One of the blog networks I have been using for a long time now is ArticleRanks. At first glance, it may seem similar to other public blog networks out there, but it does have a couple unique features that make it worth using. Not only that, but I’ve done some case studies with it that show I can get results with it. So in this ArticleRanks review, I am going to share with you what makes it one of the more effective blog networks you can start using.

ArticleRanks 2.0 relaunched in June, 2011 and it featured a newly revamped interface and some significant changes to it’s membership plans. Like other public blog networks, Article Ranks allows you to submit spun articles and add links back to your sites (up to 3 links per submission).

ArticleRanks Membership Options

ArticleRanks now has 3 different membership options and it is still one of the few blog networks left that allow you to make submissions for free. There is a catch though. You have to add your own sites to the ArticleRanks network to receive content. Depending on the page rank of the blogs you add, you will build up credits which you can use in turn can be used to submit your own articles.

Until very recently, I had been using the ArticleRanks free plan and it is still quite effective. The downside of the free plan is that you are limited to promoting only 5 sites at a time. Article syndication rates also seem lower on the free plan than the paid plans. So with the free plan I was typically getting my articles sent out to about 20-30 blogs per submission.

If you decide to go with a paid plan, you can choose between the Starter and Pro Plans. The Starter Plan is a very reasonable at only $39.99/month. This allows you to promote up to 10 different sites at a time. The Pro Plan is quite a bit more expensive at $89.99/month. However, this plan allows you to promote unlimited sites and send out unlimited articles. So which plan you choose, depends on your link building needs.

If you only have a couple sites to promote, then the free and Starter plans are perfectly fine. If you have a lot of sites like I do, then you may want to opt for the Pro plan.

Using ArticleRanks

ArticleRanks uses the standard { ~ } syntax for its submissions. It does include its own internal spinner, but I normally use Vita Vee’s Ultra Spinnable Articles or the Super Spun articles generated by Article Builder and there are no problems directly submitting either one. If you are trying to use your spun articles across multiple networks, I would suggest you use this SpinnerTools site to help you convert your articles to the appropriate ArticleRanks syntax.

ArticleRanks has a fairly standard submission interface, but I’ve always felt it’s slightly inefficient. For example, trying to preview your article is a multi-step process that is hampered by the fact that the ArticleRanks server seems to be consistently sluggish and slow.

The interface is also pretty quirky with certain browsers. For example, when using Google Chrome, it messes up the formatting of your articles until you save it and re-edit again. This is not a show-stopper, but you will probably save yourself some grief by using Firefox instead.

ArticleRanks Results

ArticleRanks does have a large established network of blogs. It is mostly a mix of user contributed blogs and blogs added by the ArticleRanks owners themselves. The PageRank of the blogs are not particularly high and I have found that the average PR of sites in the network is less than 1. However the IP diversity of the network is pretty good which means you will be getting backlinks from a wide range of IP addresses which is very important for good rankings.

For a more in-depth analysis, you can check out the ArticleRanks case study we did over at the Link Building Lab. I even show how I was able to rank a site I built from scratch just using ArticleRanks submissions.

One nice feature that ArticleRanks has recently introduced is the fact that it now build backlinks to your submitted articles. That’s right, backlinks to your backlinks. It uses social bookmarking sites to do this, and it is certainly something that does improve the indexing rate of your articles. This is a nice advantage that ArticleRanks offers that many other blog networks don’t.

ArticleRanks Pros

• Use for free if you submit sites to network.
• Good network IP diversity.
• Automatically builds backlinks to backlinks.

ArticleRanks Cons

• Buggy when using with Google Chrome.
• Slow and quirky submission interface.

ArticleRanks Final Thoughts

I have been using ArticleRanks for a long time now, and I am still quite happy with it. It is a reliable blog network that consistently delivers good results. I do wish they could somehow fix the general slowness of their server, but for now it’s just something to deal with.

If you are just starting out with building backlinks using blog networks, then ArticleRanks is certainly one of the first networks you should try. Start yourself out with the free plan, and then upgrade from there when you need to.

I just got an email from Brad Callen, talking about the upcoming launch of his new product, SEO Link Monster. This new sevice is a collaboration between Brad, his brother Matt Callen and Dori Friend.

I honestly don’t know much about Dori, but I have bought many of Brad and Matt’s products in the past. Two of them that I have used quite a bit are SEOLinkVine and My Article Network. Both are popular blog networks that have done a good job in the past of increasing the Google rankings of many of my own sites.

As everyone who reads this blog knows, I pretty much test every link building system or service that comes out. So even though the details about SEO Link Monster are scarce, I am now eagerly anticipating the launch when it comes out on February 7th, 2012.

I will probably be first in line to fork over my money for it, sight unseen.

What Do We Know About SEO Link Monster?

Not much really.

So far, I have just heard that it is going to be some sort of automated link building system combined with a huge link building network. Is it going to be a brand new network or will it be a part of SEOLV or MAN? That will be interesting to find out when it launches.

Brad has also mentioned that SEO Link Monster will be scalable, meaning that the more members join, the better results everyone will see. I’m also very curious to see what this means.

Price-wise, it looks like the service will cost $47 for the first 30 days, and then $147 a month after. This puts it in the same pricing range as SENuke X and LinkVana.

As more details come out, I will keep this SEO Link Monster review updated with the latest info. And of course when I get a chance to test out the system myself, I will put together my full, in-depth review as well.

How Does SEO Link Monster Compare?

In the meantime, have you checked out the Link Building Lab yet? If you are reading this review then I’m guessing you are interested in various link building services as well.

Inside, you will find private case studies we have done where we drill-down and give you an in-depth analysis of the different link building services we have personally used. This data is unavailable anywhere else, and it is only accessible to subscribers. Signup for free here.

You can be sure that we will add our own SEO Link Monster case study here one we have done some tests with it.

SEO Link Monster Bonus

Since this launch looks like it is going to be huge, I am also going to put together an awesome SEO Link Monster Bonus package for anyone who buys through my link. Unlike other bonuses that are sure to be out there, I’m not going to be offering the same recycled PLR crap that everyone else is.

Instead I’m going to put together some really cool bonus together that will help you make the most out of your SEO Link Monster subscription.

So make sure to bookmark this page and come back on launch day.

SEO Link Monster Prelaunch

Brad Callen is going to hold a special webinar on February 6th (the day before launch), that is going to teach a lot of free linkbuilding and SEO tips.

Here is the signup link

Article Builder is a new software tool developed by Jonathan Leger that will help you generate unlimited amounts of articles with a click of a button.

How does it do this? Well Jon has created a massive database of categorized titles, introductory paragraphs and tips and snippets that have been extracted from a huge library of PLR content.

All these elements are combined to create a highly readable article that can be used for a wide variety of purposes.

How Article Builder Works

Article Builder is an online tool, so you can pretty much access it from anywhere. The interface is pretty plain, but that’s because it’s so simple to use.

To request an article, you first need to select from one of the available categories. Currently, there are 52 different categories ranging from Internet Marketing to Dog Training to Nutrition.

Content gets added to the Article Builder database weekly, and if enough people request a category, it will get added into the system. At launch there were only 23 categories, but a month later it has more than doubled.

Next you can input in an optional list of subtopic categories and choose your minimum word count. Article Builder can generate articles from 300 to 1000 words long.

Finally specify how many articles you want it to generate and press the button to spit out your new piece of content.

There are a couple of Advanced Options you can also set that I wanted to highlight as well. If you want to use Article Builder to generate articles you can use for blog networks like Traffic Kaboom and Authority Link Network, you can check the ‘Spin articles together’ option that combines all the article intros, body snippets, and conclusions together using spin formatted text. There is also the option to generate articles with the same number of paragraphs, which is perfect for Unique Article Wizard users.

How I Will Use Article Builder

When I saw the email about Article Builder, my first thought was that it would be the perfect source of content for a link building networks like Build My Rank or Linkamotion. Instead of paying around $3 for each 300 word article, why not use Article Builder to provide the content?

To put Article Builder to the test, I decided to test it out with Build My Rank. This is a good case study for Article Builder, because BMR is quite strict about accepting unique content. For the purposes of this review, I submitted a total of 16 articles generated by Article Builder. I also did make sure to proofread each article thoroughly and made appropriate edits to ensure that the articles read well.

Did they get approved?

Yes, all 16 articles were approved by Build My Rank. Not only that, but all 16 of the articles were indexed by Google too.

Pretty good, right?

What I’m really looking forward to however, is the next update to the tool which promises to be amazing. Basically, Jon is making some changes to the Article Builder system so that every article generated will be guaranteed 75% unique. This will be an incredible feat if he manages to pull this off, and I really hope he can do this. If he can, there is no doubt in my mind that Article Builder will be the ultimate link building tool.

The only downside to Article Builder right now is the amount of categories available. As I mentioned, they the number of categories is available is growing, but at the time of this review, there are still some categories that are not available that I would really like to see.

Final Thoughts

I have some high hopes for Article Builder, which is why I went out and bought it right away. Jon always releases great products (The Best Spinner, Instant Article Wizard), and he does a great job of keeping them updated too.

While $297 a year doesn’t sound cheap at first, you have to understand that writing content yourself is time consuming and paying for it will cost you way, way more. Lets say you use it to generate 5 articles a day and 1825 articles a year. That comes out to about 16 cents per article which is an amazing deal if you think about it.

So, if you really want to boost your link building by providing yourself with an unlimited source of content, give Article Builder a shot. It is certainly a product that is worth investing in.

Easy WP SEO is a WordPress plugin that helps you optimize your posts for on-page SEO. If you want to rank well in the search engines, then you probably know that on-page SEO is an important factor to consider. In my experience, a well optimized site will have a much easier time ranking for competitive keywords than one that is not.

One of the major reasons to use Easy WP SEO is that it will grade each of your posts for a variety of common on-page SEO factors and give you an easy to read SEO score. By highlighting the important factors that you are missing, you can easily improve your content structure quickly and painlessly.

There are quite a few of these types of WordPress plugins out there, including Scribe SEO, SEOPressor, and others. The Easy WP SEO WSO has been getting some rave reviews though, which is why I decided to try it out.

In this Easy WP SEO review, I’ll take you through what the plugin can do, and how it’s going to help you out.

How It Works

After installing the plugin, you will notice the new Easy WP SEO panel on your Edit Post page. Here is where you can see the SEO Score and Keyword Density of your post.

Nothing displays here though until you specify the primary keyword you are trying to rank for and then Save Draft or Publish your post. You can refresh your scores whenever you update an existing post as well.

Once your post is analyzed, you can look at the various on-page SEO factors that the plugin is checking for. A green check means that you passed, while a red check means you failed.

Easy WP SEO doesn’t just work with new posts. You can also use it to grade the existing posts on your site.

This can be done by using the Manage Keywords settings page. Basically it lists all your posts and gives you a field next to each to input your primary keyword. If you have a lot of existing posts, like I did for JoshKotsay.com, the process can take you awhile. But it’s not too bad, and it’s really a one-time thing.

What Makes Up the SEO Score?

Easy WP SEO looks at 23 different on-page SEO factors to analyze. Some of the important ones include.

• Keyword in title, permalink url, meta description, headings and image ALT attributes.
• Minimum content length, keyword density.

Most of the on-page SEO factors I agree with and I’ve already been incorporating into my posts for years now.

However, there are a few that I don’t think matter like, like Keywords meta tag contains keyword.

What’s nice is that I can turn off these specific factors I don’t like if I want. And when I do that, they are no longer counted toward my SEO score.

I can also modify other factors like keyword density and minimum word count. So instead of the default setting of 300 words, I could change it to 500 if I thought it was a better threshold to use based on my own experience.

This flexibility is extremely important, and one of the things I like best about the plugin. The SEO landscape is constantly changing, so being able to adapt the plugin to what’s currently working is extremely important.

Other Easy WP SEO Features

Easy WP SEO can also do some other cool things.

You can have it automatically bold, italic, and underline your primary keywords. And have it automatically add your keyword to the ALT tag of any images you add to your post.

The plugin can also generate LSI keywords for you. These are basically related keywords and sprinkling them throughout your site can also give your on-page SEO a boost and help your content appear natural to the search engines.

Final Thoughts

After installing Easy WP SEO on this site, I found that in general, my on-page SEO is pretty good as I usually follow most of the guidelines that Easy WP SEO looks for.

But still, the plugin makes it easy to identify posts where I did not do such a good job so I can go in and change them.

Probably the most useful feature for me, is identifying the keyword density of each post. Now, I don’t normally subscribe to the theory that there is an optimal keyword density value that you should always follow.

But I do like to know if my keyword density falls in one of the two extremes. Too low or too high. Easy WP SEO helps me do this really easily.

So all in all, I really like Easy WP SEO. It is super flexible, and it does a good job doing what it’s supposed to do. If you have never given much thought to on-page SEO before, then I think you will really benefit from installing this plugin on your sites.

Unlike Scribe SEO which requires you to pay a monthly fee, Easy WP SEO is only $37 for an unlimited site license. That is a really good deal, and I think it will definitely help your search engine rankings if you use it.

Traffic Kaboom (TK) is a backlink blog network started by Jason Potash and Jason Katzenback. It launched in its current form in March 2011 but many of the blogs in the network have themselves existed in some form since 2006.

I’ve been using Traffic Kaboom regularly since it first opened up, so in this review I’ll share with you how it works and how it stacks up with other blog networks.

How Traffic Kaboom Works

Traffic Kaboom is a public backlink network and it claims to have several thousand sites in its network. Blogs can be added to their network through their Auto Blog Buddy Pro plugin. To build links, you submit articles in spintax format and TK will drip-feed your articles across its network of blogs. In fact, it uses the exact format as Authority Link Network does, so you can submit one article to both services very quickly.

Traffic Kaboom uses a 8-step wizard to submit your articles. Once you get used to it, it’s pretty easy to navigate, although I would prefer a more streamlined process of submitting my articles.

The article dashboard is pretty informative as it lists each of the articles you have submitted along with the status of each article, and how many times it has been posted so far. It will even track your Google rankings over time for your primary keyword which is very cool.

Traffic Kaboom has moderators which will look over each submission before approving it to go live. The moderators are relatively strict, and I’ve had articles rejected for reasons like including “irrelevant” links in my article. There also is an automatic duplicate content filter which seems to do the job well.

All in all, I consider these good features as it prevents blogs on the network from being overrun by crappy articles, and ensuring the links you do build maintain their value.

Traffic Kaboom Results

As I mentioned above, I’ve been using Traffic Kaboom for a long time. The biggest advantage that it has over other link building services is the amount of number of different blogs each submission gets distributed to. In my experience, many of my submissions get submitted to over 100 blogs. Just for comparison, Authority Link Network only goes out to 15 blogs per submission.

There are a couple of things I don’t like about Traffic Kaboom though.

First, I’ve noticed that posts sometime get submitted to the SAME blog multiple times. In one instance, I was able to locate 7 different versions of my same article on one blog.

Second, the blog network itself is not particularly strong. I’ve found the majority of blogs in its network are PR 0 and PR 1. Although, this is a general problem you will find with any blog network that allows anyone to submit blogs without restrictions.

Does Traffic Kaboom work?

With that said, I’ve experienced really nice results with Traffic Kaboom and it gives some credence to the “more links is better” camp. I actually did a Traffic Kaboom case study over at the Link Building Lab where I took a brand new site, and got it ranking in the first page of Google for two keywords…using only links built with Traffic Kaboom.

I started this case study back in March, and the rankings have held relatively steady more than 7 months later… without any further submissions beyond the initial case study.

Final Thoughts

Traffic Kaboom cost $147 per 3 months which comes out to $49 a month. This is right in line with other popular backlink networks like SEOLinkVine and My Article Network.

All in all, I’m happy with my investment in Traffic Kaboom, and I will continue to use it as a regular part of my link building efforts.

Authority Link Network (ALN) is a powerful and easy to use backlink blog network that has quickly become one of my favorites networks to use. ALN was created by Maulana T, who is probably best known for his Link Builder Pro/Rank Builder SEO software.

I first joined Authority Link Network many months back when it was completely free to join. However, in September 2011, Maulana transitioned ALN to a paid model. There are now 3 different paid membership options, with the Basic Membership starting at $14.95. While initially disappointing, the move was understandable and I still think ALN provides tremendous value for its membership cost.

How Authority Link Network Works

Authority Link Network operates a little differently than other blog networks you may be familiar with. First of all, it uses a points system which determines how many submissions you can make per day. The basic membership gives you 1 point per day where 1 point = 1 submission.

However, you can still add your own wordpress blogs into the network and you will get points depending on the PR of the site. The point system is as follows:

PR1 blog - 0.5 points
PR2 blog - 1 point
PR3 blog - 1.5 points
PR4 blog - 3 points
PR5+ blog - 6 points

Blog page rank is checked regularly so the points you have available can fluctuate if your blogs gain or lose Page Rank at any time.

I really like this system quite a bit, as it helps keep the network strong with high PR blogs.

Authority Link Network allows you to submit articles in spintax format. You can either spin articles yourself using a software like The Best Spinner or use an article service like Vita Vee’s Ultra Spinnable Articles.

Articles need to be a minimum of 300 words long, and you can insert up to 3 links per post. I like the fact that you can link out to any external site, not just your own sites. This is important to do as it makes your articles appear more natural.

Each submission will get submitted to exactly 15 different sites on the network at a rate of 5 per day. Authority Link Network archive your submissions. Once your 15 submissions are complete, the article will disappear from your dashboard.

Authority Link Network Results

There’s a lot to like about Authority Link Network. First of all, it has one of the strongest blog networks I’ve seen, especially for a service that allow user submitted blogs. Other public blog networks are filled with PR 0 blogs. ALN has a good mix of PR 1 to PR 4 blogs in it.

I also appreciate the fact that ALN is very easy to use. Other networks require you to go through multiple pages and steps to submit an article. With Authority Link Network the whole submission process is done on a single page. Building backlinks can often be a time consuming process, so little things like this can make a big difference in using a service like this regularly or not.

If you want a more in-depth look at ALN, make sure to check out the Authority Link Network case study I contributed to over at the Link Building Lab. It will give you a much better idea at how ALN stacks up against the other backlink networks.

Conclusion

Should you use Authority Link Network? Well, if you are serious about your link building, then yes. At $14.95 for a basic membership, ALN gives you some serious value for your money. Go buy yourself some high PR domains and start building more backlinks.

SEOmoz is one of the best known brands when it comes to SEO. Started by Rand Fishkin, it has become the premier membership site for learning SEO. Not only that, but they have developed an impressive set of online SEO tools that are some of the best in the business.

What’s nice about SEOmoz, is the amount of free SEO information they give you access to. Both the SEOmoz and YOUmoz blogs are both in my RSS reader, and I’m always finding cool SEO tips and case studies on there, with Whiteboard Friday being one of my favorite series of course.

SEOmoz offers a paid membership option called SEOmoz Pro. The PRO membership gives you full access to the SEOmoz suite of tools, plus all their advanced SEO training as well.

Since they offer a full free 30 day trial of SEOmoz PRO, I decided to sign up, play around with it and write a review.

What Is SEOmoz Pro?

The tagline on the SEOmoz homepage is, “Effectively Manage Your SEO”. To manage your SEO, it allows you to create campaigns for the different sites you own. With a PRO account, you can create up to 5 campaigns.

Let me highlight some of the ways creating a campaign will help your SEO.

Rank Tracking

To improve your search engine rankings, you need to know where your pages rank for your various keywords. And by tracking your rankings over time, you can see how your various SEO efforts affect your keyword rankings.

SEOmoz Pro gives you the ability to track your keyword rankings in Google, Yahoo and Bing and view your rankings over time with some nice looking charts.

Once nice feature of SEOmoz Pro is that you can hook up your Google Analytics account to it. This allows you to get traffic stats for your different keywords. I use this feature to identify keywords I don’t necessarily rank high for, but still get some traffic. Then by focusing my SEO efforts, I can really boost my traffic quite a bit once I improve my rankings for these keywords.

The only downside is your rankings are only updated once a week. Personally, I would prefer daily rank updates.

On Page SEO Reports

The On-Page SEO Reports are really quite useful, especially if you are new to SEO. Essentially, you can run a report and see how well optimized your pages are for a particular keyword. The report gives you a letter grade from A to F, plus it displays all the factors it uses to determine your grade.

These factors are categorized by importance, and if fixing the most egregious errors will no doubt help improve your search engine rankings.

Crawl Diagnostics

When you setup a campaign for your site, the SEOmoz crawler (Rogerbot) will crawl your site and look for different SEO related issues. It then displays the issues it finds, by grouping them into 3 categories: Errors, Warnings, and Notices.

Some of the things it finds are quite important to fix, like duplicate content issues, broken links and more. When Rogerbot first crawled JoshKotsay.com, it was able to identify 6 broken affiliate link redirects on the site which I was immediately able to fix. That’s potential lost revenue that I had been missing out on for a long time!

Link Analysis

One of the tools I played around with a lot was the Link Analysis feature. This is also available as a standalone tool via OpenSiteExplorer and it is powered by SEOmoz’s impressive Linkscape database of crawled urls which has over 1.2 trillion urls in its database!

The Link Analysis tool allows you to compare your own domain with up to 3 different competitors using a variety of metrics. It displays SEOmoz’s proprietary metrics like Domain Authority, Page Authority, MozRank, and MozTrust.

It also displays some other important metrics like how many total links you have, number of linking root domains, and number of class C blocks that are linking to you.

Not only that, but you also check the backlinks to your site and your competitor’s sites. By studying the external links you can do a comprehensive competitive analysis on your competitor’s linking profile. This will allow you to see where your competitors are getting links from, and find sources of links that you can use as well.

For example, different linking strategies have a distinct profile. If I see someone with tons of Web 2.0 links and social bookmarking sites, I can tell they are probably using some software like SENuke X.

If they’re getting links back from a lot of different generic blogs, then they are probably using a blog network like Unique Article Wizard. By identifying the link strategies that work best for your own site (or your competitors), you can make changes and adapt your link building strategy accordingly.

What Else Does SEOmoz Pro Offer?

I actually just touched on just the surface of what SEOmoz Pro offers. But that’s just a small sampling of the tools that you have access to.

There’s also a SEOmoz PRO Q&A forum where you can get answers to your questions. The best thing about SEOmoz is that it has an extremely large and active community full of SEO professionals.

You can either ask your own questions, or just search through the forum and read what others have asked in the past. The forums are packed with info so you are definitely going to learn a lot here.

Another nice feature are the SEOmoz Pro webinars. They usually host a couple of PRO webinars each month about a specific SEO or marketing topic. Webinars are usually 90 minutes long with Q&A at the end. And if you can’t make the webinars live, they are archived on the site for later viewing.

SEOmoz Final Thoughts

So is SEOmoz Pro worth it? The tools are definitely high quality, but whether the membership is worth it really depends on how often you are going to be using the tools.

If you provide SEO services or consulting, then I definitely think that SEOmoz Pro has the potential to provide you with a ton of value as you’re going to be getting a lot of use out of it. If you are a growing or established brand, I am sure you will find SEOmoz to be very helpful as well.

So will I continue my SEOmoz Pro free trial into a monthly membership? Probably not. I just don’t think I personally would use the tools often enough to justify the cost of a monthly subscription.

Especially since I already own several products that do many of the same things. For rank tracking, I’m already using a tool like Rank Tracker and for SEO Competition analysis I already use Market Samurai, which is quite good in its own right.

But the good thing is, SEOmoz Pro has a free 30 day trial of it’s services. So really, just try out the membership for yourself, and see if it provides enough value for your business.

Bring the Fresh is an IM course and membership site created by Kelly Felix and his partner Mike Long. Both are well known in the IM world and have earned well over 20 million a year online. Bring The Fresh is focused on showing its members step how to make money online with niche affiliate sites through video tutorials and it’s private members only forum.

I had heard good things about Bring the Fresh for a long time now. The site first launched in January of 2010. The WarriorForum Internet Reviews section has a thread about Bring the Fresh which an impressive 328 posts and 45k views at the time of this review. I spent some time reading through the thread and the overwhelming consensus was that there was some really great value inside.

While I wasn’t looking to sign up for another membership type site, I finally gave in recently and thought it would be interesting to give Bring the Fresh a try.

My first impression I had after visiting the site though was, “Man, that’s an ugly site”. It has a bright yellow color scheme with the interesting tomato logo.

Here’s a look inside:

After examining the content though I can kind of see what they’re going for here. Basically, it’s a way of showing you that anybody can make money online, and you don’t need to have any special skills or a lot of money to do so.

If you have been in the IM space awhile now, you may have heard of a hugely successful IM e-Book awhile back called The Rich Jerk. It made a ton of money, and the guy behind it was Kelly Felix. Before reading the rest of this Bring the Fresh review, spend 15 minutes or so read his life story on his personal blog. It’s a really interesting and highly motivational story, and it will help you understand what Kelly is bringing to the table with Bring The Fresh.

What is Bring The Fresh?

Basically Bring the Fresh revolves around the SEO system that Kelly Felix developed to get his sites ranking at the top of Google. He and Mike Long have both used this system to create countless numbers of these profitable niche sites. The whole thing is detailed in the Fast Start Guide, which is a PDF that you can download when you first login to the site.

Of course, many different IM courses and products claim to teach you the same stuff that Bring the Fresh does. Where BTF differs though is that Kelly and Mike are willing to share the actual domains of their own sites.

So within 5 minutes of signing up, you can see that the system works by going to Google and seeing their sites show up in the top positions that they claim.

This is huge, and a reason why the course is so popular Because who wants to waste the time following a SEO system that doesn’t work. Or one that used to work, but now doesn’t because of the recent Google Panda updates.

Being able to validate their claims definitely gives you the confidence you need to take action and start to implement the Bring the Fresh system yourself.

That said, the techniques that Bring the Fresh demonstrates aren’t particularly new. I myself have been using a variation of this type of link building system for a long time now and it’s the reason why JoshKotsay.com ranks so well for hundreds of really good keywords. So I know the BTF system works, and I can personally vouch for it.

Heck, if you came to this site via Google while searching for a Bring the Fresh review then you know it still works at this very moment!

Bring the Fresh Video Training

The Fast Start Guide really does a good job, and you can start implementing the strategies inside within a day of reading it. However, Bring the Fresh is also packed with additional video training as well.

Inside, you’ll find the Fast Start Videos which expand on the concepts illustrated by the guide. There’s videos on Market Research, choosing the right affiliate offers, and even a step-by-step video by Kelly on how to he builds his money making websites from scratch. These are particular well suited for people new to making money online.

There’s also a whole Interview Series of videos where Mike and Kelly interview each other and give you a behind the scenes look at their business. The Latest Case Studies videos has some really great content as well, with interviews from Bring The Fresh members like Tiffany Dow and Rick Rivera who have really gone on to make it big after using the course.

One downside of the videos though that I will mention is that they are now relatively old. The Market Research series that Kelly did were from May 2010. In the first video, he shares the exact keywords he used to make 1.6 million in 2 years, which is interesting to hear about, but not especially useful with all that has happened to Google Adwords since then. Still many of the basic concepts are still valid, and there are some really useful tips in each video.

Bring the Fresh Forum

The true value I think you’ll get from being a Bring the Fresh member is the forum. The first thing I always check out with any IM forum I join are the success stories. It’s one thing for people to be posting positive reviews on places like the WarriorForum where people’s motives can be slightly suspect. It’s another thing to see people posting success stories on the product’s forum itself.

Since July 2010 when the forum opened there have been:

244 threads and 3122 posts

Just to compare it with one of my favorite private forums PPV Playbook which has

109 threads and 1737 posts

PPV Playbook is about 7 months older, so that’s really an impressive number of success stories over at Bring the Fresh.

Here’s just a sampling of some of the latest threads in that forum:

Joining a community like Bring The Fresh can invaluable. It gives you the accountability you need to put in the work. It also provides the validation you need to keep going even when things aren’t going your way. And of course, to get the most out of any forum, you have to ask questions.

The most impressive aspect of the Bring the Fresh forum though is that Kelly and Mike continue to remain active participants and are truly accessible. Kelly currently has over 2000 posts while Mike has around 200. It would be easy for them to hire a few moderators to manage the forum while they go off and do other things. But Kelly is especially active on the forum and you’ll see he posts daily on the forum.

Bring the Fresh Final Thoughts

Bring the Fresh is aimed towards marketers who want to earn a passive income by creating their own money making niche sites, by getting them to rank in the first page of Google for your keywords. The system does work, but keep in mind, you will need to invest additional money in some of the tools that the system requires.

This includes buying domains, web hosting, and signup up to the recommended link building services. But if you’re able to do this, then I think you’ll be happy with all the content that is inside Bring the Fresh.

If you’re looking for an easy to follow system, and you’re someone that’s looking to be guided by marketers who have done it before then you should definitely consider joining Bring the Fresh. The basic membership is just a $97 one time fee.

Kelly Felix and Mike Long have created an IM community with some immense value, so give it a shot if you are looking to make money online.

If you’re working with paid traffic, what’s the #1 thing that everyone tells you to do? It’s to track EVERYTHING. Being able to figure out which keywords and ads are converting for your campaign and weeding out the unprofitable ones, is the difference between raking in the cash and losing your shirt. And a whole host of tracking tools like Prosper202 and CPVLab have been built to help people do just that.

But what about for SEO? Is there any way to track which keywords you are ranking for are leading to sales? Well, for the longest time no. I’ve personally made more than 6-figures this past year with SEO and I didn’t have a clue about what actual keywords were making me money. Sure, I’m guessing that product name and product name review keyword are the ones making me sales, but is that really the case?

Fortunately my good friend Chris Fong has developed a wordpress plugin that I think will change the way we track our SEO efforts. It’s called Smart Affiliate Links and I’m going to review it for you guys today.

How It Works

First of all, Smart Affiliate Links will help you manage the affiliate links on your blog. With it installed, I can setup redirects for my affiliate links so I can create nice looking URLs like http://joshkotsay.com/go/productname. This is much cleaner than your standard ugly affiliate link, and it won’t scare people from clicking on it.

That’s nice, but there are many other plugins that can do this. Where Smart Affiliate Links does its magic is with affiliate links that support tracking IDs, like Clickbank, Shareasale, CJ.com and most other major affiliate networks. With these, you can use one of two append options when you setup your links.

The first of these is ‘Append Search Keyword’. So lets say someone goes onto Google and types in the keyword “genesis child themes”. They see my Prose Theme review show up in the results and they click through. And lets assume they liked my review and subsequently bought the theme through my Smart Affiliate Link. The plugin will then append the keyword “genesischildthemes” to the end of my Shareasale affiliate link like so:

http://www.shareasale.com/r.cfm?b=255475&u=xyz&m=28169&afftrack=genesischildthemes

And in my affiliate earnings report, it will show up like this:

Cool, huh?

But what if you don’t want your affiliate manager to know what keywords are converting for you though. Or maybe you want to know more details about your converting visitor, besides the keyword info.

This is what the ‘Append Click ID’ option is for. If you use this option, a number (the click ID) is appended to the end of your affiliate link instead, and that number will appear in your affiliate reports.

You can then take that number over to your Smart Affiliate Link settings and search for it using the ‘Lookup Click ID’ function. This will bring up a Click Report with some really useful information about your converting visitor, including date/time of click, IP address, referring url, keyword, permalink (the page that link was clicked on), and tag.

Tagging is actually a really cool new feature that was added to the most recent update of the plugin. Lets say I setup an affiliate link like http://joshkotsay.com/go/prosetheme and I want to place this same link in three spots of my blog.

Let say at the top of my post, bottom of my post, and on a sitewide banner ad. You can do this normally, but how can you tell which particular link was clicked?

That’s where tagging comes in. With tagging, you can insert your link into the three areas like this:

http://joshkotsay.com/go/prosetheme/top
http://joshkotsay.com/go/prosetheme/bottom
http://joshkotsay.com/go/prosetheme/bannerAd

Notice the extra segment at the end of the link which will show up as a Tag in your Click Report. This is great, because it lets me easily identify which specific links my visitors are clicking on.

Smart Affiliate Links also keeps track of the click counts on all your links. You can also drill down and see the details of the clicks for each link, which is always interesting to look at.

This is probably the area where the plugin could use more work. I would love to have some more detailed reporting options and maybe an option to save my click data to a CSV file for future processing.

So how has Smart Affiliate Links helped my business? I’ve only been using it for a few weeks now, but it’s already revealed some interesting long tail keywords that I’ve been making sales with.

These are keywords I wouldn’t have known to rank for previously, but now that I know, I definitely will put more effort into them. And since they’re low competition keywords in general, ranking #1 for them shouldn’t be a problem.

I had been using the Pretty Link plugin for my affiliate links, but I’ve now replaced it with Smart Affiliate Links on all my sites. I really like it that much. Plus it sells for only $47 which is quite reasonable as a one-time payment and there are no site license restrictions either. So if you are making sales with SEO all, you are going to want to start using this.

One of the challenges you will face with your link building efforts, is figuring out how to get all your links indexed. Especially if you are using automated link building tools that are buildings tens and hundreds of links at a time. For example, if you have used SENuke for any period of time, you probably already know that the majority of the links you submit won’t get indexed by Google without a little help. That’s not to say that unindexed links won’t help your rankings, but in my experience, getting these links indexed will give you an additional ranking boost.

In one of my old reviews, I had taken a look at Backlink Index Express (BIE) as an automated way to get your links indexed faster. Today however, I am going to look at a similar product called Backlink Energizer and see how effective it is.

Backlink Energizer works by automatically posting RSS feed content to your own network of Web 2.0 sites (called clusters). At the bottom of each post, a specific number of your own backlinks will be added. Since GoogleBot loves these Web 2.0 sites, it will crawl these posts with your links which will help get them indexed. That’s the theory at least.

Backlink Energizer Setup

Unlike BIE, which is a standalone script you install on your server, Backlink Energizer comes packaged as a WordPress plugin. Just install it on one of your blogs and you are almost ready to use it. You will then see an Energizer menu added to your WordPress control panel.

To start using Backlink Energizer though, you do need to do some initial setup. First you need to create your own cluster. That means creating accounts on the supported sites which are: WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Multiply, Xanga, and Posterous

After creating the accounts (and verifying them), you need to add the account info into Backlink Energizer. You can also add in your own WordPress blogs if you like, using the SHWP (Self Hosted WordPress) page.

Next you need to supply your cluster with the full-text RSS feeds you want Backlink Energizer to pull content from. It’s a good idea to watch the included videos to understand the best practices for choosing your feeds. Then you need to enter in a list of keywords which will be the anchor text for your links (randomly rotated). You also have the option to set the # of Links per posts and how many posts per day for your cluster.

To complete the setup, you then need to enter in the Cron information and get it setup for your specific web host. This is what will allow Backlink Energizer to start publishing your links automatically.

Once this is done, adding your backlinks is quite simple. All you need to do is copy your list of links into the Links tab and add them. Backlink Energizer will then randomly grab content from your chosen RSS feeds, post them to the sites in your cluster, and include your links at the bottom of each post. All done without any user intervention yourself.

Does Backlink Energizer Work?

I’ve been using Backlink Energizer for several months now, and it definitely does increase your indexing rates, albeit with a couple of caveats. First, if you expect Backlink Energizer start working right out of the box, you are going to be disappointed (unless you are using your own aged blogs). For one, your initial posts to a new cluster WILL NOT get indexed, and your backlinks are unlikely to be indexed either.

For best results, my experience has been to build up the Web 2.0 sites in each cluster before using them with Backlink Energizer. That means posting some original content on a regular basis to each one, and building some links to each post you add. Get these properties indexed first, and to the point where each new content you post is getting indexed automatically by Google. Only then is it time to add the site to your cluster.

My 2nd caveat is to avoid using WordPress and Tumblr as part of your Backlink Energizer clusters. These two sites are very strict, and there’s a very good chance that your accounts will be banned if you use them. To save you the headache, I would just avoid using them.

If you setup your cluster the way I suggest, Backlink Energizer works quite well. Each time I build a set of links, I just copy and paste them in, and everything else is handled for me. Using this system, I can usually get about 50-60% of my links indexed within 2 or 3 days which is pretty decent.

I personally have my clusters add 3 links per post, and have them posting every hour, so a single cluster can handle about 36 links a day. If you have more links you need to process, then you can always setup some additional clusters to handle the load.

Backlink Enegizer vs Backlink Index Express

Both products are quite good at what they do, but I find Backlink Energizer a bit easier to setup and use. With BIE, you have to mess around with configuration files and stuff like that which is harder for less technical people. I also like the fact that Backlink Energizer uses full-text RSS feeds while BIE just uses snippets from RSS feeds which I think is more effective.

Finally, Backlink Energizer is more flexible in the fact that it supports posting to both self hosted wordpress blogs AND web 2.0 properties while BIE only posts to self hosted blogs.

Backlink Energizer Final Thoughts

If you have the patience to create good clusters, then I think you will see some good results with Backlink Energizer. Once you have things setup correctly, it really is a hands-free way of getting your links indexed. At $47 it is a pretty cost effective solution to your indexing problems, so make sure to give it a try.