Exposing Profits on the Web

I’m beginning to wonder if any help desk out there actually does anything about the tickets they receive. Perhaps I missed an email, or the spam filters got to it, or whatever, but I either way, I haven’t received my NEG refund yet. In the meantime, my army of blogs idea is on hold I suppose, and I’m going to have to make some decisions.

I did find a tool that I’m thinking about trying out, and the sales pitch indicates that it’s actually much more powerful than Niche Empire Generator. Of course, you never know until you try. Sooooo…. I have to decide whether I’m going to go for a new tool, or just go it on my own with a WordPress blog, or… hmmm…. I read Blogging to the Bank. Not much in there except put up a blog (now recommending WordPress hosted on your domain instead of free Blogger blogs as the old version did… I could have told you not to let someone else host your blog if you really care about it, but that’s another story) and promote it with some Web 2.0 techniques. This is not new or startling information folks.

Rob may make a lot of money with his blogs, but I suspect he’s keeping the techniques that really make him some bucks hidden… at least for now. Unless… hey, wasn’t there a back end for a paid membership site in there somewhere…. ahhh… that’s what he’s really after. I don’t blame him. I would be too.

Niche Empire Generator (NEG) offers a way to launch an army of blogs for profit, all from one easy to use interface. I decided to test it along with some other tools for my army of blogs concept. Well, I’ve delayed writing about the whole blogging for profit idea because I’ve been having some issues with NEG.

I’ve been testing Andrew Hansen’s Niche Empire Generator for several weeks, and, although I like the concept and the promise, I’m just not thrilled with the way it performs in the real world. This post probably won’t get me invited to the inner circle of anyone’s latest Internet Marketing hoopla party or whatever, but I really need to get this out.

I simply must go on a rant, and you know, I’m beginning to wonder if any of the so-called Internet Marketing gurus out there actually use their own product. I’m also beginning to wonder if any of the people recommending these products actually use them either!

I know that hype is everywhere, and I know that many times a product comes out and it sounds great and it addresses a big need and people start promoting it and before you know it, if you don’t start promoting it, you’re going to leave money on the table. Breathe! Well, that whole thing is really starting to piss me off. There I said it.

Ok, so this very site was created with NEG (after some trial and error on my part), and the first few posts were made with NEG. But the thing has annoyed me to the point where I’m throwing in the towel and going with another method, unless someone can convince me otherwise. Of course, since I like to be in the weeds, I’m going to be testing another idea.

NEG uses WordPress blogs, and I’ve never used WordPress until this site. I’ve mostly used Blogger. WordPress does have some interesting features, so I’m really not sure whether I’m going to keep this a WordPress blog or not. I’ve heard that some people using WordPress have a hard time getting any search engine love from Yahoo! but I have yet to confirm anything.

I just this morning purchased Blogging to the Bank, to see if the techniques in it are worth trying. Blogging to the Bank is based on Blogger blogs, and I’m not sure if some of the key ideas in there will work for me the same way with WordPress. Maybe I can come up with my own testing and try both WordPress and Blogger and see how it goes.

Back to Niche Empire Generator… The three things I liked about the promise of NEG were being able to manage your blogs from one easy interface, easy ability to adjust templates and themes that work best, and the word2link feature which automatically links words or phrases with a url. Unfortunately, none of those features do me any good if I’m spending all kinds of time cleaning things up everytime I make a post. Blogging should be (relatively) easy. A tool should make it easier, not harder!

Now, when I purchased NEG, it was supposed to be a self-hosted install. In other words, it was software I needed to install on my own domain. I thought, ok, I can deal with that. Sometimes self-hosted solutions are best. Well, apparently so many people had problems with the install that they had to change it. They set it up so that they host the software and you simply are given a web page to log into. This probably appeals to more people as well. So, after waiting for them to get that up and running, I was expecting big things.

After using it for several weeks, here are some of things that I’ve experienced as, well, annoyances! I opened a ticket with NEG support and sent them this list and asked for a refund. It resets some of the post dates to December, 1969 (seems to select random posts to do this with so I have to check every single post for the right date and adjust if needed. When I have 200 posts, I’ll be ready to kill small animals). Also,  I can’t get it to work on a subdomain. That was something I wanted it to do. Some more complaints from my list are below…

1. Everytime I update my blog, it essentially recreates everything as a new install, rather than an “edit.” This, among other things, gives me a new WordPress login password every time I make a blog entry. This is extremely annoying, and, in my opinion, unnecessary.

2. Sometimes, the “edit” button shows as “setup site,” even though I’ve selected the option to manage an existing site. If I go back to the main menu and choose “manage” again, it shows “edit” as it should. Again, extremely annoying and somewhat misleading.

3. Everytime I add a blog entry, it messes up any comments and associates them with the wrong blog entry. If I have WordPress set to approve comments before they’re posted in any way, it requires me to reapprove comments everytime I make a blog entry. Annoying!

4. Although the system asks for the Adsense pub ID, as well as a channel code, it does not put Adsense ads on the site for me, so I had to install an Adsense plug in.

5. The preview for the theme I choose shows up, Adsense ads and all, but the only theme it loads is the basic theme, and no Adsense ads.

6. Everytime I make a blog entry, I have to once again setup the Adense plug-in I installed in order to get the ads to appear on the site. Again, annoying and unnecessary.

I’ll report on my army of blogs concept as soon as I decide which way I’m going to go next with it. Talk to you soon.

So the backlinks in Yahoo! for the magnetic jewelry site have now gone from 78 to 121 within a few days. We submitted our first article for that site to the Unique Article Wizard on May 25. We haven’t submitted an article since June 5, and our backlinks continue to grow.

Considering that we had consistently been seeing less than 25 backlinks when we started the test, that is quite impressive in my book. In addition, we’ve only submitted three articles for this site so far. Had I submitted eight or 10 or more, I believe that our results would be substantially better.

Also, the traffic has now stabilized at almost four times the number of unique visitors per day compared to what it was when we started the test. This, in spite of the fact that two engines have dropped most of our pages. This also happened to one of my other sites as well at the same time. What I notice, however, is that we’re getting reindexed quite fast, and I believe this is due to the number of backlinks as well as the type of sites we have our backlinks on from this test.

It should be noted that I am not testing in a glass bubble, but I’m firmly convinced that most of what is happening here is a result of the Unique Article Wizard. Over the course of this test, I am growing the site naturally in other ways. For example, I have added several pages to the site over the course of the test.

In addition, I had submitted several other articles over the last few months, both manually and using another submission tool. While it’s possible that some of our results are from those previous submissions, I have no doubt that most of it is from this tool alone. The accelerated level at which we increased traffic, saw pages indexed in the search engines, and increased our backlinks has been unmatched.

The next step? Submit some more articles of course! I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

Want to test your site and see if you can get even better results? Try it out!