SENuke was the grandaddy of all automated SEO and link-building programs and it defended it’s crown for a long time, despite many competing products popping up on the marketplace. Now, after countless months of delays, the successor to the throne is finally here.
Without further ado, here’s my SENuke X review.
Here’s a quick review of wpMassUpdater, which is a tool so essential, that you’ll probably rush off and order it before you reach the end of the page. At least, my reaction when I first heard about his was: “How did I ever live without this?” Now, don’t worry, I’m not talking about some push-button money making BS product. No, wpMassUpdater does one thing and one thing only: It saves you massive amounts of time.
Article directory submissions are one of the first link-building techniques I ever used and did some testing with. I have tried many different automation solutions and most of them have been at least slightly disappointing. The problem usually lies in part with automation software but also in a large part with article directories themselves.
There are thousands upon thousands of article directories and they can be easily found through common footprints. The problem is that most of them are broken, abandoned, hacked or completely worthless (no PageRank, no backlinks etc.). So if you have a tool that can submit articles to lots of directories, you may find that you get far fewer backlinks then expected and that those backlinks are not very useful at all.
Today, I’m reviewing Article Marketing Robot. Read on to see if it could change my mind about article directory submissions.
Authority Link Network is a blog network with a unique and interesting concept. Usually, blog networks cost a fee to join if you want to submit articles, so you can get backlinks from the sites in the network. Receiving articles from the network is normally free. Because of this, most networks rely on reaching enough webmasters who want to receive the (often low-quality) content for their sites, to grow the network. Authority Link Network is quite different.
Read on to see what ALN does differently and whether or not their plan works.
“Build a Mailing List” is an almost universal piece of advice given by successful marketers to aspiring marketers. Anyone who’s done any of it can attest to the effectiveness of e-mail marketing. The biggest issue with it is often getting people to sign up to your list in the first place. The two products I’m reviewing and comparing in this article, PopUp Domination and Digi List Builder, are both designed to help you with that. Both are primarily created to work with WordPress sites (although there’s also a non-WP version of PopUp Domination) and both give you a variety of options for presenting visitors to your site with you opt-in box and whatever your sign-up incentive is.
Read on to learn about how these two products are different and see which one comes out on top.
| Name: | PopUp Domination | Digi List Builder |
| Creator: | Michael Dunlop, James Deer | Andy Fletcher |
| Medium: | WP and Standalone Scripts | WordPress Plugin |
| Price: | $77 | $97 |
What the two products have in common (apart from the fact that all the developers involved are British) is that they let you create an aesthetically pleasing opt-in form that “pops up” in one way or another, when someone visits your site.
Let’s take a step back and look at what is necessary, in principle, to get someone to sign up to your mailing list. There are two main factors that come into play:
Instead of trying to express what these two programs do in writing, it’s a lot more effective to just show you what they do, on video:
And here's a recap and overview of the two products:
PopUp Domination is all about delivering an enticing and attractive presentation. It creates lightboxes which are large, eye-grabbing and beautifully designed. You can use images and bullet points to create very professional looking opt-in forms, without needing any design-skills yourself.
There are seven different lightbox-designs to choose from and for each one, you can select a theme color and a button color. All of the text in the lightboxes (headlines, bullet-points, button-text) are customizable, but there are hard limits to the text. For example, if you choose a lightbox that supports a one-line headline and three bullent-points, then that's exactly what you get. There's no way to add a fourth bullet point. This is not a huge drawback, but it is something you should be aware of.
Here are just a few examples of what the PopUp Domination 2.0 lightboxes can look like (click to expand):
Digi List Builder has less emphasis on making the opt-in form look good (although they still are well designed) - you can upload a custom image (like an ecover image or a visual call-to-action), upload a custom button and input some text.
The focus with this plugin lies on how and where you can present your form to the site visitors and Digi List Builder offers four options:
See the four variations below (click to expand):
Two more things are worth emphasizing about Digi List Builder: First of all, you can use any combination of these opt-in forms. Potentially, you can have all of them running at the same time, hammering your visitors with opt-in forms relentlessly (not recommended, but possible). Secondly, and this one is brilliant, anyone who subscribes to your list through Digi List Builder will henceforth no longer see the forms when they visit your site. This is extremely cool, as it allows you to crank up the "annoying" factor somewhat, without it turning off your subscribers.
Note that if you implement Digi List Builder on your site and you already have subscribers on your mailing list, they will still see the forms. The forms only vanish for those who opt in through Digi List Builder.
So, which one is better? Both of these products are very good in their own way, so I can't make a recommendation for one over the other. The way I see it, which of these plugins is better suited for you depends on how you want to utilize them.
If you have a site that is purely built as a traffic-magnet, to get people on your list, then Digi List Builder is the better choice. On a site like this, you don't have to worry about annoying people with the lightbox or footer opt-in, as you really want visitors to either sign up or leave, anyway.
If you have a blog where you are doing personal branding, then PopUp Domination might be the better choice, as it is easier to adapt to your site's overall visual style and has more of a "wow-factor". More advantages are that you can use PopUp Domination 2.0 on non-WordPress sites, you can specify specific pages and categories, if you don't want the lighbox to appear everywhere on your blog and you can use it as an exit-popup.
In a previous post, I had reviewed a WordPress plugin for setting up easy split tests and had given it a thumbs-up. Setting up split-tests on WordPress is usually complicated or expensive… or both. The previously reviewed plugin made thing easier, but unfortunately, it’s no longer available. Now, along comes a new candidate by the name of WordPress Split Test Optimizer. Is this a better solution for running A/B tests on WordPress based sites? Does it manage to be simple and affordable at the same time?
Read on to find out.
| Name: | WP Split Test Optimizer |
| Creator: | Eric Transue |
| Medium: | WordPress Plugin |
| Price: | $47 |
The first thing you need to know about this plugin is that it integrates with Google Website Optimizer and that’s a good thing. Like Analytics, Website Optimizer is a very powerful tool that you get to use for free, courtesy of Google (and their hunger for data). The thing is, GWO doesn’t usually play nice with WordPress and while there are integration options and even free plugins to help integrate the two, most of them still have some severe limitations.
So, let’s see if WP Split Test Optimizer can justify the asking price, compared to what free Optimizer plugins offer.
Here’s a video detailing what this plugin does and how it compares to the free ones that are available.
To recap, the WordPress Split Test Optimizer plugin has two advantages over free plugins:
This plugin is being sold for $47 and while it definitely works as advertised and is a good product, I guess the main question would be: is it worth the price, compared to the free plugins available?
I’d say that depends mainly on how good you are at coding and how valuable your time is. To me, spending 50 bucks on a plugin like this is a much cheaper solution than spending hours fiddling with code (trying to get click-tracking to work, for example).
In general, if you want to start split-testing and you like to use WordPress, then this is a good solution. If you want to do more advanced, multivariate split testing and don’t mind spending more money on it, then my first recommendation is Visual Website Optimizer. For more “causal” use, WP Split Test Optimizer is the better choice, simply because it’s a solid solution and comes with a one-time price.
WP Twin is a script that lets you “clone” any WordPress site to a new WordPress install. On the face of it, that may seem pretty useless, but as it turns out, it’s actually rather excellent, for certain purposes. In this article, I’ll quickly go over what exactly WP Twin does, what kind of stuff it’s good for and what kind of stuff it’s not so good for.
