Product Reviews

A lot of things have changed since I last blogged. There have been several updates from Google – Penguin and Panda wreaked havoc on a lot of sites, social signals became more significant as more and more marketers began gaming the system and content marketing became more relevant than ever.

As I kickstarted Eddie Gear at the end of the year 2014, I made sure that I was going to take all precautions necessary to avoid being penalized and also set a good first impression. So I picked up one of the best theme frameworks in the market – Thesis from DIY Themes along with a cool Thesis skin from Thesis Laboratory that came with its own call to action widgets, post teasers, social sharing plugins et al….

With the site set up I began churning content on a daily basis generating decent traffic and readers. I implemented some of the best internet marketing practices, I even made sure that the content I published had cool headlines, attractive images (I use Canva for this) and tools like Piktochart to create engaging infographic elements.

I also enrolled in various blogging communities like Viral Content Buzz, Triberr, Facebook, Google & Linkedin groups so I could engage and share content with other bloggers in my niche.
[Read more…] about Social Warfare Plugin Review: My Secret To Getting 3X More Social Shares

They told me I couldn’t do it.

They told me its never been done before in the marketing industry.

They said it cannot be done.

Then, I told them.

And here I am writing a post that defies all logic and reason behind what I’ve learned and what markets predict.

This is 2015, If no one is going to create crazy posts like these. Then I take it up as a challenge. I hope you find this article as amusing as I did creating it.

Lets get to the topic now.

[Read more…] about 17 Ways Thrive Architect Trounces The Native WordPress Editor

RSS is DEAD!

EMAIL on the other hand is growing exponentially.

That is the exact reason why should start list building it’s what counts! And every marketer is treating it as HIGH PRIORITY. Whether you are a newbie blogger, an affiliate marketer, or a small business owner, if you don’t build an email list, you are losing out on potential customers and revenue every single minute of the day.

If you are satisfied with the high-traffic, revenue generating Google-ads optimized site and feel that email list building is too much effort (after all you’re not selling a product, so why build one), this article by Derek Halpern should have you thinking again. In fact, if you had been steadily building your email list right from your blog inception, you may not have been deeply impacted when the Panda and Penguin algorithms rolled out. But that’s another story.

The learning here is that its never too late to start building your email list. Gone are the days when list building was a major chore, tools were scarce, and the costs high. Today, there are several tools to help you generate lists in ingenious ways. In fact, plenty of WordPress plugins have cropped up, making it super easy to set things up and start milking your visitors. But where do you start?

[Read more…] about Thrive Leads Review: Helps Boost Your Email List Building Efforts

Do you have an old website with hundreds or thousands of articles and external links ?

Is your site affected by Google’s Penguin?

Are you worried that your website contains links passing critical link juice to bad or spammy sites?

If you, like me, have scoured the web for free plugins, or cheap web services to help you clean up your external links, and FAILED, here’s a tool that is so brilliant, it will have you managing all your links in no time at all.

The tool is called LinkPatrol and it has been developed and published by Search Engine Journal, experts in the field of search engine marketing.

In this post, I’ll show you how the plugin works and how it has helped clean up bad links on one of my sites.

To understand the importance of LinkPatrol, we must first understand how outbound links affect our website performance. Let’s dig in.

Issues Caused by Outbound Links

Outbound links can create SEO trouble for you in a number of ways.

Passing Link Juice

When your website links to an external site, you are passing on some of your website’s SEO value (or link juice) to them.

You obviously won’t link to a bad or spammy website deliberately, but you have no control over that website’s content either.

That leaves room for several problems. Since your linking, the webmaster of that site may have modified or removed that content, sold the website to someone who is now engaging in dubious practices, or the domain may have simply expired, leaving you with one or more bad links.

You’ll be surprised how many links on your site get caught up in these scenarios.

Poor User Experience

It often happens that website owners change their permalink structure or move their content to a different location. If you have linked to one of those articles, your website readers will end up looking at a 404 page.

This creates a bad user experience for your visitors and you may lose credibility if you have many such links going out.

Google Keyword Penalties

If you have allowed guest posting in the past, chances are, many of those articles contain generic keywords or money keywords within.

Google’s Penguin algo has penalized thousands of websites that have entertained such type of anchor text links in their articles. If you have accommodated such type of content, expect nothing less than a harsh dressing down from the G monster.

Outdated Content

Another problem with outbound links is that they may sometimes direct your website readers to information that is old and outdated. This is obviously going to offer another poor experience for your readers.

Banish External Link Demons Forever

The best way to deal with one or more of these issues is to know what links are flowing out of your site. LinkPatrol helps you unravel the complicated mess that is external linking.

What is LinkPatrol?

• LinkPatrol is a WordPress plugin that does an in-depth analysis of your website and:
• Extracts all external links in your posts and pages
• Publishes a report on your link statistics by domain, author, internal vs. external links, and links per post
• Lets you nofollow or strip links using one click action
• Continues to scan and monitor your external links

What LinkPatrol Does NOT Do

LinkPatrol does not:

• Automatically identify the 404, broken, or spammy links
• Make recommendations on what links must be removed from your site
• Automatically fix bad links

How to Monitor and Manage External Links with LinkPatrol

Now that you’ve got a basic idea of what LinkPatrol can do for you, here’s how it works.

1. Buy LinkPatrol from this website.
2. Install the plugin by uploading the file to the plugins page of your WordPress dashboard.
3. Go to LinkPatrol->Scanner.
4. Hit the Start Scan button to get LinkPatrol to start scanning your website. You only need to scan your website once. LinkPatrol will automatically scan and monitor all future links that are published in your posts.
5. Next head over to LinkPatrol->Reports. The Reports page contains 4 tabbed pages.

Reports dashboard: Displays an overview of the link stats. It shows you how many posts were scanned, how many links were found, and how many links there are per post.

You’ll also see a section with a bar chart depicting most linked to domains, authors with most links per post, a pie chart showing you the distribution of internal and external links as well as the external links per post.

Domain Reports: This tab, which is the most important one you need to focus on displays a report of the number of posts linking to each domain, the number of links pointing to each domain, the number of authors who have written posts linking to those domains, and a couple of check boxes to strip or no follow the domains.

Author Reports: This page lists all the author names, their contributions, and links per post in each of their contributions.

Keyword Search: If you need to do a quick keyword search, this page offers a search box to find posts with specific anchor text.

6. Go to the Domain Reports dashboard. Examine each domain your website is linking to. Right-click the links hyperlink to evaluate the post. Examine the post title, the external link and the anchor text. If you think that a post should not be linking to that domain, or a no-follow link will suffice, check the appropriate checkbox and click Update.

That’s it!

How LinkPatrol Helped me Overcome Google Manual Spam Penalty

When Google let loose its Panda and Penguin updates, my tech blog (http://theapptimes.com) took a hit. The 4 year old blog has over 2500 posts.

In previous years, I had accepted many guest posts from contributors around the world, and authored plenty more. When Google webmaster slapped my website with a manual spam action for unnatural links, I had to scramble to identify the sites I was linking to.

As you can imagine, there was no single tool that could pull that sort of data, at an affordable price. The result? I had to manually open up each article and do an evaluation.

It looked like I would be fixing the problem for at least the next 6 months – IF I WORKED LIKE A MAD DOG THAT IS!

It so happened that during my searches, I stumbled upon a post on Search Engine Journal explaining a similar situation they found themselves in and how they came up with a plugin to solve the problem.

I decided to give it a go and save myself from the link purging insanity that I was currently trapped in.

LinkPatrol turned out to be a revelation.

One of the first things that took me by surprise when I activated and hit the Scan button was that the plugin analyzed all my posts and identified that I had over 14500 links, that’s over 6 links per post in just a few seconds.

Yep! In JUST A FEW SECONDS! There was no time lag, performance hits, slowdowns or anything of the sort.

The plugin gave me a very good overall and in-depth domain and author-wise link history of all my 2500+ posts.

This enabled me to focus on my grueling task ahead. I was able to easily overlook posts that linked to good, authoritative domains and focused my attention on the not-so-familiar dubious ones. (As for the 404s, I had Broken Link Checker to handle them.)

This was still a manual task, but now I could quickly right-click a link to see what the post was about, what I was linking to, and the anchor text of that link. With this structured approach I was able to evaluate all my external links, all 14500 of them in just under 2 weeks.

I wasn’t slogging over the data for hours. I was able to organize all my blogging tasks during the day, while spending a couple of hours to clear up the external links. This way, I continued to focus on blogging while still fixing my outbound link issue.

Thanks to LinkPatrol, I was able to complete my fixes within a reasonable time and clear the manual spam action on my blog. Now I’m back to focusing on other aspects of my business.

If you are struggling to make sense of your external links, give LinkPatrol a go. I guarantee it will save you hours of painstaking work.

Download LinkPatrol Now

LinkPatrol – Pros

• Light-weight plugin
• Super fast analysis of your link data
• Clean dashboard showing you a history of your outbound links
• One click options to strip off or no follow links
• Ability to export data as CSV
• No need to backup the database, and should you make a mistake (in no-following or striping a URL), fixing is just a matter of unchecking the error.

LinkPatrol – Misses

• LinkPatrol does not let you see if links are broken, which would be extremely helpful. If you were linking to a good domain that has since gone 404, you could easily overlook it when using the plugin. This forces you to place your reliance on another plugin.
• Future versions are expected to support comment scanning, but for now the plugin EXCLUDES links in comments.
• Pricing could a little steep for small bloggers.

LinkPatrol is Recommended For:

• Anyone who is running a big blog or website, say over 2 years and over or with over 500 posts
• Blogs that support guest authors or multi author blogs
• Blogs that have been affected by Google’s Penguin algo

LinkPatrol Pricing

Remember, investing in the right business assets is essential if you want your blog to grow and beat your competitors. If you choose to go with LinkPatrol, you can choose from one of three plans.

Blogger: Perfect for individuals running a single blog. Cost: $50 for a single site license. You get one year of support and updates for free during this time.

Consultant: Perfect for managing up to 5 sites. Cost: $100. Free support and updates for one year.

Agency: Perfect if you are running a small SEO agency. Cost: $200.Free support and updates for one year.

Are you ready to take control of your website’s external links?

Say goodbye to your external link cleaning woes!

Download LinkPatrol Now (aff link)

Keywords are the most valuable assets of any online business. Get your keywords right and you’ve taken the first successful step to achieving your business goals. Get them wrong and you’re as good as gone!

If you want your blog, website, product, or business to be found in Google, Yahoo!, Bing or other search engines, you’ll need to get your keywords right and beat your competition to it as well.

The trouble with that strategy is that there are hundreds and thousands of users competing against each other every day to be seen on the first page of the search results.

Many of your competitors have probably invested plenty of time, money and other resources to make it to the top ten.

If you are not a big budget marketer, chances are, you don’t have the resources to compete and beat the big players.

Thankfully, when it comes to keyword research, there are some brilliant tools in the marketplace that lets you be the David to the Goliaths.

One such tool we are showcasing today is Long Tail Pro.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s first understand the significance of keywords.

[Read more…] about Long Tail Pro Review: Find The Best Longtail Keywords For Your Content

Have you noticed that almost every email newsletter you sign up to is managed by AWeber? The email marketing software.

Well, that’s because bloggers are obsessed with AWeber to manage their email newsletters.

There are well over 10 premium top quality email marketing software that are quite affordable.

Some of them are even free to use with a few restrictions.

So I asked myself, why don’t these bloggers keep the cost down and go for the free tools?

This entirely depends on who your target audience is.

Sometimes it depends on what you’re trying to do with your email list.

I decided to get to the bottom of this to figure out why is that bloggers are obsessed with AWeber.

Why do Bloggers need Newsletters?

No one asks this question anymore they all take it at face value depending on who is advising the readers.

At one point we were all told that RSS was the best technology to distribute our content.

Back in 2007 when I started blogging almost every blog I read told me that list building was everything and everyone need to generate a lead with an optin form on their blogs.

Have you checked the AWeber pricing page?

Before I even realized what I was getting myself into, I was in 100’s of dollars in credit.

If you choose to start sending out email newsletters understand this.

• List building is lead generation – if you don’t nurture the lead and convert the customer there is no point in list building.
• AWeber is a premium email marketing software and one among the best I’ve used when compared to its competitors like (Get Response, Mail Chimp and others.) and they cost you if you don’t have a plan to figure out a profitable ROI.
• You can start building a list early, but have a future plan to sell to the list.
• Its too expensive to be used as just a blog content delivery tool.
• The potential of a newsletter is more than what most bloggers do with it. (Build community or drive sales)

Premium Email Marketing Software

AWeber (aff link) offers a free 30 day trial so you can play with them to all to your heart’s content and see what the obsession is all about. Sign Up NOW!

My research shows different pointers why both bloggers and internet marketers are obsessed with AWeber despite the pricing.

Here is a list of reasons why bloggers like AWeber:

• Built-in A/B split-testing – Makes it easy to optimize subscription rates for any form. Split Tests are a good way to test different versions of a message to see which gets the best response. AWeber randomly sorts your subscribers into up to 4 groups so that you can send a slightly modified version of your message to each group.
  For example: Different subject lines.
• AWeber Form Scripts Integration – AWeber just gives you one simple little line of code to embed a form you’ve designed anywhere on your site.
• Selection and Control over Web Forms – AWeber’s interface for designing forms is just easier to use, and there are more options to start with. This allows you to create AWeber forms that blend into your site’s design.
  Send Subscribers to a Specific Page – Instead of showing your subscribers an error message. You can set a specific URL and redirect your subscribers to a desired portal or location.
• Better Deliverability – Blogger claim that from their experience in using different systems more people receive their messages with AWeber than with other email marketing software. Most bloggers also claim that other email marketing systems where often market as spam emails while the numbers were reversed when they switched to AWeber.
• Unlimited Lists in One AWeber Account – Some providers charge per list or sites to send out email to. With AWeber they were practically able to set up email newsletter for multiple websites they owned. Isn’t that something?
• Unlimited Emails – Some services charge per email that is sent out using the marketing software. With AWeber bloggers were able to send out as many as they wanted to each month to as many lists they wanted.
  Auto-responders – Offering mini course via email is a great way to generate leads. Bloggers loved to put together a sequence of emails that you can schedule to go out to your subscribers so that when they signed up for the course they got them in an order and timing as scheduled.
• Text and HTML Emails – Some bloggers who were not very good with deign, CSS, HTML, loved the fact that they can choose both HTML and Text based email newsletters. As these built in HTML templates save a lot of time. And for when times you just need to send out a text based email, AWeber does the trick.
• Analytics – AWeber has interesting ways to track the activity of subscribers of your newsletter. Not only can you track which links in your newsletter get clicked it allows you to know things like sales, CPC, CPM and more.
  Blog Newsletters – With Google not paying any importance to RSS anymore. Bloggers find it handy that a premium email software allows them to do something as simple as deliver blog posts as and when published.
• Customer Service – AWeber customers loved the way they were being treated, guided and some of them even claimed that the customer service was impeccable. I as an AWeber customer was impressed with the support that they offered when I migrated from MailChimp.
• Personalization – Many bloggers believed that the AWeber system was much better equipped to handle email customizations based on customers or lists. My bloggers lose customers because they feel that its like talking to a teller machine if the emails are not personalized.
• Incentive – Both bloggers and marketers alike love to add incentives for their newsletters, like a bait to a fish. Having an immediate email delivered right to your subscribers inbox is a much better experience.
• Follow Up – Auto-responders are terrific tools for developing an ongoing readership. They allow you to drip out valuable content over time (lead nurture) automatically. This allowed the bloggers to build up the excitement and interest before they made their sales pitch.

AWeber offers a free 30 day trial so you can play with them to all to your heart’s content and see what the obsession is all about. Sign Up NOW! (aff link)