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I have spent the last couple of days concentrating on getting more back links for this blog. Other than content, getting back links are probably the single most important thing that you can do to get your website noticed.

I’ve been submitting articles to article sites and submitting my link to free directory websites. If you have done this in the past then you already know that it is a very time consuming and tedious task. While I like the results I get, I despise doing it.

I’ve already manually submitted to around 800 directories and several article sites and the thought of sitting down and spending several weeks doing more submissions was not really appealing to me at all. I remember what I went through submitting the first time around.

I decided that I needed to speed up the process so I went looking for software that would help me get the job done faster and easier. I ran a Google search to see what I could find. I did find a nice article submission software and directory submission software. Both are free.

Before you start moaning and groaning that submitting to article and directory sites using submission software will get you banned, let me explain how the two software’s work.

Both work basically the same way so I will be talking in general terms about both. Here’s how both basically work. When you open the software you are presented with a form with all of the conceivable information that you will need to supply for your submissions. You then select the supplied list of websites that you want to submit to. Then you just start submitting.

The actual website submission form will appear in the software and will be auto filled with the info that you supplied when you first set things up. If you are required to register you simply click the register link and the registration form will auto fill the required information. You manually select the category you want to submit under and you are done. You will also be required to supply an authentication code on many of the submission websites. Other than that, that’s all there is to it.

As you can see, these are semi automated software’s that allow you to make whatever changes that you need to make for your submission to be successful and at the same time will automatically insert any redundant information for you. There is no way that you can ever get into trouble using either of these submission software’s.

Using both of these software programs knocked off about 80% of the work of submitting to the article and directory websites. You can get them for free from the two links below.

http://www.download3000.com/download_16533.html

http://www.digixmas.com

It seems like a lot of people think that there is some deep secret to getting their website indexed on the major search engines really quick. Most think that there is something special that some do to get their websites indexed really fast. I can tell you it is really easy to do and there is nothing special to doing it at all. What course of action that you decide to take will greatly depend on how long it will take to get indexed with the major search engines.

The site that you are reading this post from took 11 days to get indexed on Google. You can do it faster than I did, but to me, the way I did it is the best. You will see why as I explain the options available to you.

The number one thing that you should not do is use the search engines add URL feature. It is better for the search engines to find you than the other way around. Filling out those submission forms is nothing but a waste of time in my opinion because you will do nothing but wait and probably get nowhere.

Here are the two best ways to get indexed really fast without having to go beg other webmasters with a high PR to link back to you. Unless you have something of value to offer, you probably won’t even get a response. Don’t waste your time with something like this. There are better ways.

Here’s what the search engines do to find websites. They will go to a website that is already in their index and follow the links on the website that they are looking at to see where they lead. If there is links on that website that lead to an outside source then the search engine will go to the website where that link takes them. This process is known as crawling.

You may be thinking why that is important to you. Well it’s very important because that’s exactly how the search engine is going to find your website when it crawls the already indexed website. The objective here is to get your website linked to the website that is already indexed which will result in getting your own website indexed.

The first way would be to link to a linking service. They are just what the name implies. They will link back to your website for a price. What you want to use are websites that have the highest page rank as possible. I wouldn’t link to anyone who has a page rank of less than seven. You only need to link to one site. Once you are linked to one of these sites you should be indexed with the major search engines within 72 hours. Sometimes within 24 hours. Link with them for one month only. You won’t need them after that. Below is a short list of linking services that you can check out to get a price of what it will cost you to get a link back from a website that has a page rank of 7 or better.

http://www.textlinkbrokers.com
www.text-link-ads.com
www.linkadage.com

One last thought about linking services. Try to find a website that is as closely related to the topic of your website as possible because it will carry a lot more weight with the search engines.

While using a linking service may be the easiest way to get indexed, it’s not the best way to go because it will cost you money to get indexed. If you want to get indexed within a couple of days it is probably your only option.

If you don’t mind doing a little work you will get your website indexed within a couple of weeks using this next method. This is what I used to get this website indexed with Google and the other search engines in just 11 days.

Write an article and submit it to a bunch of article sites. Make sure that you write about something that relates directly to the topic of your website. Your article does not have to be a literary masterpiece. It only needs to be informative and written in a legible way. If your website topic has an appeal to a certain group of people, it will have the same appeal in the form of an article as well.

Because most article sites are very highly ranked, you will get the same result as you would if you had linked back from a PR linking service. The search engine will treat that link back the same as they would PR linked sites. The only difference is, you won’t have to pay for that link.

The only reason that it takes a bit longer to get indexed using article sites is that your article will need to be reviewed and accepted before it will go live on the article site. Most will take from a week to ten days before your article will go live. Once your article goes live, it shouldn’t take more than a few days for your site to get indexed with the top search engines.

You’ll get an added benefit using article sites because article sites are there to give webmasters a place to get content for their websites. If your article is picked up and posted on other websites, you will get additional link backs to your website without having to do a thing on your part which will help you with your ranking once you are indexed.

Unless you are pressed to get your website indexed within a couple of days, submitting to article sites is the best option for the better benefits it will bring at no cost. The extra work is not that much. It only took me about an hour and a half to get it all in place. Considering what you get back from it is more than worth the extra time and effort.

The only search engine that you will need to submit to will be MSN because they require you to fill in a security code. The only thing that you will need to supply is the URL to your main website page. MSN will do the rest. Here’s the URL. http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=SUNO

Below is a decent size list of article sites. Submit your article to all of them because many of them will have your article live within a few days. The faster your article goes live on as many sites as possible, the faster you will get indexed with the top search engines.

Good Luck!

http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.ezinearticles.com
http://www.articlecity.com
http://www.amazines.com
http://www.articledashboard.com
http://www.article-directory.net
http://www.submityourarticle.com/articles
http://www.magportal.com
http://www.isnare.com
http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl
http://www.webarticles.com
http://www.webarticles.com
http://articles4content.com
http://www.article-buzz.com
http://www.free-articles-zone.com
http://www.newarticlesonline.com
http://www.articletogo.com
http://www.articleworld.net
http://www.impactarticles.com
http://www.articlealley.com
http://www.directorygold.com
http://dir.salon.com
http://www.articlefever.com
http://www.content-articles.com
http://news.collectors.org
http://article-niche.com
http://blogtelecast.com
http://superpublisher.com
http://www.articlecentral.com
http://www.article-directory.net
http://www.article-emporium.com
http://www.ebooksnbytes.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://www.internethomebusinessarticles.com
http://www.site-reference.com
http://www.stickysauce.com

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After writing about Fall of the Gurus Manual last week got me thinking about some things to protect yourself from getting ripped off. If you sell your own products you need to have a robots.txt on your domain to protect your download page from being seen by the general surfing community.

A robots.txt is simply a text file that you place in the document root of your domain. What it does is tells the search engine robots what folders not to crawl and index. This is very important in protecting files and folders such as your cgi-bin that you don’t want seen by the general public.

If you promote and sell your own product, you definitely don’t want your download page listed on the search engines for everyone to see. The robots.txt will prevent that from happening.

The robots.txt in itself will not keep people from accessing your download page, it will just stop the search engines from listing it in their index. You need to take additional steps to protect it.

Most marketers, who sell their own products, use third party payment services. Pretty much all of them will require a landing page of some sort to where the consumer will be taken after payment has been made. This means that when the payment has been made the consumer must be sent to either a download page, a thank you page with a link to the download, or some type of instructional page on your domain.

The reason I mention the payment process is because the majority of websites that are compromised, are through these landing pages. If these web pages are not protected in some form they will inevitably be compromised.

Most of the time people who are looking to get stuff for free and can’t find the page that they are looking for in the search engines index will try to guess the most obvious directory and file names to where the download page may be.

My point is, don’t place your download page in an obvious place or give your download page an obvious name such as download/index.html or download/download.html or anything similar that can be easily guessed. Instead, place it several directories deep and use unique names for each directory that can’t possibly be guessed. You can use names that are total nonsense, which is probably the best way to go. Do the same for the download page as well. After all, you are not trying to rank for this page. You are trying to protect it.

If you have a domain other than the one that you are promoting your product from, you could also put your download page using the above method and redirect buyers to a download page on that domain which would further protect your product.

Another thing that you could do is password protect your download page. I used to sell some of my own products online. What I had was a script that would create a password and place that password on the landing page. When the user clicked away from that web page the password would be deleted. Scripts like this are pretty expensive and are really not required if you take the proper steps to protect your download page. If I had it to do again, I wouldn’t have bought that script. It does however add extra security.

Here are some of the things that you should have on your robots text.

There may be others that you’ll want to protect. Only you have that answer.

You can create a robots.txt by using an online robots.txt creator. Here’s one that you can use http://www.thepcmanwebsite.com/robots.txt_creator.shtml There are many others. You can run a search to find additional sites that perform this function. You can also create one yourself manually if you’d like. There are several online tutorials that will show you how.

If you haven’t done some or any of the things mentioned here to protect your products, you really should go and take care of it by implementing the procedures mentioned here to protect them.

I found a great FireFox plug-in over at Christer Edwards blog today. This is a very simple plug-in that tells you whether a web page or the entire website for that matter is in the Google index.

The plug-in, named ‘Dexter’, places a simple ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ on the far right of your status bar to let you know whether a particular web page or website is in Google’s index.

As Christer explains it over at his blog that the plug-in can be used to check and see if a directory, forum, or blog, is indexed with Google before submitting to them. This will save you from wasting your time with these websites and you will know that you are submitting only to quality websites.

To me this tool is much more valuable than that for us Internet Marketers because it will also allow us to check our own websites to see which web pages are indexed and which ones are not.

Can you see the value in this? Think about it. As a webmaster and an Internet Marketer, the more web pages on our website that we get indexed on Google, the more ways people will have of finding us. That’s the name of the game isn’t it?

As Internet Marketers, we now have a great tool that will let us know which pages we need to improve on in order to get them indexed. That very fact makes this a tool that no Internet Marketer should be without.

To get this invaluable free resource, go to Christer Edwards blog and download it. You will find the link about halfway down the post.

PS. If you find that this plug-in is as valuable as I do, please drop a link on your website back to Christer’s plug-in post. Christer also provides the code in his post to link back to the plug-in.

Something that you should know about using Pay Per Click with Google adwords that will save you a lot of money. I didn’t realize it until I had spent way more money than I intended to. Turn off the content network before you run any Google campaigns. The content network will suck up your money in a hurry and yield you with zero conversions. Take it from someone who learned that the hard way.

The content network will get you a lot of clicks. The problem is that those clicks are not targeted traffic at all. The content network consists of the Google ads that you see on non Google websites in case you don’t know what the Google content network is. Since most ads on web pages are setup in a way to make the ad blend in with the content, there are a lot of unintentional clicks from visitors of those websites. The last thing that you want is to have to pay for a click that someone didn’t mean to click on. Plus there is a fair amount of click fraud going on with a lot of these websites. So shut off the Google content network before you go live with your PPC ad.

Here’s something that your PPC ad should contain that will save you money that not nearly enough PPC advertisers do. Somewhere in your ad, either have the price, or put buy it here for the product that you are selling. If you don’t alert the searcher to the fact that it will cost them money to get your product, you will get a lot of freebie seekers that will never buy from you. Telling the searcher that there is a cost involved will save you a lot of wasted clicks and in return will save you money. Here are a couple of examples using the above method.

By doing just the two things mentioned here while they seem small will save you a ton of money and will yield you much higher profits. If you are running a PPC ad now and haven’t done these two things, every minute that passes, you are wasting money. Go pause your ad and apply the two strategies mentioned here. They will only take a minute or two to implement. For those who are not running a PPC campaign but intend to, keep these two things in mind when setting up a new ad campaign.

Christer Edwards, pointed out yesterday in response to the I’ve Been Scammed 37 Times post that I wrote that talked about what the appeal was to this ppc ad that seems to pop up no matter what search term you use. In that post I said that there was nothing obvious about that ad that would make it so popular.

What Christer basically said in his comment was that the advertiser was probably targeting people who had felt the same way about the things that they had bought. Makes perfect sense but it still surprises me that this technique of selling still works. That scam has been around forever.

I decided to check this out by running some Google searches that didn’t include the word scam or anything related to the word scam to see what would come up. You’d be amazed at how much you can learn by doing a little research, something that a lot of marketers don’t do enough of (myself included) in my opinion.

Before I go any further, let me explain a few things about Google’s ppc program that some here may not be aware of. While Google adwords is probably the most expensive Pay Per Click program on the net and at the same time is probably the fairest. While Adwords is the most expensive doesn’t necessarily mean that will be for all advertisers.

I know that some of you may be a little confused by what I just said so let me explain. Google ranks all Pay Per Click ads by performance. The better an ad does the cheaper it will cost you per click for the keyword that you have bid on. Here’s the kicker, if your ad is outperforming all the other ads for that keyword, you will be placed higher than the other ads at a lower price for the same keyword than the others. Performance and quality is everything to Google.

If you think that the sponsored ads that sit above the organic ads are there because the advertiser paid extra to have their ad placed there, you are wrong. Those ads are there because they outperformed everyone else for the keyword that was used to perform the search. I can tell you that those top advertisers are paying less than anyone else is and are probably paying less than if they were to advertise with any other ppc program.

Creating ads that are highly relevant to what you are selling and has a highly relevant well optimized landing page is what will help you get more click throughs and a better ppc ranking with Google. A well optimized ad and landing page will always outperform those that are not. Quality Score is what Google calls the performance ranking of ppc ads.

Now that the mini tutorial is over I will continue with what I found. I wanted to give you an overview so that you would know why I searched where I did and what you should do if you ever want to do any research on PPC advertising.

What I ran was three searches, all on information products. I ran all of the searches by its product name. I used only the sponsored ads that sit above the organic search results. As I said before they are the best performing ppc ads. If you want to know what others are doing, you want to research the best.

When doing research on paid ads don’t click on them. How would you like it if someone with no intentions of buying did that to you? To access the pitch page that the ad leads to, simply right mouse click on the ad link and choose ‘properties’. You will get a very long string of the URL most of which is Google’s code that tells Google who to charge for the clickthrough. Toward the end of the long string is the direct URL of the pitch page. Highlight the direct URL and copy and paste it into your address bar. Don’t copy and paste the entire string because the advertiser will be charged as if you had clicked on the ad.

Boy it took a long time to get to the point of this post. Hope you have stayed with me.? I found that the scam angle is well and alive. The three searches that I ran all used the, don’t get scammed angle to promote the products that they were selling. Keep in mind that these were the top performing ads on Google.

To me these ads are scams in themselves using the premise, if I scare people enough and get them to believe if I don’t buy here, I will get scammed if I buy somewhere else. These marketers are what gives IM a bad name. It is ashame because there are many legit marketers out there who have been labeled for something that they don’t deserve.

The three products that I checked out are from reputable business owners. There is nothing wrong with the products; it’s the tactics that the affiliates are using to promote them that is the problem here. There are far better ways to get a point across about a product than making up a bunch of BS to make a sale.

The Internet community has a very long memory and crap like this doesn’t go unnoticed and eventually it will come back to haunt the scammer in the form of posts in forums and other places warning others about what is going on.

If your name means something to you then I’d advise that you don’t use this kind of strategy to promote whatever product it is that you sell because your name could be branded forever. If that were to happen, you won’t be able to sell anything to save your own life. What else could happen is that someone could complain about your advertising to the search engine where you advertise. While the search engines robot may not be able to catch this type of thing you can bet that human eyes will spot it immediately. I will bet that the human element comes into play when someone complains. You could get banned from the search engine for life.

If people did more research, they would learn how to avoid being ripped off. The only reviews that are truly unbiased are the ones that don’t provide an affiliate link to the products site that they are reviewing. Those are the sites that will give you an impartial review. I know that truly unbiased review sites are far and between but they do exist. You just need to find them.

Some quick notes while this is still fresh on my mind. If you have contemplated hiring an SEO service here’s a few things to keep in mind before you go ahead and do so.

Run searches that are SEO related such as SEO, web page optimization, search engine optimization, etc. to see what comes up. There are plenty of people out there that offer this type of service.

Do some homework before you decide on which SEO to go with. I wouldn’t even consider an SEO service that is listed in the ppc section. I’d have a problem with a service that needs to use ppc to be found. If they can’t rank on the search engines for their own site how can you expect them to get you ranked? I’d stay away from this kind of service.

I wouldn’t hire anyone that isn’t in the top five of the search results for the searches that I run. They may cost a little more than the lower ranked services but it will be well worth it because chances are they are a lot better than the other guys.

Personally, I wouldn’t go that route because it’s not that hard to do it yourself. There is nothing mysterious about optimizing your web pages for the search engines. Besides, no one has your best interest at heart more than you do.

What’s up with that guy who has been scammed 37 times? It seems like I could run a search for apples and that ppc ad would still come up. He must be using every keyword and keyword phrase known to man. His advertising campaign must be costing him a fortune from all the clickthroughs that he must be getting. Unless he is a really dumb marketer he has got to be making money with the thing because that ad has been there for a long time.

I did click on the ad to see what he was doing so that I could add some good tidbits to post here but unfortunately there really isn’t anything to tell. What he is doing has been done many times over.

He offers a free report that reveals the three worse scams that he found. That free report is nothing but an email with three lines of the types of products that are scams. He doesn’t even name the products. Of course you are required to subscribe to his list in order to get the report. I opted out as soon as I received his email.

His pitch page is nothing special either. Same old review type of thing. He basically says out of 37 products that he bought 35 of them were total scams which leaves me with the question why does his ad say that he was scammed 37 times when he says on his pitch page that he was scammed 35 times? He also goes on to say that he had spent $4800 on the 37 products that he bought. He gives the impression that the 37 products were all information products. That would be about $130 on average, for each. That sounds pretty high considering the average ebook costs somewhere around, $30 to $50.

He also linked to the testimonials on the two sites that he was recommending in his review. I see nothing special there because just about everyone is doing that anyway.

There is nothing different about the two products that he recommends either. I know that one of them is good because I have read it. I can’t tell you about the other one because I never used it. They are not new products. They both have been around for a long time. So there’s nothing special there.

If you are waiting for me to tell you that I found something special that he is doing with that ppc campaign, sorry to tell you that I found nothing that would explain why he is doing so well.

The only thing that can explain it is for some reason people believe that review. I don’t know why because there’s nothing new or different about it from any other review that I have seen.

Have you read a headline like this or similar to this from spam emails, or on website pitch pages from marketers? I sure have. These marketers will tell you anything to get you to buy the next best thing on IM.

You are told that the new IM secret that will be revealed to you will change your life forever and is not just a bunch of regurgitated strategies that have been written over and over again by just about every marketer on the net. You get excited and eagerly give your credit card information to find that the big secret is not much of a secret at all and is generally just a bunch of made up nonsense. Does this sound familiar?

I can tell you that I will take regurgitated over any supposed secret formula that is supposed to change my life forever because there is a good reason that these strategies are taught by so many and that reason is they work. They have been proven to work many times over. Don’t let theses marketers confuse you by using the word regurgitated. They use the word to somehow down play or discredit good proven strategies in an attempt to make you believe that you need what they have to sell if you want to be successful.

I think I’ve said this before somewhere on this site that I am a sucker for a good sales pitch. I will admit that I have spent a fair amount of money on information products on and off the net throughout my adult life.

Don’t get me wrong. All information products are not crap. There are some that are very good but on the other hand do not contain the big secret that will change your life forever either. The well written and informative information products that are out there all have one thing in common. They all use the same formula of taking a proven strategy and adding their own twist to it. Forget about the idea that one day a light bulb went off in the author’s head that made them millionaires overnight. They may have become overnight successes but the chances of someone repeating it and having the same instant success is minute. There’s a reason for those disclaimers on their website. There are no guarantees. Remember that.

This site has only been here a very short time and already I have had a couple of people ask me how to make money online. Online marketing requires a combination of many things to make it successful. There isn’t one set thing that will make you successful. It’s a combination of all of them.

The best thing that anyone can ever do is learn. Don’t expect one information product to get you to where you want to go. Internet Marketing is an ongoing learning process. Those who are successful continue to learn about IM. That’s partly why they are successful.

There is a lot of good info right here on this site that will help you with that learning process. You will not find any hyped claim that you will be successful overnight or will be successful at all for that matter. I’m telling you in advance so that you don’t waste your time. IM requires quite a bit of time and work on your part before you will ever see any benefit from it at all. You will benefit if you stick with it long enough. You just won’t see it as quickly as you probably would like.

Free information is generally the best because the author doesn’t have some hidden agenda and won’t give you a bunch of hyped garbage. I can tell you right here and now that if you are looking for get rich quick information, the material on this site is not for you. The fact that several of my readers spend hours on this site reading through everything here tells me that I did a good job of presenting it. It’s nice to see that there are some out there that take IM seriously. Those who are willing to learn will do well.

If you are just starting to build your online business or haven’t yet begun here are some things to take into consideration to avoid wasting time and money.

Make a plan of what you want your online business to be. Once you have decided where you want to go with your online business do some research on whatever it is that you are planning to do with your new website. It is very important that you research whatever it is that you plan to do with your idea because you have to know where you are headed and how much it will cost you to get everything in place. You may find that it is not worth pursuing. Research will help you avoid making costly mistakes.

Run searches on like minded websites to see what your future competitors are doing. You will be amazed at how much you will learn by researching what others are already doing. Look at how they have laid out their website and what kind of products they sell and most importantly what information do they provide. After you have researched some websites you will need to ask yourself, can I do it better? If the answer is yes, move on with it. If the answer is no, scrub it and find something more workable. Doing a little research of other websites will help you understand what you will need to do, one way or another.

If you find after you have done the research that it is worth pursuing, sit down and set a realistic budget. Itemize all expenditures from hosting costs all the way down to advertising costs. If you don’t know what everything will cost, I can guarantee you that you will waste a lot of money needlessly and possibly run out of money. Don’t let that happen. For the little time that it will take to do this, there is no reason or excuse not to. It’s really important that you know what everything will cost before you ever start because you may find that you can’t afford it.

Design your website to have a look and feel to whatever your business theme is. For example, if you have a website that is about health and well being you want the look and feel of your website to be one of good health. Add some graphics if you need to, to give your website the look and feel that you want. In other words, make it look like a website that is about good health.

Make your website so that it can be maintained easily. Don’t create a website with all kinds of bells and whistles if it makes your website difficult to maintain. You don’t want to spend all of your time editing this or that to keep things running smoothly. Save yourself from that frustration.

Your website should be easy to navigate. It should be setup in such a way that your visitors can find whatever it is they are looking for easily. You want your website to say here I am instead of your visitors saying where the heck is it? If you are going to have a big website that has a lot of content, create a user sitemap and make the link to it prominent on the main page so that your visitors can refer to it when looking for something specific. Also setup a search option on your website to allow your visitors to run searches on whatever it is they are trying to find. While flash may be cool to have as an opening to a website it is generally not practical for a business site. The dialup days are over and people are too impatient to wait for a website to load and will not be as impressed as you may think. Most people click away from flash sites before the flash presentation even loads. I know that I do. Your website should have a business look but at the same time it should be inviting to your visitors. If you have to compromise between one or the other, always go with inviting.

Whatever information you provide should be written in a way that anyone can understand. The school days are over and you are not out to impress your teacher. You are providing good information that is easy for your visitors to read. Keep in mind that you most likely will have people on your website where your language is not the first language for some of your visitors. You don’t want to impress your visitors with big words, you want to provide them with good information that everyone can understand. Keep this in mind while writing the information for your website.

If you setup your online business the right way from the very beginning you will end up with an online business that you can be proud of.