Ahh damn. I’m really pissed off that Subvert & Profit sign up is broken. Even though it’s not my fault, I feel guilty for those who read my Easiest Way To Make Money Online post and then couldn’t sign up. I’ve e-mailed them and they haven’t responded yet. I guess they already know and are working on it. I’m pretty sure the “sign up” feature is pretty high on the “should be working” list for websites. I’ll keep you guys up to date and post an update once I see it working again.

In a way of weird geeky SEO compensation I thought I’d share a tip about how to get a sneaky link from a PR8 site’s directory and grab some juicy Keyword Real Estate.

The Target
Occasionally on some of my sites that I don’t deem “appropriate” to run Google Adsense on, I will opt for Adbrite as an alternative. I was checking through the backlinks for one of my sites the other day and I noticed that I had a link from the Adbrite Publisher directory. Nothing too strange about that, after all I run their ads on the site. However, what did strike me was the strength of the link…

Yahoo! Site Explorer tends to put links in rough order of importance. My site has over 30,000 links, some of which are from massive sites, yet the Adbrite Directory ranked #26. There must be some pretty nice link juice there!

A Little Investigation Work
Right, lets check this out then. If we run Adbrite through SEO Quake we can see that it has around 18,600,000 domain links and is PR8!

Excellent. Just one more thing to check. If we look at a random directory entry, we can check the source code to make sure the link is followed. Bingo. We even have some space to cram in some keywords.

How we get the link
Okay, firstly head over Adbrite and sign up as a Publisher.

I’m working on the assumption you’re not going to want to show Adbrite adverts, so you need to tweak a few things, so listen up. When you sign up you’ll be asked to create an “Ad Zone” which is similar to a Google Channel. More specifically, an Ad Zone is a page, or set of pages that you will display adverts on. So an example Ad Zone might be “Homepage – Top Banner” or “Site Wide – Footer”.

You can pretty much fly through the sign up. Make sure, if you don’t want to display adverts that you turn interstitials and inline ads off, otherwise you’ll have horrible pop-up windows appearing on your site all the time. Adbrite will ask you some fairly basic questions like what keywords you want your site listed for, what advertisers can sell to your visitors and a few questions about site demographics.

When you’re setting up your “Ad Zone Description” make sure you get your site keywords in here. The Ad Zone Description is the only thing displayed on your basic listing page, so if you can type a nice long description mentioning your keywords, you’ll skew the content of your page towards your niche, making Google think it’s all the more relevant.

At the last stage, Adbrite will give you your advert code, which will need to be pasted onto your site. This stage is required because you will not be listed in the Adbrite directory unless your adverts are getting impressions…

So take the code and stick it in a hidden div

Add this to your StyleSheet:

div#adbriteAds
{
margin: 0px 0px 0px 20px;
display: none;
}

Then when you paste in your Adbrite Javascript, put it inside the “adbriteAds” div on your webpage.

The result
Congratulations! Once the impressions are registered, you will appear in the Adbrite directory and you have just nabbed yourself one juicy link + keywords!

I might do a review of Adbrite in the future as they have proven to be a good alternative to Adsense, when you are working on projects that for one reason or another would violate the Adsense TOS.

Enjoy and accept my apologies for not being able to sign up to Subvert & Profit

Introduction
A lot of the articles and posts I’ve written so far have been covering the more advanced topics of how to use SEO, PPC and affiliate marketing to make money for your site. Apart from these skills, you obviously need to have some web design and programming skills, not to mention hosting, domains and everything that comes with being a webmaster.

However, there are a lot of ways to make money online without even having a website. Today I want to give a beginners’ guide to, Subvert & Profit. In a nutshell, you sign up and get paid to Digg and StumbleUpon specified sites. If you’re already a veteran Digger & Stumbler, you probably want to go straight ahead and sign up, and skip to the “S&P Tips section” at the end to get tips on how to get the most out of S&P and how not to get your accounts banned. I’ve already talked about using Subvert & Profit from the advertiser side to exploit Digg for links. Today I’m going to talk about using it from the social user side and earning yourself some easy cash.

Get a PayPal Account
I imagine just about everyone has one of these. I rarely meet a person that doesn’t. S&P pays via PayPal, so if you haven’t got a PayPal account, you’re going to need to go to www.paypal.com and sign up. C’mon… You got a PayPal Account, right?…

Sign up to Digg
Whether or not you already have a Digg account, it’s best to go and sign up for another one. Head over to digg.com and in the top right corner hit “Join Now”. Signing up to Digg is a pretty simple affair, so fill out the form and activate from the e-mail.

Sign up to StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a network of almost 3 million members using the “StumbleUpon Toolbar”, which is a neat little bar that allows you to give a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” to any web page you’re currently on. When you’re not voting for pages, you can click “Stumble!” and be taking to highly user-rated pages on topics that you specify in your profile. Nip over to stumbleupon.com and click their “Join StumbleUpon Today” link. You will have to sign up and download the StumbleUpon Toolbar. There is version for both Internet Explorer and Firefox and it’s not very intrusive and can be quite fun when you’re not just making money from it!

Sign up to Subvert & Profit.com
I know all of this signing up is a chore, but this is the last one – so almost there! Hoss over to subvertandprofit.com and enter your e-mail address that you use for PayPal. This will give you access to the sign up form.

Fill out all of the usual sign up gumph then check your inbox for the activation e-mail.

Set up Subvert & Profit
Once you first login to S&P you’ll need to have your Digg and Stumble usernames handy. These are entered into your profile and they will give you a verification task of a story to Digg & Stumble. They will then have to verify your actions, which can take a few hours. So go put the kettle on. Make the tea. Drink the tea. Then probably make and eat dinner as well.

Ready to rock!
We should be all ready to go out there and make some money now. Subvert is a dead easy system, they will send you an e-mail every time they have a new task for you (most days generally). Then you login and follow the request URLs and either Digg or Stumble them. (There’s two sections here, one for Digging and one for Stumbling – so get it right!). Every time you Stumble or Digg a story you get paid $0.50. Now, say you’ve got 6 stories to Digg/Stumble, you can open all 6 URLs at once and it will take around 30 seconds to complete the Digging and Stumbling. This essentially works out as earning $360 per hour for your time.

Digging Pages
Sometimes, S&P will pop you directly to the story on Digg.com, so it’s nice and easy – just login and hit the “Digg This” button. On other occasions, you will land directly on the page/article that is being Dugg. If this happens, there will be a “Digg This” button or link, somewhere on the article. So just have a quick scan and you should be able to see it. Another $0.50 in the bank.

Stumbling Pages
Stumbling is a dead simple affair. When you land on the page, no searching around – just hit the “I like it” thumbs up button on your browser toolbar. Sometimes you are the first person to Stumble a page, which means it will pop-up a form asking you to fill in the page title, description and tags. This is pulled from the page, so just hit Stumble! One bit of advice, if you have multiple tabs open to Stumble several sites, wait until the “thumbs up” icon goes green before you try and Stumble the next page. Sometimes Stumble gets a bit confused if you Stumble pages really quickly.

Some FAQS & Tips

Digg & Stumble of course, don’t really “approve” of this kind of usage and although it’s not “illegal” by a long stretch, it is against their Terms of Service, so there is a small possibility you can get banned. (I haven’t and I’ve been using this service since launch). So here’s some tips on avoiding getting banned and getting the most out of S&P.

• Make a new Digg account. They’re quick to make and if you get banned, S&P lets you quickly and easily change the Digg account you’re using from their interface
• Digg and Stumble other stories! Don’t just Digg and Stumble paid for stories! Use your Digg account normally and randomly Digg & Stumble a few things between subverting. This makes it very hard for Digg or Stumble to ban you. Afterall, any user could randomly Digg or Stumble a paid for story without knowing it – lots do in fact! So as long as you balance your profile out, you’re onto a winner
• Make sure you’ve got a system to alert you immediately when you get a new e-mail from S&P. Advertisers only pay for a specific number of Diggs & Stumbles, so if you don’t react for 24 hours, you’re going to have missed the cash boat. If you stop Digging & Stumbling pages for S&P, they seem to send you fewer notifications – so keep on the ball!

How much can I earn?
Once you’re signed up and get a couple of friends on, you can on average you can earn about $6 a day at the moment. It’s not loads, but add it up, $42 a week, $168 per month – just over $2,000 a year. Certainly not a figure to scoff at. Especially when you’re doing next to no work at all!

I’ve been using this service for a few months now and I’ve decided it is worth recommending and trying to increase the amount of users. It’s still fairly young, so sign up now and you can get your friends onto it as well. The more people that know about Subvert & Profit, the more people will buy Diggs & Stumbles, which means more money for me and you!

I’ve been pretty specific and this blog post is still pretty short! That’s really all you need to do, hardly any effort or time. It’s about as close to free money as you’re gonna get guys. Go get some! If you feel I’ve missed something out or want to know more, leave me a comment and I’ll try to answer your question

Edit: If you want a blog or forum added to this list – you can contribute it here. Also please read the latest update of this search engine.

The original nofollow list was sourced from third party sources, with the original list being created at http://courtneytuttle.com – I have taken this list and made over 200 additions and listed them by PR and category for SEO purposes.

I’ve had a pretty rough few days this week, so I dedicated quite a lot of time putting together a rather special resource for you. It may not look much, but it’s a list of over 160 categorised, PR ranked blogs which all don’t use the “nofollow” attribute in their links. Before you jump to the end of this article to download it, I’d like to say one thing: This list is not for blog spamming! Seriously, spamming it would be a waste of your time and a waste of the 10+ hours I spent putting this list together. Since I was feeling extra generous, I’ve also built the blog list into a Custom Blog Search Engine, so you can simply search for your niche and find relevant blog posts! Anyway, as I said…

Me no spammy list?
No, you no spammy list. For a start, it probably won’t work – plugins such as the awesome Akismet pretty much stop most automated spam, also if you piss the blog owners off, they’ll probably just nofollow the links anyway and then the fun’s over for everyone. There’s a much better use you can put this list to.

Ok, I’m listening. What’s there to do?
Okay, as I said, we’ve got a list here of over 160 blogs that will follow comments. All of them either have a lot of traffic, or high PR. (Some I believe have a high PR, but display PR0 because the Toolbar PR hasn’t updated yet). So for instance, lets take an example that you run a Travel Insurance website. The best thing you can do is look down list this and make your own mini-list of all of the blogs that cover travel and culture. These are going to be the blogs we want our links on, they have authority, traffic and more importantly, they are highly relevant.

It doesn’t take long to scan read a post, so have a look at the latest posts (who knows – you might learn something too!) then leave a comment on the blog, using your “name” as the keywords you want to rank for (try and keep it the least “spammy” as you can). In a standard comment you’ll want to compliment the post, make a relevant comment on the post content and a closing remark. Keep it short & sweet but try and add some value, this will get your comment approved.

If you factor this activity (say an hour a day) into your SEO/blogging schedule you’ll be picking up some nicely weighted, relevant links every single day – as well as the traffic you can generate from click-throughs. It is a safe method of building pretty good quality links that you can be sure will get indexed fast. The main leg work is in sourcing a list of blogs that don’t use the “nofollow” attribute, but I’ve already done the hard bit for you!

Isn’t there an ethics issue here?
Even for white hatters, I don’t think there’s an ethical issue here. So we’re putting our comment there for the sole purpose of getting a link, yes. However, if the blog author can read this comment and they think it adds value to the post, where’s the harm in that? If bloggers are so concerned about who they are giving their link juice to, they should be use the nofollow attribute in the first place.

That sounds like a lot of work!
Well, it really isn’t, but for your lazy types – you’re in luck. Jon Waraas has recently launched a service called Buy Blog Posts. His service essentially offers the above technique for 100, 500 or 1000 blog comments in your niche. Now, there has been a lot of criticism over Jon’s service saying it is “evil”, “vile” and it will “destroy the blogosphere”. These people, really need to get outside more, if not only so we can give them a kick in their blogospheres. As I stated earlier, if the author of a post can’t tell the comment is “pseudo-spam” then I don’t see what the problem is.

As usual – Give it a try and let me know how you get on! You are welcome to put a copy of the PDF list on your on website or blog.

Edit: If you want a blog or forum added to this list – you can contribute it here. Also please read the latest update of this search engine.

(This PDF is out of date now – use the search engine)

Yes, I haven’t blogged in a while – apologies. I got burnt out this first part of the year, with long work hours and personal projects so I took a couple of months break doing “non-computer” stuff. Writing a decent post takes a lot of effort, so I figured rather than drag Digerati down with low quality posts, I’d just save a bunch of stuff up for when I had the energy to get it all down. I’ve started catching up on some reading and I’m ready to start you off with a teaser article about using Digg to get yourself ranked better.

What’s the plan?
Okay, the plan is this. We are going to produce an article, get it to the front page of Digg, grab all the links that this gives you and turn them into something valuable for your website. A lot of people try similar methods and fail miserably, never getting off the “upcoming stories” page on Digg. So we’ll be looking at solutions to:

• How to make a powerful Digg account
• How to write a “Diggable” article
• How to guarantee front page coverage
• How to make your links relevant

With no further fanfare, lets get cracking.

A little about Digg and Digg accounts
The Digg community, much like Wikipedia does not really take kindly to “SEO types” or people trying to promote their own articles or websites. If you’re caught Digging your own stuff, or just spammy crap over and over, you’ll get your account suspended. Building up a “powerful” Digg account is a reliable (but long-term) method of making sure this strategy works well. If you create a new Digg account and Digg a story, your Digg (vote) carry less weight/authority, whatever you want to call it, than say a user who has been registered for 2 years and has Dugg thousands of stories. There is a kind of “trust” game going on with Digg and you need to get in on it. One way Digg looks at your behaviour and measures trust is by which stories you Digg. Do you only vote for the crap stuff? Or are you joining in voting on stories that are really popular? How long have you been around on Digg? When you post a story, how many Diggs does it get?

You essentially want to build a “upstanding citizen” profile on Digg. This will take time, but I mention it now because it will save you the (albeit small) expense that this tactic incurs in the future. So, as a beginning and side note to this strategy, make a point of logging into Digg everyday and doing these things:

• Look at the first dozen or so top stories and give them a Digg
• Search for stories posted by powerful Diggers and add these Diggers as your friends
• Whenever your friends post a story, make sure you Digg it immediately

The last point there is one of the most important. If you have 200 friends and you make sure you Digg their stories when they post, they will, generally without question return the favour to you. When I post a story on Digg I can get 30-40 Diggs within an hour or so just from my friends list which helps me reach the top of the “upcoming” stories list, which is your first milestone.

Bare that in mind and I’ll write the rest of this post for those who do not have powerful Digg accounts.

Choosing a subject and writing a successful article
If you’re not an experienced Digger, I suggest you take a quick trip over to Digg.com and have a look at some of the top voted stories over the last month or so. Try and get a ‘feel’ for what makes a successful story and think about the Digg audience (which is mostly techies, geeks etc…) and look at what kind of stuff interests them. To give you an idea, I’ve noted down some observations I’ve made:

• Top Tens! Very, very popular. A lot of articles are “Top 10 list of…” or lists of… stuff… To make a story hugely successful, it has to be accessible. A lot of people will be put off if you Digg a 3 page long text heavy story, no matter how funny.
• Sarcasm, humour, parody. “High brow” kind of jokes, poking fun at corporations, politicians, or simply well photoshopped images go down a storm. You know all those “Fw:Fw:Fw:BRILLIANT JOKEZ!!!11″ emails that land in your inbox from loved ones? Think the opposite of this type of humour and you’ll be well away.
• Retro stuff! Nostalgia is a powerful tool. Think thundercats, transformers, spectrums, amigas, all your base are belong to us.
• Weird geeky science stuff.. Black holes, UFOs, teleportation, time-travel. In list format where possible. Everybody loves off-the-wall useless facts.
• Once you’ve got a theme, tie as much is as possible. If you can squeeze some current buzz in like the release of a film and tie it all together with a “thundercats versus the new movie transformers” or such like, you’re onto a winner.
• Lastly, make sure it hasn’t been done before! (Or do it a hell of a lot better).

Okay, hopefully you’ve started thinking along the right lines now. You want to try and pick a topic that is related to the content of your website. This is probably the hardest part and you might need the help of a friend or two to brainstorm. A good example I saw recently was for a travel insurance company, a list of “the top 10 most dangerous travel destinations” was created, with brilliantly photoshopped images of each country, making it worth Digging just for the photos, let alone the article which was written dripping with sarcasm and good humour. Making a story controversial, may seem risky (don’t worry about that for now), but it is exactly the kind of buzz you’ll need.

Putting your article up
If it’s your first attempt, it might be worth getting a friend or two to cast an eye over it, to get their thoughts and make sure you’ve hit the nail on the head. Once you’re happy with your article, things get a bit more sneaky. Create an orphan page on the domain you want to boost and put your article here. An orphan page is once that is not linked from your site (or sitemap) or linked back to your site. This will reduce any negative impact if you’ve written a particularly controversial article and throw people off the scent of what you are trying to do. If you’ve written an excellent article that really sits well with the rest of your sites content, then by all means, put a link with anchor text of your choosing at the bottom of your story to your website. Lastly, you’ll want to add a “Digg this” and at a later stage perhaps a “Reddit” (or social network of your choosing) button to your page. This will encourage more people to Digg your story, who land on it from other sources. Now. login to Digg and post your story and give it an exciting title (this doesn’t mean CAPS!), and a taster intro. This bit isn’t too hard. If you’ve already got some friends they will hopefully Digg it for you.

Nobody is Digging my story!
Okay, if you want to make the front page of Digg, there are people that can help you. If you head over to www.subvertandprofit.com, you’ll find an entire network designed to giving your Digg stories than initial “boost” they need to go viral. In a nutshell (I’ll let you read through the site), you pay $1 per Digg you wish to buy and users on the site who have Digg accounts are paid to Digg your story for you. Now, if you’ve written an okayish article, you’ll only need to buy about 50 Diggs (so $50/£25) worth to get you front page. The rate at which you receive Diggs (and the previously mentioned “power” of a Digg have a lot more to do with your stories position than the total amount of Diggs. Once you’re story has reached this critical mass, it tends to snowball.

Wait! Wait! $50?! Does it work? Is it worth it?
I’ve used this tactic half a dozen times now, with what I would consider “okay” articles and I’ve hit the front page every time giving me thousands of visitors and more importantly, thousands of links. Yes it works, yes it damn well is worth your fifty bucks (sorry my fellow English readers, but $ is the currency of the net, deal with it). So, buy your initial Diggs, sit back and make sure you have well hell of a server! The first time I did this, I crashed my server due to the visitor load!

What’s the point of all of this? Explain!
Right, your getting thousands of visitors to an orphan page, what the hell use is that? Okay, cool your jets. What we’re really gaining here is links, lots of natural, beautiful website citations! If you’ve chosen your topic well (such as travel insurance: travel destinations) a lot of your incoming anchor text will also be relevant to your main site content. As mentioned in a previous article, you’ll be giving your website a massive shot in the arm when it comes to link velocity, which will help your rankings across the board. Having a #1 Digg story will give you the so called “long tail Digg effect”, which will see you get a whole bunch of links over the next couple of months, after the first massive influx.

What good are links to an orphan page?
A contested point, which I have experimented on (in the most controlled way possible – nothing’s perfect). Google has a “trust/authority” scoring for your domain as a whole, not just individual page strength. If you get a few thousand links to any page on your domain, Google knows the page is part of that domain and will raise your domain’s authority as a whole. Using this method, I have simultaneously jumped rankings over a dozen or more keyterms (usually going to 30-40 places in SERPs), using no other method. So it definitely works and let the nay-sayers do as they wish. Having more links to your domain, from a variety of good sources, with relative anchor text will give Google a clearer indication of your site’s content and authority, thus improving rankings.

A few tail notes
To put the last nail in the competitions’ coffin, a few months down the line when your article isn’t receiving many links anymore, remove the page and 301 it to an internal page of your choosing. This will give a specific page on your site a shot in the arm and increase rankings for that specific page. I generally just go for my main homepage, as the anchor text will be fairly mixed and you want to keep individual pages very targeted in terms of incoming anchor text.

A closing note, don’t bother putting Adsense/ads etc on your Digg article to try and squeeze some extra bucks out of it. Digg users are notoriously savvy and you’ll get the lowest click-through rates you’ve ever seen in your life and may well damage the popularity of your article.

There we go, a nice and easy way to gain a few thousand decent links! This was a taster article to get you guys (and me) back into the swing of things. I’m sitting on a massive 4 part guide to building a network of affiliate sites and automating the whole process. I’m not quite sure what to keep/remove from these next articles yet, but I’ll be posting on roughly a weekly basis for a while, so there’s a lot more to come. As always, good luck, let me know how you get on and drop me a line if you want to be my Digg friend!

Today, I want to have a chat about link velocity. In a nutshell, the term “link velocity” means, “the rate at which you gain new links to your website”. If you read SEO forums and blogs, it’s not a topic that you’ll regularly come across. People will harp on about PageRank, relevance of link and my personal favourite “just build better content than everyone else”. Now, I’m sure that last comment will annoy some people, but lets be honest here. People say “just build quality content” as if it’s as easy as knocking your tea on your keyboard. I’m not arguing that having quality content is an advantage, but quality content can take months, if not years to build and there’s nothing stopping other bigger websites just stealing your ideas!

This is what it boils down to: Google can’t tell the difference between average content and great content. It relys on people thinking your content is good and linking to you.

Link velocity is a great measure of popularity. It’s important. Very important.

Lets give an example:

Last year I set up a website for a for a niche with about 5-10 medium sized players in it and 1 super large player. These guys, quite rightfully had total domination of the SERPs, aside from SEO, they do PR releases, sponsorship, an affiliate scheme and they buy advertising on sites like MySpace.

Taking a closer look at their website:

“Super Large Player” Website Profile:
PageRank: 7
Indexed Pages: 15,771
Links to URL: 5,200
Links to domain: 610,000
Domain Age: 6 years

So by all accounts, pretty well established site with a large marketing budget. I set my own budget of £4.22 (for tea and some sherbet flying saucers) and decided it was time to take them down a peg or two.

Without getting caught up in the details of the web build, I uploaded a fairly basic, flat HTML website with about 50 pages of content, following all the basic SEO rules (page titles, h1s, anchor text usage..etc) that you can find on 1,000 other SEO blogs. The important thing is this; I noticed my super large player friend wasn’t gaining links very quickly – a chink in their armour we could exploit.

So how do we get 100 new links per day?
The niche I was in was providing web graphics. Now my competitor offered a download which installed the graphics onto your computer, for use in your blog, forum, e-mail or whatever. I opted for a “hosted” option, so you can hotlink my images off my server onto your site/blog/forum whatever.

To do this, when somebody clicked on an image, I was generated a little BBcode or HTML so they could paste it into anything they wanted. Fairly standard procedure. To get your head around the idea, my friend has built and launched a similar site – Free Icons. Have a look around the site, when you click on one of the icons, it will generate the code for you to display the icon. The code also generates an alt tag for the image, which can be the keyword/phrase you are trying to rank for.

No bombshells here, it’s a pretty standard technique. Sure enough though, after 7-8 months:

“Super Large Player” Website Profile:
PageRank: 7
Indexed Pages: 15,771
Links to URL: 5,200
Links to domain: 610,000
Domain Age: 6 years
Ranking for main terms: ~3rd

“My Home Made Website” Website Profile:
PageRank: 4
Indexed Pages: 27
Links to URL: 6,720
Links to domain: 11,500
Domain Age: 1 year
Ranking for main terms: 1st across the board

I was outranking them for every single one of their terms, result! The site’s success wasn’t on this one thing alone, but their site is stronger than mine in almost every way, the only thing I’ve got going for me is that I get a regular healthy dose of fresh incoming links every day. Google seems to deem this enough that my site should rank better.

All these extra links will boost your site’s authority. Since Google will have trouble identifying the content of the link, your on-page SEO will have to be spot on and the “regular” links you gain will have to have some well tuned anchor text. These bonus links can really give your rankings a shot in the arm.

Review your own position, you have have those dozen PR7 links pointing to your site and you’re ranking okay, but what mechanisms do you use to constantly garner new links? There’s a million and one ways you can use this technique. SEOmoz (who also briefly mentioned link velocity) offer “I love SEOmoz” badges that you can stick on your site, and guess what – they link back to SEOmoz.

For any site I do now, I always try and think of a mechanism to keep gaining links in the future, then integrate this into the design, whether it’s a tool, an image or document links. With these kinds of techniques, you can sit back and relax while other SEOs desperately scramble around the net looking for directory links and you are free to move onto your next project!