If you’re a site owner, you can benefit from Postrunner from the opposite end. Including your site in the system means you get lots of free, 100% unique content that you’d otherwise have to write yourself or pay to outsource. The Postrunner terms of service allow you to monetize the sites you put into the system. The only requirement is that if you have more than one site in the system, each one needs to be on separate Class C IP hosting. (You can use shared hosting; just don’t put more than Postrunner site on any one IP.) You also need to approve (or reject) article submissions to your site within 7 days.

This is a new approach to article marketing, and frankly I think it’s “bloody genius” as Lissie would say! Courtney Tuttle has always promoted guest posting on other site owners’ blogs as a great way to get high-quality, legit backlinks, but until now the process could take months to complete, and there was no way to track whether the site owner was leaving your links alone. The central dashboard in Court’s system changes all that. It’s not a mass article submission tool like UAW or AMA–those are quickly going the way of the dodo bird–but rather a central tracking and quality control system for your online article marketing efforts. Just a guess, but I bet the model that Court and Mark used when they set this up was Ezine Articles. Google still loves it some Ezine–sometimes my Ezines will actually outrank my sites when they’re brand new.

Lissie is launching a challenge on her blog on April 1 to see if she can rank a brand new site and make money within six months using only the Postrunner system for backlinks. Since I love a challenge, I’m going to do one over here too. Actually I’m going to do two:

*my first site will be a PR0 domain I registered a year ago but just slapped up one page for and let sit.  Now I’m going to build it out to 5-10 posts and try to rank it and make money with it using only backlinks I get through the Postrunner system.

*my second site will be another year-old PR0 domain that’s been sitting with a single post on it.  I’m going to set this one up to receive guest posts through Postrunner, backlink it through all the conventional sources I normally use with my sites, and try to rank it and make money with it.

Which site will be more successful–the one with only Postrunner backlinks, or the one with Postrunner content and conventional backlinks?  We’re gonna find out.

I’ll be using the same metrics Lissie’s using to evaluate the progress of the site.  They are:

* how many pages indexed  in Google
* how many backlinks shown in Yahoo Site Explorer
* SERP rank for the site’s primary keyword in Google
* SERP rank for the site’s secondary keywords in Google
* site income
* site costs

I’ll post another update in a few days when I get the sites ready to roll, then post updates about once a month for six months.  (BTW, please don’t ask to to see my sites.  Not all online marketers are as nice as I’m sure you are.)

May the best site win!

It took me 12 months to learn what my problem was: bad advice.

Oh yeah, there’s bad advice out there about running an internet home business. Times are tough, and a lot of people are hungry. You might be one of them. Or maybe you have an OK job, but you can’t stand somebody you work for. Or maybe you’re hearing rumors about layoffs and people being let go. I had all of these problems to deal with. At once.

When you’re hungry, or worried about losing your job, you’re a target for people who want to sell you bad advice. These people are geniuses at selling. They know how to push your buttons. The pitch goes something like this:

I started out with nothing. Then I developed the Secret Formula for making money on the internet. Within six months, I was making $100,000 a year, and I did it all by working only four hours a week. Download my e-book now and learn the Secret Formula for only $79.95. Do it today, because tomorrow the price will double.

These shysters can clean out your bank account in no time. I used to see their victims on internet marketing discussion boards all the time – people with thousands of dollars worth of advice stashed in folders on their hard drive, still making a few dollars a week. Thinking there was something wrong with them because they followed the Secret Formula and it wasn’t working for them.

But the wasted money isn’t the worst of it. The real crime of bad advice is that it steals your time. Time you could have spent building a legitimate home based business. If you just got laid off and somebody sells you bogus advice, you can’t get back the time you spend finding out it’s wrong. When you’re laid off, time is not your friend.

This happened to me. The only good news is that the money I wasted on bad advice came to less than $100. Others were not so lucky.

Late in 2008 I was surfing around the internet trying to figure out what I was doing wrong and I kept running into a funny new word: SEO. I had been hearing a little bit about it during my year of failure. Mostly bad things. I thought it meant fooling Google, or sending out thousands of spam e-mails, or building those funny looking web pages with nothing but ads on them.

I was so desperate by that time that I was ready to do any of these things, so I kept reading about SEO. It didn’t take long before my I realized I had found something completely different from the Secret Formula. For one thing, the people blogging about SEO content writing were giving the information away. For free. I wondered: if they weren’t making a living emptying the pockets of desperate people like me, how were they earning their money?

It took me another week of surfing to learn the answer to that question. I’ll try to sum it up for you in one paragraph. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Most of us think of websites as something for humans. But computers also read websites. That’s what Google is: a computer that reads the internet. SEO means writing your website so that a computer can read it, understand what it’s about, and send you visitors looking for what you have to offer.

The fun part is, when visitors click an ad on your site, you get paid. If they click at 3 a.m. while you’re sleeping, you get paid. When you wake up the next morning, you have money in your account that you didn’t have when you went to bed the night before. I still get a thrill when it happens, and it’s been happening for me since February 2009.

In the process of learning about SEO, I started learning who the experts are. One thing that stood out right away is that they’re good writers, and smart. Not only smart, but funny. My kind of people. Nothing like the smarmy salesmen hawking their Secret Formula like they think I’m stupid. SEO is still a fairly small community if you boil it down to the experts who really make a living at it.

I had already read all of Courtney Tuttle’s SEO website when I saw that he was giving away hour-long free consultations. I figured it was a come-on. Even if he actually followed through, I’d be sure to get the hard sell at the end to buy whatever product he was selling. But I was broke, so I figured I could sit through the sales pitch in exchange for some coaching. I was pretty discouraged at that point.

It was nothing like I expected. Court’s partner, Mark Butler, walked me through the process of setting up my own websites in a way that would draw search engine traffic. I took five pages of notes. He and Court had developed an instructional video series that they originally planned to sell, but Mark told me everything in the videos for free and didn’t ask me to do a thing at the end except send me an e-mail in a few months and let him know how I was doing.

After a gift like that, I would have been a jerk not to follow through. I set up a few websites according to his instructions. A month later, I had made my first $100.

Soon afterward, Court and Mark opened The Keyword Academy. There was a lot of buzz in the SEO community when they did it, because the first month’s membership was $1.00 and gave access to the entire video series. Basically they were giving away a $600 product for $1.00. And they still are.

I’ve been a Keyword Academy member since April 2009. Even though Mark had already told me everything that was in the videos, my income has grown because of the resources that my membership offers me. Every time I’m ready to cancel it and just work on my own, Court and Mark roll out another tool that I can use to make my sites work better. And the community there is smart and supportive.

I wish I could tell you it’s a four-hour work week. It’s not. In the beginning it’s a whole lot of work. But as your sites gain age and stability, your workload decreases and your income grows.

There’s a lot of rapid change on the internet. It drives me crazy sometimes. SEO isn’t for everybody. But for $1.00, you can find out what it’s all about and see if it’s for you. If you want to cancel, you can do it on your own through PayPal—you don’t have to go through a sales pitch to get out.

I am thinking of setting up a business website so I am doing an awful lot of reading and researching online. I have come across S.B.I and I am currently reading everything on their website, although I have not yet bought it. Although I am glad to have found this web page, I just don’t know what to think. The internet is such a minefield. My hubby has suggested that I initially set up a free hosting website just for the practice, before I can even think of making money with a proper webpage. I wondered if he actually has the right approach. In other words, just get used to running a web page first of all and then think about the more serious stuff later. (I do understand, of course, that just having a marvellous looking website is not the whole picture).
Thanks for your website. I am reading both yours and S.B.I’s.
I would be grateful for any help or advice anyone can give me here.

Cheers,
Susan (A newbie).
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Lorecee // Sep 20, 2009 at 12:38 pm
Hi Susan: it’s good that you and your husband learned some healthy skepticism right away about making money online. There are people on the Warrior Forum who have literally spent thousands of dollars on e-books and “programs” guaranteed to make them rich, and haven’t gotten anywhere.

At the same time, know that the best way to succeed at this is to commit, jump right in, and do it. For two reasons: first, because the beauty of the internet is that the cost of entry is so low that your actual sites are 60% of your market research; and second, because you’ll overcome your newbieness much faster if you take action while you’re studying.

I basically run each of my ideas through the metrics provided at Court and Mark’s Keyword Academy, and if the numbers add up, I throw up a site just to see what it will do. A Hostgator Baby account is $9.95 a month to host (publish) an unlimited number of domains. You also have to buy the actual domain, but you can get a .net domain at 1&1 for $5 for the first year during their sale this month. If the domain doesn’t make money, I use it for other purposes pertaining to backlinks. One hosting account for $120 a year plus 10 .net domains for $50 the first year is dirt cheap for starting a business.

Two years ago your husband would have been correct about using a free platform. And of course Grizzly’s Make Money Online for Beginners site is famous for ranking #3 for that term, which is one of the most competitive on the internet, using the free Blogger platform. But it took him at least two years to get there, and it would take him longer today. Google has been taking longer this year to index and rank Blogger blogs, and it takes more backlinks to push them to #1. The cautious mindset of “I won’t spend a dime on this until it makes me money” will hold you back by making it take longer to make money. Instead, get good instruction, do the work, and have faith that you’ll make the money back. I was making $100 a month two months after I started, which covered my expenses from the start. It’s not hard.

The reason I discourage people from using SBI is because each domain costs you $300 a year to host. You ARE going to get some things wrong at first in this business, and every time you change your domain at SBI, it costs you $50. If you want to run more than one site at a time, it costs from $150 to $300 per additional site. Their philosophy is to only have one site at first and make it your Magnum Opus. Mine is to have many sites, knowing that some will make it and some won’t, and the only way to find out is to actually put them up and see. Most of my colleagues start with Google’s Adsense program (NOT buying advertising, but rather earning a commission by publishing the ads on your site) because they allow us to focus on getting search engine traffic. Later, when you know how to get traffic, you can branch out into other, more complicated forms of monetization.

To make a long-winded story short, in your position I would join The Keyword Academy for the $1 for the first month special (it’s $67 a month after that if you decide to continue). Their method works and is white hat legit. If you’d like to “tip” me for sharing information on this blog, you can join via my affiliate links in this post or in the upper right corner of my site. I guarantee the information there will be worth $1 to you and then some.

Whatever you do, do it soon. On the net, you are losing money every day you sit around thinking about things instead of doing them–it moves that fast.

Thanks for visiting.

Lorecee