There are some products or services that require you to invest countless hours installing, configuring, studying and testing – only to finally learn, weeks later that the solution has significant limitations.

I’ve had these experiences with; Accounting programs, time management solutions, photo-editors, PPC-tools, website builders and many more.

This week I’ve been hunting for a program that would track my website ranking for various keywords and discovered Advanced Web Rankings (AWR) by Caphyon.

I’m quite particular about what I want …

1) I wanted something that ran natively on my Mac – either as an application or as something I could run on my server.

2) I rarely track my rankings on sites other than Google US but I did want a program that would give me the option of other search engines (and different regions) in the future.

3) I want something I can run automatically. Ideally a php script I can host on my server, or at the very worst something I can leave to run overnight.

4) I need something that compares my search-engine rankings over time. I was amazed that so few programs offer this.

5) I want something I’ll enjoy using.

6) I’m happy to pay for software but, as my focus is really with PPC, I don’t really want something I need to pay a monthly subscription to. (This ruled out a lot of online applications unfortunately).

You’ll be amazed at how few option there are out here. I even resorted to downloading Windows applications to test them out but most of them just looked so ugly that I knew I’d hate using them.

Advanced Web Rankings does offer a lot of features I didn’t really test. They have a comprehensive directory submission feature which allows you to enter your website details into hundreds of online directories quite efficiently. I’m sure this is something I’ve done many times before and therefore didn’t spend much time on.

What I did use extensively was their search engine ranking checker. I’m trying to get my Plug and Save website ranked for some competitive ’save electricity’ related keywords and wanted to see how I was doing.

To generate a list of desirable keywords I used Google Keyword Tool and my keyword data from AWStats. AWR does have a Keyword Research Tool built into it but I had a lot of research already complete. I am using Advanced Web Rankings with SENuke this month and this also has a tool which assesses the ease at which you might be able to get good rankings for particular keywords. After a few hours of research I got myself a list of about 50 keywords I wanted top 10 rankings for.

I really can’t comment as to how effective AWR was in improving my rankings. I used SENuke exclusively to do this but I used AWR daily just to see how well my keyword positioning was doing.

Advanced Web Rankings is pretty slow to analyse every keyword, especially if you’re not in the first couple of pages. This is apparently intentional and you can change the interval between keywords so that the wait time is less. AWR suggests that by pausing between searches you’re less likely to cause trouble with the search engines. The best solution is really to leave the rank position checker to run overnight.

I enjoyed checking my rankings. On the whole, when combined with article submissions and social bookmarking features from SENuke I’ve managed to get a top 30 placement for all my important keywords already. Most are within the top 5 and there’s certainly a lot more work i could do to improve this.

If you’re looking for a reliable and constantly updated SEO application and / or rankings checker i’d certainly recommend trying AWR for a month.

I’m English and not once needed to set foot in the USA to get any of this setup. In total I don’t think I spent more than $500.

For those of you needing a similar setup, keep reading.

1) You’ll need to incorporate your business in America. Delaware and Nevada are the two states that have the greatest tax advantages. I strongly suggest incorporating in Nevada for a number of reasons.

- There’s no income tax nor corporation tax
- The IRS are not able to access your banking records if you bank here
- Your obligations as the company president are nearly zero
- Non-Americans can be registered as th company president
- The bank I’ll be recommending has branches in Nevada but not Delaware.

I recommend IncParadise.com to register with. Get friendly with Natasha Waite there, she’s the office manager and she’s very friendly, very accommodating and a great lady to have on your side. I can’t remember their fees but I registered a C-Corporation here for less than $500. Every year I pay less than $100 for admin fees etc and I only need to submit one document covering the minutes of my annual meeting every 12 months.

2) Now you’re registered in Nevada, get in touch with Citibank. They have branches in Nevada. Speak with Robert Arnall (702-361-2365) who is the manager of Citibank N.A. and mention your business has incorporated with IncParadise. Robert’s awesome and he’ll hopefully get you set up with both a business account and personal account.

3) You’ll probably now need at least 6 months of transaction history before getting approved for a merchant account. I accepted payments from PayPal first. After you have a nice history of transactions, get in touch with Marcy Mason (marcymason {at} cox.net) who is an independent agent for a variety of merchant account providers. You’ll need to discuss with her all the information you’re going to need when applying. Marcy has a good relationship with Citibank N.A. The only things that presented a problem were …

- I did need a US person to provide their name on the account. This is because all merchant accounts require a SSN which I can’t get. I asked a friend to provide this for me and thankfully he signed the application without any issues. As a sign of gratitude I provided him with a signed document offering him my personal guarantee that I would take full responsibility for the account.

- The merchant account I applied for would not accept a series of PayPal screenshots as the equivalent of a trading statement. Instead I decided to make it look more like a statement using a HTML editor and then faxed the file to myself so that it looked like PayPal had faxed me my statement. This worked fine.

I learnt these from the DirtyCPA training videos and they comprise of the following tools and ideas …

• Link Cloaking


Make sure you have a system whereby your affiliate link is not obvious to your visitor. You want to prevent them from seeing you’re likely to be making money from the link and to discourage other affiliate marketers from finding the affiliate offer you’re directing to.

• Geo-IP


Dynamic IP scripts will automatically insert the visitors location into your text. Use it to make your landing page look like your offer is perfectly suited to your users location.

• Exit Hover


If a visitor moves their mouse close to their browsers back button, set a banner to display a message, warning or last-ditch offer to discourage them from leaving.

• Exit Pop


If your visitor still wishes to leave, force an unblockable pop-up at them as your last attempt to hook them.

• Scarcity


Use a date-insertion script to suggest that the offer will end shortly. Do everything you can to encourage the visitor to act immediately before it’s too late.

• Coupons


This is pretty self-explanatory and you can use this with the scarcity principle. Speak to your affiliate manager to see if any coupons are available.

This is something you might consider doing with Facebook ads as, the higher CTR you can generate the lower your per-click costs will be.

1. View the ads board daily to get an idea of what ads are being displayed regularly
2. Use OfferVault to locate the same offer and join the affiliate program that offers it
3. Copy the ads images and ad copy – although the course suggests using ’similar’ ad copy and contacting your affiliate manager for similar images (however I doubt that’s what happens in reality).
4. Use Google Campaign Manager or Quantcast to locate the demographic information of the website’s visitors to use when constructing your Facebook Ad.

Actually this really is nothing but common-sense and theoretically it’s likely to work. What’s kind of shocked me though is that this really is so stupidly obvious I’m surprised I’ve not just set aside a day to do exactly this.

I could reel out a few ‘inspired’ ads each day and stand a pretty good chance of identifying at least a handful of profitable campaigns.

I think the main reason I’ve not done this before is because, deep down, I don’t like the idea of copying other peoples work. I certainly wouldn’t appreciate other people doing it to me and I kind of view this as cheating.

You’ll hear ‘gurus’ pay lip-service to creating your own ads, providing value to customers, keeping things ethical, working outside of the box etc. but I’m pretty sure that a lot of these twenty-something-year-old marketers who are doing well for themselves have trodden over customers and competitors along the way. Let’s face it, this isn’t a business you’ll go to heaven for.

I recently opened a new Facebook account specifically for my business. I’ll explain why in a different post but one benefit of doing this was that my Business Facebook account is set for the USA (rather than Thailand where I’m currently living). This lets me see all the adverts that are targeted to the US market.

I’ve no idea why this works but thankfully it does.

If you are using Firefox then upgrade to the latest version, select the private browsing option, unselect it and then try again.

This seems to have fixed the problem for me and I’m now submitting a few hundred ads again.

It would be great if I was skilled in web design but I’m not and, for now I’d prefer to save time, buy a range of landing page templates and modify them than to bother trying something from scratch.

I picked up two template packs today from LPDesigner today which i’ll be using for the next few months.

I spent most of the day building a mini-site to do this.

Only after I finished did I decided to actually test how a visitor would complete their application form. Usually I’d only check that the site works and that perhaps the first page of the submissions worked correctly.

I tested the site three times.

The first time I was directed to an acai berry promotion which was NOT what I was planning to market.

The second time the first page submission worked fine but instead of taking me to page two of the offer I was taken to page 2 of an acai better promotion instead.

The third time, the offer worked fine.

I noticed that the website also changed slightly too. By the end of the day a ‘money back guarantee’ image was pasted onto the bottom of the site so obviously the webmaster was playing around.

I’d have been very upset had I began a PPC campaign on this site yesterday as, without going through these three checks I’d have had no idea why my traffic wasn’t converting.

I’m going to make sure every time I’m getting fewer conversions that expected I’ll go through the site myself and get as far as the order button.

Everybody has their reasons, some people believe that SEO work is boring and takes too long (I certainly agree with this), others believe that PPC costs mount up too fast and that SEO provides free traffic once it gets going.

Personally I know all arguments are valid but, despite dedicating most of my time to PPC right now, I need to do some SEO work too.

Here’s a few reasons why SEO should not be overlooked…

1. I want my Plug and Save business to be making $6,000 profit per month. I’m a long way from this figure right now and most of this is because I just don’t have enough visitors to my site. By focusing on SEO I hope to triple the number of targeted visitors to Plug and Save so that, even I ever run out of money to run PPC campaigns, I can at least live a comfortable life.
2. Some niches are banned on pay-per-click sources. These include most rebill offers, tobacco-related products, recreational drugs etc. These are also highly lucrative markets so it’s worth marketing these offers any way possible.
3. There really are some fantastic SEO programs out there that take a lot of the tedium out of SEO.
4. I’m able to compete in markets where many PPC marketers are being lax.
5. I like the occasional change of focus
6. I can do both. If i’m combinnig free traffic with paid traffic to my campaigns then I can make more money for less risk
7. I have more experience in SEO than PPC

Today I’m going to investigate SEO software to identify which ones will make my SEO work the least painful, and the most productive.

As you can see, their site is currently experiencing some technical issues that are likely to discourage or prevent members signing up.

I discovered this problem early and there was no harm done, but what would have happened if I’d have launched a campaign and paid money to send people here?

Some of the affiliate networks I’m working with make it hard, if not impossible to view our own landing pages. Sometimes we need to use a VPN or proxy.

This error above is worrying because it’s not a site-critical problem. It may take hours for the site admin to even notice there’s a problem. I’ve therefore decided that the first step to take before un-pausing or beginning any campaign is to double-check the landing page.

I also plan on adding my site links to the fantastic free website monitoring service UptimeDog to be alerted if my links ever go down.