Monetize Your Site

I had reported an incompatibility issue between DLE V 1.7.0 and the All-in-One SEO for WordPress yesterday. This is just a quick note to confirm that there was a quick follow-up update to the Deep Link Engine (V1.7.1) to apparently to fix the incompatibility issue with the All-in-One SEO for WordPress issue. I have installed the update on a couple of blogs and the errors appear to be gone. Stay tuned for further updates on the DLE update situation.

An update version 1.7.0 is being pushed out to the community. I have found this update to be incompatible with the All-in-One SEO for WordPress plug-in. The incompatibility will cause several errors in WordPress. There will be a listing at the top of the SEO for WordPress page and a warning below the post window on the posting page. The solution is to turn one or the other of the plugs off. A am disabling the DLE plug on blogs in which I have both plugs installed. I think that in the long run the SEO plug is the more important.

There are some other issues with this update. The last updates came two in quick succession. I suspect that we will see V1.7.1 or 2 very soon.

In addition, running the update changed my settings on one install and may have auto-activated the plug-in on a blog where it was installed but deactivated.

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There has just been another update for the Deep Link Engine plug-in so I checked the site to see if there was more information. The page that the link takes you to is the download page, although I have no idea why someone clicking from the UI of the plug from within WordPress would want to go to the download page (actually it is a funnel page for their auto content cash system page, so that’s why they take you there). The claims of the download page are the same as they have been:

Before we start revealing the system to you, we wanted whet your appetite by giving you our exclusive “Deep Link Engine”, a custom WordPress Plug-in that puts blogs on steroids, automatically…

• Automatically get backlinks to every post you make – Tries to get backlinks with limited success.
• Get more traffic and higher rankings by just installing it once – There was an initial surge but then as the sites became a familiar face the traffic died down.
• Increase relevance and ranking power of each page with quality outbound links – It does put the links after the post, weather they are relevant or not. I have not tried with the later versions, but there was no way to control the generated links when I tried, and considering the real purpose of the plug that has probably not changed.
• Most links you get are “do follow” – I have software that detects if links are no follow and highlights them. I have looked for the links that have sent me traffic from the few blogs that approve the trackback. I think I have seen one or two that were do follow, but the bulk of those few links that the plug-in actually garnered are no follow links.
• Automatically increase the relevant content for each post – Here again the relevancy comes into question. If you could actually sort the returned URLs and eliminate those that are obviously irrelevant this statement would be more true.
• A $67 value, yours free today – A developer can assign any value to his software that he chooses. If the plug-in had ever been sold on the open market the value would have more meaning.

My comments are in bold blue above. Here are some other thoughts and observations. I suspect that the IP address of my server is now on the Akismet spam blacklist. It would explain to some extent the drop in those checking the posts. I think that most of the trackbacks end up directly in the spam folder on sites with Akismet activated. I also suspect that many blog operators do not even check the spam queue, just letting the comments be deleted automatically.

There is also a question in my mind as to the validity of my stats particularly on Commission Junction. CJ says that they trap for bot activity. I think that the activity from the DLE does not get trapped. My CTR has been through the roof on CJ since I started using the plug-in, but the sales do not add up. Even a one or two  percent conversion rate should have resulted in many more sales than I have seen.

At first I hoped that this was just that the bloggers that I could see from my traffic logs were not my target market. I began to be suspicious when the traffic died off but the click through rate remained about the same.  I then did some research on the CJ site and ran across the information that bots could disrupt the accuracy of the stats. This is the only sensible explanation of the CTRs and impression stats that I have seen.

I recently read a traffic building article that stated there was no real way to automate the job of getting backlinks. I could not argue with that statement based on what I have seen with the Deep Link Engine. Note: I am still running it on several blogs, but I think the content that I am adding is doing more for my traffic count than the DLE.

I have been using the Deep Link Engine on several blogs for several weeks. I have been observing the results and will share some of my thoughts here. This is an interesting concept but, as is often the case, it does not fully live up to the praise for its power given on the sales page.

The sales page (DLE is a free plug-in, so the page extols its virtue) says that you will get many links and most of them will be do follow. The reality of the situation is that most of these pingbacks will end up in the spam queue if anti-spam software is employed on the blogs receiving the pings. I have Akismet activated on all of my blogs, and since it comes in the WordPress bundle, I suspect that most blogs do activate it. I think that any blog that does not employ spam protection of some sort would quickly turn into an unsightly mess.

Much of the resultant traffic that I see in my server logs comes from blog admin pages. These are the conscientious blog operators. Some of them may approve the trackbacks if they are well targeted to the theme of the blog. Unfortunately, the targeting is not so good with DLE and the plug resists attempts to assist in the choices. (There has been a recent update and I have not tried to alter the results since the update, but I have no reason to suspect that the targeting issue would have been addressed.

This targeting issue is the main downside to this plug-in as well as all the free auto-content options that I have tried. The reason that the DLE plug-in was offered was to promote an auto-blogging package called Auto Content Cash. I suspect that users will see some early results that may generate some good press with the package but that the results will drop off after a short time. Long term these sites may generate some income, and with enough of them the income may become significant, but I also suspect that it would take great ‘good luck’ and a special case to come close to the sales page claims for this product.

The filtering is the problem with any of these systems that I have checked out. Google has spent years tweaking their algorithms to return the most relevant search results. You still see a percentage of results that have little relevance to your search on most result pages. In my experience this has been the problem with the software approach. If you choose by category there will be a broad range of topics involved, and some of the articles in the categories are likely to be categorized and irrelevant. And, even the best filtering software will error a percentage of the time.

I would consider trying Caffeinated Content if my economic situation would allow that course of action. As I understand it, and I have not researched extensively, this can be set up to obtain content but you still make the choice of weather to publish. This could help my workflow a bit, but there would still be some time involved in making meaningful posts to a blog.

Have you tried the Deep Link Engine? Do you have comments about its effectiveness or operation? Leave a comment!

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Many of my recent posts to this blog concern the Deep Link Engine. I am continuing my experiment with this plug-in, but I see a pattern forming, I think.

I did see a significant traffic boost when I first started using this plug-in. Of course, more than a couple of visitors a week is good for some of the blogs with which I am using the plug. It appears the the initial traffic boost falls off after a time. I can only see short term effects at this time, because I have not had the plug in service for a long enough period of time.

When the plug is first installed there is a bit of traffic. I suspect that most of this is blog owners checking on the pingbacks that they receive. This is validated by the traffic logs that I have followed. The surge of traffic on posting seems to have been dwindling as the age of the blog/plug increases. There is less immediate traffic to these blogs after posting.

My theory is that since the pings are tied to the keywords used, and since the blogs are concerned with one general topic, the same keywords reappear and the same blogs get pinged on a regular basis. These blog owners begin to recognize the source and either consider the pings as spam or approve without rechecking. Most of them probably consider the pings as spam since the blogs are not as well targeted as they could be. Some of the pingbacks do get approved sometimes. I do see the links showing up occasionally, and I do see occasional traffic reported in my analytics  from links that do get posted. The pingbacks are much more likely to result in a link if the blog is somewhat on topic.

Much of the traffic that I see in analytics comes from blogs that have a recent comments box on the main page. Of course these comments fall out of the recent category when a few new comments trickle in to the blog. This does point to the fact that the plug-in would be better suited to an auto-blogging context where there was a high volume of diverse material posted to the blog.

The real problem with the auto-blogging idea is that monetization will not be as effective without a lot of work. I have had amazing results with my posts. My affiliate links are collecting clicks at a rate that has approached 50%. There have been no conversions, but the affiliate cookies are persistent and there may be a payoff over the next few weeks (I would not suggest holding your breath.

The high click through rates are due to the presentation that I have been using on these blogs. I match a text link and a banner to the content of the post in the main posting box. The banners seem to be the source of most of the clicks. This demonstrates the value of truly targeted traffic and the potential that is available to the Internet marketer. The key, as always is to get truly targeted traffic to your blog or website.

If nothing else the experience gained through this exercise has been worth the time invested. I have had under a one percent click through rate in the past and have seen an average of over ten percent over the past couple of weeks. I had almost suspected that there was a problem with the reporting on my primary affiliate program site, but then I looked at some of the other numbers and realized that there is a clear trend. This trend is not entirely due to the Deep Link Engine. While having the semi-targeted traffic helps the real story here, as far as the click through rate is concerned, is with the layout and add placement.

I now understand my job better and may be able to pursue a more profitable course of action. If I can convert some of this traffic into sales it will be a beautiful thing.

I have been working, and I do mean working, on a new blog. I am not writing the content, I am using article directory articles. I am adding relevant pictures to these posts and integrating some advertising with the articles.

This approach is a bit time consuming. Time will tell if it produces the desired results.

The blog has a theme and I am hand picking articles to support the theme. I do have the Deep Link Engine hooked up to the publish button so there are a few links back to the site building up on the web (while checking the traffic logs I have seen a few).

The new blog is the About Music blog. Take a look and tell me what you think!

Last evening I had an interesting experience. One of the blogs to which DLE had linked was frustrated that someone out of their area had linked to their blog. They left a comment complaining about the link! Now, most blog owners would be pleased to have a gratuitous backlink, but not this one.

Now comes the adventure in this adventure story. Since I had a complaint I decided to act and delete the link. I opened the post in the editor and found the code in the html view. I deleted the code and hit the republish button. I had read on another blog in a comment to an article on the Deep Link Engine that removed links were replaced on update, so I opened the page and checked. Sure enough, the offending link had been reinstated. I tried the same course of action a couple of more times with the same result. Finally I deactivated the plug, removed the link and updated the post. I checked that the link had been successfully removed. Then I reactivated the plug-in. (I should go check to make sure that it didn’t go back and check its work.)

I do see a stream of traffic (maybe more like a trickle) whenever I post to one of the blogs where the plug is active. I even had some search traffic or recent posts that may indicate that the external links are of value. It may be too soon on those posts to explain in any other way. I will continue with the program for a reasonable length of time in order to evaluate the result properly.

Also of interest, one of the visitors to this blog yesterday was looking for instructions to uninstall the plug-in. There is the activate/deactivate link within the plug-ins list that will disable the plug-in. I suspect that to uninstall you would need to either FTP into the plug-ins folder or use the hosting service cPanel file manager to navigate to the plug-ins folder and delete the ‘pingback’ folder. The plug-ins folder is found within the wp-content folder. Deleting the ‘pingback’ folder should completely remove the plug I would think, but it may be an adventure waiting to happen. I have not tried this course of action, at this point.

I had initially installed the plug on this blog, but when I found that I could not control the output I disabled it. I use the Deep Link Engine on several blogs where I do not write most of the content. On any of my blogs where I do write most of the content I either did not install or disabled the plug-in.

There is an available update to the plug-in. The update offers the option to automatically update all of your old posts with the click of a button. Posting does take some time because of the pings sent when you hit the publish button. There have been several times when my server, set for 30 seconds (a long time for a cpu that is running around 2 Ghz) has timed out. This would indicate that the DLE is not particularly kind to your server. You may end up with an unhappy host if you turned the automated function loose on a few blogs, particularly if the plug-in does not pace itself.

And so, the saga continues. Have you any experience to add to the discussion? Leave a comment. Thanks!

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.