PDFBrander is an excellent server side PDF rebranding solution for webmasters and bloggers. Unlike traditional rebranding tools which invariably require the end user to download a PDF file and an executable rebranding program, PDFBrander offers a much cleaner and simpler solution.

PDFBrander is a script that requires installation on your server but it is extremely simple to set up and there is no need to mess with databases or anything very technical at all.  The script is well supported with very thorough video and PDF documentation so even the less technical should have no difficulties getting it set up.

Once installed PDFBrander is also simple to use from the built in control panel.

Once you have created your PDF, the script will find all the hyperlinks within the document and offers you complete control over which of those links will be rebrandable. You can choose to let the end user replace both full URL’s or a selected segment.

After completing the simple form, your rebrandable documents are then ready for people to download and can be integrated into your website in a variety of ways. You can see an example of how this works on a WordPress powered site at the following link on one of our own articles here – it will open in a new window for you:   Twitter & WordPress Marketing

As you can see, all the end user has to do is add their own affiliate links, click a button and their personalized copy becomes immediately available for download. There is no complicated software for them to install and no messing about figuring out “placeholders” or how to format their links. This ease of use makes it much more likely that your affiliates and visitors will make use of the service and that others will do the same.

viral marketing of this nature is extremely effective but only if it is made as simple as possible for people to use. PDFBrander provides that simplicity. If you have an affiliate program of your own, think how much this will help your affiliates to promote on your behalf and the likely increase in exposure and traffic you can generate. Even if you don’t have an affiliate program, rebrandable reports are a great way to encourage others to promote your PDF’s as they have an incentive to do so in the form of their own links being contained in the reports.

You can read the official promotional material below. Overall we can highly recommend the script to affiliate program owners and anyone who is interested in generating more traffic through viral marketing with rebrandable PDF documents and you know that this comes from a customer with genuine hands on experience of the product.

You can use existing PDF documents or create new ones. If you are looking for a good PDF creation software we use a free program which makes it extremely easy to create PDF’s and in the spirit of sharing we have made it available for you to download through the following link:

Get Easy PDF Maker Here.

You can download your copy of PDFBrander Here

Free PDF Report You Can Rebrand and Share

If you are using either Twitter or WordPress or both, this new short report will help you to get the most out of both. Whether you are looking to drive more traffic to your WordPress powered sites or to your affiliate marketing offers, the tips and tools in this concise guide will help.

The report is 18 pages in length and introduces some of my own tried and tested methods but will hopefully inspire you to do some creative thinking yourself.

You can download a copy of the Twitter and WordPress marketing report, rebranded with your own affiliate links (See the form below) and you are free to use your branded copy in your own promotional and marketing efforts. Rebranding is a simple case of adding your own affiliate links in the boxes filling out the captcha and downloading your PDF.

When you give away your branded copy containing your links, you can pass on the same rebranding rights to your visitors, subscribers, readers and customers.

Such rebrandable PDF books and reports can be a great draw and the simplicity of the brand new server side branding method we have installed makes the whole process far less painful than the more traditional branders that made people jump through so many hoops that they often lost heart and never rebranded anything.

With a few mouse clicks this report can be personalized and downloaded ready to be shared. No complicated brander software to download to your machine and no learning curve. This will encourage your visitors to rebrand and pass along the report and heightens interest in your own blogs and sites by virtue of the fact that you offer something of perceived value.

Try it for yourself and see how simple it is.

You can then use the report in a variety of ways – add it to your blog as a gift, share i with your subscriber list, add it to giveaway events, use it as an opt-in reward to build your own list, write a post about it and link to the download. Those are just a few of the things you can do to increase the viral effect of your report and how you can achieve a viral effect for your affiliate links. Think creatively!

We will be offering more ebooks and reports as time goes by so please subscribe and be the first to know – the early bird catches the  worm!

(IMPORTANT NOTE: If you do not have a Clickbank affiliate link you can get one here and you can get a free SocialOomph account here

If you leave any of the boxes empty the links in your PDF will not work correctly)

Our Limitless Profits review is based on our actual experience of the product which we purchased simply in order to prepare an honest and fair assessment of what the program offers.

Like many Clickbank products, the sales page offers only slight clues as to what  you might expect to find inside and makes many of the usual claims although the presentation video is keen to point out that this is not a “push button” software – let’s face it, most of us know that that kind of thing doesn’t really exist.

Limitless Profits is aimed squarely at those who are just entering the world of affiliate marketing and after watching the sales video we were keen to take a look inside and see what they were offering, particularly as it is sold on the basis that you will not need a domain, hosting, or a website.

I’m pleased to say that this claim is true. The system that they are offering relies far more on viral marketing methods and is delivered via a WordPress powered membership site. Once logged in you will have access to a thorough video training section which clearly lays out what you need to do and it is basically pretty simple stuff.

The membership costs $47 one time, or, if you click to close the window, you will get the $10 discount on the second page, so, basically, it’s going to cost you $37.  Is it worth it?

To be honest, yes, it’s worth the small one time investment. Some of the content might not be new to the more experienced marketer but such customers will still find it useful as the software will save you a lot of time in setting up viral marketing campaigns. It really is just a case of point and click. Many of the affiliate programs you will be utilizing are well known and you may well be using them already.

The system offers some clever and useful ideas into how to achieve everything you need without shelling out any additional money whatsoever. There are a couple of minor problems which I can’t really talk about without giving too much away but they are minor and do not detract from the total package.

So, does it do what it claims? Well, we spent an evening going through the videos, skipping some of the stuff we already knew but we did indeed learn some new things and were impressed with the content and the software that is the key – certainly in a time saving sense. We set up all our campaigns within an hour or so and then began the promotion process. There is absolutely no reason why the program shouldn’t deliver what it claims it can. How fast it will do so is dependent on many factors but in terms of returns vs time and effort spent it is well worth it.

After purchase you can expect the usual upsell and it’s an expensive one although probably worth it if you can afford it. However there is absolutely no need to buy anything other than the product itself which, in these days of deceit and misdirection, is a refreshing change.

If you are a struggling Clickbank affiliate, this program will certainly help you make sales but it’s not restricted to Clickbank by any means. Expect to spend a short time watching the videos, completing the necessary affiliate account registrations if you’re not already using them and then the rest of the time promoting your campaigns – the more you put in to spreading your viral campaigns the better but this can be spread out over days or weeks or you can get stuck in and spend some intensive online time setting up the promotions.

Limitless Profits – Click Here Now To Visit

Overall we’d say it’s a good product for the price and worth investing in. We will watch our own affiliate campaigns carefully and see how well it performs in the real world but we have reasonable expectations that it will deliver sales and commissions over the course of time.

Related articles

• How To Achieve Higher Revenue as A Clickbank Product Vendor (articles.thecaymanhost.com)
• How To Make Bigger Profits With ClickBank (ronmedlin.com)
• This Weeks Top Five E-Marketing Products on ClickBank (desktopserver.com)

Free PDF niche marketing reports and ebooks for bloggers and affiliate marketers are extremely useful in a variety of ways and as it’s been a while since I gave anything away I thought it might be nice to share a collection of niche reports that you can download immediately and use to promote your own site, opt-in list or whatever.

There’s no catch here, you can use any of these free reports as your own giveaways and rewards, you can even add them to free giveaway events if you choose.

No opt-in is required. The link below is a direct download.

The free reports cover a variety of niches so hopefully there is something useful for everyone. They are all contained in one zip folder that can be downloaded from the link below:

 Click To Download Your Free PDF Ebooks Here

Inside you will find the following free reports, all of which you may give away or even sell if you wish. You may use them in free marketing giveaway events, use them to build your list, offer them to your own website visitors and social networks. I hope you will find some of them useful and as you can see, some of the most popular niche markets are catered for.

Below is a sample of just one of the titles to give you an idea of the type of content you can expect – this is the Membership To The Bank report and is best viewed by clicking on the full screen mode:

The other included titles are listed below:
twitter Marketing Mastery
JV Fast Profits
Membership To The Bank
Domain Flipping Treasure Map
Work At Home Maximum Profit
Facebook Marketing Profits
Hand Over Fist Moneymakers
Work  At Home Maximum Profit
PLR Godfather
Building The Business Brain
Offline Super Cash
Fitness Resolution Fortress
The Basics Of Bodybuilding
The Beginners Guide To Golf
The Basics Of Forex
Energy Efficient Home Ideas
Super Speed Dating Secrets
Authority Anthem
Courage and Confidence
How To Make Her Fall For You On The First Date
10 Sure Shot Ways To Get Your Ex Back Within One Week

video Review Of  This Excellent video Marketing Software

Traffic Player review – A WordPress plugin that enhances videos from YouTube and any other video sources watch the video now for full details of this excellent video marketing software and how it can increase traffic and sales to any videos.

WP Social Lock is a WordPress plugin that was originally sold, I believe, as a WSO through the Warrior Forum but we came across it more recently when trying to solve the problem of locking specific content on a WordPress site until the visitor took a specific action – we wanted to make content available only after the visitor shared a specific page or post either via Facebook, twitter or Google +1.

This is not a new concept and marketers have been employing such “social content locking” methods for some time now but despite the fact that there are a variety of options on offer we constantly found that either the solutions didn’t work or were capable of only fulfilling part of our requirements.

We’ve listed most of the things we tried at the end of this review so that you won’t have to search as hard as we did!

The good news is that we found a winner in WP Social Lock, a neat little plugin now owned and distributed by Marc Hennes who has proved to be a very helpful and responsive plugin developer.

The video below sums up WP Social Lock in a nutshell if you don’t wish to read our entire post.

As you can see from the above demo, the idea behind WP Social Lock is to restrict certain areas of your site from public view, much as you would do with the various content locking plugins available as stand alone scripts or features of membership plugins, whereby only registered or logged in members can see certain content on your site. There are plenty of free plugins that can do this in the WordPress plugin repository. However, what this plugin allows you to do is restrict your selected content to only those who share your selected URL via one of the three main social networking sites and at present there are not any free plugins that do this as far as we know.

The benefits of this are obvious. First and foremost it will generate traffic from all three of the social networks as people Tweet, Like and +1 your page/post and give it exposure to potentially unlimited new visitors. It has excellent viral potential and used wisely can gain you a lot of visitors and perhaps a lot of customers or subscribers, whatever you are looking for in essence.

The claim that you will generate huge numbers of backlinks is perhaps true in part, although how much weight Facebook and Twitter links really carry is anyone’s guess to be honest and as for Google +1 it’s perhaps too early to tell how much an increased number of likes is going to impact your ranking or SERPS results. Ultimately though, none of these increases will do your sites any harm and you will get more traffic.

WP Social Lock has been around for a while now but its usage is still not as widespread as you might expect for such a neat little WordPress plugin. As we’ve already said, there are several others around, most more expensive and invariably incapable of offering shares on the big three networks. There are several Facebook only plugins but despite Facebook‘s massive reach there are still plenty of people who don’t use it. Restricting content based on a Facebook “Like” is a little tough on those folks, as indeed is restricting it to just Twitter. By using the three options in WP Social Lock you probably have the majority of internet users covered.

The plugin is easy to install and use – entering a simple shortcode before the content you wish to lock is all there is to it really.

So what about problems? Well, like many WordPress plugins, conflicts can arise with themes, other plugins you may be running etc. but Marc is helpful and responsive with his support so if you do encounter any issues they should be resolved fairly quickly. When you run other plugins that rely on the API’s of sites like Facebook and Twitter it’s not always the plugin’s fault when odd behaviour strikes.

One question that was raised frequently when the plugin was first launched and only offered Facebook and Twitter options was whether it would affect the spidering of your content by search engines. The answer to this is no – even though human visitors cannot see the content until they complete the required action, the spiders are granted full access to read and crawl the entire post or page so there should be no detrimental effects on the SERPS performance.

We had one minor issue with another plugin we were using on the site where we first tested WP Social Lock but after a quick process of elimination we isolated the conflict and informed Marc, who immediately set to work in the quest for a solution. We found our own fix in the end but our emails were all answered promptly and helpfully.

(If you would like to see a real world example of a page on which we deployed WP Social Lock here is one you can check out).

Overall, we love this plugin and recommend it to anyone who is looking for ways to boost their traffic. All we would add is that it isn’t something you should use indiscriminately. Selective restriction of your best/most valuable content is quite reasonable but overdoing it could be a real turnoff for a lot of people if you demand they share too much before allowing them access and they will be more likely to move on if you get too heavy handed.

If you would like to try WP Social Lock for free you can download WP Social Lock Lite free from here. (The Lite version allows you to lock content subject to a tweet on Twitter).

We hunted high and low for both free and paid solutions to social content locking on WordPress and came up with quite a few but in terms of value for money, user experience, layout, ease of use and features, WP Social Lock was a clear winner. Here are just a few others that we looked at, tried or rejected. All have their pros and cons, and as you will see, most are not quite as simple or well featured. We are going to be looking at a free plugin in the course of the next few weeks which although not really a competitor to WP Social Lock is pretty cool in its own right so watch this space for that one.

Other Social Content Locking plugin options for WordPress users:

WP Like Lockout – we haven’t personally tested this one but the sales page itself employs the lockout which seems a bit counter productive if you ask us. It would appear to be an OK plugin if you want to use Facebook likes alone but it uses popups which are a lot more intrusive and potentially frustrating for visitors than WP Social Lock’s interface. Much will depend on the settings you elect to use on the popup. It is also more expensive by around ten bucks so in terms of value for money it’s in last place here on that basis alone – there are better and cheaper choices as you can see. If you want to see it in action there is a video at this link WP Like Lockout

Google +1 Content Locker – simple, easy to use and cheap at just $7.00. If you’re going to go for a single content locking option Google might be the best bet as opposed to Facebook. Only time will tell. You can get Google +1 Content Locker here.

WordPress Like Locker – from the same author as the above and also cheap at $7.00. We have used this in the past and it’s effective enough, not overly intrusive and simple to use. If all you care about is Facebook likes it’s a good enough choice. See the details at WordPress Like Locker

Social Traffic Pop  – the third option from the same stable as the previous two plugins. Works on all three major networks – Google +1, Facebook and Twitter. Comes in at $18.00. We like this one and have used it in the past but still prefer the non pop up approach to content locking overall. Having said that, this is the cheapest of the plugins that support all three networks and represents good value for money. Read more about Social Traffic Pop.

This list is not exhaustive and there are other products out there which may or may not float your boat but if you want an easy professional looking social content locking plugin, our recommendation for WP Social Lock is one we are happy to make.

Please let us know what you think in the comments section. Have you ever used WP Social Lock? What do you think about social content locking in general? Would you ever try it or do you think it would  put off your visitors? Do you have any experience of other WordPress solutions that we haven’t mentioned?

Would you like to sell your ebook on Clickbank for free – without the normal upfront registration costs, marketing costs, website and sales pages creation and all that hassle? I got an email recently from Harvey Segal and I always have time to read emails from this guy because his advice is invariably good.

If you’re ready to submit your book and start making money and don’t want to read all this stuff just click here to sell your ebooks online for free

If you’ve never heard of Mr Segal he’s the man behind such gems as Clickbank For Newbies and the Ultimate Supertip both of which have helped a lot of people to make money online. When it comes to Clickbank this is on expert you should take notice of, he runs the Ultimate Guide To Clickbank and it’s as valuable and relevant today as it was when he first launched the site – don’t be fooled by the simple, some might say ugly website design – the content outshines the look and lets you get right to the meat of making money on Clickbank fast. I’ve made money with all of Harvey’s products and recommend them highly.

Anyway, on to the latest email, the reason you came here you want to publish an ebook, sell an ebook online, perhaps sell an ebook on Clickbank and leverage the huge power offered by their affiliate network.

The problem is you’re on a very tight budget, maybe you’re great at writing, you have a great subject and valuable information, but you’re not so hot on how to publish and sell online.

Want To Sell Your Book On Clickbank? Click Me Now

Well,  you’re in luck having landed on this page today. If you’re comfortable with setting up a sales page, marketing and paying a fee to get your books published in the Clickbank marketplace you might like to read my post about Creating Your First Ebook but if all that is too much trouble and is just standing in the way of selling what you have written we can take care of it all for you with a brand new service.

This brand new service isn’t going to cost you anything up front. That’s right, we’re going to show you how to submit your ebook to this new site where they will take care of all the technical, nerdy marketing and up front costs for you.

Sound good? You bet it’s good – that’s why we’re recommending you check it out now if you have a book you’ve been wanting to sell already but just haven’t got past the final hurdles or if you are looking to sell a book you’re working on right now or planning for the future.

Head over to We Sell Your Books – it’s a simple looking site but it’s consequently easy to navigate. You could submit your book in the next couple of minutes and be making money this week.

Good luck and please let us know if you found this post useful – share it and help your friends and readers make some money online.

WordPress speed and load times have become increasingly important, particularly since Google decided that the speed of a website would be included in their search ranking algorithm. If your site is very slow to load, not only will this now put off a percentage of your visitors, it might conceivably affect your ability to achieve certain ranking levels in the SERPS for your chosen keywords. It’s just one more thing to consider if you run WordPress powered sites.

WordPress is a great dynamic platform but it is easy to forget that as time goes by, the more content and features you add, edit and remove, the more you need to keep on top of your sites’ performance. Housekeeping is a boring and tedious task but we’ve put together some resources designed to make the chores a little easier.

So, how do you know if your sites are running too slowly in the first place? The first thing we recommend you do is open a Google Webmastertools account if you don’t have one already.  This is something that everyone running any kind of website should have for the wealth of important information and diagnostics it provides you with.

Next, add both the Firebug and Page Speed extensions to your Firefox. (Also available for Chrome if you prefer Google’s browser).

You can now go ahead and load your page and test it with the extensions you have just added. If the results are horrible and don’t mean a thing to you, never fear, read on to discover a number of ways to bring your website up to speed.

WordPress Plugins for Performance

The following WordPress plugins can all be useful in your quest for greater performance and are listed in no particular order aside from the first one which we highly recommend all WordPress users should install on all sites.

W3 Total Cache Plugin – download and install W3 Total Cache and follow the instructions carefully. It is probably the most complete and stable caching plugin currently available but, it needs to be set up carefully because some settings may actually make your site perform worse in certain areas. This will depend on several factors including your hosting arrangements and everything that is running on your site, themes plugins etc.

The good news is that there is plenty of help available if you need it. As you tweak the settings, check the effects it has on your page speed performance using Firebug or the Google Page Speed option that W3 Total Cache can install on your WP-admin dashboard if you select that option. W3TC can be tweaked for shared hosting, VPS users and dedicated servers. It places a new set of options in the left hand menu of your WP-admin panel.

Also check to make sure that all the features of your page are still displaying correctly and if you are using any kind of pop ups check that they are working – often the minify settings can mess with such things.

It is a great cache plugin but the options available also make it easy to end up with conflicts or even slowing down your site – there is a great guide already published on Zemalf.com and we highly recommend you read it and follow the set up instructions provided at their site – W3 Total Cache WordPress Plugin Setup Guide

IF things go wrong the important thing is not to panic! We have had a situation where all we got after configuring the plugin was the dreaded white screen = no admin dashboard and no site. If this happens the simple fix can be found at HackTrix – How To Fix The Blank Page Or Blank Screen In WordPress

If you find yourself having major problems with the plugin – and some sites do seem to have them, so be warned, there are alternatives. We installed and configured W3TC on one site and it seemed to be performing fine until we saw the error logs on cpanel which had grown to over 2GB!We can’t tell you what happened but the site was throwing up 500 internal server errors and that was enough for us to uninstall the plugin. We did try messing with the settings but all was to no avail, so it had to go. After deleting the plugin there were several display problems and only after much frustration and head scratching did we get things working normally again. If you have this problem it might be worth waiting a while to see if your site returns to normal after uninstalling W3TC because in our case it seemed to fix itself  after a couple of hours so maybe there was some residual caching going on – we really don’t know.

If you do have issues we would recommend you give  Hyper Cache for WordPress a try instead. This is a far less intimidating plugin to install and works straight out of the box in our experience. When we installed it on the aforementioned site the page speed ratings were within one or two points of those achieved with W3TC  and we didn’t have to spend ages carefully configuring it. We will monitor it carefully but so far it’s looking very capable indeed and isn’t causing any obvious problems at all. Top marks for Hyper Cache. This is the plugin that we use on this site and although it is not as effective as W3 Total Cache, it gave us far less issues. With W3TC, if you are using manual settings to minify javascript and CSS, you will have to keep those settings up to date each time you add/remove plugins etc. and to be honest, the speed advantage over Hypercache wasn’t worth the hassle but that is just a personal preference, and, as the saying goes, your mileage may vary!

In addition to W3 Total Cache, or Hyper Cache or even in isolation the following plugins can also be helpful in speeding up your WordPress page speed.

Clean Options WordPress Plugin – If your blog has been around for some time you’ve probably added and removed all kinds of plugins, themes etc. This plugin Finds orphaned options and allows for their removal from the wp_options table. You could have hundreds of orphaned options and this will help you clean house in that area. Be careful and make sure you are definitely only removing genuinely orphaned items though. You might be well advised to back up before you make any changes just as a precaution but on the whole the plugin is reliable and does a good job.

Better Delete Revisions WordPress Plugin – use this plugin to delete the revisions that WordPress automatically creates and stores every time you create ot alter posts and pages. These files can build up over time and take up space and impact on performance. This plugin makes it simple to find a delete all the revisions clogging up your WordPress. If you want to prevent revisions being stored in future you could install the Revision Control plugin to make the job easy. If you do this, you can remove the Better Delete plugin once you have set Revision Control to not save revisions in future.

If you have access to PHPMyAdmin through your hosting account you can then optimize your MySQL database. It’s easy to do – just click on the db name (WDRP1 or similar) highlight all the tables and select optimize from the drop down box at the bottom. That’s it, done. This can make a surprising difference to your site’s performance all by itself.

If you prefer not to mess with your databases in this way, try installing the TentBlogger Optimize WordPress Database plugin and do it from your WordPress admin with one click. The plugin will always tell you when your database is optimized and if not how much space you can shave off by optimizing. Couldn’t be simpler. It works on most sites although we did have a poblem with it on one WP site but to be fair, it’s an old site and the theme conflicts with a fair number of plugins so that was probably the culprit as opposed to the plugin itself.

Another useful plugin is WP Smush.it, basically an image compression plugin that will reduce the size of all the images in your WordPress media library and consequently improve load times. The quality of the images is not adversely affected and once installed it will automatically compress any images you add to your pages and posts. You can also apply it to all existing images in your library. Worth looking at if you have an image intensive site.

As you implement these things you should find your performance rating in Page Speed / Firebug starting to improve after each step. Take note too of the other recommendations that Firebug offers in respect of optimization. You may not be able to achieve a green check mark against every item, but the more you can get, the better.

There are various online services that will test the load time of any webpage although the disparity in the results that you will get prove that in reality they can only give a vague indication of how quickly your visitors will see your page load. This is because there are so many factors that affect that load time – their physical location, their equipment, their connection to the web, their browser type and version etc. etc. If you want to try some of them however there is a list available at PCDrome.com – 10+ Best Web Tools to Check Website Loading Time

While you’re doing all this housekeeping and tweaking, it is also a good idea to check for broken links on your site, particularly if you’ve never done so or haven’t had a clean up in a long time. We use Xenu’s Link Sleuth  for this (which can be downloaded for free) but there is also a WordPress plugin (isn’t there always?) that can check your WordPress sites for links that are  no longer functioning. It may not be compatible with the latest version of WordPress yet you can give it a try and see if it works for you. WordPress Plugin Broken Link Checker.

If you those results spend a lot of time tweaking your on page SEO, don’t let the results of your hard work be negatively impacted by ignoring the performance factors of your site(s)

Facebook pages  have become a great way to promote all manner of things online and to help drive traffic via the huge social network.

Facebook allows anyone to sign up for a developer account and create customized fan pages where content can be inserted into an iframe to serve all manner of content to page visitors. However, with more and more users now using Facebook via a secure https, unless you are delivering your iframe tab or page content over SSL visitors will no longer be able to see your carefully crafted content without clicking on a link that asks them to revert to non-secure browsing in order to see the page. Most users won’t do this of course because they will feel threatened simply by the warning.

At the moment, your pages remain live but at the end of October 2011 Facebook will insist that you server a secure version of your iframe. It hasn’t yet been made clear what will happen if you do not do so.

SSL certificates are expensive and if you don’t have one this represents a bit of a dilemma.

However, there is now a free and easy way to make your Facebook iFrame  tabs and pages available over SSL and it is  very quick and easy to set up.

Head over to the website of Social-Server.com, register with  your name and email, and all you have to do is enter your URL, click a button or two and presto, you will be given a shiny new https: URL which you can add in the relevant field on your Facebook page or app options and your iframe will be served perfectly to anyone whether they are using https: or not.

An awesome free service that will save Facebook developers and fan page owners huge headaches and not inconsiderable sums of money.

If you have any iframe content on Facebook pages, now is the time to fix this and ensure that your visitors always see what you want them to. Don’t wait until October, you could be losing a lot of traffic already.

If you know anyone else who might benefit from this great free service please share this article with them to help them out and we welcome your feedback in the comments section below.

Image via Wikipedia

The announcement of Google’s latest algorithm changes designed to weed out poor quality content from what have commonly become known as “content farms” poses some interesting questions.

Early figures suggest that a number of well known and long established sites have been hit quite hard in the SERPS.  Some early indications of sites affected by Google’s content farm algorithm changes have already been published.

Certainly, the knock on effects of the change will take some time to become apparent but certainly, those who use article marketing are going to have to up their game when it comes to producing content.

Over two years ago I wrote a post entitled “article directories must raise standards” because it was only ever going to be a matter of time before the chickens came home to roost over the absolute garbage that was being passed off as content by authors, publishers, and the article directories and their editors.

It would seem that this is exactly what the latest algorithm updates are targeting – not by domain per se, but by individual pages on  those domains. With Ezinearticles marked as one of the heavy losers in the SERPS, my complaints about the decline in editorial quality control at what was once the  market leader in its field and loved by the search engines, is getting a slap for falling asleep at the wheel.

Based on early results though, if you are using article marketing as an SEO tool, there isn’t any reason to panic as long as you are submitting quality, well written articles. If on the other hand you spin crap into more crap, use rehashed PLR drivel that thousands of others have mangled before you, well, don’t expect your results to be much to write home about any longer. The abuse of what was once a wonderful system for all concerned, has, as predicted not only by me but many others, finally been tackled by Google.

It’s probably going to upset a lot of people. It will mean a lot of changes for some and hopefully it will allow article directories who publish only solid content a fair chance to rank well against the big boys who have been so dominant in the past. Good editorial practice should be rewarded, good content writing should be rewarded, and the tons of spammy, useless, marketing driven nonsense will be consigned to irrelevancy as it should have been a long time ago.

Article directory owners will need to get their act together, marketers will need to totally re-evaluate their content writing and syndication. The message is nothing new from Google – write good content for human readers and you will have no problems – we (Google) are all about producing the best, most relevant search results for our users.

I had a quick look at a couple of recent articles I had published at a few article directories, particularly those mentioned as big losers in the article linked to above. I’m pleased to say that they still appear to be ranking in the top three results for my chosen keywords which seems to endorse the view and the intention not to penalize domains in a blanket slap, only to penalize poor content published on those domains to improve the search experience.

Update: March 1st 2011

I carried out a small experiment over the last few days which seems to indicate that although most article directories are likely to be affected, some do seem to have been hit much harder than others, and although some people are claiming to understand the reasons and to predict the long term impact, things like this serve to prove that none of them are doing any more than guessing – probably a fruitless exercise,

Anyway, I wrote an article a few days ago, just before the algorithm changes hit, and submitted it to a handful of some of the top directories. The first of these was GoArticles and, as is often the case, it was published there first, literally within a few minutes. The next to approve it were ArticlesBase and Amazines, on the same day but several hours after GoArticles. Most of the others have not yet approved it.

That same day, the article was appearing high on the page one results for the targeted keyword from both ArticlesBase and GoArticles (this keyword was not particularly long tail, but was in a very particular niche with little competition or real search volume).

Today however, the GoArticles version had disappeared completely. The article was completely original and unique, and was written by myself, it was over 1000 words and, if I say so myself, very well written in terms of spelling, grammar and punctuation and not stuffed with keywords but written very much with human readers in mind.

The ArticlesBase copy is holding at number four on page one of the Google SERPS.  There are absolutely no differences from the article that was published first at GoArticles – they were identical throughout.

The Amazines version has also slipped out of the first 100 results having originally been indexed on page three.

The screen shots from Alexa’s data on GoArticles are inconclusive this early after the Google changes, but although they show some notable percentage losses a day or so in in terms of reach and page views they indicate an increase in terms of their percentage of visitors from search engines since the algorithm was implemented. Looking over the longer term though, the ups and downs don’t appear to be drastically abnormal.

Fig1 -

Fig 2

Fig 3

To add even more interest to the experiment, I bookmarked the articles in a few places too and republished the article at a limited number of third party sites (content farms if you wish).

At Thoughts.com, only submitted today (several days after the article directory submissions) the post is being ranked fifth, right below the ArticlesBase item.

The Goarticles URL, bookmarked at Faves is showing up at the top of the third page of results i.e 21st position.

I didn’t post the article on the WordPress site to which the article was linking – this site already performs extremely strongly in all three major search engines and I’m sure, if I did republish it on that site it would outperform the content farms, and, if I intended to post it on the main site prior to syndicating and bookmarking it would still do so. I’m hoping that this is really what Google is trying to ensure happens going forward so that original authors and their domains rank first for their content.

So, the algorithm is definitely making its mark but is it really rather a case of  over exuberance or clumsy heavy handedness? This particular article was in the fine art niche and was a fairly in depth look at the intricacies of the fine art market in a specific country and region. I’m all for getting rid of the crappy, spun a million times dross that is the staple of many article directories and distribution services but in this case, a good and very relevant piece has been lost to Google’s visitors. To add insult to injury, the bulk of the results now showing on page after page are for sites selling posters – literally hundreds of them. This is not really a balanced search result and probably not at all what searchers would be looking for if they used the keywords/keyphrase targeted in my article.

Overall, it does seem apparent that those involved in article marketing will have to make some adjustments. My guess is that article marketing does have a future, but not for those who are not prepared to write their own quality content and restrain themselves from submitting to hundreds of directories. The article directories themselves will almost certainly have to undergo some serious quality control changes too, and doubtless, a good many will go the way of the dodo if they do not adapt. As for the countless marketers who have spent time building backlinks and traffic via rubbish articles whether or not they are about to see their efforts come unraveled only time will tell.

Do I agree with Google’s stance? In part yes, if it genuinely improves the search results and enables decently written useful content from individual bloggers as well as the big boys to beat out the shotgun approach of some of the directories and associated spammers but to be honest I’m reserving judgment until a little more time has allowed the dust to settle.

Related articles

• Google Kills eHow Competitors, eHow Rankings Up (seobook.com)
• Google Aims To Take Out Content Farms (technologyreview.com)
• Google Rolls Out Search Algorithm, Targets Content Farms (ghacks.net)
• What Google’s Crackdown on Content Farms Means for Bloggers (blogworld.com)

SEO Elite reviews can be found all over the web nowadays and this alone means that you may have considered using it yourself at some point. SEO Elite from Brad Callen has been around for several years now and in its latest incarnation, SEO Elite 4, is still performing well for many webmasters, even though it has had and continues to have its critics. All webmasters know that search engine optimization and keyword research are vitally important aspects of running a website or blog; at least if you want traffic to your sites.

Never an exact science, SEO has spawned a huge industry and not a little controversy over the years. The only thing that most people agree on is that the whole business is an ever changing sea of methodology and that what is a great SEO technique today, may be next to useless tomorrow. With search engines forever tweaking their algorithms and ranking factors, it is almost impossible for anyone other than those working on those factors, to know what exactly needs to be done to get a decent position in the search engine results pages and keep it.

Naturally, developers have come up with numerous software tools and packages to try and crack the business of achieving a top ranking, with varying degrees of success.

SEO Elite has been around for several years and has somehow continued to prove its effectiveness and worth, despite all the changes that are seemingly constantly being brought to the attention of webmasters. Whilst it is not cheap, if you have the budget and want to improve your results in the organic search listings of the major search engines, SEO Elite is one tool you should definitely consider.

Even though there are many alternatives out there, a great deal of them are not worth the purchase price and some are, sad to say, a complete waste of time and money. With SEO Elite you know that you are getting a regularly updated and powerful SEO optimization tool with reliable help and support. The features are comprehensive and we have posted three videos below so that you can see the sort of thing SEO Elite can help you with.

This only really scratches the surface but gives you a good idea of the interface and how quickly the software can help you with the detailed tasks involved in optimizing your website. To achieve manually what SEO Elite can provide in terms of research and suggested improvements would patently take a totally unrealistic amount of time.

You can find out more about SEO Elite or buy the software at the company’s website www.seoelite.com

If you are seriously considering working on your own on site optimization a tool like SEO Elite will do most of the heavy lifting for you and when used correctly will certainly see your sites improve in the SERPS.

The company also produces the excellent Keyword Elite and Affiliate Elite products and have established themselves as a trusted source of reliable and effective tools for webmasters, marketers and affiliates alike.

We hope you found the videos a useful insight into at least some of the the workings of SEO Elite.

If you prefer the idea of free SEO software there are plenty of options too and I’ve discussed several of the best collections elsewhere. For WordPress SEO advice our WordPress SEO Secrets videos are a very good place to start.

Register For A Free Author Account Here

If you have a review or an article dealing with any aspect of web hosting or want to promote your websites to the world you can register for free and post away – there are only a couple of rules and provided they are followed this will be a great way for you to earn backlinks and syndicate your content to a wider audience.

As article directories go, there are none of the usual restrictions – you may include video in your posts as well as hyperlinks in the body of your articles as well as the resource box at the foot of your posts.

The site runs on WordPress, and it has been set up to be search engine friendly using a range of plugins to ensure your content gets spidered and indexed quickly. If you already blog on WordPress the members area will be very familiar to you.

As it is a brand new site, now is the time to register and start posting your content and links – we are accepting articles on all web hosting and domain name topics as well as internet marketing articles, SEO, WordPress, general blogging and website design and promotion. If you write about any of these things you can sign up as an author and start spreading your message.

As an author you may post as often as you wish. All we ask is that you refrain from using affiliate links (including redirects) and stick to the topics allowed. This is not a general article directory but one aimed at those looking for information on specific subjects.

After registration make sure you fill in your profile details to gain as much advantage as possible as when people click on your profile they will see your website links etc.

When posting be sure to include your relevant targeted keywords and tag your posts so that they can be more easily found.

If you are a publisher looking for content you may use any of the articles in the database for your own sites provided that they remain unchanged in any way, including all live hyperlinks which must be left intact – the content is free so please respect the author’s and their right to exposure if you are using their work.

Other than that, all we ask is that you enjoy the new site and help us make it a success

TCH

First off, we are going to be moving to a new home on the web as we have outgrown our present hosting plan – more of that in a separate post. We have suffered a lot of downtime in recent months and it as done a fair bit of damage to our rankings which is another reason why we are making the move.

I have been considering the future of this blog for sometime and although the new hosting arrangements will allow it to remain without eating up too many resources, the fact that it is a non WordPress blog is one of the reasons its future is uncertain. Moving it to WordPress is so convoluted that I doubt I will try it for this site so I’m considering all options carefully before making a final decision.

If you haven’t visited our main site recently, please drop by and see what we have been up to – a new series of video tutorials on things like WordPress, cpanel and other blogging and web hosting related subjects are to become a regular feature and are proving very popular. My blogging focus will probably shift to this site far more as the year progresses – if you are reading this post here, you can see that I am slowly moving selected content over already.

I have been busy elsewhere this past few months both online and off and my wife and I are about to open a physical offline business having launched a new website last year and the move into a retail premises is the focus of our efforts at present. We used WordPress for the site and you can visit Arteccentrix for another example of what can be done with the software and associated plugins, it really is a versatile platform – it’s not internet marketing related.

So, 2010 is going to be an exciting and busy year! I hope that all my loyal readers will stick around and enjoy it with me.

To kick off this new year I’m starting with a few tips that will help your marketing efforts online this year.

URL Redirection and Affiliate Marketing – if you are still using the TinyURL service to shorten your links you may want to rethink the idea. Why? Well, it has been a much abused service and as a result you could be losing a lot of traffic and visitors if you continue to use it. Browsers like Google Chrome now include a feature for users to preview every TinyURL as so many links led to undesirable or spammy sites. This means that instead of redirecting to your page, users will see something like the image below. This is plainly not a good thing!

So, if you’re looking for a better alternative there are plenty out there nowadays – ViralURL is one option and can help you with more than just redirection, as can the excellent and new service from Skadoogle.

However, I recently discovered that ViralURL also has problems associated with it – having been unfairly flagged (imo) by the Spybot Search and Destroy software, anyone running Spybot and Internet Explorer is unlikely to see any of your links at all. I’m not sure how many users Spybot S&D has, but it’s a pretty well known tool and it’s free. CNET alone cites the number of downloads from its sitealone at 111,925,794 so it has to be borne in mind. ViralURL id certainly going to be crippled on a lot of machines out there. Rightly or wrongly SpybotS&D have decided to “protect” their users from ViralURL links and have refused to remove the flag, despite the best efforts of ViralURL to state their case. I think the people at Spybot are morons judging by the comments they made on their forum and simply do not understand viral marketing or any form of affiliate marketing at all. Needless to say I choose to use alternative software for parasite detection.

If you want a professional link cloaking script for your own domain we still say that Samurai Stealth Cloaker is the best out there. You can visit my hub on link cloaking and redirection for more tips too.

When it comes to marketing online, your list is going to be one of the most important aspects of those efforts and if you are still baulking at the thought of getting started with your own list, make 2010 the year you get to grips with building your own list of subscribers. You can choose from countless list building programs but the bottom line is that most of them are a waste of time – sorry to say that but it’s true.

For some great listbuilding tips try Josh Spaulding’s report on email marketing, it’s a steal and contains some great information.

I’m often asked what programs and services I would recommend for beginners to the world of internet or affiliate marketing but it is such a huge subject that without a clear idea of exactly what model you are intending to use it’s very difficult to answer.

If you are just starting out, there is a very good 120 video course available called IM For Newbies that covers all kinds of topics and explains how to do a whole range of things – it’s not the most advanced stuff but if you’re wanting to accelerate your learning curve it’s very worthwhile and good value for money at only $7. For anyone wanting to learn how to set up affiliate marketing sites or niche sites, the free training videos at the Clone Cash System are well worth a look too.

If you are planning to use WordPress in your online marketing there are a huge number of free and paid resources available – take a look at my main site’s WordPress tools section and check out some of the WordPress Training videos too. You can even get a free membership site software for WordPress at Memberfire, so if you are looking to set up your first membership site for free or paying members, it’s a great place to start.

As far as free services go there are a million and one that claim to be the answers to your prayers, but they can’t all possibly be telling the truth. That’s not to say that some will work better than others for different people and their online ventures. There are literally thousands of options, tools and sites out there, so many that it can be difficult to know what to do and where to begin but my advice would be to try as much as you can cope with – test and discard anything that does not bring results. Do not just take someone else’s word all the time – if you like the look of a free service try it – there can often be some nice surprises when you do so.

You will have noticed  several buttons in the sidebar for free advertising sites – if you have no advertising budget to speak of these can be quite effective – I know because I’ve seen some good results with them in recent months so give some a try and see if they can help you too. In my experience if you have the right product/service they can be good for list building and even sales. I’m also currently trying some banner advertising with an exchange that seems to be performing reasonably well although I’ve never been a fan of such things before – it all depends on what you’re advertising but it’s a no cost way of getting your sites seen in more places and there is a WordPress plugin available too.

If you stick with me on this blog or subscribe to my list, I will post results and ideas of my own to help you further your online goals at the start of this new decade!

I’ll report back on the hosting move once it’s underway – if the new service is as good as people claim, you can be sure I’ll be giving a full and detailed review of my experiences and the services provided so look out for that in the weeks ahead.

TCH

Ezine advertising can be a good way to reach a large number of people interested in your business. In effect you are renting opt-in lists of others and the good thing is you do not need to worry about spam allegations or other headaches. Submit your advertisement and it will be sent to the subscribers of the relevant ezine(s).

We have found what we consider to be a very good deal details of which can be viewed below. Each group of ezines below has at least 500,000 total subscribers and you can place an ad with any group for just $15. There are currently 156 Ezines with 2.6 Million+ Subscribers and 5 Groups which means you can place a five line ad for less than 4¢ per 1000 Ad Impressions.

–>

If you would like to advertise your business on our pages please click on “Advertise With Us” in the left hand menu. We have deliberately kept costs low and a 125X125 site wide advertising banner is just $30 per month at the time of writing. We also have a 7 day option available for $10.

Ordering your ad couldn’t be simpler, just fill out the online form with your options and your ad will be placed immediately after ordering. Your ad will appear above the fold in the right hand sidebar for maximum exposure.

Payment can be made securely via PayPal or credit card if you don’t have a PayPal account.

OK, I know I told you I’d be reducing the number of rants that I publish on this blog. Well, since I’m about to start http://www.crackerjackseo.com/ (newly registered) I’ve decided to start ranting once again right here. So all my long, how-to’s etc. related to SEO will be published at crackerjackseo and all my other Internet marketing musings, including rants will reside here.

About 12 hours ago I ordered a dedicated server through HostGator. During the ordering process I chose PayPal as my payment option (I wasn’t asked for my PayPal email.

Order was complete, nothing was charged. A few minutes later I received a call from a HostGator rep telling me they need my PayPal email to get this going. No problem. I provided the email and was told my server would be up within 24 hours. I also replied to a ticket telling them my PayPal email just to be sure.

-PayPal email given to HostGator twice-

This morning I wake up and see an email from HostGator. I open it up and I see login details. The server is up and ready, right? Of course not.

They reinstated a reseller account I had over a year ago. Not that it matters, but that didn’t even work trying to login through the provided IP, UN and PW.

I call HostGator to see what’s up. I get some kid (sounded like he was about 16 y.o., who sounded mad at the world.) He very rudely said “You’ll just have to wait for your ticket to be replied to, Sir”

After hanging up I got a little P.O. and called back. This time I spoke with a helpful female agent, but after 15 minutes or so I was told I need to reorder the server because a PayPal email wasn’t sent. About that time I thought this was some kind of joke! I had given it to the guy who called me, I replied to the ticket with the PayPal email and I had given it to her. Yet, they were unable to charge me and fix this big mess.

-PayPal email given to HostGator for the 3rd time-

By the way, while I was on the phone with her I received another email from HostGator stating that I need to go to some URL to change my primary domain and I need to pay $5 for that to happen.

So, I figured I might as well just order and get this all over and done with (thinking they would take care of it right away.) I said “OK, I’ll just reorder.” She said OK, the people who set it up are gone right now, so they should get to this later today sometime. “When?” …”I don’t know”

Does HostGator even care whether they make a sale or not? I mean, I don’t care how much money I make, if I have a customer who is ready and willing to give me $200 EVERY MONTH I’m going to bend over backwards for them!

Now I’m in a predicament. It took me 2 weeks of looking at various dedicated server deals and nothing compared to what HostGator had to offer for the price. I don’t want to spend over 200/month for a server, but it looks like I’m going to have to.

The best deal in the world isn’t worth it if the support is the worst in the world!

The beauty of these is that if you are a webmaster you can use them yourself and also display them on your website or blog for the convenience of your readers. The first is the Keyword Research Tool and the second a Link Analysis Tool, and we have shown both of them below so that you can see just how they will look if you decide to add them to your site.

Thanks are due to both Andy Beard for his recent post highlighting these new tools and explaining how to display them on your chosen sites and to the author, Aaron at SEO Book for making them available. They have a lot more free SEO tools for your use, so pay them a visit too and enjoy.

Having built your website you are probably waiting for that flood of visitors to start arriving but this won’t happen overnight. There is a great deal you can do to improve your chances of good search engine rankings but the whole field of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be very complicated and is rarely an exact science. The information is out there if you are prepared to do your research but for many people, time is the biggest limiting factor when it comes to SEO and there is a lot of information to wade through.

There are however a couple of very simple steps that anyone can take to help the Search engines find and index your site correctly. Both will take only a couple of minutes to implement and will repay you well if you take the trouble to complete them.

Firstly, you should ensure that you have a robots.txt file in the root of your domain (the place where your site’s homepage resides) and that it is valid and functioning correctly. The simplest way to do this is to go to one of the many online robots.txt generator and validator sites, where all you will have to do is type in your website address and a couple of options and they will generate the appropriate file for you. We recommend Yellowpipe Robots.txt Generator which will also enable you to choose to banish the robots you don’t want visiting your site, such as known email harvesting bots. There are plenty of other online services available if you search for them. This method ensures an error free robots.txt file which you can then upload to your server. It’s that simple and the search engine spiders will then be aware of exactly where to visit on your site.

The next task on your list is to set up sitemaps, which have become steadily more important in recent times. You may well already have a Google sitemap on your site and if you do, it will probably be called sitemap.xml. Sitemaps also reside in the root of your domain and make it much easier for engines to find and index your content.

There are plenty of ways to set up a Google sitemap and it’s probably the most important one, but it won’t hurt you to have more sitemaps either. The easiest way for you to do this is to use the excellent services at AutoMapIt Automatic Sitemap Service who will not only create six sitemaps automatically for you, but upload them to your server too if you wish. If you prefer to upload the files yourself, you can do so. This is a free service, although you can upgrade at very reasonable cost and benefit from some even more valuable services. Setting up the free sitemap generation is simple and quick and will give you a far greater chance of being fully and properly indexed. Certainly worth a few minutes of your time.

As we said at the outset, these are very basic SEO steps, but nonetheless a good starting point for any webmaster.

Technorati Tags: Free sitemap generator , Sitemaps , Google sitemap , Robots.txt validator , Robots.txt generator , SEO , Building sitemaps , How to build sitemaps , Making a sitemap , Webmaster tools

Advertisement – Buy WordPress Cloner Here

All WordPress users are aware that there is a veritable gaggle of plugins available to enhance your WordPress blogging experience. I decided that I’d publish the ones currently in use on this blog, along with links to the dedicated authors of WordPress plugins everywhere who make so much available to the community for free. If you find one you like, say thank you to the person who made it, and, if you can and they accept donations, help them out.

Of course, these are not necessarily THE best WP plugins, just the ones we use and think are great. I’m sure you all have your own favorites and if you think there is one we just shouldn’t be without, do please tell us.

WordPress Automated Upgrade Plugin – this one is new and promises to save a lot of people a lot of worry and heartache when it comes time to perform an upgrade to the latest version of WordPress. If you start biting your nails at the thought of performing an upgrade, this could be your salvation! Thanks to BloggingTips.com for the low down.

aLinks WordPress Plugin – another great idea that allows users to turn any word or phrase of your content into hyperlinks, they can be Amazon links, Clickbank, E-Bay, Wikipedia, links to other areas of your blog. A very cool plugin indeed, simple, effective and gives users total control. Author: Sean Hickey

All In One SEO WordPress Plugin – A Plugin that allows you to tweak your WordPress blog’s SEO friendliness. Now, who doesn’t want that? Author : Uberdose

Amazon Context Link Ads WordPress Plugin – Another Amazon plugin. This one will find phrases and keywords within your text that are relevant to Amazon products, and will insert a hyperlink for you. Just install the plugin, tell it your Amazon Associates ID and you’re done. Author : Patrick Chia

CAPCC WordPress Plugin – Installs Captcha for comment and registration forms. Excellent spam protection. Author : Coice

Do Follow WordPress Plugin - Join the movement of bloggers against the rel=nofollow tag. Removes the nofollow attribute from your comments. Author : Denis de Bernardy

Feedburner Feedsmith Plugin – Forward all WordPress feed traffic to your Feedburner feed. Original author : Steve Smith

Feed Footer Plugin – Allows the insertion of custom footer fields to your RSS Feed. Author : Sherief Mursyidi

First RSS Plugin – A Good Choice for easy insertion of RSS Feeds. Author : Chris Hatcher (website no longer online)

Google Sitemaps Plugin – Add a Google sitemap to your WordPress blog and help that Googlebot! Author : Arne Brachhold

Gregarious Plugin – Add Social Bookmarks To Your Blog. Author : Ankur Kothari

InlineRSS Plugin – Another option for those wishing to use syndicated feeds. Author : Cal Demaine

KB Advanced RSS Widget – Widget that gives much greater control over how feeds are displayed. Author : Adam R Brown

My Page Order Plugin – Gives you complete control over page order. Author : Froman118

Kontera ContentLinks MIVA Plugin – The simple way to get your ads working. Author : Rodney Shupe

Share This Plugin – Neat tidy social bookmarking function. Author : Alex King

Simple Trackback Validation – Additional simple spam defence. Works well. Author : Michael Woehrer

Subscribe Me Plugin – The neatest solution for your RSS subscription offers. Author : Denis de Bernardy

Footnote – The CAPCC plugin mentioned above may conflict with WP’s forced moderation options if you are using latest version of WP (2.2) resulting in all comments bypassing moderation. You may want to consider an alternative captcha plugin in this case.

It’s quite a list and there are several more plugins not currently in use. These are all simple to install/configure and use for bloggers of all abilities. Do you think we’ve missed any good ones? By all means let us know your own plugin preferences and why you like them so much.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Web Design, WordPress Plugins, Best WordPress Plugins, RSS Plugins, Anti Spam Plugins, Social Bookmarking Plugins, Useful WordPress Plugins