Well…. It’s been a hell of a long time since I last posted. In fact, probably about 7-8 months.

Here’s the deal  - I have been thinking a ton about what to do with this site. I’ve actually had a few different plans on my “list” several times over the past year or so, but ended up deciding not to carry them out.

Fact of the matter is this – I actually like having this site. I try a lot of different things and use a lot of different products, so I feel like I can provide a lot of insight on what works and what doesn’t. The biggest issue is, I don’t want to become another lame Internet marketing “guru” giving away free ebooks and shit and flogging various products that I haven’t even fully vetted and don’t actually support for meager affiliate income.

So I’m not going to.

I have tried doing affiliate links and all kinds of shit like that in the past and for one thing, it hasn’t made me much money to begin with and for another thing, I simply don’t like doing it. Period.

So from now on, I’m doing things strictly my-way and we will see what the results are. First off, there are going to be no affiliate links anymore – except for 1, the Keyword Academy. I have been a member of the Keyword Academy and paid $33 monthly dues every single month since June of 2009. It is the only product/service I would pretty much recommend to anyone, regardless of what they actually do.

Additionally, I am going to keep this as an affiliate promotion for the following reason – I am active there. If you are interested in what I have to say, then you can see a lot more of it by participating in the forum there. Not only that, if you sign up via my affiliate link, you will have free access to private message me on there whenever you like as long as you are a member and I will be happy to take a look at what you’ve got going and make suggestions.

Eventually I am going to offer a separate consulting service here, but if you want free unlimited consulting with me, that is how you can get it.

Other than that, no more affiliate links. Everything I post here is going to be purely unbiased. I will be sharing my own actual experiences and opinions and have no vested financial interest in anything I talk about.

So hopefully as readers, that will be really beneficial for you, and it will help me expand my influence at the same time, which never hurts.

So what else is new?

A lot of stuff has gone down since I posted July of last year. Overall, I have been doing pretty well and haven’t gotten crushed by any of the various algo updates, etc. that have taken place. So that’s all good stuff. I’m still pretty much plugging away. I still work a lot on several e-commerce businesses I own, still have  my web development and marketing company, still have a ton of affiliate sites, and I’ve been expanding into some new service-oriented offerings which has been fun, exciting and lucrative.

I also updated my formerly pathetic ab0ut page, something I had been meaning to do for a very long time.

What’s in store for this site?

As I stated above, I’ve actually been thinking a lot about this site and have had a ton of ideas. This morning, I started a new list of things I am going to add to the site, and I am going to also keep adding to my list as I think of new things. For now, you can expect to see:

- a ton more product reviews. I have used a lot of products and there are many -good and bad, that I would love to share my experiences with. This ranges from hosting, to wordpress themes, to backlinking tools.

- I’m going to start a PAGE that will link to all my product/service reviews and be sorted by products I like, and those I dislike.

- I’ve got a ton of affiliate sites that I don’t have time to work on. I intend to start giving away 1 site per week for free indefnitely

- I have a plan cooking to do an experiment on how much effect a large volume of social signals can have on promoting a niche site

-Thinking about changing the design of this site

- Also thinking about changing the domain name and using this domain for another project

- Thinking about running some live case studies based on user submitted project – IE, I help you improve your site to get more traffic, make more money, etc.

All this is just a small sampling of the shit-ton of ideas I have had over the past year, so hopefully there will be a lot more exciting stuff beyond that. If you subscribe via RSS you might notice a lot of product reviews and other stuff coming through as I try to get that stuff all added.

Any other thoughts or stuff you would like to see? Hit me up.

That’s what I aim to change. This post is going to offer information about each hosting company I have had experience with. Additionally, I am not promoting any of these products in any way, so you can be confident that you are getting good information here. Full disclosure – at one time I did promote Bluehost as an affiliate, but I am no longer doing so.

So Which Hosting Company is the Best?

Unfortunately, they pretty much all suck… Or you could look at it the other way and they are all pretty much decent – with a few exceptions. The reality of web hosting is, you are not going to find any company that doesn’t have a lot of pissed off customers and negative reviews out there. It’s just the nature of web hosting. A lot of time people hosting sites don’t know what they are doing, fuck something up and get frustrated if the host doesn’t answer to their every whim immediately. Conversely, there are some just plain shitty hosting companies out there.

Let’s take a look at each company I have had experience with in-depth.

Hostgator

One of the most popular hosts out there and amazingly one I have never tried or used. I promise I will give them a try soon and report on it. From what I hear, I would probably compare to Bluehost but with more coherent support.

Bluehost

I mentioned before that I used to promote Bluehost as an affiliate, and I did so because it was my favorite hosting company out of the many I have tried. It is probably still near the top for me, however I don’t know if I would say it’s my favorite.

Positives:

The cost for a year of Bluehost hosting is around $70. The nice thing about Bluehost is you can host multiple domain names within 1 hosting account. They use a regular old cPanel style hosting admin area and everything is very straightforward. Another thing I like about Bluehost is that the speed is above average in my opinion when compared to other hosting companies.  I have been with Bluehost for a long time now and host some of my best sites there.

Negatives:

By far the biggest negative with Bluehost is they have very shitty support. If your site gets hacked, you are fucked. If you run into any kind of problem that requires any kind of technical skills to solve, you are probably fucked.  They will shut down your hosting account without any warning. Here’s an example – I had a site with a trademarked name in the domain name. Eventually, the party holding the trademark filed a DMCA complaint with Bluehost – which is completely to be expected. Bluehost reacted by immediately shutting off my hosting account. I didn’t find out until hours later when I realized I wasn’t receiving any emails. Of course all I needed to do is call them and have them remove the problem domain from my account. This kind of shit really pisses a lot of people off. I know others who have had similar experiences if a site gets hacked. The least they could do is give their clients a heads up. I could say overall that is the biggest negative by far.

Conclusion:

Despite the fact that they will shut your ass down without telling you, the overall service is still good. I personally feel confident recommending it – but if you want a company that will hold your hand, you should look elsewhere.

GoDaddy

I have been hosting sites with Godady for a very long time. They are one of the largest registrars and hosting companies out there, and I’m sure a lot of people have had varying experiences with them.

Positives:

Unlike Bluehost, I actually think GoDaddy provides excellent support. Again, it’s all in the expectation – I’m sure there are a lot of pissed off customers who would tell you different, but in my experience,  I have found their support to be extremely knowledgeable, fast and willing to help. As far as speed, I have noticed generally good load times, although I have had experience with some sites hosted there that seem to be quite slow, so it may vary depending on what server you’re on. Another huge positive – they will keep daily backups of your hosting account for 30 days and it is super easy to restore to a backup with a simple click. For this reason, I almost always recommend GoDaddy for my clients.

Negatives:

Cost wise, it is about $60 per year for an economy hosting account which in my experience works best if you are hosting just 1 site. So for you guys out there that are putting up hundreds of affiliate sites, this is not the way to go. The other HUGE issue is their shitty interface. Everything about it sucks. It’s slow, it doesn’t make sense and it takes way longer to do normal things that you can do in 2 seconds on a regular account. Setting up the account, adding a domain, installing wordpress, creating a database, setting up email – all that stuff has an indefinite waiting period attached which is just plain stupid and annoying

Conclusion:

As much as GoDaddy pisses me off sometimes, their overall service is pretty solid. I always recommend it to clients who only need to host one site. Once you get used to the quirks, it isn’t so bad. Speed is good, cost is moderate and there are always coupons available. I host some of my best sites at GoDaddy.

Dreamhost:

Another shared hosting company. Dreamhost is a little different than the average shared host. They have a lot of their own proprietary features and work slightly different. It is the second longest shared hosting plan I have had next to Bluehost.

Positives:

Cost wise, it is pretty cheap. I think it is around $120 for 2 years. I first signed up with them because i found a deal where I got the first year for like $20.00. They have a system that will allow you to automatically update your wordpress installs. I haven’t found this with any other hosting company before and I quite like it. They literally update your WP as soon as a new version is ready and send you a confirmation email. I have close to 100 WP sites hosted there, and this feature is absolutely great. I have never had to deal with their support so I have no idea how good it is. Their system is a little unusual, but it is still quick to get around – unlike GoDaddy’s.

Negatives:

The ONLY real negative I have seen is that it does run a little slow at times. Not terrible, but not as good as Bluehost or GoDaddy.

Conclusion:

Overall, a great service. If you are hosting a ton of sites, this would be my top choice if for nothing more than the auto WP upgrades. If speed is a super big issue, you may want a different provider.

1and1:

An older company that also has their own proprietary setup. I first found out about them because one of my clients used them for hosting a lot of sites.

Positives:

None.

Negatives:

Wow, where do I start? Let’s see – for some reason, they don’t have an automatic WordPress install feature and we are in the year 2012. I once contacted support and their service was awful. Their custom system is slow and stupid. They send you invoices in PDF format several times a year, rather than billing like any other normal company would. If you make the mistake of registering a domain there, it is very difficult to transfer or cancel it. If you want to set anything up, expect to wait a minimum of 24-48 hours – for what reason? I have no idea.

Conclusion:

Absolutely one of the worst out there. They are so out of touch with their customer base, it’s shocking. You would probably get a faster response time if you typed up a letter on a typewriter and sent it to them via carrier pigeon. Honestly, this is one to avoid like the plague. I still have a domain and hosting account stuck there and the only reason I haven’t done anything about it yet is because it will probably take me a full day of dicking around to fix.

Fat Cow/Netfirms

I started out as a Fat Cow customer before they were married to Netfirms. Having worked with them both before and after, I can say that not much has changed.

Positives:

None.

Negatives:

Boy where do I start. Let’s see. First off the old Fat Cow was slow as hell. New Fat Cow, still slow as hell. Out of all the hosting companies I have ever worked with, I have spent more time working with Fat Cow/Netfirms support than all the other companies combined, and it isn’t even close. Their support is inept. Here’s the deal – when you first enter live chat, you will immediately be connected to someone who does not speak english as a first language and is not able to do anything to help you. You then have to ask to talk to a manager. They will tell you the manager is not there. You have to then ask about 5 more times to talk to a manager and tell them you won’t leave the chat until you do. Finally the manager will miraculously return. Unfortunately, they do not generally have any more knowledge than the level 1 support tech. They will try to give you the “we are submitting your ticket to our tech support team with high priority” routine. If you fall for it, your ticket will be submitted to someone in tech support who won’t even read it and then send it back to you as complete after you wait for about 24 hours. You will then have to go back in to the live chat with a level 1 support staff, ask to talk to a manager and repeat the process.  This has literally happened to me multiple times and I have wasted countless hours. It is the absolute worst support EVER.

Conclusion:

Very slow, support is the worst. Absolutely avoid both of these companies. PLEASE!

iPage:

I’ve been with iPage for a couple years now. I first started using them because I found a coupon that I think gave me the entire first year for free.

Positives:

Super cheap to get started with them. They have the same interface as Fat Cow, which scares me. If I find out they are connected in some way, then I would not recommend them. Overall speed is actually not bad c0nsidering the very low price.

Negatives:

No real glaring negatives I can think of. I have not used their support so I can’t speak to their competence.

Conclusion:

For cheap web hosting, they really are not bad. I would not use them as your primary hosting account, but definitely one I intend to keep using for the foreseeable future.

Network Solutions:

A true dinosaur in the industry, yes, Network Solutions is surprisingly still in business.

Positives:

I guess I can say I have personally not experienced any speed issues. I only once had to submit a support request and it was resolved quickly.

Negatives:

They are super expensive for everything. I think their business model is to take advantage of seniors. Seriously, I really think that is their strategy.

Conclusion:

There is absolutely no reason why you should want to get involved with these guys. Honestly. You could try out 2 other hosting companies for the same amount of money. Everything about Network Solutions reeks of mothballs.

HawkHost

Probably a lesser known host, I started using them a while back after hearing about them in a forum.

Positives:

Good pricing – another place where I think I recall getting my first year super cheap. I host a pretty big site there and it handles the traffic pretty well.

Negatives:

They use a really basic cPanel setup. If you are not tech savvy, there may be better options.

Conclusion:

A very good host for a reasonable price. If you are comfortable working with a slightly ghetto interface, give them a shot.

MORE REVIEWS TO COME AS I TRY MORE COMPANIES

Well this was way back in the day when Backlinksforum still existed and I checked in there occasionally. As Terry Kyle was one of the co-owners of backlinks forum, it was only natural that my interest in aged domains led me to a course by Terry Kyle called Domain Buying Blackbelt.

In a moment of stupidity or weakness or whatever you want to call it, I caved in to the hype and purchased the course hoping to pick up some valuable knowledge. I believe the cost was somewhere in the neighborhood of $100. Not a big deal.

So immediately, when I realized that the course was built using Kejabe, I started to regret my decision. Then once I saw the actual content contained within, I knew immediately that I had made a mistake.

See, the problem with these courses is that they are pretty much strictly aimed at suckers – people who don’t know what the hell they are doing, and will buy anything, and have no idea if what they just bought was any good at all.

The premise of the whole training course was basically to provide the absolute most basic information possible in the form of extremely boring videos. I honestly logged into this thing one time ever and knew it was complete shit after about 20 minutes.

I really don’t want to go into detail, but to say that this is pretty much the most pathetic thing I have ever seen. If you are reading this and would like to know more about buying aged domains, feel free to email me and i will probably be able to sum it up better than this course did in a 300 word or less email.

I wish I would have written this review closer to the date when I actually purchased the course so I could provide some more detailed info, but it isn’t necessary anyway. If you are reading this, hopefully I just saved you $100. If you really want to learn about buying aged domains, you can join the pond at zenduck.me for $10 and learn from people who actually give a shit.

Definitely a lesson learned, and I am going to try my hardest never to get suckered into buying one of these lame courses again, and I will almost surely avoid any Terry Kyle products in the future.

Following that deindex I started to shift towards making niche sites with what I considered to be good quality content. In retrospect, most of the content I was producing, while grammatically correct, was basically pretty dry and rehashed stuff that probably wouldn’t provide a lot of value to searchers. Once I started going back through my 100 EPN sites, I made changes to quite a few of them, moving them from basically just a niche site with a handful of random keyword rich articles to sites that would actually provide some value to visitor. What I am starting to see now is that the sites that actually help the visitor and provide something of value are the ones that are going to be the cream that rises to the top. For example if I had a site about blenders, rather than just stuff it with articles on random blender related topics, I would be much better served by doing some of my own research, finding out which blenders really are the best, then writing a paragraph or two on each of the top 5 or so in a nice format for visitors to see where they can easily compare and choose the one that would suit them best. I have done this kind of thing for quite a few of my 100 EPN sites now, and this strategy seems to work very well. None of these sites have been negatively affected by Panda either. Additionally, I had a VA a while back for a few months and I had her take a handful of sites and basically perform the process that I just described above. She was able to do it OK, but the overall quality was not anywhere near the quality of the ones that I did. Formatting wise it was fine, but if I were a visitor trying to actually read the reviews she posted and determine which blender was right for me, I wouldn’t waste my time after reading one sentence. Predictably, the conversion rates for the sites that I did compared to the sites that my VA did were heavily in my favor. Meaning that by me taking the time to do it correctly, the end product is infinitely better which results in improved income daily PLUS the added benefit of having a site that is actually a useful resource to the market it is intended for.

So seeing what I’ve seen over the past 2 years or so and having personally tried just about everything, I am absolutely convinced that the best approach to establishing an online presence and making money online is to identify a specific niche, learn everything about the niche, and dominate it. If I were to have to start over from scratch, here’s exactly what I would do. I would identify a fairly large niche – doesn’t have to be super broad like “Pets” or even “Dogs”, but it would have to get a reasonable amount of monthly traffic. Ideally at least 5 digits for the top term or 2 terms.  So instead of “Dogs” as that is probably still too broad, you could go with something more specific but that still gets a lot of traffic like “Golden Retrievers”. I am just guessing that that term gets a lot of traffic. Dogs is probably not a niche I would tackle at all. Anyway the point is you want to have a nice broad enough to have decent traffic, people who are passionate about the topic, and plenty of different sub niches to work within. Once I had my main niche ironed out I would try to come up with some lucrative sub niches with in the niche to attack. So you may find that there is a lot of traffic for the terms “golden retriever breeders”, “golden retriever puppies”, “seeing eye dog” (I think retrievers are common for this), “golden retriever clothes”, etc. What I would do is take the top say 3-5 terms that you want to go after and set up a separate website for each one. Now the dog niche would be a little different because you could really use just about any dog related keywords, but the tighter you can keep your network, the better.  So instead of just mindlessly setting up a site with keyword targeted posts and slapping adsense on it, first you should have a litmus test for the keyword and that is: Can I create a site that will have value to people searching for this term?

If the answer is yes, then proceed. I recommend that before you actually build a site, you begin with the end in mind. Figure out what questions the visitor might have, how you plan to address those questions and how to monetize the site. Since you’re going to be building several sites within the same niche, I recommend you don’t plan on monetizing them all the same way. Especially not with Adsense. So maybe one site you use adsense, then another you use amazon, and another you maybe sell direct advertising. Whatever you want to do, the point is you should diversify. Then go ahead and create the site. I recommend you either do this yourself or hire someone who is passionate about the subject to produce the content. In  many cases, you don’t need the sites to be open ended – meaning, if you can answer the visitors questions with a series of 10 articles, write the 10 articles and leave it at that. They don’t all need to be blogs that you have to update constantly. If you’re doing a product related niche, identify all the products you wish to review beforehand and cover them all, then you set and forget. If you don’t have any kind of personal attachment or interest in the niche, chances are you won’t do as well at this. You need to be knowledgeable in the niche if you want to be successful.

So ultimately you should end up with about 3-5 niche sites and then ideally you want to have 1-2 tier 1 sites. In this example, a tier 1 golden retriever site may be one that is a blog – a very well written and useful blog with social media component, newsletter, and multiple ways to monetize.  OR in some niches maybe your tier one site is an e-commerce store. It can vary wildly depending on the niche you are working is. The point is you want to start out with 2 tiers in a broad, but not-too-broad niche.

The purpose of doing this is twofold. One – you will have more than one site to work on at once – I think this is important as you should never put all your eggs into one basket. Two – while working on multiple sites at once, you will still be working towards the same basic goal with all of them which is domination of your selected niche. Rather than starting one site on Forex, a site on Weight Loss and a site on Dog Training, you will instead be laying the foundation to dominating an entire niche, and every single thing you do will all be helping you move forward towards that same goal.

Now the idea here is that eventually you can link your tier 2 sites up to your tier 1 site. Do not link all of your sites together! In fact, if you can, use private registration and host them on separate hosting accounts. You don’t have to since you are building good quality sites and there is absolutely nothing wrong with linking sites together, but it’s still a good idea if you can. You probably do not need to link your tier 2 sites to your tier 1 site right away, or all at the same time, rather do it gradually, and make sure you do it in different ways on each site.  The idea is to keep it as natural as possible.

Also, keep a close eye on your stats. When you start doing good with a certain keyword on one of your support sites, target the same keyword on your main site or vice versa. Eventually you can dominate the full first page of serps for hot terms by spreading out across multiple properties. This is a huge advantage to having multiple sites in the niche.

Another thing you can do, and that I personally do is purchase existing websites in your niche and add them to your network. Why do the work when it’s already been done? In almost any niche I can practically guarantee that there are abandoned sites just sitting there. All you need to do is take the time to seek them out and buy them. That’s an instant new source of backlinks and traffic to add to your network.

By taking this kind of approach, you are going to end up producing better stuff, which in turn will help you naturally generate backlinks and increase traffic, and you won’t have to go to sleep every night worrying if you are going to wake up and find your sites deindexed the next day. The idea is to dominate and be an expert in your niche, and you can’t accomplish that by outsourcing you entire work day to the Philippines.

Of course, this is just one set of ideas. There are plenty of ways to skin a cat, but if I had to start over from scratch that is exactly how I would do it. In fact, I am working almost 100% of my time on network just like this right now. I also have some other ideas about creating a product review site but getting users to generate the content for you, creating social networks and more info on buying sites. No promises, but hopefully I will get around to posting more in those areas soon

Well for the last 6 months or so, I have been observing a lot of changes in Marketing online and the Internet as well. One of my top New Year’s resolutions this year was to step up my social game online, and learn it as well as I have learned SEO. I started out extremely slow with it. In fact, I haven’t really done much at all until just recently.

Last week, I was chatting witha  gal I do some contracting for and she mentioned the fact that Facebook and WordPress can be integrated now. I was so out of touch that I thought she was referring to putting a RSS feed on a Facebook page to display blog posts, but actually, she was talking about the recent changes Facebook implemented in February in regards to pages. (I was so out of touch,  I hadn’t even heard about it).

Anyway, after talking to her for a little while, I realized that Facebook and WordPress really can be integrated now via iframes – meaning, you can literally create and manage your facebook pages from within your WordPress dashboard. Pretty amazing, and helpful too – for those who have built and managed Facebook pages, you know there is a bit of a learning curve there.

So immediately looking into this new technology went right on to my list and within a day I had identified several plugins that work for the integration. The first one I tried was Facebook Tab Manager. This is actually a really cool plugin. Basically it adds a whole new section to your wp dashboard for Facebook pages. You go in and create them just like you would a regular page, save it, and then it will spit out instructions on how to register it with Facebook. Do that, and your page will be up and running. It looks like this:

The second plugin I found that I like is called Fanpage Connect. This plugin has a similar function but works slightly different. With Fanpage Connect, you go into your Pages menu and create a Page like you normally would. Then, use a drop down box in the editor to choose to make it a Facebook page. From there, it gives details on how to register it with Facebook and provides more options like this:

So that should give you a really rough idea about how they work. It’s also important to note that as of right now, both plugins are completely free.

Now I started out using the Facebook Tab Manager first.

Pros:

It is extremely easy to use

Keeps fan pages and wordpress pages separate

Gives very detailed instructons on setting up your page in Facebook

Cons:

I don’t like the URLs it generates for the pages

There seems to be pre-built CSS into the plugin

I had problems using custom CSS with this plugin

As I mention right above – I had problems using the custom CSS. I’m not sure if it was my fault or the plugins fault, but for whatever reason it wasn’t working for me so I switched to Fanpage Connect instead. Here are the pros and cons for Fanpage Connect:

PROs:

Generates Clean URLs

Custom CSS is a breeze

Option to have it generate a menu for you based on a custom WP menu

CONs:

Doesn’t keep Fan Pages and WordPress Pages separate

Less instruction on registering page with WordPress

Requires registration (it is still free, though)

So overall I really like both plugins. In fact, I wouldn’t necessarily choose one over the other. My plan is to try the Facebook Tab Manager again first on my next project and see if I can get the custom CSS to work.

The thing that is great about this functionality is that it vastly increases the power of facebook – to the point where you can basically build out a full website using only facebook pages. In fact, I have a plan for a new service that is actually going to be done completely via Facebook. I probably won’t detail it here until I have already started, but I’m hoping to get going on that soon.

You can see the page I created here:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Web-Contempo/195119880512373

Be sure to help me out and Like the page as well – and friend me while you’re at it.

I think this stuff is really cool and definitely on the cutting edge, so I would highly recommend learning it. I have had a lot of fun working with it so far. I plan to hopefully post a lot more tutorials and strategy here in the near future.

Diane Sontag is the author of Bookmarking Coach. I first bought Bookmarking Coach probably close to a year ago – maybe more. Anyway what it is, is a PDF guide showing you exactly how to optimize your setttings with Bookmarking Demon. The information is presented in an easy to read way, that personally had me up and running within an hour. If I had not bought this guide originally, I probably wouldn’t even be using BMD at all right now, but it’s actually quite the contrary – I’ve used it for thousands and thousands of bookmarks since, and with great success. So first and foremost, I can’t recommend Bookmarking Coach enough, as it has made my life a LOT easier.

Anyway, as soon as Article Coach came out I started bugging Diane about writing a guide for Article Demon, and sure enough, last week her Article Demon Tutorial was finally released. I’ve been eagerly waiting to get my hands on this, as I’ve had Article Demon sitting on my desktop collecting dust for the past several months. Finally this morning I got to crack into it.

The problem with Article Demon is there are so many nuances to setting up accounts, pen names, spinning articles, submitting articles, etc, that it makes it challenging and even overwhelming  to try to figure out where to start. I’m personally the type of person who has a hard time following instructions – maybe its a “man” thing, I don’t know – but for whatever reason I just have a real hard time with it. So I find it nearly impossible to sit through the video tutorials that come with Article Demon in the first place – in my opinion they are extremely boring and start off with information so basic that it’s hard for me to even follow. So the great thing, for me, is that I can follow the Article Coach tutorial (the format is much easier to follow and the screenshots make it really easy to reference), then go back and watch any videos I need to supplement the additional information – allowing me to skip over a lot of the fluff videos. I don’t necessarily suggest everyone do it this way, but it works for me.

So the first important step is creating accounts. Diane offers some great Article Demon tips that will help you optimize the account creation process. In fact, right away, I learned several things I wouldn’t have even thought of about the account creation process – it is a lot different than BMD or SENuke or other sort-of similar software programs, and needs to be done correctly in order for you to reap the best results. So right away I picked up some invaluable information.

There is also some great info on turning failed account creations into live accounts – in fact this portion of the guide is very detailed and shows screenshots of different directories that will help you along in the process of getting thee accounts activated – and with a program like this, every account matters.

Pen names and processing bonus directories – these are both important features in the guide. First pen names – this is something that you absolutely need to understand before you can use this tool. If not, you might end up wasting a lot of time. As far as the bonus directories, you will get a walkthrough on setting up the additonal bonus directories that come included  when you buy the software, and also learn how to add your own additional directories. This was extremely helpful to me!

Once you’ve added your directories, set up accounts, created pen names, etc, you will be ready to start blasting off articles. Diane shows you how to optimize your performance settings with the help of detailed screenshots. These settings will help ensure that you are going to be running as efficiently as possible and getting the maximum number of successful submissions. Best part – all you need to do is follow the screenshots, and it only takes a minute or two to completely optimize all your settings.

As far as submitting the article goes, there are a ton of things you will need to know in order to maximize the amount of successful submissions you have on each one. Diane covers them all. You’ll learn about optimizing your title, how long your article should be, how unique it should be, and how to use your keywords/anchor text. Additionally, she has a ton of information on optimizing your resource box. Overall, this is the kind of stuff you NEED to get right, and she has already done all the work for us in terms of figuring out exactly what works best.

Last but not least, there is a ton of information on using the scheduler. Now I tried using the BMD scheduler a while back on my own, and could not for the life of me figureit out. I haven’t tried this portion of the tutorial in her guide yet, but I am definitely planning to do so. In fact, I am going to be getting a dedicated machine soon that I plan to put Article Demon on so I can schedule this stuff to run automatically. I know this Article Demon help will be extremely valuable to me when I am ready to get started with that.

So in conclusion, I sincerely recommend Article Coach, and Bookmarking Coach as well. Believe me, I wouldn’t have spent the time to write a review this long if it wasn’t something I truly use myself and fully recommend. Edwinsoft has very powerful products – IF you know how to use them. If you are thinking about buying either BMD or Article Demon, I recommend you visit Diane’s site – http://bookmarkingcoach.com/.  There, she has links that will get you $50 off of BMD and a staggering $70 off of Article Demon. So definitely stop there first and cash in on those discounts – then you can use the money you saved to pick up the coaching manuals.

Also – it is important to mention that these manuals are constantly updated. As versions of BMD/AD are updated with new/different features, and as directories change things on their end to try to weed out spam, Diane is also constantly testing and updating settings to make sure we’re all using the best configuration possible to achieve the maximum number of successful submissions. As soon as the manual is updated, I get a new copy emailed to me. It doesn’t get any easier than that.

One more thing I will add – she also has a weekly proxy service for around $7. I have been a subscriber as long as I have owned BMD. I get 50 tested proxies emailed to me every Sunday ready to go right into BMD and AD. Even though I have Scrapebox, and could probably harvest my own proxies, I like the amount of time I can save by using this service, and I know the proxies are GREEN and ready to go.

So be sure to check out Article-Coach.com if you have or are thinking about getting Article Demon.

Basically Headway is a completely customizable WordPress theme. It can be very basic, or extremely detailed, depending on how you want to customize it. My VA has been able to do some really cool designs with it, and that is only at a modest skill level.

One of the coolest things about Headway is the visual editor. Here’s a real basic idea of some of the features ( I couldn’t do a screenshot of my own admin interface because of the way the visual editor works):

Anyway, so you can see that with the visual editor you can basically control all aspects of the design, without having to do any coding at all. And for people like me who like to get dirty with the code, you can also turn the visual editor off.

So I decided to try this theme out on a site of mine that badly needed a makeover. I literally downloaded it, installed it, activated it and played around with the settings for about 5 minutes, and the result was a custom wordpress theme that looked about 100 times better than the previous theme I had been using.

Best part of all, I didn’t have to waste any time reading any instructions or anything. The interface is actually really intuitive, so if you’re like me and you’ve worked with a million different WordPress themes already, you will have no problem picking this up. For example, I always like to remove the post meta information from my niche sites – that would be the date, author, etc. Usually right below the post title. In most cases I actually have to go into the code and mess around with a couple different files in order to completely remove the post meta info – which is very important, by the way. With Headway, I was able to remove it with 2 simple clicks. Not only that, I didn’t even have to read any instructions or anything to figure out where to go to do so. I basically just went to the place in the configuration where I thought the setting would be, and sure enough it was right there.

So overall I’m really loving this theme so far. I just used it for a really simple site to test it out, but I have some plans to do bigger and better things with it, and my VA has been able to produce some really cool stuff already. I would say that this is definitely a great option for a beginner who doesn’t want to even think about code, as the visual editor is one of the best custom visual editors I’ve seen for a WordPress theme, and it’s super easy to get up and running. If you’re more advanced or looking for 1 theme that would be flexible enough to use for multiple sites, then this is also a great option. I can tell there is clearly going to be a learning curve if you want to do some of the crazy cool stuff that’s possible with this theme, but just like anything else, it will be worth the effort you put in to it. You can take a look at the Headway site to see some really cool examples of live sites done with Headway that you would never even think were wordpress sites.

So overall Headway gets my full recommendation – if you’re on the fence, hopefully this will put you over!

Check out Headway at headwaythemes.com

So last week I wrote a post outlining my experiment with Fiverr. Now granted, the post wasn’t pulitzer prize material by any means, but still, I think the concept was interesting, and would be worth a quick look over by nearly anyone interested in SEO.  So as part of my ongoing effort to become more social, I decided to head over to Sphinn and submit the story. I’ve actually had an account with Sphinn for quite a long time – no idea why I originally created it, but for whatever reason I had an account there. Anyway, I logged in and began to submit my article. I followed all of their steps, and even went so far as to write a nice custom description of the article. Normally, I probably would have just copied a few sentences out of the first paragraph.

Then I got a message stating that since I’ve never submitted an article to Sphinn before, it would have to be approved by a moderator. One day went by. I checked in and saw that my article was still pending approval. Two days went  by – I checked in again and my post was still pending. 3 days went by – I tried to log in and, funny, my login information didn’t work. Odd considering I had been logging in daily with no problems.  So I put in a lost password request, and a new password was sent to me. I logged in to see that my post was no longer pending approval, rather there was simply a blank white space where it had been. At first I thought it had been published, however a quick search showed that it had not. Then I thought maybe there was some kind of glitch, so I decided to go ahead and try to submit it again – sure enough, there was an error stating that the URL had already tried to be submitted before.

So, my article was not approved by the “editor”, and not only did I not recieve any notice about my article being rejected, they actually locked my password. Now that is just plain fucked up. At first I was pretty mad about it, but then I began to think about it more, and think about the type of content commonly posted on Sphinn, and it made me realize that most of the stuff published on Sphinn is pure watered down crap anyway.

I subscribe to the Search Engine Land Daily Search Recap. First off, for those who don’t know, Sphinn is a branch of Search Engine Land, so the hot Sphinn topics are always included. In general, I have always liked the Search Engine Land Daily Search Recap for no other reason than I can stay up to date on actual search engine news without having to go visit any sites. I actually read an average of about 1 article from the entire recap every 2 days. I mostly just skim the titles and intros included in the newsletter.Most of the information is either News, which is generally not that interesting beyond the headline, or SEO articles, which are almost all so watered down and rehashed that there is no point in even reading them.

So the funny thing about Sphinn, is they obviously are trying to maintain tight editorial control so that their bookmarking site is almost if not more boring then their main site – which, by the way, is also extremely lame.

So to help me illustrate my point, let’s take a look at some of the “Recent Hot Items from Sphinn” from Monday’s email:

5 Things I Hate About Google, Revisited 5 Years Later – Wow. I was actually going to try to read this article so that I could find some things to complain about, but it was so boring, I didn’t even know where to start. Maybe he should have thought twice about revisiting this article in the first place. Honestly, I really don’t know who out there ever cared about search results numbers that don’t make sense – 5 years ago or now. Sorry to all the Danny Sullivan fans out there, but I find this completely useless. Completely worthless article.

Here’s another Gem:

How to Write Product Descriptions that Sell, Boost SEO Efforts – Wow again. What a totally stupid article. If you actually take 5 minutes out of your life to read this article, you will probably find, like I did, that the author’s main point is that you should write unique descriptions of your product. Well no shit, sherlock. Honestly, if you are an e-commerce site owner, and had an ephipany after reading this article, I seriously would suggest changing your profession.

I was going to do more, but this is pretty bad as it is and I don’t want to waste any more time on it.

My main point is that I have realized that Sphinn is operated by people who are only interested in what the “fossils” of SEO have to say, and basically seem content to keep rehashing the same shit over and over again. No I don’t need any more articles on how to write title tags, I understand that Facebook can play a role in my SEO campaign, and I don’t need to read any more stupid SEO checklists that are written for an audience with literally no understanding of SEO at all.

The sad thing is there are some really talented writers out there that don’t get any kind of buzz from these lamestream SEO people. I think as a result I am going to start my own bookmarking/voting site for SEO and Internet marketers. I found a really cool WordPress theme with this functionality built in, and hope to get a chance to start working on it in the next week or so. I would really love to have a place where actual good articles/new stories are collected and posted so that we can all have an easy way to stay updated.

So the first thing I really like about it is the fact that it aggregates WEBSITES for sale across the web – not just domains. So you’ll see listings from all the major sites  – Flippa, DigitalPoint, etc, in one place. That definitely saves me time, and also shows me stuff from places I wouldn’t normally look. I actually don’t care much for Flippa anyway, so I much prefer browsing their listings via Flip Filter.

Another nice thing they have is a good assortment of the most popular filters. So for example if you only want to look for AdSense sites, or E-Commerce sites, there’s a button for that right off of the main menu. That makes it easy for me to pop in real quick every couple of days just to glance at what’s new.

Here’s a basic idea of how the e-commerce site filter results look:

Nice, clean, easy to browse through quickly and check for winners – perfect for me.

So overall I’m really liking this tool a lot. As a matter of fact, on one of my first times using the tool, I actually stumbled across and existing site for sale that I really liked. Now I found that the site itself was way overpriced, but the niche that this site was in was actually brilliant. So I’m actually now going to be working on developing the idea here on my end into what will ultimately (hopefully) turn out to be a full scale ecommerce store.

My point is, taking the time to browse websites for sale is great even if you aren’t actually planning on buying a site. It can be a really good place to get ideas, and see real life examples of functional sites that are making money – this is great for beginners and advanced users, and something I have personally done with a lot of success for many years now.

Overall this tool is great. It’s affordable for the everyday internet marketer at just $9/month or $79/year – and they even have a free version that isn’t too bad if you just want to test the waters. You won’t be able to dig in too deep, but like me, you will be able to at least get a good feel for how it works, so I highly encourage everyone to head over to www.flipfilter.com and give the free tool a test drive!

Start (monday): 46

Tuesday: 45

Wednesday: 42

Thursday: 11

Friday: 10 (first page)

So overall, the results obviously speak for themselves. Moving up over 30 spots and onto the first page in 3 days is a fantastic result. That being said, it has only been 3 days, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see these rankings fluctuate a LOT over the next several weeks. Overall, though, it does show that something is happening, so that is a good start. I got the results of the mass article submission back first and pinged all of those links using a free pinging service. So far, that is the only additional work I’ve done.

I plan to let this stew for another week or two to kind of feel out what’s happening, then I will evaluate and decide the next move. Depending on where I’m at, I may order up another round of everything, but I’ll just have to see. I will probably eventually ping all of the links that have been built, but I don’t plan on doing much else besides that.

Anyway, the second bit of news is that I’ve set up a new twitter account – twitter.com/wpcontempo.  Anyone who was following my other twitter account should definitely start following this one if you want to stay up to date. I plan on using this account a lot, and only for topics specific to this site. My other twitter account is my personal account and most of the subject matter is not really relevant to MMO or SEO.  So give me a follow if you want to get more frequent updates. I am going to try my hardest to tweet something useful at least once per day, including weekends.

Additionally – the reason the two topics of this post are related is because I am going to be tweeting an update on this experiment daily. There really isnt any reason to write up  a ton of posts detailing the fluctuations in ranking for this experiment, but I will quickly check the rankings every morning in Scroogle and update on my twittter for anyone who is interested.

I also have a couple additional experiments in the works. I am liking the direction this is going, and it gives me more interesting stuff to write about.