Monetize Your Site

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.