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 writing about SEO 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’m not going to tell you to hurry up and join because the price will go up. But my one regret is that I waited so long before I got good advice for my internet home business.

Since it’s a free theme, you’ll have to be willing to make some compromises that you wouldn’t have to make with Thesis or Lifestyle, you’ll need to contact your hosting provider to make a simple change on their end, and you’ll have to be willing to change some coding in CSS and PHP. I’m not an expert coder by any means, but I’ve gleaned enough information from the Arras forums to put together a decent looking magazine style site with it and am sharing the information here. If there’s a problem I haven’t figured out, and you know how to solve it, please jump in with a comment.

Similar to the Lifestyle theme, the Arras layout gives you a banner feature across the top of your site with carousel rotation of snippets and images from multiple posts. Below the carousel, you can set up smaller static featured posts, either in a grid, or stacked. At the bottom you can place an unlimited number of deep links to other posts on your site, which are good for both visitor navigation and on-site SEO. For sidebars, you can set the theme to display a left or right sidebar, or both, plus two footer blocks at the bottom. The theme supports 2- or 3-column layout, and is widgetized. You can find several demo sites at the bottom of these pages:
http://demo.arrastheme.com/
http://www.arrastheme.com/wiki/

So far, the creator of Arras has been releasing beta versions of the theme that keep up with Wordpress updates, so check what version of Wordpress your site is running before you get the theme. As of this posting, the most recent update for Arras was version 1.3.6, 11-2-09—pretty good for a free theme. Its requirements are:
* PHP 4.3 or later (PHP 5 recommended)
* GD Library PHP extension (available with PHP 4.3+)
* WordPress 2.7 (MU) or later (WordPress 2.6 is not supported)

My preferred way of installing Wordpress themes is to download the zip file directly to my hard drive from its Wordpress site:
http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/arras-theme
Then I extract the zip file and open my FTP program. On the right, open the themes folder for the site you want to install Arras on. On the left, click into the Arras theme folder until the folder name you see is arras-theme (NOT arras-theme.1.3.6). Upload and disconnect.

Now log into your Wordpress control panel and select the Arras theme to get a general idea of how it will look. The site will be a bit wonky until you add your images and make a few code changes, so if it gets traffic, you’ll probably want to switch back to your old theme until you finish. (Note: you won’t be using a static home page with Arras, so you need to change back to Your Latest Posts on the “Reading” setting if it’s an existing site.)

First, set the posts you want to rotate in the carousel bar at the top by opening them in Quick Edit and checking “make sticky” (for new posts, in the publish box, click Privacy and make them sticky there).

To choose which posts you want featured below the carousel bar, you need a category dedicated to it. It doesn’t matter what you name the category (I call mine Featured Posts), and you can use an already existing category if it includes only the posts you want to feature. You’ll need a third category for the news links below the featured posts, unless you just want to include everything on the site.

Now make the Arras theme active again and go to the Arras Theme panel from the Wordpress control panel toolbar on the left.

Click the Categories tab. Set Featured Category #1 (the carousel) to “stickied posts.” Set Featured Category #2 to the category name you chose (Featured Posts). Set News Category to All Posts, or skwhatever category you want to use for single-line links at the bottom of the site.

The Navigation tab changes the look of the top navigation bar that runs horizontally across your page under the header. I’ve left this at the default setting of Home, Pages, and none, or you can use this plug-in to add drop-down boxes to the header:
http://pixopoint.com/products/multi-level-navigation/
It works great but defaults to a weird blue color that I haven’t attempted to change.

The Layout tab lets you set how many posts appear in each section. I like 3 to 5 posts in the carousel (Featured Posts #1); 6 posts in Featured Posts #2, and 10 or more posts in the News section at the bottom. For Featured #2 display type, leave it at “node based” (this will allow your photos to be displayed). Leave both News Display Types at Per Line (you can play with them later). For Single Post Display, I only check “Post Thumbnail,” but it’s OK to check any other items you want to appear when the reader clicks away from the magazine front page to a post. Leave Position of Custom Fields checked to Before.

Now click the Design tab. At the top, choose whether you want a 2- or 3-column layout, and left or right sidebars or both. At the bottom, set the background color for the theme by # and then a 3- or 6-digit hex-HTML color code. For web safe hex-HTML colors, see this chart:
http://html-color-codes.com/
To expand the range of colors, use this tool:
http://www.colorschemer.com/online.html

Time to add your images. The sticky posts will need wide images to look their best. For each sticky or Featured Post category post, upload an image directly into the Wordpress Library from the Media panel in the left toolbar. (Don’t place any image code for inside the post, or it will appear twice.) When the upload is finished, scroll down and copy the site URL of the image. Go over to the post you want it to appear in and scroll down to the Custom Fields box. Enter the field name as thumb. In the value box, paste the URL that you copied from the library. Click update. Your image is now in the post, but it won’t be visible until you make a change with your hosting provider.

After you’ve set up the look and feel and have uploaded some images, it’s time to contact your hosting provider and get the mod_security whitelist rules changed for your domain so the Tim Thumb plug-in that installs with Arras will display your images properly. Hostgator is right on top of this problem: simply open a livechat session and type in the following:

I’m running the Tim Thumb plug-in on one/some of my sites. Please add the appropriate rules to mod_security for www.yourwebsite.com and whitelist for the domain.

If the Hostgator tech is new and doesn’t know what you’re talking about, tell him you’ve already asked them to do it with other sites and it should be in their tech manual. Other hosting companies might need more hand-holding. You can find more information about this fix here:
http://code.google.com/p/timthumb/issues/detail?id=8

Keep your site open while the tech fixes it; when he’s finished, you should see your thumbnail images on your front page. I have no complaints about the Tim Thumb plug-in; it works great. I’m batching up all the sites I want to convert to Arras and will have Hostgator fix the whitelist all at once for them. I admit that having to contact your hosting provider is a PITA, especially if they’ve never had to perform the fix before. Also, if what I’m describing is actually a security concern, please post a comment below.

Now it’s time to do some coding to pretty up the theme. I do my coding from the Hostgator cPanel in the Code Editor screen. If I screw up, I just FTP the default version of the file from my copy of Arras on my hard drive. If you’re making extensive mods, save a copy of the file after each one so you don’t have to start all over again.

To get rid of the ugly search box in the header bar, go into the arras-theme folder from your File Manager in cPanel and open the header.php file in Code Editor. Around Line 83, delete the following code and save:

<div id="searchbar">
<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/searchform.php'); ?>
</div>

To get rid of the date and number of comments across the Featured Post thumb images, click into the Library file and open filters.php in Code Editor. Around Lines 41-42, change this code:

$postheader .= '<span class="entry-meta"><a href="' . get_permalink() . '">
<span class="entry-comments">' . get_comments_number() . '</span></a>';
	$postheader .= '<abbr class="published" title="' . get_the_time('c') . '">'
. get_the_time( get_option('date_format') ) . '</abbr></span></div>';

to this code:

$postheader .= '<span class="entry-meta"><a href="' . get_permalink() . '">
<span class="entry-comments"></span></a>';
	$postheader .= '<abbr class="published" title="' . get_the_time('c') . '">
</abbr></span></div>';

This fix works great for taking out the text, but it still leaves the ugly black bar across the thumb images. I have the code for taking them out, but it also takes out the bar across the carousel banner at the top, which I want to keep. I’m living with it for now; suggestions are welcome.

I’ll add instructions for changing the color scheme and a custom header at a later date. If you want to use Arras, it’s worth registering for their users forum at
http://www.arrastheme.com/forums/

You can also dump any CSS style into the Arras CSS folder, and there are plug-ins for a newspaper style, as well as translations, none of which I’ve tried.

Have fun with this great theme.

Update February 4, 2010: Here’s a screenshot of the Arras 1.4 control panel showing the new Wordpress 2.9.1 thumbnails feature. You no longer need to use the “Custom Fields” box to its left to place thumb images on your site.

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).
#

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 $33 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

Cohen decided to sue the blogger for defamation and filed suit against Google in January 2009 to make Google release the blogger’s name. In August 2009, Judge Joan Madden of the Manhattan Supreme Court ruled that Google would have to provide the blogger’s name so that Cohen could proceed with her defamation lawsuit. Google complied, and now the whole world knows that Rosemary Port, a 29-year-old student at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, is the owner of the now-defunct “Skanks in NYC.”

A few comments on this case from a legal perspective are in order. First of all, the court did not rule that Port actually defamed Cohen; it only ruled that Cohen had a right to file the lawsuit and forced Google to provide the information that would make the suit possible. Of course I wanted to know what Port said (wouldn’t you?) so I headed on over to the ever-reliable
New York Daily News and got the dirt. Port called Cohen a “ho,” a “skank,” a “psychotic lying whore,” and an “old hag.” Port also wrote that Cohen had posted photos on her personal website of herself fully clothed simulating sex with a fully clothed male at a party. The Daily News also said that Port was mad at Cohen for bad-mouthing her to Port’s ex-boyfriend. Ladies, pul-eeeze!

In my opinion, none of this drama amounts to a winnable defamation claim. Port’s smack talk about Cohen doesn’t contain enough facts to be proven or disproven, and there’s even a case from a federal circuit from a few years ago holding that there’s an expectation on the internet that bloggers will engage in exaggeration and hyperbole, and that nobody in their right mind would believe them enough to damage anybody’s reputation. (Yeah, I know you want the cite, but I can’t bill anybody by the hour for writing this blog, so I’m not going to give it to you. So sue me.) The one exception would be the bit about the photos, but there’s already evidence in the case that Cohen had posted some questionable photos on her site. Add to that the fact that Cohen is a frequently-photographed fashion model and therefore probably a public figure, and you get Port as the probable winner in this little catfight. Apparently Cohen realized this too, at about the same time she realized that Port’s little Blogger blog, which probably got 10 visitors a day before Cohen sued Google, had suddenly become a hot news item in Manhattan, where they eat this sort of thing up. Not the kind of fame your career needs if you’re trying to get hired in the Big Apple, so Cohen announced that she was dropping the suit—ostensibly out of the kindness of her heart.

I heard about the lawsuit against Google on Webmaster Radio (hat tip to Justin at seozombie.com for Twittering it), and I want to address all the things that the site got wrong, which are pretty numerous. For one thing, Webmaster Radio got the name of Port’s blog wrong (they called it “Skanks of New York.”) After that, they called the decision “precedent-setting,” and made this grand statement:

The decision removed any lingering comfort bloggers might have in the sense of anonymity on the Internet. As of last week, there is none and bloggers are on notice that they can be held responsible for their writing should it be deemed defamatory or libelous. The decision should also serve to stem the tide of nastiness found throughout much of the blogosphere. It might also have a rebound effect of opening the door to others who feel they too have been unfairly libeled in blog posts.

First of all, a decision from the Manhattan Supreme Court is anything but “precedent-setting.” Although New York’s weird nomenclature for its state court system makes this court sound like the great seat of high jurisprudence, it’s just a basic state circuit court whose decisions are only binding on the parties in that particular case. (It’s remotely possible that a different plaintiff who sued Google in Manhattan again could claim that Google was bound by the Cohen case under the doctrine of collateral estoppel [and no, I'm not going to explain that to you], but it’s not a sure winner.)

To sum things up: the New York court ruled that Cohen could make Google hand over Port’s name so she could sue Port. If a fashion model from Lawrence, Kansas, was the victim of a Blogger blog called “Skanks of Lawrence, Kansas,” and sued Google in the Manhattan circuit to get the owner’s name, Google wouldn’t have to face the wrath of Judge Madden again. They’d simply say, “What, exactly, does this have to do with Manhattan?” and file a motion to remove the case to Kansas, where it belongs.

More important, there have been several other cases dealing with this very same issue. Some have held that anonymous bloggers are protected under the first amendment, while others have held, as Madden did, that they’re not entitled to anonymity if they defame someone. Many of these cases are in the federal circuits, which actually are “precedent-setting,” at least in a fairly large geographical area if the case gets filed in federal court. The law here is very much in a state of flux, and most people I know who blog are well aware that the hosting companies will out you in a heartbeat if somebody has their lawyer write a nastygram on letterhead. If somebody is thin-skinned (or you infringe on their copyright or trademark), there’s no need to file a lawsuit in order to get your name. In other words, the better informed among us don’t expect privacy, but we speak out anyway.

Port, apparently, isn’t one of the better informed. She’s filed a lawsuit against Google for “breaching its fiduciary duty” to protect her anonymity while she was using Blogger. Now, I’ve put up a lot of Blogger blogs, and I never saw anything in the little “I agree” scroll screen where Google agreed to protect my anonymity, let alone any implication of a fiduciary duty. WTF??? Which brings me back to the Site Build It Scam incident. A couple of months ago, Ken Evoy was blathering in the forums that he and his company had an “actionable claim” against the perps. LOL. An actionable claim means your attorney knows he can file the lawsuit without the court sanctioning him for bringing a frivolous claim. In no way does it mean you’re going to win—it means your lawyer knows he can bill you for upwards of $50,000 while you pay for discovery without incurring the wrath of the court. And as Cohen quickly found out, defamation might not wreck your reputation, but filing a defamation lawsuit almost certainly will. Or ask Brian Clark what happened to him with Lissie’s review of Scribe SEO.

The latest site building product  to hit the internet is Niche Devil. Like all product roll-outs of this type, this software has been accompanied by considerable hype. Never one to mince words, let me try to separate the fact from fiction and wild rumor for you.

I got into internet marketing too late to take part in the Build a Niche Store (BANS) party, but I hear it was quite a party while it lasted. BANS is one of several software packages for building affiliate commission sites. A lot of people made a lot of money running BANS on cheap .info domains that sold eBay products through the eBay Partner Network affiliate program.

Then came the BANS slap on Google. Two IMers whose blogs I follow say that the BANS script has a unique code pattern that’s easily detected by Google. These guys both write code, so I trust what they say. The problem was that thousands of BANS sites hit the internet in a short time frame. The product builds sites so fast that people who bought it were pumping out hundreds and even thousands of EPN sites with no content, just eBay listings. Totally against Google’s terms of service, so everybody’s sites got deindexed literally overnight.

Niche Devil is designed to do what BANS did, only faster, and without the obvious code pattern, or “footprint.” I’m still on the fence about the product, but I’ve read literally every site on the internet that mentions it, including some that are very critical of it. Here’s what I’ve gathered so far:

• monetization: supports EPN, Amazon Affiliate, and Chitika.  Do not use it with AdSense, as it’s totally against Google’s terms of service
• speed: Niche Devil is freaky fast at building affiliate sites.  It’s faster than BANS or Storestacker,  and way faster than PHPbay.
• footprint: Unlike BANS, the developers have made some effort to cover Niche Devil’s tracks.  Some reviewers have opined that no code can be made Google-proof, and I agree, so ultimately, how well it will hold up depends a lot on how many people buy it.  These tools are made for massive auto site generation (which is why Google hates them), so there’s some risk involved.  But that’s also the nature of internet marketing.  If you tried to use 2005 methods today, you’d fail.  (Hell, you’d probably fail using 2008 methods.)  At $97 for Niche Devil plus $79 for a pack of 100 .info domains from GoDaddy, it won’t take long to make your money back.
• site quality: I found a link to an actual site built with Niche Devil.  Basically it’s a mash-up of EPN links, twitter tweets, Yahoo Images, and scraped news feeds.  Nothing out of the ordinary for a thin affiliate site.  The attractive thing about this content from an SEO standpoint is that it refreshes each time the page loads, so it’s constantly pumping out new material automatically after the site is built.  It has a built-in ping feature so it pings every time you get a visitor and and a new piece of content loads.  This is no substitute for backlinks, especially on a .info domain, but the approach works–I’ve used it on one of my own sites with PHPbay Lite and kept a post ranked on page 1 for weeks with no penalty from Google.

Vic Franqui is marketing Niche Devil in cooperation with IQbizz, an Irish software development company.  Like most of this business, personalities seem to carry more weight than the merits of the product, and a lot of people are ready to either buy or reject the product because it’s Vic’s.

It’s impossible to read the real motives of online marketers (although you’re welcome to guess at mine if you like), but I do want to point out one thing:  the 14-day marketing window before the product closes is designed to keep too many people from buying it and beating it to death so Google smacks it.  Many people have opined that this is just the usual cheesy “buy now or lose your chance forever” trick, and no doubt it does help sell the product.  But this isn’t your typical affiliate campaign roll-out.  It has all the trappings–the ugly sales letter on the website, the glowing testimonials–except the most important one.

What’s missing?  The armies of affiliates.  I signed up to promote the product on the first day of its release, and guess what my number is?  I’ll give you a hint:  it’s less than 500.  Way less than 500.   Now who the hell rolls out an IM product with fewer than 500 affiliates on Day 1?   I tracked the number of websites promoting it, and it barely covers 4 pages in the SERPs.  My sense is that the owners are not really pushing Niche Devil that hard, at least not with this initial release.  I have no doubt we’ll see it sold again sometime after the 14-day window is up, but probably for a much higher price as part of a larger package.

What would I use it for?  I’m not in EPN yet, and if I’m going to build backlinks to a site, even a thin affiliate site, I’d rather do it on a less risky platform, like PHPbay, which according to Justin at SEO Zombie, can be customized to leave no footprint.  But for testing niches and building a huge network of backlinks, I think this software would rock.  If it makes a little bit of money in the process, so much the better.

Price: UAW is $67 a month; AMA is $47 a month.

Ease of Use: UAW spins your article by having you write three versions of each paragraph and mixing and matching them. It allows you to vary entire sentences within the paragraph and even write different content altogether for each spin. AMA uses the more traditional approach of having you substitute different words using curly brackets and the pipe symbol. For example, a sentence written “All dogs {like|love} bones” would publish randomly as “All dogs like bones” or “All dogs love bones.” AMA works from the basic structure of each sentence, so your paragraphs will look more alike. I personally find it easier to substitute synonyms with the AMA system than to write different sentences with the UAW system, and I wish that UAW would add an AMA type of spinner to its system.

Duplicate Content: neither UAW nor AMA pass Copyscape 100%. A really thorough rewrite in AMA with 10 spins for each sentence will get you pretty close, but that’s even more work than UAW’s system. I’ve given up on worrying about duplicate content—I used to believe the conventional wisdom that Google only ranks the site with the best backlinks and ignores the others, but then one of my colleagues suggested that I google “carrot juice has many health benefits” and all 10 results on page 1 of the SERPs have identical content. Now I’m a believer. But I still avoid duplicate content in the following instances:
* I don’t submit duplicate content to high-quality sites like Ezine Articles and Hubpages. These sites want original content because of their own internal rules, not because of Google’s rules, so that’s what I give them. (I’ve been known to submit a UAW or AMA spin to Ezine before sending it out through the article service, though, and it’s worked every time).
* I don’t submit duplicate content to any article distribution service (UAW, AMA, etc.), because that’s part of their user agreement.
* I don’t put duplicate content on any site that I’ve monetized, such as with AdSense, Amazon Affiliate, or eBay Partner Network, because Google doesn’t like thin sites set up only to make money.

Quality of Network: there’s just no comparison; the worst article directory in UAW’s network compares favorably with the best site in AMA’s network. UAW might at least screen their network applicants before approving, while all you have to do to include AMA material on a site is send them your URL. I’ve had articles appear on UAW sites as high as PR2; a few of them are still PR2. With AMA, I’ve followed my pingbacks and ended up at some really spammy looking sites with multiple pop-under windows that I can’t close and the like. The vast majority of these sites weren’t even indexed by Google, which means they’re useless for backlinks. I’ve had some of my UAW submissions drop off the site’s home page before they could be indexed, but at least the home page was indexed.

Resource Box: UAW gives you two links in a resource box at the end of your article. AMA lets you put two links in the body of your article. I’ve read that Google gives more weight to AMA’s system, although how much more is anybody’s guess. I also find UAW’s spinner for the resource box hard to use, but I’m probably trying too hard to vary the text. Keep it simple…you know the rest.

Affiliate Program: both services offer an affiliate program. Both services are closemouthed about how much they pay their affiliates and when.

Results: UAW made a noticeable difference in my traffic. AMA didn’t.

Verdict: starting in July, I’m going back to UAW. It’s more expensive than AMA, but the quality of the network is everything with this type of service. If you’re new to SEO and have no choice but to run the article marketing treadmill, then choose the service that will give you the most return for your hard work—even if it costs a little more.

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.

If you’re just starting out in the make money online game, you might not know what a backlink is. A backlink is a link on another site that points to the site you’re trying to rank in the search engines for.

Beginners often put all of their energy into building a great site with quality content and forget that getting backlinks to that site is the other half of the equation for online success—the most important half. Of course, Google says otherwise. Google says that if you build great content, visitors will somehow find your site, read it, and backlink to it without being asked, because they love it so much.

Google has to say this, because they don’t like site owners getting backlinks by artificial means. They want their search results to be a meritocracy. This would work if there were no money to be made online and the ‘net was a pure marketplace of ideas. But the reality is, there is a bundle of money to be made online, and Google is making more of it than anyone. In fact, their AdSense program made $1.8 billion gross sales in 2008. In such a competitive environment, business owners use Search Engine Optimization seo(SEO) techniques to try to get more traffic than other sites in the same niche, or subject area.

On-page SEO consists of writing your site’s pages so the search engines (mainly Google) can tell what those pages are about and classify them into search results. Search engines get their results by using a programming formula (called an algorithm, or ‘bot/robot) to scan (crawl) the pages for keywords and their surrounding context. Google likes on-page SEO because it makes Google’s job of returning quality search results easier.

Off-page SEO consists of getting backlinks by various proactive means. Google doesn’t really like you being proactive with backlinks, but it tolerates some off-page SEO techniques more than others.

For instance, you’ll never have a Google problem if you e-mail a site owner in your niche and say, “Would you mind checking out my site, and if you like it, would you place a backlink to it on your site? This fits in with Google’s view of the web as a meritocracy, but remember that the web is also a competitive environment, and backlinks are so valuable that they’re a form of currency. That site owner will probably think, “What’s in it for me?” So if you’re lucky and he doesn’t just trash your e-mail, he’ll write you back and say, “I’ll link to you if you link to me.” Google sees even this type of harmless link trading as beyond the scope of its meritocracy, so it assigns less value to reciprocal links that point to each other. How much less? Nobody really knows; we just know that two-way links are less valuable than links that only point one way.

If you’re doing off-page SEO, it’s important to distinguish between backlinks that Google merely devalues and backlinks that Google actually punishes you for. Think of it as the difference between a civil infraction like a parking ticket, and a felony crime. Two-way links are a civil infraction. There are some Google misdemeanors in between, too. Google owns about 72 percent of the search engine results online, so it functions as judge, jury, and executioner.

In that “gray hat” area between the purely “white hat” one-way link, and the felony level, there are a lot of things you can do to get backlinks to your site. Most of them involve some degree of automation through SEO software, and that’s why they’re “gray.” Google hates automation, because when taken to the limit it allows one human being to bombard the internet with literally hundreds of thousands of sites and backlinks to sites. If you’ve ever run across a really crappy looking site with nothing but links and text that looks like some twisted form of Russian, you’re looking at an example of what in Google’s view is an internet felony. If you’re bothering to read this post, then trust me, you don’t want anything to do with this stuff. Not only are those folks utterly ruthless, but it’s way too much work: slap up 1,000 sites in a day, get 100,000 backlinks, make money for a week, Google nukes everything, rinse and repeat. Stick to white and gray techniques and you’ll avoid the Backlink Blues.

In my next post, I’ll talk about some software tools for getting backlinks.

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.