Sorry Smart Traffic, Didn’t Know it’s Illegal to Give Bad Reviews
I’d like to apologies to Smart-Traffic.co.uk for giving them a negative review. They’ve informed me my review was illegal.
I received a phone call from them yesterday. Apparently they’ve been advised by their “lawyers” that they should take legal action against me if I leave my negative review of their company on my blog. I was told “just because you have a blog doesn’t mean you can say whatever you want.” I told him I was just reporting my experience. He said something along the lines of “it’s costing us money and you can’t prove everything I said was true” as the reason I have to take the review down.
So as they insisted the review has been removed from this website. You can now find the smart-traffic.co.uk review on a much more popular and high ranking website . You can rest assured that if Smart Traffic still have issues with this, I will seek more media coverage of the subject. Giving a bad service is one thing, threatening legal action against anyone openly reporting their experience is another. I’m not going to let a corporation get away with bullying tactics.
By the way Smart-Traffic, don’t bother calling me again. If you want to get in touch, you can email me, so that everything we both say is recorded. That seems fair doesn’t it?
By far the Easiest way to Pick a Domain
Just wanted to say I think this site is an awesome domain search tool. Type some keywords and it produces a list of available domains and it’s all done in an AJAX way so it’s all done without you needing to change the page.
Rank vs. Traffic
We all know higher ranks equal more traffic but it’s hard to say how much more traffic. Here’s an example for a single keyword I got to number 1 yesterday.
The first three points on this little graph are three days when my site ranked 4th in Google. I was getting around 35 visitors per day. Then I climbed to 2nd and my traffic jumped to 130 per day. Finally I got to number 1 and my traffic just about doubled to 260.
Is Content King?
A lot of SEO gurus in forums bang on about building great content. That’s the way it should be and I agree this is very important, but until you’re really established, even the best piece of content in the world isn’t going to do you much good if no one sees it in the first place. You need an audience including people that publish on the web before you’re going to get any extra recognition for your great content through search engines.
I’ve got a few decent posts on this blog I think like the one about getting reindexed in Google but as no one has wanted to link to my site, I’m not going to rank very highly for anything but a few long tail searches. I know I could rank better if I put the effort in but it’s not much fun and and I don’t get anything out of it except a few more comments (the joy of getting comments on here is the only reason I write anything at all on here really). So good content (that people who publish online will be interested in) + effort in contacting those people = good search rank.
Where I’ve Been
I’ve been neglecting this blog for a little while now. I’m sorry about that but remember, this is just something I do for fun so I’m not promising regular updates. What I’ve been doing while I’ve been away is working hard on a new affiliate website. I’m actually very proud of it despite not making a penny from it yet. I’ve been working on getting a good lot of search traffic and I’m now ranking top on Google for the most competitive keyword I’ve ever gone for. It’s been a lot of hard work but I’m sure it will pay off.
Planning Link Acquisition
Acquisition isn’t a word I use in conversation often. I’m not trying to sound clever, I’ve just spend 5 minutes trying to think of a simpler title but “Planning Link Getting Rate” didn’t really work well.
I’ve been working on a new affiliate site. I’m pretty excited about it. Yesterday it was my second most visited site a nd it’s only been running for two months. I’m not making any money from it yet, just trying to make it popular. Anyway, I thought I’d share my plan of how I’m going to get more links.
Sorry, I’m not showing where I’m planning on getting the links from. I just wanted to let you see I’m not planning on getting all my links at once and that it’s a good idea to make a plan.
Sorry, I have to keep some secrets.
I’m Sorry about my Dull Looking Blog
This interesting post clearly shows that blogs with lots of pictures, videos and lists attract more attention that those with just text. I’m sorry my blog currently looks so boring. I’m going to do something about it:
- I’m going to include more pictures.
- There will be more videos.
- I’ll make some lists
One day I’m going to put a picture in every post just to make it look nicer (even if it’s not entirely necessary).
That's better.
Top 10 Google Traffic Predictor
Here’s an easy way to predict how much traffic you would get if your site were at a different spot on page 1 of Google. You can also use it to work out how much money that would bring you (assuming the keyword generates the same conversion rate as the rest of your traffic). The Google Traffic Predictor is based on leaked AOL click through rate data.
Network Blazer Review
Overview: £20 per month to build and host easy to make affiliate websites.
I first joined Network Blazer with a free trial which came with an ebook which has now been replaced by Info Product Killer. Network Blazer is run by a man with a split personality. His evil side is an lazy, arrogant, 17 year old, international sex machine and affiliate millionaire with a fondness of the word “numpty”. In some of his videos he talks about Affi as if he is a different person and at one point even received a text message from him. Thankfully his alter ego seems to have disappeared although I’m not entirely sure that his technical support isn’t another side to his complex personality.
Network Blazer itself is a content management system designed to make building an affiliate website easy. It does this well, this most complex code you’ll need to understand is [LINK=http://www.example.com/]Buy Toys heres![/LINK]
Network Blazer provides an easy interface for uploading pictures, text and most importantly price comparison charts which are updated automatically.
One of the best features is that you don’t need to pay for a host or deal with FTPing everything for the site since all sites are hosted on Network Blazers servers. There is no limit on the number of sites you can host on their which is a great deal in itself. It has a members’ only forum with lots of nice people and no egos.
The downside is that you have no control over the code. If you want to do anything which isn’t built into the system, there’s no way to do it. For example, Google analytics is built into the system, but Webmaster tools isn’t. You can’t edit CSS (well you can change the background and text colours) which makes all Network Blazer sites look very similar. This can make them an easy target for a manual penalty and you might need to deal with a Google reconsideration request. Many updates to the backend are talked about but rarely delivered with a few acceptations such as servers based in the US to help with localisation.
Network Blazer Conclusion
If you have could fully edit your sites, I would recommend Network Blazer to just about anyone who wants to get into affiliate marketing. But you can’t so I’m going to say it’s a great all in one affiliate website package for people who don’t have much experience building websites.
Affiliate Christmas Sales Chart
He’s a little graph I knocked together to show how you can expect your affiliate sales to go over Christmas. This is basically my Amazon sales from last Christmas. Obviously it isn’t going to match for ever market but it might give you an idea. I was mostly promoting a baby toy and a video game thingy (I’m not using the word “thingy” to imply a lack of knowledge on the subject, but just to be vague). It’s interesting to see that by far the best week for sales is the week around New Year’s Day.
My top 5 days of the festive period were:
29th
27th
30th
26th
28th
Surprisingly these are all after Christmas Day. So the fun only really begins on Boxing Day. The best day before Christmas Day was the 15th.