Unfortunately, a closer look under the hood reveals that there are a few things GA does not do well at all. Depending on your business model and your needs, a different analytics solution might serve you far better and be a lot more useful to your business.

Read on to discover the drawbacks of using Google’s own system and learn about the best Google Analytics alternatives.

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What’s Wrong With Google Analytics?

From a technical standpoint, there is at least one glaring mistake in the way Google Analytics tracks pageviews and visitor actions. We’ve written about it extensively in the post about bounce rates, where you’ll also find something of a hack, to help improve the situation.

In short, GA cannot truly measure how long a visitor stays on your site, unless they perform another action like a new page load. Many visitors will show up as having stayed on your site for zero seconds, even though they might have spent minutes or more, reading a page or watching a video. This leads to skewed bounce-rate and time-on-site data. This is not necessarily a deal-breaker, but it’s something you should be aware of.

By all means, use GA, it’s infinitely better than not analyzing your traffic at all.

For many website owners, there’s one other reason not use GA: Google. GA is free and the trade-off is obvious: you get a great, free service in return for data. Keep in mind that Google does not condone most of the things we do to get better rankings and more traffic. If you do any kind of active link-building, no matter how legitimate it is, Google might just decide that they no longer tolerate that and start cracking down on it. One way or another, many or all of your sites are probably in some way involved in manipulating search results in your favour. Google no likey.

What if one of your sites gets caught up in a Google cleanup/slap and it just so happens to be sitting in a GA account along with all of your other sites? Could that compromise every single website you own? Possibly. I, for one, would rather not find out the hard way.

How to Spy on Your Website Visitors

Here are some of the criteria I looked for, in the different analytics services:

• Does it do real-time tracking, so that you can see what’s going on on your site right now?
• Does it properly measure time on site, even if only one page is viewed?
• Does it make a distinction between a “bad bounce” (short, one-page visit) and a “good bounce” (long, one-page visit)?
• Does it allow useful sorting and filtering of the stats, so you can make intelligent decisions based on your analytics?
• Does it allow easy goal/conversion tracking?

Woopra

Woopra is extremely attractive and highly customizable. You can either use it online or download a desktop client or mobile app to track what’s going on on your site.

The customization options are this service’s strongest point: to any set of data you’re looking at, you can add any kind of filters you can think of. Do you want to look specifically at the conversion rates from people who discovered your site through twitter and viewed at least two pages? No problem. Do you want to attach a specific label to anyone who leaves a comment on your site and also pass their name and email address to Woopra? With a bit of custom coding, it can be done.

To top it off, Woopra also comes with a live chat feature, which lets you display a “chat with us” widget on your site, or lets you automatically invite visitors to chat when a certain set of criteria are met. For example, you could set the chat window to pop up when a visitor is spending a certain amount of time on the checkout page, to help them with any last questions or objections they might have. As I’m sure you can see, Woopra is powerful, if it’s used right. But therein also lies a big problem with the service…

There are three big disadvantages to Woopra:

1. Their pricing plans don’t allow you to group multiple sites together. You have to create a new subscription for every website you want to add.
2. Woopra don’t do customer support. They have a support desk, but from what I can tell, they ignore tickets, even if they contain very simple questions.
3. There’s no documentation to speak of. At the time of writing, there are API and developer docs, but no basic instructions for how to use Woopra.

Woopra Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Woopra is an extremely promising service that has the potential to be hugely beneficial to your business. Unfortunately, since they severely lack support and documentation and because of their pricing model I can’t recommend them.

Link: Check out Woopra here.

Mint

Mint is a very stylish “less is more” kind of analysis software. Where many others pile on feature after feature, Mint strives to show you the most relevant data about your website in a simple “at a glance” kind of way.

The “less is more” principle is take a tad too far, sadly. The standard view shows you the visitor count (total and unique), the top referring websites, your most popular pages and the most popular search terms people are using to find your site. You can edit each view for a certain date-range or to show you recent terms/referrers rather than popular ones. Interestingly, there’s also a separate view for traffic coming through image searches, which could be a very interesting feature for certain types of websites like portfolio sites, sites about design or any other image-heavy sites.

Data digging is almost non-existent with Mint. It also doesn’t show bounce rates, time on site or any other useful user engagement metrics. My impression is that Mint shows you mainly “vanity stats”, but fails to give you the tools necessary to sort your data in such a way that it can lead to intelligent changes on your website, that improve your business.

The basic functionality of Mint can be expanded with so-called “Peppers”. These are plugins for Mint, which are provided by the developers themselves as well as third-party providers. Possibly, some of the features I was missing in the standard version can be added through these extensions (I did not spend a lot of time searching through them).

Mint is a self-hosted script and it costs a flat rate of $30 per website, making it very affordable.

Mint Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Mint is stylish and light-weight, but is it also useful? Unless there’s a very specific feature found in one of the many “pepper” extensions, that you’ve been looking for, I can’t see a reason to use Mint.

Link: Learn more about Mint here.

Clicky

I’ve been using Clicky for quite a long time now. In the beginning, I had mixed feelings about the user interface, but once I got used to it, I recognized it’s merits. The standard dashboard gives a very comprehensive overview over all of the core data: visitors (today vs. yesterday or any other date-range you set), visitor actions and bounce rate, top content, top search terms and traffic sources.

One thing Clicky does reall well is allow you to dig down and segment/filter your data in many ways. It doesn’t just show you some fancy graphs, it let’s you get right down to the stuff that matters the most: you can find where your best converting traffic is coming from, you can see which pages are grabbing your visitors’ attention and which aren’t and much more.

Clicky also offers a simple way to set up campaigns and track earnings. An interesting feature is that it allows you to set up custom twitter searches, so that you can monitor mentions of your site or brand on twitter, from within the Clicky dashboard. The service also integrate with a service called SheerSEO as well as Visual Website Optimizer for rank tracking and split testing respectively. Plus, it comes with a very well-made WordPress plugin.

Clicky calculate bouce rate differently from most analytics solutions and they’re proud of it. Clicky considers every visitor who spends more than 30 seconds looking at a page as an “engaged” visitor and doesn’t count them as a bounce, even if they don’t view a second page on your site. This makes a lot of sense, since you can’t really say that someone who visits your site, reads a whole post and then leaves was “bouncing”. They just found what they were looking for. With this, Clicky has more relevant bounce stats, especially for blog-style sites where the goal is not necessarily to get every visitor deeper into a sales-funnel.

Clicky Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Intuitive and clean user-interface, reasonable pricing and some innovative features make Clicky a Google Analytics alternative worth taking a closer look at. Clicky has become my favorite analytics solution and I gladly recommend it.

Link: Click here to get Clicky with it.

StatCounter

StatCounter is one of the better-known free Google Analytics alternatives and it’s been around for a while.

There’s no way to be nice about this, so I’ll just say it: Compared to the other solutions listed here, StatCounter is ugly. But, just because you don’t get the “oooh, shiny!” effect when you log into StatCounter, doesn’t mean it’s a bad product. The basic data is all there and you can get insights into visits, visitor paths, popular pages, entrance- and exit-pages, incoming keywords etc.

In terms of segmentation, goals, campaign/funnel tracking and fancy stuff like that, StatCounter lags behind the competition. As with Mint, I found that StatCounter fails to deliver the kinds of insights that will actually help you make meaningful changes to your site.

StatCounter Features and Highlights

Conclusion: StatCounter has one saving grace: it’s free to use. Given that, it’s no surprise that it doesn’t come with all the bells and whistles of premium solutions. Unfortunately, some of those bells and whistles are really important, which is why I can’t recommend this product.

Link: Learn more about StatCounter here.

reinvigorate

Reinvigorate looked very promising, back when I was using the beta version. It still looks exactly the same, now. And that’s a bad thing.

Reinvigorate still feels like a beta product, even thought it’s been on the market for a while now. It has a very attractive looking user interface and it comes with a built-in heatmapping feature which can be very useful.

Unfortunately, in terms of actual traffic analysis, reinvigorate is mostly frustrating. It offers a great overview of the basic stats such as number of visitors, visit lengths and so on, but it doesn’t let you go any deeper than that. I found myself constantly clicking on elements of the UI, expecting to get a more detailed view for a specific page or specific search term. But nothing happens when you click, because more detailed reports are not available.

To make things worse, it seems that this service has been abandoned: at the time of writing their blog has been offline for more than a week (but a link to it from the sales-page remains) and their customer support is unresponsive.

reinvigorate Features and Highlights

Conclusion: in its current form, reinvigorate is a basic heat-mapping tool with some analytics added on. This could be quite useful, but especially since it seems to be abandoned, I’d recommend using a dedicated heatmapping service and a better analytics solution instead. Reinvigorate is not recommended.

Link: Take a look at what reinvigorate could have been, right here.

Piwik

Piwik is advertised as an open-source alternative to Google Analytics and this seems an accurate description. It’s completely free to use and fairly easy to install. Currently only available as a self-hosted script (which has it’s advantages), there’s also the possibility of a hosted version of the service in discussion.

While the Piwik dashboard is nowhere near as fancy looking as some of the competitors’, I immediately took a liking to it. It’s a bit reminiscent of the WordPress admin interface and it just seems to have all the data and all the buttons in the right places. I found it very easy to navigate the data and set up some basic goals for performance tracking. It’s also a breeze to add as many websites as you like to one and the same Piwik installation. Much like with Mint, the Piwik dashboard is very customizable and additional plugins are available to add to the system.

One of the best features is that you can very easily set up and track goals. Beyond the basic stats, I would have liked options for deeper and more detailed segmentation, which is often lacking.

Piwik Features and Highlights

Conclusion: For a free analytics tool, Piwik is quite impressive. I would have liked a few more features, but the only big drawback is that Piwik has the same, inaccurate way of tracking bounce rates and visit lengths that Google Analytics has.

Link: Get a taste of Piwik here.

Open Web Analytics

Open Web Analytics (or OWA) is another free, open source web stats solution, like Piwik. It’s also self-hosted and it’s available as a WordPress plugin, which creates one instance of OWA to track the specific WP site it’s installed on. Installed separately and independently from WordPress, you can use OWA to track multiple websites.

The user interface is reminiscent of one of the older Google Analytics interfaces in the choice of colors as well as the general navigation. It’s not a carbon copy of GA by any means, but it offers the same general navigation options and if you’ve used GA for a while, it won’t take long until you feel right at home with this new interface.

Open Web Analytics is very feature-rich, especially considering that it’s free to use. It can track goals along several steps of a conversion funnel, it offers separate stats filtered by pretty much any factor you can think of and it even offers heatmaps and mouse-tracking. However, be warned: with those last two options active, OWA will gobble up server resources like nobody’s business. A shared hosting account will not find this agreeable.

Open Web Analytics Features and Highlights

Conclusion: OWA is amazing, for a free product. It offers very deep analytics with an intuitive interface. Unfortunately, it also has the same bounce-rate and time on site weakness of most analytics tools. In short, it’s not perfect, but possibly the best free solution available.

Link: Grab your copy of Open Web Analytics here.

Chartbeat

Chartbeat is like reinvigorate on steroids. Which is to say that it’s extremely pretty, but also mostly useless.

Chartbeat has a very strong focus on what’s happening right now, as opposed to the emphasis on historical data analysis that most tools have. On a second-by-second basis, it shows you how many visitors are on your site, how many of them are reading or writing (e.g. comments), the geographic location of the visitors, an action stream and much more. Like Clicky, it also comes with twitter monitoring, so you can see who’s talking about your site or brand, at any given moment.

One very interesting and potentially useful user engagement metric is that Chartbeat shows you a graph of the average scroll-depth for your visitors (i.e. how far down a page they are scrolling). Apart from that, I find it difficult to envision the actual use of all these metrics. Chartbeat shows me what’s buzzing on my site at any given moment, but unless I can match up factors like conversion rates, traffic sources etc. none of this really helps me make intelligent decisions about my site.

Chartbeat Features and Highlights

Conclusion: Chartbeat is very pretty and maybe there are some uses to it. To me, it seems more like a super-attractive distraction than a useful tool.

Link: Marvel at Chartbeat here.

Honorable Mentions: Mixpanel and Kissmetrics

Mixpanel and Kissmetrix are two analytics services that were specifically made for businesses selling services or products. Both of these tools are especially useful if you are selling a subscription service, as they can not only track conversions, but also track retention rates. With that, they can give you insights into where your highest-converting visitors are coming from and what steps they usually take before signing up. In addition, they can help you analyze what makes customers stay with your service for a long time and what makes them leave in a hurry.

Mixpanel and Kissmetrix are very interesting services for a specific type of business. Because they are closely analytics-related, I wanted to mention them here. However, they aren’t necessarily meant to replace your “regular” website analytics and because of how highly specialized they are, they don’t quite fit in with the other services here. Perhaps I will review them separately, sometime.

Go here to check out Mixpanel and Kissmetrics.

My Personal Preferences

Leading up to this review I was using a huge range of different analytics apps for my various websites and I had fun experimenting with all the different features and options. However, at some point I wanted to consolidate my data and not have to log into a dozen different panels to see the traffic stats for all my sites. Currently, I use Clicky as my main analytics tool. I’d love to be able to recommend Woopra, as I think it’s the most promising of all tools, but the disadvantages I mentioned outweigh all it’s great features.

I only use GA on sites that I created a long time ago, using GA from the beginning. I keep it there, along with Clicky, so that I don’t lose the historical data. When creating a new site, I would only use GA if it’s a site monetized with AdSense. With AdSense, Google is already spying on your site anyway and linking AdSense and GA can give you great insights. Any other site goes on Clicky.

I originally wanted to use either Piwik or OWA, but I didn’t like how resource-intensive they were, sitting on my hosting account. So just be warned: if you have sites with a fair amount of traffic, the self-hosted analytics solutions can become quite the resource gluttons.

Conclusion

As you can see, for anyone wanting to keep Google’s googly-eyes away from their visitor data, there’s no shortage of excellent Google Analytics alternatives. Most of these services come with either a free version or a free trial, so there’s nothing stopping you from giving them a test-drive. If you don’t want to spend anything extra for your analytics, then you should give either Piwik or Open Web Analytics a try.

What do you use for analysing your website visitors? And how do you make use of the data you get? Let me know in the comments below!

Cheers,

While we can’t be certain exactly what these signals are, it is widely suspected that bounce rate is an important ranking factor. In this post I’ll define exactly what bounce rates are and describe when a bounce isn’t actually a bounce.

Plus, you’ll discover why the bounce rate data shown in Google Analytics is mostly useless and see what you can do to fix this problem.

What is the Bounce Rate?

Here is Google’s official definition of bounce rate:

Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page. Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.
- Source

So, effectively – if someone visits a page on your site and then leaves without visiting any other pages on your site (either by hitting the back button on their browser, by visiting another site, closing the browser, or by entering a new domain into the address bar) then that’s classified as a bounce.

When is a Bounce not really a Bounce?

Here’s where it gets slightly more confusing…Consider the following two scenarios:-

By definition, both visitor A and visitor B have bounced, however when used in conjunction with the time on site metric you can see that while visitor A probably didn’t find anything useful on the landing page (having spent only 5 seconds on site), visitor B has stuck around for over 5 minutes, probably found the answer the he/she was looking for and then bounced.

In the search engine industry, this time on site metric is called “dwell time” and dwell time has a very high positive correlation with user engagement.

Consider the example that we used in the “New Rules of SEO” webinar: If a user types in “USD to GBP conversion”, it’s likely that the user will land on a page with a calculator and bounce away when he/she finds the answer that they’re looking for.  In this example, the landing page catered exactly to the needs of the user, but the user still bounced (by definition).

However, when bounce rate and dwell time are used in conjunction with one another, a more reliable insight is gained into how engaged a particular user is with a piece of content.

There is significant evidence to suggest that search engines are looking very closely at dwell time and using it as a signal:

While it may feel like you’ve poured your heart and soul into creating the content on the website, quality is in the eye of the visitor, and short page dwell times can indicate the content is not capturing the visitor’s interest. Something about the content is not grabbing their attention.

- Duane Forrester – Public Outreach, Bing Search Engine

So, what we really should be doing as webmasters is paying attention to bounce rates in conjunction with dwell times.  If we find content that has a high bounce rate and low dwell time, then that is a good signal that the content is not giving the users what they expect.

Here in lies the problem….

Bounce Rates and Google Analytics

The most obvious way to track down content that is under performing in these key metrics is to use Google analytics and apply a filter across all your content.

However, Google analytics only tracks bounce rate and time on site metrics through pageviews.  This is really important to understand – if you don’t then you may start hacking out content from your site that you think is performing badly, but in reality may not be.

For example, if a visitor lands on one of your pages, stays for 8 minutes and 12 seconds before “bouncing” back to the search engines then two things will happen:-

1. The search engines themselves will see this as a positive signal because of the extended dwell time (high dwell time = good user engagement)
2. Your Google Analytics tool will show “100% bounce rate” and “0:00:00” time on site which most webmasters will interpret as a bad signal!  To reiterate: Even though the visitor has stayed for 8 minutes before leaving, it will be shown as “0:00:00″ time on site because the visitor hasn’t loaded another page on your site.

As you can see, there is a huge disconnect between what’s really happening and what’s being reported in Google Analytics.  The disconnect is so vast that less knowledgeable webmasters may end up removing content from their site that’s actually performing well!

Here are some more examples of the disconnect between what actually happens and what’s reported in Google Analytics:-

And here is the quote from Google Analytics themselves to confirm that this is what happens:-

When a page is the last page in a session, there is no way to calculate the time spent on it because there is no subsequent pageview. For this reason, when Page A is the last page in the visitor’s session, its time calculation is not counted for that view. In addition, when that page is the only page viewed in the session, no time on page is calculated.
- Source

Here’s something else that matters: Google does not use any data from your Google Analytics account to calculate rankings.  Sometimes, you have to take what Matt Cutts says with a pinch of salt due to the obvious conflict of interest that someone in his role is faced with – but on this occasion I’m very confident that Google don’t use Analytics data.

I can guarantee that the bounce rate  and time on site stats you see in your Analytics accounts are not the same metrics that the Google Rankings Team use to determine the best results for any given query.  The rankings team need far more accurate data than Analytics can provide.

What This Actually Means for Us

When you notice in your Analytics tool that a page has 100% bounce rate and a “0:00:00″ time on site, this doesn’t mean that the page is necessarily not performing well.  It could be that all visitors to that page stick around for more than 5 minutes before leaving, effectively sending a positive “dwell time” signal to the search engine.  In other words: we have no way of using Google Analytics to reliably determine the worst performing content on our site.

We need a better way of identifying poorly performing content pages.  A way that enables us to make decisions and understand what content is being appreciated and what content is holding our rankings back.

How do we Fix this in Google Analytics?

What we’d really like to know is:- “For each page on my site, what percentage of visitors stick around for longer than x seconds?”.  The value of x is up for negotiation.  Shane and I have agreed that for this site we think a suitable benchmark is 30 seconds.

If someone lands on a page and bounces within the first 30 seconds, that’s a pretty sure sign that they haven’t really found what they’re looking on an information site like ImImpact.  On the other hand, if someone stays for longer than that, then they’re at least somewhat engaged (started reading or watching a video).

Thankfully by using a feature called “Event Tracking”, we can set this up relatively painlessly simply by adding a line of code to our Google Analytics snippet:-

Synchronous Analytics Code (Old Version)

If you’re using the original Analytics tracking code (not the asynchronous version), then this is the code you need:-

Just add the following line under the pageTracker._trackPageview(); line:

Synchronous Analytics Code (New Version)

If you’re using the new version of Google Analytics tracking code (the asynchronous version), then this is the code you need:-

Just add the following as the last _gaq.push declaration in the script:

Thanks to padicode for these Analytics snippets

How Does this Work?

This script will countdown 30 seconds from when the page loads and then will “push” an event to Google Analytics.  Once the event is triggered, Analytics will no longer count this user as a “bounce” even if he/she doesn’t load any other pages on your site.  The net result is that you should see a decrease in the bounce rate on your site.

Here is a screenshot showing the bounce rates before and after the script is applied:-

The Best Way to Find Underperforming Content

Now we have set a bounce to only be recorded if a visitor stays for less than 30 seconds we have a much more reliable set of data that we can use to identify the pages that perhaps aren’t giving the end user what they expect.

To find these pages, I recommend navigating to content -> site content -> pages, clicking on “Bounce Rate” to sort from highest to lowest and changing the sort type to “weighted”.  This will give you a list of pages with the highest bounce rates to the lowest weighted by pageviews:-

With this view you can then sort through the pages to identify those with the highest bounce rates and the lowest average time on page.

Alternatives to Google Analytics

Of course, there are alternative solutions to Google Analytics.  Both Woopra and Clicky have a more accurate way of measuring both bounce rates and time on site through a process called “pinging”. Shane will be updating his Alternatives to Google Analytics post very shortly with more information about this and other new features.

In Summary

This is a mighty long post, so I wanted to write a very quick executive summary for you:-

1. If someone visits a page on your site and then exits that page without visiting any other page on your site then that is a bounce
2. Search engines use a metric called dwell time to determine whether a bounce is a “good” bounce (ie. the user found what they were looking for) or a “bad” bounce (ie. the visitor leaves within 10 seconds because your page sucks)
3. Google Analytics calculates bounce rates and time on site through pageviews.  This means that if someone “bounces” off your page then it’s always reported as 0:00:00 time on site no matter how long the visitor stays for.
4. Event tracking can be used to manipulate the bounce rate metric so that bounces are only recorded if a visitor leaves after less than 30 seconds (example script above)
5. Both Woopra and Clicky are great alternatives to Google Analytics for more accurate data.

We think that Google Analytics should do a better job of providing accurate time on site and bounce rate metrics because lesser versed webmaster may be misled into removing content that appears bad but is actually performing well.

What are your thoughts on this? Leave a comment and tell us what you think!

In this roundup review, that’s the very question we shall aim to answer. Read on to see a complete comparison of Article Marketing Robot, Magic Submitter, Rank Builder 2.0, SEnuke X, SEOLinkRobot, SERPAssist and Sick Submitter.

Overview

	Name:	Price:	Link Targets:	Custom Links?	Ease of Use:
	Article Marketing Robot	$87	3758	LIMITED	Fairly Easy
	Magic Submitter	$67/month	1555	YES	Fairly Easy
	Rank Builder 2.0	$77/month	1385	LIMITED	A Bit Messy
	SEnuke X	$147/month	1113	LIMITED	Very Easy
	SEOLinkRobot	$57/month	79	NO	Easy
	SERPAssist	$77/month	???	NO	Very Easy
	Sick Submitter	$20/month	Custom	YES	Rather Difficult

Note that “Link Targets” (the number of sites the software can submit to, to get a backlink) should be treated as a ballpark guesstimate, because these numbers are subject to change. Also, no software will ever get a 100% success rate with the submissions. Finally, most of the tools let you add your own link targets, so the numbers are fluid anyway (“limited” means that only one type of link target, forum profiles or article directories in the case of ARM, can be custom-added).

Summaries

The following are brief summaries highlighting some of the unique features and characteristics of each of the tools in this roundup. I have written extensive reviews on each one of them (and also made separate videos for each one), so I won’t go into too much detail. If you want to know more about any one of the tools, there’s a link to the full review at the end of each summary.

Article Marketing Robot

Article Marketing Robot is actually the odd one out in this roundup. All of the other tools submit to various kinds of sites like social bookmarking sites, forums, free blogging sites, article directories etc. Article Marketing Robot, on the other hand, focuses fully on Article Submissions and nothing else.

ARM is highly automated, pretty easy to use and can submit to massive amounts of sites. Granted, the success rates tend to be low, but even after you clean up the target list by dumping all of the sites where submissions failed, you’re still left with a heck of a lot of links. Add to that the fact that you get in-content anchor-text links and it’s clear that ARM is a serious contender. Plus, the second way in which it’s the odd one out is that it’s the only program to come with a one-off price. Very nice!

More information: Article Marketing Robot Review

Magic Submitter

Magic Submitter is a real “everything-submitter”, from articles to bookmarks to videos and press releases, if there’s a way to get a backlink from a site, Magic Submitter can probably automate it.

It comes with a lot of link targets right out the box and also lets you add your own custom lists of link targets. Some aspects of the user interface take a bit of getting used to, but once you’ve gotten the hang of it, Magic Submitter is pleasantand easy to work with.

Automatic submissions to PDF sharing sites and statusnet-micro-blogs as well as automatic video submissions set Magic Submitter apart from most other tools and it’s nice to have the option to get some links from these less-trodden paths.

More information: Magic Submitter Review

Rank Builder 2.0

Rank Builder 2.0 means well, but can’t quite keep up with the crowd. The product comes in the form of six separate programs that do various types of link building. You can add your own custom lists of forum profiles, but the other modules (web 2.0 sites, press releases, articles,…) aren’t customizable.

Rank Builder is unnecessarily complicated, stating with a convolued sign-up process for the software and ending with the less-than-intuitive user interface which is slightly different for each of the six modules.

While this product is not downright bad, it makes a bit of an unfinished impression and compared to the likes of Magic Submitter and SEnuke X, it’s hard to find a good reason why you’d want to bother with Rank Builder 2.0.

More information: Rank Builder 2.0 Review

SEnuke X

SEnuke was the ganddaddy of all link-building software and accordingly, SEnuke X has some big shoes to fill. It does so rather adequatly with a strong emphasis on ease of use and “hands-off-ness”. The campaign-setup wizard and the simple diagram drawing tool for mapping out your backlink network make SEnuke X very easy and straight-forward to use.

Unfortunately, the forum profile builder is the only component where you can add your own link targets and the diagram builder has a few limitations (not every type of submission can be linked to from all others), but the bottom line is still that SEnuke X can build a lot of links for you, with very little human intervention required and scheduling link campaigns over longer periods of time could not be any easier.

The big downside to SEnuke X is the price: at $147/month, it’s by far the most expensive software in this roundup.

More information: SEnuke X Review

SEOLinkRobot

SEOLinkRobot is like a smaller brother to Magic Submitter or SEnuke: it has fewer features, isn’t as highly automated or sophisticated, but at heart, it’s the same kind of thing. Plus, it comes at a lower price than most tools represented here.

SEOLinkRobot is a solid piece of software and one feature I particularly like about it is that it lets you build open link-wheels with web 2.0 properties as well as more advanced, interlinked mini-nets (including automatic bookmarking) very easily. The downfall of SEOLinkRobot is that it only submits to about 80 sites in total. That’s just way too few link targets, compared to the competing products.

More information: SEOLinkRobot Review

SERPAssist

Using SEnuke X it seems like nothing could possibly be even more “hands off” short of just outsourcing all of your link building to a service provider. SERPAssist proves this assumption wrong. With SERPAssist, the actual submission processes aren’t even done from your local machine or through your Internet connection, instead all you do is define how you want your backlinks built, using a very nice diagramming tool. The resulting link-building tasks are then uploaded and done for you, in the cloud.

Unfortunately, SERPAssist is severely limited in the amount of different types of links it can build as well as in the total number of sites it can submit to. Much like SEOLinkRobot, there’s nothing wrong with the software itself, but it’s just too “weak” because of a lack of link targets.

DISCLAIMER: I assume that the situation with SERPAssist hasn’t changed since I last used it (which is a few months ago). According to their official site, the number of links the software can build has actually shrunk since then and I am awaiting confirmation of this.

More information: SERPAssist Review

Sick Submitter

Sick Submitter is a fairly complex and ultra-customizable link building tool that has a strong emphasis on automating profile links. Sick Submitter can be customized to do almost any kind of link building and in fact it needs to be customized by you, the user, since it does almost nothing in it’s out-of-the-box state.

With Sick Submitter, after you’ve gotten accustomed to use the tool, it will either cost you a lot of time (scraping your own link targets, building custom packets and custom submission templates) or a lot of money (buying pre-made link packets and submission templates provided by the user community). Given that you spend one or the other, Sick Submitter does turn into a very powerful link-builder, though.

More information: Sick Submitter Review

Roundup Video 1

For my conclusion to all this and to see which of the products comes out on top, watch this video:

Roundup Video 2: What Really Matters

Here's a second video, to clarify some important points, talk about what really matters and also a tip on how to use backlink building software for the fastest and best results possible:

Download Video 1
Download Video 2

Conclusion

Watch video one for the real conclusion, but just to have something in writing: SEnuke X is the best of the bunch in terms of automation and I recommend it. Magic Submitter is the best value for your money and I also recommend it. Pick one and start using it to get your stuff ranked!

All the best,

P.S.: I'd appreciate it if you would help spread the word by clicking on the "Like" button. :)

Is SEOLR a serious competitor and will it help you get your sites ranked more easily than ever before? Or is it just “yet another” mediocre link-building tool?

Read on to find out.

SEOLinkRobot Overview

SEO Link Robot is a windows-based program and, like many of it’s kind, it automates backlink building through various submissions, like article-submissions to article directories and free blogging sites, social bookmark submissions etc.

Available Link Targets

As of this review, here’s a breakdown of the sites SEOLinkRobot can submit to:

• 26 Free Blogs
• 9 Article Directories
• 10 Press Release Sites
• 18 Social Bookmarking Sites
• 16 RSS Directories
• Loads of Pinging Sites

Total Link Targets: 79

This is a pretty low number, compared to many competing products. It’s not necessarily a deal-breaker, but mixing up links from only 79 sources can only get you so far, no matter how fancy your link-building strategies are.

SEOLinkRobot Video

It’s far more effective to show what this software does, rather than just write about it for pages on end, so here’s a quick walkthrough video:

Mini Nets and Limitations

As mentioned in the video, the options to automatically build large or small (open) linkwheels and the "mini-net-builder" are features that make SEOLinkRobot unique. I've seen many backlink building services that offer creating mini-nets and networks consisting of multiple mini-nets for their clients. SEOLinkRobot can automate much of the creation tasks for those kind of link networks.

The problem is the lack of diversity in the available link targets, though. You may be able to build very complex, interlinked networks using SEOLR, but all of those links will be coming from the same 79 total websites...

And while I'm nagging: SEOLinkRobot lacks a scheduling function and it seems that account creations are only possible with one thread at a time (which makes them a very slow process). On the other hand, the submissions work with multiple threads and in general, I've found SEOLR to be overall easy to use and pleasant to work with. While the total number of sites in the system is low, at least the success rates are very good.

Conclusion

All in all, SEOLinkRobot is promising, but too limited to warrant a real recommendation. There's nothing dramatically wrong with it, except that it just doesn't submit to a large number of sites. If it were available at a one-time price, I'd recommend it as a nice little mini-net building software, but as it is, I'm not sure SEOLR is worth the cost, compared to the competing products.

Click Here to Check Out SEOLinkRobot!

Do you have any questions or feedback about the product or this review? Let me know by leaving a comment!

Cheers,

What exactly does Sick Submitter do and is is it better, worse or just different, compared to the competition? Read on for all the details.

Sick Submitter Overview

Sick Submitter is a Windows desktop program that was originally built to create forum profiles as backlink-sources and has since evolved into an “everything submitter” with capabilites for submitting articles, bookmarks, RSS feeds and various forms of profile links.

One thing that comes to mind almost immediately, when you start working with Sick Submitter is “learning curve”. While I wouldn’t say that the software is needlessly complicated, it sure is complex. It does a lot of things in many different ways and it’s highly customizable. These traits and “simple” are mutually exclusive, I’m afraid.

Custom Lists, Custom Wizards, Custom Everything

Out-of-the box, Sick Submitter does not have a very impressive list of link targets and isn’t nearly as capable as it can be. Sick Submitter is very much based on customization and it has a very lively community. To really get the most out of it, you will either have to download free link packets, purchase premium link packets, use something like Scrapebox to create your own link packets or do all of those things combined.

There are two types of scripts you can add to Sick Submitter: packets are lists of link targets that you can load into the program and run submissions for. Wizard templates are like plugins that “teach” Sick Submitter how to do a new type of submission. For example, there’s a Wizard Template that lets you add your own lists (or purchased lists) of WordPress multi-user sites to then submit content and links to, which is something Sick can’t do out of the box.

Here’s an overview of the types sites Sick Submitter can submit to without additional Wizard Templates:

• Forum profiles (SMF, FluxBB, PunBB, PHPBB)
• RSS Directories
• Link Directories (PHP Link Directory)
• Article Directories
• Social Bookmarking Sites
• Blog Comments?

And here’s a non-exhaustive list of what it can do if you add the available Wizard Templates, from the Sick forum:

Sick Submitter Video

To give you a better impression of how this program works, here’s a walkthrough video:

Working With Sick Submitter

What sets Sick Submitter apart from most other link-building tools is that it's highly customizable. This can be a big advantage or a big pain, depending on how you look at it. On the one hand, Sick offers a wealth of possibilities, since you can create your own site lists to submit to (using Scrapebox, or Sick's own scraping tool), download free and paid packages and link-lists and even create your very own submission templates from scratch. On the other hand, Sick Submitter requires a lot of setup and customization and the importing of link-packets before it really does anything useful.

In short: the good thing is that you can customize it, the bad thing is that you have to customize it.

Conclusion

I can recommend Sick Submitter only if you really enjoy tinkering with software. If you like the fact that you can scrape your own link lists, import various packages and templates and build your very own link-building machine, then Sick Submitter should be right up your alley and the low monthly price is a nice added bonus. Concerning the price, you need to be aware, though, that Sick Submitter is almost certainly going to cost you more than the $20/month price tag. At the very least, you will also spend some money on various packets and link lists (which typically sell in the range of $10-$50 a piece). In addition, most heavy users of Sick Submitter own Scrapebox, maybe a few private proxies and either a dedicated notebook or a VPS to run it on.

At any rate, don't let the low price tag fool you. It's no use having a cheap tool that you never use because it's too time-consuming to work with.

Having said all that, Sick Submitter is a tool with a lot of potential and it can build various types of links that no other tools can. Once past the learning curve and in the right hands, this can be one powerful SEO tool.

Click the button below to get your free trial of Sick Submitter:

Get Your Free Trial!

In this review, we’ll take a look at exactly what this software is capable of and test how well it does what it’s supposed to do.

Rank Builder 2.0 Overview

Once you’ve made it past a rather arduous purchasing- and signup-process, it’s a bit of a surprise to see that Rank Builder installs as six separate programs, rather than a single one. The six programs or modules are: an article submitter, a link wheel builder, a press release submitter, a profile link builder a social bookmarking tool and a video submitter.

Here are the available link targets in a bit more detail:

• 24 Article Directories
• 43 Web 2.0/Linkwheel sites
• 21 Press Release sites
• 1250 Forum Profiles
• 40 Bookmarking sites
• 7 Video sites
• 10 RSS Directories (part of the Link Wheel Builder)

Total number of link targets: 1385

It’s possible to add your own list of forums to build profile links from as well.

Rank Builder 2.0 Video

Here’s a video showing the software in action. It wouldn’t make much sense to demonstrate all of the modules separately, but you’ll get a good idea of how the software works and what it does from this brief demonstration:

Problems...

Rank Builder 2.0 has a few rough edges that didn't leave a very good impression with me. For one thing, the fact that it's split up into six seperate programs is really just an un-welcome complication from the user's standpoint. You have to log in to each of the modules separately and add your configuration details (email account information, decaptcha/deathbycaptcha login) to each module separately. It also limits the capabilities of the software since there is no component stringing all of the modules together, which means that you can't do a full run where you build all types of links all at once, without manual intervention.

Rank Builder doesn't come with a scheduling feature and it likely never will have such a feature, because it's split up into different software components. The user interface is not particularly complicated, but neither is it appealing or intuitive. The fact that each of the modules has a slightly different UI is an added annoyance.

Finally, I also saw some difficulties when running submissions in multiple threads. For some reason, sometimes some of the browser windows Rank Builder opens fail to initialize, which leads to an extremely low success rate for submissions. The only solution I found was to run only one thread at the time, which slows the submission process to a crawl.

Conclusion

As you can probably tell, I wasn't particularly taken with Rank Builder 2.0. The product isn't terrible and it does build links for you, once you've got it all set up. However, from the purchase/signup process to the unintuitive member's area with minimal documentation (either there aren't many tutorials or I just can't find them) to the small issues with the software itself, the whole thing just seems unfinished and rough around the edges.

With alternatives such as Magic Submitter and SEnuke X available, there's no reason to put up with this kind of mediocrity.

If you have any questions or want to share your thoughts, please leave a comment!

This post is not an extensive review, since I didn’t test every help desk solution out there in great detail. I did, however, spend some time poking around, looking for (genuine) reviews and user feedback, combing through feature lists and weighing pros and cons. Since I already did all that work, I figured I might as well share what I learnt with you.

Read on to see which free and paid helpdesk solutions are right for you.

Essential Features

The standard features included in almost any kind of customer support software are things like ticket creation (let’s you follow one thread of conversation from beginning to conclusion of a support request), multi-user support and smart categorization for the requests (e.g. keep the technical issues separate from pre-sales questions and feature requests). If you’ve ever submitted a support ticket anywhere, I’m sure you’re familiar with the basics. Plus, the software should have a clean and intuitive interface and all that.

Apart from these basics, there were two main features that struck me as essential, when it comes to a help desk:

1. Email Piping
2. Knowledgebase

Email piping simply means that you can set up your support desk to work seamlessly with email. Whenever you write an answer to a ticket, the customer will receive an email containing the entire answer and they can also simply reply by email to send an answer back to the ticket. If a desk doesn’t support email piping, that means the customer needs to go to the support site and log in every time they want to reply to a ticket. As a customer, I find this annoying, so I definitely want to afford my customers the luxury of email piping.

The second feature is having a knowledgebase included in the helpdesk. The knowledgebase simply contains answers and instructions concerning the most common questions and issues. Ideally, there’s also a dynamic search function which displays possibly related KB articles whenever someone submits a ticket and starts typing. The advantage of this is clear: It can decrease the volume of support requests, when answers to the most common questions are presented right inside the support desk.

Help Desk Solutions

With that said, here’s a run-down of all the programs and services I had a closer look at.

HelpSpot

HelpSpot is one of the “big” fully-featured help desk solutions, used by many large corporations. Something that sets HelpSpot apart from most other solutions is that they have an emphasis on integrating the support desk with existing websites. You can see an example of this on HelpSpot’s own support section, here. It’s not the only solution that can be seamlessly integrated into your site, but here, it seems the standard option, while for other desks, it’s more of an “also possible”.

HelpSpot also comes with a wide array of automation features and all sorts of advanced stuff I’d never even heard about, before I started researching support software. For smaller businesses, it’s likely that many of these features will remain untouched. Still nice having them, though.

Finally, I couldn’t help but notice that HelpSpot has a silly pricing model. Potentially, it could have been one of the most straight-forward models, since you simply buy one license for each member of support staff. So, one person using the system = one license and each license is a one-off payment. Simple and fair. Except that there’s also bulk prices for larger amounts of licenses and there’s also an annual support fee of $49 and this is also per staff member. It’s like they wanted to have a USP of no running costs, but then couldn’t help themselves adding some continuity in there anyway.

Click Here to Visit HelpSpot

Kayako

Among marketers I know and on various webmaster forums, the most common answer to the question “what help desk do you recommend?” was: “Kayako“. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re the best, but it’s a good indication that they’re very popular and that they’re doing something right.

There are three versions of Kayako:

Kayako Resolve is the support desk part of the solution, wich includes support tickets, email integration, a knowledgebase and all that other good stuff.

Kayako Engage also includes a help desk, but has an emphasis on real-time support, including a live-chat feature for your site, click-to-call and visitor monitoring (which I assume is some variation of site analytics).

Kayako Fusion is a combination of the two solutions above. It’s the all-in-one package.

In most cases, Kayako Resolve is likely the thing you’re looking for. On the features-front, Kayako offers everything you could possibly want plus a whole lot of stuff you didn’t even think about. There’s no doubt that this is a fully-featured solution. Plus, with the newest (v4) version, they also have quite an appealing user interface, for both the support staff and the users/customers.

Kayako is available as a hosted solution (monthly fee) or as a self-hosted, downloadable version (single fee).

Click Here to Visit Kayako

ZenDesk

ZenDesk is another very popular support desk and chances are, that you’ve already encountered and used it as a customer at some point. ZenDesk has a very appealing interface for support tickets and the knowledge base. Plus, it shows the customer which support member they are assigned to, including an image. This gives it a nice, personal touch and generally means that the desk is pleasant to use. This is an important factor for making a positive impression during the customer support process.

Another positive factor is that the pricing starts at a very low $9 per month per staff member. Although this version is fairly limited, it makes ZenDesk accessible even to small businesses.

Unfortunately, ZenDesk tainted their reputation a while back by hiking up prices unexpectedly, even on their existing customers. Not surprisingly, this caused a lot of outrage and all-caps twittering. An official apology was issued shortly after the initial price increase and the mistakes were largely un-done. The reason I’m mentioning this here is that this raised a red flag for me. Sure, they went back on their decision, but who wouldn’t, when the alternative is losing tons of customers? It’s hard to tell whether it was a genuine mistake or whether it was greed getting the better of them. At any rate, this is what made me cautious about choosing ZenDesk.

Click Here to Visit ZenDesk

Free Help Desk Software

Here are the free solutions for customer support, that I took a closer look at.

HESK

Among the free solutions, I saw HESK recommended the most. It’s a free and fairly simple solution with a nice user interface. It comes with (almost) all the essential features, but doesn’t hit you over the head with a massive feature list.

HESK might be a perfect solution for small businesses and those just starting out. The only thing I don’t like about it is the fact that it doesn’t support email piping. This means that your customers need to come to your support site and log in with a username and password, every time they want to see a reply or ask a follow-up question.

Click Here to Visit HESK

osTicket

As the name implies, osTicket is an open source support desk solution. It’s a more complex and feature rich solution than HESK, or at least, it can be.

Of all the free products I found, this is potentially the most fully-featured and that’s in large part due to it’s open source nature. There are many plugins and mods available for osTicket. On the one hand, this means it’s highly flexible, on the other hand, it means you have to get into it and study the software, the extensions and so on, before you have your perfect custom solution. Depending on how much of a geek you are, this is either a headache to be avoided or the best thing ever.

Bottom line: if you are technically savvy and aren’t afraid to invest some time in installation and customization of the software, osTicket could be the perfect solution for you.

Click Here to Visit osTicket

Trellis Desk

Trellis is a free helpdesk software made by Accord5. It’s the solution we settled on for the support desk for IM Impact and SwissMadeMarketing and there are two main reasons for this: first, it’s free and that’s nice. Second, of all the support software I looked at, I really like the balance of features offered by Trellis. It does everything I want my helpdesk system to do, but isn’t cluttered with features I won’t need or overloaded with options that make it difficult to use.

It does still require some time to install and set up properly, but very likely less so than osTicket. With Trellis, we were able to implement a nice system that includes email piping and a good knowledgebase and were able to do so for free and with little time invested.

Click Here to Visit Trellis

Conclusion

Trellis is the software we settled on for ourselves, but that doesn’t necessarily make it the “best” solution available. There are two factors that played an important part in the decision.

The first is that while I intend to grow my business, I also intend to keep it fairly lean in terms of manpower. It’s highly unlikely that I’ll end up running a huge company with dozens of people on a support staff anytime soon, since I automate as many aspects of my business as possible and I don’t deal in physical goods (believe me, physical goods generate far more support requests than digital products). If I did expect this kind of growth, I would have gone with one of the paid solutions.

The second factor is that my business partner Sam is a programmer who can handle installation and setup of a helpdesk software with great expertise. He knows what he’s doing and it doesn’t take him long to get something like this up and running. If it were just myself, it would be a greater time investment. Why is this important? Because time is money. It’s not worth it to spend hours upon hours fiddling with software just to get something for “free”, if a couple of bucks a month will get you a hosted solution where you never have to do any technical stuff yourself and there’s support staff you can call on. Even with Sam involved, we decided to only dedicate a very limited amount of time to installing a free help desk. If we would have run into any major complications, we’d have chosen a paid, hosted help desk.

And that’s a valuable bit of advice for pretty much any aspect of your business.

Thanks for reading and I hope you find this article useful.

All the best,

After many webinars and some bad experiences, I hope I can make the decision a bit easier for you, if you’re currently on the lookout and unsure which service to go with.

dimdim

I started out using dimdim, because they offer their services at very attractive prices. At the same time, their platform is still very feature-rich and there’s the added bonus that the meetings and webinars in dimdim are browser based, so that the attendees don’t need to download and install any software to take part.

You can use dimdim for online meetings with up to 10 people, completely for free. Just $25 per month will expand that to 50 users and even the webinar option for up to 1000 attendees is still very affordable at $65 a month. When I was looking for a webinar platform, I wasn’t sure what exactly I’d do with it and I didn’t know if I’d be hosting webinars on a regular basis or not. Because of this, I was happy to find an affordable solution like this.

In total, I held one meeting and two webinars with dimdim, before I stopped using the service. The meeting, including only two other people apart from myself, went down without any issues. The first webinar was a bit more problematic. Some of the attendees couldn’t get the audio-feed to work and there were some other minor glitches along the way.

The second webinar was a catastrophe.

I had invited a guest expert for this webinar, which was being held for paying customers. We tried for about 40 minutes to get everything to work before we gave up and rescheduled the webinar… Among other things, either the audio or the video feed (or both) always went lost when we switched the presentation over to the guest presenter. We also couldn’t find a way to turn off the webcam feed, which was only burning up resources and, if anything, distracting from the actual presentation. The whole thing just felt like we were using a pre-alpha version of a program, with every action accompanied by various glitches and problems.

I was lucky. I was lucky that both the guest expert and the customers were willing to show up again a week later and no-one asked for a refund (although many were clearly frustrated with the experience).

In this age of Google Alerts, it’s not unlikely that a dimdim rep will jump in, in the comments section and let me know that this was a big exception and they’ve served thousands of webinars successfully etc. But the problem here is that there absolutely can’t be exceptions like this. Interaction between yourself and your subscribers and customers is extremely valuable and you can’t take it for granted that people actually make time to show up for a live event. It’s incredibly damaging to your reputation and your business when the attendees are “punished” with a negative experience, once they’ve decided to pay attention to you like this.

GoToWebinar

GoToWebinar is the webinar platform that pretty much everyone in Internet marketing uses. And once you’ve used them yourself, you’ll see why.

The downsides are that everyone involved needs to download the GoToWebinar software to be able to host or attend webinars and that the prices are pretty steep. The option for webinars with up to 100 attendees will cost you $99 a month, the plan for up to 500 attendees per webinar costs $399 a month and the largest plan, which allows up to 1000 attendees, costs a whopping $499 a month. If you ever wondered why so many marketers desperately pitch their products on webinars, that’s part of the reason, right there.

Having said that, you need to be aware that it takes a bigger list than you might think to even get 100 attendees into a webinar. Basically, look at the average amount of unique clicks you get from sending an e-mail and divide that by three. That’s roughly how many people will show up to a webinar, live. So, it’s not like you need the max. plan if you have a few thousand people on your list.

I’ve hosted about a dozen webinars with GoToWebinar, so far. All of them have been completely glitch-free, I’m glad to say. The GoToWebinar control panel is also very cool, offering you tons of useful features. The learning curve is minimal and I felt right at home with the platform, fairly quickly.

Conclusion

If you find yourself in the same situation as me, a few months ago, where you aren’t so sure about webinars and GoToWebinar just seems too expensive, here’s my advice: Take their 30 day free trial and do at least two webinars during your trial period. The only question is: Are you going to do webinars on a regular basis? If the answer is yes, then go with GoToWebinar.

Don’t worry about the price. It’s very easy to make the money back, even if you are not being pitchy and promotional in your webinars. Particularly the prices of the larger plans can be off-putting but believe me, once you have enough leverage to get 1000 people into a live webinar, a $499 a month price-tag is not going to be an issue for you, anymore.

Cheers,

Read on to find out.

SEO Blueprint Overview

Without any further ado, let’s go into some detail on each of the three tools in SEO Blueprint:

Link Blueprint

Link Blueprint is a fairly simple link-exchange system. You can add sites of your own to the system and request links to those sites. This will cost you credits. Other Link Blueprint members will link to your site and you will link to their sites, which earns you credits.

The system makes sure that there is no reciprocal linking going on. Link exchanges like this can work, but Link Blueprint doesn’t offer anything that sets it apart from other, similar systems.

It should also be noted that Link Blueprint requires quite a bit of manual work. For me personally, it’s too time-intensive and too fickle to bother with, but if you invest the time and effort necessary, you can make Link Blueprint work for you.

Article Blueprint

Using Article Blueprint, you can submit spun articles (using an interface where you spin articles paragraph-by-paragraph, very similar to the Unique Article Wizard system) to a network of websites. Every article you enter gets posted on 470 sites, which looks great at first glance, but doesn’t hold up very well under close scrutiny. The problem is that the articles you submit are buried away somewhere in the background on 470 sites that aren’t article directories or blogs. The sites are on all kinds of topics and all they do is feature an inconspicuous “Articles” link, which leads to a completely non-optimized back-end with piles of articles from all the Article Blueprint members.

It’s disappointing to see that there is literally zero on-page optimization going on in these “article dumps”. It would not take much to set the system up to add proper tags, format the pages a bit less hideously and do some good interlinking. From what I found, looking at the articles, it doesn’t seem like providing valuable backlinks to the Article Blueprint customers is a major concern for the network owners…

Up until recently, Article Blueprint also posted to a series of regular article directories, in addition to the network of 470 sites owned by the creators. If this feature were still part of the package and the network was better optimized, Article Blueprint would be a very useful tool. In it’s current state, it’s not really worth an investment, unfortunately.

In an isolated test, I did not see any significant rank movements for a long-tail keyword, building Article Blueprint links only.

Blog Blueprint

Blog Blueprint is a high-PR blog network which works in the same way as LinkVana or BuildMyRank. You submit short, 100 word article snippets and include one link. Each of those snippets goes out to one single blog in a network of blogs that all have PageRank. As demonstrated by BuildMyRank, this is a method that can work extremely well, if the network is really a high-quality network and it’s ensured that the links get indexed and all that.

Unfortunately, Blog Blueprint is a far less groomed network than BMR. There is no additional work done to ensure indexation of your posts and from what I’ve seen, the blogs seem to get flooded with spammy posts, for the most part. I did see some rank improvements from posting to Blog Blueprint, but since I was an IM-Advantage member and the URLs of your Blog Blueprint posts show up in the Bookmarking tool available only inside IM-Advantage, I could help them along a little and make sure they got indexed. As an SEO Blueprint member, you won’t know the URLs of your blog posts, so results may vary.

Conclusion

SEO Blueprint initially looked like an awesome deal: 3 different link-building tools at a very reasonable price of $67/month. Unfortunately, the tools are all okay, but not great. And in the case of Article Blueprint, I’m afraid calling it “okay” is actually an overstatement.

Here’s the problem: $67/month is not terribly expensive, but two out of the three tools aren’t much worth having, so I can’t recommend SEO Blueprint. Blog Blueprint, the most effective tool of the three, is available separately for $59/month. But instead of getting that, get BuildMyRank, which is essentially the same thing, at the same price, but way better.

SEO Blueprint looked promising, but after closer consideration, I have to put it on my “Don’t Buy” List.

Easy Video Player 2 boasts a few features that are actually very useful for marketers and others that aren’t so much. In this review, I’ll show you exactly what the software does and you’ll learn how it compares to other video players (some of which are available for free). As usual, this review is a bit “late”, since the big, hyped-up lauch of EVP2 is already over. For those who haven’t yet decided whether EVP2 is the right thing for them: Here’s perhaps the first and only actual review, made by someone who’s both used the software as well as many other competing products.

Read on to get the scoop on Easy Video Player 2.

Easy Video Player 2 Overview

At it’s most basic, EVP2 embeds video files that you’ve uploaded into nice-looking players and gives you a code that you can stick on your website, where you want that video to display. This may seem very simple and if you haven’t done much work with video, you might be asking yourself why one would need an expensive piece of software to do this. If you have worked with video a lot, then you probably know how complicated things like this can be.

Before I go into a few more details on Easy Video Player 2 features, let’s address one common question:

Why Not Just Use YouTube?

If the answer to this is clear to you, skip on down to the video.

It is, of course, possible to upload video files to YouTube, vimeo, DailyMotion or any number of other video streaming sites, then grab the code from there and embed the video on your site. This costs absolutely nothing and is very easy to do. So why buy something like EVP2?

Mostly, it’s a question of branding and control. A video embedded from YouTube is branded as a YouTube video, will display related YouTube videos (unless this is explicitly turned off) and may not visually fit in with the rest of your web-page.

More importantly, a video like this is not 100% in your control. There are rules regarding the content (videos that are too commercial might be removed), there are limitations on how long your video can be and there’s always the risk that your account might get blocked or a video removed, at any time, for various reasons.

Finally, you also need to consider that it can make you look unprofessional, if you have a sales-page or product-page and your videos are embedded from YouTube.

On top of all that, Easy Video Player 2 offers a whole bunch of features that are not available through video streaming sites. On the other hand, many of those features are overrated…

Overrated Features

The marketing for EVP2 put a lot of focus on the sharing options you can activate for your videos and how these could make your videos go viral and help you make money and/or grow your list.

Those features are:

• Adding buttons below your video for sharing on facebook, twitter and digg.
• Adding embed code to your video, so that your viewers can publish the video on their sites as well.
• Placing a clickable button (e.g. an “Add to Cart” button) right inside your video.
• Placing an opt-in form right inside your video.
• Creating a nicely styled page for your video, including the sharing options and facebook comments.

So, the idea is that you make a video and add an opt-in form or a clickable button and then, thanks to the sharing options, it will go viral and be spread all over the Internet, getting you new signups and generating sales on autopilot.

This concept has some serious flaws, unfortunately. To name just two, videos with commercial intent are a lot less likely to be shared and go viral than non-commercial videos (simply think of all the viral videos you know of and ask yourself if they had worked if there’d been a pitch at the end) and your viewers are unlikely to perform two actions with your video (sharing, embedding, opting in or making a purchase all move the user away from the video page – they are unlikely to come back and perform a second action, once they’ve completed one process).

I don’t mean to be discouraging. If you own Easy Video Player 2, I recommend you give the viral thing a shot. It might just work. But these features are not, in themselves, compelling reasons to purchase this product.

The Upsell that Shouldn’t Be

I feel like anyone thinking of purchasing EVP2 needs to be warned of the upsell. Once you’ve made the initial purchase, there will be an upsell for what is called the “commercial” version of EVP2. What this upgrade (for $77) does is remove the Easy Video Player 2 branding from your videos. The “normal” version will display the Easy Video Player logo in the bottom left hand corner of your videos for the first few seconds of playtime and there will be a “Powered by Easy Video Player 2″ links above your sharing buttons, if you choose to display them.

In my opinion, the creators of EVP2 made a terrible choice in positioning this as an upsell. What happens is that you make a purchase and are then informed that what you got was acutally a branded version (which makes it seem like what you just bought is somehow limited or less valuable) and you need to hand over more cash to get rid of that branding.

On closer investigation, you’ll find that the non-commercial and commercial options are actually a very good deal and they should have been positioned as a choice between “Easy Video Player 2″ for 200 bucks and “Easy Video Player 2 – Branded” for those with a smaller budget. It’s a great deal either way because you can have the branded player use your affiliate link (when people click on the “powered by” link and buy the product, you get a commission) and getting an unbranded version of Flowplayer (the player that EVP2 is based on) happens to cost a fortune.

This is just an example of bad marketing, if you ask me.

What EVP2 Gets Right

I’ve been quite negative about Easy Video Player 2, so far, so it’s time to talk about what this product gets right and what it’s really useful for. The best thing about EVP2 is in it’s name: It makes things Easy.

The most complicated part about it is the installation (EVP2 is installed your server), which comes with very well made and detailed instructions. Once that’s done, you’ve got a very nice, easy-to-use dashboard for managing all your marketing videos. They are very easy to set up and customize and some of the features are really very, very useful. For example:

• You can add a download button to your video in one click.
• You can add “events” to your video, which will make any HTML elements appear above or below the video, triggered when the video reaches a certain point. What’s more, you can add several such events.
• The page creation feature can be very convenient if you want to send a link to your video, but don’t want to embed it on any of your existing websites.
• You can have your video play in a lightbox at the click of one button (great for showing higher-resolution videos that often don’t fit into a website’s layout).
• You can set up automatic redirects that take the viewer to a specific page after the video has finished.

For your video marketing needs, Easy Video Player 2 really is an excellent choice. What’s perhaps the most important thing about it: If you link up EVP2 with an Amazon S3 account, you’ve got yourself the cheapest, most reliable and fastest video streaming device I know of. Since most other commercial video streaming solutions come with running costs and EVP2 is available for just one payment, it can save you quite  a lot of money in the long run. Of course, that’s only if you actually do a lot of video marketing. Which brings me to the final point.

EVP2 Video Review

Here’s a video tour of Easy Video Player 2:

Should You Buy Easy Video Player 2?

It’s very simple:

If you are not doing any video marketing yet, then there’s no need to get EVP2. It will not be the missing link that finally makes you lots of money. The possible exception here would be that you absolutely know that you’re starting with video marketing and you have several projects lined up that require a player such as EVP2.

If you are a video marketer, i.e. you already work with videos for your sales-pages, squeeze pages and products, then you should get EVP2. You’ll love it.

Click Here to Get Easy Video Player 2