David Leigh

I noticed on another blog a post from Jason Bentley at scribd. To set the record straight he confirmed that the Stompernet video was not the reason for pulling links from scribd, but that an increase in spam in December and over the holiday period had prompted their action.

He also says that responsible marketers will be able to use their service again once they’ve completed some mods to the system.

Another point I’d like to make is that I guess I was the blogger referred to in Andy Jenkins email broadcast on Saturday saying that SMARTS had been pulled. In fact I didn’t point the finger at Stompernet, I suggested it might be related. Perhaps that was lost in my conspiracy theory joke - just shows always use smilies if you don’t mean it.

And just because the was no cause and effect between Stompernet and scribd, I stick by the point I was trying to make; the internet marketing community ought to be more careful about what they publicise, especially in a viral campaign such as this.

Earlier today I found that links in my documents published on www.scribd.com no longer worked. That creates a bit of a problem since I’ve been using scribd to test new niches for the last few months. Scribd documents get ranked really fast, so it was great to be able to rank and get orders within a few days.

A week or so ago Stompernet published a video detailing this exact technique. And you know what - suddenly there are thousands more scribd pages appearing. And today this in the scribd FAQ:

“Can I include links in my Scribd documents?

No. Due to abuse from search engine optimizers and internet marketers, we have adopted a no link policy. You may place one link in the website field of your profile page. You may not add HTML links to documents on Scribd.“

Now it could be coincidence, but one possible scenario for this to happen is that the volume of internet marketers introduced to scribd after the Stompernet video brought this to the attention of the scribd admins, in which case Stompernet has spoilt the ride for everyone.

<irony>And if I were looking for conspiracies I might think it was done on purpose so that people could see how good the new Stompernet program is, get people to sign up AND demolish competition at the same time.</irony>

Don’t worry I don’t expect any sympathy, I’ll move on and do something new.

I got home last night to find the latest Immediate Edge newsletter - or at least half of it - available for download.

Although it’s a bit later than planned this 23 page newsletter has a couple of great strategies for making money online fast. It won’t get you earning big bucks, but never forget that while $10/day doesn’t sound like much it totals $3,650/year - and if you have several of those regularly earning for you the cash quickly mounts up.

One of the strategies is about earning from cost per action (CPA) networks, where you get paid every time someone performs a specific action, usually which is to give their email address. Dan Raine was able to average $34/day from this method with a couple of hours work while testing the strategy - that’s $12,410/year. I know you can’t retire on $12k per year, but once you’re earning that $12k move on to another niche - if you manage one every month for a year you’ll see it quickly adds up with the added benefit that the more you do it the better you’ll get at it.

I’ll be giving this a shot over the next week or so because it does look pretty easy to implement - I’ll let you know how I get on, although obviously I won’t be revealing which niches I’m targeting. One of the Immediate Edge strategies called Maximum Edge is currently bringing in one or two sales every day and so Immediate Edge is now paying for itself several times over.

That just about wraps it up, I can’t wait for the second half of the newsletter!

Click here for more info on Immediate Edge

Technorati Tags: immediate edge, seo, internet marketing

Well, I’m back. And it’s an interesting start to the year.

First I forgot to renew one of my domains. The website isn’t important to me any more as it has had a Google penalty for around 18 months, but almost all my email goes through this domain as I’ve used it since 1999.

First of all I thought that people weren’t back at work yesterday, until I looked at the website. Thinking it was my server, I checked another domain; it was fine. Finally checking the DNS details I found that to all intents and purposes the domain no longer existed.

Re-registering the domain was no problem, and the website was up and running within a couple of hours. But when I found no email this morning I began to worry. After multiple reconfigurations it might be working - it was throwing out a 550 - no relaying error earlier, but I’ve received some spam which at least is a good sign

The second interesting thing is that I’m no longer on Digg. Digg+blog has been a powerful combination in getting articles to rank in minutes, but I admit that I may have overdone it with Digg. They clearly think so as my account is no longer and my IP address seems to be blocked.

I’ve been using Digg regularly since about May for StomperNet SIMPLE; then the 30 Day Challenge; and just recently with Immediate Edge. I’ll take it a bit easier with other similar sites as I’ve been hitting them too, but it will be interesting to see how much my rankings suffer by being bigtime undugg.

Oh, the shame of it - what would Ed Dale say?

Technorati Tags: digg, immediate edge, stompernet simple, 30 day challenge

Keyword Elite is a piece of software written by Brad Callen which looks at keyword supply and demand to help identify low-competition niches. I’ve been aware of Brad for quite a few years now, although my memory is slightly hazy as I always used to confuse him with Brad Fallon - I could never work out why emails from the 2 Brads never seemed to file themselves properly in Outlook as I thought they were one person, but that’s another story.

I bought Keyword Elite earlier this year when I was starting to look at Adsense arbitrage following the release of the ebook by Michael Plante. Before that I was using a combination of Overture results and hand checking competition for small keyword lists and the rather clunky keyword tools in Site Build It, which relied at the time on input from Overture as well as Wordtracker. BTW, don’t bother looking for Michael Plante’s book now because Google has effectively killed arbitrage and if you do try it anyway you’re likely to have your Adsense account terminated with no chance of being allowed back in. I still have my Adsense account because when I saw the way it was going I stopped arbitrage. (more…)

Jonathan Ledger is currently promoting a free ebook entitled Search Engine Myths Exposed to his mailing list. The video doesn’t really explain very much about it but you can find out more from his site here.

I don’t know how good this report will be, but worth taking a look when it comes out anyway.

Jackhammer

Originally uploaded by Tom O’Neill

I blogged the other day about my favourite 7 internet marketing tools - in fact I’ve thought of some more I should have added to make it up to at least 10, but I’ll leave it for another time. The problem is it doesn’t matter how many tools you have or how good they are - if you don’t set out from the start to do your internet marketing right you aren’t going to achieve a thing.

So… before you spend any more money on IM tools, make sure you have a plan to actually achieve something. If you can justify a new tool because it will help you with your plan, by all means buy it. If it is just the latest fad tool, then leave it alone and spend the money on a good IM education or PPC.

One of the great things about Immediate Edge that I keep going on about at the moment is Ed Dale’s course on Facebook ads, which depends on geo-demographic data. Ed can probably explain better than I can:

The course will be released as a standalone product in the New Year, but you can get access to it right now by joining Immediate Edge now! I have huge respect for Ed and Dan Raine as internet marketers and the information I’ve got from Immediate Edge is absolutely first class, so if you want to get in on Facebook ads before Christmas and get a head start over the crowd, now is the time to join The Edge.

Since I joined Immediate Edge at the beginning of September I’ve been really focusing on the strategies shared by Dan Raine and Ed Dale at every opportunity I can. Not aimed at beginners like the 30 Day Challenge, Immediate Edge is all about showing how to use advanced internet marketing strategies and to eliminate risk from the equation.

The first of these is the Maximum Edge, which is a superb way of ranking on the first page of Google withing 24 hours - it really is unbelievable.The other strand which I’m following with interest is Ed Dale’s series on Facebook marketing. This really is the cutting edge of internet marketing and will be released as a stand alone course in the new year - luckily we Edge members get this in advance and it’s being rolled out now.

Another great thing is the newsletters. Appearing approximately once a month they are packed with info to try on your existing websites and often include software to add a feature. If you can set up a Wordpress blog then you can almost certainly get this software up and running too.

You can try out the Immediate Edge’s advanced internet marketing strategies risk free. Sign up and if you are not happy with it within the first 30 days you’ll receive a refund. Great stuff.

I was thinking about what Internet marketing tools I use most the other day and decided to write a post on it and list them here. They’re in no particular order, but I do use everything listed here on a regular basis and so recommend them on that basis.

1. Firefox with loads of pluggins, including the SEO tool, ScribeFire for blogging, Google notebooks and Session Manager. If you change from Internet Explorer you’ll know why…

2. Keyword Elite is a great tool for finding niches by checking search volume and competition of keywords from Wordtracker, Google, Ask and Yahoo. I used to use it exclusively for my keyword research until…

3. GTrends Second Edition is based on the idea that came out of Immediate Edge and then the Thirty Day Challenge to verify keyword data using Google Trends data. The idea is to use a keyword with a known search volume to more closely estimate the search volume of your target keyword. I now use Keyword Elite to generate keywords to research and then GTrends to generate the data.

4. WordTracker gives you 100 keywords for free, but to really go deep into a niche you can generate 1,000 long tail keywords by signing up for the full service.

5. Webposition Gold allows you to automatically check your website rankings for a list of keywords on Google and a whole list of other search engines. It also has a tool to analyse the on page stats such as word density and compare them with top 10 listings to help you rank better, although I don’t use this - linkbuilding is far more important these days and as long as you have an optimised title and description that’s all you really need to do, except for control PR through “nofollow”.

6. OnlyWire is a great free service that allows you to social bookmark to a ton of sites automatically.

7. Socialposter is another free service that helps you submit to a whole load of social bookmarking sites. I use it for Digg, Propeller, Reddit and Stumbleupon only as it isn’t as automatic as Onlywire because these sites require some user input.

Well that’s it, my seven top internet marketing tools. What do you think?

PS If you’d like to keep up to date with my thoughts on Internet marketing and Search Engine Optimization, why not join my mailing list? Don’t worry I’ll never Spam you!