Monetize Your Site

I have had the Deep Link Engine in operation on a few of my blogs for about a week. I considered writing up a report in the form of a PDF and offering it for download from the parent site, Selling on Your Website. I could have combined parts of the several posts about the Deep Link Engine along with my latest observations into a reasonable report. I am not sure that I have enough to add at this point to make that worth while, but I can offer some useful advice on using the Deep Link Engine.

The Deep Link Engine currently available bares little resemblance to what is stated about it on the download page. From the download page:

So what is “Deep Link Engine” for Wordpress?

Simply it’s a WP plugin that automatically, and systematically get more links to each and every blog post you create. Either manually, or automatically.

It was designed to be used with stand-alone wordpress.org blogs. So you would need to have wordpress hosted on your server, or hosting account.
How it works…

For each post you create Deep Link Engine will analyze the content of your post, determine 5-10 keywords, then go out and find relevant blogs related to those keywords. Once it is done finding blogs, you select which blogs you would like to link to.

By linking to these other blogs we send a “pingback” notifying their blog’s software that we referrenced them on our website. Leading to deep relevant links to all our blog posts. Over time this will greatly enhance your ranking power for internal pages. The best part is easy.

Deep Link Engine for wordpress is really “push button” link building at it’s finest, and you get access to it absolutely free.

The text in red requires further comment. My guess is that the plug-in was originally designed in this way, but was changed to accommodate use with auto-blogging software. There appears to be little, if any manual control.

The plug conducts its final search when you hit the publish button. I thought that perhaps you could gain some control by adding to the automatically produced keyword list. Even this has proved to be a false hope. I produced a post that included a video with little supporting text. There were no keywords generated by the plug so I added several keywords and hit the publish function. When the post was published I glanced at the keyword box only to find that my added keywords had been lost for the most part.

My advice would be that if you choose to use the Deep Link Engine just install it and set it up in settings. Don’t bother trying to control anything in the way of output, for the most part it will be a waste of time.

Now for a little better news I will speak about results. I don’t consider that the time is adequate to fully evaluate the effectiveness of the strategy, but I can give some observations of early results. You will likely see a traffic spike when you first begin to use the plug-in. I suspect that most of this early traffic is from blog owners who have been pinged. They are not likely to be the targeted traffic that you would hope for, but they will improve your traffic count for the short term.

I have gone into my traffic log on the server and seen the activity there. I have also followed some of the referrer links in Google Analytics. I have seen several places where the trackbacks were listed to my blogs. Most of these are nofollow but a couple have been dofollow. Even as no follow other blog visitors can click on the link if they have the interest.

For the most part I am using this with an article distribution service provided by iSnare, an article directory. I will maintain the regimen for some time until I can give a more definitive opinion as to the value of the strategy.

If you have an opinion please share it in a comment. Thanks!

I have a few articles published on various article directory sites. When I am viewing my analytics I see a few referrals from these sites. I think that the most consistent traffic (subjective not objective) comes from the site Buzzle.com. This may be due to the content of the article there (I have only posted one article there). This is a library site, not a reprint site.

Ezine articles gives a very complete article analytics page to each author. This page tracks views, reprints, and comments among other things. The pattern that I see emerging for most of the articles that I have posted there is that one is likely to see several views by passers by while the article is on the first page of results for the category, but few will click through. Then, later in the article’s life, the targeted audience will come upon the article, probably through an article search. These viewers are much more likely to click through to the offer site.

This makes doing your keyword research even more important. You want your article to show up for your target audience when they do a search on the article site. Keywords need to be incorporated into the article title in a sensible manner. They also need to be worked into the article a few times. This will help to get your article in front of your target viewer.

My primary sources of clicks have been Buzzle and eZine. I have a few articles up on Go Articles with little direct result. I do see a trend toward more traffic to all the sites that I have supported with articles. My conclusion is that there is still value to article marketing. The best approach would  be through volume and consistency. I think that sticking with the higher quality sites is probably the best plan for direct visitors, but shear number of backlinks may improve the organic traffic more.

I have been using WordPress for my blogging software for some time. In addition to blogs WordPress is used extensively for the bed for other websites. This is a trend that I have observed to be on the rise.

There are some advantages to using the WordPress software for a site or a blog. WordPress has some automation that helps get the word out. Whenever there is a post to a WP site there is an automatic ping sent to an RSS aggregator. This is a flashing light telling the world that there is new content available. The various search bots are attracted to the flashing light and the new content can get indexed very rapidly (no promises on this, but I have seen it happen within hours). The sooner your content is indexed the sooner it can show up in search results.

Basic to the WordPress experience is the theme. A theme is a skin for your WP site. There are many, many options available. I use one called the untheme-two-column that is an adaptation of the default theme designed to be easily edited. I use this because I want to make my blogs match my simple sites of which they are a part. There are many free themes available as well as paid themes. There are also people who specialize in modding and producing themes. They can give you a truly unique theme for your WP site.

There is also a built in comment system with the package. Comments can add content to your site and make it a more interesting place to visit. There is also a blog comment spam industry, so I would recommend that you either moderate all comments or turn commenting off in your control panel. There is a good spam filter plug-in that comes with the package. Be sure to activate the plug-in if you leave commenting turned on. I do recommend that you leave commenting on in most cases, but be aware that you will need to check what is going on with your comments on a regular schedule.

WordPress can be hosted on your hosting space as long as you have file upload access, php, and a MySQL database available. Most paid hosting plans will include these basic requirements. Many paid hosts offer a one click install for WP through their cPanel. There may even be some free hosts that offer the required features. If you don’t have a one-click install option and don’t want to do the installation yourself there are people that would do the installation for you for a nominal charge.

As well as themes there are many plug-ins available for WordPress. These can extend the utility of the software for your particular purpose. Plug-in installation is usually straight forward and easy. There will probably be a plug-in available to do whatever you want to do. Some of the latest and most useful will be listed in a section of your control panel  dashboard along with other announcements by the WP team.

Some of the advantages to using WordPress are:

• Easy installation
• Changeable look through the Skin System
• Extensive Plug-in library
• Quick Indexing by the search engines
• Built in comment system
• Built in RSS feeds for posts and comments
• Email notifications of comments

These things combine to make a WordPress site a good choice for the bed for your site or blog.

The new blogs at the audioart musicplayer and webpickups sites are live. (That reminds me that I need to update navigation on both and add links on the blogs.) I installed the KeyWordLuv and DoFollow plug-ins on both of these new blogs. They both incorporate the Deep Link Engine and iSnare content distribution system.

The About Music Blog under the AudioArt MusicPlayer domain is signed up with the category of entertainment. I am also inviting guest bloggers to submit material for this blog. An interesting experience transpired when I updated the post. DLE found a post on my main business blog among the links returned as related to the post. I received a ping and approved the trackback.

The WebPickUps Blog incorporated into the WebPickUps site is due to receive articles in the humor and sexuality categories. This will draw the right traffic for that site if the linking scheme works. Overall it is an interesting experiment. I have seen traffic increases on all of the blogs where I have incorporated the system, but the jury is still out on the value of the effort.

At any rate, stop by the new blogs and say hello! Leave a comment and say that I sent you.  Thanks!

I have been fussing with the Deep Link Engine for about a week. It is not everything that I hoped that it would be, but it does collect links and add them to your posts.

I have all but quite fussing with the interface except in the rare instance that the generated keyword list is too short. I had tried deleting various keywords. It now appears that the only control left over the plug-in is to add some keywords to the list produced by DLE.

This software was developed as an introduction to a product, auto content cash, that the team has just launched. While the plug does gather links there is no manual control as was mentioned on the download page. I suspect that the intention when developing the plug was to give the manual control as stated. The plug-in needed to be fully automatic for use with the various auto-blogging packages including their new offering. This means that the meaningful search is done after the publish button is clicked. What is really needed is a manual/automatic switch in the options. This could default to automatic, but give us the option to manually select the blogs to which we wish to link.

In using the plug-in I have seen some immediate results. Most of the immediate results that you will see are the better blog operators visiting your blog to see who the heck linked to their blog. This is low quality traffic, but it is a traffic boost. I have seen the trackback on a few blogs and they have all been nofollow. Anyone interested can still click on the link, so there will be some incremental traffic produced. With enough of these scattered around there could be a long term traffic boost. How targeted that traffic is remains to be seen, but could be improved with the ability to hand pick the links. It is too bad that is not currently possible.

I discontinued using the plug on this blog and any of my blogs where I am producing most of the content. If I could hand pick the links I would use the plug-in here. I do have it installed on several blogs where I am populating a good bit of the content with iSnare articles. I have found that they have a good automated content distribution system, and most of the articles are of reasonably good quality. The resolution of the articles sent is not as good as it could be because of the limited number of categories, but they do not auto-post, so you do have control of what you print. This is the best distribution system that I have found to date, but I have not searched long and hard. If they could set it up with some keyword filters it could be significantly improved. I intend to set up two more blogs using this system this evening.

Do you know of other content distribution systems? Please tell us in a comment.

I am beginning to see articles trickle in to other sites on which I have installed the scripts. It does appear that this will work as I had hoped. When I saw that I was actually getting some articles I signed up two more blogs. I will keep you updated on the progress and results.

I expect that I will see some curiosity seeker traffic as I do have the Deep Link Engine active on all of these sites. There will be a percentage of those sites that are pinged that will check on the site sending the ping. I did see one trackback resulting from a ping by the DLE. It was set as nofollow, but the search engines don’t always follow that rule. I will be watching traffic and SERP to see if this strategy has value. To some extent more traffic means more clicks, but it is really targeted traffic that is needed to make money.

I installed the article gathering script that works with the iSnare article directory service on one blog. It proceeded to download some articles. The articles are well written and add value to the blog. I liked the way that it worked so I went and registered two or three other blogs this morning. The first blog started collecting articles within a couple of hours. The additional blogs have not been sent any articles after several hours.

I may need to investigate further. All of the domains are hosted as add-on domains in my hosting account. That means that they all have the same IP address. The serving software at iSnare may not be set up to deal with a situation like mine. The information that I have been able to find is a bit limited. I did not see any notice that this was not allowed or would not work. I registered several accounts because the address is required for the script and there is no way to add additional URLs within the account. I want different subject matter for each of the blogs.

Time will tell, I guess. Has anyone else used this service? Has anyone been able to use it with multiple blogs from the same IP address? Tell me in a comment. Thanks!

I researched the free auto-blogging software that I had run across. The developer admits on the Warrior Forum that the software is black hat. They use scrappers to pick up their content and scrub all the links out of the posts. It does function and the Deep Link Engine does work with it as best that it can.

I also found an alternative that I like better in some ways. There is a bit more work involved but the result conforms to the article marketing terms of use. The author’s resource box is retained and the article keyword list is supplied. This is a free service of iSnare, one of the frequently mentioned article directories. There is a free script that you put into your blog folder that populates article drafts into your database. You are free to choose the articles that you use.

I had tried a similar service from ArticleUnited, but was very disappointed with the results. The iSnare service seems to be much better. I will be adding it to a couple of other sites this week. I added it to the MC Rally site this evening. That is one on which I had the other service installed. There were only three articles that the script ever pulled and they were not well targeted. The new service had pulled at least a half dozen articles when I checked this evening. They are primarily on one topic, so I may spread them out a bit.

I will test this a bit more and then provide the links, but Google knows now if you ask the right questions.

I have made several posts about the Deep Link Engine. I also mentioned a free auto-blogging plug-in. I have given the Deep Link Engine enough publicity and am still not ready to publicize the auto-blogging software.

The Deep Link Engine was provided as an incentive to sign up for a mailing list on what is known as a squeeze page. The developers have their own auto-blogging plug-in that is offered in a program that went live today. I suspect that part of the reason that DLE works the way that it does is so that it will auto-populate links on the auto-blogging sites. This should improve the performance of the blogs.

The grand experiment of the title is an emulation of the new program offered by the DLE developers. It is not as fully automated as their program, but it should be a fair test of the potential in some ways. I put a blog up on a sub-domain space. Sub-domains are not as good as top level domains at drawing traffic. I picked a popular niche. While it will be harder to promote the site in the competitive environment the potential for reward is high. Clicks on ads in competitive markets return higher payouts and there are many high paying affiliate programs. If I am able to drive some targeted traffic to the site there is a chance for a payout. My only expense for this is the time involved in setting it up and overseeing the project. I already have the hosting space and a sub-domain is just a special part of an existing domain.

I have now looked at three of the initial articles that were returned. The first one has almost no content. It appears to have started life out as an affiliate text link with the affiliate link stripped out. The second was either written by a seriously non-native English speaker or was scrambled by the spin software on the article server, or perhaps a little of both. The third article is perfectly readable and of reasonably good quality.

I did have a bit of a problem getting the plug-in to work on the new blog. I jumped through a couple of hoops and was able to get it operating. I then tried to add the plug to a couple of other blogs without success. I jumped through all the same hoops but there was no joy in the end. I have some work to do on the new blog and then I may investigate the difficulties with the other instances. It may be that only one instance can operate on the server. Perhaps a reseller hosting plan would work differently.

Have you tried auto-blogging? What were your results? What software did your use? Leave a comment about your experience or thoughts on the subject.

I have deactivated the Deep Link Engine plug-in on this site. I have tested the plug to some extent and have some complaints regarding the way that it operates. There appears to be no control over the blogs to which a post links. The plug-in initiates a search when you hit the publish function and actually does the full treatment at that time no matter what you have told it you wish to do. Deleting blogs in the plug-in grid does no good because the final search is carried out after you hit the publish button.

This plug-in would be fine for an auto-blogger who does not want to mess with the content at all. If you are generating original content and would like to display only relevant blog posts this is not the plug-in for you.

I peeked at the net through Google’s eyes and do not see much in the way of negative comment. There does not appear to be enough experience with the plug for glowing comments either. While looking at some commentary I ran across a free WP auto-blogging plug-in. I think that I will go and try the two of them out together. If I hit the mother load I will let you know! Off to do a little research.