Resources
Here I’ve listed a number of products, plugins and websites I use that may be of interest to you…
Site Builders
Top Design Blogs [$200] – This is a service I provide for building WordPress blogs that are fast, search engine optimized (SEO) and, most importantly, secured and hardened against hackers. Sites include a number of security plugins, all preconfigured, that thwart various types of attack on a blog. A premium, mobile-responsive theme is also included, as is 12 months of web hosting. Blogs are search engine optimized and built for speed, an increasingly important ranking factor. Once you receive your blog, all you need to do is add your content. Some of the sites I’ve built for clients can be seen on the sales page.
Site Build It! [$299/year] – This is an online website builder. It’s point-and-click approach makes it easy to build sites, especially if you’re a complete newbie. However, Site Build It! is much more than just a site builder; it includes a number of research and other tools, including a way to mail newsletters, track statistics, build backlinks and it will promote your site for you (something they’re very successful at). However, it does cost $299 per year per site. It sounds expensive, but sites should make much more than the annual fees each year. Read my Site Build It! Review here.
Keyword Research Tools
Google Keyword Tool: [Free] – Google’s keyword tool is still a great research tool and the data from it is at the heart of some of the other commercial keyword tools. Any searches you run should be for Exact Match phrases as this will give you more realistic results. The “Competition” column in the results provides an indication of how many advertisers are bidding on Adwords for a keyword; it is NOT an indication of how strong or weak the competition is for a keyword in the search engines!
Market Samurai: [$149] – somewhat expensive but the best keyword analysis tool I’ve used to date. While it uses only keywords provided by Google, it provides a number of tools that allow to you assess the quality of those keywords in terms of site or article building. You can check the relevancy of the keywords to your niche, see how much competition there is for those keywords, determine how strong that competition is and get an idea of how profitable that keyword could be to you. You can also see how competing sites are linked to (number of links and from where), the PageRank of the sites linking to them and assess how easy or difficult it would be to get onto the first page of Google for your keywords. Using Market Samurai as a research tool allows you to discover if a niche is worth going into before you even plan to build a site, so it can save you wasted time and energy. The software can also find affiliate programs for your keywords, saving you time looking for suitable products and affiliate programs on the main ad networks and beyond. Very powerful stuff. Free videos on how to use Market Samurai.
Micro Niche Finder [$97] – This is a another tool I’ve used for keyword research. Among its many functions, it allows you to see how much people are bidding for keywords in Adwords (Google typically pays about 60%+ of these fees for Adsense clicks), so it’s a great way of seeing if a particular niche is worth going into. It also allows you to check if a particular keyword is available as a domain name. You can also do keyword brainstorming and have it suggest niches to you. Since buying Market Samurai, this is a tool I no longer use. Read my review here.
Jaaxy [$49/mth] – This fast keyword research tool grades keywords as easy (green), medium (yellow) or difficult (red) to rank for based on a number of criteria. You can see at a glance which keywords you should be targeting to rank easily for and to bring easy traffic to your sites. Free trial allows you to perform 30 free searches.
Getting Traffic
Building backlinks through various methods (see Article Marketing below) is still the best way to drive traffic to your sites. These are the current best tools (following the various recent Google algorithm changes):
SENuke TNG [$67/month for Lite version; $147/month for regular version] – an expensive tool to be sure but allows you to create as many tiered link building campaigns as you want, in a variety of ways (including ways you set up yourself). It posts to article directories, Web 2.0 properties, Social Networks, Social Bookmarks, RSS Aggregators and Press Release sites. But you have to post add the content to post. The software is integrated with Jon Leger’s Article Builder so quality articles can be downloaded from it automatically and sent out to your selected sites and resources (those listed above). There’s even now a 30-second setup wizard to make setting up backlinking campaigns as easy as possible. I talk more about a previous version of SENuke here. 7-Day Free Trial available.
Link Building Service [$60-$350] – This is a link building service that creates a tiered link structure. Only a few sites it posts to will link to your site, but it build links to those tier-1 sites, strengthening them and they, in turn, strengthen your site. The Hoth is a good option if you don’t want to use software like SENukeXCr to build your own link campaigns.
SocialADR [Free – $17/$47/$72/$117 per month options] – This is a credit based system for buying and posting large numbers of social bookmarks to various services to boost your website’s profile online. With the Free service, you have to do all the work; with the paid options, all the work is done for you.
Article Marketing
Unique Article Wizard [$67/month] – This backlinking service goes the article marketing route. You submit a quality article that can be spun (UAW provides a couple of ways to achieve this), and Unique Article Wizard will post the article (a unique version of it) to hundreds of article directories. Each time an article is posted, it will contain a backlink to your site. Members can also submit their blogs so that content from UAW is published on them, so that’s another way of getting more backlinks. Unique Article Wizard has survived the Google algorithm updates and does nothing that would aggravate Google. It’s a tries and tested system unlike others which have fallen by the wayside, especially in the last year. Read my review here.
The Secret To Making Money With Article Marketing [$77] – A system in a box that will provide you with unique articles, along with an article submitter that you can use to submit articles to article directories. All you have to do is insert your Clickbank ID into the affiliate links.
Video Marketing
Content Samurai [regularly $97/mth but only $47/mth through this special link] – A cloud based video creation service that allows you to create an unlimited number of videos of any length. Paste in a script or article and it will create the video based on that. It adds background images based on keywords in your sentences. Royalty-free music tracks are also provided. All fully editable should you want to make any changes. 7-Day Free Trial Available. This is a video I created with Content Samurai:
Instant Video Wizard [$997/year] – Very like Content Samurai in how it creates videos, it also includes text-to-speech technology which provides 47 male and female voices, speaking a variety of languages. The software contains a translation feature that allows you to create different language versions of your videos, translating both text and speech. You can also add Adobe After Effects videos with your branding, for example. The software also includes over 100,000 articles you can use as the basis for your videos if you’re ever stuck for content for a video. Here’s a video I created with Instant Video Wizard:
Pay Per Click
Cheaper, Better Alternative to Adwords – Bidding for keywords on Adwords is now an expensive business. The days of $0.05 bids are gone. But Adwords isn’t the only game in town and low bids are still possible at other Pay Per Click sites.
Tracking & Statistics
Pretty Link Lite Free WordPress plugin – Mask your affiliate links, track and get statistics on them – the best way to find where paying customers are coming from so you can build on those successes.
Pretty Link Pro (not free) – Does everything the Lite version does plus a lot more, including being able to associate keywords in your content with your masked affiliate links.
Monetizing Your Site
Socrates Premium WordPress Theme – A customizable WordPress theme designed for affiliate marketers. Very popular in the internet marketing community.
phpBay Pro – The best WordPress plugin for adding eBay auction listings to your posts. However, you do need to be a member of the eBay Partner Network though in order to display products from eBay. Sample site here.
Auction2Post – The best WordPress plugin for creating posts based around an eBay listing (i.e. each post is about one item on eBay).
phpZon – The best WordPress plugin for adding Amazon products to your posts. Obviously, you have to have an Amazon affiliate account.
WP Zon Builder – The best WordPress plugin for adding Amazon products as posts to your blog. Various post parameters can be changed (product description, customer reviews, etc).
