Hoorah! Subvert & Profit is back in action again! You can now sign up and check the guide to getting the most out of this awesome service!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So take the code and stick it in a hidden div

Add this to your StyleSheet:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some FAQS & Tips

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One last thing! - If you know of any other blogs that don’t use the “nofollow” attribute, leave them in a comment on this post and I will add them to the blog search engine - lets build this resource for all of us!

I like to think of websites as flowers. Now just before you unsubscribe to my feed, de-bookmark my site and thumbs down me on stumble, hear me out. It’s actually a pretty good analogy!

Okay, so I don’t literally think of websites as flowers, but I’m going to roll with this because I think it makes everything a bit more interesting to imagine pretty flowers than Googlebots (what does a Googlebot look like anyway??). I was looking at some SEO forums today and I saw some pretty bad advice being dished out, unfortunately a lot of people were agreeing as well. So I guess this post is really to bust some link building myths and most importantly, give you a perspective where you can make your own link building decisions.

Simplifying things, there are two main things that are measured when looking at link profiles with websites:

Authority
Gaining links from highly ranked powerful sites, will of course pass some of this authority onto your website. Getting some authority links shows your website is trusted and isn’t a pill-popping-phishing-farm.info. Obtaining these kinds of links tends to be tricky, because you generally have nothing to offer these websites and a lot of them will rather just compete with you than help you out, because they are in the dominant position. Google has to be more careful nowadays and use a series of measures to rank websites as there’s a lot of webmasters who are whipping up their own authority real estate and using it to their own ends [insert evil laugh]. While helpful, in competitive market link building, a few big authority links aren’t going to have you sitting #1. So Google also takes close stock of…

Popularity
Link popularity! Diving head first into dangerous PageRank “is it meaningful, is it not”? territory. I’m not even going to touch on that subject, there are a lot of people who’d rank a whole lot better, if only they spent the time they stare at that stupid green bar actually doing some SEO! I really want to talk about Link Profiling.

Link Profiles
To understand how important this is, we’re going to use my wonderful flower analogy. So lets imagine we’re at a flower show and everyone has put their flowers (websites) out on display. The flower judge (Google) is going to come along and rank these flowers in order of how big and well developed they are. Unfortunately, our judge is blind. So he can’t tell how beautiful the flowers are, only how big they are. However, our judge can still judge the show, because he has a clever way of working out how beautiful the flowers are as well.

Since this is a kind of weird flower show, there are some extra rules. Everyone with flowers is allowed to take some of their flower food and give it to what they think are the beautiful flowers in the show to help them grow some more. Naturally, the biggest and most beautiful flowers attract the most food and grow even quicker. However, there are also some small flowers with really nice, um “buds” on them that attract a few people so they get a nice boost too.

So the flower judge goes around and ranks the best flowers as he sees (hawhaw) fit and takes notes on how well everyone is doing. He sees some really bad flowers too, seriously, they’re like f**king twigs and nobody has fed them at all.

Since the flower show as over 100 billion flowers in it, the judge really never gets a rest. He kind of does laps constantly re-ranking flowers, getting minimum wage in his never ending job. So when we get back to our first group of flowers again, everyone has been working hard on growing them. Poor old twig man’s flower is still looking as crap as ever. So twig man walks around the field before the show and picks up all the flower food he can find that other people have dropped. This flower food is a bit rotten, but it’s certainly better than nothing. The food makes his flower grow a lot bigger, but not all that beautiful. “That’s okay” he thinks, “The judge is blind, he can’t see my flower isn’t beautiful and I’ll be sure to win!”.

When re-ranking the flowers, the judge comes twig man’s flower and has a feel and thinks “Well, this is has certainly grown quickly compared to the other 100,000,000,000 flowers in the show. It must be quite a beautiful flower, I’ll rank him a bit higher”. Twig man is dead chuffed and his flower gets 10th position in his flower niche.

Before the judge comes around again, twig man sets off to find more dropped flower food. Crap! There’s nowhere near as much as last time and what is left is really rotten! Still, nobody is feeding twig man’s plant for him, even though it’s a big plant, it’s an ugly plant. So twig man feeds his plant what bits of rotten food he can. When the judge finally returns and examines twig man’s plant again, he thinks “That’s strange. This plant had grown a lot last time I saw it. Now it has hardly grown at all. Almost all of the other plants, when they start to bloom, grow faster month on month. I think this man is cheating…”

..and so twig man of course loses his place in the flower show…

WTF? Can you say that again, without the patronizing story?
Okay, so what we’re describing here (if my little story wasn’t too abstract): flower food is links, the size (authority) of the flower (site) is relevant to how much food (links) it has and how beautiful a flower is describes the quality of it’s content. The amount of flowers in the show is trying to demonstrate how much comparative data Google has at it’s disposal. So, what you may think you can squeeze by, will stand out like a sore thumb when compared to the profiles of millions of other pages in your niche.

Googlebot’s are not human so they really read your content and decide on it’s actual quality. Googlebots rely heavily on links and most importantly, trends in links. The best term I’ve heard used is the “organic bloom” effect, which describes a continued up-surge in links. The theory is; if you write some excellent content, people will link to it, people follow these links, agree it’s good content and link to you as well. This effect is exponential, the more links you have, the more new links you are likely to attract overtime. It can be quite obvious to Google that you have poor content if you try wham 100 top directory links at your site, they get indexed then the following months you get nothing. If you had great content, your website would continue growing.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn into one of those people that says “The best SEO is just write good content”, because that’s not SEO, that’s just writing good content and having a worthwhile website and frankly people that say that are cop outs. There are ways that you can mimic the “organic bloom” effect and make Google think you’ve got the best website in your field.

Which brings me neatly to the crap I saw on an SEO forum today…
A chap was asking how many directories he should submit his site to and if he should outsource the work. He said he had found people offering 500/1000 directory submissions for $200. The advice given to him by the resident “SEO Experts” was “only to submit to the top 50 directories, everything else is a waste of time”.

My outlook is this; a “top” directory is obviously popular and therefore normally has 2 million other links in it, reducing the quality of the link you receive, so although the link will get indexed, it’s still only a directory link at the end of the day. Also, as we just demonstrated what good is having 50 new links just suddenly appear to your website? Guff all.

Yes, small directories may seem like a waste of time, however they also provide this “organic bloom” effect. If you pay $300 for 1,200 directory submissions, you’re guaranteed to get new links indexed every month for absolutely ages. Not to mention the time you’re going to save. If you can find someone with a good reputation to manually do these links for you, it’s worth forking out so you can spend your time working on more advanced tactics.

The organic bloom effect is the exact reason that link laundering and exploiting link velocity works so well. I’ve been approached many times by e-commerce clients asking for help with SEO, because they are in a sticky position with content. People don’t go to e-commerce sites for great content, they skim a variety of sites for research then land on a chosen e-commerce site to buy. Sometimes optimising a page for links/search engines is at the other end of the scale to optimising for purchase conversions.

If you’ve got a site like this and your competition is outranking you just because they’re older and bigger, copying the organic bloom effect can make Google think your site is more beautiful and you’ll have an advantage that your competition didn’t even know existed. That will give them something to think about when their staring at their silver medal!

edit:

Found this search “recommendation” somewhat amusing:

Hehe