Everybody knows by now that backlinks are the key to ranking a website and making money with it. The new Postrunner guest post system over at The Keyword Academy lets KWA members post articles to a huge collection of member-owned, member-moderated websites. Within each 300-word, 100% unique article you write, you can include 2 do-follow links to the site of your choice, with whatever anchor text you want. All of the sites in the Postrunner system are on unique IP addresses and are fed through a central dashboard using the WordPress interface.
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!
