Fiverr

Firstly, my experiences on Fiverr are only as a buyer.  I have never listed a gig, but have occasionally thought about it but the actually commission you receive has put me off (although there are quite a few tricks you can you to increase your profits from Fiverr, which I might cover in another article).

The other things I should point out is all the Fiverr gigs I’ve tried are related to SEO and graphics, so I can’t comment on the quality of gigs in the other categories.

It’s a Jungle In There

With so many people offerings gigs on Fiverr, it really is like a jungle in there.  You never know if you are going to come across a beautiful butterfly or get bitten by a snake.

The Fiverr rating system can give you a general idea as to the  quality of the gig, but it’s not a completely reliable or foolproof system.   I’ve ordered some gigs that had rave reviews, but found the results were were mediocre.

As with a lot products or services, the best recommendations come from your friends as they are the people you trust the most.

Bad Fiverr Experiences

Luckily I’ve never had a completely negative experience with Fiverr.  Perhaps if I had ordered a greater variety of gigs, the odds of getting a really bad one would increase.

Of all the gigs I order, I’ve only had to get one refund due to the gig not being completed.   I have to say that I don’t find the refund process on Fiverr to be entirely obvious, but once you’ve worked out where to flag the information, it generally doesn’t take very long for a Fiverr staff member to review the details and issue a refund (if appropriate).

For me, the type of gigs I was most disappointed with the results (with the exception of one person) were the ones related to creating graphics, ie: banners, headers, logos etc.   I’m no graphic designer, but honestly, some of the work I received was very basic or just looked plain amateurish.   I know you can’t generally expect a highly professionally designed graphic for only $5, but I was expecting a little more.

In most cases, I ended up doing the graphics myself and personally thought I did a much better job.

The other types of gigs I usually avoid are anything to do with SEO.   You can do some real damage to your rankings with some of the backlinking gigs on offer.   Most of these use automated software to blast out spam comments or pretty much useless profile links.  I can understand why some of these gigs do well, as there are a lot of people who don’t know much about SEO that read the gig descriptions and get sucked in.

Good Fiverr Experiences

Like I already mentioned, Fiverr really is a jungle, but there are some great services on offer that are high quality and an absolute bargain.

In regards to graphics and logos, I’ve ordered three gigs from a user called creative1desing

The particular gig I ordered was:

Create 3 Different Logos For Your Website or Blog

You’ll probably see some negative comments as graphic design is a very subjective and personal opinion.   Obviously for $5 you can’t expect the world, but I was happy with each of the results. 

The seller states that if you aren’t happy with any of the designs, they will redo them.   I got them to make some minor modifications to one set of graphics I ordered, which was done very promptly.

Now, I know I said there are a lot of SEO gigs on Fiverr that you should not touch, however I tried one just recently which I was very impressed with.

The Fiverr user is called gearmonkey

The particular gig I used was:

Writing an article and posting with a contextual link  on a PR8 blog

Firstly, I was amazed by the speed of how long it took between supplying the URL and keyword for the article and when the article was actually published on his blog.   The article published read very well and passed Copyscape.

It’s pretty rare to find a genuine offer to have an article posted on a site with a PR8 homepage, and even when your article drops off the homepage, you will still get some link juice from the home page PR.  

I was actually a little reluctant to publish the link to the gig, as I don’t want too many people using it (purely being selfish of course ), but I’m happy to recommend it.

I haven’t tried any other of gearmonkey’s gigs, but if they are anything as good as the gig I tried, then I’d have pretty high confidence in there quality.

If you know of any other great Fiverr gigs you’ve come across, please leave a comment below.

Cheers

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There are obviously huge sites like Amazon that spend a lot of money into market research and website design and most people would agree that Amazon is highly effective from both the view of an Amazon affiliate and as a buyer.

As I live in New Zealand, I can’t always buy the items I’m after locally.  Additionally, if they are available locally, they are generally much more expensive than buying them from overseas.

Therefore, I tend to purchase quite a few products from various sites.

One thing you quickly realise when you live outside the US or UK is that many sites don’t ship internationally.   This is where my biggest gripe on website/shopping cart design lies.

Essential Information That Should Be Available

Shipping Details

I can’t remember the number of times I’ve found a product that I’m after on a particular website and then I have to hunt around all over the place to eventually find that they don’t ship overseas.

Then on the sites that do offer international shipping, they often make the shipping costs very inaccessible.   Sometimes, I have to add the items to the shopping cart, then register a user account, add all my address details and then, and only then, is the shipping costs displayed.  Quite often, the shipping costs are so expensive that it would more than double the cost of the item, so it really annoys me when I can’t find that information up front.

Now don’t get me started on sites that offer international shipping and assumes the rest of the world uses the same address formats as the US.   New Zealand does not use zip codes (we have postcodes) and we don’t have states.

Payment Options

My next gripe is sites that don’t clearly state what forms of payment they use.   I like using Paypal for most of my online purchases and generally favour a site that has a Paypal payment option.  However, it isn’t always easy or obvious to find whether a site has a Paypal option or not.

The same applies to credit cards.  Not everyone has a Visa or Mastercard, so it’s good to know what other forms of payment are accepted.

I have come across a few sites where this type of information is cleared displayed on their homepage and it certainly saves time knowing if you have a valid method for purchasing items on the site.

Applying This To Your Own Sites

Browsing various shopping sites is a good way of doing market research into the aspects of the site or shopping process that you like or dislike.

If you have your own site selling physical products, please ensure you have clear information as to your shipping and payment methods on the home page (or at the very least, prominent links to appropriate pages that contain all the details).

Even if you don’t directly sell physical products, but are an affiliate for physical products, you should still have the shipping and payment details available.

On one of my Amazon affiliate stores, I used to get a lot of queries from people outside the US asking if shipping to their country was available.  After replying to quite a few emails, I made sure I updated the shipping information on my site to state that shipping was only within the US.

This hasn’t entirely stopped all the queries about shipping, but it has certainly reduced the number of them.

Cheers

YSE was without a doubt, the most popular tool and source of information for seeing what backlinks a site has.   Many tools and plugins used YSE to get their backlink data, so they all have been affected as well and have had to move to a new backlinking data source.

So now Yahoo Site Explorer is dead, what are the alternatives?

In this article, I will be taking a look at four alternatives for YSE.

Note that the services some of the serviced I’ve reviewed have paid subscriptions, I am only looking at the features/reports that you get with their free offerings.

Backlink Reporting Sites Reviewed

The four sites I’m be taking a look at are:

1. Open Site Explorer – Operated by SEOMoz.
2. Majestic SEO Site Explorer – Operated by Majestic SEO
3. Ahrefs Site Explorer – Operated by Ahrefs
4. Blekko – Search engine with SEO reporting facilities

One thing to note is that all of the four sites will give you different data and different results.  Unfortunately when it comes to backlink data, there just isn’t any resource that can give you 100% accurate results.

Videos of Yahoo Site Explorer Alternatives

For those who prefer the visual medium, I’ve created the following two videos to give you an overview of what each of the sites offers in terms of backlinking data and other SEO data.

This video covers Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO Site Explorer and Blekko.

This video covers Ahrefs.

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer (OSE) is operated by SEOMoz, who are a highly respected SEO organization.

OSE has free and Pro membership levels, with the paid membership getting you access to additional reports and services.

The reports you get in the free version of OSE include:

• Inbound Links
• Top Pages
• Linking Domains
• Anchor Text
• Ability to compare backlink metrics between up to 5 sites

The following OSE screenshot shows the default Inbound Links report.

 Open Site Explorer Summary

While there is some very useful data returned by OSE, probably the biggest issue is the freshness of the index.  Even though the index is large, it is only contains about 25% of all sites on the web.  That’s one of the reasons why the total number of backlinks reported is substantially fewer than what the other sites report.

Additionally, the data is only refreshed every 30 days or so, which means there is always a lag between new backlinks and when they are reported.

 Click here to try out Open Site Explorer

Majestic SEO Site Explorer

Majestic SEO currently would rank as the most popular Yahoo Site Explorer alternative.

Just about every piece of software like Traffic Travis, Market Samurai etc, all changed their backlinking data source from Yahoo to Majestic SEO.

Like OSE, Majestic SEO Site Explorer comes in free and paid subscription versions, where the paid subscription gets you access to more data.

Majestic Site Explorer reports include:

• Top Backlinks
• Referring Domains
• Top Pages
• Backlink History

Majestic SEO also have a few additional SEO tools that you can access.

The following Majestic Site Explorer screenshot shows the default summary returned for a site.

Majestic Site Explorer Summary

There’s a good reason why Majestic Site Explorer is popular, and that’s due to the size of the data and more importantly the freshness of the data.

Since March 2011, SEO Majestic update their index daily.  In the backlink history reports, you can use the “Fresh Index”, which shows you backlink data from the last 30 days, or you can use the “Historic Index” which shows you all available backlink data that Majestic SEO have for a particular site.

Click here to try out Majestic Site Explorer

Ahrefs Site Explorer

Ahrefs Site Explorer isn’t as well known as Open Site Explorer and Majestic Site Explorer, but it does have some very useful data that the other sites don’t.

Ahrefs is another free/paid subscription service.   If you don’t register, you are limited to 10 queries per day, if you register for a free account, you are limited to 20 queries per day.

Ahrefs Site Explorer reports include:

• Top Pages
• Backlinks
• Anchor Text
• Referring Domains
• Referring Subnets

There is also a SERPs Analysis function that is really handy as it will show you what keywords a site is ranking for and their position and movement in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The following Ahrefs Site Explorer Screenshot shows you the default information returned.

Ahrefs Site Explorer Summary

Even though the free version of Ahrefs is more limited than the other sites, the information it returns is very useful.   In particular, the ability to see what keywords and what rankings a particular site has is great when you are doing competition analysis.

Click here to try out Ahrefs Site Explorer

Blekko

Blekko is different to the previous sites as it is primarily a search engine.   However, it is a very flexible search engine that gives you very useful SEO data.

Blekko uses special filters/modifers that they call slashtags.  One of these slash tags is /seo, so when you do a query like:

somedomain.com /seo

You will get all the SEO data for that particular domain.

Blekko SEO Reports include:

• Inbound links and their location
• Outbound links
• Internal Links
• Crawled pages and their rank
• Domains that contain duplicate content

The following Blekko screenshot shows the default SEO information returned.

Blekko Summary

Of all the newer search engines that have been created, I’ve found Blekko to be the most interesting and most useful. 

While it’s backlink data isn’t as detailed as the other sites, it is free, fast and easy to use.

Click here to try out Blekko

Recommendations

 A lot of the time, the type of information and style you like to see it in comes down to personal preference, so my main recommendation is to try out all four sites and see which you like best.

That said, my two favourite sites are:

1.  Majestic Site Explorer – This is mostly due to it having the most comprehensive and accurate backlink data of the four and the freshness of the index.

2. Ahrefs Site Explorer – I like to use this site to get SEO data that the other sites don’t provide, eg: keyword/ranking data.

If you know of any other similar sites (that are free to use), please leave a comment below.

Cheers

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Typically a person will come across  a WordPress site that they really like and are interested in using the same theme, but find there is no information or links in the footer as to what WordPress theme has been used.

If you know what to do, you can look in the HTML source for the site you are interested in, but I decided that I would create a free tool to make this process super simple.

What WordPress Theme Is That?

So I created the site  called What WordPress Theme Is That?

It’s very easy to use.  All you do is enter a domain or URL and click on the “Check Site” button.

Here is a screenshot showing you the type of results you’ll get.

There will be a minority of WordPress sites that have their theme obscured, so the tool won’t get all the details for those sites, but for the vast majority of sites, it should correctly detect all the details.

Below is a short video showing you how it works.

Hope you find it to be a useful tool when building your WordPress Sites.

Cheers

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QR Codes are an equivalent of a barcode for mobile phones.  The QR Code can contain up to 4296 characters of information.  

The type of information they can contain are:

• Website URL
• Email address
• Telephone number
• Contact Details (VCARD)
• Google Places information
• Social Media, eg: Facebook, Twitter etc.

QR Codes have been very popular in countries like Japan and Korea and are gaining a lot more popularity in Europe and the US.

The Real Estate industry has adopted QR Codes very quickly as it’s easy to see the benefit of being able to quickly view the details of a house by simply scanning a QR Code.

To really get a good idea of the power of QR Codes, then I think the video below illustrates this very well, with Tesco using them to great affect in Korea.

Now is the great time to jump on the QR Code marketing bandwagon while there are still plenty of opportunities available.

Cheers

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Time and time again when I’m reading posts on Internet Marketing forums like the Warrior Forum, I see the same keyword research mistakes come up.

Keyword research is your foundation of SEO and without proper keyword research, the rest of your efforts are most likely to be a waste of time.

So what are the biggest keyword research mistakes?

1) Search Volume

By far the biggest mistake people make with their keyword research is using the wrong monthly search volume figures.

We all know that a good keyword should have good monthly search volume and low competition.   Typically “good search volume” is defined as 3000+ searches a month (this is not a figure set in stone though as it depends on the type of keyword).

Typically what happens is that someone who is doing their keyword research will go to Google Adwords Keyword Tool (GAKT), specify their keyword and see what the monthly search volume is.

Correct?

NO!

The problem is that by default, GAKT returns broad match search results when you really want to look at the exact match search results.

OK, so let’s use an example to explain what the difference is between broad and exact match search results and why it is so important.

For the rest of this article, I’m going to be using the example keyword phrase:

antique coffee table

So if we login to our Google account and go to the Google Adwords Keyword Tool,  put in our keyword phrase, we can see the following results:

That’s 12,100 searches a month!  Happy days!

Not so fast.  

Click on the checkbox next to [Exact] under the Match Types in the left column and let’s see what results we get:

The exact match search volume is shown for the keyword phrase in square brackets, ie: [antique coffee table]

The global monthly searches for the exact match result is a only 1000, which isn’t too bad, but certainly way less than the 12,100 results for the broad match.   I’ve seen some keyword phrases where the difference is huge; for example the broad match results over 100,000 and the exact match results less than 100.

Just imagine if you built a website and optimized around a keyword that you thought got a lot of searches, only to find that even though your site is ranked at the top of Google, you are getting a  very tiny trickle of traffic.

It can be very disheartening.

Match Types

Alright, I’ve told you that you should always be using the exact match figures, but I have explained why…..yet.

Let’s look at the three different match types and what they mean.

Broad Match

A broad match is where your keywords can appear in any order and don’t have to be next to each other.

The following are all broad match results:

• antique table with coffee grinder
• a coffee table looks great with antique features
• sit at a table sipping coffee and reading books about antique furniture
• give your table and antique look by staining it with coffee

A broad match search is the default search type when you do a Google search (that is, without quotes). 

So a broad match search for our example keyword phrase, gives us:

That’s over 9 million results.

The first page of the results will have pages directly related to antique coffee tables, but let’s have a look at some of the results returned further down the search results:

This particular page isn’t specifically about antique coffee tables, but mentions a coffee table and an antique drafting table as it is still a broad match result.

This particular result was buried quite a long way down the search results, so someone searching for antique coffee table would almost certainly never even see it.

The point being, is that if you relied on the broad match search volume in GAKT, that will include all sorts of vaguely related searches that you won’t be optimizing your site for.

Phrase Match

A phrase match result is where your keywords appear in the exact order, but can be surrounded by other words or punctuation.

The following are all phrase matches:

• Why antique?  Coffee table for sale.
• antique coffee-table
• antique coffee, table free.

When you do a Google search in quotes, you performing a phrase match search.

So using our keyword phrase, the phrase match search gives us 123,000 results compared to just over 9 million results for the broad match search.

All of the search results will contain the phrase antique coffee table.

Here is one of the results on the very last page:

Notice that there is punctuation in the keywords, but the word order is the same.

Exact Match

The first and most important thing to point out is that exact match only relates to GAKT.  

There is no direct way to use exact match in a Google search.

Exact match is pretty self explanatory.  It includes searches for that exact phrase.

As we’ve seen, the broad match search figures can be much, much larger as they include so many other vaguely related searches.  By using exact match search figures, you get a much more accurate idea of the actual search traffic you are going to be targeting and optimizing for.

2)  Competition

Once you’ve found a good keyword, you need to know what sort of competition you are up against to get ranked on page 1 (and there’s no point in aiming for page 2 or lower).

The two main mistakes I’ve seen with gauging competition are:

i) Number of Search Results

This advice goes along the lines of put your keywords in quotes and check the number of results returned, if they are less than [insert some random number here], then it is a low competition keyword.

Now there is some element of truth in this method.  If a keyword search in quotes (phrase match) returns 10 million results and another returns a few hundred results, it’s reasonable to assume the keyword with 10 million results will be harder to rank for.

However, that is a very poor way of judging the competition.

As you are obviously trying to rank on page 1, the sites on page 1 are really your only competition.  You need to look at various factors such as on-page and off-page SEO for the top 10 results to gauge how difficult it would be to beat them.

It doesn’t really matter if there are a million results. If most of them are poorly optimized, then you have a very good chance of outranking them.

ii) GAKT Competition Bar

Quite a number of people don’t understand what the competition bar in the GAKT results actually means.

Let’s look at the results for our example keyword again.

You can see the competition bar for the exact search is almost 100%.  

Some people incorrectly interpret this as the competition strength for trying to rank for the particular keyword.

What it really means is the Adwords competition for that particular keyword, ie: the number of people trying to bid on that particular keyword for their adwords campaign.

While it can be a useful metric to look at if you are building Adsense sites, it has very little to do with the competition strength of sites for that keyword.

3) Commercial Intent

Assuming you find a good keyword with low competition and a good number of exact match search results, there is one more piece of the keyword research puzzle that you can get wrong.

This is where commercial intent (“buying keywords”) comes in.

If you have a site ranked on page 1 and are getting lots of traffic but little to no sales, it could be down to the keywords you original chose didn’t have a very high commercial intent.

By commercial intent, I mean how likely is the person searching for that term looking to purchase something.  

People may be just searching for advice, information or free products, in which case, there’s not much point in creating a website targeting their searches.

So what are some of the ways of determining commercial intent?

1. Put yourself in the mind of the person doing the search.  If you were doing a search for a particular keyword, are you looking for something to buy (or potentially purchase if you came across something that looked really good)?
2. Keywords targeting specific models.  For example, if someone searches for “LED TV’s”, they are most likely in a research phase to find out more about LED TVs.  However, if someone searches for a specific model of LED TV, they are generally looking for a place to confirm their decision and hopefully purchase from.
3. Look at the CPC and Competition columns in the GAKT.  Generally if a keyword has a good CPC (say, more than $2) and high Adwords competition, it’s generally a good indication that the keyword phrase has a high commercial intent, otherwise people wouldn’t be bidding on it.

Video Summary

For those of you who prefer viewing videos rather than reading articles, the following video gives a summary of what I’ve written in this article.

Getting Keyword Research Right

While keyword research is always going to be an inexact science, by avoiding the common mistakes I’ve listed above, hopefully it will increase your chances of creating a successful site that gets good conversions.

Cheers

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Given the huge popularity of the SEOPressor plugin, I thought I’d do a comparison with some recent competitors.

The basic premise of an on-page SEO plugin is that it gives you suggestions for improving on-page SEO and an overall score.

In theory, if the score that is reported by the on-page SEO plugin is high, then you should have a highly optimized page.

The six on-page SEO plugins I’m comparing are:

1.  SEOPressor - This is the most well known on-page SEO plugin.  It was developed by Daniel Tan and has been on the market for some time.

2.  BloggerHigh SEO – This is a free clone of the SEOPressor plugin.

3.  ClickBump SEO – This is a recent entrant into the on-page SEO plugin space.  It is developed by Scott Blanchard.

4. WP SEO Beast – This on-page SEO plugin arrived on the screen just after ClickBump SEO.   It is developed by Prashant Sharma.

5.  Easy WP SEO – This is the highly popular on-page SEO Plugin that is developed by Chris Landrum.

6. Measure My SEO – This is the newest on-page SEO Plugin on the market and is developed by Jason Fladlien and Wilson Mattos.

Demonstration of the On-Page SEO Plugins

The following video gives a brief overview of what each of the plugins do and how they compare to each other.

Please note that when I recorded the original video, WP SEO Beast wasn’t available, so the WP SEO Beast review is in the video below:

The video below shows a quick overview of the Easy WP SEO plugin

 Note that in the Easy WP SEO video above, this was using Easy WP SEO version 1.5.  Since then Easy WP SEO v1.6 was released and has a number of major improvements, including:

• Copyscape checking
• Export/Import of Easy WP SEO settings
• Ability to check membership/protected pages
• Ability to check any URL on your site, eg: archives, categories etc
• Ability to fine tune what SEO checks are used in the ratings
• Better SEO report option.

Looking at the Plugins In More Detail

SEOPressor

I was a reluctant purchaser of SEOPressor as I really didn’t think $97 was particularly good value for what it does (particularly if you already know the elements of on-page SEO).  However, given I review products, I ended up buying a copy as at the very least, it’s a useful reminder for particular on-page SEO elements I might have forgotten.

Good Points

• Has a central administration menu for defining keywords and viewing page/post scores and descriptions.
• Works with auto-blogs by giving it a list of keywords and SEOPressor will automatically “decorate” the keywords, ie: bold, underline, italics.

Bad Points

• Price!  In my opinion, $97 for a plugin like this is way over priced.  I think somewhere between $30-$50 is much more reasonable and realistic.
• Nags you about not having an H1 tag, when the vast majority of WordPress themes automatically use H1 for the post/page titles.  Of course you can ignore the suggestion, but it’s something that really irks me.

Click here to access the SEOPressor website

BloggerHigh SEO

BloggerHigh SEO is essentially a rewritten version of SEOPressor.

The actual author and origins of BloggerHigh SEO is a little mysterious.   It appears to be a product of the “Masked Guru”.  Whatever the origins, the big plus of BloggerHigh SEO is that it is free and rebrandable.

Good Points

• Can’t argue with the price as it’s free!
• The plugin is rebrandable, so you can rebrand it yourself (with some limitations) and give it away or sell it.
• Pretty much does the same things as SEOPressor.

Bad Points

• No central administration page.  You need to go to each individual page/post to check the score and suggestions.
• If you don’t have the “hide attribution” option checked, then you’ll have an ugly footer added to each of your pages that have links to the various BloggerHigh sites.  Although, to be fair, as it is a free product, you can’t really blame them for wanting backlinks to their sites.

Click here to access the BloggerHigh SEO website

Clickbump SEO

I recently bumped (bad pun) into Clickbump SEO on the Warrior Forum.  The plugin itself is not currently promoted so much as a standalone plugin, but usually offered as part of the Clickbump Engine Bundle.

Scott did mention that he had registered a domain for Clickbump SEO, so it will be offered as a standalone product very soon.

As I wasn’t that interested in the Clickbump Engine, I purchased just the Clickbump SEO plugin.

Good Points

• It’s less than half the price of SEOPressor.
• Is aware of WordPress themes that use H1, H2 and H3 tags for headings.
• Doesn’t have any overheads of processing a page to add auto-decoration.
• Has a LSI function to grab related keywords.  Very handy reminder of what keywords/phrases to sprinkle into your article.
• Customisable keyword density settings.
• Keyword/Score summary from the Posts/Page manager.

Bad Points

• Can’t really think of any.

Click here to access the ClickBump SEO website

WP SEO Beast

I bought the WP SEO Beast plugin when it was first released so that I could add it to the list of other plugins to compare it to.

I found a few issues with version 1.0 of the WP SEO Beast plugin, so I contacted the author (who was very prompt with his responses) and waited until version 2.0 was released.  This is the version I’m basing my review/comparison on.

Prashant Sharma has obviously studied the other on-page SEO plugins that are available as WP SEO Beast seems to borrow a few ideas from all of them.

WP SEO Beast is probably best described as a cross between ClickBump SEO and SEOPressor.  It does however, have a SEO settings option (similar to all-in-one SEO) which none of the other plugins don’t have.   This has good and bad points as I’ll detail below.

Good Points

• Costs $37, for a plugin that offers more than SEOPressor at more than twice the price.
• Has an option to generate LSI keywords.
• Is aware of WordPress themes that use H1 tags for the post/page title.
• Has summary pages for post and page scores.
• Has support for mobile devices.
• Has inbuilt SEO options to set the meta Title, Description and Keywords so no additional SEO plugins are needed, eg: all-in-one SEO.   Note that I’ve also listed this feature in the bad points

Bad Points

• Probably my biggest gripe with WP SEO Beast is that it forces you to use it’s SEO settings for title, description and keywords.  This means you have no choice to use another SEO plugin like all-in-one SEO or Platinum SEO.  If you do have one of these plugins active, you will end up with two sets of clashing SEO meta data.
• Your score is marked down if you don’t use SEO Beast title, description and keywords, but more importantly, your score is marked down if you don’t use the auto-decoration options (bold, italics, underline).  That means if you manually decorate your keyword, WP SEO Beast doesn’t recognise it.

I think it is only fair to point out that Prashant Sharma is extremely keen to take on board any suggestions to improve the plugin (unfortunately he didn’t address my gripe with the plugin recognising manually decorated keywords though), so you may well find the issues I’ve brought up have been dealt with.

Click here to access the WP SEO Beast website

Easy WP SEO

Easy WP SEO was the latest of the on-page seo plugins that I had a look at.

My first impressions were very favourable as Easy WP SEO has a very professional and polished look and feel.   This certainly extends through to the very extensive documentation that is available with the plugin.  There are instructional videos for every single function of Easy WP SEO.

One big feature that only Easy WP SEO has, is the ability to specify multiple keywords.   This is really useful as most of the time, you want to optimize for your main keyword plus a selection of secondary keywords.   With Easy WP SEO, you can easily select which keyword you want to see the analysis for.

Good Points

• Very clean and professional design.
• Ability to handle multiple keywords.
• Has an LSI function, where you can list LSI keywords and drag/drop them into your article.
• Able to fine tune a large number of settings, eg: keyword density, minimum number of words, title length etc.
• Only on-page seo plugin to include a readability index.
• Has a Copyscape check function.
• Extensive documentation including a manual and video guides.

Bad Points

• Can’t think of any.

Easy WP SEO is not currently available to the public via the main website, however you can grab a discounted copy below.

Click here to access the discounted copy of Easy WP SEO

Measure My SEO 

I recently came across the Measure My SEO plugin, but haven’t had time to personally review it.  I’m including it here for completeness.

Note that I’m basing my information about the Measure My SEO plugin from the Measure My SEO website.

At first glance, Measure My SEO looks like a much more pretty version of SEOPressor or BloggerHigh.  The core functionality doesn’t appear to be much different, but there are a few key differences that make it stand out.

Good Points

• The settings page allows you to control exactly what SEO features you want to measure.
• Has a live checker that automatically updates the SEO page score without you having to update the page.

Bad Points

• Not as fully featured as WP SEO Beast, Clickbump SEO and Easy WP SEO.

Click here to access the Measure My SEO website.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is an important part of on-page SEO, but you should be aware that there are a few different ways to calculate it and you will get different results depending on what tool you are using.

There are two main ways to calculate keyword phrase density.

A=Total occurrences of the keyword phrase in the article

B=Total number of words in the article

C=Number of words in the keyword phrase

Keyword density calculation 1 uses:

(A / B) * 100

Keyword density calculation 2, uses:

(A * C / B) * 100

Let’s have a look at an example and the difference in the keyword density score those two formulas can make.

Let’s say we have a article with 1000 words and using keyword phrase of “search engine results page” (4 words) where there are 10 occurrences of that phrase.

So using the first formula, that gives us:

(10 / 1000) * 100 = 1% keyword density

and using the second formula, gives us:

(10 * 4 / 1000) * 100 = 4% keyword density

That’s quite a difference depending on which formula you use.  (Note: the differences only apply to keyword phrases and not when you use a single keyword).

All the on-page SEO plugins I tested use the first formula apart from BloggerHigh SEO.

With Easy WP SEO you have the option which keyword density calculation to use, where the default is the first formula.

There is a good explanation of keyword density calculations on Wikipedia.

So Which is the Best Plugin To Use?

My recommendation is if you already have SEOpressor and are relatively happy with using it, then there’s probably not a compelling reason to throw it out in favour of BloggerHigh SEO, ClickBump SEO,  WP SEO Beast, Measure My SEO or Easy WP SEO.

If you are on a tight budget, then BloggerHigh SEO is a good option.

Of the other four plugins, my pick would be for Easy WP SEO.  With the version 1.6 update, Easy WP SEO is now well ahead of the pack.

Of the other on-page SEO plugins, my next pick would be ClickBump SEO,  followed by WP SEO Beast or Measure My SEO.  

Hopefully all these on-page SEO plugins will be further developed and I’ll update this review page if there are any major changes.

If you come across any other similar on-page SEO plugins, let me know and I’ll add them to this review.

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I’ve been using DigiResults as both a product seller, an affiliate,  and a buyer since DigiResults came onto the scene in October 2010.

In this DigiResults review, I thought I’d give you my impressions on the service given that I’ve seen it from all sides of the market.

What is DigiResults?

Probably the easiest way to think of DigiResults is that it is an alternate service to places like Clickbank, PayDotCom, Commission Junction, E-Junkie etc.

DigiResults enables you to sell your products (physical and digital) and as an affiliate, you can promote any of the listed products on the DigiResults Marketplace.

Payments and commissions are done via PayPal.

DigiResults Video Overview

The following video gives you a brief overview of some of the features of DigiResults and what the interface looks like.

Features of DigiResults

OK, so what are some of the features of DigiResults that I like?

Navigation

Probably the biggest aspect I like about DigiResults is the ease of use.   I have accounts on many other similar sites and I have to say that DigiResults is by far and away the easiest in terms of set up and navigation.   I curse every time I’m on a site like e-junkie where the navigation is not intuitive at all as I think it is critical that things should be easy to find and easy to set up.

On DigiResults, you can literally set up a new account and list a product in under 15 minutes.

Commissions and Refunds

The other feature I really like about DigiResults are the instant commissions.   This works really well from both the seller and affiliate perspectives.

There is no waiting to get paid when a sale has been made.  Your PayPal account is instantly credited whether you are the vendor or an affiliate.

On the flipside, refunds are easily handled with no action required from your affiliates.   As a vendor, if you need to issue a refund, DigiResults automatically reverses the payment from both your account and the affiliates account.

Flexible Payment Options

Most other similar systems have restrictions on what percentage you can set your affiliate commissions to.  DigiResults allows you to set the affiliate commission between 0% and 100%.

You might wonder why you would want to offer a 100% affiliate commission, but it is a great method for building your list.

If you want to offer your product at different prices, you have two options:

You can set up discount codes/coupons, which give the buyer the set discount at the point of purchase.   You can choose whether the discount codes are public or not and also set an expiry date.

An alternate method is to add a “variant”.  For example, if you have a special offer you want to give your customers or an affiliate, you can set up a variant with a different buy price.

There’s no limit to the number of variants and discount codes you can set up.

Hosted Downloads

If you don’t have the technical knowledge or software on your own site to offer secure downloads of your product, then DigiResults has an option where you simply upload your product and it will generate a unique download link for every buyer.

Autoresponder Integration

DigiResults can automatically integrate your preferred autoresponder (pretty much supports any autoresponder, eg: iContact, Aweber, MailChimp etc), so that your buyers can be automatically added to your list.

Note that this only works if you use the DigiResults hosted downloads.   Also important to point out is that buyers will still need to confirm their opt-in if you are using an autoresponder that only supports double opt-in.

DigiResults Screenshots

Here are a collection of screenshots that show the main parts of DigiResults.

The screenshot below shows the main dashboard when you log into DigiResults.  It gives you a handy summary of all the important information like number of sales, refunds, and affiliate sales in the last 60 days.

The next screenshot shows the page where you set up your product that you are selling.  As you can see, the options are pretty straight forward.

There are some optional advanced options not shown in this screenshot to configure your affiliate programme page, cancellation/receipt pages and options to allow you to additionally sell your product via ClickBank and PayDotCom.

The last screenshot shows the DigiResults marketplace.  This is where affiliates can select the product they want to promote and get all the details such as affiliate links, sales pages, affiliate promotional details etc.

The marketplace is really the only section where I think DigiResults needs some major improvement.

You can sort the list by any of the columns, but there are no advanced search features and categories to browse the products by.

Having said that, I know the DigiResults is constantly improving and I’m sure that the marketplace will be one of the things on their list to improve.

Final Thoughts on DigiResults

DigiResults is gaining a lot of popularity, particularly with internet marketers, as it provides a very simple and easy ways to enable your products to be promoted and sold.

At this stage, most of the products listed on DigiResults are in the internet marketing area, so most of the potential affiliates would be looking for products also in that category.  However, that certainly shouldn’t prevent you from listing a non-IM product.

For me, the biggest aspect I like about DigiResults is the simplicity.    It means I don’t have to muck around wading through huge manuals or watching lots of tutorials to get everything set up.

I highly recommend DigiResults and you can instantly join at no cost, so check it out for yourself.

>>Click here to access DigiResults<<

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I’ve written this SECockpit review in the hope it will give you enough information to make an informed decision as to whether SECockpit is the right keyword research tool for you.

It’s certainly not my aim to give you an unrealistic and hyped up review of SECockpit that you’ll see on some other sites.

I’ve been lucky enough to use SECockpit since the very first limited release.  I’ve seen the product develop and evolve into the fully featured keyword research tool it is today.

Firstly, in case there’s any confusion, there is no relationship between SEO cockpit and SECockpit.  It’s a bit unfortunate that the names are so similar, but I guess there’s only so many combinations of product names you can come up with that have SEO and Cockpit in them.

SECockpit is a product from the SwissMadeMarketing team of Shane Melaugh and Sam Haenni.

Some of you will know Shane from his previously released products such as Backlink Battleplan and Sam has recently partnered with Shane as the brilliant technical person.

SECockpit was made available via invitation, so it has had a lot of real world testing before the public launch on July 5th.

Click here to visit the SECockpit Official Site

SECockpit Components

SECockpit has two main components:

1. Keyword Research – this is the heart of SECockpit where you do all your keyword searches, analysis, filtering and arranging your results.
2. Project & Task Management – this is where you can track your various projects and automatically assign tasks and track project revenues.

Obviously it is the keyword research component of SECockpit that will be of great interest to most people and the area where I’ll be concentrating on in this article.

SECockpit Overview

The  screenshot below shows the main SECockpit keyword search results.  The green niche bar gives you an idea of the niche strength, which is based on search volume, competition strength and a few other factors.

Keywords where the green indicator is high, are definitely worth checking out.

The competition strength is show by the orange bars.  This is broken down into positions 1-3, 4-7 and 8-10.   Having this breakdown can let you know how easy or not it is to get on page one and more importantly, how much competition there is for the first three spots (which after all, is where you really want to rank).

SECockpit Videos

The best way to get an idea of how SECockpit works and the features it offers is by watching the following videos I made.

In the video below, I give you an overview on how SECockpit looks and operates.

There have been a number of changes and improvements to SECockpit since I recorded this video, but the core functionality hasn’t changed.

There have been improvements in the filtering and keyword options, eg: grabbing keywords from Google Wonderwheel, Google suggest etc.  There have also been additional columns added so that you can see if there are things like Youtube, Amazon, or Google Sniper pages in the top 10 results.

In this second SECockpit video, I go over some of the additional features and options that weren’t available when I made the original video.

What are the advantages of SECockpit?

There’s certainly no end of keyword research tools on the market and I’ve used quite a few, eg: Market Samauri and Keyword Elite.

Now while, those keyword tools are certainly not bad, there’s one attribute they all share – they rely on the data from Google and Yahoo.  This is primarily the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for the search numbers and results and Yahoo explorer for backlink information.

Now SECockpit certainly uses Google Adwords Keyword Tool for getting a lot of its information, but there are some major differences:

1.  The range and diversity of keywords

You can greatly increase the number and diversity of keywords you are searching on by using the SECockpit Google Suggestions and Wonderwheel options.  In particular Google Wonderwheel can be a great source of long tail and related keywords.  SECockpit can dig down to 2 levels in the Wonderwheel, which can potentially find a few great keywords that you wouldn’t normally find with other keyword research tools.

2.  Competition Analysis

Most importantly, the competition analysis uses data supplied by SEOmoz.

If you’re not familiar with SEOmoz, they crawl the web and collect their own search data and metrics which is more complete and more accurate than what Google provides.

Most other keyword tools rely on a combination of data that is mostly supplied by Google for their analysis.

3.  SECockpit is a web Application

This means it is OS independent as it runs in your browser.

It also has the advantage that your local computer won’t get a temporary ban from Google for performing too many requests.

Additionally, as the processing is done in the cloud, the results are fast.  If you were to do the same type of processing on your local computer, it would chew up a lot of resources and take substantially longer to give you results.

4. Integrated Project and Task Management

Now while I don’t yet use the project and task capabilities of SECockpit, I can see that they would be useful for some people, although I suspect most people wouldn’t bother with it as they have their own methods for tracking projects.

SECockpit allows you to create projects around sets of keywords.  It then has built in  task lists based on the type of project that you can use, or create your own.

The screenshot below shows the the project creation:

Interview with Sam Haenni – SwissMadeMarketing Co-founder

In this interview with Sam Haenni, Sam discusses:

• the background behind SECockpit
• technical challenges along the way
• number of keyword searches that SECockpit performs
• future development plans for SECockpit.

SECockpit Pricing

The pricing for SECockpit may be considered expensive for some people, but you need to keep in mind that SECockpit is a premium product and uses a lot of infrastructure to perform the massive amount of processing it does for every keyword analysis.

I have seen a number of new keyword research services on offer that utilize SECockpit as the tool they use for keyword research.  In these cases, the SECockpit monthly fee would be quite easy to cover and make a sustainable business model.

SECockpit Final Thoughts

It takes quite a bit for a keyword research tool to impress me, but I could see the value and worth of SECockpit from day one and having used it extensively, I can vouch for the results I’ve gotten.

One tip I would give is to not get too hung up on trying to find “diamonds”.  When I initially started using SECockpit, I discarded any keywords that didn’t have a “diamond” ranking.  This was a mistake as I was missing lots of good keywords.

I personally think keywords with “diamond” rating are generally quite difficult to rank for as the SECockpit algorithm is biased towards the number of daily searches.  That means if a keyword has a large number of daily searches and relatively low (that’s lowish for a high competition keyword) then it may get a “diamond” rating.

In general, it’s probably fair to say that “diamond” keywords are high reward, medium/high effort keywords.

While some people might be put off by the SECockpit pricing schedule,  you need to consider the power of SECockpit and the tools you are getting for your money.   At the very least, you could sign up for one month, to try it out and see if you agree that it’s the best keyword research tool available.

Bottom line is that I have no hesitation in stating that SECockpit is by far and away, the best keyword research tool I’ve ever come across.

>> Click here to find out more about SECockpit<<

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What is Google +1?

In a nutshell,  Google +1 is a way for people to indicate whether they like a particular piece of content.

It’s Google’s attempt to compete with Facebook’s “Like” button which has virtually become the de-facto standard for sharing and giving a thumbs up for content we like or find interesting.

What Effect Will Google +1 Have On Search Results?

That’s certainly what a lot of people are asking.  At this stage, the effect is quite minimal, but it’s safe to say that if Google +1 takes off in a big way, it will become a much more important factor in search engine rankings.

Here’s what Google has to say about it:

+1 helps people discover relevant content—a website, a Google search result, or an ad—from the people they already know and trust. Adding the +1 button to your pages lets users recommend your content, knowing that their friends and contacts will see their recommendation when it’s most relevant—in the context of Google search results.

When a signed-in Google user is searching, your Google search result snippet may be annotated with the names of the user’s connections who’ve +1′d your page. If none of a user’s connections has +1′d your page, your snippet may display the aggregate number of +1′s your page has received.

and particularly this quote is revealing:

Content recommended by friends and acquaintances is often more relevant than content from strangers. For example, a movie review from an expert is useful, but a movie review from a friend who shares your tastes can be even better. Because of this, +1’s from friends and contacts can be a useful signal to Google when determining the relevance of your page to a user’s query. This is just one of many signals Google may use to determine a page’s relevance and ranking, and we’re constantly tweaking and improving our algorithm to improve overall search quality. For +1′s, as with any new ranking signal, we’ll be starting carefully and learning how those signals affect search quality.

Notice that Google says that they’ll be seeing how Google _+1 is used and adjusting their search algorithms accordingly.

Should I Start Using Google +1?

Regardless of whether Google +1 actually takes off or not, it certainly doesn’t hurt to start implementing it on your sites.   The worst that can happen is that it will unused or ignored and you can remove it at a later date.

However, if Google +1 does take off, it is a great advantage to get in early to establish some ratings on your sites.

Implementing Google +1 is pretty simple.  You can either generate a code snippet to add to you site at:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/+1/button

or if you have a WordPress site, then you can use the Google +1 WordPress Plugin from WPMU.org

Given Google +1 is quite new, there aren’t too many Google +1 plugins at this stage, but I’m sure that plenty more will be developed and that Google +1 will be incorporated into the popular social bookmarking plugins.

Hopefully you’ll notice this article has Google +1 buttons at the top and bottom of the article.

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One angle I’ve been seeing quite a bit recently is the suitability and level of trust a user places in a domain name.

For example, if a user had to go to a site like:

http://amazingdiscounts.XYZ

Where XYZ could be any of the lesser know domain suffixes like .me, .pl, .tv etc

would that user be suspicious or at least cautious being on a site that wasn’t a .com, .net or .org?

Additionally, I also see claims that if your site isn’t a .com, then users won’t remember the URL of your site or end up going to one of your competitors sites.

Well, I think that would have been the case 5+ years ago when users relied heavily on bookmarks and typing in the URL’s of the site they wanted to visit.

In my opinion, the whole process that most people use to navigate and find information on the Internet has changed significantly in the last few years.  Let’s look a some of the reasons, why I think this is the case.

Search Engine Prevalence

Obviously search engines have been around for sometime, but when Google hit the scene, it changed the way people search for information.

These days a lot of people use Google as a portal, ie:  it is the place they use to access any information or site they need.   Whether their home page is set to Google or whether they use a Google search bar in their browser, they are constantly interacting with Google.   For these types of people, Google is the Internet.

Additionally, these days, Google provides much more information than the standard search results in the early days.  Now you can get search results on current news, images, videos, maps and all manner of related information.

Google becomes so integrated into these people’s usage, that they rarely or never type in a URL in the browser address bar.  So for example, to go to Amazon, instead of typing:

http://amazon.com

in their browser address field, they’ll type “Amazon” into Google and get to it that way.

Browser Improvements

Browser development have included many improvements to make navigation so much easier from the early days when a browser was much more basic in functionality.

In the early days, to navigate to a web site, you would need to either:

1. Type in the full URL of the site you wanted to go to (including the http://)
2. Have previously bookmarked the site
3. Use a search engine like Yahoo or Altavista (in the days before Google) or navigate through an Internet Directory.

These days, just about all modern browsers like Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and IE have a range of features that make the above methods mostly redundant.

Features such as:

• Integrated search engine functions, so that there is no need to even navigate to a search engine.
• Auto-completion where you can type in the first few letters of a site, and the browser will display possible matches from your browsing history or bookmarked sites.
• Reopening of tabs and windows when you restart your browser.   In the old days, you had to manually open all the windows you were previously on (assuming you could remember what they were and had bookmarked them)
• Adaptive address bar.  You can type virtually anything into the address bar and get a result.  For example, typing in amazon.com or Amazon, will get you to the Amazon website, whereas in the old days, you needed to type in exactly http://amazon.com

Bottom line is that not many people type in the URL of a website these days.

The Trust Factor

It’s certainly true that the .com extension is the most common in existence and that there’s a certain familiarity with them.

So the question is do people trust non .com domains?

Well, that depends.  Some people pay attention to the domain name and might be put off a little by an unusual domain extension (given that they are sometimes used for phishing sites), however, I think that most people wouldn’t even look at the URL of the site they are on and even if they did, they wouldn’t care if the page in front of them had what they expected or what they were looking for.

Having said that, I found the following piece of information from Alex Smith on the Warrior Forum to be very interesting:

I decided last year that rather than replying on my own preference (.com) and marketers’ general preference (.com), I’d ask all my customers and prospective customers what they prefer to see, and what they think “looks best” on my sort of sites and what gives them most confidence in the site.

And the answer came back “.info”, loud and clear, from a big majority of those who expressed a preference, in each of eight different niches.

Looking To The Future

With the advent of global top-level domain names happening sometime in 2012, there will be a flood of new domains that will increase the top level domain diversity.

Cities and big companies will be applying for these new global names, so in future you’ll be seeing domains like:

cafes.newyork

camera.canon

So what does this all mean for Internet Marketers?

Well, I personally think that popular top level domains will have less and less importance as more choice becomes available and the general Internet users either become more used to the variety, or just don’t know or care.

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Backups aren’t the most exciting thing, but without a proper backup system in place, it can hurt really hard with all the work you may loose.

Like a lot of people, I’ve been doing adhoc backups of my main WordPress sites, but had no real backup plan in place.

I got motivated to look at WordPress backups in more detail after the disk in my laptop failed (yes, I did have a backup and yes I was able to completely restore everything).

So I’ve spent the last few days trying out pretty much every WordPress backup solution I could find.   I didn’t bother with some of the WordPress backup plugins that were very old and abandonded.  I’ve concentrated on the free WordPress backup solutions, but do list a few of the paid WordPress backup solutions as well, although I haven’t personally used them.

WordPress Backup Solutions Reviewed

The following is an alphabetical  list of the WordPress Backup solutions that I personally tried out:

1. Automatic WordPress Backup
2. BackWPup
3. EZPZ One Click Backup
4. myEASYbackup
5. Online Backup for WordPress
6. PressBackup
7. Snapshot Backup
8. Updraft
9. Xcloner

Additionally, I  have included some information on the following WordPress Backup solutions that I haven’t had a chance to try yet:

1. Backup Buddy
2. VaultPress
3. WPTwin
4. Blog Zapper

The information in this review is based on my own personal experiences and on the versions of the software available at the time.  You may get different results on your server depending on the environment.

I’ll will endeavour to update any information if there are major changes to the WordPress backup software.

Backup Features

When looking around for a good WordPress backup solution, you need to keep the following points in mind:

• Is it robust?  This is critical for anyone wanting reliable backups.  I came across a few products that I wouldn’t want to rely on for backing up my sites.
• Is it easy to install and configure?  There’s no point in installing a backup solution if it is too complex and time consuming to set up.  On the other hand, it is good to have enough configuration options to make it flexible.
• Does is backup everything?  Not all WordPress backup solutions backup absolutely everything.  There’s really not much point in doing a backup if it isn’t 100% complete.
• Can you schedule backups?  Not all WordPress backup solutions have a scheduling function.  They are more designed for adhoc, manual backups.
• What storage options are available?  Some WordPress backup solutions only allow you to backup to the local server and let you manually download to your computer.  Others have options to transfer the backup to a FTP server or cloud storage service like Amazon S3.
• Security.  Some WordPress backups create a full backup that you can download, but unless you have some restrictions around that like a unique backup name and/or password protected access, it means anyone can potentially download your backups.
• Restore process.  It’s one thing to backup your site, but if you need a bullet proof and easy way to be able to restore the backup or clone the backup to another site.

Backup Storage Options

The following are the most common options for storing WordPress Backups:

1. On the Webserver

Almost all WordPress backup solutions directly or indirectly store the backups on your local webserver.  This is OK for most purposes, but to be really robust, you should have a copy stored off site.

2.  Via Email

This method is OK for smaller backups, but if the backups get too large, mail servers will start to reject them.  Additionally, it isn’t very secure as anyone can potentially access your backup if it is unencrypted.

3. To a FTP Server

This is one of the most common options to store your backups on another server.   You just need to make sure you have access to a server with FTP access.

4.  To a Cloud Storage Service

A cloud storage service is place where you can store any data you like (backups, videos, files etc) on storage servers provided by a company.  These services give you very high bandwidth access to your data and very high reliability.

The most common services are:

• Amazon S3 – this is a very popular service and is very cheap to use
• Rackspace Cloud Files – Very similar to Amazon S3

Another storage option which is quite popular is Dropbox

Dropbox gives you 2GB of free storage for storing whatever files you want including backups.

Automatic WordPress Backup – by Dan Coulter

This was one of the first WordPress backup plugins to support Amazon S3.

Version 2 of the plugin was released in late 2010 (there have been some minor updates since then) which added an easy option for restoring your backups.

You must have an Amazon S3 account to be able to use this plugin.

The screenshot below shows the options you can set with Automatic WordPress Backup.

The steps are pretty straight forward:

1. Add your AWS keys
2. Select or create an S3 bucket name for the backups
3. Set the backup schedule
4. Select which parts of the blog to back up (in most cases you want all options selected)
5. Select whether to delete old backups (not really an issue unless your site is huge)
6. Select whether you will have a credit in your footer or write a review of the plugin.

That’s all that’s required.

You can click on the “Save Changes and Backup Now” to do an immediate backup (highly recommended after first installing the plugin).

Automatic WordPress Backup has a simple menu to restore from a backup where you select the particular backup you want to restore and click on the “Restore from backup” button.

It then displays a message saying it is restoring from the backup and will be finished when the page refreshes.  This is a little concerting as you don’t get a nice bold confirmation when the restore has finished, but in my reasonably limited tested, the restore function worked just fine.

Good Points

• Simple to install and set up.
• Has an option to do manual as well as scheduled backups
• Has a simple restore function.

Bad Points

• Limited to users with Amazon S3 accounts.

BackWPup – by Daniel Hüsken

BackWPup has quite a number of configuration options.

It works by creating a ZIP (other formats supported) file of your site (includes the database and all the files) into a unique folder name under the wp-content folder.

Once the backup has been created, you have the option to send it to:

• A FTP server
• Amazon S3
• Microsoft Azure
• Rackspace Cloud
• Dropbox
• SugarSync
• Email

This gives you quite a bit of flexibility as to how and where you like to store your backups.

The configuration options are quite detailed, which may put some people off if they like the options to be simple and more limited.

The following screenshot shows a portion of the options to set up a backup job.

Good Points

• Very flexible with how you want to set up the backup.
• Supports many different methods for storing the backup.
• Good logging.

Bad Points

• Might be a little too complex for some people.
• The restore process is semi-manual.

EZPZ One Click Backup – By Joe Cook

The premise behind EZPZ One Click Backup is that you can install it and start doing backups without setting anything.

There are options for scheduling the backups, along with filters to exclude certain folders, but these are optional.

By default, EZPZ One Click Backup creates the WordPress backup on your server.  You have the option to manually download the backup or you can purchase an EZPZ One Click Backup extension for $2.95 that will enable an option to save your backups to your Dropbox account.  Alternatively, you can specify a FTP server to send the backup to.

The following screenshot shows the output the plugin generates when it creates a backup.

Good Points

• Very simple to set up and use.
• Fairly simple restore process.

Bad Points

• Limited options for storing the backup off-site.

myEASYbackup – by Ugo Grandolini

myEASYbackup is designed to do manual backups of your WordPress site with the option to send the backup to email, FTP or use a storage service created by plugin author.

On first glance, the interface looks very slick with nice graphics and layout, however I didn’t find it that intuitive when I started using it.

Here’s a screenshot of what myEASYbackup looks like:

Good Points

• Allows you to store the backup outside your web folders for better security.

Bad Points

• No scheduling option.
• Slightly confusing interface and mode of operation.

Online Backup for WordPress – by Backup Technology

[Updated details on 12 Oct 2011 with the release of new version]

Online Backup for WordPress is a backup solution produced by Backup Technology that allows you to backup your WordPress securely to Backup Technology’s storage servers.

Version 1 of the plugin only backed up the database, but since the release of Version 2, it allows you to also includes all the WordPress files (eg: plugins, images, themes etc) with the backup.

Before you can start any backups, you need to create a free account on the Backup Technology site that gives you access to 100MB of free storage.  You need to set up one account per WordPress site.

The following screenshot shows you the single configuration and backup page for the plugin:

Good points

• Simple to install and use.
• Encrypts your data.
• Includes a restore process.

Bad Points

No real bad points to speak of.

PressBackup – by Infinimedia Inc.

PressBackup is available as a free plugin if you backup to your computer or Amazon S3.  They also have a subscription if you want to use their storage service.

Setting the backups is very easy to do via the PressBackup wizard.  Once you’ve run the wizard, you can either run a manual backup or wait for the scheduled backup to run.

The interface is straight forward as the following screenshot shows:

Good Points

• Very easy to set up.
• Has a built in restore option.

Bad Points

• No support for FTP servers.
• Can’t specify the S3 bucket name the backups get stored in.

Snapshot Backup – by Jay Versluis

Snapshot Backup is a simple plugin that backups up your WordPress site and sends it via FTP.

There’s not really much else to describe as there aren’t many options as you can see in the screenshot below:

Good Points

• Simple to use.

Bad Points

• No automated backups.
• The configuration options are found under the Dashboard menu (last place I’d expect a plugin config to be)
• The backup is stored locally in a non-unique folder which means it could potentially be downloaded by someone else.
• No restore option.

To be fair, this plugin is quite new and there are a lot of features on the roadmap, so you may find some of the issues above are addressed in later versions.

Updraft – by Paul Kehrer

Updraft gives you the options of manual or scheduled backups of your WordPress site to your local server, email, FTP server, S3 Amazon or Rackspace Cloud.

The configuration options are quite straight forward and there is context help for each option.

The following screenshot shows the single configuration/backup/restore options:

Good Points

• Good selection of backup destinations.
• Easy to use interface.

Bad Points

• After playing around with the backup directory location, the Updraft got confused as to what backups were available.
• Hasn’t been updated since July 2010, although the author mentioned he’d release a bugfix in Feb 2011.

Xcloner – by Liuta Ovidiu

Xcloner is a backup and restore application  that will backup any PHP/MySQL website and is available as a native plugin for WordPress and Joomla.

The software is free and there is an option to pay for professional support.  If you don’t want to pay for support, there is a free forum available to get help.

Xcloner has options for backing up to your local server, FTP server, via email and to Amazon S3.

You can restore your backups or clone them to a new site by specifying the FTP details of the new site and database details (this part is a manual process).  The restore script then does the rest for you.

As the Xcloner works on generic websites, Joomla and WordPress, the interface is a bit different to most WordPress plugins.

There quite a few options, but it doesn’t take too long to be familar with the setup.

The following screenshot shows the main configuration page:

During my testing of Xcloner I did have some issues with the backups not fully completing.  The support for Xcloner seems to be good, so I posted on the Xcloner support forums and will hopefully get an answer as Xcloner does look very promising.

Good points

• Can use on generic websites as well as Joomla and WordPress sites.
• Good range of backup options supported.
• Has an easy option for restoring and cloning WordPress sites.
• Good documentation.
• Support forum.

Bad points

• Can take a little time to learn how to use.
• Scheduling has to be manually set up.

Paid WordPress Backup Solutions

The following is a list of WordPress backup solutions that either have a one off payment or a subscription payment.

I haven’t personally used any of these backup solutions, but I am providing them for completeness.  The information I’m giving is based on what’s available on the products website.

BackupBuddy – by iThemes

BackupBuddy allows you to backup your WordPress site to a FTP server, Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud.

It is a complete WordPress backup solution as you can schedule backups and either restore them if your site is corrupted or migrate/clone them to a new site.

Pricing is based on the number of WordPress sites you want to backup:

• $45 for 2 sites
• $75 for 10 sites
• $150 for unlimited sites

VaultPress – by Automattic

VaultPress allows you to have realtime backups of your WordPress sites.  That means whenever a new post,  comment or any other content is changed or added to your site, the changes are synced to the cloud storage services.

Pricing is based on a monthly fee.  Currently this is set to:

• Basic – $15
• Premium – $40
• Enterprise – no pricing available at the time of writing.

WPTwin – by Jason Fladlien and Wilson Mattos

WPTwin is primarily designed to clone WordPress sites and costs $97.

It is not a WordPress plugin.  To clone a site requires FTPing a script onto the source and destination servers.

WPTwin does have a very good reputation and I haven’t seen any bad experiences with it.

As WPTwin doesn’t have a scheduling option, it is better suited to one-off or adhoc backups.   This means it wouldn’t be very suitable for auto-blogs.

Blog Zapper – by Carl Ringall

Blog Zapper works in a very similar fashion to WPTwin in that it is a standalone utility that you can use to copy, backup and clone your WordPress sites.

The cost of Blog Zapper is $37.

Conclusions On The Best WordPress Backup Solution

I can’t tell you precisely which WordPress backup solution to use because it depends on your budget, the number and type of WordPress sites you operate, the amount of data you have to backup, how often your content gets updated etc.

Hopefully the information I have given in this article will help you make a decision as to which backup solution to choose.

I would love to hear your experiences with whatever WordPress backup solution that you are using.

If you know of any good WordPress backup solutions I haven’t covered here, please leave a comment and I’ll endeavour to add them to this review.

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The keyword research tool market is very competitive with many products on offer, so how does Niche Finder stack up against the competition and where does it fit in the niche research market?

The first thing to point out about Niche Finder is that it is a tool designed specifically for keyword research without all the extra stuff that can sometimes over complicate a product.  Brad claims that his aim with Niche Finder was to design a tool that was very simple to use, yet very effective.

Has Brad succeeded with that claim?

Niche Finder Overview

Features of Niche Finder

I personally think one of the best features of Niche Finder is that it is very simple to use and find good keywords.

There’s no learning curve like a lot of other keyword research tools.

The interface is very clean as you can see from the screenshot below.

Once all of the data has been retrieved, you can easily sort any of the columns or add filters to narrow down the information.

One feature that is very handy for narrowing down suitable keywords is the difficulty score.  This is a score between 1 and 100 that indicates the difficulty of ranking for that particular keyword.  The first column also shows the niche difficulty with colors.

green = easy

yellow = medium

red = hard

So if you were working on a large set of keywords, you can simply add a filter to exclude all keywords in the “hard” difficulty range, so that you can concentrate on more manageable keywords.

Obviously, you do need a little caution with completely relying on the difficulty rating.  What I do is if I find a good keyword, ie: good amount of global monthly searches and low/medium difficultly, I do a sanity check by cross referencing with some other keyword tools I use, plus a good old Google search and eyeballing the top 10 results.

That said, I’ve found the difficultly ranking to be quite good and is certainly a very handy guide when sifting through lots of keywords.

Demonstration of Niche Finder

I originally wrote this review in Dec 2010.  Since then, Brad has added a number of new features to Niche Finder.   Most notably, getting backlink data from Majestic SEO and domain availability information from Domainface.

Below is the Brad Callen’s video demonstrating the latest features of Niche Finder.

Below is my original review video.  While Niche Finder has changed a bit since I recorded the video, the core functionality of Niche Finder hasn’t changed.

Final Thoughts on Niche Finder

Like a lot of internet marketers, I own and use a variety of tools and services for keyword research.  Most notably, my other favourite keyword research tool is SECockpit.

What I like about Niche Finder is its simplicity.  Generally, if I’m researching a new niche, I’ll fire up Niche Finder first, then when I’ve found some potential keywords, I’ll inspect them further with some of my other tools like Traffic Travis.

If you already have a keyword research tool that you are very happy with and good results from, I wouldn’t necessarily suggest you purchase Niche Finder.  However, if you are looking for your first keyword research tool or another method to compliment your keyword research, then I think Niche Finder is a pretty solid investment.

>>Click here to check out Brad Callen’s Niche Finder Tool<<

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The “brilliant” idea behind these types of emails is to trick you or at the very least make you very curious to open them.

However, I would suggest these types of email are very deceptive at best and just down right deceitful at worst.

So what type of email subject lines am I talking about?

Ever seen some of these?

• You just made a commission
• Re: Your free download link [response required]
• Paypal you $100?
• Your download link (license youremail@example.com)
• RE:  Your username and Password
• Re: new password for your account
• Re: your download
• Activate your download
• Your members area login
• Congrats Peter – You got an affiliate sale
• Your order was processed

and so on…….

I’m sure you’ve seen this type of stuff.

Remember that I’m not talking about standard spam that you receive, I’m talking about lists that you’ve subscribed to, whether it be to download a free ebook or buying a product.

These people are abusing their list and you should not tolerate it.

At the very least, make sure you:

UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THEIR LIST!

and if they are using one of those really deceptive subjects (typically the ones that start with RE:), then report it as abuse.

The more people that take action, the less likely these so called marketers will use such tactics.

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You are freed from having to generate multiple buttons for each product you are selling and having to copy/paste HTML into your WordPress page (which can be a real pain at times).

The plugin is very flexible and very easy to configure.

Overview of Easy PayPal Shortcodes

The video below shows you how to install, configure and use Easy PayPal Shortcodes.

Raising Money For the Red Cross Christchurch Earthquake Appeal

The main motivation for creating and selling this plugin was to raise money for the Red Cross 2011 Christchurch Earthquake Appeal.

After the plugin was launched, I donated 100% of proceeds raised during the donation period  (ending 24 March 2011) to the Red Cross.

Following up with my original statement that I would provide full financial disclosure, the details of the amount donated are below.

There were a total of 31 sales (some at the full price), which came in at $282 (includes DigiResults processing fees)

Then using the US to NZ conversion rate on 24 March 2011, this came to NZ$380 (rounded up).

A big thank you to everyone who purchased Easy PayPal Shortcodes.

Where to Get Easy PayPal Shortcodes

You can purchase Easy PayPal Shortcodes via:

* Easy PayPal Shortcodes Sales Page

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