This is very dangerous! Your sites could start going down one by one. Be sure not to use ‘admin’ as your user name and choose a strong password.

I’ve seen a lot of folks talking about how their WordPress blogs are being hacked lately. You should always update your WordPress blogs every singe time an update comes out. Especially if it’s a security issue. I personally know about ten people who have had lots of their blogs hacked within the last month. That is why I want to take a moment and share a tip with you that can help keep your WordPress blogs a bit safer.

Big Tip: hide your list of plugins. The reason you should hide your list of plugins is because a hacker can find out what plugins you use by following this url: www.example.com/wp-content/plugins. Obviously replace ‘example.com’ with whatever your site is.

Hackers find out which plugins have vulnerabilities and regularly exploit them so it’s a good idea to hide your list of plugins. How do we do this?

• Open up notepad and save a blank file named “index.htm.” You actually need to put the quotes around that so   the file isn’t accidentally saved as a text file.

• Now open up your FTP client and upload the empty file you just created (index.htm) into the wp-  content/plugins directory on your server.

You’re finished!! Piece of cake right?  You might also take care to cover your templates too. Just do the exact same thing but upload the empty file to wp-content/themes and that will take care of your templates.

I strongly recommend that you try this out and update all of your wordpress blogs with this little fix. It would be a terrible shame to have that blog you have been working on for two years suddenly die. These hackers are usually just malicious nerds who have nothing better to do than just totally mess up your site. They will get inside and just cause havoc for the fun of it. Some hackers will try to inject things into your sql database by exploiting security vulnerabilities in old versions of WordPress.

By the way, you can see lots of blogs that haven’t covered their tracks by googling wp-content/plugins. Don’t be one of them!

I’m talking about scoring an Alexa rating of 65,000 in a matter of a few months! Yes, believe it or not it can be done, and you can do it too. By the time you get done reading this article you’ll know all you need to know to create a brand new blog and get just tons and tons of traffic for free. Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? Rest assured it is quite possible. So how do we do it? Read on.

Let me caution you first that this is not for lazy bloggers and heaven knows, most bloggers are lazy. Very lazy! This is going to require lots of writing and lots of work but is well worth it. Ever heard of ‘Google Trends?’

Check out this link: Google Trends and you will see the top 100 google trends. These are the top searches for the day and are updated every hour. Google gives us google trends because they want us to provide information about these keywords. You should think of each trend as a keyword because that’s really what it is. Some of these trends get ten, twenty or even eighty thousand (!) searches in a single day! Are you starting to get the picture?

In case you are not getting the picture yet let me state it plainly. You should start a google trends blog and blog about google trends. You can name the blog whatever you want as it will be a very general blog. You will end up blogging about everything under the sun and more if you do it right. This can easily get you 100,000 unique visits a month in no time at all, if you are good at it.

What is the right way to work google trends?

First of all you need to write about twenty five or thirty posts a day. That may sound like a lot and it is but the posts can be short and they don’t have to be top quality. In light of that you can just pump them out one after another. I aim for 200 - 250 word posts and I don’t check the spelling. I just publish and move on to the next one. You see, you will need to post alot because this is a numbers game. What you are trying to do is ‘catch’ a trend.  You want to be the one ranking in position one for at least one of these trends.

Get a Link From Google!

You may also get a link from google trends if you are lucky, and that’s a PR7 link! You can’t knock every one of them out of the park so that’s why you need to post a whole lot. This is real blogging here. Some folks do this professionally and work nothing but trends.

What Makes This Work?

What I would like you to understand is that many of these trend keywords are brand new keywords. Think about this: suppose you see a breaking news update on CNN and Joe Schlazzenburgersauce killed 100 people in somewheretown. People will hear about this and then search this guys name in google to see what they can find, and that is how a new keyword is born. At least in this case.

So a zillion people search for Joe Schlazzenburgersauce and google doesn’t really have any information about this guy yet. So if you are one of the first people to blog about Joe Schlazzenburgersauce then you are going to rank near or at the top for this guys name. See how it works? To do this you need to have good timing. These trends are updated every hour so it can be hard to keep track of which ones are going up and by how much. That’s another reason you need to post alot.

Check Out A Real Trends Site For Yourself

The reason I wrote this post today was because as I was browsing the net today I ran across a really good example of a trends site at No Hard Times. Check out the alexa which is still under 100,000 and notice that the archives only go back to may. This site is on a subdomain so if you go to the who is it only gives the info about the main domain. But the alexa rank is good. Notice this blogger worked trends exclusively.

Last thing I want to say is that you will be more likely to catch a trend if you have lots of links to your blog first. My favorite technique is to write a trend and then immediately after posting it I fire up Bookmarking Demon and bookmark my post like crazy, being sure to use the trend keyword as the anchor text in my bookmark. I always use the trend keyword in the title of the post as well as in the post content itself. I bold the keyword once or twice for good measure.

As far as monetization goes I use adsense but beware. The traffic is not targeted so you need lots and lots of traffic to make any money. Study the blog I linked to above and try it yourself. You might be amazed!

There are a few reasons I would like to share with you but two come to mind immediately. The first one is avoiding the Google Sandbox. For those that don’t know what the sandbox is let me explain. The sandbox is a term used to describe an adverse effect on your sites ranking when it’s new. In other words if you have a relatively new site that suddenly disappears from the search results, you might be sandboxed.

This has nothing to do with bad seo or anything like that. This is just a normal process that new sites go through. You could have a site that is say, 4 months old and it’s starting to bring in some traffic. Then, suddenly one day you realize that your sites now ranks on page 432 for your keywords. I should point out that Google never clearly stated or admitted that the sandbox exists but many experienced seo’s will attest to it’s existence.

Some believe it is just an aging filter used to combat spam. From personal experience I would have to say that the sandbox definitely exists and it’s quite annoying. One day I’m ranking on page one for my keywords and the next day I’m not even in the top one hundred. It usually takes a month or two to emerge from the dreaded sandbox and things go back to normal after that. still, it’s a couple months of downtime.

The sandbox generally only applies to sites younger than one year and usually much newer than that. This is where buying preowned domains comes in. Preowned domains have already gone through the whole sandbox treatment assuming they are older than a two years. This is very convenient to say the least.

The Older The Better

Another reason to buy preowned domains is the age factor. Age plays an important part in rankings. Many times you will see sites ranking for competitive keywords just on their age alone. This is because Google gives more trust weight to older sites. They gain in authority. So it’s actually quite possible to purchase an aged domain and make money with it in the same week. Sometimes these aged domains just rank based on their authority alone. It is a great match with adsense.

So between avoiding the sandbox and having instant authority it should not surprize your that many experienced internet marketers just love preowned domains.

Where to Buy Preowned Domains.

You can find them at freshdrop.net for $5. Talk about sweet! But you should be careful when purchasing a preowned domain. Do a little research and make sure it wasn’t used for spam or anything shady. You can do this by using a site: command on the domain in google. Just go to google and type site:mysite.com and see what comes up. If you see links to porn or gambling then avoid the domain. If you see cached pages then you might want to buy that domain right away.

Sometimes if you check that inlinks on a preowned you could be pleasantly surprised! I found on that had links from the state of Virginia…talk about authority! You might find some really legit business or finance sites that have links from a well known newspaper like the NY Times. You’ll find all kinds of cool goodies if you look hard enough. Don’t worry about page rank because it really doesn’t matter. What matters is age and authority.

Link building is a task we must all devote some time to everyday if we want to be successful. High rankings depend largely on the amount of anchored backlinks you have and traffic depends on how high you rank in the serps. Any little thing that we can do to help us save some time in our link building efforts should not go unnoticed. In that regard I want to introduce you to a new plugin I stumbled upon.

It’s called Ping Crawl. Ping Crawl is a very clever little devil indeed! When you activate this plugin it will get links to your posts, on the deep pages automatically. Here’s how it works.

Whenever you post, Ping Crawl finds similar posts on other blogs and posts them as links at the bottom of your post. The cool part is that first, Ping Crawl checks to see if the posts allows pingbacks using the post tags.  If they do then they are added as links.  So far this has a reported  %80 success rate.

The plugin was cleverly designed to use your tags to perform searches using googles api key to check for 35 (you can adjust that) results that also contain the same tag name.  It does this for each tag you put on your post. The idea here is to find truly relevant posts. Once Ping Crawl has its 35 results it checks it loops through them and checks to make sure that the resulting pages have a pingback in the meta tag. It also checks to make sure ‘trackback’ is in the source code. If both of these requirements are met then the result is stored in memory. Finally, once Ping Crawl has found 5 legitimate pingable targets the links are added to your post.

At this point the urls that were stored in memory are retrieved and a pingback is sent.  This is a terrific way to easily get some free links! I’ve been using this plugin to good effect on some of my other blogs such as celebrity blogs etc…

One thing about this plugin is that it takes a minute or two for Ping Crawl to run. It depends on how many tags you use and the creator of this cool plugin recommends using no more than three tags per post.

This is a good way to get some links to a new blog and depending on your tags you might get some sweet links and even some traffic. I imagine this would work really well with an auto blog setup. For instance, if you outsourced a hundred articles and set a cron job up to post every other day, you could basically get links automatically.

I found this cool plugin at a cool site called Bluehat Seo. You can download the plugin here.

Have fun.

For those of you who are really new to the blogging game and haven’t experienced the hassles of spam let me explain a little. You have a blog and you are posting away and everything is hunk-dory. You’re not getting any traffic but it’s still hunky-dory. Then, one day you see an alert in your email that says you need to moderate some comments on your blog.

You get all excited because finally someone has left a comment on your blog! Your eyes glaze over as your taste true success for the first time ever online. As you make your way to your blog you imagine how once it takes off, you’ll be at the beach just hanging and blogging. Living the good life…

You get to your blog and go to the admin panel to check your comments. You have 500 comments!! “What’s going on here?” you think to yourself. Upon closer inspection you see that almost all of the comments are total spam. Just tons of links and nonsensical gibberish. Of course whenever this happens there are always a few ‘non spam’ comments mixed in. So this means you have to go through all the comments one by one and delete about 495 of them!

Talk about a waste of time. This is when you really learn to appreciate Askimet. Askimet is your anti spam tool for WordPress blogs. Some folks have a little trouble activating Askimet because you need and api key from WordPress. No worries, it’s a piece of cake!

First of all you need an account with WordPress. That’s free and easy. Then:

1. If you don’t already have it in your admin panel when you install WordPress then like any plugin, you simply upload it via ftp to your server.  Just navigate first to your public_html folder. Then from there go to the wp_content folder.  Finally you’ll see the ‘plugins’ folder. Naturally, that’s the one you upload your plugins to.
2. Go to the plugins tab in your admin panel (top right next to settings) and activate the plugin by clicking ‘activate’
3. You’re not finished yet. With many plugins this is all you need to do. That’s why WordPress is so cool. However with the Askimet pluing we need to do a few more things.  You’ll notice near the top of the page it says that Askimet is almost ready and you need your WordPress api key.
4. Simply click the link and you should see your api key at the bottom of the page.
5. Enter your api key into Askimet.

That’s it! Now you don’t need to spend time fooling with spam comments. Askimet will take anything that looks like spam and put it in a queue for a few days then delete it. Most spam comments have a number of links in them so they are easy for Askimet to spot. Although legit comments do sometimes get caught up with the rest.  If you aren’t using Askimet you probably should be.

Looking at your stats and interpreting the information is a vital part of your ongoing business strategy. You have to know where your site or sites are ranking and for which terms. You want to be informed of your page rank and any changes that take place. We want to know how many visitors we’ve had and how many hits we’ve had. We want to know how many pages have been visited and if the pages are indexed in the first place.

There’s a lot of information in our stats that can help us adjust our business plans accordingly. In short, we want to know which sites need our attention more than others. So I would imagine if you are reading this up until now then you are probably saying to yourself, “Yeah, that all makes sense but that’s what I have Google analytics for…and it’s free.”

Well I used to use Google analytics as well and it is a very good free tool for sure. But the problem is that when you have many domains it is extremely time consuming (but not unpleasant mind you) to go to each account and check the stats. I have over 300 sites and thousands of pages to keep track of. That’s why I have Domain Dashboard.

Check this out: with Domain Dashboard you can check all your stats, manage all of your login details and keep track of your keyword rankings for all of your sites in one place. You can also access your cpanel’s at all of your hosting accounts so you never have to go bouncing around from one to the other again. Domain Dashboard allows me to free up valuable time to work on more important things like building links etc…

Domain Dashboard shows you the total domains, total pages indexed, total domains indexed, total domains with traffic, top 10 domains receiving unique visitors and the top ten most recent domains indexed. In the statistics panel it will also show you spider activity, bandwidth and robot activity.

It is really easy to set up and get this software running that even a total newbie can do it. You just enter your web host manager login, password, and ip address, create a nickname for your account and that’s it. Domain Dashboard will go a retrieve all of your information. It took me 5 minutes to download, install and get my info together and Domain Dashboard has been working for me ever since.

This is a must have tool for serious internet entrepreneurs with multiple websites and domains. This is not a tool for someone who has yet to make money online. If you are in the “I haven’t made any real money yet” category then this is probably not for you. You would be better off purchasing other software first like BANS, Seo Elite, Keyword Elite and perhaps after that some link building software such as Bookmarking Demon, Article Submitter Platinum (it auto submits your articles to hundreds of directories) and Fast Blog Finder.

Once you have say, more than 30 sites or so you may want to consider picking up Domain Dashboard. If you have closer to 80 or 100 sites then you absolutely need this. You want to be working on your business not in your business right?

So again I recommend a true time saver and time is money. When I think of all the time this software saves me I just can’t help but whole heartedly recommend this little gem.

A family member was talking to me at the last family gathering about making money online. He is very enthusiastic and about to really jump in and get dirty! The problem is he, like all of us at one time, has no clue what so ever about how to make money online. Zero. Anyhow, he was asking me for advice incessantly. “What should I do first?” he kept asking me. I told him that there are lots of ways to make money online and some are more complicated than others.

After some reflection I told him to go out and buy BANS first and foremost. I explained to him that BANS is a no brainer and even if you have are really terrible at internet marketing, if you build enough BANS sites you will make money. He seemed to like that idea and he is now on his way to creating a BANS empire.

BANS is something I recommend for everybody but especially for noobys. It is just so simple and uncomplicated and really hard to mess up. Let me explain a little bit about how it all works.

First of all this is an Ebay partner thing. You need to sign up as an Ebay affiliate. It’s all in the BANS user manual which by the way is THE BEST user manual I have ever seen! So what you are actually doing is becoming an Ebay affiliate and creating a store to sell highly targeted items. It works like a charm.

If you plan to create a whole lot of BANS site, which is what I recommend, then you will want to sign up at hostgator for a reseller account. Then, once you have your reseller account and you’ve signed up at Ebay you are ready to start.

You need to buy a domain to set up BANS on. Do not use a dot info domain!! Google has changed its algorithm as of about April 2008 and all of my dot info BANS sites got de indexed! Not all of them actually but the vast majority of them did. My dot coms are perfectly fine. So NO DOT INFO’S.

Once you have your new domain and you’ve transferred it to your reseller account you simply upload the BANS software to the appropriate folder and follow the simple directions. It takes me about 10 minutes to set up a three page site/store. Do you see the potential here?

I actually upload BANS to the ’skel’ file in my main domain at my reseller account. This saves time on future installations as now, every domain that I transfer to my reseller account will automatically have bans uploaded to it. So taking this into consideration I can actually set up an entire BANS site in 4 minutes flat! Once you get the hang of it you can put up dozens of sites in a single day. It is tedious but profitable.

I keep my BANS sites small and extremely targeted. The method I recommend is based on volume and trickle traffic. I target very low competition keywords that get maybe just a few searches per day. for instance I had one site that featured as the main keyword “Fender Stratocaster Electric Guitar 1972 Used Free Delivery.” It’s true, I found this keyword while doing my keyword research and it is actually something that people search for…when they are ready to buy!

So with keywords like that it’s no wonder that I take position one in many cases. I don’t get much traffic to my sites but the traffic I get converts well and that is all that matters to me. I aim to make about a dollar a day from each of my BANS sites. Since they are so easy to set up those dollars start adding up.

You get a commission from each sale but what’s even better is that if someone signs up for a new Ebay account, you make $25! Can this be exploited? It sure can but I will save that for another post. I just want you to realize how doable this is. Surely you can average a buck a day from one site right? I don’t think that that is wanting too much. The challenge is scaling it up and creating a couple hundred sites but that’s what BANS is supposed to do.

First I would like to say a few words about article marketing in general before I get on to the actual review. Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to build links hands down. For those who don’t know how or why article marketing is so effective let me briefly explain how it works.

When you submit an article to an article directory you are allow to place two and sometimes three links in the resource box. The resource box is where you can write a little something about yourself or your website and leave a few links. I always leave three links in the resource box even if some of my articles get denied because most of them are approved. Starting to get the idea? Let’s put some numbers to it and say that submit your articles to all the directories you can and one hundred of them get approved. Each article has three links in the resource box so that totals 300 links.

Don’t expect your links to show up quickly because they don’t. Your articles are buried deep in the article directory and it will take a while before the search engines count them all. So expect to see the results of your article submissions show up slowly over time. I am experimenting with the idea of gathering all the urls from the article directories where my articles are kept and pinging them to alert the search engines. I am just experimenting but so far this technique seems to help get more of those submitted articles indexed quicker. More testing is needed in order to refine the process and develop a script to do it automatically.

Article Submitter Platinum has about 374 article directories that you can submit to and, like the directory submitter, it is a semi automatic process…sort of.

You simply enter in your article and fill in the blanks. Then you can navigate from the top of the list to the bottom and submit your article to each and every site on the list. Article Submitter Platinum will load your information at each new article directory saving valuable time.

But here’s the kicker. Article Submitter Platinum has an ‘auto submit’ feature that allows you to submit to hundreds (but not all) of the directories! You just click ’submit’ and off it goes. Article submitter platinum will enter all the captchas and even pick the categories. Too bad directory submitters can’t do what this article submitter does. This is truly automatic but it doesn’t submit to all of the directories, only about half 200 of them or so.

I have no complaints about this software except for the fact that sometime it doesn’t pull up the right category. Unfortunately I don’t recommend using this software if you are submitting articles for clients for that very reason. But for myself this is what I use. I actually used to manually go to about 33 article directories and slow submit to them. How inefficient! Now I take ten minutes, write an article and submit. Done, finished.

The great thing about article marketing is that webmasters who are looking for free articles will download your articles from these directories and put them on their sites. They are supposed to keep your links in the resource box but some don’t. None the less this is the viral aspect of article marketing and it is quite effective. I have a number of articles that were downloaded 500 times or more over the years and the links just keep coming.

If you don’t have Article Submitter Platinum then I suggest you get it as it is a great time saver and it generates links like crazy.

I have tried a number of directory submitters over the years and this one by Brad Callen is probably the best in my opinion. First of all when discussing directory submitters, those of us who have some experience with this type of software know what the main problem can be. The most irritating problem of all is that the directories change status all the time.

Directories that used to be free are now free only with a reciprocal link or, sometimes they are not free at all anymore. Keeping the database up to date is the biggest issue in my book and I have to say that I have been a bit disappointed with every directory submitter I have ever tried including this one. Having said that I should also add that Brad does in fact try to keep updating the list from time to time. Overall I am satisfied with this aspect of Directory Submitter Gold by Brad Callen.

Other than that I absolutely love this software! It make the directory submission process semi automatic. You first need to load your information and just fill in the blanks. Directory Submitter Gold will ask you for your name, email, website title, url and so forth for each campaign. It will then load this information each time you navigate to a new directory saving you boat loads of time.
You still need to wade your way through the categories at the directories and choose the most relevant one so it isn’t completely automatic unfortunately, but none of them are.

The software’s interface is divided into columns showing you the name, type of directory, whether it is paid or free, the page rank, alexa rank, date last submitted, anchor text used and your description. Again I will remind you that to be completely honest the page rank information is only partially accurate and needs updating a little more often that Brad Callen actually updates it.

But as usual I don’t like to fuss too much over details. The point behind directory submissions is to generate anchored links. By far and large, directory submissions result in nice clean one way do follow links.

Directory links show up very slowly over time so it looks completely natural. In light of that I usually submit my new sites to a few hundred directories as soon as possible. I may even submit to more than that depending on how many links I need to rank competitively in a particular niche. One thing you should be aware of if you haven’t done directory submissions before is that not all of your submission will be approved. The directories can deny your site inclusion for any reason they want. They could dislike your site or find it to be unsuitable in their directory, or they could just be backed up and don’t want any new submissions.

Back to the software. Another important feature that Directory Submitter Gold offers is the ability to enter in multiple titles, keywords and descriptions for each campaign. What ever you enter in for a title will actually be used as your anchor text when your links shows up. So by varying the titles you actually vary the anchor texts. This is important if you want to avoid ‘Google Bombing.’

So the bottom line is that I do recommend Directory Submitter Gold by Brad Callen and I do feel it is the best choice among the directory submitters currently being offered. I do wish that Brad would clean up the list a little more often and update the page rank information but all in all those things do not detract from the overall usefulness of this software.

I still give it two thumbs up.

Created by Edwin Soft, Bookmarking Demon allows you to semi automatically sign up and register at each of the top 20 social bookmarking sites. These are sites like Faves, Getboo, Simpy and 17 others. All you have to do is enter the captcha when prompted and Bookmarking Demon will do the rest.

The idea behind Bookmarking Demon is to create links for your sites. Some people say the get tons of traffic with Bookmarking Demon but that hasn’t been the case in my experience. I basically use Bookmarking Demon to generate some anchored links and to help get new sites and pages indexed.

Some of the major social bookmarking sites are no follow and some are do follow but I don’t make too much of a fuss about that. A link is a link and don’t forget that Yahoo and MSN don’t care about do follow and no follow. Not only that but sometimes you may see in your Google webmaster tools that some of the links showing are supposed to be no follow. So it seems to me that sometimes Google follows the no follow links.

The point is that when you bookmark your site at these high traffic and often crawled sites, the search engines are more likely to find your links and follow them to your blog or site. This is how Bookmarking Demon can help you get your sites indexed. So as far as indexing goes Bookmarking Demon has been a great help for me.

There are some of these top social bookmarking sites that are in fact do follow. This is great because we can stack up those anchored links in a hurry and improve our pages rankings.

Bookmarking Demon will also search for scuttle sites on the web and register at those too. Scuttle sites are created by a script called ‘Scuttle.’ They are basically unknown bookmarking sites and there are hundreds if not thousands of them scattered across the web. A lot of these scuttle sites don’t even have an admin panel so guess what we can do with Bookmarking Demon? We can link like crazy! True they are not the highest quality links but anchored links all count a least a little bit.

As far as ease of use goes I think Bookmarking Demon is a piece of cake to use. I use it in a very simple way and don’t make use of all the features. For instance there is a proxy server for those of you who abuse BMD and get your IP’s banned at the social bookmarking sites. I haven’t been banned so I don’t use that but lots of new users seem a little overwhelmed when faced with all the options.

Again, I keep it simple. I simply sign up and register at the top social bookmarking sites. Once that’s done I go to the ‘Bookmark URL’ tab and enter my url’s. Bookmarking Demon will prompt you for a title name and keywords as well as a short description for each url you submit.

Then I click ‘bookmark’ and that’s it. It bookmarks all my urls! I could do this by hand and so could you, but in an effort to save lots of time I have no problem using this excellent software.

One thing potential buyers should be aware of is that Edwin is in the process of a major upgrade as of the time of this writing (July 16, 2008) and will soon be announcing Bookmarking Demon 4. It will be more expensive than the previous versions but if you purchase before the update you will be grandfathered in and thus avoid paying the ‘New Price.’

I highly recommend Bookmarking Demon as it saves time, generates one way links and helps to get your sites indexed more quickly.

From these four ways to get links to your site I would have to say that commenting on blogs will get you the least amount of links. Having said that I would also like to add that I think there is no better way to score some real quality links. Almost all of your article submissions, directory submissions and social bookmarking tags will be gray bar links, meaning they are a page rank zero.

So blog commenting is a really practical way to grab some high page rank links from authority sites. Page rank isn’t everything but it is a factor in how Google ranks your site. It also reflects the authority of your site to some degree. We can all agree that a site with a page rank 8 is an authoritative site.

I used to use Blog Comment Demon by Edwin Soft but I switched to Fast Blog Finder for one particular reason. Fast Blog Finder parses the do follow from the no follow. I have checked and double checked just to make sure that it was accurate and indeed it was.

I would also say that Fast Blog Finder easily finds many more blogs than Comment Demon or the free program Real LInk Finder. Real Link Finder is a great free tool no doubt but it doesn’t really compare to Fast Blog Finder. I have lots of experience with both and Fast Blog Finder is my preferred tool for blog commenting nowadays.

With Fast Blog Finder you can refine your search for relevant blogs according to a variety of criteria. It will search for both do follow and no follow together or just do follow if you want. You just type in a broad search term related to your niche and press start. This software shows you the url of the blog post, the page rank of the domain, the page rank of the post page, the number of outbound links and whether the page is do follow or no follow.

Fast Blog Finder saves your results so you can go back later and do a comment run. I often get thousands of blogs in my results to comment on. There is just no way you can comment on that many blogs in one sitting so it’s great that it automatically saves your lists for you. You don’t have to save and store away any lists or anything. Nice and lazy!

The real key in knowing how to fully exploit this powerful tool is knowing how to search. Most people do exactly what I recommended above which was to enter a broad search term into Fast Blog Finder and let it bring in relevant results. That is just fine and dandy but you could get a little creative here and find some really high page rank pages to post on. I have found personally a ton of PR6 posts that are actually do follow and they had just a few comments on them.

I am not going to give away all my secrets but I will give you a tip. Think about what kind of pages get lots of trackbacks. It is already well known that pages that get lots of trackbacks end up with high PR. Can you think of any reasons why lots of folks would send a trackback to a post? Maybe someone was link baiting with a free download of some sort… Hmmm

Learn how to search for footprints. Footprints in this sense are phrases that are common to a certain type of blog or post. For instance “download free” is a footprint. This query will bring back results where there was a free download of some sort. If this was on a blog then there are sure to be some trackbacks. Do you see what I mean?

Bottom line is I highly recommend Fast Blog Finder as a one way link building tool. It is in my opinion the best program for blog commenting out there today. With a little creativity you should be able to score some awesome links in no time flat. In fact, I find this software addicting!

Analyzing your competition is an absolute must. You should never just blindly create a site and try to start ranking for all kinds of keywords. This is an important step that I think a lot of inexperienced internet marketers don’t fully take advantage of.

Aside from helping you decide if a certain niche is worth pursuing, analyzing your competition is also a great way to learn about what it takes to rank number one particularly in the Google serps. The sites taking position one in Google must be doing something right in Google’s eyes and this is important for us to understand. These sites sitting at the top of the serps have done a tremendous amount of successful research and work to attain their elevated ranking.

We can just simply copy the seo strategy of the top sites and then go a bit beyond to take position one for ourselves. Think about it. Some ambitious webmaster or seo has put in countless hours finding places and ways to get links from all sorts of relevant sites. A lot of time goes into that. Yet all we have to do is analyze their on page and off page (back links that is) seo strategy and presto! We have a winning plan.

This is where SEO Elite comes in to play. With SEO Elite I can analyze both the on page and off page statistics of my top competitors. I can look at whether or not my competition is placing their keywords in the title and h1 tags. I can also look the keyword density of their content and if the keywords are in bold or h2 tags. This tells me a lot. For instance, right off the bat I know if my competitors know seo or not. If they have neglected to optimize their ‘easy to do’ on page factors then that is usually a good indication that their off page optimization is lacking as well.

It also gives you an idea as to whether or not you will have nagging long term competition or not. What I mean by that is sometimes, when you finally take position one away from your competitors they suddenly wake up and begin to try to out optimize you.

If however your top competition for a potential niche doesn’t even know how to optimize their on page factors then chances are they wont know how to fight back when you take position one from them. I like easy targets.

Next comes the critical off page optimization. This is basically about the back links. Did you ever wonder how many links it takes to get to the top of the serps? Well now you can know for sure. Just enter the url of the site you want to analyze into SEO Elite and I will show you ALL of your competitors back links. Not only that but it will show you what the anchor text being used in their back links. This is of huge importance. This will tell you how many links you need to take position one. Actually you will probably need about %30 more links than your top competitor.

SEO Elite will also give you the titles of the pages linking to your competitors. In this way you can get a feel for how relevant your competitors links are. Remember, links from relevant pages weigh more than links from non relevant pages. So say your top competitor has 100 links featuring the anchored keyword you want to rank for. Now let’s also say that these 100 links are mostly from non relevant pages. This is good news for you! This means that you could possible outrank your competitor with fewer links as long as your links are more relevant on the whole.

SEO Elite also provides the url of the page that is giving your competitor a link. For one thing if you discover a bunch of spammy links you can report them to Google as you approach the number one spot! Hey, it’s all part of the game. But perhaps more importantly you can find some great places to get links to your site.

I would say that one of the greatest benefits of using SEO Elite is being able to study some of the very creative methods that some webmasters use to achieve a top ranking. This can teach you a lot about how the search engines think. Once you analyze a hundred top ranking sites or so you will probably never read another ebook on how to rank in Google.

Personally, I’ve discovered many interesting strategies that I’ve not seen discussed anywhere online period…and I’m not about to discuss them either!

Brad Callen, the creator of SEO Elite takes pretty good care of his customers. My hard drive failed on me and I lost my software (I procrastinated backing up my files…bad, bad, bad!!). I email Brad and in no time flat I had another download link in my email with no bologna or anything. Great customer service all the way around in my experience.

I highly recommend SEO Elite to anyone who doesn’t have it yet is serious about making money online.

What Keyword Elite does and how to use it properly is of course two different things. Let me start with what it does and why I recommend it and then I’ll get into how I use Keyword Elite to begin a very important part of analysis called keyword research.

Keyword Elite will, like all other keyword tools, will create a great list of related keywords based upon the main and generally more broad keyword you enter in. This is called ‘project one.’ In fact, it takes a while but Keyword Elite will actually create a list of up to ten thousand related keywords. That’s quite a bit! It will grab keywords from meta tags and titles and even misspelled keywords. It will search Ask.com, Google suggestion tool, Yahoo, Freekeywords WT and keyword Discover if you have an account with them.

Once you have created a keyword list you can select a number of keywords to send to ‘project two.’ This is where Keyword Elite will analyze the cost per click information, number of results, number of searches the previous month, R/S ratio, KEI, and the number of Google campaigns. Not only do you get the number of Google campaigns but you can also see the website urls of the folks buying the ads. Needless to say that can be yet another resource to mine for effective keywords.

This is what I consider the meat of the software. With just this information alone you can make a much more informed decision regarding your keyword selection. You could do this all manually too but Keyword Elite is such a great time saver that I consider it a must have tool in every webmasters bag of tricks.

Another great function of Keyword Elite is the ability to analyze your competition. You can see the page rank of your competitors as well as a host of other statistics. For instance you can see if the keywords you are analyzing are being used in the title and header tags as well as the alt image tags and links. This is great because now you don’t have to go to each site one by one. You can get a complete overview all in one place at one time. Very convenient.

There are other valuable functions that Keyword Elite can perform but these are the ones I use most often.

I use Keyword Elite to generate a huge keyword list from which I select the most choice phrases. I then create a keyword list from each of these choice phrases and come up with even more keywords. Once I have a giant, massive keyword list I choose a few targeted phrases to send to project two where I will analyze the CPC, KEI and number of searches etc…

I only select the top buying phrases for further research but that doesn’t mean I just dump the rest of that massive list! I often use that leftover list to base my content and titles off of.

Now, in project I determine which keywords would be both profitable and easy to exploit. I look for keywords that have a high cost per click. I want ads on my site that pay well so CPC is important. I don’t want to do a lot of work only to find that I will get paid .02 per click. Once I find a decent paying keyword from among my top targeted list I then check out the KEI and number of searches.

KEI stands for Keyword Effectiveness Index. It is basically a ratio between the number of searches and the number of results showing for that query. The higher the KEI the less competition. However, I use the KEI more as general guidance than the ultimate determining factor. I always analyze the back links of the competition to help make my final determination but the KEI points me in the right direction.

The bottom line is that Keyword Elite is much more than just another keyword research tool. It has many features that help you save lots of time in doing your keyword research. Everything from generating great keyword lists (check out those misspelled keywords!) to analyzing to competition in very sneaky ways.

This is just a brief overview of what Keyword Elite can do and is in no way meant to be a comprehensive review. That would simply take too long as this is an incredibly versatile tool. I highly recommend it. Using Keyword Elite in conjunction with SEO Elite is a real powerhouse combination. This gives you such an enormous advantage over your competitors who only use the free tools.

If you haven’t done so already check out my ten part series on how to make money blogging.

1. Demand that each post you write REALLY be useful to your market. Think. Bring a new twist to an old subject. Connect 2 very different ideas and then write about how they relate to each other. The more unique and insightful you are, the more reason you give readers to keep coming back.

2. Respond to comments as soon as possible. Show appreciation for the comment and then get right to the point. Always take care to be polite, confident, and helpful in answering comments. This is a great opportunity for relationship-building. Don’t let communication with your market slide. If you don’t show up, they will stop showing up.

3. It may sound harsh, but some readers will actually downgrade you in their minds if they see bad grammar or misspellings. Edit & spell-check every time. Especially in a corporate blog, some readers consider minor errors to be a sign of incompetence. Your blog needs to be darned close to perfect in spelling and grammar.

4. Readers will email you with questions. You will hear some questions over and over. Write a great answer once, then use that same answer every time. Save your own time. Also, as you get an idea which questions many people are going to have, you can create a corporate blog FAQ page to feature the most common questions.

5. Crack the whip on yourself. Set up a feed reader that churns out a steady stream of fresh ideas from other bloggers every day. Set a writing schedule and stick that forces you to be cranking out new, unique, valuable material every day. Maybe it will help to imagine a bad, bad, evil-eyed boss standing over you.

Your corporate blog readers have high expectations. It’s important that you come through for them.

• Customers
• Prospects
• Vendors
• Employees
• Bosses

1. Look at your stats. What urls is your corporate blog traffic coming from? Take a look at those urls. Now … who exactly is reading your blog?

2. Keep a constantly-updated list of who reads your blog (by url), and check out their websites. Find THEIR blogs. Look for posts that would be really useful to your readers. Now … in your blog, link to THEIR post. Talk about the value of the information. Tell what you learned from it. Do a review. Write about it in your blog.

3. They will find out. They will notice when they start getting traffic from your blog. Chances are, they will pay more attention to you and will write about you. It can be the start of a great relationship … and when you write a really hot column after you’ve featured several other bloggers in your posts, it could be the start of a viral explosion for you.

4. Include a button on your post to “Email a friend.” The easier you make it for people to share your content, the more they will do it, when they really like your content.

5. Moderate other blogs and forums. What questions are asked? What are the hottest subjects in YOUR market? Compile some of your blog posts together into an ebook targetting that topic. (Be sure to put your url at the bottom of each page & on the cover.) Come up with a title that would have strong appeal for the audience of the other bloggers who connect to you. It’s worth the effort to spend time choosing a really hot title. Publicize the ebook on your blog, and email your contact list to offer the free ebook to their readers.

6. What could you put in a video that would be funny and/or controversial and relevant to your market? Humor or controversy give your video the chance to get passed around a lot.

These ideas are not difficult or costly or time-consuming to implement. A consistent program of 1-6 above will get your corporate blog viral exposure over time.

The way to get great value from your corporate blog is to publish information of great value to your target markets. The more value you give, the easier it’ll be to gather together a big group of like-minded people and build and then deepen your relationship with them.

2. Encourage & solicit comments on your corporate blog - use them as a self-improvement tool.

A big measure of your success will be how well you create a dialogue with your readers. A good way to get comments is to ask questions. Ask if your readers have experience with a particular issue. Ask what solutions they’ve come up with. Ask what bloggers they really value. Ask, ask, ask. Make a point of asking a question at the end of every post, and you will get feedback and you’ll start building relationships with certain readers.

3. Sign up for feeds from bloggers you really admire.

We all need good models. You can learn a lot by watching what others in your profession do. What do they do that you don’t like? OK - be sure to not do that in your own blog. What do they do that you LOVE? OK - be sure to add that to your own blog. Make a list of the best things and the worst things you see in other blogs. Keep it in view. Add to it when you see something new.

4. Target one post every day.

Now that you have those feeds, what do you do with them? First, make note of the blog post titles that really attract you. Re-write that title to make it your own, and then write a post of at least 300 words about your new title. Now you have your own take on a subject that some other blogger believes is important, with a title you really like. Could be a winner.

5. Get (and STAY!) at least 4 weeks ahead on corporate blog content.

You can pretty easily write 2 of these 300-word posts in an hour or less … maybe even 20 minutes. Stockpile posts until you get several weeks ahead.

First, they have to trust you. Suspicious people don’t buy - they find excuses not to. But once they like you, that changes everything. People buy from people they like and trust.

So you have to give your readers every reason to like and trust you. If your blog content is insightful, that is a great start. They’ll respect your knowledge and/or experience. And if your content is actually useful to them, they see you as valuable. At that point, they’ll like you or be very close to it.

Your job will definitely be easier if you have a testimonials section about what you are selling. People like to know that someone else has gone first. They love to read stories about how someone in their shoes has used a product and benefitted from it. When they see that other people like you and trust you, that makes the buying decision easier for them.

And, ironically enough, it helps if you don’t try to sell them. In fact, you cannot sell them. A corporate blog is part of the social media parade. Your focus is doing everything in your power to build “know, like and trust” with your readers. Build the relationship. Get close to them. Understand them. Show that YOU like THEM. Once they see that you are like them and that you actually do like them, your persuasiveness will increase considerably.

Let them see how much you care about what you’re doing. Let them hear in the words you write the passion you have for your niche. Tell stories. Tell why.

One more thing. It helps to know who your market does NOT like, and to write about that common enemy. The easiest, safest target will usually be some government agency (unless you are blogging for a government agency!) Learn all you can about that enemy and its history and its current shenanigans. Your intimate knowledge of the bad guy will go a long way toward making you much more credible with your target market … and much more persuasive.

Why?

Because that is what THEY expect.

If you get on your blog and write a 600-word piece about how your company’s fizzgrabber fandoogles the exterior whatzitstam, then you are going to have serious difficulty building a following for your blog. A blog is not a sales device. Let’s rephrase that - a blog is NEVER a sales device. It can be the precursor to the precursor to a sales device. But that is as close as you should ever get to the sales function.

A corporate blog exists to put a human face on some vast, unknowable corporate entity. Your company will be much more successful financially if prospects and customers can relate to you and bond with you through shared experiences. A blog gives you the opportunity to do that.

The biggest complaint people in corporations make about blogs is, “The darn thing can’t sell anything!” Which is 100% true. You cannot sell from a blog, and you should not be trying. However … you can bring value to the lives of your prospects and customers. You can find out what they want and help them find it, whether it’s your own solution or someone else’s. You can build a community - over time - of people who value your regard for them and your knowledge about their industry and your dedication to helping them solve their problems.

What’s the payoff in that?

More of those people will become customers. And more of those customers will stick with your company. All because they see you as different from all the others, someone who values THEM rather than their wallet. That is how a corporate blog can produce for you, and that is the attitude you can take that will ultimately be successful.

It’s a good line to remember when you’re writing your blog post headline. There is a strong temptation to be funny, or to be clever, or to be really innovative. It’s a good idea to resist this impulse. “Funny” is very difficult to execute well in a headline. Often it appears offensive to the reader. “Clever”, more often than not, totally falls flat. The reader doesn’t get the cleverness, and so there is no reason for them to read the article. And “innovative” tends to just lose people.

Time is so precious these days. People will only stop to read an article that really promises to deliver a result that is really valuable to them. So use your headline to get that message across to them directly. Just tell them exactly what benefit they will get from reading your article.

Examples:

• SEO Tools That Save Bloggers a Lot of Time
• How To Become The Center of Your Target Market’s Attention
• 5 Ways To Turn a Casual Reader Into a Raving Fan
• How To Squeeze a Great Blog Article Out of an Old TV Show

For many of us who like to write, it’s natural to try to be clever. That’s OK. Just recognize that you need to edit out that cleverness, especially in your headlines. In fact, my first headline for this article was, “Just The Facts, Ma’am!” And that would have meant nothing to anyone younger than 50. Benefits may not be clever, but they are very safe. Better - they are what your readers are looking for.

Tagging has developed as a means of partially taming the randomity of the internet. Obviously, the web has an endless stream of information about everything under the sun. So the question becomes, if you want information on oranges, how do you find that stuff specifically, without having to wade through apples, pears, grapes, peaches, pomegranates, etc., etc., etc?

Search engines are part of the solution. When you search for “oranges”, you get thousands or millions of pages of websites that include the word “oranges”. Most searchers never read past the Top Ten listings on the first page. And those listings usually got there by virtue of being really good at Search Engine Optimization or by spending money for an SEO expert to get them that result. The search engines are doing other things now to try to get you more relevant results, but it’s still a struggle to find good information with many searches.

“Tagging” resulted from this frustration. The idea is to label any web content with a handful of simple words - “oranges”, for example. This tag makes the content more easily discovered by search.

And here is the biggest benefit to a blogger: if you post valuable, useful articles, and if you consistently tag every post you make with maybe 4-8 keywords reflecting post content in some way, then over time, YOUR blog will become a very valuable resource to people interested in those keywords. They can actually come to your blog and get better, more reliable, less spammy, more focused search results than by doing a Google search.

In other words, if you are publishing good stuff on your blog, then over time the act of tagging can add great value to your blog and attract more visitors and keep the fans you have, because you have given them such a valuable and easy-to-search resource. So it’s to your benefit to use that “tag” box every time you make a blog post.