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Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Bluetooth garage door opener'

Today I made a Bluetooth garage door opener. Now I can open my garage from my Android phone. There’s a short how-to YouTube video from Lou Prado. Lou also made a website btmate.com that has more information, and you can watch an earlier howto video as well.

The project itself was pretty simple:
- Acquire a Samsung HM1100 bluetooth headset (the Samsung HM1800 also works). You can buy these cheap from Fry’s or eBay. I got mine on eBay for $10-$15.
- Crack open the earpiece on the Bluetooth headset and solder one of the earpiece wires to the base pin of a transistor. Solder red and black wires to the other pins of the transistor.
- Connect the red and black wires to the garage door opener. It turns out that most garage door openers are built to allow easy insertion of wires, which is nice.

That’s more or less it. My soldering was ugly as sin–too ugly for me to even post a picture. And rather than leave the house for some heat shrink tubing, I just left bare wires on the transistor, but everything works fine.

Lou wrote a nice Android app that’s free to install and then pay-what-you-want for a license. Then it’s just a single button to open or close the garage door. In theory, I could use Tasker to open the garage door automatically when I get home.

It’s not quite as sexy as Brad Fitzpatrick’s Android garage door opener, but it was a fun little project for a day.

You may view the latest post at http://feeds.mattcutts.com/~r/mattcutts/uJBW/~3/qakkZnk0Vy8/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Triple X Niche Case Study Update: Expenses Report'

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Last month we mentioned that the Triple X Niche Case Study was now live on ViperChill. If you missed the launch then a quick summary is that three people will be tackling the same industry with three different approaches. I (Glen) am only allowed to focus on social media. Diggy (my SEO business partner) is only allowed to focus on SEO and Mr.V (a beginner to making money online) is allowed to do anything he wants.

When we originally planned the case study we each had a $1,000 budget in mind. After a lot of feedback however this was lowered to $500 for the first two months of the project; November and December. Many of you have been following the case study closely on the forums and I’m proud to announce the threads have been viewed over 40,000 times with over 30 case studies being shared there.

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Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '30 day challenge update: stretching!'

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I like to set myself different challenges every 30 days. In October 2013, I tried to eat better and exercise more. I did alright on that, but without a specific daily goal, I had a hard time deciding how well I did. I mostly got back into the habit of exercising daily, so that was helpful.

For November 2013, I tried to do a “no work November.” I had enough vacation days built up that I was hitting the upper limit for work, so I took a bunch of vacation in November. My in-laws visited one week, then it was a family member’s birthday, so we took some time off at a resort in Arizona. Then it was back home for a week before spending the week before Thanksgiving in Kentucky with my family.

I learned a few things in my month off:
- I still enjoy reading tech and Google news for fun. It’s amazing (or problematic?) how much time you can spend just surfing the web each day and reading what other people are writing.
- My initial goal was to not read work email at all, but I had to give up on that. There were a few urgent things I genuinely had to weigh in on. I eventually settled for reading work email but trying really hard not to reply unless it was an emergency. I probably ended up writing 20-30 replies over the month, along with passing on spam reports that people emailed to me.
- I realized that I’d gotten in the bad habit of giving friends my work email address, as well as forwarding my personal email address to my work email. Takeaway: keep your work email separate from your personal email. Seems like common sense, but after almost 14 years at Google, things had gotten tangled together.
- A couple good pieces of advice that I failed to heed: 1) remove your work account from your phone, so you can’t check work email or docs on your phone. 2) if you have an “email tab” that you keep pinned on your browser, unpin and close that tab. I didn’t take either of those steps, but I should have.
- I didn’t feel the need to start any big projects, or write any Android apps, or blog a lot. I have a newer Linux computer that has configuration issues; I didn’t tackle that. Mostly I enjoyed reading a few books.
- I’m incredibly proud of the whole webspam team at Google. Things ran like clockwork while I was gone. I’m really grateful to the phenomenal people that fight spam for Google’s users every day.

Which brings us to December 2013. Back in September, I threw my back out. I can still move around fine, but it sometimes hurts if I bend in various ways. So my goal for December 2013 is to do 15-20 minutes of stretching–things like cat and camel–each day to help my back recuperate.

How about you? Are you doing any 30 day challenges?

You may view the latest post at http://feeds.mattcutts.com/~r/mattcutts/uJBW/~3/cxu0ESNlL7Y/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'What would you like to see from Webmaster Tools in 2014?'

A few years ago, I asked on my blog what people would like from Google’s free webmaster tools. It’s pretty cool to re-read that post now, because we’ve delivered on a lot of peoples’ requests.

At this point, our webmaster console will alert you to manual webspam actions that will directly affect your site. We’ve recently rolled out better visibility on website security issues, including radically improved resources for hacked site help. We’ve also improved the backlinks that we show to publishers and site owners. Along the way, we’ve also created a website that explains how search works, and Google has done dozens of “office hours” hangouts for websites. And we’re just about to hit 15 million views on ~500 different webmaster videos.

So here’s my question: what would you like to see from Webmaster Tools (or the larger team) in 2014? I’ll throw out a few ideas below, but please leave suggestions in the comments. Bear in mind that I’m not promising we’ll do any of these–this is just to get your mental juices going.

Some things that I could imagine people wanting:

• Make it easier/faster to claim authorship or do authorship markup.
• Improved reporting of spam, bugs, errors, or issues. Maybe people who do very good spam reports could be “deputized” so their future spam reports would be fast-tracked. Or perhaps a karma, cred, or peer-based system could bubble up the most important issues, bad search results, etc.
• Option to download the web pages that Google has seen from your site, in case a catastrophe like a hard drive failure or a virus takes down your entire website.
• Checklists or help for new businesses that are just starting out.
• Periodic reports with advice on improving areas like mobile or page speed.
• Send Google “fat pings” of content before publishing it on the web, to make it easier for Google to tell where content appeared first on the web.
• Better tools for detecting or reporting duplicate content or scrapers.
• Show pages that don’t validate.
• Show the source pages that link to your 404 pages, so you can contact other sites and ask if they want to fix their broken links.
• Or almost as nice: tell the pages on your website that lead to 404s or broken links, so that site owners can fix their own broken links.
• Better or faster bulk url removal (maybe pages that match a specific phrase?).
• Refreshing the existing data in Webmaster Tools faster or better.
• Improve robots.txt checker to handle even longer files.
• Ways for site owners to tell us more about their site: anything from country-level data to language to authorship to what content management system (CMS) you use on different parts of the site. That might help Google improve how it crawls different parts of a domain.

To be clear, this is just some personal brainstorming–I’m not saying that the Webmaster Tools team will work on any of these. What I’d really like to hear is what you would like to see in 2014, either in Webmaster Tools or from the larger team that works with webmasters and site owners.

You may view the latest post at http://feeds.mattcutts.com/~r/mattcutts/uJBW/~3/lyA2xoSBQr0/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'On vacation the rest of November 2013'

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For the folks that don’t know, I’ve been out for a couple weeks and I’ll be on vacation the rest of November. If you’ve tried to contact me recently and haven’t heard back, that’s probably the reason.

Added: if you enjoy watching our webmaster videos, you can follow @googlewmc to hear as soon as we publish new Webmaster Central videos. It looks like @googlewmc is just about to hit 100,000 followers on Twitter!

You may view the latest post at http://feeds.mattcutts.com/~r/mattcutts/uJBW/~3/qUBTrxEW83g/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Please help me run the Boston Marathon'

On April 21st, 2014, I’m going to run the Boston Marathon. If you want to show your support, please donate to a good cause for cancer research. Anyone who wants to give is welcome.

So many people have been affected by cancer, including members of my own family. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute funds basic and innovative cancer research. That’s why I’m trying to raise $9,000 for the Dana-Farber Marathon Challenge.

I’ve been running for a few years now (that’s me at the San Francisco marathon), but this is the first time I’m trying to run to raise money for a cause, and I would really appreciate donations. It won’t give you more PageRank or a higher rank on Google, but Dana-Farber is a great institution and I’d love to raise as much money for them as I can before I run in Boston. If you can, please consider donating to kick cancer’s butt. Thank you!

You may view the latest post at http://feeds.mattcutts.com/~r/mattcutts/uJBW/~3/C0TKMOkckNY/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'Introducing Our Niche Site Case Study (With a Twist)'

One of the things that undoubtedly helped me to succeed online was seeing that other people were having success. It wasn’t so much specific examples – not many people shared them when I was starting out to be honest – but just knowing that someone had figured out this making money on the internet thing showed me that I could do it too.

It’s natural to get inspired by the success story of others. I remember hearing about a grandmother who had been writing her whole life but was always scared to get feedback on her work. After finally publishing her book well past the age of 80, she said it was the best thing she’s ever done. It became quite the internet sensation as it really sunk in the idea of “it’s never too late”.

Today I want to announce my own success story. Hopefully. With the launch of a brand new niche site case study where I build a website from scratch and share the results with you all, in public, via this website.

This isn’t something entirely new. Friends like Pat and Spencer have ran their own case studies and had great results. Both from the success of the sites they built and the reactions from their audience. Some of you may remember I also ran my own case study a few years ago, but other business opportunities got in the way and it just didn’t go like I had originally planned.

Most case studies, particularly those that start with a site built from scratch, are generally just a blogger who runs a popular site sharing the results of their own marketing efforts in a new industry. More recently I’ve seen a number of case studies where someone who has had success in this field instead teaches someone else how to build a profitable site and follows their journey.

While those are beneficial to both blogger and reader, I don’t just want to follow that mold. This is ViperChill. If I’m going to do something, we are going to do it different. Do it big.

The reason I say we, is because there’s 3 of us.

One niche. Three websites. Three different people competing against each other. Live, for free, with nothing to sell you.

The Original Idea

I get asked fairly frequently about whether I would be interested in working with someone to help them build a niche site. This invariably either involves them “generously” giving me a small percentage of the site income if they make a profit or is someone who just wants to intern for me to learn what I do.

Since I never know these people, it’s hard to commit to work with someone who might stop working in a few weeks and honestly, if I’m going to be putting so much time into one website, I would much prefer it to be my own.

The intern idea is always a nice gesture, but I’m too paranoid to trust someone I’ve never met with my business operations. At least operations where they would actually learn anything interesting.

I was contacted by Mr.V a few months ago when he had the idea of doing a public case study where I teach him how to build a profitable site and he follows my advice. This would mean that you don’t just get the results of someone who has clearly had success online already. Instead you see the results of a self-professed ‘newbie’ who hasn’t profited from the internet before.

This would be more challenging, but a lot more realistic.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve heard the idea, but it came to me at a time where I could use another site in my arsenal for marketing that isn’t primarily SEO focused. This is something I haven’t had for quite some time.

The Three Pronged Approach

First of all, the people involved are:

• Myself
• Diggy, my business partner and SEO fanatic
• Mr. V

Each of us will be building a website from scratch and starting our marketing efforts on November 1st 2013. This is not just a typical competition between the three of us though. We each have limitations on what we can do.

Glen’s limitations are that I cannot purchase a single backlink, get links from any blog networks or basically do anything to artificially increase my own link count. My focus is going to be entirely social and trying to get links the Google-recommended way. By creating great content in an industry where I have zero authority or presence.

Diggy’s limitations are that he isn’t allowed to rely on great content to build his site. Instead he must focus entirely on SEO. He is allowed to use link networks, build spammy links and anything else he thinks will work.

Mr V’s limitations are simply that he is a beginner to building and profiting from niche websites. He’s allowed to write great content, focus on SEO, buy ads or anything else he wants to do.

All of us have a $1,000 budget for phase one of the project (the first 2-3 months). I think this is a realistic figure that other people could replicate if they wanted to give making a living from the internet a real try. We couldn’t do this for free simply because you have to price in domains, a website theme, hosting, and so on. Every single little fee will also be accounted into this $1K budget.

To summarise, that means we’re approaching one niche from three different angles:

• Growing a website socially and getting natural links
• Growing a website through greyhat SEO
• Growing a site through any means (but as a beginner)

The end goal is trying to build sites which make money. We will of course also be sharing things like traffic stats, traffic sources and any conversions we make whether financial or for an email list.

Why Mr.V Is Crucial

Though I have no idea if myself and Diggy will make any money – at least not in the short-term – we will get some results. There is no doubt our sites will get traffic. Adding someone into the mix who has not built a lot of sites before gives this case study a different dynamic.

For every question that I am asked by Mr.V, I will make sure to share the answers that I provided to him via this blog. This means that I’m not just covering the things I think you (beginners especially) might have problems with, but answering actual problems that are found on the journey by someone in your shoes.

I know this wont appeal to long-term, successful marketers, but I hope people who are struggling online will get a lot out of this.

The only reason I’m calling him Mr.V and not by his real name, yet, is because I don’t know him. It’s possible that he wont put any time into this project or disappear from the internet. I really don’t think that will happen, but I’m just protecting his identity in case anything comes up before we start the challenge (again, that’s November 1st).

I will be the owner of his domain – until the end of the challenge when I transfer it to him – to ensure that we have a third person for the project. If he disappears, then someone else could easily take over and it wouldn’t ruin the case study.

I Want Your Feedback! Here’s Two Chances to Win $250

I thought I would give you a reader an opportunity to put their stamp on this case study by helping us make it amazing.

The first area I need help with giving the case study a name I can use for future updates. I had phrases like “Niche Site Trio” and “Triple Threat Niche Case Study” in my head but lets be honest, they aren’t that great. I have no doubt someone reading this could come up with something better.

The other area I need help is if you see anything missing with this idea or something else I could do to make the case study better for you. Are the limitations that myself and Diggy have a stupid idea? Should the budget be lower (or higher)? Anything you want to make sure we do? The best feedback / suggestion (even if it isn’t used) will be rewarded.

So, that’s two chances to win $250 from me direct to your Paypal account.

I always deliver when it comes to competitions. Jon Cooper of PointBlankSEO was the winner of our BacklinksXXX affiliate competition and we sent him $2,000 of camera gear:

When you consider that people are leaving their homes and moving out to Asia for the possibility to make $1,000/m doing this online stuff, this is something I’m going to be taking very seriously. Even a few hundred dollars per month extra would be a lot for a great deal of the audience here, so I want to provide an on-going case study that is going to help people see what is possible.

Look out for the next update in two weeks when we start, and I look forward to the comments…

You may view the latest post at http://www.viperchill.com/niche-site-twist/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '[GET] How I Stopped Blackhat Forums & File Sharers Distributing My Products'

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That’s a slight lie. They’re impossible to stop, but you can reduce sharing by almost 100%. That’s exactly what I did when it came to people pirating my own software and I’ll show you how. But first, a scenario: You’re with your child (or niece, nephew or young cousin) at home and find yourself needing a few hours break to get some work done. Said youngster tells you about a movie they’ve been dying to watch and you see it as the perfect opportunity to get some peace for a few hours. You begin the online hunt to find it.

It’s not on Netflix, which you pay for monthly. iTunes doesn’t seem to have it either. Hulu looks promising, but then you get an error saying it’s not available in your current region. Then, what’s that? A Youtube link for that exact movie. 2 hours long, and in perfect HD quality at that.

Do you click play?

You probably know it’s not there legally, especially when the uploaders description is “I don’t intend any copyright infringement” as they often tend to do. If you’re like anyone who I’ve asked this question to before then absolutely Yes, you would click play.

It’s easy to do something like this when you really don’t have to face any direct consequences of the action. Your ISP isn’t going to turn off your internet. You’re not going to get sued by Disney. And it has 55,000 views already so it’s not like you’re the first.

While this is a rather tame example, I’ve had to deal with copyright infringement quite a lot over the last few years for my own products and services. It started out when I launched Cloud Living way back in my PluginID days, and has certainly continued with software like OptinSkin and even my most recent launch, Backlinks XXX.

Notice the predisposition towards internet marketing products. Anything you launch in the IM niche has a far greater chance of being ripped from your site and shared around the web. IM products are not alone, but ‘pirates’ keep me 100x busier than any non-marketing software has.

I can confidently say that as of the time this blog post goes live, there is no access to Backlinks XXX or OptinSkin that is publicly available. At least not on the first few pages of Google, which is what I believe all product owners should be aiming for. The truth is that you cannot stop people sharing your product — they will find a way. Microsoft and Adobe are billion dollar corporations but any teen can go and download Microsoft Office or Photoshop right now. While you can’t stop it you can limit the exposure to it at the heart of where people find pirated content: Google.

I’m aware there are versions of OptinSkin out there but I am not going to take them down. Why? They’re literally the first ever release of the software and it doesn’t even work properly at all anymore. We’ve made dozens of upgrades since that first iteration. I get a laugh out of people who use customer support and are clearly running a pirated version.

I am aware that writing this blog post is probably going to open me up to a lot of Blackhat marketers, many of whom read this blog, and like the challenge of now putting my stuff out there on the web. This is a topic I really wanted to cover as I believe it can help a lot of content creators, so I’m not going to let that possibility scare me from helping others.

It’s not like people haven’t been trying. I’ve successfully removed hundreds of releases of each product from the web already. A few more won’t hurt, since I’ve very much refined my approach.

This is not only prevalent for Internet Marketing (IM) related products. Even IM forums share fitness products, courses on productivity, WordPress themes and video courses from independent creators. Today I’m going to share with you how to protect your precious product launch from people who simply want to share it with others.

Before tackling this, I did have to think about what must go through someone’s mind to share this kind of information. I’m not an internet angel, I remember getting a pirated version of Photoshop back when I was younger because I simply could not afford to purchase it. That being said, I would never dream of uploading it for others though even if I knew how to share it with total anonymity.

From what I can tell, the main motivations are:

• Earnings from download sites. They pay a certain amount of money per thousand downloads that you generate
• You improve your ‘standing’ on a Blackhat community and build up your rep points. I.e. sharing appeals to your ego
• You don’t like the person sharing the product and want to hurt their business

If there’s anything obvious I missed, please do let me know.

The Single Biggest Reason Why It’s So Easy to Pirate Products Online

There’s nobody willing to take the blame for the piracy.

The forums pass it off to their users in their terms of conditions before you register. The forum user passes the blame off to the file sharing site because he doesn’t actually host it. The file sharing site then passes the blame onto the uploader. The web host passes the blame back to the file sharing site, and on it goes.

Everyone wants to share it but nobody wants to take responsibility for it.

The forums want to share it because this is the major reason why people visit Blackhat forums anyway. The users want to share it because it increases their rep on the site or they make money from the file sharing host. The file sharing host wants to share it because they make money on ads being displayed and can get you to download other software for a commission.

The hosting company with the file sharing site wants to keep getting that big hosting income every month so they turn a blind eye until asked otherwise.

Getting on the Phone with Someone Who Pirated my Software

In the early days of OptinSkin, it was really disappointing to see how much the software had been shared around the web. There was one person in particular who seemed very set on getting it out to as many people as possible.

What made my clean-up operations harder was that these sites will often mirror their uploads to other locations. So you only need to share my software once and it’s automatically on dozens of different websites where people can download it. That gets frustrating very fast.

I got to the point where I was spending so much time filing DMCA requests and the like that it became a little too much. I stopped focusing on where the software was but instead on who was sharing the software.

I found my ‘target’ and sent them multiple PM’s on a certain forum, asking them to please stop. I didn’t get a response. I then decided to try and get their phone number. My thinking was that if I could speak with them, maybe I could reason with them over the phone and they would see that I’m a real person who would really appreciate if they didn’t do this.

As luck would have it, with enough persistence, I got the phone number. Their username had came up on a a gaming forum, where they linked to a website they presumably owned in the signature. Fortunately the WHOIS data was open, and based on the surname being very closely related to their username, I thought I had who I was looking for.

This was nearly two years ago so forgive me for not having this perfect, but the call mostly went like this:

*Ring Ring*

Receiver: Hello

Me: Hello, is this Alisha?

Receiver: No, that’s my son.

Me: Oh, I’m just calling to talk to Alisha about some software he has been using on the internet.

Receiver: Sorry, we’re not looking to buy anything.

Me: Ahh, no. I’m not trying to sell something to you. Alisha actually owns our software already, I just wanted to talk to him about it.

Receiver: Uhm…Okay, hold on.

**Some muffled talking in the background**

Receiver: Hello

**This time it was a very, very young voice on the end of the phone. I would say no more than 13**

Me: Hey Alisha, are you a member of a Blackhat forum called XXXX

Alisha: Yes

**If he hadn’t said yes, I don’t know how I would have continued the conversation**

Me: I’m just phoning because you’ve been sharing my software all over the web. It’s something that cost me thousands of dollars to make, over 6 months to put together, and I would appreciate if you weren’t doing that.

Alisha: OK, sure.

Me: I would appreciate if you could take down the links and threads that you’ve been starting on forums

Alisha: OK

Me: Can you do that after our call?

Alisha: Yes, I’m sorry. That’s no problem

Shortly after the call, the links were in fact taken down. But not until Alisha sent me one last message. He finally replied to the Private Message (PM) I had sent him a few weeks prior.

“Fuck you. Don’t phone me. I’m not the only one sharing your software. Fuck you”

I have to admit I laughed. As soon as the phone was down, the keyboard warrior attitude returned.

Theme Not OK

One of the most prolific sites on sharing the creations of others, especially from designers on Theme Forest, is ThemeOK. They neatly packaged Backlinks XXX up in a ZIP file (videos included), and shared it via a blog post on their website. This blog post subsequently ranked very highly in Google.

As do most of their blog posts. The traffic potential in this niche is absolutely huge…

I didn’t blur out the domain to make them totally anonymous. They’re very simple to find, but they don’t deserve any traffic or free publicity from me (or any blogger).

I filed a DMCA request with the website owner (more on DMCA’s later) and asked for the page to be taken down. After I received a confirmation of the page being gone, I had hoped to get an answer on their motivations of running the site:

He says the other sites copied his information yet he had the power to remove the links almost instantly. It also makes no sense that someone else would promote his site in the file URL. Since that email exchange, ThemeOK actually rebranded themselves to ThemeKO. They’ve definitely found a niche that people are flocking to in the tens of thousands and are looking to take advantage of this:

Trust me, there’s no EXE file that comes with any of my products. Without downloading the file, it will likely either assist in putting malware on your computer or actually give you something like a toolbar, where the site owner gets paid for that install. Or both.

They Will Find A Way

Guess what happened on the very first day of launching Backlinks XXX? I got 10 customers for the income of one!

I decided to try a little idea that I wasn’t sure if it would pay off. I tried to get in on a group buy of my own product because that way I would know exactly who purchased it originally before sharing. Every copy I find on pirate sites tells me who shared it, even if they ripped text directly from my pages.

I’ll teach you how I know who shares something later in the post. And it doesn’t involve anything messy like license keys. My attempt at getting in on the group buy didn’t work, but I guess I should be reassured that they wont give my work to other people very easily.

I found that people were even willing to abuse a vulnerable website (vulnerable meaning it has some kind of hole that allows people to post content on it). Backlinks XXX found itself promoted on the official website of Mary Mary who seem to be quite well known in America (can a commenter confirm?).

On another note, that site is being abused very heavily and those spammy pages rank very highly.

Some people will even go as far as to build their own file sharing forum and the file hosting site that hosts the files. Effectively taking money from both sides of the equation. Allegedly. Legally it seems safer if I add that this may not be the case.

Let’s just say that that Feedurbrain.com (the forum) and iSaveLink.com (the file sharer) who use the same domain registrar, and have the same WHOIS location, is pure coincidence. Also that iSaveLink support threads get answered by Feedurbrain.com members is just totally random and not related.

Feedurbrain is a tricky one because the website owners do not respond to any emails via their contact form. The email addresses’ found on their WHOIS data also doesn’t work. For this one, I had to go directly to their host. Put a domain into Whoishostingthis.com and you’ll find out who their hosting company is.

For Feedurbrain, it turned out to be ID3 (a dutch company) hosting the forum and Namecheap hosting the file sharing site. I’m amazed Namecheap would host a website like this to be honest. I submitted a DMCA request via ID3 and Namecheap and the page was removed from the forum within a few days. However the page is now back and Namecheap never once responded to a single email. All I received was that ‘this has been forwarded to our legal department’

I sent two follow-ups and didn’t get a single response. It doesn’t help when very large, seemingly legitimate companies don’t seem to care that their clients are operating in this way. I wonder how the marketing guys at Namecheap would react if they knew. Anyways…

The Page That Has Saved My Products (And Sanity)

For a good portion of my products now, I invested in a way to track people who simply copy content from a membership site or try to crack a plugin and share it around the web. For instance, here’s what you see when you first visit Backlinks XXX:

I really didn’t want this to seem like some kind of scare tactic, and simply wanted to mention that we’re not stupid and we actively do track people sharing our software and videos. Notice the specific sentence I highlighted. Since we’re using a form of membership software already, all we have to do is tap into that with specific information for each user.

Essentially you can pick a point in your content where you would like to place randomised content (this is unique data you assign to each user) then you track any shares of that item. It will only match one person, and then you can go and look into Paypal or Clickbank or whatever and get more information on that person.

I think this works so well is because nobody is going to have any idea where those sentences are and they actually make fairly decent sense. Since adding this page (and the plugin) I’ve noticed that sharing of the product has stopped by almost 100%.

I haven’t found a single copy of my membership sites shared since I added that security notice and implemented the randomising system. I’m not trying to tempt any Blackhat forums here; I’m simply trying to help you protect your own creations from people who would love to see them spread across the internet.

Usually I would share this with you but let’s not make their job easier. You can get this done for less than $100 on oDesk.

How to utilise the DMCA

The DMCA stands for the Digital Millenium Copyright Act and is primarily what allowed me to get hundreds of files taken off of file sharing websites. Like this:

I’m not a laywer (obviously) so to get specific information on the DMCA I recommend the Wikipedia page for the act, here. As I understand it in its basic form, it enables you to prove that you are the owner of specific content and would like the infringing material removed.

Most file sharing sites have the following DMCA requirements:

• A statement that you’re the original owner of the material being infringed
• Identify the original source
• A statement that the information you’re sharing is correct
• The location of where you believe the infringing material is
• A signature (a digital signature is fine)

Which ends up looking something like this:

Keep it saved somewhere so that you can use it again very easily. I like to use Canned Responses for Gmail so in just two clicks that whole message has been pasted. Then you just change the location URL of the infringing download or page.

9 times out of 10 this is all you need to do and the pages are usually removed within 48 hours. It’s not as difficult as you maybe once first thought. You will make some forum members unhappy though…

Google URL Removals

If you can’t get a specific file sharing site to comply with a DMCA request then you still might be able to get the page taken out of Google’s search results if they are actually infringing on your data. This is a tricky one because on one hand some of them are only linking to the site and not actually doing anything illegal.

However, if they have taken content from your product or your sales material (unique images, sales text, etc) which is common, then the Google URL removal tool is another option to think about.

Amazingly, URL’s get removed within 2-3 hours of submission. There’s always 1 or 2 that don’t get approved that fast – I don’t know why – or not at all. As you can see below though, I have been fairly successful with this.

You can find the URL removals dashboard in Webmaster Tools at this URL.

Don’t Forget the Obvious

I hope I’ve just shed some light on the things that aren’t clear and known to everyone. Don’t forget to think about the other options at your disposal as well. Besides my security page example, this was very much a case of what you can do after this happens to you. Don’t forget about other things to do before as well.

This could be things like using membership site software which limits login attempts for each account and allows you to protect download links to zip and PDF files. If you’re selling a plugin then at least put some form of licensing in the code, even if it can get cracked.

There is a very big business out there online for people to share your products. They get paid by the download companies or get free VIP status on Blackhat forums (along with some rep points). The forums make special areas for people to share these downloads but don’t take responsibility for the content of it.

Essentially they turn a blind eye as it is a major traffic driver to their sites. The fast growth in this niche doesn’t always pay off though…

If you have any of your own advice and suggestions, I would love to hear them in the comments. I really hope this helps some of you with current and future product launches online…

You may view the latest post at http://www.viperchill.com/blackhat-forums/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '30 day challenge: better email handling'

Some relatives were visiting this past week, so my inbox has a triple digit backlog. That’s after aggressive pruning of mailing lists and so on. Nearly all of those emails mention me in a “to:” or “cc:” line and request a response. Some observations:

- roughly 40% of those emails are from the outside world (that is, not from colleagues at Google).
- only 5% of my emails are from people who are actually on my team.
- 3% of my current emails are about internal legal matters.
- 1% are from public relations folks.
- about 10-12% of those emails are about a couple recent internal projects that aren’t related to webspam but that I’m helping with.

My 30 day goal this month is to get to a better place with email. Heck, I might make “better email habits” an ongoing 30 day challenge until things are in a better place. Could I get to a healthier place in three months? Four months? I have no idea how long it will take, but email represents my largest source of work stress. When I’ve tracked my time in the past, it takes me about three hours a day to keep from falling behind on email. If my whole day is full of meetings, then I’m spending several hours at night to keep my head above water. Does anybody else tackle email on their vacation so it’s not as bad when they get back? Some of you do, right?

At 40% of my overall load, it’s clear to me that I have to do something different for emails from the outside world. For years I tried to answer everyone who emailed me. I’m going to have to go “lossy” and just let some of those emails drop.

I need to think about whether it makes sense to write a blog post like Chris Sacca did (which
Rick Klau recently surfaced) that tries to address the common things that people email about. Then again, Rand Fishkin did something like that at http://moz.com/rand/making-email-more-scalable/ and he reported that he ended up with “a bunch of very angry people” when he pointed them to a blog post.

So I’m not sure whether it’s better not to reply, or to write up a canned response or maybe a blog post or a flowchart that I can point people to. If you have tips that have worked for you to make email more manageable, let me know in the comments below.

You may view the latest post at http://feeds.mattcutts.com/~r/mattcutts/uJBW/~3/2-EGtfQKGbA/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, 'The Most Profitable Year of My Life, Thanks to Google [Webinar Replay]'

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A few weeks ago I did my first ever Webinar in the marketing world after being asked to speak to members of a community called Link Club. This is 80% of what I spoke about on that live webinar, replayed for you here in a new video. The reason I’ve taken 20% out is simply to give their audience something unique as a thank you for motivating me to put together a webinar in the first place. I don’t think it would be fair to repeat things word for word here.

That being said, there’s still a ton of stuff I hope you can take away from this. Nobody on the internet is sharing more than what I’m giving you in my latest posts, and especially this one where I share:

• My favourite place for getting SEO case studies I don’t see anyone talking about
• Exact backlinks to one of my websites
• How I abused Google’s Freshness algorithm (and my traffic jumped up)
• How I rank for any phrase I want in iTunes

If you’re reading this in your inbox or a feed reader, click here to go to the post

Feel free to hit the full-screen button if the video size is a little too small for you. I kept the quality quite high so it should still look good on your screen. Please do let me know what you think of this in the comments. If the reaction is good, Diggy is going to share his ‘Future of SEO’ webinar in the next few weeks

P.S. Closing the doors to my ‘private SEO circle’ in less than 48 hours. This is the last time I’ll mention it for at least a few months so send me an email to hq – AT – viperchill.com if you’re interested

You may view the latest post at http://www.viperchill.com/webinar-replay-1/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '2 Million Backlinks and 15 SEO Answers from Google's Matt Cutts'

I’ve covered some pretty controversial topics in recent weeks when it comes to SEO. Revealing I’m a scammer, showing how freshness is being abused and then doing a follow-up blog post to show the same again. Though at times it may seem like I’m being a bit harsh on Google, I have acknowledged that the job their staff have must be one of the hardest in the world. Trying to defend yourself against thousands (millions?) of people who are focused on nothing more than gaming their system on a daily basis.

I still feel though that the search results from 2011 and 2012 are just far better than what we’ve seen in 2013. Google should not be getting tricked by people simply changing the date on a blog post and thinking that it’s suddenly fresh and deserves better rankings. There’s also no doubt in my mind that Youtube has a huge algorithmic preference over other video platforms like Vimeo, Wistia & DailyMotion, no matter what Google say about keeping things fair.

My original plan with this blog post was just to share with you the answers from the Webmaster videos that Google share on their channel which are primarily hosted by their head of web spam, Matt Cutts. Then my brain went off on a bit of a tangent and I wanted to cover how much you can really trust about what Google themselves preach. Their head of webspam, Matt, is someone who has no doubt made millions of dollars from his Google stock options (he joined 13 years ago) so my only prognosis is that he genuinely enjoys his job and the intelligent people he gets to work with every day.

On the face of it, you have to give Google credit for making the effort. They don’t really have to give any advice to SEO’s or webmasters; they can just ignore the whole lot and I honestly don’t think it would impact their search market share. Good luck convincing your friends outside of search to start using Bing or Yahoo anytime soon. On the other hand though, it’s also clear to see that most of the videos are just a PR stunt for Google, trying to encourage their ideal internet to make their own jobs easier.

The biggest thing that stands out to me from all of these questions and answers on their Youtube channel is just how scared of SEO the general webmaster seems to be. So much talk of penalties, the disavow tool and updates like Penguin and Panda have put the ‘mom and pop’ on the back foot and worried about doing literally anything to their site.

15 SEO Answers Directly from Google’s Matt Cutts

Whether they give you information you can actually use or should take with more than a grain of salt is debatable, but I recommend every internet marketer who focuses on search to at least watch and read the information Google put out there. It can be a little tedious to go through lots of 5 minute videos from their Webmaster Help Channel, so I did it for you and put the answers together here.

Is load speed a more important factor for mobile? Is it really something that can change your rankings, all other things being equal?

“All things being equal, if your site is really really slow, we do use page speed in our rankings. All things being equal, then yes, a site can rank lower. Look at your neighborhood of websites and if you’re the outlier – your site is very very slow – then you may rank lower.

It’s not that in mobile we apply that any more or any less for desktop search.”

What should we do with embeddable codes in things like widgets and infographics? Should we include the rel=”nofollow” by default?

“My answer is coloured by the fact that we’ve seen a ton of people trying to abuse widgets and abuse infographics. We’ve seen people with a web counter and they don’t realise there’s links with mesothelioma in there. I would not rely on infographics and widgets as your primary way to gather links. I would recommend putting a no-follow, especially on widgets. Depending on the scale of what you’re doing with infographics, you might want to put a rel=”nofollow” on those as well”

What can I do if someone – like my competition – is trying to harm me with bad backlinks?

“You’ve done the right thing; you got in touch with site owners and you’ve said look, please don’t link to me I don’t want to have anything to do with your site. If those folks aren’t receptive then just go ahead and disavow those links. As long as you’ve taken those steps you should be in good shape.”

As memorable .com domains become more expensive, developers are choosing alternate new domains like .IO and .IM which Google geo-targets to small areas. Do you discourage this activity?

“You can pick any domain you want, but if you pick a domain like .ES or .IT because you think you can make a novelty domain like Google.it – “Google it” – or something like that, do be aware that most domains at that specific level do pertain to that specific content. We think that content is going to be mainly intended for that country.

There are a few country code top level domains that are sort of generic because, for example, .IO stands a for something related to the Indian Ocean but there were very few domains that were actually relevant to that. We might go ahead and say okay this is a generic country code level top level domain.”

How does Google treat hidden content which becomes visible when clicking a button? For example a page to buy something then a “show details” button which shows more information.

“If you’re using a tiny little button that people can’t see and there’s 6 pages of content buried in there that users can’t see and that’s keyword stuffing, then that is something we could possibly consider hidden text and probably would consider hidden text.

In general if you just have an ‘ajaxy’ sort of site and things get revealed and you’re trying to keep things clean, that’s not the sort of thing that’s going to be on the top of our list to worry about because a lot of different sites do that. It’s pretty common on the web.”

How does duplicate content that’s legally required (i.e Terms & Conditions across multiple offers) affect performance in search?

“I wouldn’t stress about this, unless the content you have that’s duplicated is spammy or keyword stuffing or something like that I wouldn’t worry about it. We do understand that various places across the web do need to have disclaimers and various legal information.”

Should a customer with 20 domain names link them all together or not, and if he does should he add no follow to the links?

“First off, why do you have 20 domain names? *Giggles* If it’s all cheap online casinos or medical malpractice in Ohio, having 20 domain names there can look pretty spammy and I would probably not link them all together.

On the other hand, if you have 20 domain names and they’re all versions of your domain in different countries then it can make sense to have some way to get from one version of the domain to another version. Even then I wouldn’t link all of the domains in the footer, all by themselves. I would probably have one link to a country locator page on the main .com.”

A client got unnatural link warnings in September 2012 without any example links. 90% of links were removed and I asked for examples in every reconsideration request. Shouldn’t it be better to have live / cached “list” of bad links or penalties in Google Webmaster Tools?

“We’re working on being more transparent and giving more information in messages as we can. I wouldn’t try to say “hey, give me examples” in a reconsideration request (RR) because a RR will read what you say but we can only really give a small number of replies.

Yes the RR has been granted or no you still have work to do. There’s a very thin middle ground which is ‘your request has been processed’. That usually only applies if you have multiple web spam actions.”

If my site goes down for a day, does it affect my rankings when this happens?

“If it goes down for a day then you should be in good shape. If it goes down for two weeks then there’s a better indicator that your site is actually down and we don’t want to send users to a site that is down. If it was only just a short period of downtime I really wouldn’t worry about that.”

If I write about another article, where should I link to the original source?

“Whatever way you choose to do will work fine for Google’s ranking because the link – whether it’s at the bottom of the article or whether it’s in that first paragraph – it still flows pagerank either way. Credit will flow to the website that you’re referring to.

For my personal preference, I prefer when a link is relatively close the top of the article.”

Which aspect of Google updates do you think the SEO industry simply won’t get? Where do you see many SEOs spending too much energy on when they could be taking care of other things?

“One is the difference between an algorithm update versus just a data refresh. When you change an algorithm the signals that you’re using and how you weight those signals are fundamentally changing. When you’re doing just a data refresh, then the way that you run the computer program stays the same but you might have different incoming data or refresh the data that the algorithm is using.

I’ve seen a lot of accusations after Panda and Penguin that Google is just trying to increase its revenue. Let me confront that head on. Panda, if you go back and look at Google’s quarterly statements they actually mention that Panda decreased our revenue.

A lot of people have these conspiracy theories that Google is making these changes to make more money. Not only do we not think that way in the search quality team, we’re more than happy to make changes which are better for the long-term quality of our users.

A lot of people think about “how do I build more links” and they don’t think about the grander global picture like how do I make something compelling and then how do I make sure that I market well. You get too focused on search engines and then totally miss social media and for example social media marketing.”

Why does Google continue to present multiple results from one domain on a search result?

“In the past it was the case that you could search for ‘antique green glass’ and all of the results might be from one domain and that was kind of a bad experience. We introduced something called host clustering which means for each hostname – so like per subdomain – you only get two results.

We then saw people – spammers and bunch of different webmasters adapt – say “ok, do a bunch of different sub-domains and get two results from one hostname, two results from another hostname” and they can get back to crowding up the whole results page again.

We changed things again because we do want diversity in our search results and we made it such that you can get results from one domain then another result from one domain then other results from that domain get progressively harder and harder to rank.

We then made another change not too long ago where we say – if someone is searching for rental cabins in Tennessee – and there’s a really good website about that it may be helpful to show more than just a few results from that domain.

Once you’ve saw a cluster of results from one domain, once you go through subsequent pages we wont show you that domain again so that should help improve the diversity.”

What does Google think of single-page websites? There are some great websites using only a single page (& lots of CSS and Javasvcript) bringing the same user experience as a regular website with many subpages?

Google has gotten better at handling javascript and a lot of times if you’re doing some different or strange JavaScript interaction or having things fold in or out we’re pretty good at being able to process that. In general I wouldn’t bet your SEO legacy on this one single page working well.

If it works for you and users to have that all on one page, for the most part it should work for Google as well.”

Do Google take action on sites that do keyword stuffing (with phone numbers)?

The answer is yes we do. We get a lot of complaints about that. When you type in a phone number of you just get page after page after page of those cookie-cutter sites you get really annoyed and we hear those complaints internally within Google. We treat it basically as keyword stuffing as you’re repeating very similar words after each other – just like someone throwing a dictionary up on the web (but with numbers).

We do consider that web spam.”

Matt’s Comments in a Video about Negative SEO

“We try to think about whether there’s a way that person A could hurt person (competitor) B. We try really hard to design algorithms which are robust and resistant to that sort of thing.

At the same time, a lot more people are thinking about their backlinks…what if people try to do negative SEO? Where they point links at a site to try and make that site rank lower. In my view there are very few people who talk about negative SEO and fewer who try it and fewer still who actually succeed.

We’ve just uploaded a Disavow tool which allows people to upload a text file of links and say “I would like Google to ignore these links to my site.” If you’re someone who wants to do Negative SEO it’s probably a much better use of your time to try and do something productive.”

How Much Can We Take Seriously?

It really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to you that spamming Youtube to death works pretty well after my last few blog posts, but it’s a shame that it happens in such prominent industries. And even more of a shame when it comes from networks that Google definitely seems to know about.

First came the tweet from Matt:

I didn’t actually catch this at the time (hat tip to GOS) but it definitely went viral among the Blackhat forums which you can see with pretty much any Google search on the topic. Many of them who relied on Russian link networks started getting a little worried.

Further confirmation came a month later when the highly respected Barry Schwartz covered the topic on Search Engine Land. SEL is without a doubt the most respected publication when it comes to search engine news, so it wasn’t hard to put two and two together judging by the dates on the tweet and their post.

It’s easy to think when you read something like this that you should totally stay away from any of these networks. Especially when they’ve been called out specifically. I mean something so public surely isn’t going to work in Google anymore is it?

How’s this for irony. Let’s look at two popular SEO related search terms. These are arguably some of the most competitive search terms on the web not because of their search volume (although they do get 40K+ exact searches per month) but because you’re literally competing against other people who consider themselves to be among the best at getting top search engine rankings.

And what do we have ranking number #1 for ‘SEO Company’?

Note: I did edit this screenshot to remove the Adwords ads but didn’t alter the positioning of results

An awful Youtube video. I use proxies any time I perform these kind of searches and I’m not logged into Google. The comments I’ll show you in a second clearly prove I’m not the only one seeing these results either. They might change in a few days from this post – I don’t know – but the ones I’ve called out in recent blog posts over the last few months haven’t changed.

Let’s put in another search term like ‘SEO Services’ which gets over 40,000 exact searches per month. It’s a pretty ideal buyer’s keyword if you’re looking for SEO clients:

So where are these links coming from? Well, you can of course start digging into the backlink profile, but other members of the SAPE network pretty much give it away themselves:

And if you’re not convinced, tell me when you last saw such a natural link profile like this one below. Over 2 million backlinks in such a short period of time, more than likely from the SAPE.ru link network.

Please be aware that there are a lot of imitators in Google trying to rank for the name of this network to get customers because of how well it works. They are not the service I’m referring too here. We’re focusing solely on the Russian network that was supposedly taken down and ‘dealt’ with already.

I could do this stuff all day long. Oh wait, I do. The list of examples I have is mind-blowing.

As a side note: My ‘private SEO circle’ is opening 20-30 new places on September the 2nd (will probably max out after an hour or two) so send me an email to HQ @ name of this website if it’s something you might be interested in.

The Google PR Spin

I really wanted to leave some feedback after each Matt Cutts’ answer but I didn’t want to ruin the flow of your reading. Comments like “[don't do negative SEO] it’s a much better use of your time to do something productive” and “just go ahead and disavow those links” aren’t exactly ideal to me when you consider that Google don’t show all of the bad links they supposedly know about pointing to your site. With great timing, Jim Boykin shared some responses from an interview he just did with Google’s John Mueller over Google Hangouts. Here are some of the main takeaways:

• Google supposedly have technical limitations for how many ‘bad links’ they can show in Webmaster tools (1,000 links from 1,000 domains) – I find this hard to believe by the way
• Don’t think you’ll get help from Google on this when Matt commented above that you shouldn’t expect people who handle reinclusion requests to send you example links
• It’s up to you to disavow links even if they’re from sites that scraped content from those that already link to you
• The links in webmaster tools in many cases are years old and rarely get updated (this is from Jim’s experience, not mine) making the job even harder

My thoughts for a while now – which I’m glad Jim touched upon – are basically why can’t Google just give those links no value rather than relying on us to do the job for them and report links which may have been built unnaturally. John’s response: “Well, if we could recognize all of them I guess that might be a possibility.”

There’s a lot to take away from that statement. It’s near impossible for Google to be able to detect with 100% accuracy that certain links are good while others are bad and thus rely on us to report it for them. There are exceptions of course, but then again you have to keep in mind a) Whether something was Negative SEO on another site by a competitor and b) blanket rules for this in the algorithm would wreak havoc across normal search results.

Recently there was a bit of drama surrounding a Moz.com post which suggested that Google +1′s were the number one factor in getting search engine rankings these days. This was quickly debunked by Matt over on Hacker News and the post on Moz was edited to reflect that they had meant that shares on Google+ were getting sites rankings. I’m not here to bash Moz but the correlation does not equal causation. Sites that write good content generally have readers who will share their content on social media sites like Google+ and they are actively attracting new backlinks anyways which help their rankings.

I am here to point out how much Matt dodged a lot of questions on that thread and really didn’t want to talk about shares having an effect on rankings (all that juicy pagerank) but just reverted to the good old Google PR angle “focus on creating great content”. Just like that amazing video that ranks number #1 for SEO company and top 3 for SEO services, right?

If you’re new here, I did write a few blog posts recently which show lots of other examples of terrible search results and I tend to get a few dozen more in my inbox from readers every time I write a blog post like this. I really don’t like to be the person to call out too many examples though (I blurred the links in my last post on request from someone I had ‘outed’).

To wrap up this post, there are a few things I want you to keep in mind:

• Listen to what Google have to say via these channels, but don’t take it too seriously past common sense
• Do not do crazy SEO tests on your money site (the site you can’t ‘risk’) but do SEO tests
• Remember that while Google may have around 2.5 million servers, the people who put these algorithms together sit down for staff meetings at a conference table every week to try and deal with the challenges they face just like you or I would (but a little smarter)

Next week I’m sharing a replay of my first ever webinar which shows you some SEO tactics you can put into place that take affect immediately and will give you an upper hand on people who only read SEO blogs and don’t follow through with their own testing. You’re going to love it (I hope)! Thank you, as always, for reading…

You may view the latest post at http://www.viperchill.com/2-million-backlinks/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com

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Build Backlinks Online has posted a new item, '3 Conversion Tricks I Use to Get More Leads Than You (+ Free Squeeze Page Template)'

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When I released OptinSkin back at the beginning of 2012, one of the main marketing angles for the product was that it allows split-testing. Similarly, when I released my free training guide Cloud Blueprint, split-testing was stressed so much as something that can take you from being someone who does ‘okay’ online to someone who can quit their job. When changing just one word on your sales or squeeze page can literally mean a 1,000% change in conversions, I’m amazed when I don’t see people doing it.

Today I’m going to share some of my more private landing page tips that help me get more subscribers and sales than my competition in virtually any niche I enter. I’m also going to give you a high-converting squeeze page template you can customize until your heart’s content. Finally, I’ll share – step-by-step – how to implement split-testing so you have no reason not to be doing it.

100% Free HTML Squeeze Page

I want to kick off this post by giving away a totally free HTML squeeze page that you can use to easily collect email subscribers. I did have the idea of using WordPress and custom pages for this giveaway but I thought it would be too much hassle to make it compatible with people’s themes etc. (and there are premium plugins which do exactly this). The freebie is more about giving you an easy way to quickly get into split-testing without needing any technical knowledge (besides FTP) and start building your readership.

I designed this after putting together so many squeeze pages recently for sites in my PPC case study and this template was one of the best that I found to be working. You can view a preview of it and some of the features, below:

Installation

To install the template, you simply need FTP access to your server. If you do not have this, simply ask your web host what those details would be and then use a tool like Filezilla to access your site. Navigate to wherever your website files are – usually public_html – and create a new folder for the name of your squeeze page. EmailA or something similar is fine. Then just drag and drop the theme that I give you to this location, and it will be up and running instantly.

The theme can be found here: http://www.viperchill.com/SqueezePage.zip (Right Click > Save Link As)

User Guide

I did spend a lot of time putting this together so the user guide is behind a little ‘share please’ box. I’ve never done anything like this before, but would appreciate it if you could help me spread the word. If you are more technically inclined already it should be very easy to edit the theme without the guide. However, if you are a beginner, you’ll get access to a huge page on this website which gives you a lot more information.

6 Things I Learned from My Last Round of Split-Testing

Please keep in mind that the following lessons may or may not work well in your industry. The true beauty of split-testing is that you really never know what is going to convert highly for your audience and the plus side is that there’s always a lot of fun in trying.

1. A laptop screen above my opt-in form worked better than a DVD style cover, an eBook cover and an audio CD graphic. The audio CD was by far the worst graphic that I tested. Keep in mind that I did put an image on the laptop screen that was relevant to what I was giving away and didn’t just leave it blank

2. A blue opt-in box worked better than any other colour I tested. Even when I matched the opt-in box to other colours on the site (such as having a red box with a red title) I still couldn’t beat blue with blue for my particular niche.

3. Having a Facebook like box on the page lowered conversions every single time. I’ve had it help when I’m selling a product, but for a squeeze page it just seemed to take people’s attention away from what I was actually doing. Heat-mapping tells me that people weren’t clicking on it – which is fine, I don’t want them to – so it’s not simply that I was directing them elsewhere and thus lowering conversions.

4. Words like “Weird” “unexpected” “unexplainable” “shocking” and so on which increase people’s curiosity helped a great deal. For instance, it would be better for me to say “This weird piece of software sped up my PC overnight” then something really clean and clear like “I installed this software and my computer became faster”. That’s just an example; I’m not involved in the speeding up of your computers.

5. The title still has the biggest impact for me when it comes to increasing conversions. This not only includes the words used as mentioned above, but the colour and even more importantly the font that is used.

6. Having an image underneath the opt-in box (even like the grass you see in my example) could not be beaten. It increased my conversion rate every single time. I played with this to show people’s faces, screenshots of the software they were getting, random ‘press’ images, and so on. Though not all of the images worked much better, every single one increased conversion rates in some way.

Using My Magic Grass Idea for Higher Conversion Rates

The last point there, number 6, was what I refer to as ‘magic grass’. It’s a really simple idea but something that just seems to work over and over again for me when it comes to getting more opt-ins. Have something on your page that people are likely to click on and then remind them to opt-in using a javascript alert.

Click on the grass below to get an idea of what I’m talking about (you’ll have to be viewing this on site, and not in an RSS reader or your inbox):

If you’re using this on a really long page – like this blog post – you’ll have to pick a point in the page using the anchor attribute for HTML links where the user is returned to after they click OK. You probably noticed you got redirected to just above the grass. Typically I don’t have to do this on opt-in pages as they’re short enough that people don’t have to scroll, so it’s fine if someone is taken back to the ‘top’ of the page.

Here’s the code:

<a href="#" onClick="alert('Hold on quick fingers! Enter your email address in the box for INSTANT ACCESS to your free guide!')">IMAGE CODE HERE</a>

Make sure you put the code for an HTML image or whatever it is you want to trigger a pop-up where I have written ‘IMAGE CODE HERE’. It works especially well for:

• Any graphics on the page showing what you’re promoting
• Graphics showing underneath your opt-in form (possibly as wide as the page)
• Thumbnails showing a clip of a video they’re about to get access to

You can make the message be anything really. Just make sure you’re not condescending and make sure you do write in a fun, playful way. The key point is to remind people that they’ll get the bonus or benefit once they opt-in.

If you use any kind of heat mapping software (I use what’s built into Visual Website Optimizer which I’ll cover later) then you can see where people are clicking and then use that section of your page to trigger this kind of javascript alert.

Please note that I actually wasn’t using a picture of grass in the heatmap above, but I was using something with the same image dimensions (wide but short) which was semi-relevant to what I was giving away. You can split-test this of course to see what works best for you.

Don’t Show Your Add to Cart Button Instantly

This works especially well if you’re doing one of those ‘free guide’ or free presentation style videos where you are actually using that free concept to push towards a sale. If people can see an “Add to Cart” button under the video from the very start they know you have more intentions than just giving away something for free. At least give them a chance to give you a chance by delaying the effect.

<script type="text/javascript">
function showBuyLink() {
document.getElementById("buylink").style.visibility = "visible";
}
// adjust this as needed, 1 sec = 1000
setTimeout("showBuyLink()", 230000);
</script>
<div id="buylink" style="visibility: hidden" align="center">
YOUR ADD TO CART BUTTON / LINK GOES HERE
</div>

Don’t forget to change the part in bold with how long you want the delay to be. 1000 equals a 1 second delay. If you’re promoting a 10 minute video then I recommend trying about 3-4 minutes in because at least this way you’re only showing it to people once you’ve really got their attention with it. As with the theme of this blog post though, this is something you should absolutely be testing.

Get People to Click-in and They’ll Opt-in

This was one of the random ideas I had a few weeks ago that I put into action. At first it sucked pretty badly but with some tweaking it did outperform other pages in some ways. I found that it worked best when someone already know of me / my website and then went to buy or sign-up for something. However for cold traffic it didn’t seem to be as effective as having everything on one page by default.

What this does is basically lure people into taking a very simple action – clicking a link – and then getting them to opt-in or convert in other ways after. For example, you would say you’re giving away something for free and then tell people to click a link to get that free thing – making them assume the link is the access. That link then just unveils more content on that same page and doesn’t take them anywhere else.

My guess is that – psychology wise – they’ve already performed one action and engaged with the page so they’re more likely to repeat it and engage again. Here’s an example below:

This wont work if you’re reading this in your inbox or an RSS reader, you’ll have to come to the post

Click here to download your 100% free PDF

What you reveal is not a boom graphic but the rest of your page where they convert. Hat tip goes to RS for the code. There is a much better way of doing it that I used to use but I can’t find the old code source I’m afraid. The “much better” way simply means that you don’t have to write Click here to download 3 times in a row in the code. It’s only a once off thing though.

Split-Testing is Everything

Split-testing is so crucial to your success when it comes to sales page and squeeze pages that I just can’t over-hype it enough. If you’re not testing, you’re losing money. I can enter brand new niches where I know less about the market than anyone else and quickly overtake their income because I’m finding out what a particular audience really responds to rather than just guessing based on my extensive “experience”. This is not just some broad statement either, I’ve done this for friends and clients where I know very specific figures about their income / leads and I’ve been able to surpass that through nothing but hardcore testing.

Here’s a good example from Mind Valley when they split-tested promoting the Silva Method which has millions of customers.

Recently for example, I removed all text from the Backlinks XXX sales page and replace it with a video. We’ve tried (and are trying) lots of videos on the sales page. Every single variation with a video beat the version of the page with a lot of text that I had in place for months. It sucks that I put so much time and effort into some of the graphics we had up on that page – literally a week of solid work – only to find out it’s not really helping us get sales at all.

But that’s what testing is for. You have to put your ego aside and accept that something else might be working better even if you don’t want it to be. I’ve put together two short guides for you on how to set up testing with different services.

Split-Testing with Visual Website Optimizer

I read the story behind Visual Website Optimizer (not an affiliate link) recently and have to say it was pretty inspiring. Started by one guy out in Mumbai, India, all he wanted was to make $1,000 per month from the service to replace his current income and then some. A few years down the line he’s pulling in millions of dollars per month, works with his best friends, and never took money from a single investor.

Not a bad end result.

The reason the service is so successful is because they’re great at every aspect of their offering. Great support, a great interface and most importantly, great (and fast) results for your split tests. When you first sign-up to the service you get a list of options for split-testing as you can see below:

A/B testing and Multivariate testing seem to be the most popular that I read about online. A/B testing will basically replace one object of the page for you with another. Like swapping between a red opt-in box and a blue opt-in box. Multivariate testing will variate through multiple objects on your page (such as titles, graphics, fonts — whatever you choose) and try to find you the best end result. Multivariate testing only really works well if you have a lot of traffic though, as there are so many variables that it needs to test.

I don’t actually use either of these, but instead rely on split-URL testing. I make too many odd changes (such as changes to the code snippets I shared above) that I find easier just to keep on separate pages of WordPress and use the split-URL options.

After you’ve then put in different variations of the page you want to test, it’s time to select what your goal is. Visual Website Optimizer have options for pretty much everything:

I generally use either visits a page or submits a form. Both of them can be used for tracking opt-ins as you put in your form submit URL from Aweber or you can put your thank you page in as the page that someone has to visit. If you aren’t sure what to track or how to track it then I recommend sending through an email to support. I had a unique situation with some membership site software I run (they go to Paypal then back to my website) and wanted to ensure it would be tracked correctly as the produce is expensive (and sales rarer) so I would have to wait a while for it to test properly.

They promptly responded and helped me select the correct variable.

With testing, your results aren’t always going to be better than your original page. Sometimes your gut instinct is pretty good and the changes you make actually lower conversions. Here’s an example of this happening for me:

Sometimes they go the right way but it’s hard to separate a winner (it can take a lot of traffic) and you need a little patience. I do have far more clear cut examples of of successful testing but this was such an anomaly for me that I had to take a screenshot. I know the traffic numbers are very low so it’s too early to pick a winner, but never have I ever seen the exact number of conversions from visitors for two additional variations that I’m testing.

Split-Testing with Google Analytics Experiments

Google used to have their own split-testing tool that was independent from Analytics called Google Website Optimizer. It seems these days this is now built into Google Analytics so you’ll need to make sure you’re running that on your website to take advantage of this free offering. I personally don’t use Google Analytics at all anymore – though my clients do – so don’t have any personal tests to show you.

I will show you how to set it up though. Once you’ve logged into your Analytics account, you’re going to want to click on Content then select Experiments. You’ll be faced with the following options window:

For the percentage of traffic to test I would probably go for 100% unless you’re making some drastic changes that might put off a large portion of your audience. If that’s the case, then scale things down accordingly.

The next option will then ask you to define the goal (conversion) you wish to track. Something simple like someone landing on your thank you page – where they get redirected after subscribing to your email list – is an obvious one you can use for testing both your own site and on my free squeeze page.

You’ll then see a preview of the experiment before it goes live with the tracking code you’ll need to install on your site.

Simply follow the instructions here and you should be up and running. As mentioned earlier, I don’t use Google Analytics for website tracking so unfortunately don’t have any reports to share with you like I do for Visual Website Optimizer. As with most things Google though, it appears incredibly easy to set-up and be on your way to getting more conversions if you don’t have the budget (or desire) to use VWO.

I hope I’ve inspired you to give split-testing a go if you aren’t doing it already. And if you are doing it, some code and ideas which might help to improve your conversions even further. If you have any questions or feedback, I’m here in the comments. I would love to know what you think…

You may view the latest post at http://www.viperchill.com/ultimate-squeeze/ You received this e-mail because you asked to be notified when new updates are posted. Best regards, Build Backlinks Online peter.clarke@designed-for-success.com