I get a lot of comments here at the Electron Plumber, and every once in a while I get one that is worth writing a full article follow up on.  Today someone named Entrepreneur 1224 asked:

Why would u still have a job if u are making numbers like this? I’m sorry but that’s very hard to believe, if you’re actually that good at making so much money you would be smart enough to invest all your time and effort to make even more, please explain.

Luckily for me, your belief is not required for Amazon and Google and a bunch of other direct affiliate programs to deposit money directly into my bank accounts each month.  My big guns deposits in November:

The top two are Paypal, the bottom two are direct into my checking account.  There are more smaller deposits as well, but so far it’s been around $2600 for November.  Expenses are around $250 for link building services, hosting and domain costs.

So why aren’t I living the good life and sleeping in every day on that $2400 you might ask?  Or quit my job and put in 100 hours a week towards doubling or tripling that?  It’s fairly often that I wake up and ask myself the same thing you just asked.  But I already know the answers.

Let me explain my situation to you and maybe my readers can offer some advice for me here.

Reason #1: Quality vs Quantity

First off, I adamantly refuse to make money by ever screwing anyone over ever.  Ever ever ever ever.  Many affiliate marketers make their money by promoting whatever pays the most commissions.  Scammy get rich schemes, fake weight loss free trials, ringtone offers with monthly hidden rebills, penny auction scams, you name it.  They are making money by screwing over Joe Consumer, and I will not ever do that.  Never ever.

I also will only promote products I believe have some decent value.  That’s why I mostly stick with Amazon.

I also hate list building and using psychological techniques to convince people to buy something.  The product has to be worth owning and worth buying without me needing to trick you and beat you about the head and neck with spam to buy it.   This is where I probably lose the most money.

I don’t want clients or to train people right now, the time demand is too great.

So what do I do?  I create web properties and write my own unique copy for everything that a person might see and click on to get to an offer or product I think they should buy.  Some people make money by throwing up 500 thin affiliate sites and making $.25 a day off each one, but spam like that never works long term.  I want to only spend my time on project that can build and grow long term value.

Take my Great Link Building experiment from this past year as a perfect example.  That helped monetize ElectronPlumber.com in a way that I never had before.   Real content with real results showing real value.  No BS fake reviews, no hard sell, just the facts.  These services are worth paying for based on this exact measured performance.

So that’s reason #1:  It takes time and effort to do Quality work.  But it’s also why my profits are consistently growing year over year and I’m less susceptible to offers disappearing and Google changing their algorithm.

Reason #2: It’s All Relative

While I am not the 1%, I am the 10% and things are pretty darn good.  Nice big house near the coast (with a sizable mortgage), beautiful wife, kids in private school, etc.

I have an Engineering degree and 15+ years experience in high tech.  I earn a very nice six figure salary running a department at a rapidly growing high tech company, big pile of stock options that aren’t done vesting yet, company health/dental/vision plans, 401k, the whole kit.  The work is fulfilling, promotion opportunities abound, occasional travel to exciting yet safe destinations, and for the most part my work is self directed.

So I think of Internet marketing as a hobby that happens to also make money  like some people make money playing online poker or selling gold they earned in an online game.  However, my employer might not see it like that, which is one of the reasons I don’t reveal my name or plaster my face all over this site like you see other successful internet marketers doing.

So from where you sit in your apartment, a few thousand dollars a month might seem like just the thing to get you out of a crappy job and kick start an internet marketing career.  But for me, that’s barely half my mortgage.  Or half a month of the kids private school for that matter.  And I actually have a damn good job.

That’s reason #2.  To replace my job and percs and keep my comfortable lifestyle for me and my family I need to be consistently earning 6-8 times what I am today in IM.

And because of my issues with quality and not scamming people and my desire to put my effort into projects that build long term value, that takes time to build.

If I quit my job today and worked my ass off building many more sites and quality content, I wouldn’t start seeing results for around 6 months at least.  And one more big algorithm change with Google could push that out to 12 months or more.

Reason #3: Consistency & Safety

As an internet marketer, you are always at the whim of the search engines or affiliate networks.  Just when you think you have a offer dialed in and a product converting well, the offer is canceled.

Just when you get an original article to the top of Google for your chosen keyword and start making good money off it, Google changes their algorithm and it drops to page 2.

Products on Amazon that are converting run out of stock or go up in price or come out with a new model or name and your SEO becomes useless.

Google rejects your PPC ad because the page you’ve been working hard on looks too much like a bridge page (by the way Dan if you’re reading, I’m still working on it…)

But you need to be diverse enough to not feel the pinch when any one of those things happen, and you need to keep inventing ways to stay ahead.

You could say something similar about having a regular job, that they aren’t consistent, companies go out of business, you could get laid off at any minute, etc.  But you don’t know just how good I am.  I’ve been in the hardware and software industry for 15+ years and have worked for four successful companies during that time.  I’ve never been unemployed, never been laid off, I only switch jobs when I know for sure that a new company is up to my standards and offers more growth than the last one.

So that is reason #3.  Until any internet marketing business matches the stability of my current job and start to provide the same amount of satisfaction, I’m not jumping ship.

So what?

For me, slow and steady wins the race.  I’ve only been at this for a little over 3 years putting in 5-20 hours a week part time, and I’m doing way better than most people who attempt to do this full time.

The only way to overcome #2 and #3 is by continuing with Rule #1:  quality content is the way to go.  Even if search algorithms change or one social media network rises above another, good quality unique content will always be valuable.  You might have to work at getting people to click “Like” or “Share” or “+1″ or whatever, but quality will always survive and have value.

Stay tuned!  I just signed up for an SEO hosting account with 60 unique Class C IP addresses to start my own private link network to start helping my sites even more.

Why Do I Still Have A Job? is a post from: ElectronPlumber

Time for a quick update on the Backlink Bombardment Experiment!  If you just joined on, I’m taking an existing site that has pretty much sat dormant for a year and using a couple of article backlinking services from The Great Link Building Service Experiment of 2011 on it.

Now, I was planning on really BOMBARDING the heck out of it full blast.  But a new time sensitive project with a Black Friday deadline has eaten into the time I was planning on putting into writing and spinning articles.

So far, the bombardment has consisted of:

• 15 BuildMyRank unique 150 word articles
•  200 Unique Article Wizard spun 300 word articles

Both spread out over the last few weeks.  Been too busy to really try out the awesome looking new TheBestSpinner upgrade that I use to spin my 1WayLinks articles, but it’s on my plate for this week.

So far though nothing stellar to report other than a small leap from PR0 to PR1.  Google & Bing continue to play with the search algorithm it seems and while some keywords have climbed up a bit, others have gone down a bit.  One thing I learned from my last experiment though is that slow and steady wins the race here.  It took a good four months before any of the sites broke the top 20 for any keywords, so I’m in this for the long haul.

Once I get a few more weeks of readings I’ll put these results into graphical form for easier viewing.

The actual results:

• Page Rank: 1 (+1)
• Keyword #1:
• Google Position: 59 (+8)
• Bing Position: 24 (+1)
• Keyword #2:
• Google Position: 36 (-15)
• Bing Position: 17 (+3)
• Keyword #3:
• Google Position: 26 (-9)
• Bing Position: 18 (+2)
• Keyword #4
• Google Position: 173 (+26)
• Bing Position: 47 (-43)
• Keyword #5
  • Google Position: 11 (+3)
  • Bing Position: 6 (-2)
• Keyword #6
  • Google Position: 3 (+2)
  • Bing Position: 44 (-7)
• Keyword #7
  • Google Position: 80 (+52)
  • Bing Position: 48 (+17)
• Keyword #8
  • Google Position: 200+ (no change)
  • Bing Position: 119 (+41)

Backlink Bombardment Experiment Week 3 Results is a post from: ElectronPlumber

A comment came in the other day on my article on Why Your Amazon Affiliate Site is Failing Miserably regarding the value of a certain Amazon affiliate website called Thisiswhyimbroke.com.   I’m a big fan of the site for the most part (wish I’d thought of it first!), having come across an ad for it on reddit.com a few weeks before Adam from the site commented on here.

The comment from Margus was:

Hmmm not sure why you say thisiswhyIambroke does it right. Unless you have some great knowledge about the commission and sales they do, it seems the site is way too thin on content to pull in any real long tail traffic from google. The descriptions of each products are like 100 words long, it has like 100 affiliate links right on front page, makes me question really.

From my personal experience a site is able to pull in good traffic from google only if it has a clearly defined niche (like lets say black boots) and then it has separate pages on every possible types, shades, sizes makes etc. on the black boots. This site seems to be way all over the place for Google to actually understand what the site is about (other than it is obviously affiliate site with little content and lots of outgoing links).
So in order for it to get traffic to its site, it would need to build a lot of back links to each product page, and even then it is a bit questionable…

Only thing that is intriguing for me about it has things on there that are quite expensive ($17 000 dollar table??? WOW) So I guess if you manage to make a commission on that just once, you would be happy….

Margus, I have some experience with general Affiliate sites.  One  of my biggest sites is very general.  From your example above, my site would be about all kinds of footwear rather than just a specific niche like black boots.  You can do quite well by being general then drilling down for specific categories and products.  It’s like casting a wide net and seeing what you catch vs trying to harpoon a whale on your first fishing trip.

My number one rule with a broad affiliate site, use rapid fire and see what you hit.   Make a site and keep posting on topics in a broad niche.  Check your traffic reports and see if you naturally hit any keywords, then backlink for those.

So, let’s take a look at Thisiswhyimbroke.com and break them down a little.  Adam, I’m going to be a little critical here, but you’ve done EXTREMELY well getting that site to a point where it could reach critical mass just in time for the 2011 holiday season.

First off, here is an example of a page from Thisiswhyimbroke.com about an airsoft minigun.

Why’d I pick that page?  Because you are already naturally ranking #14 in Google for that search term which gets around 1600 searches a month, and I think a couple links like that one will help you get on page 1 for that term.  With no outside backlinks to speak of that page is already ranking in the top 20.  A little link love should drive it onto Page 1.

Thisiswhyimbroke Traffic Report

As of right now, Thisiswhyimbroke.com has an 3-month Alexa rank of 40,000 and a 1-month rank of 25,000.  That means they are trending upward, which is great.  Compete.com puts their monthly traffic at 50,000 visitors also trending upward.

(Note – heard from Adam after publishing this that the 50,000 visitor estimate on Compete.com is “very, very, far low” and frankly I believe him.  You don’t get 30,000 likes on Facebook without at least 50-100 times that in visitors – El Plumber)

From my experience a targeted product site can turn 1 visitor into $0.10-$0.25 in affiliate commissions during a normal month and $0.25 to $1.00 during the holiday blitz.   This is assuming people already have a buying intention when they visit your site.  For example, someone searching in Google for “blue widgets coupon” or “best blue widgets” has a buying intention.   I can imagine that tiwib.com is pulling WELL below that since most of their traffic is “cool site” traffic from places like Reddit and Facebook and not people with a buying intention.  Cool site traffic typically converts fairly poorly and needs a ton of traffic to make up for it.

Add ~30,000+ Facebook “likes” and there are potentially thousands of clicks every time they post a new product to their Facebook page.  Again, non-targeted traffic is really tough to gauge and convert.

Are they hitting $.04 a visitor and making more than $2000 a month yet?  Hard to guess with non-targeted non-buying traffic.  Only Adam can say for sure.

The great thing about Amazon affiliate traffic is that during the peak online holiday season (Black Friday through December 15th) conversions jump about 5X their usual rates.

So what would I do with Thisiswhyimbroke.com if it were my site?

Taking It to the Next Level with SEO

It would take way too long to get into all the minor SEO  issues your site has right now.  But I’m going to touch the top three as I see them:

1. Too many links on your home page.  You have some amazing viral link love going on with your site, but you have so many links on your home page you are diluting pretty badly.  Thin the herd!  Sort through your traffic stats and see which products get the most click throughs.  Grab a month with Clicktale and record some visitor movements to see how far 75% of the people get on your homepage, then cut it off there.
2. Focus your linklove!  Use SemRush (love that tool) to see what valuable keywords you are currently slightly ranking for, then put a focus on those links on your home page.
3. Longer unique descriptions of products.  Take anything you are ranking for in #2 above and write more content. Shoot for 300+ words for maximum SEO effect.

Advertising with Adwords

I’ve noticed via SemRush that you tried your hand at a little Adwords advertising.  However, as you probably quickly found out, people who search for things like “cool gifts” and “cool stuff to buy” don’t actually convert well.

Want to know a little secret of mine for finding good converting keywords to use with Adwords?  Use SemRush to find and steal competing sites best keywords!  For example, plug Thinkgeek in and check out what they are advertising in Adwords.  While I’ve never heard of a drink called “bawls” apparently it must convert to sales as Thinkgeek is paying for that keyword in Adwords.

It’s an awesome way to find what products tend to be other sites most lucrative.  But be careful!  They might be advertising not because it converts but because they bought a truckload of “bawls” and are just trying to offload it quickly.

Go through the full list of keywords they advertise for and you’re sure to find some awesome gems.

Be More Social

You can’t comment on any of the products!  That’s half the fun of a site like this and developing a community atmosphere can only help your traffic and profits.   Drop the Facebook Comments for WordPress plugin on there (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook-comments-for-wordpress/) and let people go to town!

Stop Leaving Money On The Table

The biggest biggest issue I see on your site is that you don’t have affiliate links for your highest value items!?!!?1!!11   Hammacher-Schlemmer has a 8% affiliate program.  If you think no one  is going to buy that robotic jet ski through your site, then you haven’t been paying attention to the Occupy WallStreet protests closely enough.  Somewhere there is a high flying financier who spends his days counting his piles of cash and surfing the internet from his beach house in the Hamptons who needs that thing!  And hell, that’s a $1360 commission!

If that isn’t enough to convince you, the magic holiday season is approaching fast!  People click stuff on your site, which sets an affiliate cookie which lasts for 30 days on Hammacher-Schlemmer.  Then 20 days from now they come back on Black Friday and actually buy stuff and you get credit for it.

Want to really optimize your clickthrough and cookie dropping?  DON’T SHOW THE PRICE.  Make a cute little graphic for “Price too outrageously high to fit in this text box, click to see it!” and stuff like that to encourage people to click through.

Did This Help?

Adam, hopefully you see this and don’t get offended by the criticism.  You have a great site that has viral money potential and you are so very very close to breaking through this holiday season.  I hope you guys make it.  I’m rooting for you!

And hey if you want to take my advice, feel free to add The Electron Plumber to your Staff section.  I’d like my title to be “Awesomeness Consultant”.

Affiliate Site Analysis – Thisiswhyimbroke.com is a post from: ElectronPlumber

It’s always nice to see that my stuff is actually being read by people.  I frequently look at my traffic statistics to see how people are arriving here at the Electron Plumber and where they came from, but other than that I can’t actually tell *who* was here.

I’ve always wondered if any of the more well known Internet Marketing personalities ever make it to my little site here.  Unless they comment it’s impossible to tell.

Except when they buy something through one of my affiliate links:

Thanks for stopping by Potpiegirl!  Love your stuff by the way.  As a fellow “ethical” Affiliate Marketer I’ve been following you since I got started back in late 2008 when you weren’t killing it quite like you are these days.

Keep up the good work!

Hey, Potpiegirl was Here! Affiliate Cookies Are Great. is a post from: ElectronPlumber

My last SEO experiment was wildly successful on a number of levels.  I’ve held the top position in Google for a keyword I thought was going to be much harder to rank for over two months now and now hold position 2 and 3 as well!  The sites are now more than paying the bill for the four link building services that I’m not really even using right now.

So I’m moving on to my next experiment!

I was going to do a Duplicate Content vs Spun vs Unique experiment next, but the 20-30% drop in traffic my sites have experienced with the latest Google 2.5 Panda update has made me rethink that.  The effort and cost involved in creating three different sites and hundreds of unique articles necessary to make the experiment fair doesn’t seem to be worth the end result right now.  I need to make a few new sites sing first to make up for the lost traffic and lost revenue.  Check back in 2012 for the Duplicate vs Spun vs Unique experiment.

Instead for the end of 2011, it’s time for the Backlink Bombardment!  I’ve going to point all 4 link building services from The Great Link Building Service Experiment at one site that I’ve never really built links for.

I’m going to take one site that I’ve been sitting on for a few years now that has never quite gotten off the ground traffic wise.  I’d set it up last year as an example of how you can make money on virtually anything that people might search for online, especially things you’d never really think people care about.  I had intended to make my own online course stepping through making the site and promoting it, but it went by the wayside.

I’d never really done any link building to the site other than basic social media link posting to Twitter, Mr Wong, Digg, etc.  But despite that it actually has some first page rankings for some fairly easy keywords.

It makes around $100 a month off 800 page impressions and 400 unique visitors a month.  The Adsense CTR and eCPM is about 5 times any of my other sites, so I know it could be a big cash cow if I can get the traffic up.  It doesn’t have any good #1  keyword ranking right now, but has some #5-10′s that are certainly worth going after.

It’s certainly not a big money maker and if the blitz manages to get it sandboxed or deindexed it certainly won’t break the bank.

I’m still paying for all 4 services from the Great Link Building Service experiment and I’m going to point ALL of them at this one site for the next few months.

I’ll do my best to keep the linking rate as natural looking as possible since most of the services all you to specify how quickly you want the links created or articles published.  I’ll probably start with 2 a day per service for the first week, then maybe 5 the next week, then 10 the week after, etc.

I’m also going to try to keep the link text natural as best I can, mixing in around 10% junk link text with the specified text and not let any one keyword or phrase go more than 50% for a page.

There are 8 keywords I’ll be going for, ones that are already ranking on some level.

So, without further ago here are the details at the start.  Difficulty is based on a scale from 1-10 with 10 being the hardest.

• Earnings per month: $100
• Page Rank: 0
• Google Indexed Pages: 60 (including tags and category pages)
• Articles: 15
• Targeting 8 Keywords:
• Keyword #1:
• Words: 2
• Difficulty: 5
• Exact Searches Per Month: 5400
• Google Position: 67
• Bing Position: 25
• Keyword #2:
• Words: 3
• Difficulty: 3
• Exact Searches Per Month: 170
• Google Position: 21
• Bing Position: 20
• Keyword #3:
• Words: 3
• Difficulty: 3
• Exact Searches Per Month: 590
• Google Position: 17
• Bing Position: 20
• Keyword #4
• Words: 3
• Difficulty: 4
• Exact Searches Per Month: 880
• Google Position: 200+
• Bing Position: 5
• Keyword #5
  • Words: 3
  • Difficulty: 2
  • Exact Searches Per Month: 720
  • Google Position: 8
  • Bing Position: 4
• Keyword #6
  • Words: 2
  • Difficulty: 3
  • Exact Searches Per Month: 320
  • Google Position: 5
  • Bing Position: 37
• Keyword #7
  • Words: 4
  • Difficulty: 4
  • Exact Searches Per Month: 1300
  • Google Position: 132
  • Bing Position: 65
• Keyword #8
  • Words: 3
  • Difficulty: 3
  • Exact Searches Per Month: 480
  • Google Position: 200+
  • Bing Position: 160

Stay tuned for results!

The Backlink Bombardment Experiment Begins! is a post from: ElectronPlumber

FYI, just a quick update on the sites in the Great Link Building Service Experiment that I started back in February this year.

The official experiment is over, and other than tossing some Adsense on one of the sites and putting some backlinks on the lower sites back to some of my other sites, I haven’t really done much in the way of link building or optimizing.

And then the infamous “minor” update from Google called Panda 2.5 hit on October 14th and stirred up the pot.  Where did these sites land?

For my main 3 word keyword:

• The Build My Rank Site: #1
• The Unique Article Wizard Site: #2
• The 1WayLinks Site: #3
• The LinkAloha Site: #64 (still sandboxed for the homepage!)
• The Quick Blast From All Services Site: #11

Note that all of these are Exact Match Domains (EMDs) or this keyword, just with a .net or .com or .org or a “-” in between the words.  The one “rumor” that pretty much everyone agrees on about this latest Google update is that EMDs received a big boost for their exact keyword.

For the higher volume two word keyword:

• The Build My Rank Site: #200+
• The Unique Article Wizard Site: #179
• The 1WayLinks Site: #200+
• The LinkAloha Site: #181
• The Quick Blast From All Services Site: #151

The Build My Rank site had been naturally ranking for that two word keyword at around #30 before, so that is a little disappointing that it disappeared completely.

My guess is that the other sites are still slightly ranking for that two word since those networks received way more actual links vs the BMR one.  For example, the BMR site had about 90 links total to it, with maybe 5% being that higher 2 word keyword, so like 4 links.  For UAW it was ~2000 links, so 5% of that is 100 links.

What does that mean for the latest Google update?  That one hundred PR-0 links beat four PR-2/3 links?  Maybe.  I think it’s more likely that they trimmed down the spill over link love from link text.  Maybe they used to count “best seo experiment” in the link text as both “best seo experiment” and a little “seo experiment” and a little “best seo” as well and now maybe not so much.

Only time will tell.  Update as they happen!

Google Panda 2.5 Update – Link Building Service Sites Went Up! is a post from: ElectronPlumber

I keep seeing pitches like this filling my spam email account I use to sign up for “free” reports and trials and ads all over the internet about how a Mom makes $6000+ a month “posting links” for Google.

Sometimes they say $1,000, sometimes $10,000, sometimes it’s overnight, sometimes it’s 14 days.  In any event, as you probably suspect, it’s going to cost $27 or $47, or $97 or $197 to find out.  Yeah, everyone likes to end their prices with 7′s.  Does it help?  Probably not.

So how does it work?  How can you make thousands of dollars overnight?

Simple!  First create a website for a scammy affiliate offer or eBook get rich quick offer where you show people how to make money advertising on the internet, the same one that you thought about buying.  For most of them, you can make $20 every time someone buys one.  Not that hard to find, there are plenty of them out there.  Start with Clickbank, but to make real money you’ll probably have to go down the ladder a few rungs and find a shady offer or payment processor.

Next, do a little advertising.  Google Adwords probably will ban you for advertising this stuff.  But there are plenty of others.  Say you spend $100 on advertising.  Did you sell at least 4-5 copies and come close to breaking even?  Good!  Otherwise, try again with another product, another site, and another $100.

Found a winner before you wasted thousands of dollars?  Great!

Now, tweak your site or sales page filling it with half truths and emotional pitches that have nothing to do with the eBook or product but about working at home, financial freedom, how a drunk slob like until you went from being $50,000 in debt to owning your own yacht, etc.  Spend another $100 dollars on advertising.  Did you sell 6 or more?  Awesome.  You just spent $100 on advertising and made $120 for a net gain of $20.  Tweak it some more.  Add a bizarre picture with some animation to your advertising to catch peoples attention, throw a bunch of fake comments at the bottom of your site.  See if you can get 15 or more sales for $100 in advertising for a 50% profit.

Great!  Now spend $20,000 on advertising all over the internet, or say some guys in India or China to create a Facebook virus that “likes” your page 100,000 times.  Do it right and you’ll get $30,000 back for a $10,000 profit.  Wait, what?  Oh yeah, they forget to mention that to make money quickly, you need money to spend.

Now sit back and wait a month until you get paid from the affiliate program or payment processor.  Rinse, repeat until it stops working, which will probably be very soon.  Once you start advertising in enough quantity to make a decent amount of money the vultures come out and start copying your offer.

And there you go!  Now you know why you see so many of these scammy offers and ads all over the internet.  It’s big business and so far the FTC can barely keep up with the biggest and worst of them.

Still thinking about spending $29 on that site promising you thousands of dollars a month posting links on Google?  At least now you know what you are buying.

How To Make Thousands of Dollars Overnight! is a post from: ElectronPlumber

As part of my link building service experiment I chose four services with the thought that I would write the content for each service.

It worked fine for a few months.  I would write 8 short articles with unique content for Build My Rank, then spin those articles to create the articles for UAW and 1WayLinks.  Link Aloha doesn’t need content, so that was no effort at all.

But I got sick of write 150 word posts over and over again and quickly realized that it wasn’t a good use of my time at all. 

In the hour or two it took to write those 8 articles that were only useful as backlink fodder I could have cranked out some real useful content for one of my sites instead and expanded my money making sites.

So I set out to find a freelancer to write them for me.  Luckily for me, with the global economy being what it is it’s not hard to find someone willing to do the work at a very low price.  See my article on why it’s hard to make decent money online for an analysis of why there aren’t really many online work at home job opportunities.

However, the global economy works both ways and in this case it’s to your benefit.  There are many sites out there where you can find and hire a freelancer.  My absolute favorite for this sort of thing is Freelancer.com.  My goal?  Get 100 BMR articles written for $1 each.

Make An Exact Set Of Requirements

First, spell out EXACTLY what you want the freelancer to do.  In this case, I wanted 100 BMR articles of minimum 150 words each.  Make a list and post it.  For example, mine said things like:

Must pass Copyscape and be accepted into BMR.  Needs to be understandable and readable English, does not need to be a work of art.  I give you 10 keywords, you write 10 articles on each keyword.  Must provide at least 10 articles a day until all 100 are complete, No links or BMR submission skills necessary, since I like to do my own.  Must be in CSV format, etc. 

Make it a nice long list of requirements and put everything you are worried about in there.

The Hidden M&M Technique

You ever hear about singers and bands who demand extraordinary and bizarre items, such as a bowl of M&M’s backstage but with no Red ones?  Are they crazy?  Do they do it just because they can?

No.  They do it to test their concert venue management.  In this case, they have to trust that the show organizer who runs the stadium or concert hall pays attention to details.

A typical concert requires hundreds of different items to be exactly right.  From the power requirements, to the weight of the lights, to the stage construction.  Skimp on the details and the show might be over from lack of power to drive the amps.  Really skimp on the details and people could get seriously hurt or worse.

So many bands and singers hide little odd details in their contract.  They might have a list of food to be available backstage in one section that includes M&Ms, but in the middle of the section about the power requirements would sneak in a rule saying no Red M&Ms are allowed backstage.

That way the singer or band manager knows that if they see any Red M&M’s in the bowl in the dressing room, they need to review EVERYTHING on the list to make sure they didn’t also forget or miss five other items that could literally bring the house down.

So how can you use this?  Hide a specific instruction in the middle asking anyone who applies for your job to do a specific task.  In my case I hid this in the middle of my requirements “Send me a private message stating ‘I understand these requirements’ exactly”

And you know what?  I received over 50 replies to my simple $100 Freelancer.com posting.  And only 5 of them sent me the required private message.  And of those three of them had fairly good grammar in their replies.  So I chose two of the three and gave them both the assignment.

And now for around $200 plus some small fees I had 200 Build My Rank articles that were all accepted on the first try.  Sure, they weren’t going to win any Pulitzer Prizes for literature, but they got the job done in the end.

Remember, put your effort where you can add value and outsource the rest!

How To Hire A Good Freelancer is a post from: ElectronPlumber

Wow, time certainly does fly doesn’t it?  When I kicked of this experiment sitting in coffee shop back in February I though six months was going to be an awfully long time, yet here we are.  Actually, I started by registering the sites in January and started building links in early February, so it’s now actually been over 7 months.

I took some readings at the 6 month mark and they haven’t changed much at all from the final results below, so these rankings have stuck for about 5 weeks at this point without any more link building what so ever.

So, for those of you that don’t like to wait, here are the final results for my main three word targeted keyword:

• The Build My Rank Site:  #1
• The Unique Article Wizard Site: #5
• The 1WayLinks Site: #8
• The Link Aloha Site: #71

I think the biggest takeaway here is that the majority of the services I tried actually work.  Now that being said, Google is constantly looking to improve their search algorithm and these rankings might not hold forever.

But heck, I’m ridiculously excited by these results.  Last month the BuildMyRank site made over $250, and the 1WayLinks site earned about $30.   Yeah, I’m not going to retire on that money, but if the rankings hold those sites will bring in over $5000 in the next year with the holiday season bump.  And considering the effort it took to make all five sites and use these backlink services for the past 6 months totaled well under 100 hours.

So do the math here.  If I spend 20 hours to make one site and all the backlinks to get it on page one, I can probably do 20 sites in the next year in my spare time at around 8 hours a week.

Maybe you’ve noticed that I haven’t been posting much on the Electron Plumber lately.  Now you know why!

Backlinking and SEO have always been the weak link in my website strategy and now I’ve really found something that works.  The top three services really did far better than I was expecting here.

Here is the final breakdown, from worst to best:

LinkAloha Site (.com):

• Google Rank: 63
• Harder 2 Word Keyword Google Rank:  not in the top 200.
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #2: 179
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #3: 101
• Pages Indexed: 9
• Yahoo reported Backlinks: 10
• PR: 0
• Links Generated: 2500

The LinkAloha site took a dive in the past month, but only because it’s dropped back into the dreaded SANDBOX.  The main home page is indexed, but that page no longer appears in the search results for the main keyword I’m targeting. The #63 ranking is actually for a sub page.  Don’t forget that the Google algorithm penalizes/sandboxes PAGES, not whole sites.  If your whole site is gone from the index, it’s almost surely a manual de-indexing by a Google Quality Engineer.

Since LinkAloha v1 uses auto generated profile links, it’s likely that only a small percentage of them are found and recognized by Google and I probably have too high a mix of keyword targeted links.   I’ll have to adjust the mix between the keyword targeted links and the “junk” links here.

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1WayLinks Site (.net):

• Main 3 Word Keyword Google Rank: 8
• Harder 2 Word Keyword Google Rank:  141
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #2: 200
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #3: 106
• Pages Indexed: 10
• Yahoo reported Backlinks: 57
• PR: 1
• Articles Generated: ~1150, 3 links per article

The 1WayLinks site makes a very respectable showing here in the experiment, ending up on page one after the full six months.  Note that I tried very hard to use 1WayLinks in it’s raw form here to make the experiment fair.  But from what I’ve read one of the greatest strengths of 1WayLinks is that it outputs a full and accurate listing of every URL your article is published at.  Most people using 1WayLinks successfully say that building an RSS feed for that link list and/or using the built in spinner to backlink those older articles and that RSS feed in future 1WayLinks articles really makes the service take off.

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UniqueArticleWizard Site (.org)

• Main 3 Word Keyword Google Rank: 5
• Harder 2 Word Keyword:  142
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #2: 65
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #3: 144
• Pages Indexed: 9
• Yahoo reported Backlinks: 6
• PR: 1
• Articles generated: ~900, 1-2 links per article

Ok, so I crapped all over UAW at the start of this.  I take back every bad thing I said!  It was a few months after the other services had started showing rankings and UAW was no where to be found.  Then around month three the UniqueArticleWizard site started to climb in the rankings and ends up at second place.

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BuildMyRank Site (.org):

• Main 3 Word Keyword Google Rank: 1
• Harder 2 Word Keyword Google Rank:  34
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #2: 23
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #3: 20
• Pages Indexed: 8
• Yahoo reported Backlinks: 16
• PR: 2
• Arties Generated: 98

The BuildMyRank site did far better than I had ever hoped at the start of this experiment.  I figured if any of these services could get onto page one for my chosen keyword then it would be a great addition to my link building toolbox.  Not only did three of the services get me into Page 1, but this number #1 ranking is really like striking online gold.   The current good ranks for the subpages with very little targeting shows just how strong these BMR articles are.

Since hitting #2 this site was on a $150 a month pace, now at #1 it looks like a $250-300 a month pace for affiliate earnings.

This site is obviously the keeper here.  I’m going to start more heavily targeting some sub keywords using multiple services and see if I can’t kick this site up into the $500-$1000 a month range.

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And so that’s it!    Check back as I’m creating a write up and final review of each service I looked at here.  Also, every once in a while I’ll report on the general health and earnings of the top site in this experiment as I continue developing it.

The Great Link Building Experiment of 2011 – Final Results is a post from: ElectronPlumber

It’s time for the Month 5 update!  I think my “week” count has gotten off somewhere, since the experiment was officially started back in Feb.   I’ve allowed the sites to sit and absorb the latest article posting push that I made in June and haven’t posted any new articles or links since that last push.  I’m planning one last article push before the end of this six month experiment and the start of my big duplicate content experiment.

As you probably already read, two of the sites in the experiment were put in the so called Google sandbox after link building a bunch of similar keyword links in June.

You can read how I managed to pull the BMR site out of the sandbox.  After that, bam, it was back in the rankings right where it was before.

But I waited for the LinkAloha site.  I gave it a full month to see if it was a fluke when I nudged the BMR site out of the sandbox.  And there it sat, at the very bottom of the search results for a full four weeks.  Until a few weeks ago.  I changed my LinkAloha daily link building settings to include similar generic keywords and full URLs just like I had the BMR site.

And guess what!  Lo and behold I check two days later and there it is, right were it was when it disappeared.

Definitive proof?  A sample size of two sites certainly isn’t going to pass any statistics tests, but heck if I’m not convinced.  The 1WayLinks site is also in the same boat right now, but I’m going to sit and wait on it for a while, maybe a month or two before trying the same technique to unsandbox it just as a final data point.

Some good movement this past month. The UAW site is now on page 1 at position #9.   The BMR site has now sitting at #2 for my main keyword and had a corresponding 50% increase in traffic and is on track for it’s second $100+ month from Amazon commissions.   Considering my past experience with 10x monthly profit over the holiday season, this is on track to be a $2500+ a year site for me after only 5 months.  Which makes me wonder what the heck I am doing here writing this article when I should be building another site.  But I started this experiment with you guys in mind, and I’m certainly going to finish it!

And now for the official numbers:

UniqueArticleWizard Site (.org)

• Main 3 Word Keyword Google Rank: 9  (+10)
• Harder 2 Word Keyword:  200+
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #2: 49
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #3: 78
• Pages Indexed: 9
• Yahoo reported Backlinks: 19 (+16)
• PR: 0

Since coming back from a VERY slow start the UniqueArticleWizard site continues to climb in the rankings.  It was certainly the slowest starter in the experiment, but is now in a very respectable second place with it’s entry onto page 1 for my main keyword.  Note that it’s one of the only sites with no Page Rank, yet still outranks most of the others for my main keyword.

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1WayLinks Site (.net):

• Main 3 Word Keyword Google Rank: 200+ (SANDBOXED)
• Harder 2 Word Keyword Google Rank:  200+
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #2: 160
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #3: 88
• Pages Indexed: 9
• Yahoo reported Backlinks: 70 (+17)
• PR: 2

1WayLinks is sitting in the sandbox right now, having dropped there about two weeks into the latest article submission.  It puts links out at 10-20 a day, so it can take some time do to a larger 300-400 article submission.  Note that it has the highest PR of all the sites, so I expect it to come out of the sandbox with some good movement up in the rankings.

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LinkAloha Site (.com):

• Google Rank: 31 (+5)
• Harder 2 Word Keyword Google Rank:  not in the top 200.
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #2: 76
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #3: 96
• Pages Indexed: 9
• Yahoo reported Backlinks: 19 (+10)
• PR: 1

The LinkAloha site continues to hang in there.  LinkAloha just updated their link offering this month that I haven’t taken advantage of yet.  They’ve added 3 other types of links that you can take advantage of each month.  Right now I can add 20 Article Directory links, 30 Social Bookmarking links, and 20 Private Blognetwork links to the 500 Forum profile links I’m getting each month.  They said that it’s free for current subscribers and they plan to raise prices for new  subscribers once the testing period is done, so if you’ve been thinking of trying out LinkAloha, now is the time!

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BuildMyRank Site (.org):

• Main 3 Word Keyword Google Rank: 2 (+1)
• Harder 2 Word Keyword Google Rank:  36
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #2: 29
• Sub Page 3 Word Keyword #3: 17
• Pages Indexed: 8
• Yahoo reported Backlinks: 21 (+19)
• PR: 1

BMR continues to dominate and received a nice spike across the board since the last 30 article push.  If you are worried about not getting your “money’s worth” by not posting 300 articles a month to BMR, you can officially stop worring!  I’ve only posted 70 articles total with links pointing at to the BMR site over the last 5 months and the results have been great.  I don’t think more would really have helped, except maybe the sub-pages.  I’m going to focus on those next and see if I can rank all of them on Page 1 in the coming months and really drive the revenue from this site into the $5000 a year range.

There is still at least one month of official data still to come, as well as long term followups.  Click Here to subscribe to The Electron Plumber so you don’t miss any updates!

Great Link Building Service Experiement of 2011 – Update Weeks 13-20 is a post from: ElectronPlumber