with these results I got, and it’s great to know that it is possible to recover from the Google Panda update.

In this post Panda world, quality content does matter. Combine solid link building strategies with good quality content and I’m convinced that your rankings will start to improve.

What do you think of my results? Please leave your comments below.

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You want to build an email list right? Well, if you have your own site, then adding an opt-in form to your site can be any easy way to increase the number of subscribers to your email list.

If you look at various blogs, you’ll see that people do this in many different ways. Some use lightbox popups, others place an opt-in form in their sidebars, and some choose to put them in the bottom of their posts.

Today I want to review a WordPress plugin I’ve been using on this site for a few months now, called WP Subscribers, which was created by Jenni from IntenseBlog.com.

WP Subscribers is jam packed full of features and allows you to add all different types of opt-in forms to your site including:

• Lightbox Popups
• Header/Footer Bar Opt-in forms
• In-Post Opt-in forms
• Custom Opt-in forms (place anywhere)
• Traditional Exit Popups
• HTML Exit Popups

If you have been browsing around my blog for a bit, you can see I’m using both a Lightbox Popup and a Custom Opt-in form in my sidebar. All this was done with WP Subscribers, which makes the process relatively simple to do.

Setting up WP Subscribers

WP Subscribers supports all the major email autoresponders, including AWeber (what I use), GetResponse, and MailChimp. In the Setup Opt-ins page, there’s a form where you paste in the html code from your favorite autoresponder. Then press the Detect your form code button and the plugin will extract the info it needs from your code.

The Create Opt-In forms page has tabs to create all the different types of opt-in forms. To create a Lightbox popup for example, you can choose from one of the 12 included lightbox templates. Each template also has 8 different color schemes. To put the specific content for the popup, you can insert your Popup Title and Popup Content using the free-form text areas.

The Custom Opt-in form works similarly, except there’s no templates to choose from. After inputing your form Title and Content, you have to style it yourself using the settings options. This is relatively simple, and you can also use custom CSS if you prefer. WPSubscribers includes a Custom Opt-In widget, so adding the form was just a matter of adding that widget to my sidebar.

Other Cool Features

As I mentioned, WP Subscribers is packed full of features, many which I haven’t even tried yet.

One of these is the Facebook Connect integration. This lets you add a Facebook connect button to any opt-in or on your blog and it will automatically subscribe a visitor via their FB account, without them having to directly enter their Name and Email address.

WP Subscribers also supports a list building referral system. You can make it so your subscribers get points for referring visitors to your list which they can redeem for whatever incentive you choose. If you have something good to giveaway, this can be a fantastic way have your email opt-ins grow virally.

WP Subscribers Negatives

WP Subscribers can do so many different things, but with this comes some extra complexity. The settings pages are quite filled with options, and I think less tech savvy users may get overwhelmed when they first start using the plugin.

WP Subscribers does include a nice set of tutorials to demonstrate the various features of the plugin. Some tutorials have written step-by-step instructions which is nice, and some have video demonstrations. The videos are silent though, and I do wish Jenni would narrate them (or hire someone to narrate them) to make them easier to follow.

My biggest beef with WP Subscribers though is with its AWeber integration. The plugin doesn’t add the AWeber tracking pixel to its opt-in form, so it can’t track my form impressions inside my Aweber dashboard. Although the plugin has its own built-in analytics, I’m not a huge fan of it and I would rather look at my stats from inside my AWeber account. It seems like a weird oversight, but hopefully this gets addressed in a future version.

Popup Domination vs WP Subscribers

The biggest competition to WP Subscribers is Popup Domination by Michael Dunlop. Popup Domination is probably the most popular lightbox opt-in script out there and is used by some of the most well known bloggers. So how does WP Subscribers compare vs Popup Domination?

Well as you can probably see, WP Subscribers can do way more things then Popup Domination can. While Popup Domination is limited to lightbox popups, WP Subscribers can do that and much more. The ability of WP Subscribers to add all the different opt-in forms to your site can really do wonders for increasing the size of your email list.

That said, Popup Domination does have some nice advantages. First of all, it’s quite a bit easier to use out of the box and I think the lightbox templates are slightly more polished looking than WP Subscriber’s. It works seamlessly with AWeber in terms of tracking and it also includes a standalone version for people not using WordPress.

So which one should you choose? It really depends on your needs. If you need to be able to integrate multiple opt-in forms on your site or are interested in the Facebook connect or subscriber referral features, then go with WP Subscribers. It’s super powerful when you really delve into it.

If all you need want to use is a nice looking lightbox popup that you can setup really quickly, you may want to consider Popup Domination.

Price-wise, Popup Domination is a $47 one time fee, and can be used on unlimited sites. WP Subscribers has 2 licensing options. The first option is a 3 site license for $47. Or you can pay $97 and use it on unlimited sites.

Final Thoughts

Before you go rush out and buy any of these products though, make sure you have something valuable to give away. You need a good incentive for people to actually join your email list.

It could be as simple as a free report or maybe some software you create that you know your visitors will love. Combine this with a wordpress plugin like WP Subscribers, and you can really start to grow your email list.

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I’m one of those people that need to write a todo list each day. If I don’t, I end up not getting anything done, wasting an entire day surfing the net or watching TV.

I need to have some tangible goals in place that I can check off, so I can feel productive about my day. This keeps me on track, and helps me prioritize the important things I need to get done.

A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across this awesome web application called WorkFlowy. The whole tool is built around the concept of creating lists.

Lots and lots of lists.

The concept is really simple, but its execution is fantastic. Not only do I now use WorkFlowy to track my todos each day, it’s also become the place I go to organize my thoughts and ideas. It’s pretty cool, so let me share with you how it works.

WorkFlowy Overview

After creating your free WorkFlowy account, you start out with a blank slate. To get going, you should create some top level lists. Currently, I have three: IM Stuff, Personal, Work. But really, it’s up to you and you can pretty much organize things however you like.

In WorkFlowy, lists can have an arbitrary number of items. Items become sublists by nesting other items under them. Nesting an item is as simple as pressing the TAB key.

As you start using WorkFlowy more and more, you will end up creating a giant, constantly changing document of lists. You might think this could get unwieldy, but this turns out not to be the case.

Clicking on the bullet next to each item zooms in, which displays only what’s in that sublist. As you keep drilling farther and farther down, a breadcrumb menu at the top is kept updated to help you navigate back to where you want to go.

Lists can be collapsed and expanded with a click of the mouse. And using the search box is a handy way of filtering your list with items that only contain your search terms.

Watch how this all works in this 45 second intro WorkFlowy video:

WorkFlowy keeps it simple by adding just a few extra functions. This includes the ability to:

• Mark items complete as you finish them.
• Add arbitrary notes to items.
• Tag items using # (tag) or @ (person) to make searching easier.
• Export your lists to the clipboard.
• Share your lists (or sublists) with others and edit them in near real-time.

How I Use WorkFlowy

While I initially started using WorkFlowy as my main todo list, I’ve now begun using it for a lot more than that. I’ll use it to brainstorm ideas that I have, and organize notes for any projects I am currently working on.

As an example, for this blog I’ll use WorkFlowy to keep track of the blog topics I want to write about. If a new blog topic pops into my head, I’ll quickly add it so I won’t forget. Then when before I sit down to write a particular post, I’ll use Workflowy to create an outline and organize my thoughts around what I want to write about.

I’m not a natural writer, so this really helps me through the writing process.

What’s nice is that WorkFlowy it’s completely on the web, so it will work on my Mac or PC. There’s also a nice mobile version, that will work on iPhone and Android phones as well. This makes it super convenient, so I always have access to my lists wherever I am. It has become one of my essential online business tools.

Does WorkFlowy seems like something you would use? If so, check it out. It’s easy to learn and creating an account is free.

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You’ve been blogging for more than six months now. It’s time to take a new leap, it’s time to prove to yourself that all the efforts you put into delivering great content on a consistent basis and into marketing that content is not in vain. It’s time to start getting something in return from the good things you have given to the world.

One of the major reasons why people blog is to make money online, and after several months or even years many of them find it difficult to make money from their efforts simply because they don’t know how. If you’re in such situation this article will give you a few ways to make money online using your blog, and if you’re just getting started the methods listed below can be equally effective.

Offer Your Expertise

This is personally one of my favorite ways to make money online, and what I currently use. If you’ve been blogging for more than 6 months now then there is every probability that thousands of people read your blog monthly and at least one of them sees you as an expert. You can easily use this to your advantage to make more money from your blogging efforts by offering your expertise to your readers.

This could be in the form of you consulting with them. It could be in the form of you working for them. It could be in any other form, but it must be in an area where your readers already perceive you as an expert.

Take Joost de Valk (Yoast to many), who’s developed many popular wordpress plugins like the WordPress SEO plugin. People see him as a WordPress and SEO expert and because of that, he is able to make some extra money offering WordPress and SEO consulting.

The SEM Group is another example of a company that has a good blog which they leverage to market their Google Places SEO services which will help you Google Places optimisation immensely.

The reality is that irrespective of your niche, you have at least one unique skill you can start offering to your readers to start making money today. Learn to be a unique blogger, which will help you attract readers to your blog.

Review Affiliate Products

The next method on this list you can utilize to start making more money from your blog is by reviewing useful affiliate products occasionally.

The reality is that your reason for blogging in the first place is to impart value in your readers and help them and the reality is that value doesn’t necessarily mean free. There are situations in which your readers will need premium tools to make their work easier and effective and you can easily use this opportunity to review relevant affiliate products that your readers would love to buy.

This way, you will be helping them get results easily while at the same time making some bucks for your recommendation.

On this blog, Chris has reviewed products like Clicky and Build My Rank. These are products he uses everyday and believes in, so it makes sense for him to write an in-depth review. If you use and like your Hostgator webhosting for example, it makes sense to write your own Hostgator review to make some additional commissions. Don’t try to write positive reviews about every product under the sun though. Otherwise you’ll soon start to lose credibility with your readers who are wondering if you’re just doing it for the money.

Create Your Own Product

As bloggers, we all are experts in our fields. For readers to listen to you it means they see you as someone who knows what he is doing. After all, no one wants to spend his/her time reading things from someone they think don’t know what he is doing.

The fact that your readers already see you as an expert is enough for you to make money. All you need to do is create a product related to what you blog about, and then do all within your power to market the heck out of it. This way you will be helping more people while at the same time making money from your blogging efforts.

Look at someone like Kim Roach who’s well known for her excellent traffic tips. All she did was package together some of her favorite traffic strategies into high quality videos, and released them as a product called the Traffic Dashboard. With the number of loyal fans her blog has, there’s no doubt she has sold 1000′s of copies.

Final Thoughts

While there are certainly other ways to make money online, these are three of my favorites that I’ve used on my own blog. And if you don’t have a site yet, don’t worry. It’s really not hard to learn how to start a blog. So try these tips out for yourself, and let me know what you think.

Onibalusi is a 17-year-old blogger and the founder of the popular internet marketing blog, YoungPrePro. He helps bloggers learn how to make quick cash.