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Blogging to the Bank V.3
It's been about two years since I last reviewed "Blogging
to the Bank" by Rob Benwell. That was v.1, which Rob released in
2006. I missed out on v.2, but decided that I ought to get up-to-date
and buy v.3 (November 2008).
A lot has changed in the blogging world since v.1,
so an update was essential.
What Is It About?
"Blogging
to the Bank" is one man's account of how
he discovered powerful ways to use "blogs" ("Web
Logs")
to drive traffic to his niche product websites.
A "blog", by the
way, is a type of website that's very easy to build and update
without using any of the normal web building software. Have a look
at my
Marketing Sparks blog as an example.
Now Rob Benwell didn't follow any of the well-trodden
paths reccommended by marketing "gurus". He just started experimenting
and, according to his evidence (yeh, more of those boring screenshots
of ClickBank account statements!), he achieved some very nice profits.
Now he's not talking mega-bucks, but a few hundred
dollars a day is worth having! And his eBook takes the reader through
all the steps that he took to get to this pleasant position.
He assumes that the reader knows nothing about
blogs or blogging, so he starts by describing in detail (with some
good screen shots) exactly how to set up a blog - and where. He also
explains how you can easily get fresh content for your blog; a blog
without good, fresh content is dead in the water.
He assumes that you, dear Reader, like he, is going
to use blogs to earn affiliate income, so he shows us how to identify
good, profitable niche products.
He also shows us how to optimise our blog for the search
engines. And then (and this is where it gets contentious), he describes
five methods to "Flood your blog with targeted traffic" (i.e. attract
visitors to your affiliate-promoting blog who arrive in a good 'buy'
frame of mind). Methods 1 - 3? Great. Sound ideas! Methods 4 & 5?
Stay away from them, in my opinion. They're scary. Maybe they work,
but I'm not going to try them!
In the final sections of his eBook, Rob talks about
how he set up a network of interlinking blogs, each boosting the
search engine ranking of the others. And he gives us evidence (screen
shots of search engine results pages) showing how he got some of
his niche product pages to positions 7 & 9 out of 5.5 million and
1.2 million web pages respectively. (Suspicious, me? Yes. I checked
it. He was right and he's still got the same high ranking. Very impressive!).
So, that's what Rob covers in his eBook. So what's
my take on it?
What I Like About "Blogging To The Bank"
- It's short. Just 39 pages long. I like that. I'd sooner
pay more for fewer pages of good quality info than less for hundreds
of pages of fluff. For one thing, it takes me less time to read.
For another, it doesn't cost me as much in paper and toner (I like
to print out eBooks).
- It's very readable. Rob has a concise
style which comes over as very genuine. Maybe that's because he's
a fellow Yorkshire
man (we tell it like it is). And no, the fact that he lives,
coincidentally, only 30 miles away from me hasn't influenced this
review :-)
- It's got some ingenious info. See
"What I learned" below. I'm not a complete novice blogger, but
there was some advice that Rob gave me that made me think: "Well
yes, that seems obvious. But why didn't I think
of that before". And I hadn't fully appreciated how you
can use blogs not only to attract potential customers to affiliate
links
in your blog, but also how you can use them to drive traffic
to your other websites.
- Rob is a good teacher. The way
that he explains how to do things, complete with his annotated
screen
shots, makes the eBook equally suitable for novices as well as
for more experienced internet marketers. In fact, I've copied part
of
his style when giving advice to owners of my Newbies Starter
Kit.
- The lack of blatent advertising. It
really annoys me when I pay money for an info product and have
to plough through pages of ads for other products. It's worse than
having
to watch trailers at the movies! But, apart from a few justifiable
affiliate links, Rob avoids this annoying trait.
- The bonuses. Especially the video bonuses about
shoving a new website into the "Big Three" search engines in record
time. Great stuff!
What I Didn't Like About It
- The Title. Yes, I know I'm always
going on about naff titles! But I really hate product titles which
pander to the "bling" culture. I would much sooner have seen the
eBook called something like "Power Blogging For Success".
But maybe I'm not a good copywriter!
- The "Black Hat" techniques. These
appalled me and I will never use them. OK, Rob does have a clear
warning about these two methods of getting targetted traffic
to your blog. And maybe they worked for him. But will they work
in the future?
And will people who follow his advice on these two techniques
suddenly find their sites banned from the search engines? I hope
that Rob
monitors search engine developments carefully and removes these
two ingenious techniques from his eBook when (yes, "when"
not "if") they
get banned by the search engines.
- The construction of the PDF eBook: It
annoyed me that the Contents page didn't have the section titles
clickable so that you could go directly to a section. Also, there
were no bookmarks set up. Finally, in my version of Acrobat Reader,
at least (6.0.1), none of Rob's links to other resources (including
his affiliate links!) were clickable. Not a very professional
use of PDF technology.
What I Learned From The eBook
- The 2 best Blogger.com templates. I'm
taking Rob's experience on trust here, but I'm following his advice.
Here's one
blog I've set up in the past few days using one of his
suggested templates (one of the two he's found to produce the best
results).
- Tips on optimising your blog for the search
engines. To be honest, I've never given this a great
deal of thought. But Rob's detailed advice has really got me
thinking.
The ways in which he recommends using keywords in actually setting
up your blog were really insightful to me.
- The concept of networking blogs. OK,
I'm not going to go as far as the automation of blog creation (Rob's
scary "Method
5" - creating several hundred new blogs a day). But I can now
see how easy it is to manually create and maintain a few new blogs
a
day, whilst still staying clear of the 'blog and search engine
police'! I think that his techniques of cross-linking blogs is
not only ingenious,
but it also seems to be very powerful. I'm going to spend about
30 minutes a day over the next week or so doing just this.
There's probably a lot more that I'm going to learn from "Blogging
to the Bank" over the next few weeks. But I prefer to try and test
just one or two new ideas at a time. That way I get full value from
the information resources that I buy. Conclusions
If you are completely new to the concepts of "blogs"
and "blogging" you are going to get far more out of "Blogging to
the Bank" than I did.
But even if you are a fairly experienced blogger, I
think that you are going to get your money's worth from this concise
and readable eBook. Just stay clear of Methods 4 and 5!
OK - make up your own mind. You've read my impartial
comments. I think you should invest this modest sum in "Blogging
to the Bank" (ugh!)
Find Out More About "Blogging to the Bank" From Here
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