The book is 242 pages. About 230 is worthy of the left to right movement necessary to power your eyes for processing the data. There is not one single thing in there that you do not know about. You will learn to build sites. Promote said sites. Then scale your effort. Nothing you haven’t read before. But if you aren’t making more than $1K a month with Adsense then I reckon homeboy has a thing or two to teach you (I do and yet he still did). Particularly in regards to doing this crap right. If you are enamored with blogs then keep blogging. He, like me, digs static sites. If you don’t like to write or outsource, then keep Autoblogging or doing whatever blackhat bullshit that makes you fatstacks. There is nothing easy here. But if you want to put in the work, or outsource, then the little light will once again blink on alerting you to something that can increase your soon to be worthless U.S. dollar collection.

As a matter of fact I have been totally retooling what I do based on his Article Baiting method. It requires a shitload of article writing. I’ve written at least 4 articles a day for the last 45 days and used them to build sites and promote them exactly as he says in the Blueprint. The search engines are ravenous over my efforts. The articles are being syndicated all over bringing in tons of backlinks. Every single word is original. Every single thing I do is completely white hat. Pearly white. Used to be that I would build a site. Promote it with a few bullshit links from garbage article directories, blog commenting, lenses, Hubpages, Blogger blogs, etc., add nausea. Now I just hammer Article Baiting and a few other techniques that he suggests.

Nothing I’m doing is a change from when I said I’ve basically given up (hosted) blogging (Blogger is turning into something cool) for static sites. I build mini sites using keyword research with Micro Niche Finder and/or Market Samurai (which just so happens is the author’s go to tools as well), write articles and collect traffic. It’s just a bit more aggressive. It makes more sense. I’ve gotten myself (yet again) more organized.

Believe me when I say if you follow the Blueprint, and more so if you do it manually without the tools he suggests,  you will be working your ass off. I’ve been working my ass off with the tools he suggests using. But if his experience is legit then I have no reason not to think I will be more successful chasing Adsense, which is what I hope to accomplish with this.

I will most likely burn the fuck out in a few more short weeks flogging this. Perhaps I will shamelessly pimp another product to this blog next month for something as dubious as autoblogging or worse. Who knows? What I do know today is that this ebook is a really good blueprint.

I have no beef with ETS. The video for ETS is actually what you should be doing to create micro niche sites. There is no mystery or secret there. But the implementation of systems like ETS is just adding huge amounts of competition to the web sewers. Yes, I know there are millions of niches and there is enough for everyone to compete and blah, blah, blah. And normally if it was just dudes creating a reasonable amount of websites and getting normal amounts of backlinks it wouldn’t really be a big deal. But does anyone remember how hard it was back in ‘03-’04 to get in front of directory generated spam sites? They were one reason guberus  started preaching about niches. You couldn’t compete with the onslaught of big crap so you had to go for the little crap. Well there are tools that are making it potentially difficult to compete for little crap now.

ETS creates blog networks apparently. I only know what I watched in the organic traffic video. They discussed a way to set up what they called “micro site networks” manually with Wordpress-Mu. The following is a screen cap of one of the slides presented:

Sure, this is no secret. This is how folks create massive amounts of blogs quickly.  But apparently they will be automating this process. 30,000 remote blogs created. 30,000. You think running around collecting comment backlinks, bookmark links and writing an article for Ezine Articles will mean anything to an onslaught like this? There are probably dozens of programs like this to do the same thing. I dunno.

So how are you going to compete? Still think building a well-written fancy pants blog is going to matter? Maybe it will. Systems like this will certainly make your work a lot harder. Do I have a problem with using ETS? I don’t. But I lament that competing on the web has come to this mass generation of spam niche domination.

A lot of folks are going to use this system. Couple of thousand maybe? A hundred or so will probably actually do anything with it and few dozen are going to pound the hell out of the web sewers. I personally have no interest in spending a couple of hundred dollars a month not to mention the cost for domains (which they omitted  in the video) for dedicated hosting and building tens of thousands of blogs.

There is no doubt you can make money with this system. You can simply brute force your way to top Google rankings using backlinks from properties you control. It looks expensive. The hosting is not cheap and I don’t know how you square all the domains you have to buy. But this is what is required to keep up.

I guess I am naive enough to think that building a good site that people actually want to naturally link to will matter in the end. Systems like this come and go. They are great for a quick blast of cash. Will this last? I dunno. Do I care? Not really. I am simply going to plod along building a site here and there on things that I care about. Folks using systems like ETS can potentially rape the web sewers for eyeballs and clicks and make a boatload of fat stacks with anxiety built web properties all the while looking over their shoulder to see if Daddy G is watching the proceedings. I’m kind of done with that nonsense. These guberus are going to have to get rich off someone else’s monthly dime.

It makes my head hurt to think about using and maintaining a system like this. I don’t know if I’ll make another dime slinging content into the web sewers. But I simply refuse to use systems like this to further the depths. Not that I care about the quality of the web, I’m just sick of this kind of crap.

At $1,750 a year you could make the argument that you should be able to find enough keywords to make back the charge to your credit card. Maybe the first batch you found in the first few months finally start cranking out $30/day then you’re golden.

Like most products 90% of the folks who buy it will do zippo with it. But the problem is with a product this expensive you will have serious people using it. And most are going to “discover” the same keywords out of the database. Will we all use the same keywords to build webpages? Doubtful. Will you have competition? Probably not any more than any other keyword search you do.

For those that do not know this tool goes at keyword search from a different angle than what you are used to. We are used to analyzing a seed keyword and figuring out if it pays and gets traffic and what the competition is. This tool finds keywords that gets traffic, pays high for Adsense, is low cost for PPC, etc. It backs into keywords. This tool is like the ultimate in keyword brainstorming. Very cool actually.

My opinion with the product is that it is made for full-time folks or those that dedicate a lot of time to their Internet marketing. If you aren’t willing to use the data by slinging webpages aggressively then you could be wasting your money.

I suppose you could get a subscription to IMeye and use the crap out of it for a couple of days then cancel. They are really in a jam with this product as they can’t allow tons of people access to it hence the high cost. The data would find a saturation point. Even with a million plus keywords they churn thorough the database there are still only finite amount of keyword that people will be able to use for Adsense or PPC or whatever. The less it costs the more that play. But the more it costs the harder it is to make it worthwhile unless you are a power player.

I will be canceling my subscription. This tool requires a serious mindset for its utilization. I prefer to dabble in this business. I like Micro Niche Finder which is far cheaper and not a subscription service. $147 is a lot of money. You can all imagine the worthwhile things that can be bought to advance your business for that kind of money.

So check it: I threw a PLR article into MAR. I bought the token database as well so it became a simple push button exercise to “rewrite” the thing. It instantly became 45% spun. It read perfectly fine. I made a few extra adjustments so it would be at least half to 60% unique. The token system is easy and typical.

Here is the cool as shit thing about the tool. It has an export button to your favorite article services like UAW and AMA. It adjusted the article for the AMA format. I opened up AMA dropped the article in and went through and added additional sentences where possible (For those in AMA you know what I’m doing). That article in, let’s say 10 minutes, became 100% unique to splash across the blog network.

Then I turned my attention to MAS. I created a profile. Probably 75-80% of the directories accepted my registration. And registration and validation and all that crap is super quick. I set up a “real” email on a hosted domain and had it forward to a Gmail account. I continued the profile wizard after waiting about 15 minutes to make sure I would scoop up all the validation emails that would trickle into Gmail.

Once I had registered the majority of the emails, I ran the keyword search to make sure I submitted to the right categories. Yea, it only submits to those directories that have the right category to submit to. Slick. I added the article, summary, resource box and tags into MAS. All fields spinnable. Clicked the big green button. Within 15 minutes or so I had 400 articles in the directories. 200 or so were pretty much instantly approved. All dubious quality of course but backlinks nonetheless. It has a nice submission check feature to see if your article was approved. You can schedule submissions too. It never felt like a burden.

Bought a lot of shit recently. Micro Niche Finder. Market Samurai. Magic Article Rewriter. Magic Article Submitter. Cost me $300. Shit, my dad was self employed and would spend thousands on tools for his shop if he thought it would speed the process up or make things easier on him and the guys. Some worked. Some didn’t. But the bottom line was better processes and more money. I understand that nobody approves of buying tools. That everything should be done manually and for free. That all content must pass the rigors of Google quality. Well, nobody is playing by the rules. They haven’t since the day I started slinging websites. If backlinks are what Daddy G wants then backlinks is what I will give him. I don’t want to sling utter shit though. MAR will rewrite a good article into many versions so I can distribute it without worry across my tiers and into AMA. MAS slings an article into hungry directories. Tie it up with a nice BMD run.

I wish it hasn’t come to this but it’s all about backlinks. Maybe Google figures out another way to rank our webpages tomorrow. Maybe backlinks mean nothing by summertime. But right now the one with the most/best backlinks win. Sorry it’s just the way it is. You may get lucky with some groovy long tail keywords and satisfying SEO but it’s only a matter of time before the competition takes you down if you don’t have copious amounts of backlinks. Maybe domain age will save you for a while. But there are some pretty big forces out there smashing the web with backlinks 24/7. The tools and networks are mind-blowing. The competition fierce. Autoblogging is what directory generators were in ‘04. Auto review sites are eating the web up. And that shit has gotten way more sophisticated.

No, I don’t want to sling shit. The article I drop into MAR is one that would be good enough to post into Ezine Articles or onto a money site. MAR makes very readable copies of it that you control. The article directories are very happy to receive your article. Believe it. They have Adsense and affiliate offers they want folks to click. And if someone scrapes your article from the directory, then that’s good for you, the directory and the dude that wants your content on his site. Lots of wins all around. Isn’t link sharing and content distribution what Google says it wants anyway? Sure you are manufacturing interest in your site with all these copies of your article that you hope Google’s algos interpret as unique content. It’s the game. Think Daddy G is playing fair?

I figure I either have to keep up or cut grass this summer for extra cash. I will keep trying to build sites people give a shit about but so far I haven’t created the next Mashable. But what I am creating is many little sites that are collecting buckets of change. Collect enough change and pretty soon you are talking real money. But all these sites need backlinks and content. I don’t have time to write college dissertations for every webpage. MAR and MAS is my edge.

I had tried Market Samurai as a demo a year or so ago. I didn’t much care for it. Having to open up tab after tab to evaluate different keywords annoyed the hell out of me. But some tools had been added and maybe things were different. Micro Niche Finder is a product I didn’t know much about. I just saw that in every forum I visited to try to figure out if Market Samurai was worth buying comparisons were made with Micro Niche Finder. So how the hell are you going to know if one or the other was a worthwhile purchase unless you tried both? So I shelled out the cash to do so.

Like I said I had Market Samurai installed before so when I tried to make the purchase of the product it wanted to charge me $150. I decided I wasn’t for that option because I knew if you purchased soon after downloading the trial version you could have it for $97. I simply got a key sent to another email address and paid the lesser fee. Damn if I hate all these pay option gymnastics Internet marketers are intent on having you participate in. I also bought MNF for $97. I bought them the same day about a week ago. Market Samurai is also still technically in Beta though it seems like it has been for over a year. Whatever.

Micro Niche Finder

Instead of showing you how to evaluate a niche to build a website, I thought I’d show you how I used MNF to figure out why my website is a load of shit and doesn’t produce. The niche was/is “belly fat”. I’m sorry for not using the “dog training” niche to demonstrate some IM shit. I know that is what you are used to seeing and may find this niche confusing for the demonstration.

So I entered belly fat into the search bar and hit enter. I got 180 words in about 3 seconds. The next thing I do is click on the “Filter Results” tab. See that “Easy” button? I always click it to do the initial filter. It is a built in filter that automatically selects those keywords that match the user guidelines. That gives me an easy place to start.

Next I click global search count and remove some keywords that are obviously useless as too competitive. “Belly”, “lose fat”, etc. 56 out of the 180 “belly fat” keywords were selected for further study.

Next I click on the “Get Checked Exact” tab. What I am looking for is those results under 100,000. Less is better. This shows the number of web pages that are indexed in Google for the given exact phrase.

Once this is complete I sort the “Get Checked Exact” and only check those that are less than 100,000. You may choose less or more. As you follow along with my “belly fat” example you will note that of the 180 keywords I am down to 2 keywords that meet the criteria. Is it any damn wonder why I make zero money with this niche?

Anyway, at this point you are ready to figure out the “strength of competition”. If you have a bunch you would simply filter on those that have met the criteria up to now and have the program select those keywords to run the SOC check. The filter system in MNF is fantastic. As it is, for “losing abdominal fat” and “lose abdominal fat” are the only two to meet the criteria so  I can simply click on “Get SOC” and it will quickly get the results. You are looking for green. Some look for green or yellow. Red is obviously bad and should be avoided.

So of the 2 keywords that were candidates for SOC check only one was worthy of the next step which is the “measure of backlinks”. I click the “Get MOD” and hope to see a result under 30 or so. I do. The keyword I should have been targeting was “losing abdominal fat.” I can assure you I have not got a single article that references “losing abdominal fat”. My freaking site was named after belly fat. I was being generous by even letting “losing abdominal fat” be analyzed.

Other goodies in the program can be seen by left clicking on the keyword. You will see a menu that will allow you to dig deeper in the keyword, find Amazon products with the keyword, Crapbank products, Ezine articles, etc. All very useful for various reasons.

Market Samurai

So did I hate Market Samurai? Not at all. It’s actually quite useful as well. As a matter of fact I am keeping both.

Curious about how Market Samurai did with my belly fat example? Me too. So here we go. Create a project then add a keyword to analyze. Click “Generate Keyword” and you will get a list of keywords. Then I click “Analyze Keywords”. It will bring back the SEO Traffic and something called PBR%. Now, the user manual says to filter SEOT with 80 and PBR% by 15%. I do and click filter. It leaves me with 60 keywords to mess about with.

Next we want to filter on the SEO competition, which is how many webpages appear for that exact term. We used 100,000 in MNF so we will here as well. I also leave the Adwords amount checked as well as SEO Value to see what Market Samurai says is the total value of that keyword. I click “Analyze Keywords” again.

So what are we left with? “Loose belly”, which make zero sense. “Getting rid of fat”. Could be interesting but it doesn’t contain my keyword phrase of “belly fat”. “Belly jiggle” which is funny and has no monetary value. And lookie here: “lose abdominal fat”. Interestingly close to what MNF found.

Now here is where these products differ. If you want to analyze “lose abdominal fat” you have to open up a new tab. remember in MNF where you click the phrases you want to evaluate for MOB and SOC? Well to get at the same data it requires a new tab in Market Samurai. Which isn’t a big deal for one keyword, but imagine if you had 30 to evaluate? In MNF I simply click the checkboxes and let it go to work. In Market Samurai I have to open up a new tab for each freaking keyword.

But the SEO info that Market Samurai brings you is actually incredibly useful. It evaluates the page that is ranked in the search engine for title, Yahoo directory inclusion, DMOZ, etc. If there are a couple of keywords with “Y” across DMZ, YAH, Title, etc. then maybe I pass on trying to compete with that word, particularly if the PR is 4 or better. This is all great info.

So, after I have weeded out the keywords with MNF I take those “green” keywords from MNF and drop them in Market Samurai’s SEO competition tab to do another important check. I want to know how competitive those pages are. How good their on page SEO is. This is useful info.

And that’s not all. Market Samurai will dig up content from Ezine Articles and other groovy sources. Is that important? Sure. Because you can evaluate the article to see how often it has been used on the web. If it’s only got a couple of indexes then I’ll use for one of my feeder sites. Duplicate content my ass. As long as it has been barely used I’ll use it. It can also publish content to your blogs. Nice.

Market Samurai also has a nice backlink finder tool. It will search through Squidoo, Hubpages, forums, Google blogs to find places to add you backlink. It will also figure out if it do-follow or not. Groovy stuff.

So there you are. I use and really like both of these tools. I find my keywords with MNF finder because it is more convenient and easier. I use Market Samurai to further my evaluation. I use Market Samurai to find content and publish to my sites. If I only bought one I would buy Micro Niche Finder.

First of all, don’t pay full price for the thing. Simply click away from the site and the unethical script will pop up with Julie begging you not to leave and giving you $10 off. People who use this type of marketing suck. It basically shits all over the people willing to buy the product for “full price”.

The bonuses include a two year old niche technique ebook. A Twitter “system” ebook and videos. Some PowerPoint slides for more niche discussion. And some PLR and graphics for 5 overused niche topics. Oh and you can submit your email to a couple of his buddies for more worthless IM junk. Can’t recommend any of it as terribly useful. You might argue that the Twitter thing is to your liking but honestly there isn’t much to it. That’s why people offer Twitter ebooks for free.

So what about the ebook? Go read Griz. Go buy Digital Nomad’s Guide to Make Money Online. You’ll get far more out of the experience. This book is written with the day one newbie in mind.

So begins the Introduction on who he is. That blogging is the greatest thing since the moon landing. That you can make money. Give people a reason to read your blog. Blog it. Blah, blah, blah.

Next is finding something to sell on Crapbank of course. When you find that jewel of literature grab some keywords from your favorite tool. What keywords are best to use? Dunno. He doesn’t go into it. What if the keywords are highly competitive. Tough shit. He doesn’t write about it. Did you know that if there wasn’t any advertisements then the market isn’t profitable? I know. Shocking.

Find something you want to pimp? Great. Find yourself some hosting. Get yourself a domain. Used is best of course. Anything exciting about that in the ebook? No. Not really.

Time to build a blog. Did you know there was something called Fantastico to help you build a blog? Crazy. I know. He breaks things down into short and long term blogging. Short term is flippers. Long term is money sites. Whatever.

Optimize the blog. Does the book provide any magic elixir? Nope. Standard SEO plugins and the like. He suggests buying fancy graphics packages for the blog just in case you didn’t know that if you were in it for the long haul and want to brand your shit you should do something more than just a default theme.

Of course he is big into building email lists so he makes a few suggestions about building that and creating a newsletter. Can’t disagree with that. 30,000 people bought some iteration of his Blogging to the Bank ebooks. Mostly through guberu pimping. If you are inclined he gives you a little boost in that direction but really the instructions are all available at your favorite autoresponder store.

He delves into SEO in a paragraph. Same for on-site optimization. No tricks. Just a perma link here and a description there. All very 2004.

Monetization. He doesn’t tell you how to make money as much as what to plaster on your blog to make money. Banners, Adsense, 125×125 ad sales.

He talks about content. He still uses PLRPro. I commend him for that. I do too. He says pretty much what I do. Post about once a week over the course of the year. Did you know you can write your own content that you can post on your blog and on article directories? If not, Blogging to the Bank 2010 is the ebook for you.

Outsourcing was mentioned. Nothing you haven’t read before.

Backlinks were mentioned. No tricks. Nothing to get you ranked higher or faster. Standard fare. Lots of bloviating on getting noticed in Twitter, Digg, Technorati, etc. Typical write and hope. Maybe you’ll get traffic from an article. Maybe not. Will it help get you ranked in the search engines? Not from my experience. But the book doesn’t discuss why social traffic sucks and what you must do to get organic traffic in the search engines. But given this dude is all about building a list you shouldn’t expect to learn much about organic traffic goodness like the Nomad ebook.

And apparently his new gig is selling blogs. He gives his criteria for selling them. Not really my thing nor am I interested in it becoming my thing.

So there you have it. Blogging to the Bank 2010 review. If you are a rote newbie then it might be of value. But even if you are there are better how-to sites and ebooks to choose from. If you are looking to “blog to the bank” don’t expect this ebook to teach you how to make money. It ain’t happening. Get Digital Nomad’s Guide to Make Money Online or read Griz’s stuff for free. Griz has posted a few other sites that are worthwhile as well like the University Kid or Blogger Illustrated which he currently promotes.

Stay tuned for my next review. Two keyword research software products go head to head…

Twitter Tool

Found a cool tool. For those of you who dig Social Media and are trying to make money with the effort, you should check out EverTweet. Yes, I am fully aware of the majority of folks who find Social Media a waste of time. You would prefer these type of people not to visit your site. But if you are one to embrace the new media and want a chance to diversify, this is really neat. The joy is you can accumulate followers automatically based on keywords. It also tracks who follows you and removes them if they do not follow you after a certain period of time. Think of the spam opportunities. I am.

Let’s say you have a site on the ever popular “dog training”. How are you going to get visitors? Schlep around trying to get Google ranked with links and articles? Sounds fun. What if every day you had a service like EverTweet that would search out Tweets that had the words “dog”, dog training” and “poop machine”. How cool would it be if it automatically tried to set up a follow connection with those people? Up to 2,000 a day. Think maybe those people might have an interest in Tweets on that topic from you in the future? Maybe that Tweet links to a Crapbank product. Or an Amazon product. Or a new article you wrote. Or a blog post.

From the site:

Choose a keyword or phrase, select how many people to follow each day, choose when to drop lame friends, and you’re done. A week from now you will have hundreds if not thousands of new followers – and it never has to stop.

I have no idea if you will make money with it. It’s just another tool. You’ll have to figure out how best to use it to accomplish anything. Check it out for free.

Web Hosting

I spent an hour and fully dumped Lunarpages from hosting any Wordpress blogs. That is one shitty host. Had the fun of getting those blogs transferred to Hostgator. I will be using Hostgator and the free hosting I get from Affilorama from now on.

Sell Out

And finally: Guess what? I’m a sell out. I got an iPhone. We got my daughter one and it seemed pretty cool. They day after Christmas we got my bill for Sirius radio. Paying a stupid annual fee for the privilege. Looked around and discovered that I can get any music/news I want for free with Flycast, Pandora, last.fm, etc. Called Sirius and canceled. Will use the money saved for the monthly fee for iPhone data charge. We have a family rate so it wasn’t that much more. So there. I have a stupid iPhone that my youngest daughter has been glued to since we bought it. But it will be nice to have a means of getting on the web at work without having to deal with the censorship.

I am always looking for shit to write about. I do the typical keyword dance to see what people are searching for and write some wordy mess that pools together a bunch of primary and secondary words that people ignore on the road to clicking a pay link. I can write. I just find it exhausting to come up with ideas sometimes.

Some of your favorite guberus have made the suggestion to go through the question and answer sessions at Yahoo Answers. It’s a good idea. It helps prime your brain with good topic suggestions. But it’s a mess going through the inane questions to get to  something that you would want to use as fodder for your next masterpiece. Answer Analyst helps.

Let’s say that you have a site about mountain biking. It might be helpful to know what the hell people want to know about the activity. If you knew the questions you could provide the answers. Google would love you long time.

Look at the screen shot below of the search I did for mountain biking. As proof I own this software for you and the FTC, the screenshot shows my blog behind the tool.

Anyway, the search was on Y! Answers. It took about 3 seconds to collect all those questions. Time save = huge. Now I know what people really want to know. And I can write a post for every single one of those queries. Do you see the research potential? No, you don’t need the tool to do this but I would much prefer to spend my time playing marbles with my daughter than sorting through questions manually on Yahoo for ideas.

Ok, so much for finding questions. What about finding answers? Basically you ask the tool a question and it goes out to Google or Y! Answers for the answers. Your choice.

For this example I used the ever popular, acne. I put in “what is acne” and it took about 5 seconds to go out and parse through the results. It left me with tons of answers and references. You simply select the results you dig and paste them, with or without the reference, to your clipboard. Grab half a dozen and go in a reword the things and you have a quick post. You can get short, medium or long answers, by the way. Handy if you just need a quick blurb to quote or if you need a long dissertation to rewrite.

I prefer finding questions. I can typically write 300-400 words on most anything. What I did last night for a couple of posts was find the questions people are asking then go to Nichebot and get some secondary keywords to sprinkle around.

Getting answers from the tool is not as excellent as finding the questions. I put in “what are carrots” and got two lame wiki answers. Then again I put in “what is solar” and got a ton of answers. The longer the question the more dubious the results. You can’t put in “what is the best front fork shock” and expect an answer. Well, you can expect an answer but you ain’t getting one from the tool. It’s best used for high level research. One maybe two keywords.

I like the tool. By itself it won’t make you any money. It is simply a nice tool to help with mundane tasks. If this is not how you want to create content or find ideas then it won’t be of any value to you. I am always looking for ideas to write about. Knowing what the questions are is a great place to start.

So here is the deal. Homeboy is selling it for a discount until tomorrow. You’ll have to go through your spam email and find a favorite guberu with the discount price. My affiliate link is for the full boat price of $97. I paid $27 for it. Well worth the price. He is normally selling it for $97. Telling you this makes me the worst affiliate marketer on the planet. But I can live with that.

Would I pay $97 for it? Yes and no. Yes knowing what I do about the product after paying $27 and seeing the research it provides quickly. Grudgingly of course, because $97 is a high price. But no, because I would be in your shoes and not want to part with the cash for this tool at that price. I know your thought process.