Perhaps you’ve heard of it, perhaps not. Maybe you’ve heard people in the SEO community refer to “ALN” and had no idea what they were talking about. Well, in this post, I’m going to shed a bit of light and offer my thoughts on this particular “link network” after having tinkered with it.

Some time ago, I blogged about the pros and cons of blog networks, and I went into some detail about blog networks in general. Authority Link Network (aka “ALN”) is basically a blog network, but it is unlike any other one I’ve ever used. The main thing that sets ALN apart from the other ones I’ve tried in the past is that along with the paid option you would expect, there is also a “free” option.

Yes, the quotation marks around the word “free” imply that there is a catch. However, it’s a pretty dang neat catch. If you want to get access to ALN without paying, you simply have to add a blog or two of your own to the network. This pretty brilliant system makes it so that fresh, quality blogs are constantly being added to the network. Naturally, there are some guidelines for sites that are submitted to be accepted.

Criteria
- You can only submit sites that are built on the WordPress CMS, version 2.6 or newer. If you are running older versions than 2.6, finding a good blog network is probably the least of your problems.

- The “Hello World” default WordPress post must be removed. No brainer.

- The default blogroll must also be removed. Sorry, I know you like linking to WordPress Planet whenever possible.

- XML-RPC must be enabled. If you don’t know what this is, it doesn’t matter. Just go to the “Writing” section under the “Settings” tab in your WordPress backend area and click the box to enable it.

- The blog can’t exist in a subdomain or a subdirectory. It needs to be on the root of the site.

- You must use any theme OTHER than the default WordPress theme on the site. Don’t be lazy.

- Have multiple categories (every post shouldn’t be posted under “uncategorized”).

- The site MUST be PR1 or higher. PR0 sites are not accepted. Also, if you are submitting a site with a TLD other than any of the following: .com .net .org .info .co .ca .me .us .biz .co.uk .com.au .net.au .ws and .t, it will basically count as only half of a regular submission.

If it seems like they are a bit picky, that’s because they are. The strict guidelines help ensure that the network isn’t clogged up with a bunch of junk sites. There are some other obvious rules (you can’t remove articles/links that have been posted to your sites) and a few not-so obvious rules. You’ll have to read through their FAQ for detailed info.

If you don’t want to bother with adding your own sites to the network, there is always the paid option. The cheapest plan (called the “Basic” plan) currently costs $14.95/mo. Considering the quality of the sites on this network versus most of the networks I’ve seen/used, I think that’s an extremely reasonable price.

Click here to get started with ALN.

A lot of my “real life” friends are engineers. Mostly mechanical engineers, but one is a software engineer. Often times I feel excluded because I am in a room full of engineers and I stand alone as a filthy capitalist. But then one day it hit me: I am an engineer.

When I first heard about “social engineering” it was in the context of phishing passwords on MySpace. Not very glamorous. However, it recently occurred to me that a lot of my SEO efforts can actually be classified as social engineering. More specifically, methods such as this or this. Those are just two examples of methods I use that I have detailed on this site. It really only scratches the surface as far as what you can do when you really put your mind to acquiring links by thinking outside of the box. Especially if you don’t mind being a little sneaky about it.

Am I saying that I go around creating fake online personalities and use them to gain access to websites that I will somehow exploit? No. I’m also not saying that I don’t!

The same software engineer I mentioned earlier recently explained to me that a lot of cases you hear about in the media relating to big companies having their security compromised are actually due to social engineering. It is more likely that someone somehow found a vulnerability on the inside (such as a clueless secretary with too much access) than a white van full of hackers in black jumpsuits plugging mysterious boxes into the back of the building.

You are always going to have competitors that are buying rankings. They will buy directory submissions, social bookmarks, regular old paid links, all that good stuff. Stuff that most of us do. By applying and creating social engineering link building methods (and succeeding) in addition to those standard methods, your competition doesn’t have a chance. Unless they evolve to that level, they simply have no access to the type of valuable links that are available. Then they go and make excuses to their clients (probably something about domain age or page loading speeds).

Perhaps you’re hoping I’m going to get a little bit more specific? Well, I think that would sort of defeat the purpose of what I’m saying here. This is a public blog, after all. I’m talking about using that big old brain of yours to come up with social engineering methods to acquire links that no one else can get. Just focus on whatever website it might be that you want to get a backlink on, and figure it out. Granted, some feats would be dang near impossible. If you can get a footer link on Google’s home page, then I will assume blackmail or something highly illegal was involved. But there are vulnerabilities everywhere. Don’t get discouraged, get excited.

In conclusion: Knowing how to use automated/paid links properly is still a very powerful weapon in your arsenal. However, without getting those few precious authority links that the other, inferior SEOs cannot access, it’s going to be a long and unexciting ride trying to make a buck, if you’re playing in anything remotely competitive.

Of course, you could always create incredible original content and optimize user experience to the point where people just can’t help but link to your site…but who has the time for that?

Like most of my ideas for posts, this one came from a thread on Wickedfire. My response there was short, but don’t worry, I have reserved my unnecessarily detailed and long-winded response for my blog!

First off, I know there are still some of you that don’t understand the value of Wikipedia links. I’m not even going to try to convince you otherwise. You’re better off just changing your mind right now and going with it. Yes, they will bear the “nofollow” attribute. If you don’t believe in the power of nofollow links (especially from an authority page), then you may return to digital point and go about your business.

Also, let’s not forget that in many cases, a well-placed Wikipedia place will result in targeted referral traffic.

Okay, so here are the simplified steps:

1) Find a recent, relevant news publication. I prefer interviews, because you can include a quote from the interview in the Wikipedia page you’re targeting.

2) Post this story on your site. A re-written copy will have a better chance of success, but I’ve also had links to stories I just copy + pasted stick for months and months (with no end in sight).

3) Do not put any ads/affiliate links on this page.

4) Place your link using proper formatting as a reference. If you don’t know how to properly format a Wikipedia link, see their documentation on this subject.

5) Do not do this repeatedly from the same IP within a short period of time.

After the dust has settled (perhaps a month or so), you may want to get a little ballsy and put ads/affiliate links on the page. Or, if you want to be more conservative about it, just enjoy the visitors you receive and the SE credibility of having sticky inbound links from Wikipedia.

Yes, Wikipedia does have editors. Some of them take more pleasure than others in being hall monitors and looking for links to delete. Also, pages related to certain high-competition niches are monitored a bit closer than others, since they are frequent spam targets. Try to find creative ways to fly under the radar. There are currently nearly 76 million Wikipedia pages indexed on Google, so, they can’t find everything. And even if they do, if you have followed the steps above, your link has the best chance of not being cock-blocked.

Oh, and one more tip…internal linking on Wikipedia is obviously very important and powerful. It’s also a lot easier to get away with dropping a link to another Wikipedia page than it is to an external site. So, if you don’t have any luck getting a link to stick on the high-profile page you’re originally targeting, you might want to consider dropping the link on a related but less desirable/less monitored page. That should be easier to stick, and once it does, you can work on building backlinks to the page from other, more authoritative Wikipedia pages to enhance the power of your link.

Okay. That’s all. More beer now.

You may recall a post of mine not too long ago about using Google Insight to find hot new niches. The site I’m about to talk about was originally built because of that same simple method. I recently sold it, so I thought I would immortalize its memory by making this post.

Out of consideration for the new owner, I’m not going to discuss the niche or show the URL here. If you are dying of curiosity, message me for more info. But for goodness sakes, don’t obsess about niche specifics. Find your own gold!

I will now detail exactly what I did to quickly rank n’ bank with this one. I will assume you read the post about Google Insight, so we will skip that step. Actually, that’s not even a step, that’s a pre-step. So, here we go:

Step One – Building a Product Filled Site
Using PhpBay for WordPress, it is easy to create lots and lots of pages with stuff your visitors are hopefully looking for. Because PhpBay results are html based, the SE’s still see it as unique(ish) content. You can tweak the settings so that duplicate results are omitted, adding to its uniqueness. I use a WP plugin called Duplicate Post to make it easy to create lots of similar pages where I may just be making one small tweak from the original (i.e., red widget to blue, to yellow, etc). I ended up with something like 300 different product pages, the vast majority of which contained no content other than the relevant listings pulled from Ebay. The ever popular All in One SEO plugin was used to take care of on-site SEO.

3 pages of additional relevant content without any product listings were added and linked to in the sidebar. The Google XML Sitemap plugin was used to generate a sitemap which was linked to in the footer.

Step Two – Disregard Team Fortress 2, Acquire Links
Keep in mind that we are trying to rank n’ bank here, not necessarily build a site for long-term revenue. Then again, sometimes you get long-term revenue anyway, but for all intents and purposes, I was looking for short-term gains here. Because of this, a hefty dose of dodgy link building was applied.

Utilizing my 2k links/day Drip Feed Blasts subscription, I blasted 2k direct profile links per week to the site. Thanks to the set-it-and-forget-it nature of DFB, this was easily achieved with minimal effort. I also ran Drip Feed Login regularly. If you’re familiar, DFL is a program included with a DFB subscription (are you keeping up?) that you install locally on your machine and run that periodically logs into the xrumer generated profiles created by DFB, causing links to your profiles to appear on the homepages of the respective forum targets where it shows the users currently online. Pretty neat, right??

I used a couple different blog networks to generate around 300 in-content links in various spun articles.

I suppose I should have mentioned earlier that the domain was a hyphenated EMD (exact match domain). I used very little anchor text variation in most of the links I generated. Mostly singular/plural versions of the main keyword.

I spent probably an hour at most doing manual blog commenting. I used two relevant sites of my own to link to the new site from their respective sidebars.

Total Time Spent
Had I had known I was going to blog about this site from the beginning, I guess I would have kept better records. Estimations will have to do.

I would say that total time spent from researching the niche, building the site, and building the links, I probably spent somewhere in the ball park of 6-8 hours.

Revenue
Prior to being sold the site was making a steady $400-$450 month. It sold for a little over 3 grand. The total revenue after the sale was $5,362.59.

Why Sell?
This is the main question I get when selling any site, and I take it as a compliment. Because of the niche, and despite the high volume of clicks it was sending to Ebay, the traffic was pretty low quality. I didn’t like running a campaign with Ebay with such a low EPC. So, I decided to cut it. But I think in the right hands it could be tweaked and made into something much better. You know, by someone willing to spend more than half a day on it.

I know this case study is not very organized and lacks fancy graphics. I probably left out something important, too. Feel free to ask any questions you may have below.

EDIT

Okay I forgot something many of you will probably find pretty important. The site IS currently sandboxed on Google. Not de-indexed, mind you, but it ranks on like page 10 or something for its main keyword. This sandboxing happened soon into the site’s life. It still received (and still receives) hundreds of unique visitors per day thanks to prominent rankings on Yahoo! and Bing.

Some backlinks of actual quality would probably easily revive the site on Google.

You like that stupid title? Yeah, I know you do!

Today I’m going to talk about blog networks. To be more specific, I’m going to talk about services offered that include multiple blog posts over a network of blogs all owned by the same person/company, with the aim of acquiring quality, in-content links from various web properties. As with pretty much all SEO services, there is plenty of garbage to separate from the gold. I’m going to talk about some qualifying factors I look for before choosing to use or not to use (or continue to use) a blog network service.

Footprints
If you’re buying 100 blog posts, the whole dang point is to make it appear to Google as if 100 different sites decided your site was worth mentioning. I cannot say with certainty exactly what factors are analyzed by Google in order to determine the uniqueness of any given group of sites. Anyone who tells you with certainty is either a liar or in breach of their NDA with Google and soon to lose their employment. However, we can use logic to determine what criteria should be met to ensure that the posts look unique in the eyes of Googlezilla:

• •Unique IPs – Most all services offer blog posts on sites hosted on unique C-class IPs (if they want to compete)
• •Unique Themes – Does using a small handful of themes over multiple sites necessarily make a blog network worthless? I’m my opinion, no. But I’m definitely willing to spend more money on a network that uses lots of unique themes.
• •Unique Content – Whether the articles are all hand-written (super expensive) or they are spun, you obviously want the articles to be unique.
• •Anchor Text/URL Diversity – This is very important to me. Not all blog network services offer a lot of flexibility in spinning your anchor text or URLs. In some cases you might not want to spin your URL, because you are only targeting one particular page. I understand that, but you should still be spinning your anchor text to some extent to make your links appear more natural.
• •TLD Diversity – Not a make or break quality, but I’m not willing to spend as much on a network of blog posts that are all on .info domains.

Shit That Pisses Me Off About Crappy Blog Networks
Obviously the goal of anyone who creates a blog network is to make money. That is all fine and dandy. The trouble comes about when sharp corners are cut to make the network more profitable. Here are some red flags that the blog network you are working with/considering working with is a steaming pile of poo:

• •Minimal Inbound Links – How hard is it to at least drip feed some links to your blogs so that those of us paying for posts on them might actually get a tasty drop of link juice out of them?
• •Pray for Indexing – Related to the above gripe, there are many crappy blog networks that simply do not get crawled because Google doesn’t give a flying fig about them. Why? AINT GOT NO LINKZ. Or worse yet, the domain was blacklisted a long time ago.
• •HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DOG AND MAKE HIM LOSE WEIGHT AND GROW HIS PENIS WITH MONEY MADE FROM FOREX INVESTING – Okay, if the network has a ton of posts not even remotely relevant to each other or the title of the site, I might still use it. But a niche specific network or a big network that gives you the flexibility to decide what category of sites you want your content on is worth infinitely more. Nobody wants their well written article posted right above some gibberish post about dick pills.

I have used a lot of different networks, this is true. Definitely more bad than good. To share all of the good ones would be shooting myself in the foot, but I will mention one that I used just recently that I’m quite satisfied with, offered by LinkMason. Visit the link for the details.

So, basically I got this far in the post, then got distracted by YouTube videos about that homeless guy with a radio announcer voice, and then got involved in a heated email thread with some friends, and now I’ve completely forgotten where I was going with this post (if anywhere), so I guess I’ll just stop now.

Happy New Year!

We may be well into November, but believe it or not, there is still time to take advantage of the huge surge of holiday spending online by establishing brand new sites and getting organic traffic.

Find the Golden Terms
Your first friend in this process is going to be Google Insights. Using this handy dandy tool, you’re going to want to search something general, such as “shoes” or “toys’ or whatever. Scroll down to the bottom of the results and you’ll see “Rising Searches”. Take a peek at them and see if anything looks interesting. You might want to avoid brand names…you might not. Depends how off-white your SEO hat is.

“Breakout” terms can be golden. They can also be crap. “Breakout” means that the term has recently experienced a surge in search volume of 5,000% or more. Of course, if it gets 2 searches a day, and then one day it got 100 for whatever reason, it will be labeled a “breakout” term.* Do a little research before you go domain crazy. Obviously some breakout keywords are next to worthless (especially with small search volume) while some may be worthwhile. Some breakout terms and the terms that show 200-500% increase (or more) are going to be the money makers.

Try to Snag Them
You might be surprised how easy it is to find available .coms for some of these terms since they may have only recently landed on the radar. Take your list of prospects to Namecheap (the promo code this month is FAMILYWARMTH) and see what you can find.

Build Links, Utilize the Boost before the Deadly Dance
If you’ve ever built/ranked a site in your life, you know that new sites are usually easy to quickly rank for their targeted term (assuming it’s not crazy competitive), at least in the short-term. It is very common for new sites to hang out on the 1st page for a few days or a few weeks before Google asks it to dance. The “dance”, of course, is the endearing term that has come to represent the seemingly random and chaotic position changes that can occur shortly after a new site gets indexed and ranked. Depending on your link building techniques and consistency, the site may settle back down on the 1st page (possibly in an even better position), or it may be cast out to page 24 where it will shrivel and die. In some rare cases, new sites like this actually hit the front page and stick for the long-term. But, that’s besides the point…

The idea is to build sites around these trending keywords, throw them together quickly, slap on some monetization such as Adsense/Amazon/EPN, whatever, and milk that honeymoon traffic you get. You want to try to time it so that your site attains that initial favorable position in the middle of the online shopping frenzy that happens at the end of this month well into the middle of December. So, the time to start building is NOW.

If you need link building ideas, they are all over this site. I know my navigation sort of sucks. Think of it as a barrier for entry.

And, of course, if the site you build is halfway decent, perhaps you can continue expanding it and by the time the next holiday season rolls around you can put it to even better use.

*I take no responsibility if I fucked up my math somehow

I like making websites. I really do. Creating content is a royal pain in the ass, but I like taking a WordPress theme, tweaking it, and using it to create a website that is actually somewhat useful and looks nice at the same time.

I noticed that one of my sites had a huge spike in traffic this morning, so I checked it out. Turns out a certain blogger had referenced my site and it was published on Yahoo! Finance. Pretty sweet. I then went and spent some time taking a close look at that site, pondering why it has done so much better than similar sites of mine in the same general niche. Especially since it is so clearly an affiliate site.

The main reason, I have deduced, is that it actually provides some goddamn value to the visitor. Yes, it took me like 3 days to build the whole thing and have all of the proper navigation in place (and I still add to it once a month or so). And come to think of it, I spent more time on that aspect of that particular site than I ever do on the rest of them that only earn a fraction of what this particular one earns. This is also reflected in the 25% average bounce rate (like 20% for its primary keyword).

The thing is, I can SEO shitty substance-free sites until I’m blue in the face, and I can profit from them to some degree, but ultimately they are going to hit a glass ceiling. Those sites are never going to be shared via email or referenced on prominent, authority websites. In the long-term, I’m better off having 10 of the sites like my precious little golden child site than 100 decent ones with limited potential.

I would say the three main things you need to keep in mind when building a new site are the following:

Design
Obviously. People (including you and I) often bounce right away if a site looks amateur. If you can’t make it look right, you might as well pay someone else to make it look right.

Navigation
They say your visitors should always have multiple routes in which they can get to your inner pages. I’ve found that big shiny logos really help, for instance, if you’re doing some sort of e-commerce site with products from different brands. Little text links in the sidebar won’t always cut it. Drop down menus are always good. A prominent SEARCH feature that WORKS is good. Don’t be afraid to create sub-directories and really refine what your visitor is looking for (if the niche permits it). Once people are a few clicks in, they are already invested in your site, and if you show them exactly what they’re looking for (instead of general results), conversion rates obviously go up.

Resources
Even if they don’t help sell anything or push traffic through your affiliate links, add some helpful shit. Whether it be how-to guides related to your niche, FAQ, or even just a collection of helpful related videos embedded from YouTube, it gives your site credibility that can pay off in the long-term. It also keeps people clicking around. Don’t even monetize these pages. Just put them there. You might also want to find a way to link to them from Wikipedia. These are the pages that are most likely to gain backlinks naturally.

A while back I talked about a super effective, white-hat method of gaining powerful backlinks. In a nutshell, it’s a crafty approach to getting other webmasters to link to your site. Obviously, the effectiveness of this method (or any link begging) is going to be drastically improved if your site actually looks like its contributing to the internet and isn’t just a spammy, dime-a-dozen, junk site.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve got some pretty junky sites in my portfolio. I think I might lose my off-white card if I didn’t. All I’m saying here is that the extra work it takes to build something useful can pay off huge in the long-term, and long-term is what the SEO game is all about, as far as I’m concerned.

Maybe my next post won’t be so squeaky clean. I’d hate to have you guys think I went soft. I’ll cook something up.

If you haven’t heard of Drip Feed Blasts (DFB), well then thank your lucky stars that you read my dang blawg. This is one of those tools that a handful of SEO’s are using the dickens out of, but most are hoping to keep quiet so that it doesn’t get adopted by the bumbling retards of the SEO world and subsequently become worthless. Since we all know only the elite read my blog, and the folks from places like Warrior Forum think this place is immoral and far too realistic, it is of course safe for me to promote DFB here.

Those of you who hang out at Wickedfire (the true WF) know about Guerilla. When he’s not schooling people in political/economic debates, he drops golden nuggets of wisdom. He is one of the people behind this awesome new service. If you are growing impatient, you may check out the DFB sales thread on WF…but only if you promise to come back here and read the rest of my post.

What it Does

Ever heard of Xrumer? Of course you have. You already know that it is a somewhat pricey link spamming utility, famous for leaving buttloads of pharmacy type links (not exclusively, of course) on forums all over the internet. Some traditional white-hat SEOs (read: bitch niggaz) frown on this software because they believe it is a one-way ticket to Google purgatory. You already know how I feel about link blasting.

The trouble with Xrumer is that the learning curve is a bit high. Another problem is that, well, you have to use it yourself. F-that, right? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a service where you could just enter your URLs with varying anchor text and schedule it to run daily? Dang…that sure would be nice. But where the shit are you supposed to find such a utopianistic service?

Tha’ts right, DFB. What a smarty pants you are. The DFB interface is about as easy to use as it possibly could be, and it allows you to blast 500, 1000, or 2000 links per day (depending on your subscription level). Pricing is $49/mo, $67/mo, and $99/mo, respectively. Anyone who has ever paid for a single Xrumer blast already knows what a ridiculous value that is. You can create different blasts to run on different days, and you can combine blasts to run together. You can mix and match URLs and anchor text to your heart’s content. I haven’t seen a truly valuable link building service like this available in a very long time. Get it.

Support
Phenomenal. There is a forum where the creators of DFB not only respond to questions, but also contribute valuable SEO tips and strategies.

Pinging
DFB does currently include their own in-house pinging service, but it is still being worked on and isn’t yet 100% functional. In the future I hear there are plans to release a custom pinging solution within DFB from the creator of MegaPinger.

What is this MegaPinger You Speak of?
It is exactly what it sounds like. If you need to ping a ton of URLs, you need MegaPinger. It has proxy support, unlimited URL support, and can support up to 500 threads at once. That’s a lot of support.

Wait Why do I Need to Ping my URLs?
Whether you are building lots of backlinks with DFB, manually, or with some other automated system, it is a very good practice to ping the URLs that contain your backlinks in order to get them indexed efficiently. MegaPinger is by far the best and most cost effective way to do this. Currently you can get a lifetime license for only $27.

This is pretty much as white hat as it gets. Or at least as white hat as I get, in any case. It is also incredibly effective. I’ve been implementing this technique for a few weeks now and the results have been phenomenal.

You can’t beat relevant, authority links. You just can’t. Especially if they’re do-follow/one-way links. Of course, reciprocal ones aren’t so bad either. So, what’s the best way to get them? Well, you could of course simply email the webmasters of sites that you’d like to have a link on and ask. In some cases, this will work. It usually helps to be polite, throw in some flattery about their site, and maybe offer a link back in exchange. But, depending on the niche, you’re going to have varying degrees of success. Despite your advanced charm, some emails will still be dismissed. I’m going to teach you a simple method to drastically improve the success of good old fashion link-panhandling.

What You Need
Aside from a computer, the Internet, and your incredible powers of persuasion, you will need to install this Firefox plugin.

What You Do
Step A: Find a juicy site or blog in your niche with high PR and tons of inbound links. Ideally something ranking for a keyword you’re trying to dominate (or maintain). Do they have a links page? Perhaps a blogroll? If yes, proceed to step B.

Step B: Navigate that mouse of yours to your Tools menu in Firefox and select “Check Page Links”. This will activate that new plugin you installed. You will see the progress at the bottom. If there are lots of links on the page, it may take a couple minutes. Go roll a cigarette or perhaps get briefly involved in political debate on Wickedfire. When you come back, you will notice all the links on the page have been highlighted. Proceed to step C.

Step C: Look for red and yellow highlighted links. These links are the problematic ones. Most webmasters don’t have time to check their blogroll often and are usually linking to a few dead sites. Every now and then the plugin will mistakenly mark a working site as a problem site, so in the name of being thorough, we’re going to manually check these. Open up a notepad document so you can catalog the URLs that are broken. Make a list. Proceed to Step D.

Step D: Find the email contact for the site. Create a new email. Proceed to Step E.

Step E: Now it’s time to sweet talk the pants off these bitches. Let them know that you are so-and-so from yourspammyasssite.com. Tell them you were browsing their links and happened to notice the following links are bad: badlink1.com, badlink2.com, badlink3.com, etc. Casually mention that Google tends to frown upon dead or broken links, and it can often hurt your search engine rankings when you are linking to resources that don’t exist. After all of this, mention that if they feel that your site is relevant, you would appreciate it if they would consider linking to you.

I Dunno Dude, This Sounds Like Too Much Work
How dare you. First of all, Rome wasn’t built out of hay, okay? When you shoot out a handful of these emails, you’ll see how well it works. Every single person that has responded thus far has agreed to give me a link. One-way links. One site even gave me a paid spot for free, out of gratitude (for six months). Of course, not everyone has responded. In all likelihood, some emails are probably never even read. That’s just the nature of the game. But it is still very effective and very much worth it.

And if that doesn’t convince you, I’ll have you know that within the past couple weeks I have moved onto the first page (not quite #1, but getting there) for a keyword I had been targeting for a long time. A highly competitive keyword that gets 90,500 searches/mo, according to Google (yes, exact match). I attribute this sudden success to the links I’ve acquired in this short period of time.

You want that SEO money? Hmmm? Do you!? Wanna sit around all day playing video games and drinking Mtn Dew while your sites keep making you money? Well you gotta do the leg work first. Stop reading my whack ass blog and go try this. You may send me gift baskets later if you’d like.

A Dark Twist
Sorry. Thought I was done blabbing. Not the case. It just occurred to me that you might be able to dirty up this method. I don’t really like advocating squeaky clean white-hat SEO methods because they make me feel like a square. So I’m just going to throw this out there.

Let’s say you have a site outranking you for a particular keyword. One of the first things I do in this situation is figure out who is linking to them. You can do this easily by using Yahoo! Site Explorer. Now, for the sake of this example, let’s say you determine that ABCsite.com is linking to your competitor, XYZsite.com, in their blogroll. This would work best with a site with a lot of links. You would use the method detailed above, everything the same way. Find the broken links on ABCsite.com, and contact the webmaster with a humble request to have your site included. Only difference is, in this case you would casually interject your competitor site, XYZsite.com, into your list of broken sites, after listing 3 or four legitimately broken/dead sites.

The idea is to trick the webmaster at ABCsite.com to not only add a link to your site, but remove the link to your competitor’s site, after you’ve convinced them that it’s a dead link. Perhaps after the webmaster sees that the first two or three links in your list are in fact dead, they will assume the rest of your list is accurate. How devious. What’s the worst that could happen? If the webmaster notices the link is in fact still good, he/she will most likely just assume it was a temporary outage or a simple error.

There. Now I feel off-white again.

First of all, if you haven’t already, you need to read this post, which was the inspiration and the foundation for this method I still currently use to build links. And I’m not the only one doing it.

Trouble was, after I read that article, I was left feeling sort of confused still. How do I take a womens shoes site (or something like that!) and turn it into a piece of useful software? Well, one answer is in the title of this post, now isn’t it!?

Screensavers are usually in either one of two formats: .exe or .src. If you don’t already have the software to compile screensavers, you might want to “buy” some. I’m currently using a program called “Screensaver Factory 5 Enterprise”. If you already have some images, you can literally build and compile a simple slideshow screensaver in about 30 seconds. In the womens shoe site scenario, I would probably put together a nice little slideshow featuring the most sought after womens shoes. By default, the program adds little fancy transitions and what not. Not that they really matter too much. If you really want to get maximum benefit, you might want to watermark your images with your URL (yes, people actually download these things).

Distribution
Now, you’ve got your screensaver. It is time to distribute it. Just about every software download site has a submission area. At this point, if you’ve never authored/distributed software before, you might be thinking about outsourcing this part. Well, that’s not entirely necessary, thanks to a little something called a PAD file.

What the Shit is a PAD File?
I’m glad you asked! PAD stands for “portable application description”. Basically, a PAD file is an xml file that exists on your server (or wherever) that contains all the necessary information about your software such as size, version, links to download and more. The idea is that instead of having to manually make updates all the time when things change with software (like updates), you simply update one PAD file and the sites offering the software usually poll their PAD files regularly for changes. Now, the beauty of using the PAD file is that most of these software sites that accept submissions will ONLY ask for a link to your PAD file because it already contains all the information they need. This means your time spent on each site is quite minimal.

I Can Haz PAD File?
Yes, you can. I use a simple utility called PadGen that you can download here to create my PAD files. Keep in mind that not all fields are necessary so don’t spend all afternoon on it. Just get the important ones covered. Some sites do have requirements about what information needs to be contained in a PAD file before it is accepted for inclusion or review.

Hopefully I don’t need to tell you that you need to include your URL to the site/page you’re promoting in your PAD file.

How ‘Bout Some Sites?
Of course. I live to please you. I’m going to give you some master list of software sites that will accept your useless ladies shoe screensavers, but I will give you a few. They really aren’t hard to find, and there are tons of them. And of course many of them just scrape data from the other ones so there are plenty of links to be had, here. There are also distribution services in the business of charging you for distributing your software, but I don’t think they’re necessary for this sort of task. Now, about them sites…

1. Softpedia.com
2. Windows7Download.com
3. FreeDownloadManager.org
4. DailySofts.com
5. PCWin.com
6. FileBoost.net
7. FreeWareTown.com
8. Files54.com
9. A ton more…get your Google on

Alrighty. Have fun. Please don’t take my method (which is obviously just an interpretation of Eli’s Method) and run it into the ground. Thank you.