I say “aggressive,” because while I didn’t put up a lot of links (only 10 per post), I used similar or identical anchor text for all of them and did them all within a two-day period. If you’re already a member of The Keyword Academy, you know that this is not recommended on sites less than 90 days old However, the sample site is a year and a half old and has a solid link profile already, so I decided to take a chance and hammer it.

The results have exceeded my expectations. For example, here’s a Ranktracker graph of one of my targeted keywords. The low point puts my site at #50 for the keyword on July 21, the day I put up the post and started building links with Post Runner.

The high point shows my site at #14 today. As I said, this jump happened with only 10 Postrunner backlinks anchored on my keyword. This keyword is rated as medium competitive by The Keyword Academy tools and has an income potential of about $50 per month.

But wait, there’s more. The home page of the sample site has suddenly started ranking for all kinds of long tails that it didn’t rank for before. All of them are related to this keyword. So the system is giving me broad relevance at the same time as it gives me specific relevance for my targeted keyword.

This is just my initial effort with Postrunner–really pretty half-assed because my job has been so distracting for the past month. But you can bet I’m going to keep using it and climb to #1!

P.S.: I love using Ranktracker to check how my sites are ranking for lists of specific keywords. It holds hundreds of keywords, runs them lightning fast, and lets me track each one on a graph so I have a visual of how they’re doing.

Give the free Ranktracker download a try–the trialware won’t let you save any data, but after you’ve used it once, you’ll be pulling out your credit card so you can get the full features of the software. Bonus: there’s even a version for Mac!

So here’s where I am at 14 days into the project:

Niche site supported only with Post Runner links:
5 keyword targeted posts written and posted
5 articles written and posted on Post Runner
SERP ranking for primary keyword: 11th

Post Runner system site supported by conventional linking:
I’ve put this into the system and am getting posts, but haven’t had time to backlink it yet. Some good-natured jeering from my compatriots ought to remedy that.

Will post again in two weeks with another progress report.

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.

Article marketing is a labor-intensive but effective way to get keyword anchored backlinks to your site or sites. With article marketing, you write an original short article on a subject related to the site you want to promote, and submit it to an article directory or blog that specializes in publishing other bloggers’ content. It’s a fair deal: the publisher gets free content for his or her site, and in return you get a free do-follow backlink from their site to yours.

Article links don’t carry the highest weight with Google, but they aren’t devoid of juice, either. I can say after three months of it that the sites I’ve been marketing with articles are doing three times as well in both rankings and traffic than the sites with no articles. It works especially well in combination with other linkbuilding activities–article marketing gives you quantity while direct link exchanges give you quality.

To really make article marketing work for you, it’s best to get one of the monthly subscription services that will put your article through a spinner and then mass submit it to their network of sites. The spinner takes your writing and mixes it up so it’s fairly unique but still readable. The mass submitter frees up your time so you can do other things–like get more backlinks.

The two heavy hitters in the article subscription service world are Unique Article Wizard, and Article Marketing Automation. I’ve been a UAW subscriber for three months but recently switched over to AMA to compare how they perform for me. Here’s a quickie comparison of the two which I’ll update as my AMA articles make their way out to the internet.

Article quality: UAW reads better because you spin one paragraph at a time, instead of one sentence at a time. My UAW stuff reads like it’s not spun. With AMA you can only see the sentence you’re spinning so you’re going to get repeated words, especially nouns where there should be pronouns. Ugly, but you can clean it up afterward if you’re that picky (I am).

Article uniqueness: I ran my UAW stuff through Copyscape and am getting an average of 8 out of 40 spins per article flagged for duplicate content (not counting the unauthorized scraper sites). Duplicate passages run from 20 to 50 percent of the whole article. My AMAs are too new to check, but because they’re spun sentence by sentence, I’m guessing they’ll be much better than UAW, which gives me solid paragraphs of duplicate content.

Article network: I like UAW’s article directory network a lot. Some of the pages have retained PR of 1 and 2 long after they pick up my article (the page, not the entire site), although most of the pages are NA. It’s too early to tell with AMA, but if it’s all blogs, I’m going to be a bit skeptical of the quality until I see who’s picking me up. I also question whether the AMA network will pick up everything I submit. UAW’s network would really stretch to put my stuff on their sites. I’ll post more on this as soon as I see the AMA network in action.

Ease of use: I like AMA’s shorter length requirement. It’s easier to write 300 words than 500 words. And I like AMA’s sentence by sentence spinner better than UAW’s triple paragraph spinner, even though UAW produces prettier content. With AMA I just grit my teeth and pull toward the end, while with UAW I wonder if I’m ever going to see the end. Also, I found UAW’s resource box spinner really frustrating to use–I’d screw it up and then have to erase everything and start from scratch.

Link quality: it seems to be the consensus that AMA’s contextual link in the middle of an article packs more weight with Google than UAW’s resource box at the end. You can vary the anchor text of the links in AMA just like you can in UAW, but it’s even more complicated than UAW’s system. In AMA, you have to insert some fairly basic code, while UAW uses a copy-and-paste menu.

Price: At $47 a month AMA is $20 cheaper than UAW. If you click my affiliate link here, you can get 2 weeks to try AMA out for free by signing up to carry their articles on your WordPress blog. You don’t have to accept the articles for publication, just agree to receive submissions by email.

Verdict: If I could afford to have both and had time to take advantage of them, I’d do both, because the networks are so different. UAW has given me a few high-PR links, so I’m not dumping them for good, even though the balance of advantages goes to AMA.

Yahoo Site Explorer does the same thing. It’s free but it doesn’t tell you about dofollow, anchortext, or pagerank. You have to look that info up manually.

The problem with SEO Elite is also its advantage: it works out of a database that the company compiles once every day and a half or so, instead of directly out of Yahoo Site Explorer. That’s good because it’s fast–obtaining this data is very browser-intensive, so a temporary Google and Yahoo IP ban with the captcha is a sure thing if you use other tools. Link-Assistant has a lovely little tool called “SEO Spyglass” that tries to do everything Callen’s tool does but better, running directly over Yahoo Site Explorer instead of a private database. And it does–except that the search takes literally all freakin’ day (sometimes two) if you don’t want your IP to get banned. The same goes for all the other free tools (SEO Book, SEOquake, SEO for Firefox) that run over Yahoo Site Explorer.

The bad thing about SEO Elite? It’s not complete. I bought it in January, relied on it as complete, and then in March I started digging around in Yahoo Site Explorer and found several high-PR sites backlinking to my competitors that SEO Elite never showed me. I was still within the refund window and I almost sent it back, but I weighed my options and realized there is nothing else out there that gives me a competitor evaluation in a reasonable time frame.

So I use SEO Elite to screen niches and individual keywords for competitiveness. It allows me to eliminate 90% of the ones that are too competitive, then drill down into the ones I’m on the fence about by using YSE. Here’s how: With SEOquake or SEO for Firefox, you can sort all of the backlinks to the site in question by their PR. If the competing site is a 4, then it probably has a couple of 4s and 5s backlinking to it. For all the 4s and 5s backlinking to your competitor, you should look for that backlink on their sites and determine (1) whether it’s dofollow or nofollow, and (2) whether the backlink is anchored on the keyword you’re competing for. SEOquake will put a strikethrough on nofollow links if you set it up that way in preferences, but for anchor text, I usually end up going into “view source” and looking at the HTML. It’s a time-consuming process.

I work in “borderline” niches with a lot of PR3 and PR4 competition–the ones Mark and Court say “maybe” on, because their earning potential is so much higher than the low-hanging fruit with only PR1 and PR2 competition. If it’s too competitive, SEO Elite will probably let me know, and I’ll reject that niche. If it passes SEO Elite, I do the final step of running a manual check in Yahoo Site Explorer before I commit to the niche and buy a domain name for it.

SEO Elite is still a valuable tool used by many internet marketers that I respect, including Griz, Splork, and Justin Briggs. If you buy it, get the one-time purchase for $167 instead of the $47 a month recurring subscription. You can do this by changing “index2″ to “index1″ in your browser window when you reach the buy page. The interface is clunky, the tutorials are useless, and the support staff is surly and hard to deal with, but in my opinion it’s still the best tool out there to do what we do.

It’s a long, tough haul doing all the work it takes to rank for moneymaking keywords so that people start coming to your site. If you follow good Search Engine Optimization techniques (SEO), then inside of a month you could rank at the coveted position #1 on the Search Engine Page Results (SERPs) as long as the keywords you’re trying to rank for don’t have a lot of strong competitors. The problem is that you’d have to do some pretty aggressive backlinking to your site, and Google doesn’t like that sort of thing. If your baby blog doesn’t play nicely with the other blogs, then Google will send it to the sandbox to play by itself–down in position 900 or so in the SERPs.

So even though you have the capability to annihilate your competition, you should refrain from trying to do so during the first three months of your site’s life. In the beginning, you need to woo Google like it’s a reluctant lover who’s playing hard to get. It’s frustrating, because if you’re new to making money online, you’re unsure whether what you’re doing is going to work. If you’re going to avoid sandboxing, then you have to invest a considerable amount of time up front before you know whether what you’re doing is going to pay off for you.

If you have an aged domain, you can be more aggressive with your backlinking strategy–sometimes. An aged domain is one that was originally registered three or more years ago–the older, the better. Google likes older domains because they’re less likely to contain spam or engage in other black hat schemes. Spammers like to register a bunch of cheap domains in bulk, work them for a few weeks until Google shuts them down, and then go out and buy a bunch more. Aged domains cost too much to be of use to black hat site owners.

You can buy aged domains on FreshDrop (a GoDaddy site). Be sure to pick up the coupon code from the top menu bar of the website. They advertise them at $5 each, but there’s a $5.00 service fee too. With the coupon you can get an aged domain for around $9.00. Add private registration (which is a must-have item in my opinion) and the price comes out to around $16.00. Well worth it if it helps you keep the site from sitting in the sandbox for six months to a year.

Things are never black and white with Google. There are rumors that if the site changes owners, Google resets the clock on an aged domain. This doesn’t make sense to me–if Pepsi buys the Aquafina company and takes over ownership of Aquafina’s website, does Aquafina get de-ranked? Not likely.

It’s more likely that a total change in site content might trigger a caution flag with Google. You will be adding lots of new content to the used domain when you buy it–the content doesn’t come with it. Don’t expect to keep any pagerank the used domain currently has–I bought a three-year-old domain a few months ago with a PR3, and within two weeks, it went to PR0.

I’ve also heard rumors that Google stops counting existing backlinks when a site transfers owners. I’m skeptical of this rumor too, but then I don’t look for used sites with backlinks–I can get my own backlinks. What I’m looking for is a registration date of five years ago or more. I’m reading positive accounts of people building new sites on aged domains and adding up to 1,000 backlinks in a month without a sandbox penalty. Do it at your own risk, but if you’re successful with it, please drop me a comment here. We’re all in this together.