2. Ezinearticles reacted. Or perhaps I should say they over-reacted?

Why Care About EZA?

Ezinearticles have been a pretty reliable traffic source for affiliate marketers for a long time. In fact, they’ve been such a staple in Internet marketing, it’s almost impossible for you to be in this field for more than a few days before you learn about them.

So, what happened? If you want to get all the details, you can read up on them in this post about Ezinearticle’s reaction to the Google slap.

Here are the cliff-notes:

Basically, EZA’s reaciont to the change is to make EZA a much less attractive place to submit articles. Increase minimum character count, lower maximum allowed keyword density, disallow people from posting the same article to their website and to Ezinearticles (does that also mean EZA articles will no longer be open for syndication? not sure), more rejected articles, potentially longer review process…

Pretty much everything that would put people off of submitting articles in the first place. They also announced that they would nofollow all links, including the ones in the resource boxes. After much protesting, they seem to be reconsidering this position, though.

The goal is, of course, to increase the quality of the articles on EZA and hopefully regain their lost rankings in Google.

The Death of…?

Ezinearticles got hit hard and now their firing on all cylinders to try and recover, which is understandable. The problem is that they’re pointing the wrong way.

Their proposed solution is to increase the quality of articles submitted to EZA. Guess what? Google can’t detect the quality of an article.

Which brings me to the reason for writing this post in the first place. On the one hand, it’s interesting to see this happening. And who knows, maybe we can soon all finally write a “the death of…” article and not mean it ironically.

More importantly, there’s an SEO lesson in this. Yes, high quality, relevant content is the best kind of content to create, SEO-wise. Why? Because that’s what search engines want to deliver to their end-users. They can’t truly separate good from bad content yet, but that’s the ultimate goal. So by creating awesome content, you’re ahead of the curve, in a sense.

But awesome content does not equal SEO. And just because Google has made a change doesn’t mean SEO has changed.

SEO is this: Figure out what signals Google is looking for when placing pages at the top for desirable search terms and send those signals deliberately.

Martyrdom is not going to cut it. Google will not reward you for working extra hard and neither will it reward Ezinearticles for punishing it’s authors extra hard (unless they make adjustments specifically for EZA, which is possible but unlikely). I’m all for good content. But the bare essence of SEO still lies in finding the right tweak and has little to do with (human, subjective, elusive) “quality”.

What are the new tweaks? I don’t know yet. For now, just keep building those links.

Cheers,

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.

Article Marketing Robot Overview

Article Marketing Robot is actually more than just an article submitter. It comes with:

• Article directory account creator
• Automatic e-mail verifier
• Complete article spinning tool
• Decaptcher integration
• Backlink checking and reporting

Link Volume and Link Quality

As mentioned in the intro to this article, my main concern with article directory submissions is that, in my extensive experience, the failure rates tend to be very high and the link quality tends to be very low. So, how does AMR hold up in this regard?

At the time of writing, you start out with a database of 3758(!) directories. The first step is to create accounts for all of these directories. To do this, you set up an e-mail account and give Article Marketing Robot access to this account. You should also sign up with Decaptcher or DeathByCaptcha (recommended) and link the account to AMR, otherwise you’ll be manually solving captchas all day.

The robot then goes out and starts creating accounts. This worked flawlessly on the majority of directories. Next up, you set it to go through your e-mail inbox and confirm all the auto-confirmation messages sent out after registering to most of these directories. In my test, it successfully confirmed 2152 accounts. So, even though there is naturally a certain failure rate in the signup process, we’re left with more than 2000 directories we can submit to. That is still A LOT.

The next step is to add a spun article to Article Marketing Robot. It has a complete, fully functional spinner built in. It seems to be decent enough, but I didn’t spend too much time with it, as I’m a satisfied user of the Best Spinner. When you add your article, you also set tags and categories and, of course, include a resource box with links back to the sites you want to promote.

Once that’s done, you hit “submit” and choose whether you want to submit to all of the directories on one go, or spread it out over a longer period of time (AMR needs to be running in the background for the latter function). Article Marketing Robot is a multi-threaded application and given enough processing power and bandwidth, it can zip through a thousand submissions in just a few minutes.

In my most recent test, 1380 of the submissions were successful. If you look at how many of those submissions go to directories that have any PageRank at all, there are 283 left and if you look for PR3 and higher, you’re left with 77 sites.

This illustrates my point about article directories. Out of a pool of a whopping 3758 directories, you end up with only about 77 submissions where the backlink can be expected to pass a good amount of link-juice. That’s 2.05% out of the original list of directories.

So it’s Rubbish?

No. Not at all, actually. Article Marketing Robot is easily the best article submitter I have ever seen and there are several reasons for that.

It Does Build a Lot of Links

Those links are mostly not very valuable, but there’s merit in volume as well. While the failure rate is significant, it’s not nearly as high as the failure rates of some other submitters and the total number of directories in the system to begin with means that you still end up getting a big old load of backlinks for any run you do with this software.

The one thing to keep in mind is that you’re looking at one single set of directories, here. This means that if you submit two articles with links to the same URL, the second round of submissions will have limited link-value since the links will be coming from the same sources as the ones in the first round. The best way to use it is to do one round of submissions for every new page on your money sites, as well as for every major page linking back to your money site (i.e. use it for link reinforcement)

It Saves Lots of Time

Many automation tools aren’t all that automatic. They require lots of setup and maintenance and you need to constantly be around while they’re working and intervene yourself from time to time. Article Marketing Robot is not like that at all, fortunately. It does require a bit of setup time, but once that’s done, it is as close to a fully automatic solution as anything can get.

Link Reports

A very special feature that AMR boasts is that you can set it go check on all the articles it’s submitted for you and it will return a report of all the live links it finds. This is particularly useful if you want to feed a list of all your linking URLs into a backlink boosting system.

One-Time Price

Article Marketing Robot is available for a one-time fee of 80 bucks. That is a really good deal and it would not have been surprising to see a recurring fee attached to a product like this. That’s a big plus, since you can potentially get a lot of bang for your buck, if you use AMR often.

Stellar Support

I only had slight difficulties with the program once and contacted Vince, the creator of AMR, with a question. I could hardly believe how quickly he replied. He was incredibly helpful and offered absolutely stellar support. I honestly don’t know how he does it, with all the customers he already has. In any case, I think it’s really worth mentioning, as it shows that Vince cares about his customers and goes out of his way to help them. Big thumbs-up for that!

Conclusion

Normally, I’d make a video showing the process of setting up accounts and doing submissions etc. However, you can find videos detailing all these steps on the sales-page for AMR, so it would feel redundant if I made such videos as well.

Article Marketing Robot is without a doubt the best article directory submitter I’ve ever used. It works swiftly and efficiently and is a useful link-building tool, despite the failure rates and the fact that many of the directories provide only limited link value. You can’t expect any SEO miracles from doing a few AMR submissions, but used as a bulk link builder and link-hub builder in conjunction with a few other techniques and tools, it’s very useful. Couple that with the one-time price and you’ve got yourelf a very good deal. In other words: It’s not necessarily the first tool I’d spend my money on, but as a part of my SEO arsenal, I’m very happy to have Article Marketing Robot.

If you buy through my link, you can now get a discount on your purchase of Article Marketing Robot! Simply click the button below or any of the links to AMR in this article and you’ll be taken to the special discount page!

Click Here to Get the AMR Discount

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.

In terms of these requirements, blog networks may just be the perfect link-building tool. In this article, I explain what blog networks are, how they work and what their benefits and drawbacks tend to be.

What is a Blog Network?

As the name implies, it’s a network of blogs. These blogs are all connected to one central hub, your “blog network provider”, if you will. This is usually a paid service that you need to sign up for (more on that, later).

What the blog network does for you is that it allows you to publish articles to lots and lots of blogs.

It usually goes like this: You log in and submit a new article, after picking an appropriate category, entering some tags and inserting a few links into the article body. This article is then sent out to and published on lots of blogs that match the subject of your article (i.e. a health-related article is posted to health-related blogs).

You might conclude that using a blog network for link building is a bit like article marketing using free article directories, then. Except that it’s way better.

Benefits of Blog Networks

Here are the major advantages that blog networks offer over other kinds of link-building and article marketing:

• Full Control Over Anchor Texts
  You get to choose the desired anchor text and link location and you can also set up different variations of the anchor text (using spinning syntax) to make your link profile look more natural.
• Fewer Restrictions
  Many article directories are very strict about what kind of content they allow. They also usually don’t let you place links within the article body and are restrictive about what you’re allowed to put in your author box, where links are allowed. On blog networks, there are also rules about what you are allowed to post, but they’re rarely as restrictive or picky as article directories tend to be.
• More Links
  Submit your article to an article directory and you get one, maybe two links from the resource box. Submit an article to a blog network and you will see your article published to dozens, if not hundreds of sites, receiving new backlinks every time.

The Receiving End

You might be wondering where all those blogs in the network are coming from. The answer is simple: Each blog network allows you to “plug in” your own sites as well, to receive content from other blog network members.

The benefit of doing this is that the sites you plug into the network will have lots of new content posted to them, all of it relevant to the subject of the sites. In other words, it’s a form of auto-blogging. Of course, those posts contain links to other people’s sites, but you can still monetize the surroundings of the post contents (with AdSense, banners,…). This way, you can conceivably set up a few dozen auto-blogs that will eventually generate some passive income thanks to the constant influx of fresh content.

Downsides of this System?

From a publisher’s point of view, the main problem with blog networks is a lack of quality. By and large, the content you’ll receive from these networks is really just a placeholder for the links inside it. Content can range from half-decent to barely readable garbage. Whatever you do, don’t plug a blog you really care about into a blog network. Even moderating every post that comes along isn’t a good strategy, since it’s just a waste of time.

From the link-builder’s perspective, blog networks are much more interesting. You get good, in-content backlinks from many different sites and IP addresses. However, the quality problems affect everyone. Since generally, the content is rubbish, you won’t get any publishes on truly high-quality sites and especially if the network lacks good moderation, your links can be extremely low-quality.

In short: you can get bad content and decent backlinks, but don’t expect any miracles.

In Conclusion

Blog networks provide a powerful way to build backlinks and as long as the quality of the network is good. And even if the quality is bad, the backlinks will still help your site rank.

Cheers,

As always, comments and questions are very welcome!

The Best Spinner is a new product by Jonathan Leger and in this review we’re going to find out whether it can live up to it’s name whether it’s just another piece of junkware you should steer clear of. Read on to get the details.

The Best Spinner Overview

The Best Spinner is yet another article spinning tool. It’s certainly not the only one of it’s kind, but it does have some interesting features that make it stand out of the crowd. Let’s go right ahead and look at it’s main, unique selling point:

User Generated Database

When you load a text into the Best Spinner, you can select individual words and get a list of suggestions for synonyms you can replace these words with. Creating the spinning syntax is just a matter of clicking on all the synonyms you want to include.

Other article spinning programs have had similar features and it usually spells disaster for the readability of the spun texts and articles these programs produce. Just replacing individual words with synonyms is a guaranteed method for butchering an article. So, how does the Best Spinner attempt to solve this problem?

First of all, the database of alternatives is human-generated and human-prioritized. For any given word, the best Spinner will suggest words that other Best Spinner users have chosen as replacements in the past. And the more often a word has been chosen by users in the past, the higher up in the list it appears.

Secondly, the Best Spinner does not only offer alternatives for individual words, but also for phrases. Again, these alternatives are human-generated. It rarely offers alternatives for phrases of more than two or three words, but still: This is already a great step forward in the realm of semi-automated article spinning.

Finally, the Best Spinner is not only about having alternatives inserted automatically (otherwise the database would never grow), it’s also made sure that inserting new alternatives for words, phrases or entire paragraphs is as easy and convenient as possible.

Check out this short video to see the system in action:

More Features in The Best Spinner

Apart from the basic spinning functionality, the Best Spinner has quite a few more tricks up it’s sleeve.

• Nested Spinning
  TBS fully supports unlimited nested spinning (spinning within spinning). This is a very important feature since nested spinning is perhaps the best way to increase uniqueness of an article while keeping it readable. When it’s used correctly, nested spinning can help you create hundreds of unique articles from just one spun article.
• Replace All
  For any word or phrase you are re-writing, you can tell the Best Spinner to apply the same variations to all the occurrences of that same word or phrase throughout the entire text.
• Favourites
  You can save variations for particular words as your favourites and have them replaced in new texts at the click of a button.
• Different Spin Syntax Formats
  TBS supports three different spin code styles that you can export your texts to, depending on which distribution software you want to use them with. This saves a lot of time for anyone submitting to several different blog networks and/or using several different submitters.
• Auto Spin
  TBS features something of an auto-spinning option by allowing you to have all available words replaced with the favourite variations from everyone in the database. This makes sure that only the most relevant and frequently used synonyms are chosen.
  The results produced by this are remarkably readable for auto-spun content and certainly better than the results I’ve seen from any other spinning software. Having said that, the resulting “unique articles” are still not something I’d want to put my name on.
• Post to Blog
  You can have your text posted to as many WordPress blogs (of your own) as you like. This way, you can create something like your own little article network.
• Sentence-by-Sentence Spinning Mode
  A recent update to the Best Spinner included a new mode, specifically for spinning entire sentences. This method of spinning is very useful and one I personally recommend, since it creates far more readable and less “spun-looking” articles than word-for-word spinning.
• Rewrite Mode
  This mode is interesting for everyone using PLR, since this material often needs to be rewritten, at least in part. In rewrite mode, you can use the convenient selection and writing modes in TBS, but it won’t insert spin-syntax. Instead it will simply replace the original text with the new variations.

It is also worth noting that the Best Spinner is being continually updated with new features bug fixes etc. It’s always good to know that a product is being continually worked on and improved.

In my view the Best Spinner is not primarily and article marketing tool, but more of a link-building (through article marketing) aid. The power of having many spun articles lies in the fact that you can submit semi-unique content to many different places and get lots of backlinks that way.

The Best Spinner: Conclusion

There’s no doubt: The Best Spinner lives up to it’s name. It’s simply the best article spinning tool I’ve ever come across.

It’s very easy to use and it makes article spinning a hundred times more convenient and faster than if you were doing it manually.
That doesn’t mean it’s a magical money-maker, however. Article spinning isn’t something that will make you rich over night. It’s simply something that can be put to good use for SEO purposes and that can be a good component in your overall marketing strategy.

But this is one of the things I really like about the Best Spinner: It doesn’t claim to be a miracle cure for everything. It claims to be an awesome article spinning tool and it delivers.

It’s so straight-forward, that the next part here might seem overly simplistic:

This is for you, if:

• You are doing any kind of article spinning as part of your marketing.

This is not for you, if:

• Article spinning is not part of your strategy.

Definitely give TBS a try, especially since right now, a trial for only $7 is available.

Click here to start your trial of the Best Spinner!

(Yes, that’s an affiliate link.)

While I’m generally not a big fan of article spinning, I still make use of the technique here and there and I’m still going to be testing article marketing and rewriting software. Enter the CRewriter. This is an online application that you can use to make the article spinning process a bit simpler. Best of all, this tool is completely free to use.

Below, you’ll find a video showing the CRewriter in action and some more details about what it does and where you can find it.

Summary/Conclusion

The CRewriter is a very neat tool that basically inserts the spinning syntax (curly brackets and pipes) for you. You still have to do the actual rewriting yourself and that’s a good thing, because it means no one is going to create horribly unreadable garbage like most automatic spinners produce.

Most importantly, CRewriter lets you enter alternatives for entire sentences or any amount of text you like and it supports nested spinning. If you are serious about rewriting complete articles, you’ll get the best results by starting out with spinning large sections of text and then spinning sentences and words within those variations. This will result in the best kind of unique articles, if you can keep the overview over what you’ve spun and how the variations come together.

If it could handle larger portions of text without slowing down, this would be a flawless little tool. As it is, it’s still amazing value considering that it’s free to use.

What are your experiences with article spinning? Do you know and/or use tools like the one above or do you know a better one, perhaps? I’d love to hear your take on this!

Cheers,

What is Web2Mayhem? That’s actually not an easy question to answer, because Web2Mayhem includes so many different things. One possible answer is to say that W2M is an all-in-one website promotion system. It includes automatic submission tools, a link-network and a syndication network, keyword research tools a link cloaking and tracking service and a complete step-by-step system for promoting websites.

Does this product deliver or is it spreading itself too thin? Read on to get the full details.

Overview

W2M is a system that has many aspects. Actually, saying that is still an understatement. Below, you find a complete feature list with a brief comment for each item. If you’d like to see some further explanations and more details, check out my Web2Mayhem videos.

Web2Mayhem Software

• Account Creator
  The Account Creator does what it’s name implies: You enter all of your account info (desired username, password, e-mail, profile-picture etc.) and this tool goes out to 97 different websites and creates accounts for you there.
  A great feature of the Account Creator is that it also uploads a profile-picture and a short bio to all the accounts where this is possible, giving them a human touch.
  –
• RSS Announcer
  The RSS Announcer will take any feed you specify and distribute it to 37 different RSS aggregators online.
  –
• Social Bookmarker
  This program can automatically bookmark any webpages you load into it on a total of 37 different social bookmarking sites like Diigo, Blinklist, Mixx and others.
  –
• Video Sharer
  This tool will upload your video files to a maximum of 17 different video sharing sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Flyxia and others. Note that for many videos, it won’t make sense to submit to all 17 sites, since some of them are niche-specific and don’t accept videos on every subject.
  –
• Article Distributor
  This program submits your articles to 29 article directories online. Among the directories listed are Ezine Articles, GoArticles, Articlesbase, articledashboard and many more.
  –
• Blog Poster
  The Blog Poster is quite an interesting feature. The Account Creator will create profiles for you on 10 free blogging platforms like Blog.com, Blogger, tumblr and so on. The Blog Poster is the tool you use to submit content to all of those free blogs.
  You can use this to just submit the same articles you’re already distributing to article directories, but you can also make use of the free blogs in additional ways. After all, most of these free blogs allow you to insert links in the body texts, add pictures and videos and generally let you do a lot more with your content than what you can do on an article directory.
  –
• PAD Submitter
  This tool submits PAD files to shareware and freeware directories. Even if you don’t have any actual programs of your own, you can take an ebook and convert that into a PAD file for submission. In this case, you probably won’t get much attention in the form of people actually downloading the files, but you’ll still get backlinks from the websites where your files are listed.
  –
• Podcast Broadcaster
  This program submits your podcast audio files to 14 different podcasting sites. Again, this is something that can get you a lot of exposure and some nice backlinks as well.
  –
• Content Spinner
  The Content Spinner is a relatively simple text-spinning application. It lets you simply mark text you want to create variations for and then manually enter those variations into predefined fields. The program will then insert the correct spinning syntax for you (and you can even choose among four different types of spin code).
  –
• Keyword Corral
  This tool lets you import data from the Google keyword tool and filter and sort it according to what you are looking for. It’s a pretty solid tool and a good addition to the Web2Mayhem system, but it does require quite a bit of manual labour, compared to high-end solutions like Keyword Elite 2 or Market Samurai.
  –
• Web Page Analyzer
  The Web Page Analyzer will check some on-page stats on your site and compare them to the top listed pages for a keyword you specify. You’ll get a rundown of keyword densities, occurrence of the keyword in title, header and META tags etc. The tool can also be used to analyze competitor’s pages before you even enter into the race for ranking for particular keyword.
  –
• Note that for all the submissions that have captcha protection, you can integrate Decaptcher into W2M, if you have an account there (Decaptcher is a paid service).

–

Web2Mayhem Online Applications

• Syndicate Kahuna
  The Syndicate Kahuna is a network of blogs that you can submit content to. Similar to article directories and the free blogs, this is one more source of backlinks and traffic for your website.
  The only drawback is that you have to spin your text in order to get a good number of submissions (a non-spun article will not be submitted and the more you spin, the more submissions you are eligible for). After I plugged one of my blogs into the Kahuna and started receiving submissions from other members, I came to the conclusion that this is a big flaw in the system: Most of the articles I received were the kind of unreadable rubbish that auto-spinning software produces.
  –
• PAD Software Submitter
  In the W2M members area, you’ll find another PAD submitter which is separate from the desktop software one. It does the same basic thing, but submits to different directories.
  –
• Link Exchange System
  Also part of W2M is a very neat link exchange network. All you need to do is plug a script (or WordPress plugin) into a page on your website (this will be your links-page) and specify your niche. The script will then automatically create a list of links out to other sites relevant to your niche and in return, you get links back from other websites. The system makes sure that all the links are one-way and you get to pick the anchor-texts of the links pointing to your site.
  While links from link-pages may not be terribly valuable, the W2M link-exchange is the easiest and fastest way to get a couple of custom anchor-text backlinks that I’ve ever seen.
  –
• Collaborative Blogs
  As a Web2Mayhem member, you get the option to create mini-blogs on two collaborative blog sites. You can get your own category or subdomain on these blogs and have the advantage of your articles and links appearing on a frequently updated, aged, high-PR and frequently crawled web-property.
  –
• Web 2.0 Co-op
  This is a system that organizes the mutual promotion of social media content among the members. Here’s how it works: You can post “jobs” and see other members’ “jobs”. A “job” could be giving someone’s site a digg or a thumbs-up, rating and commenting on someone’s Squidoo lens or bookmarking a webpage for someone. For each completed job, you get credits which allow you to post your own jobs and thus get your own Web 2.0 content promoted.
  While you will never get thousands of diggs or stumbles just from the Web 2.0 Co-op, the system can give your content a great, initial boost that can make a big difference.
  –
• Redirect Kahuna
  This application is a link cloaking/redirection service that includes detailed tracking.
  –
• Keyword Research Tools
  Additionally to the offline tool (Keyword Corral), there are several online tools you can use for keyword research.

–

The System

If you look at that feature list and think that it all might be a little too much, you’re not alone. When I first saw how extensive W2M is, I expected the whole thing to be pretty chaotic and thought it would take me days just to learn my way around all the tools.

However, Web2Mayhem also comes with a step-by-step system and instructions on how to use it. The system simply runs you through several phases for promoting your website going from finding a niche and keyword to the initial promotion phase and all the way to the “maintenance” phase, which is when your site is ranking #1 in the search results and all you have to do is make sure it stays there.

If you just follow this system, you will be introduced to every one of the features of W2M one by one and there is a document and a video tutorial for each one.

Even though there is a ton of training material to go through, it is very well structured. The only thing I can complain about is that the video presentations could be better, but that’s really nit-picking.

As for the system itself: I found it to be very solid and fairly easy to implement. There’s no doubt that following this system will get your pages ranked. The system is nothing revolutionary in itself, it’s just that the W2M software lets you do a lot more promotion and link-building than you would ever be able to do manually.

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So, What’s Bad About It?

I’ve been saying an awful lot of good things about Web2Mayhem so far and I’m starting to feel uncomfortable. I hate it when something I write starts looking like a pre-sale.

So, let me put my critic-hat on and tell you some things that could be improved in W2M:

• Flexible Account Management
  W2M has only one set of user-data per account profile. This means that if you already have an account on GoArticles that you would like to submit to and you have another account on articledashboard, but with a different username, W2M can’t submit to both those accounts from the same profile. You’ll have to create separate profiles or create new accounts with identical username/PW combinations.
  It would be nice if there was an “I already have an account here” option.
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• All Browser Submissions
  All of the submissions are done in an automated browser window. The only problem with this is that it’s a bit slow, at times. The system works quite well, though, so there’s me nit-picking again.
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• Automatic E-Mail Confirmation
  Currently, you have to manually go through all of your mails and confirm the account creations. No fun.
  There are tools that can automatically go through your mails and confirm them. From what I read in the W2M forums, they might already be working on such a solution.

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Ratings

Fluff-o-Meter

Again, I’m always careful about being too enthusiastic about the products I test, but I really have to say that Web2Mayhem is one hell of a fluff-free zone. The training material gets straight to the point and the entire system is focused on getting results. There’s none of the “I made $X in only X days and you can too!” bullshit that you so often find with make-money-online stuff. It’s all abaut learning how to do things and then doing them. No filler.

Web2Mayhem: Fluff-Free Zone.

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Spam-Factor

My inbox has not suffered much from signing up to W2M. I do get occasional mails and most of them are at least somewhat promotional in nature but, and this is a big BUT, they usually contain some really good value like webinar and interview invites (and those webinars and interviews are well worth listening to).

Promotion + value = list I don’t mind being on.

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Scam-Scale

We can go straight to the synopsis-box with this one.

Nothing scammy detected.

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Overall Rating

The core of Web2Mayhem consists of a very good collection of auto-submission tools and a solid, well laid-out system to follow for promoting your website(s). Just to be clear: You will still have to do work. To make full use of Web2Mayhem, you should ideally have at least one (better several) monetizable sites in place and be willing to write articles and make videos and maybe audio content on a regular basis.

What Web2Mayhem does, is take that content that you create and make the absolute most of it by spreading it far and wide across the interwebs. And if you’ve ever wondered how to best coordinate all of the different properties to which you submit content, you’ll find a very good answer to that in the W2M training manual and videos.

This is for you, if:

• You have money-making websites already and want to get more out of them.
• You know how to build and monetize a website, but lack the tools and/or knowledge to get them ranked in search results.
• You already create content like articles, videos or podcasts and want to ramp up the results you see from them.

This is not for you, if:

• You are completely new to online marketing.
• You have never created a website before.

To sum it all up, Web2Mayhem is a powerful system with powerful tools. Work with it and you will be rewarded.

To learn even more about Web2Mayhem, check out my videos and to see the product itself, click the banner below.

Squidoo is a very popular article database. Actually, calling it an article database is a complete understatement. While the underlying principle is similar to that of an article database – you can register, publish your own content and also link back to your websites – Squidoo has a lot more to offer. What mainly sets it apart is that you can add a lot of multimedia and interactive elements to each of your pages (called “lenses” on Squidoo). From images and slideshows to videos, polls and digg-like voting elements, there is a huge selection of fun stuff you can add to each of your lenses.

Since Squidoo even allows affiliate links and encourages it’s users to make money (there’s a revenue sharing model), it’s a great resource for every online marketer or article marketer. I’ve put together a series of instructional videos that go into some detail on how to build a lens, how to add in multimedia elements and how to promote the lens to get more visitors and clicks.

Video 01: How to Build a Squidoo Lens

Video 02: Analysis of the Top Ranked Squidoo Lenses

(Also check out my written report on the top ranked Squidoo lenses.)

Video 03: How to Add Images and Other Modules

Video 04: Easiest Way to Use HTML for Improving Your Lenses

And here’s the link to that nifty little HTML-writer: Arachnophilia

Video 05: How to Monetize Your Squidoo Lenses

Video 06: Promoting Your Lens, Part 1

Video 07: Promoting Your Lens, Part 2 – How to Get Ranked in Google

And that’s it for my first round of Squidoo tutorials. I’ll probably revisit this subject sometime in the future, but for right now, I’m moving on to the next subject.

All the best,

Someone made the suggestion to me to make some tutorials about Squidoo, an interesting article/webpage publishing service that many online marketers use for a bit of article marketing and backlink building. I will be publishing a series of Squidoo tutorials here, shortly. Before that, let’s take a look at some of the top-ranked lenses out there to see what we can learn about making great Squidoo lenses.

Method

To learn about the best lenses on Squidoo, I simply took a look at all of the top ranking ones within Squidoo itself. The site has it’s own ranking system that evaluates the lenses according to how many visitors they’ve had, how frequently they are updated, how many ratings they get and probably many more factors.

I spent some time browsing the top entries in every category as well as some random, not highly ranked lenses to get a feel for what contributing factors to a high rank might be.

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Content

While I will be talking about some objectively measurable metrics in just a minute, you always have to keep one thing in mind: There are many factors that play a part in getting your lens noticed, liked and ranked highly, but above them all is the quality of your content. If your content is not compelling, interesting and generally worth reading, it doesn’t matter how much you tweak other aspects of your lens, it will simply never fly.

Having said that, let’s go ahead and take a look at some of the other factors that I found the most popular Squidoo lenses have in common.

Length
This one is quite surprising, actually. It turns out that the majority of Squidoo pages that are getting a lot of visitors, are very long. Since Squidoo is very multimedia rich, I didn’t do a word-count. Instead, I just counted how many pages I had to scroll down on my screen in order to get to the end of the page.

The shortest lens among the top ranked ones I analyzed was 5 pages long.
The longest one was a whopping 32 pages long!
The 20 top pages I analyzed had an average length of 17.5 pages.

Image Density
With only very few exceptions, the most successful lenses all feature a lot of images and the occasional video. I didn’t count the images in the Amazon ads modules or the user-pics in comment-modules, only the images and videos the author inserted themselves, by hand.

On average, the lenses I analyzed have exactly one image or video per page. So when you go through them, you’re never just staring at text.

Here is how the image density (imaged per page) was distributed for the lenses I analyzed:

What this shows is is that there are some exceptions with lots of pictures and some with very few (steep bits at the beginning and end of the curve), but the majority of the lenses have around 0.8 to 1.2 images per page. So, having at least one image per page seems to be a good rule of thumb.

Interactive Modules
On Squidoo, you can include different interactive modules in your articles. From simple comment boxes to polls there are lots of possibilities to get the readers involved. I noticed that practically every successful lens contains at least one interactive element. Practically every lens I looked at had a comment section. Most of them also included a poll or some similar type of interactive module. I can imagine that these modules motivate readers to return to the lens several times, to see whether someone has replied to their comment, for example.

On average, the analyzed lenses had 1.7 interactive modules. Most of them had two.

Trending Topic
Finally, I noticed that around one third of all the top ranked lenses are about a topic that is something of a trend. For example, you can find quite a few highly ranked lenses about twitter, the new Twilight movie, celebrities and, currently a real winner, Christmas.

This is no big surprise. Content about current and trending topics tends to do well and Squidoo is no exception.

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Build That Lens!

So, there you have it. Head on over to Squidoo and build a lens. Add lots of images, make sure your readers get to have their say once or twice on the page and write about a current issue and you could potentially have a traffic-driving winner on your hands. Give it a shot!

For more instructions on how to go about building a lens, check out my upcoming video series.

Cheers,