**Sorry guys, the Rank Tracker Beta program has now closed! A huge thank you to everyone who participated in the Beta, we received some excellent feedback and made many changes to the software as a result. For everyone else, be sure to check your inboxes over the next few weeks for more information about the full release!

A Quick Recap…

A few weeks ago Google made some changes that had a big impact on the Rank Tracker module in Market Samurai.

In response to this, it’s been necessary for us to create an automated, weekly Rank Tracking service, and rebuild our Rank Tracker module from scratch.

And while it’s taken longer than we first thought, we’re really excited to share that after many late nights of coding (and over 80,000 lines of new code)… IT’S READY

And we couldn’t be happier with the result!

With a new intuitive interface, you can now manage multiple rank tracking campaigns – completely on autopilot.

And because the new Rank Tracking system sources ranking data from reliable third party providers, it’s more stable and faster than ever before.

To join the Rank Tracker beta program, and be one of the first to get access to automated rank tracking, here’s what you need to do…

How To Get Started With The NEW Rank Tracker

To access the new Rank Tracker System, simply click on the link below and log into your Noble Samurai account using your registered email address and password.

You’ll then be able to join the beta program and download a special version of the software.

Click here to log into your account and get the New Version of Rank Tracker

If you can’t remember your password you can reset it here.

Your Free 50 Keyword Plan (Available Until 31st of May 2012)

As our last blog post outlined, our big hope was that we would be able to offer a FREE rank tracking plan for existing owners of both Market Samurai and Article Samurai.

The good news is that we will be able to offer a great FREE plan for all current owners of our products.

Until the 31st of May 2012, ALL existing customers of Market Samurai and Article Samurai will be eligible for a free 50 Keyword plan. The free plan will be reduced to 10 keywords for customers who sign up after the 31st of May 2012.

This means that 92% of our customers will get the benefit of automated rank tracking without spending a cent!

All you need to do is join the beta program here, install the latest version of Market Samurai, and access Rank Tracker by clicking on the Module tab.

To secure your 50 keyword plan, all you have to do is intall the update when the new Rank Tracker is released, and before May 31st, go to the Rank Tracker module, and your account will then be automatically setup with the introductory 50 Keyword White Belt Plan.

Details Of Our Paid Plans

Our ranking usage data analysis shows that our free 50 keyword plan will be more than adequate for 92% of our customers.

However, if you’re one of those who are in the 8% of users who track more than 50 keywords, then we want to make sure that we look after you too.

To understand how our prices compare, it’s important to assess the competition and see what the cheapest available options are on the market to track more than 50 keywords on a weekly basis:

So, if you need to track more than 50 keywords then the cheapest plan from competing services begins at $19 / month, and you can pay as much as $99 / month!

To ensure that our existing customers get the best deal possible, we’re offering two sets of plans:

1. Plans for our existing customers (or new customers who purchase before May 31st), which will include a 50% discount for the life of the plan.
    
2. Plans for new customers who purchase Market Samurai after May 31st.
    

Here’s a list of what our plans will be for Noble Samurai’s New Rank Tracking service:

So, if you’re an existing customer with 100 keywords, you can track your rankings for only $5 per month. That’s only $0.05 per keyword – less than a quarter of most of our competitors’ offerings!

Summary

1. Market Samurai’s new automated Rank Tracking System is now ready for beta testing. To grab your copy, just click this link, sign in to your account and join the beta program.

   *Sorry guys, the Rank Tracker Beta program has now closed! Be sure to check your inboxes over the next few weeks for more information about the full release!
    

2. Until May 31st, If you’re an existing Market Samurai (or Article Samurai) customer you’ll get access to a FREE 50 keyword Rank Tracker plan – which our usage data shows will be suitable for 92% of our customers.
    
3. If you’re part of the handful of customers who need to track more than 50 keywords you’ll be able to get access to special plans which are less than a quarter of the price of most of our competition.
    

We look forward to hearing your feedback on the New Rank Tracking System.

- Eugene

I’m really glad to be able to share with you some more information about the new Rank Tracker service.

This blog post contains a lot of information, but I wanted to answer as many of your questions as possible about our new service. In particular this blog post will cover:

1. A recap on the current status of the Rank Tracker module.
2. A status update of the progress of the new Rank Tracker service.
3. What’s different about the new Rank Tracking service?
4. Details of our FREE keyword tracking plan – based on our usage data I’m pleased to announce our free offering will satisfy the needs of over 92% of our users.
5. Details of our pricing plans – and how you can get access to a 50% discount.
6. How our new Rank Tracker service is different to other services on the market.

There’s a lot to cover, so let’s get started.

1. Rank Tracker is currently working and functional in Market Samurai

It’s important to reiterate that the current Rank Tracker module is currently working and functional.

After the Google change our first priority was to restore core functionality as quickly as possible. Rapidly, over a period of several days we released updates which restored functionality to all our core modules.

Most importantly, Rank Tracker IS currently working. The large majority of our users monitor fewer than 50 keywords and our service should be running smoothly for these users.

If you’re checking a large number of keywords (100+) you may be asked to complete a captcha to continue pulling back ranking data, but you can still fetch the full set of keyword data.

2. What progress has been made on the new Rank Tracker service, and when will it to be ready to use?

Since restoring full functionality to Market Samurai we’ve been tirelessly working to bring you the new “cloud” version of our Rank Tracking service.

Here’s a quick update on how we’re going:

• We’ve already made significant progress building the back-end infrastructure and services to deliver the new Rank Tracking service.
• We’ve spoken to over a dozen rank tracking data providers and negotiated a great deal on your behalf to be able to reliably handle the demands of our user-base – at over 200 million ranking checks per month, this is a significant load for many of the providers that we’ve spoken to!
• We’ve designed an easy-to-use interface for quickly and easily migrating your existing Rank Tracker information to the cloud and for managing your online campaigns.

So when will this be ready for you to use?

While we have made significant progress so far, our current best estimate is that we’ll be in a position for a large beta test in approximately 2–3 weeks’ time, with a public launch about 2 weeks following that.  This will give our beta testers a chance to get a few weeks of ranking reports through, to flush out any problems before we make it available to everybody.

I realise that this is longer than we originally estimated, but I think you’ll agree that it’s more important to make sure that the new version is as reliable and stable as possible, and that involves a few more weeks than we originally estimated.

Please rest assured that this is our #1 priority, and every available resource at Noble Samurai is working to bring you the new Rank Tracking service as quickly as possible.

Once again, the existing Rank Tracker module is currently working and will be able to serve the majority of our users’ ranking requirements until we’re in a position to roll out our new service.

3. So what’s different about the new Rank Tracking Service?

If you’ve used Rank Tracker you’ll quickly realize its main drawback – it’s slow! It’s a problem that the current Rank Tracker module shares with all desktop rank checking software.

If you’re serious about checking your rankings, you have to fire up the software each week, click the “Update Rankings” button, and then wait up to half an hour or more before all your rankings data has updated! And the more keywords that you are tracking, the slower it becomes!

And that’s for each Rank Tracker data file that you have. Many of our users have multiple sites or clients that they need to check the rankings for, and each of these in a different project file. If you have 3 or 4 files, the whole process can take several hours to complete, which is not ideal.

The new Rank Tracking service is very different. Instead of having to check your keywords yourself, we’ll check the keywords on your behalf automatically, and send you an email each week when your keyword rankings are ready.

Here’s how it will work:

1. First, upload your existing Rank Tracking files to the Noble Samurai “cloud” servers, where your ranking data will be stored.
    
2. Then, choose which keywords you want to monitor on a weekly basis. You also nominate which day of the week you’d like your ranking checks updated.
    
3. Once a week, our “cloud” servers will check your rankings on your behalf (you don’t even need your computer to be turned on! Everything happens automatically on our servers).
    
4. When your rankings have been checked and your ranking reports complete, we’ll send you an email notification to let you know.
    
5. You can then open Rank Tracker, and instantly view your ranking data.
    

Because we do all the heavy lifting from our “cloud” servers, you spend less time waiting for results, and can spend more time interpreting your data!

4. What are the details of the FREE Rank Tracking plan for existing Market Samurai owners?

Our big hope was that we would be able to offer a FREE rank tracking plan for existing owners of both Market Samurai and Article Samurai.

We’ve spent the past few weeks analysing the usage patterns of our current customers, and also aggressively negotiating with ranking data providers to understand:

1. If a FREE plan is economically possible at all; and
2. What a FREE plan would include for our existing users.

The good news is that we will be able to offer a great FREE plan for all current owners of our products.

In an analysis of our ranking usage data over the past year, we uncovered the following usage pattern for our current customer base:

92% track less than 50 keywords
7% track between 51-500 keywords
1% track over 500 keywords

Our goal was to provide a FREE plan that would ensure that as many of our customers as possible would be completely unaffected by the Rank Tracker changes.

I’m happy to announce that ALL existing customers of Market Samurai and Article Samurai will be eligible for a free 50 Keyword plan.

That means that over 92% of our customers will get the benefit of the improved Rank Tracking service (where we look up your rankings for you automatically each week), and won’t have to pay a penny for it!

There are some important things to note:

1. While the free plan will be free to you, it is NOT free to us - We will be paying thousands of dollars each month, on your behalf, to underwrite these free plans. We’ve set the freeline at a level that should satisfy the vast majority of users (over 92%), while setting the amount of cash that we need to outlay each month for our customers to a sustainable level.

Rest assured, this won’t bankrupt us, but it’s important to share that as we’ll be footing the bill for these FREE accounts, we had to draw the line somewhere, and a 50 keyword plan strikes a balance of meeting the vast majority of user’s needs, as well as managing our ongoing costs.

2. This offer will ONLY be available for existing Market Samurai (and Article Samurai) owners, or anyone who purchases Market Samurai before April 30th May 31st - As our existing customers and trial users are those who will be most affected by the changes, this offer will only be available to the existing ownership base – anyone that has a full version of Market Samurai or Article Samurai, as well as any current trial user who upgrades to the full version before April 30th May 31st.

3. After the 30th of April 31st of May, the FREE plan for any NEW customers of Market Samurai will drop to 10 keywords per month - As there is a substantial ongoing cost in providing these FREE plans the 50 keyword free plan is only available to existing owners (and anyone who upgrades to the full version before April 30th May 31st).

With almost 60,000 customers, you can start to understand why providing this FREE plan will cost us thousands of dollars per month.

That’s why we can only make this offer available to existing customers. Future customers will be limited to a 10 keyword / month plan.

4. This FREE 50 keyword plan is equivalent to PAID plans that cost up to $22.50 a month - We’ve done a thorough analysis of the competition in the rank tracking service space. Most rank tracking services fail to provide a FREE plan at all, and have a minimum entry price of $29 to $49 a month just to sign up. This being the case, the actual value to you for a comparable 50 keyword plan is anywhere between $5 to $22.50 per month.

Only existing customers, and those who purchase the full version of Market Samurai before April 30th May 31st, will be entitled to this free 50 keyword plan – which provides up to $22.50 per month of keyword ranking checks, for FREE.

5. Details of our pricing plans

Our ranking usage data analysis shows that our 50 keyword plan will be more than adequate for over 92% of our customers.

However, if you’re one of those who are in the 8% of users who track more than 50 keywords, then we want to make sure that we look after you too.

Before I reveal what the pricing plans are, it’s important to review the competition and see what the cheapest available options are on the market to track more than 50 keywords on a weekly basis:

So, if you need to track more than 50 keywords then the cheapest plan from competing services begins at $19 / month, and you can pay as much as $99 / month!

While this might seem like a lot, there are good reasons for the price. There are hard costs to providing an infrastructure to check large numbers of keywords.

When doing our analysis and pricing model we have two definite advantages over our competitors:

• Most competitor pricing is targeted at SEO agencies – companies with deep pockets. Agencies often charge hundreds or thousands of dollars to their own clients every month, and can therefore afford to pay substantial amounts each month to get their keyword rankings updated for them.
   
  Agencies manage multiple clients – needing to track hundreds or thousands of keywords each month. The pricing structure of the plans currently offered in the marketplace reflects this need. Unfortunately, this puts it beyond the reach of many small online business owners, particularly if they only need to track a few hundred keywords.
   
• Most of our competitors serve a relatively small client base of SEO Agencies - and so are unable to spread their infrastructure costs across tens of thousands of users as we are.

We know who our customers are, and they are very different from the SEO agencies! While we do have some agencies and SEO consultants using our software, most of our users are small online business owners who don’t have hundreds of dollars per month to spend on tracking their rankings.

We’ve taken this need into consideration when coming up with our own Rank Tracking plans.

To ensure that existing customers get the best deal possible, we’re offering two sets of plans:

1. Plans for our existing customers (or new customers who purchase before April 30th May 31st).
2. Plans for new customers who purchase after April 30th May 31st.

Here’s a list of what our plans will be for Noble Samurai’s Rank Tracking service:

So, if you’re an existing customer with 100 keywords, you can track your rankings for only $5 per month. That’s only $0.05 per keyword - less than a quarter of most of our competitors’ offerings!

For all existing customers (and for anyone who upgrades to the full version of Market Samurai before April 30th May 31st), you’ll get access to all our retail plans, but at a 50% Half-Price Discount!

If you study the plans above, you’ll see that even our future retail plans (which kick in only for new customers who purchase after April 30th May 31st) have a price per keyword less than half of most of our competitor’s offering. To get the same price per keyword from competing services, you’d need to spend at least $99 per month!

We’d love to be able to offer FREE ongoing Rank Tracking to all our affected users, however, for reasons I’ve already covered, economically this is just not possible.

Our 50 keyword FREE plan, which meets the needs of over 92% of our customers, will cost us thousands of dollars each month to cover.

If you’re one of the handful who tracks over 50 keywords (and you’re an existing customer), we are able to give you special pricing – less than a quarter of the price of our competitors.

Anyone who purchases our product after April 30th May 31st will be able to choose from our retail plans, which are still great value – at less than half the price of most of our competitors.

All the Rank Tracker plans provide weekly reports. How will this work, and why aren’t we able to provide more frequent updates?

With just a few exceptions, the majority of our competitors provide only weekly ranking updates, and for good reasons:

1. If you do regularly monitor rankings you’ll notice daily fluctuations in your results. This daily “noise” distorts the real picture of what is happening to your rankings.
    
   The vast majority of SEO professionals check their rankings on a weekly or fortnightly basis. It is generally accepted among SEO circles that checking rankings more often than this provides little value. It’s the equivalent of monitoring the stock price of your shares on a minute by minute basis. It’s too granular to provide any meaningful or actionable trends.
    
2. There is a real, tangible hard cost to providing large volumes of keyword rankings. There is a significant infrastructure that needs to be built to look up millions of keywords per month. Providing weekly rankings means four checks per month per keyword. Providing daily rankings involves seven times as many keyword lookups, which translates directly into seven times the cost. Services that provide daily rankings are significantly more expensive per keyword to track – and rightly so!

In the interests of keeping keyword rankings as accessible and as affordable as possible to our customers, we have opted to initially provide only weekly ranking reports. If there is sufficient demand we may introduce daily rankings, but these plans will naturally be much more expensive to provide.

6. What’s unique about our Rank Tracker service? How does it compare with the competition?

If you haven’t really used the Rank Tracker module before, or haven’t checked it out for awhile, here’s a quick recap about some of its unique features beyond being just a quarter of the price of the competition.

They say that “feedback is the breakfast of champions”, and from the beginning Rank Tracker was designed to provide rapid feedback about the “effects” of your SEO link-building work and SEO strategy.

1. Rank Tracker not only checks your ranking in the 3 major search engines, but also reports the number of links that are pointing to each of your ranking pages - Typically, as your link-building work increases, you’ll see an increase in the number of links, followed by an increase in your rankings. It’s a leading indicator to rankings, and only Noble Samurai’s Rank Tracker offers this feature. (SEO professionals love this feature – because it provides evidence of all the hard link-building work you’ve been doing)
    
2. Rank Tracker shows you the rankings for EVERY SINGLE WEB PAGE THAT YOU CONTROL - It’s common in modern SEO to use multiple domains to rank for keywords. Most other Rank Tracking services can only track one domain, and only tells you the highest ranking you hold. We allow you to track any number of domains, as well as special URLs like YouTube videos. We show you all the rankings you hold in the top 100 results, not just the highest one.
    
3. Rank Tracker allows you to track unlimited domains for a single keyword - Most other rank tracking solutions on the market charge their customers based on a concept called “keyword pairs”. If you wish to track your keyword rankings on a keyword for 5 different domains, you’d have to enter that keyword in 5 times, eating into your monthly quota. In Rank Tracker, that will count as only a single keyword – so your Keyword quota goes a lot further.
    
4. Rank Tracker allows you to track the rankings on Web 2.0 sites (such as YouTube and Squidoo), that you control, but don’t own! - Many solutions on the market limit you to only tracking pages on a single domain, or force you to track each Web 2.0 site as another “keyword pair”, eating into your limited keyword quota. As you know, YouTube and Web 2.0 sites often comprise a critical part of modern SEO. Only Rank Tracker allows you to add as many Web 2.0 web pages as you like – while only using up a single keyword of your weekly quota.
    
5. Rank Tracker supports the full range of search engine language and country combinations - Speaking to many rank tracking data providers we realized that very few support the full range of Language and Country combinations available in Google and the major search engines. Market Samurai has become very popular for non-US, non-English speaking customers because we’ve worked very hard to support right-to-left languages such as Hebrew, and “Unicode” languages such as Japanese and Chinese. The data provider we’ve chosen is one of the few who is able to provide the full range of Language / Country combinations.
    
6. Rank Tracker manages the issues of Google “localization” and “personalization” - Google often serves up different ranking pages based on where you’re situated. Google also personalizes your search results based on the sites that you frequently visit. This “localization” and “personalization” behaviour can make it very challenging to get an objective set of general search results as a benchmark for your SEO activities.
    
   As a result, you often see very different results searching Google from your own web-browser than what a rank tracking service reports. The ranking data provider we’ve chosen does an excellent job of removing such biases from the results.
    

Summary

Phew! That’s a lot of information to digest! Here’s a quick recap if you’re short of time:

1. If you’re an existing Market Samurai (or Article Samurai) customer you’ll get access to a FREE 50 keyword Rank Tracker plan – which our usage data shows will be suitable for over 92% of our customers.
    
2. If you’re part of the handful of customers who need to track more than 50 keywords you’ll be able to get access to special plans which are less than a quarter of the price of most of our competition.
    
3. We’re working really hard to get the new Rank Tracking service out to you as quickly as possible. We hope to have a version to Beta test in the next two to three weeks. We’ll send an email with the details of how to sign up to the Beta when it’s ready.
    

A big thanks once again to the incredible support and encouragement we’ve been receiving from our customers!

If you have any questions which aren’t directly answered in this post, please feel free ask them in the comments below.

Hi All,

A quick update on our progress in restoring Market Samurai functionality and some answers to common questions.

First up, a big thank you to all of you who’ve posted, emailed and tweeted various encouraging words (our users are awesome!). As mentioned in our previous post, we’re genuinely sorry for the outage.

The good news is that thanks to a big weekend and some late nights by our development team, we’re mostly up and running again. Here’s a breakdown…

What’s working?

The good news is that with the exception of large scale rank checking, Market Samurai functionality is now restored. Here’s a breakdown of the status by module.

Keyword Research – Fully Operational
Please note, we continue to use Google for keyword generation, traffic and CPC estimates.

We have introduced Bing for some competition estimates (see below for why Bing data works here).

SEO Competition – Fully Operational
Please note, the SEO Matrix continues to show the top 10 results from Google

Viewing (and sharing) a competition matrix has been restored and works as it previously did (including showing Google PageRank for the top 10 competing web pages).

As some users will be aware, when looking at a particular URL, the SEO Competition module allows you to explore and see the anchor text and authority of each of the top 1000 back links for that URL. This is a great way to explore competitor back links and see linking opportunities.

We’ve temporarily substituted Google’s PageRank in this detailed analysis for ACRank (an alternative and less accurate authority). We’re talking to data providers about a more robust measure of authority (e.g. PageRank, MozRank or equivalent) and will revisit this in coming months.

Rank Tracker – Operational from the local machine
Please note, we continue to track rankings from Google

As a temporary measure, we’ve modified Rank Tracker to use your local machine to check rankings in Google. Rank checks for the other engines (Bing & Yahoo!) continue to run via our servers. Checking rankings via a locally installed application works for users monitoring a small number of keywords, but for larger volumes will generally result in your service from Google being temporarily degraded.

Obviously this isn’t ideal and so we’re working on a replacement rank tracking service and we expect this will take 2-3 weeks to implement.

To date we’ve collated our usage statistics, made contact with six potential data providers and drafted an updated user interface for developers to begin working on. You can read more about this below.

Domains – Fully Operational

Monetization – Fully Operational

Find Content – Fully Operational

Publish Content – Fully Operational

Promotion – Fully Operational

Common Questions

As you’d probably guess, our support staff have received a deluge of queries, and so I thought I might help to answer a few common questions:

Will Market Samurai become a monthly subscription product?

Or as one user put it – is this all just a ploy to move to a monthly payment scheme? The answer (to both questions…) is no.

With the exception of Rank Tracker (see below), Market Samurai will continue to be a one off cost. Users who’ve been with us from the beginning (over 3 and half years ago) have received approximately 450 free updates as we’ve kept up with all the various changes in the SEO landscape – and there will be many more to come!

As many have already realised, we believe offering a high value, one-off payment product is the best way to build a loyal user base.

With the demise of Yahoo Site Explorer (previously used to power back link and Anchor text analysis) we moved to a commercial arrangement with Majestic SEO (at a 5 figure monthly cost) and have absorbed the expense without passing a cent of this substantial cost on to our customers.

Will Rank Tracker have a monthly cost and what will it be?

Google’s recent changes mean that we can no longer viably pull rank data for our user base (over 400K users in total).

As mentioned in the previous post, initial estimates put the purchase cost of our daily data requirements at $40,000 per day, a cost that we’re unable to absorb. So our intention is to buy ranking data from a reliable wholesale supplier and make it available on a subscription basis through the application.

We don’t yet know what the cost for Rank Tracking will be and how the offer will be structured. All we can say is that regardless of the reason, we understand that taking one of our modules that was “free to use” and making it “pay to use” isn’t great news for our customers.

We can say with confidence that we’ll be in a position to offer a highly competitive price structure on our revised ranking service. This is possible because we’ll be buying the data in bulk and we understand offering a great deal will be an important way to keep faith with you, our users.

Obviously any such package will be optional and we understand if you’ve recently purchased Market Samurai for Rank Tracking and feel you didn’t get value from your purchase you’re entitled to a refund.

We also feel this move will give us the capacity to improve the functionality in key areas also.

Can I use Rank Tracker on my local network?

As indicated above, Rank Tracker has been temporarily updated to make use of your local computer and we’ll soon be offering a revised service that again pulls data from our servers. Checking a moderate to high volume of keywords from your local computer can result in a temporarily degraded Google service for all those on the same network as you. In corporate environment this should generally be avoided.

Where does Market Samurai now use Bing data?

Important – we continue to use Google for:

• Keyword generation
• Traffic estimation
• CPC estimation
• SEO competition is still based on Google search results
• Rank Tracking continues to track rankings in Google (as well as Yahoo & Bing)

However, we have moved three data points within our Keyword Research module to Bing (via their excellent API):
SEOC – the number of competing pages containing the target keyword phrase.
SEOTC – the number of competing pages with the target keyword phrase in the title tag.
SEOUC – the number of competing pages with the target keyword phrase in the page URL.

The great news is that many users rely on SEOTC as a competition metric and due to restrictions on query volume, we previously required users to click on each keyword to trigger the data collection. With Bing integration, we’re now able to revert to automatically pulling this data for all keywords making it much quicker and easier to filter out keywords with high SEOTC / SEOUC competition.

Is Bing a valid measure of competition? Aren’t I trying to rank in Google?

Important – we continue to use Google for:

• Keyword generation
• Traffic estimation
• CPC estimation
• SEO competition is still based on Google search results
• Rank Tracking continues to track rankings in Google (as well as Yahoo & Bing).

SEOC (and the related SEOTC and SEOUC metrics) all help answer the same basic question “how many pages in the world have my keywords in them?”. Or put another way, if a keyword has a low SEOC metric, it’s ’scarce’ or ‘less used’ online than keywords with a high SEOC value.

These measures serve as high level filters to help you weed out prospective keywords that will likely have strong competition. There is a reasonable correlation with low SEOC and low competition. We should note, we have seen many cases where keywords with high SEOC values could be ranked for easily and some with low SEOC values being impenetrable.

Ultimately, in SEO, you only have 10 competitors, and they are those sites taking the top 10 rankings that you must displace in order to pull traffic. SEOC (and related measures) should be used as a basic filter, but NEVER (let me repeat that; NEVER!) as the sole basis for selecting a keyword, particularly one of the primary keywords on your site. Once you’ve filtered out the likely high competition keywords, it’s by reviewing results from the SEO Competition module (which continues to be based on the front page of Google) that you can determine with reasonable certainty your capacity to gain a ranking.

The SEO Competition module allows you to see at a glance the key SEO metrics for each of your competitors ranking in the top 10 positions.

So is Bing OK for high level competition analysis?

Given that our approach to high level competition analysis comes down to ‘how many other web pages have my keyword in them?’, then Bing is a great data source.

Bing indexes the same data (e.g. web pages) as Google and despite being somewhat of a late comer to the search game, they now boast a massive dataset (and have captured a strong market share – approximately 30% in the US including their results via Yahoo!). Remember, this has nothing to do with search algorithms.

We’re not comparing the relative merits of Bing vs Google in returning good search results (although Bing has come of age in this space too). It’s about the size of each search engine’s index – and Bing’s index is now easily large enough to give good competition metrics.

Furthermore, whilst many SEO tools include an SEOC style measure at a broad match level (e.g. your target keyword can be broken up as separate words mixed anywhere in a page), Market Samurai pulls SEOC data on a phrase match basis. This means that with Market Samurai you’re seeing how many target pages contain your keyword as a complete and intact phrase. Whilst SEOC will only ever be still a high level filter, the use of phrase match data is generally more accurate.

Why are other SEO products not affected?

Over the past three and a half years we have become very familiar with Google’s tolerances for high query volumes. Late last week and over the weekend we observed three specific and quite radical changes in this tolerance which we were unable to resolve despite the deployment of additional resources.

As one of the largest players in the market, it’s difficult to determine if Market Samurai was specifically targeted or if Google implemented new policies and we were simply active enough to trigger limits. This is quite possible as were previously one of the only tools to offer real time rank analysis on an unlimited volume of keywords. How other tools will fare, only time will tell. The good news is, we’ve been able to respond and resolve most issues.

Will Market Samurai be offline for six months?

There have been estimates from external parties in the SEO space that the issues at hand will take us six months to resolve. It’s now 5 days since we observed the change in Google’s tolerance for large volumes of queries and we again have 100% of our modules fully operational.

We anticipate a solution to large scale Rank Tracking within 2-3 weeks.

We’ve got 400,000 users, why can’t we just absorb the cost?

As you can probably understand, there are limits to what we can afford when selling a one-time payment software package which requires ongoing staff, infrastructure and data services to maintain and deliver the software.

We have a little over 50,000 paid users, with the remainder using the free edition. Whilst we are fortunate to have a profitable business and cash reserves, the cost to purchase data we previously pulled directly is beyond our means. The only silver lining is that with the user base we enjoy, we expect to be able to negotiate and in return offer ranking data on a very competitive basis.

Thank you again for your support!! (seriously!)

Finally, we would like to apologise again for the inconvenience caused by our down time. All our staff have worked some very long hours to make the required updates and I’d personally like to say a heart felt thank you for all the positive comments, emails & tweets we’ve seen come our way.

We’re as committed as ever to making Market Samurai the best Internet Marketing investment you can make.

Eugene

If you’ve tried to launch and use Market Samurai in the last few days you’ll have noticed that there are large areas of functionality that are broken.

What Happened?

As you know, Market Samurai pulls data from dozens of different search data providers so that you have all the data you need in a single place to make the most informed decisions about your online marketing opportunities.

In order to obtain this data we often need to perform large numbers of queries and searches through free services such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing on behalf of our users.

For example, tracking the rankings for even a few keywords can require thousands of searches. By performing these queries on your behalf, using our servers, we saved you hours, days or sometimes even weeks of time compared with doing these queries by hand.

Several days ago, Google made some significant technical changes to its services that make it impossible to reliably perform large volumes of free queries.

As large portions of Market Samurai currently use Google’s service, this has temporarily broken a range of functionality in Market Samurai (and related products, including modules from Domain Samurai and Article Samurai – although the core syndication functionality in Article Samurai is unaffected).

It’s also worth noting that most other SEO software has been affected in some way by these changes. Edit: we had received reports that other software was affected.We have since discovered that this is incorrect and other SEO packages are not being impacted by this change.

What We’re Doing About It…

We’re working tirelessly around the clock to restore the vast majority of this functionality, and we estimate that most of the application will be functional within the next few days.

As there is such a large amount of functionality that is currently built upon Google’s services, we’re prioritizing the high usage modules such as Keyword Research and SEO Competition, and then moving on to the other modules.

What Are We Going to Use In Place of Google?

It’s important to note that much of the data that we supply in Market Samurai could have easily been provided from other search engines. (eg. locating articles about “dog training” in our Find Content module).

In these simple cases we’re going to just replace Google with Bing.

As you know, Bing has made some big improvements in recent years and there are many who are saying that Bing’s algorithm produces more relevant results than Google for many keywords.

As an SEO marketer, it is important to understand that Bing’s index is rapidly approaching the size of Google’s, and as they also power Yahoo!, they have rapidly grown to capture over 30% of the search queries in the US.

But why is this important?

The increased use of Bing as a search engine is important because competition metrics, such as SEOC (“SEO Competition”) and SEOTC (“SEO Title Competition”), measure the scarcity of keywords on the Internet. The idea behind keyword scarcity is that keywords that have a high scarcity are likely to be more useful keywords for your marketing campaign. A good candidate for a more detailed competition analysis, by using our SEO Competition module matrix, would be a keyword where there aren’t many pages on the Internet containing that keyword in the title or body of a page – i.e., keyword with a low SEOC/SEOTC value.

These high-level competition “scarcity” numbers can also come from another search engine, as long as the index is of a comparative size to Google. We believe this is the case with Bing.

It’s important to note that making a keyword decision based solely on a scarcity metric such as SEOC or SEOTC will provide poor results. It’s not a substitute for doing a detailed analysis by using the SEO Competition matrix and a backlink analysis.

The scarcity metrics help us quickly filter out keywords that are highly likely to be TOO hard to rank for (because they have a lot of relevant content out there competing for rankings). They DON’T tell you that a keyword will be easy to rank for. (i.e. use these numbers only to disqualify tough keywords)

Until this change is implemented, we’ve unfortunately had to introduce a manual check for SEOC values, similar to that for the SEOTC/SEOUC values. We understand that this is frustrating and time-consuming, but it was the only way we could keep this data available.

Changes to Rank Tracker

The module most affected by these Google changes will be the Rank Tracker module.

The Bad News…

With over 400,000 users now, tracking the ranks of your keywords on your behalf results in literally millions of Google searches every day. Google’s changes mean that it will be simply impossible for us to continue doing this on your behalf.

Unlike Bing and Yahoo!, Google has no API (commercial or otherwise) which is suitable for tracking rankings. The APIs that do exist for Google often produce results that are significantly different from actual rankings, making them useless for SEO purposes.

There are third-party companies that do have accurate APIs to Google, and we are currently in negotiations to get access to their data.

The particular company that we are talking to provides the ranking data to major SEO tools such as the excellent Raven Tools product, for example.

However, this data is expensive (Raven Tool’s cheapest plan costs $99 a month to track 1,000 keywords), and the underlying cost of ranking data is a large part of the reason for this price.

We’ve evaluated many options and it seems, at this stage, that the only way for us to offer Google Rank Tracker functionality to our users is to buy this data.

However, with a fixed-price product and so many users, it’s simply an economic impossibility to provide the same rank tracking functionality on an ongoing basis. In fact, it would cost us over $40,000 a day to purchase this data!

So, we’re left with the difficult decision of having to pass this costs on to our users in some fashion (most likely a monthly paid service).

Please know, if you’re an existing Market Samurai buyer we’ll try to keep this cost as low as possible.  Potentially we will even try to offer a free level of service for a small number of keywords.

Unfortunately, this change will take a while to implement, at least several weeks. So until that time you may need to check your rankings manually, or perhaps try the 30 day trial at Raven Tools until we can get the new version of Rank Tracker out the door.

We’ll be releasing an updated version of the existing Rank Tracker module shortly, that will enable you to check a very small number of keyword rankings in Google (up to 10), by using your own connection rather than our servers to perform the searches. This is a temporary workaround until we can put a more permanent solution in place.

The Good News…

However, the news is not all bad. Rank Tracker has always been a very slow module to use due to the higher numbers of searches it requires.

The new Rank Tranker module built on the paid API will enable us to check your rankings in the background from our servers each week, so that when you open Market Samurai, you’ll instantly be able to see your rankings report—instead of waiting upwards of 10–30 minutes to check all your keyword rankings.

What To Do Next

We know the implications of these recent Google changes are very disappointing and will cause some anger amongst our users.

We understand this, and while we these changes are beyond our control, I want to apologize on behalf of the whole Noble Samurai team. We’re very grateful for the support of our customers over the years – you’re the reason we can do what we do!  We deeply appreciate your patience through this difficult time.

Our current estimate is that we’ll have the vast majority of Market Samurai’s functionality working again within the next few days. The revised Rank Tracker module may take us several weeks to fully implement, though you can still check small numbers of keywords manually in Rank Tracker, as well as checking Bing and Yahoo! as normal.

Please be assured that as a small software development team, we understand that delivering great value is what keeps us alive and what built this business in the first place. When the dust has settled, we’re determined to do whatever it takes to ensure the investment you made to own Market Samurai is the best Internet Marketing investment you’ve made.

However, if at any time you don’t think Market Samurai is worth your initial investment please contact our help desk for a partial or full refund—just be aware that our help desk has a high volume of tickets at the moment, so it may take a little longer than usual to get to your requests.

Once again, I’m very sorry for the inconvenience that this has caused our customers.

We’re working around the clock to get this fixed.

Please leave any questions, concerns or encouragement (we could use a little bit right about now!) in the comments below.

Yours sincerely,

Eugene Ware
CEO
Noble Samurai

So you’ve found a great keyword – It’s got good traffic levels, high commercial value and it’s extremely relevant to the product or service that you have for sale.

Sounds like a winner right?

Well – maybe…

You see the biggest mistake that new online business owners make is that they select keywords that are just too difficult to rank for!

It’s the SEO equivalent of a tiny 80-pound weakling going up against Mike Tyson – They just don’t have a chance!

What’s worse is that many new website owners THINK they can win if they just work hard enough, so they put in weeks and weeks of manual work but still get NOTHING.

Others try to win the SEO battle by employing outsourcers to build links for them, but after spending thousands of dollars, they often realize that they’ve been trying to win an impossible battle and that all the money they’ve spent has been completely wasted.

To make sure YOU don’t fall into these common traps, you need to learn how to assess the true competition in your niche.

Now what if there was a step-by-step BLUE PRINT that told you not only how strong your competition is, but also exactly what you need to do to outrank them?

Your SEO Blue Print

The good news is that this BLUE PRINT does exist and everything you need is already built into Market Samurai’s SEO Competition Module.

BUT only a small handful of SEOs actually know about it.

In fact, it’s probably fair to say that this is the Best Kept Secret in Market Samurai.

AND what’s really cool is that this powerful feature just got a HUGE boost in performance, which means you can now systematically demolish your competition faster than ever before!

Here’s How It Works

We’ve just struck a deal with Majestic SEO, the owners of the world’s largest and most frequently updated back link database.

This means that we can now analyze the back links to your site AND your competitor’s sites faster than ever before.

Literally, what used to take 10 minutes, now takes SECONDS!

To show you how this powerful feature works and to walk you through your SEO BLUE PRINT, we’ve put together a video that reveals how you can apply this in your business RIGHT NOW.

Enjoy!

In our last video, Dave Jenyns shared his “George Foreman Method” which is a proven 7 step process for building a team of ‘A Players’ that can help you to take your business to the next level.

In the second video of this Outsourcing Series, Pete Williams is going to spill the beans on his incredible ‘Content Leverage System’.

This is the first time that this content has been publicly available. The last time Pete presented this material was at an exclusive closed-door seminar held by Ed Dale. When Pete finished his presentation he received the ONLY standing ovation of the entire seminar.

So today, you’re in for a real treat.

In This Video

• How to become a market leader in your niche in just 30 minutes a day.
• How to systemize content creation to produce high quality videos, audio and reports – all on auto-pilot.
• Why you should only work on the core elements of your content creation, and outsource the ‘mechanics’
• How to ethically hijack traffic from some of the most popular web properties like: YouTube, iTunes and top article directories.
• The 11 step process that quickly and easily creates thousands of high quality, backlinks to your site.
• Plus much, much more!

mp3 | pdf

We hope you enjoyed this series. If you need more help with Outsourcing, click here to see how Dave and Pete can help.

Following on from the great feedback we received from our recent Conversion series, today we want to kick off a new series targeted at another area in which a lot of online business owners have MAJOR problems, which is ‘Outsourcing’.

You’ve probably already realized that with keyword research, content creation, article distribution, social media and all of the other aspects of building an online business, it’s virtually impossible to do all the work yourself.

Now, more than ever, online marketing is a “Team Sport”.

The reality is, if you have a great team, you can get more done with less work, and achieve far greater results. In fact, I don’t know anyone who is really kicking goals online who doesn’t have a strong team behind them.

The Secret Of Noble Samurai’s Success

Here at Noble Samurai we have built a pretty amazing team and this has been one of the real secrets of our success – We know the power that comes from having a passionate and capable team.

So how can you start building your own team?

One popular option is Outsourcing, which involves hiring individuals to complete specific tasks, or bringing ‘virtual team members’ onboard to become part of your online business.

The Double Edged Sword

However, Outsourcing is a Double Edged Sword.

If you do it right, it can be the best thing that happens to your business, BUT if you get it wrong, it can also be a disaster – wasting loads of valuable time and money.

To help you discover the ‘right way’ to approach Outsourcing, we’ve asked two of our good friends Dave Jenyns and Pete WIlliams to share some of their most valuable Outsourcing strategies with you.

These guys are the real deal. They live and breathe this stuff, and the information they are going to share with you in this series is Pure Gold.

In This Video

In the first video of this Outsourcing series, Dave Jenyns shows you how to build a team of ‘A Players’ using the “George Foreman Method”. This is the exact method he uses to attract, filter, pick and train team members for his online business.

You’ll discover how you can model this same process to build a high impact team at a fraction of what you might expect to pay.

In this video you’ll discover:

• Why being the bottleneck in your business will cripple your results, and lead to failure;
• The simple 7-step “George Foreman” process that makes top candidates “float to the top of the pile”;
• How to make your business stand out from the rest, and attract top “A-players”;
• The websites to use to consistently find the best staff;
• One simple question you can ask an “A-player” that no B or C-Players want to answer;
• A real-life case study example of how Dave found a recent team member;
• Why Richard Branson avoids the cliche “customers are #1″ and what his alternative is;
• And much, much more.

And remember to leave your comments and feedback below. We’d love to hear what you think of this video!

As we end our series on conversion, I want to reinforce that a low conversion rate will cripple everything else you do online. You can’t afford to bid in PPC, your efforts in SEO will yield small results and affiliates won’t promote you.

In today’s increasingly competitive online space you need to focus attention on boosting your conversion rate.

The good news is, there are systematic processes for boosting your conversion. Today, we’ll take some of these processes and look at two case studies looking at sites submitted by Market Samurai users.

A quick recap on our conversion maximisation series

Hopefully you got some good ideas from our four part series on conversion. If you missed some of it, here’s a summary:

Part 1 – Why testing is critical to maximising your income online, the benefits you’ll get by becoming an active tester and our free conversion checklist for maximising the profit from your website.
Part 2 – How and where to test as well as the “Big” reason why folks don’t test.
Part 3 – Seven techniques you can apply immediately to boost sales and conversions.
Part 4 – Overcoming logistical problems & how to be your own highly paid conversion consultant.

Don’t forget our free conversion checklist.

So back to the case studies…

An Expert Blogger Without an Income stream – Case Study #1

Market: Teaching children with learning disabilities

Site: TeachingTheFuture.net

Our first case study was submitted by Rachel, an expert in teaching children with learning disabilities. Clearly passionate about her topic, the content quality on her site is first class. However, the site has a weak call to action and isn’t yet being monetized at all, so we take a look at:

• Beefing up your call to action response rates – we look at how Rachel can raise opt-in rates, and get more leverage from the brilliant free report she offers. We suggest she’ll do this by changing visual layouts, ‘benfitizing’ the call to action (hmm – that’s not a real word…) and ‘objectifying’ it, e.g. making it appear tangible.We also make reference to a great post by James Dyson showing some brilliant opt-in layouts).
• Orientating visitors to reduce bounce rates – this is a content rich site, written by a passionate author, but it fails to quickly orientate and connect with its target audience. The outcome is we expect Rachel’s site will likely suffer from a high bounce rate.We discuss some simple structural changes that she could use to address this.
• Quick and easy ways to boost reader engagement by making her content “Sell” – Eugene insightfully walks through two simple techniques that Rachel can use to better engage visitors.
  • Firstly, he tells us how rearrange headlines and and bullet points by moving away from ‘feature’ lists and instead ‘leading with benefits’. The trick is that we can greatly increase the impact of our copy when we engage the right hand side of the brain first with a juicy benefit and then justify it (for the left side of our brain) with a solid feature to back it up.
  • Secondly, he looks at the way users often skim read rather than read in full, and how to arrange our content to maximise response from visitors who do this.
• Techniques for testing profitability before creating your product – Rachel is an active and expert blogger, but yet to publish her own paid information product, Eugene gives a number of techniques she can use to test the commercial viability of her market (and likely make a few dollars) before she writes her own product.

So check out the review with this video:

An SEO Consultant “Doing Most Things Right” but Crippled by a “Message to Market” Mismatch – Case Study #2

Market: SEO Consulting

Site review done on salesmaximus.com
(Adarsh, the owner has now moved his site to ConversionChamp.com)

Our second case study was submitted by a Adarsh, an SEO consultant. Adarsh gives us a great opportunity to work down our conversion checklist [link2] as his site contains a commercial call to action (he’s giving out free SEO consultations as a lead generation activity).

At first glance, Ardash’s site seems to tick all the boxes. It’s got a clear call to action and some solid design elements. However, if we are correct, and Ardash’s major income stream is through SEO consulting and SEO services, then a number of key issues exist:

• Boosting response by matching your message to your market – Adarsh gives away a guide to ‘starting your online business’. Typically this kind of offer might appeal to non-business owners looking to start an online business out of hours.However, as an SEO consultant, it’s been my experience that the money is in targeting people who already run successful businesses (either offline or with a hybrid online / offline model).So the free offer may be poorly matched to the target market, and an offer around boosting business through SEO might make more sense.
• Stand out in a tough market with strong niche focus – Selling SEO services online is a very competitive space. Your offer must stand out to cut through the clutter and so we look at ways Adarsh could specialise or select a niche market to improve his offer.
• Increase conversion by testing soft vs hard offers – He can try offering a free report, a non-threatening ‘soft’ offer which is great for building lists; or doing ‘two step’ marketing where you ask for money later. But if we’re correct then Adarsh will make money when prospects book in a free consultation (what I call a ‘hard’ offer, because folks know they’ll get a phone call). If so, then Ardash may want to look at more aggressively selling the free consults both by increasing the profile of the free consult offer (it’s currently buried and obscure) and by highlighting the benefits (tell people what they’ll learn).
• Boost sales by creating service widgets – Clearly Adarsh offers a range of SEO services, but these would be overwhelming to most prospects. By grouping the service offerings into bundles Ardash could remove confusion and boost sales.
  Finally, I should say, Adarsh is very clever. He’s an SEO consultant and managed to get himself a site review on this website – a high traffic site with lots of visitors looking for help with SEO! Hope you win a few jobs Adarsh

  So check out the review by video:

  Would you like to see more site reviews?

  Do you like the site review format? Is this something you’d like us to do more of? I’m thinking of occasionally taking users’ websites (with their permission of course) and reviewing the SEO and link building that’s being applied and pointing out growth opportunities. Is this something you’d find interesting?

  Are there other topics you’d like us to focus on? We’d love your suggestions in the comments below.

  All the best with boosting your website conversion!

  Cheers,

  Ben (& Euge!)

Most folks know that inbound links to your website (when combined with on-site optimisation) are the key drivers of ranking, especially for high value keywords. Most of us also know that not all links are equal and that links from high authority sites carry a lot more power (or ‘juice’ as we like to call it).

What you may not be aware of is that along with the number and quality of links, there’s a third criteria you should also consider; and thanks to our awesome data partners at Majestic SEO, we’re proud to announce the addition of the “Referring Domains” data within Market Samurai’s SEO Competition module.

What are Referring Domains?

It’s pretty simple actually. Each different website that links to a website as a whole, or a specific page on your site is considered a different referring domain.

So if you have 100 links pointing to a page and 90 come from one website and 10 from a second, you’ll have a referring domain count of two (because only two different websites link to a given page on your website).

You’d expect to get a low referring domain count when you’ve focused your link building efforts on a single source website.

Why should I care about how many referring domains a page has?

It’s clear that the number of different referring domains pointing to your site is an important ranking factor for Google. In fact, Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz fame writes: “In our analysis of correlation data, no single metric has a more positive a correlation with high rankings than the number of linking root domains.”

Note: This citation from Rand is now almost two years old and if you read his later posts, he now also places significant emphasis on links from social media (a finding we can verify from our link building campaigns).

I think it’s easy enough to imagine why search engines would use the number of unique referring domains as a ranking factor. It’s not to hard to manipulate one or a few sites and gain a high volume of links, but it’s tougher to gain links from a variety of sources (especially respected ones).

It seems to me that engines like Google are looking for sites that are gaining link popularity in way that looks ‘natural’ and referrals from a variety of sites is an indicator of this.

Can I measure the Referring Domain count for specific Pages and Domains?

Market Samurai now offers two ways to measure a referring domain count:
1. Referring Domains to Page (RDP) – a count of the number of referring domains to a specific page.
2. Referring Domains to Domain (RDD) – a count of the number of referring domains to the domain as a whole.

I did a quick survey of 10 random keyword phrases based on the objects in my office (for the curious, I used Dog Training, Curtain Tassels, Flat Screen Monitor Reviews, Winnie the Pooh, Brother Printer, Lifespan of Tyrannosaurus Rex, Apple Power Adaptor, Burgundy Women’s Purse, Boot Cut Levi Jeans and Vanilla Ice Cream – and yes, the stuff around here is quite random!).

Interestingly, I observed that the RDP count (Referring Domains to the Page) fluctuated wildly. In fact RDP was often zero and generally showed little correlation to ranking.

RDD (Referring Domains to the Domain) however, was a far better indicator. Whilst it wasn’t the case that the search result with the highest RDD always had the highest ranking (on page optimisation is still critical), it was the case that even for the more obscure phrases, that in almost every case, the minimum RDD count to get on the front page was in the thousands.

It would appear from this sample set of phrases that you simply must have a spread of links from a number of different domains to be ‘in the game’ on medium to high competition phrases. The only exception to this rule was the ‘special case’ search result listings like Google images, maps etc.

Where can I see the Referring Domain counts in Market Samurai?

To see the referring domain count for a given page, simply go to the SEO Competition tab and tick the checkbox to enable “Referring Domains – Domains (RDD)” and “Referring Domains – Page (RDP)”. Here’s an example:

For the super curious, it’s also worth getting a Majestic SEO account (a free account will do fine). You can then click on the little arrow next to the referring domain count on the SEO Competition tab. Majestic will then show a page showing how the referring domain count has grown over time (which is both cool that they know that info and I’d suggest also a gradual growth in links is also an indication of “natural” link growth).

How does this help? What should I do if I’m struggling to rank for a target keyword?

Before you worry about having a low referring domain count, my advice is get back to basics. Firstly, I check that your “on site” structure is right, for example, confirm that the keyword you wish to rank for is in the title tag on the page you wish to rank . Also check that the page has plenty of links pointing to it from other pages on your site. Finally, ensure that these links within your site include the target keyword in the anchor text.

Beyond the basics, you’ll basically need more links. If your domain as a whole has a low referring domain count, then I’d go for a general mix of links to both your domain and your target page from a variety of sources. If your domain already has a wide range of referring domains already, then I’d run a more focused link building program to the page you’re working on specifically.

How can I get links from a broad range of sources?

Building links is a topic I could (and probably should) devote a lengthy series of separate blog posts to, because there are an almost limitless array of ways you can build links.

Here’s a short (and very incomplete) list of the link building approaches I like at the moment:

1. Article Syndication – Syndicating articles to build links is still very much a staple for SEO’ers around the world. There are ways to leverage your efforts here to increase the ‘spread’ of the articles you write that can significantly increase the value from a single article and we’ll likely have more to say on this over coming months.

2. Get Social – taking the content you’re writing and pushing it out through social channels will get you links. You can both simply republish or promote content on your social media profiles and you can intentionally invite people to push the ‘like’ button etc. In recent blog posts where I ‘asked’ people to press the Facebook like button I got 10x the number of “likes” as when I didn’t.

The direct links you’ll create via Social Media will likely be ‘no-follow’ (and so not worth much) but it seems your presence on these properties is being watched by Google anyway. Plus, the flow on effect of being profiled in Social Media will gain you links both from relationships you’ll create and even from the scrapers that take this stuff and republish it.

3. RSS Feed Submission – This is a little techy, but it’s a lovely ‘do once, get benefits for life’ type deal. Here are the steps involved:

a. Create an RSS feed of your content in an Abstract form (e.g. publish only part of each content item or article). Be sure to include a link back to the full article in your feed.

c. These RSS feed directories will then republish your content and include your link back to the original source. So every time you publish content you get an instant backlink.

Again, this is a little techy, so perhaps worthy of a full post on it’s own, but I’ve found this approach particularly helpful for large sites with lots of pages that aren’t being fully indexed by search engines. Remember, if a page isn’t indexed, it won’t drive any organic search traffic.

4. Forums – Find a handful of the big, high profile forums in your industry and get involved. Make sure you fill out your forum profile completely and put a link your signature file. Then, participate in the forum. Don’t spam the other members, but instead, help them out.

If you stick around for a while (or even better do some research at sites like Yahoo Answers), you’ll find that the same topics and questions get raised over and over again.

A great tactic is to prepare a list of common questions with answers and then watch the forums to see when these common questions get asked (an RSS feed is often available on forums which makes it easy to watch new posts being entered).

You can then swoop in each time there’s a question you can answer. Note, it’s best to put each response in slightly different words to avoid annoying users of the forum. It’s also OK, to say “here’s a short answer, I’ve written a longer post on my blog about it….” and then link back to your blog.

5. Being good at what you do – OK, so this isn’t really a link building strategy as much as a ‘how do to life’ strategy. In general, if you do good work, people will link to you. Particularly if you do good work and get in the habit of asking those you work with to give you link you’ll get some.

We aim to sell a good product and MarketSamurai.com has attracted over 2.3 million links without any formal ‘link building’.

6. Publishing content on your site – Again, not a traditional link building suggestion, but internal links are valuable. It’s simple maths that a site with 1000 pages has more internal link ‘juice’ to share than the site with 20 pages (you’ll also pick up a stack of long tail traffic by publishing lots of content).

Building more content on your site is a killer traffic strategy.

In addition to the above there are many other link strategies you can follow including Social Bookmarking (great for helping pages get indexed), directory submissions, begging (e.g. ask those you do business with to link to you), competitive research, where you use tools like Market Samurai’s link profile report to see what links your competitors have and see if the link source will link to you and much more.

So take a look now in Market Samurai and see what kind of referring domain profile you have.

Cheers

Ben

P.S. Like the post? I’d love you to share the love with a Facebook ‘like’ below.

P.P.S. For everyone following the Conversion series blog posts, don’t worry, we haven’t forgotten! The final post in the series will be out soon!

Get Your Free Checklist, plus, take our “30 Minute Site Review Challenge” and win one of three website critiques by a Samurai staffer.

Today we ‘bring it home’ on this whole topic of conversion. By now, I hope you’re totally convinced that testing is the easy path to increased profit, a better lifestyle and a real competitive advantage.

In our final video, we’ll cover the logistical problems that can come up when testing and how to tackle these, and then we’ll walk through the very same conversion checklist I use.

Click here to download Ben’s personal Website Conversion Checklist.

Serious about Increasing Your Website’s Sales?

Take the Samurai “30 Minute Site Make Over Challenge”
And win one of three free website conversion critiques

OK, so you’ve got to here, you’re obviously getting serious about conversion. (Well done! This stuff is ‘live in a nicer house’ kind of powerful).

So, we have a challenge for you. I’ve thrown in a few prizes to make it interesting, but really, the benefit you want (and can expect) is a long term increase in your sales.

Early in my career I saw this process directly add over 100K to a client’s website. I’ve also watched a very ‘average’ Internet Marketing consultant consistently charge $500+ / hour to undertake this exact process (and you can do right now for free!).

Here’s the challenge:

“30 Minute Site Makeover Challenge”

Step 1 – Remove distractions – Shut down the software that will distract you e.g. email, Twitter, Skype, and turn off your phone … (yes, the world keeps spinning if you don’t answer your phone for half an hour). If you’re a coffee drinker, go get yourself a cup (let’s enjoy this, hey?).

Step 2 – Print off and review the checklist – Print off a copy of our conversion checklist and sit it by you for reference. Take 2 minutes to skim through it from top to bottom to refresh.

Step 3 – Pick a website you want to improve – Pick your most profitable or your highest traffic website (the one where an improvement in conversion will yield the most benefit). If you’re just learning Internet Marketing and don’t own a website yet, you can still do this exercise on a competitor’s website or for a friend just to see how powerful this exercise is.

Step 4 – Pick a “starting point” – I almost left this step out, because I don’t want you to get stuck here (so don’t!).

Do you know “off the top of your head”, the most common way new prospects find you? If you do, we’re going to use this as your starting point (if not, your starting point is your home page).

You might be getting lot of organic search engine traffic, so your starting point would be the results of a Google search for your most popular search term (often your brand name). It could be an offline advert. Whatever it is, make note of this as your starting point.

If you don’t already know how customers commonly find you, don’t get distracted and try to find out, we’ll just use your website’s home page as your starting point.

Step 5 – Print off a copy of each of the pages a prospect will visit from the starting point through to finishing the ‘goal’ you want your prospect to complete (e.g. buying from you or submitting their details as a new lead). Printing off pages might sound like a bit of a time waster, but you’ll see in a moment why it’s super important.

The series of pages a prospect follows to engage with you, or buy, will vary greatly from site to site, but a common path might include:
A search result or PPC advert (be sure to print this page off too, it’s an important part of the process).
A landing page or your home page
A product details page
A single order page or a few pages in a shopping cart checkout
A thank-you page.

Now, for those generating leads rather than sales online, the path will probably be quite short but that’s fine.

Step 6 – Think about your prospect – Take five minutes to get a mental picture of a prospective customer. Ask yourself questions like:
a) What does a normal, average prospect look like? How old are they, are they male or female, what sort of income do they have etc?
b) Now think about what is their life like, how busy are they, what are their main concerns in life? What are they worried about?
c) How familiar with technology are they?
d) What are the ultimate benefits they want from the product we sell?
e) Why might they be skeptical about buying from us?

Take a moment and note down any key points or observations you make. I even like to mentally give this prospective person a name.

Step 7 – Critique your own site – Now you’re ready to be your own ‘highly paid marketing consultant’. You’re going to slowly walk through your website with fresh eyes. On one side of your desk place the printed checklist and on the other, a pile with a printed copy of each page a prospect follows from discovering your site to buying (or completing whatever the goal of your site is).

You need to intentionally forget all the ‘history’ about your site (like how the developer was a pain to work with or that time, your sister said she didn’t like the colors etc) and pretend to be your best prospective customer discovering the site for the first time.

Beginning at your ‘starting point’ (see above), carefully follow the process of moving from ‘discovering’ your website through to purchasing. Take at least 15 minutes to do this – it can be the most profitable 15 minutes you’ll have this year.

For each step in the process, glance over the checklist. Using a pen, make big, obvious notes on the printed copy of your website whenever you see a ‘conversion’ problem.

Maybe your main call to action is buried and less prominent than the affiliate offer you’re promoting. Maybe upon reflection, your claims are all generic and lack specificity, maybe there’s little urgency when you could easily create some, maybe the site is simply difficult to actually use and you’re annoying prospects (a sure path to the poorhouse).

Remember – you’re not thinking like a website owner, you’re playing the role of the casual website visitor, just noting down issues as you go through.

Step 8 – Prioritize your list – Make a list of all the conversion improvement ideas you’ve identified. Order this list in terms of the improvements you think will be most beneficial. Remember, improving the earlier parts of your sales process will generally yield the best results as these often get the most exposure and test results will come in quickly.

Something I didn’t mention in the video is that sometimes you’ll encounter a problem that just needs to be fixed and it isn’t practical to test the ‘old’ version vs the ‘new one’. For example, it can be difficult to split test two radically different ordering procedures. So mark any such changes as “just fix” and organise to get that done.

For the rest of the conversion problems, you’ve now got a priority list of what to work on to boost your sales.

Well done! Make it a goal to systematically work through your list and watch your income rise!

Did you take the “30 Minute Site Make Over Challenge”?

Have you taken the time to do the above challenge? If so, we’d love to hear about it. Simply use the comments below to list the name of your site and the top three conversion improvements you’ve discovered.

In a week from today, we’ll post a list of the three winning contributions and in a follow-up post we’ll do a live critique video, showing what you’ve recommended and how else we think you could boost improvement.

Can’t wait to see what you folks come up with,

Ben

P.S. I’m hoping you don’t watch today’s video and think, “That was interesting”, or even worse “Yeah that’s good, I should work on my conversion some day”.

I’m hoping you’ll think “Damn it, I could have been making a stack more money!” and take the time to get to work and test your sales funnel.