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With such a huge range of WordPress plugins to help build your mailing list, you might wonder what Hybrid Connect has to offer that makes it different to all the other similar plugins.

Over the last few years I’ve used a number of popular plugins to handle email opt-in forms, popups, popunders etc, but I’ve settled on using Hybrid Connect for all my sites.

You’ve probably already noticed that I use Hybrid Connect forms in various locations and designs on this website.

To find out how I came to the decision to use  Hybrid Connect exclusively on all my sites (and for clients), read on…….

Hybrid Connect Summary

Official Website:   http://hybrid-connect.com

Publisher:  IM Impact – Shane Melaugh & Paul McCarthy

Price: $39 for Single Site, $57 for Multi Site and $127 for Professional License

Guarantee: 30 day money back guarantee

Video Review

For those of you that prefer the visual medium, the video below gives a good summary of using Hybrid Connect.

Hybrid Connect Features

I’m not going to bore you with all the features of Hybrid Connect, as it does a lot of the stuff most other similar plugins do.   Instead, I’m going to cover the features that I considered to be major factors in my decision to purchase Hybrid Connect.

Facebook Sign Up

Firstly, the main selling point of Hybrid Connect is its ability to show an opt-in form with either the traditional email address sign up, or Facebook connect, depending on whether the visitor is logged into Facebook or not.

Note that this hybrid feature is entirely optional.   On one of my client websites, I turned off the Facebook option as their target audience weren’t big Facebook users.

You have complete control over how you want Hybrid Connect to operate.

Form Designer and Customization

While my web design skills are OK, anything that makes the task easier is most welcome.

Hybrid Connect comes with a range of pre-designed templates that you can use as your starting point for building your forms.

The screenshot below shows a small selection of the various templates.

Once you have chosen your template, you can edit the text and images.

To get the form looking exactly how you want, there is an extensive list of customization options that you can tweak.   If I was being nitpicking, I’d say that the customization options might be a little overwhelming for some people and it would be nice to see a basic/advanced settings for customizing.

The screenshot below gives you an idea of the types of elements you can change.

It is important to note that while there are a large number of options to tweak, as you get a preview of the form that instantly updates whenever you change the settings, you can easily see what affect each option has.

Flexibility of Form Placement

I really like that you can display Hybrid Connect forms pretty much anywhere you like on your site, either via the built in settings, shortcodes, widgets  or the raw code you can insert anywhere on your theme.

Hybrid Connect allows you to create:

• Forms on any post/page
• Forms at the bottom of any post/page
• Widget to add forms to the sidebar
• Lightbox form
• Squeeze page
• Slider Forms

Hybrid Connect Support

Quite often, one major factor that is commonly overlooked when purchasing software is the level of support and upgrades you get.

Too many times I’ve purchased software from seemingly reliable sources, only to find that when it comes time to get a response to a support ticket, the reply is either not helpful or in a lot of instances, it is non-existent.

I’ve been using Hybrid Connect since it was initially released as a beta product.   As it was an early release, I did find some bugs and limitations with it, but I was highly impressed with the level of support I received and a number of suggestions I made to improve Hybrid Connect were incorporated into later releases.

Additionally, because  this product was created by Shane Melaugh, I have a very high level of confidence that the support and development of Hybrid Connect is solid.   I can base that opinion on Shane’s previous excellent track record with looking after his clients.

Summary

Given my very favourable impressions of Hybrid Connect so far, I have great confidence that you’ll find it one of the best list building plugins out there.

I encourage you to try it out for yourself.

[button size=”large”  link=”http://umstrategies.com/hybrid-connect” linkTarget=”_blank” color=”blue”]  Click here to visit the Hybrid Connect website [/button]

Cheers

Fiverr has been around for a while now and I’ve used it since it was launched, so I thought it would be a good time to revisit my experiences with Fiverr.

Firstly, my experiences on Fiverr are only as a buyer.  I have never listed a gig, but have occasionally thought about it but the actually commission you receive has put me off (although there are quite a few tricks you can you to increase your profits from Fiverr, which I might cover in another article).

The other things I should point out is all the Fiverr gigs I’ve tried are related to SEO and graphics, so I can’t comment on the quality of gigs in the other categories.

It’s a Jungle In There

With so many people offerings gigs on Fiverr, it really is like a jungle in there.  You never know if you are going to come across a beautiful butterfly or get bitten by a snake.

The Fiverr rating system can give you a general idea as to the  quality of the gig, but it’s not a completely reliable or foolproof system.   I’ve ordered some gigs that had rave reviews, but found the results were were mediocre.

As with a lot products or services, the best recommendations come from your friends as they are the people you trust the most.

Bad Fiverr Experiences

Luckily I’ve never had a completely negative experience with Fiverr.  Perhaps if I had ordered a greater variety of gigs, the odds of getting a really bad one would increase.

Of all the gigs I order, I’ve only had to get one refund due to the gig not being completed.   I have to say that I don’t find the refund process on Fiverr to be entirely obvious, but once you’ve worked out where to flag the information, it generally doesn’t take very long for a Fiverr staff member to review the details and issue a refund (if appropriate).

For me, the type of gigs I was most disappointed with the results (with the exception of one person) were the ones related to creating graphics, ie: banners, headers, logos etc.   I’m no graphic designer, but honestly, some of the work I received was very basic or just looked plain amateurish.   I know you can’t generally expect a highly professionally designed graphic for only $5, but I was expecting a little more.

In most cases, I ended up doing the graphics myself and personally thought I did a much better job.

The other types of gigs I usually avoid are anything to do with SEO.   You can do some real damage to your rankings with some of the backlinking gigs on offer.   Most of these use automated software to blast out spam comments or pretty much useless profile links.  I can understand why some of these gigs do well, as there are a lot of people who don’t know much about SEO that read the gig descriptions and get sucked in.

Good Fiverr Experiences

Like I already mentioned, Fiverr really is a jungle, but there are some great services on offer that are high quality and an absolute bargain.

In regards to graphics and logos, I’ve ordered three gigs from a user called creative1desing

The particular gig I ordered was:

Create 3 Different Logos For Your Website or Blog

You’ll probably see some negative comments as graphic design is a very subjective and personal opinion.   Obviously for $5 you can’t expect the world, but I was happy with each of the results.

The seller states that if you aren’t happy with any of the designs, they will redo them.   I got them to make some minor modifications to one set of graphics I ordered, which was done very promptly.

Now, I know I said there are a lot of SEO gigs on Fiverr that you should not touch.  I did try some recently and while I was initially impressed, I later worked out they were using greyhat methods.

In particular, there are a lot of Fiverr gigs that offer services that provide you with unique articles that are guaranteed to pass Copyscape, but in actual fact just steal unauthorized content from many sources and run it through some software to make it appear “unique”.

My next post will be covering this in more detail.

If you know of any other great Fiverr gigs you’ve come across or ones to definitely avoid, please leave a comment below.

Cheers

Yahoo Site Explorer (YSE) was finally closed in November 2011.

YSE was without a doubt, the most popular tool and source of information for seeing what backlinks a site has.   Many tools and plugins used YSE to get their backlink data, so they all have been affected as well and have had to move to a new backlinking data source.

So now Yahoo Site Explorer is dead, what are the alternatives?

In this article, I will be taking a look at four alternatives for YSE.

Note that the services some of the serviced I’ve reviewed have paid subscriptions, I am only looking at the features/reports that you get with their free offerings.

Backlink Reporting Sites Reviewed

The four sites I’m be taking a look at are:

1. Open Site Explorer – Operated by SEOMoz.
2. Majestic SEO Site Explorer – Operated by Majestic SEO
3. Ahrefs Site Explorer – Operated by Ahrefs
4. Blekko – Search engine with SEO reporting facilities

One thing to note is that all of the four sites will give you different data and different results.  Unfortunately when it comes to backlink data, there just isn’t any resource that can give you 100% accurate results.

Videos of Yahoo Site Explorer Alternatives

For those who prefer the visual medium, I’ve created the following two videos to give you an overview of what each of the sites offers in terms of backlinking data and other SEO data.

This video covers Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO Site Explorer and Blekko.

This video covers Ahrefs.

Open Site Explorer

Open Site Explorer (OSE) is operated by SEOMoz, who are a highly respected SEO organization.

OSE has free and Pro membership levels, with the paid membership getting you access to additional reports and services.

The reports you get in the free version of OSE include:

• Inbound Links
• Top Pages
• Linking Domains
• Anchor Text
• Ability to compare backlink metrics between up to 5 sites

The following OSE screenshot shows the default Inbound Links report.

 Open Site Explorer Summary

While there is some very useful data returned by OSE, probably the biggest issue is the freshness of the index.  Even though the index is large, it is only contains about 25% of all sites on the web.  That’s one of the reasons why the total number of backlinks reported is substantially fewer than what the other sites report.

Additionally, the data is only refreshed every 30 days or so, which means there is always a lag between new backlinks and when they are reported.

 Click here to try out Open Site Explorer

Majestic SEO Site Explorer

Majestic SEO currently would rank as the most popular Yahoo Site Explorer alternative.

Just about every piece of software like Traffic Travis, Market Samurai etc, all changed their backlinking data source from Yahoo to Majestic SEO.

Like OSE, Majestic SEO Site Explorer comes in free and paid subscription versions, where the paid subscription gets you access to more data.

Majestic Site Explorer reports include:

• Top Backlinks
• Referring Domains
• Top Pages
• Backlink History

Majestic SEO also have a few additional SEO tools that you can access.

The following Majestic Site Explorer screenshot shows the default summary returned for a site.

Majestic Site Explorer Summary

There’s a good reason why Majestic Site Explorer is popular, and that’s due to the size of the data and more importantly the freshness of the data.

Since March 2011, SEO Majestic update their index daily.  In the backlink history reports, you can use the “Fresh Index”, which shows you backlink data from the last 30 days, or you can use the “Historic Index” which shows you all available backlink data that Majestic SEO have for a particular site.

Click here to try out Majestic Site Explorer

Ahrefs Site Explorer

Ahrefs Site Explorer isn’t as well known as Open Site Explorer and Majestic Site Explorer, but it does have some very useful data that the other sites don’t.

Ahrefs is another free/paid subscription service.   If you don’t register, you are limited to 10 queries per day, if you register for a free account, you are limited to 20 queries per day.

Ahrefs Site Explorer reports include:

• Top Pages
• Backlinks
• Anchor Text
• Referring Domains
• Referring Subnets

There is also a SERPs Analysis function that is really handy as it will show you what keywords a site is ranking for and their position and movement in Google, Yahoo and Bing.

The following Ahrefs Site Explorer Screenshot shows you the default information returned.

Ahrefs Site Explorer Summary

Even though the free version of Ahrefs is more limited than the other sites, the information it returns is very useful.   In particular, the ability to see what keywords and what rankings a particular site has is great when you are doing competition analysis.

Click here to try out Ahrefs Site Explorer

Blekko

Blekko is different to the previous sites as it is primarily a search engine.   However, it is a very flexible search engine that gives you very useful SEO data.

Blekko uses special filters/modifers that they call slashtags.  One of these slash tags is /seo, so when you do a query like:

somedomain.com /seo

You will get all the SEO data for that particular domain.

Blekko SEO Reports include:

• Inbound links and their location
• Outbound links
• Internal Links
• Crawled pages and their rank
• Domains that contain duplicate content

The following Blekko screenshot shows the default SEO information returned.

Blekko Summary

Of all the newer search engines that have been created, I’ve found Blekko to be the most interesting and most useful.

While it’s backlink data isn’t as detailed as the other sites, it is free, fast and easy to use.

Click here to try out Blekko

Recommendations

A lot of the time, the type of information and style you like to see it in comes down to personal preference, so my main recommendation is to try out all four sites and see which you like best.

That said, my two favourite sites are:

1.  Majestic Site Explorer – This is mostly due to it having the most comprehensive and accurate backlink data of the four and the freshness of the index.

2. Ahrefs Site Explorer – I like to use this site to get SEO data that the other sites don’t provide, eg: keyword/ranking data.

If you know of any other similar sites (that are free to use), please leave a comment below.

Cheers

Given the huge popularity of the SEOPressor plugin, I thought I’d do a comparison with some recent competitors.

The basic premise of an on-page SEO plugin is that it gives you suggestions for improving on-page SEO and an overall score.

In theory, if the score that is reported by the on-page SEO plugin is high, then you should have a highly optimized page.

The six on-page SEO plugins I’m comparing are:

1.  SEOPressor – This is the most well known on-page SEO plugin.  It was developed by Daniel Tan and has been on the market for some time.

2.  BloggerHigh SEO – This is a free clone of the SEOPressor plugin.

3.  ClickBump SEO – This is a recent entrant into the on-page SEO plugin space.  It is developed by Scott Blanchard.

4. WP SEO Beast – This on-page SEO plugin arrived on the screen just after ClickBump SEO.   It is developed by Prashant Sharma.

5.  Easy WP SEO – This is the highly popular on-page SEO Plugin that is developed by Chris Landrum.

6. Measure My SEO – This is the newest on-page SEO Plugin on the market and is developed by Jason Fladlien and Wilson Mattos.

Demonstration of the On-Page SEO Plugins

The following video gives a brief overview of what each of the plugins do and how they compare to each other.

Please note that when I recorded the original video, WP SEO Beast wasn’t available, so the WP SEO Beast review is in the video below:

The video below shows a quick overview of the Easy WP SEO plugin

Note that in the Easy WP SEO video above, this was using Easy WP SEO version 1.5.  Since then Easy WP SEO v1.6 was released and has a number of major improvements, including:

• Copyscape checking
• Export/Import of Easy WP SEO settings
• Ability to check membership/protected pages
• Ability to check any URL on your site, eg: archives, categories etc
• Ability to fine tune what SEO checks are used in the ratings
• Better SEO report option.

Looking at the Plugins In More Detail

SEOPressor

I was a reluctant purchaser of SEOPressor as I really didn’t think $97 was particularly good value for what it does (particularly if you already know the elements of on-page SEO).  However, given I review products, I ended up buying a copy as at the very least, it’s a useful reminder for particular on-page SEO elements I might have forgotten.

Good Points

• Has a central administration menu for defining keywords and viewing page/post scores and descriptions.
• Works with auto-blogs by giving it a list of keywords and SEOPressor will automatically “decorate” the keywords, ie: bold, underline, italics.

Bad Points

• Price!  In my opinion, $97 for a plugin like this is way over priced.  I think somewhere between $30-$50 is much more reasonable and realistic.
• Nags you about not having an H1 tag, when the vast majority of WordPress themes automatically use H1 for the post/page titles.  Of course you can ignore the suggestion, but it’s something that really irks me.

Click here to access the SEOPressor website

BloggerHigh SEO

BloggerHigh SEO is essentially a rewritten version of SEOPressor.

The actual author and origins of BloggerHigh SEO is a little mysterious.   It appears to be a product of the “Masked Guru”.  Whatever the origins, the big plus of BloggerHigh SEO is that it is free and rebrandable.

Good Points

• Can’t argue with the price as it’s free!
• The plugin is rebrandable, so you can rebrand it yourself (with some limitations) and give it away or sell it.
• Pretty much does the same things as SEOPressor.

Bad Points

• No central administration page.  You need to go to each individual page/post to check the score and suggestions.
• If you don’t have the “hide attribution” option checked, then you’ll have an ugly footer added to each of your pages that have links to the various BloggerHigh sites.  Although, to be fair, as it is a free product, you can’t really blame them for wanting backlinks to their sites.

Click here to access the BloggerHigh SEO website

Clickbump SEO

I recently bumped (bad pun) into Clickbump SEO on the Warrior Forum.  The plugin itself is not currently promoted so much as a standalone plugin, but usually offered as part of the Clickbump Engine Bundle.

Scott did mention that he had registered a domain for Clickbump SEO, so it will be offered as a standalone product very soon.

As I wasn’t that interested in the Clickbump Engine, I purchased just the Clickbump SEO plugin.

Good Points

• It’s less than half the price of SEOPressor.
• Is aware of WordPress themes that use H1, H2 and H3 tags for headings.
• Doesn’t have any overheads of processing a page to add auto-decoration.
• Has a LSI function to grab related keywords.  Very handy reminder of what keywords/phrases to sprinkle into your article.
• Customisable keyword density settings.
• Keyword/Score summary from the Posts/Page manager.

Bad Points

• Can’t really think of any.

Click here to access the ClickBump SEO website

WP SEO Beast

I bought the WP SEO Beast plugin when it was first released so that I could add it to the list of other plugins to compare it to.

I found a few issues with version 1.0 of the WP SEO Beast plugin, so I contacted the author (who was very prompt with his responses) and waited until version 2.0 was released.  This is the version I’m basing my review/comparison on.

Prashant Sharma has obviously studied the other on-page SEO plugins that are available as WP SEO Beast seems to borrow a few ideas from all of them.

WP SEO Beast is probably best described as a cross between ClickBump SEO and SEOPressor.  It does however, have a SEO settings option (similar to all-in-one SEO) which none of the other plugins don’t have.   This has good and bad points as I’ll detail below.

Good Points

• Costs $37, for a plugin that offers more than SEOPressor at more than twice the price.
• Has an option to generate LSI keywords.
• Is aware of WordPress themes that use H1 tags for the post/page title.
• Has summary pages for post and page scores.
• Has support for mobile devices.
• Has inbuilt SEO options to set the meta Title, Description and Keywords so no additional SEO plugins are needed, eg: all-in-one SEO.   Note that I’ve also listed this feature in the bad points

Bad Points

• Probably my biggest gripe with WP SEO Beast is that it forces you to use it’s SEO settings for title, description and keywords.  This means you have no choice to use another SEO plugin like all-in-one SEO or Platinum SEO.  If you do have one of these plugins active, you will end up with two sets of clashing SEO meta data.
• Your score is marked down if you don’t use SEO Beast title, description and keywords, but more importantly, your score is marked down if you don’t use the auto-decoration options (bold, italics, underline).  That means if you manually decorate your keyword, WP SEO Beast doesn’t recognise it.

I think it is only fair to point out that Prashant Sharma is extremely keen to take on board any suggestions to improve the plugin (unfortunately he didn’t address my gripe with the plugin recognising manually decorated keywords though), so you may well find the issues I’ve brought up have been dealt with.

Click here to access the WP SEO Beast website

Easy WP SEO

Easy WP SEO was the latest of the on-page seo plugins that I had a look at.

My first impressions were very favourable as Easy WP SEO has a very professional and polished look and feel.   This certainly extends through to the very extensive documentation that is available with the plugin.  There are instructional videos for every single function of Easy WP SEO.

One big feature that only Easy WP SEO has, is the ability to specify multiple keywords.   This is really useful as most of the time, you want to optimize for your main keyword plus a selection of secondary keywords.   With Easy WP SEO, you can easily select which keyword you want to see the analysis for.

Good Points

• Very clean and professional design.
• Ability to handle multiple keywords.
• Has an LSI function, where you can list LSI keywords and drag/drop them into your article.
• Able to fine tune a large number of settings, eg: keyword density, minimum number of words, title length etc.
• Only on-page seo plugin to include a readability index.
• Has a Copyscape check function.
• Extensive documentation including a manual and video guides.

Bad Points

• Can’t think of any.

Easy WP SEO is not currently available to the public via the main website, however you can grab a discounted copy below.

Click here to access the discounted copy of Easy WP SEO

Measure My SEO 

I recently came across the Measure My SEO plugin, but haven’t had time to personally review it.  I’m including it here for completeness.

Note that I’m basing my information about the Measure My SEO plugin from the Measure My SEO website.

At first glance, Measure My SEO looks like a much more pretty version of SEOPressor or BloggerHigh.  The core functionality doesn’t appear to be much different, but there are a few key differences that make it stand out.

Good Points

• The settings page allows you to control exactly what SEO features you want to measure.
• Has a live checker that automatically updates the SEO page score without you having to update the page.

Bad Points

• Not as fully featured as WP SEO Beast, Clickbump SEO and Easy WP SEO.

Click here to access the Measure My SEO website.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is an important part of on-page SEO, but you should be aware that there are a few different ways to calculate it and you will get different results depending on what tool you are using.

There are two main ways to calculate keyword phrase density.

A=Total occurrences of the keyword phrase in the article

B=Total number of words in the article

C=Number of words in the keyword phrase

Keyword density calculation 1 uses:

(A / B) * 100

Keyword density calculation 2, uses:

(A * C / B) * 100

Let’s have a look at an example and the difference in the keyword density score those two formulas can make.

Let’s say we have a article with 1000 words and using keyword phrase of “search engine results page” (4 words) where there are 10 occurrences of that phrase.

So using the first formula, that gives us:

(10 / 1000) * 100 = 1% keyword density

and using the second formula, gives us:

(10 * 4 / 1000) * 100 = 4% keyword density

That’s quite a difference depending on which formula you use.  (Note: the differences only apply to keyword phrases and not when you use a single keyword).

All the on-page SEO plugins I tested use the first formula apart from BloggerHigh SEO.

With Easy WP SEO you have the option which keyword density calculation to use, where the default is the first formula.

There is a good explanation of keyword density calculations on Wikipedia.

So Which is the Best Plugin To Use?

My recommendation is if you already have SEOpressor and are relatively happy with using it, then there’s probably not a compelling reason to throw it out in favour of BloggerHigh SEO, ClickBump SEO,  WP SEO Beast, Measure My SEO or Easy WP SEO.

If you are on a tight budget, then BloggerHigh SEO is a good option.

Of the other four plugins, my pick would be for Easy WP SEO.  With the version 1.6 update, Easy WP SEO is now well ahead of the pack.

Of the other on-page SEO plugins, my next pick would be ClickBump SEO,  followed by WP SEO Beast or Measure My SEO.

Hopefully all these on-page SEO plugins will be further developed and I’ll update this review page if there are any major changes.

If you come across any other similar on-page SEO plugins, let me know and I’ll add them to this review.

Cheers

I’ve been using DigiResults as both a product seller, an affiliate,  and a buyer since DigiResults came onto the scene in October 2010.

In this DigiResults review, I thought I’d give you my impressions on the service given that I’ve seen it from all sides of the market.

What is DigiResults?

Probably the easiest way to think of DigiResults is that it is an alternate service to places like Clickbank, PayDotCom, Commission Junction, E-Junkie etc.

DigiResults enables you to sell your products (physical and digital) and as an affiliate, you can promote any of the listed products on the DigiResults Marketplace.

Payments and commissions are done via PayPal.

DigiResults Video Overview

The following video gives you a brief overview of some of the features of DigiResults and what the interface looks like.

Features of DigiResults

OK, so what are some of the features of DigiResults that I like?

Navigation

Probably the biggest aspect I like about DigiResults is the ease of use.   I have accounts on many other similar sites and I have to say that DigiResults is by far and away the easiest in terms of set up and navigation.   I curse every time I’m on a site like e-junkie where the navigation is not intuitive at all as I think it is critical that things should be easy to find and easy to set up.

On DigiResults, you can literally set up a new account and list a product in under 15 minutes.

Commissions and Refunds

The other feature I really like about DigiResults are the instant commissions.   This works really well from both the seller and affiliate perspectives.

There is no waiting to get paid when a sale has been made.  Your PayPal account is instantly credited whether you are the vendor or an affiliate.

On the flipside, refunds are easily handled with no action required from your affiliates.   As a vendor, if you need to issue a refund, DigiResults automatically reverses the payment from both your account and the affiliates account.

Flexible Payment Options

Most other similar systems have restrictions on what percentage you can set your affiliate commissions to.  DigiResults allows you to set the affiliate commission between 0% and 100%.

You might wonder why you would want to offer a 100% affiliate commission, but it is a great method for building your list.

If you want to offer your product at different prices, you have two options:

You can set up discount codes/coupons, which give the buyer the set discount at the point of purchase.   You can choose whether the discount codes are public or not and also set an expiry date.

An alternate method is to add a “variant”.  For example, if you have a special offer you want to give your customers or an affiliate, you can set up a variant with a different buy price.

There’s no limit to the number of variants and discount codes you can set up.

Hosted Downloads

If you don’t have the technical knowledge or software on your own site to offer secure downloads of your product, then DigiResults has an option where you simply upload your product and it will generate a unique download link for every buyer.

Autoresponder Integration

DigiResults can automatically integrate your preferred autoresponder (pretty much supports any autoresponder, eg: iContact, Aweber, MailChimp etc), so that your buyers can be automatically added to your list.

Note that this only works if you use the DigiResults hosted downloads.   Also important to point out is that buyers will still need to confirm their opt-in if you are using an autoresponder that only supports double opt-in.

DigiResults Screenshots

Here are a collection of screenshots that show the main parts of DigiResults.

The screenshot below shows the main dashboard when you log into DigiResults.  It gives you a handy summary of all the important information like number of sales, refunds, and affiliate sales in the last 60 days.

The next screenshot shows the page where you set up your product that you are selling.  As you can see, the options are pretty straight forward.

There are some optional advanced options not shown in this screenshot to configure your affiliate programme page, cancellation/receipt pages and options to allow you to additionally sell your product via ClickBank and PayDotCom.

The last screenshot shows the DigiResults marketplace.  This is where affiliates can select the product they want to promote and get all the details such as affiliate links, sales pages, affiliate promotional details etc.

The marketplace is really the only section where I think DigiResults needs some major improvement.

You can sort the list by any of the columns, but there are no advanced search features and categories to browse the products by.

Having said that, I know the DigiResults is constantly improving and I’m sure that the marketplace will be one of the things on their list to improve.

Final Thoughts on DigiResults

DigiResults is gaining a lot of popularity, particularly with internet marketers, as it provides a very simple and easy ways to enable your products to be promoted and sold.

At this stage, most of the products listed on DigiResults are in the internet marketing area, so most of the potential affiliates would be looking for products also in that category.  However, that certainly shouldn’t prevent you from listing a non-IM product.

For me, the biggest aspect I like about DigiResults is the simplicity.    It means I don’t have to muck around wading through huge manuals or watching lots of tutorials to get everything set up.

I highly recommend DigiResults and you can instantly join at no cost, so check it out for yourself.

>>Click here to access DigiResults<<

Cheers

 SECockpit Background

I’ve written this SECockpit review in the hope it will give you enough information to make an informed decision as to whether SECockpit is the right keyword research tool for you.

It’s certainly not my aim to give you an unrealistic and hyped up review of SECockpit that you’ll see on some other sites.

I’ve been lucky enough to use SECockpit since the very first limited release.  I’ve seen the product develop and evolve into the fully featured keyword research tool it is today.

Firstly, in case there’s any confusion, there is no relationship between SEO cockpit and SECockpit.  It’s a bit unfortunate that the names are so similar, but I guess there’s only so many combinations of product names you can come up with that have SEO and Cockpit in them.

SECockpit is a product from the SwissMadeMarketing team of Shane Melaugh and Sam Haenni.

Some of you will know Shane from his previously released products such as Backlink Battleplan and Sam has recently partnered with Shane as the brilliant technical person.

SECockpit was made available via invitation, so it has had a lot of real world testing before the public launch on July 5th.

Click here to visit the SECockpit Official Site

SECockpit Components

SECockpit has two main components:

1. Keyword Research – this is the heart of SECockpit where you do all your keyword searches, analysis, filtering and arranging your results.
2. Project & Task Management – this is where you can track your various projects and automatically assign tasks and track project revenues.

Obviously it is the keyword research component of SECockpit that will be of great interest to most people and the area where I’ll be concentrating on in this article.

SECockpit Overview

The  screenshot below shows the main SECockpit keyword search results.  The green niche bar gives you an idea of the niche strength, which is based on search volume, competition strength and a few other factors.

Keywords where the green indicator is high, are definitely worth checking out.

The competition strength is show by the orange bars.  This is broken down into positions 1-3, 4-7 and 8-10.   Having this breakdown can let you know how easy or not it is to get on page one and more importantly, how much competition there is for the first three spots (which after all, is where you really want to rank).

SECockpit Videos

The best way to get an idea of how SECockpit works and the features it offers is by watching the following videos I made.

In the video below, I give you an overview on how SECockpit looks and operates.

There have been a number of changes and improvements to SECockpit since I recorded this video, but the core functionality hasn’t changed.

There have been improvements in the filtering and keyword options, eg: grabbing keywords from Google Wonderwheel, Google suggest etc.  There have also been additional columns added so that you can see if there are things like Youtube, Amazon, or Google Sniper pages in the top 10 results.

In this second SECockpit video, I go over some of the additional features and options that weren’t available when I made the original video.

What are the advantages of SECockpit?

There’s certainly no end of keyword research tools on the market and I’ve used quite a few, eg: Market Samauri and Keyword Elite.

Now while, those keyword tools are certainly not bad, there’s one attribute they all share – they rely on the data from Google and Yahoo.  This is primarily the Google Adwords Keyword Tool for the search numbers and results and Yahoo explorer for backlink information.

Now SECockpit certainly uses Google Adwords Keyword Tool for getting a lot of its information, but there are some major differences:

1.  The range and diversity of keywords

You can greatly increase the number and diversity of keywords you are searching on by using the SECockpit Google Suggestions and Wonderwheel options.  In particular Google Wonderwheel can be a great source of long tail and related keywords.  SECockpit can dig down to 2 levels in the Wonderwheel, which can potentially find a few great keywords that you wouldn’t normally find with other keyword research tools.

2.  Competition Analysis

Most importantly, the competition analysis uses data supplied by SEOmoz.

If you’re not familiar with SEOmoz, they crawl the web and collect their own search data and metrics which is more complete and more accurate than what Google provides.

Most other keyword tools rely on a combination of data that is mostly supplied by Google for their analysis.

3.  SECockpit is a web Application

This means it is OS independent as it runs in your browser.

It also has the advantage that your local computer won’t get a temporary ban from Google for performing too many requests.

Additionally, as the processing is done in the cloud, the results are fast.  If you were to do the same type of processing on your local computer, it would chew up a lot of resources and take substantially longer to give you results.

4. Integrated Project and Task Management

Now while I don’t yet use the project and task capabilities of SECockpit, I can see that they would be useful for some people, although I suspect most people wouldn’t bother with it as they have their own methods for tracking projects.

SECockpit allows you to create projects around sets of keywords.  It then has built in  task lists based on the type of project that you can use, or create your own.

The screenshot below shows the the project creation:

Interview with Sam Haenni – SwissMadeMarketing Co-founder

In this interview with Sam Haenni, Sam discusses:

• the background behind SECockpit
• technical challenges along the way
• number of keyword searches that SECockpit performs
• future development plans for SECockpit.

SECockpit Pricing

The pricing for SECockpit may be considered expensive for some people, but you need to keep in mind that SECockpit is a premium product and uses a lot of infrastructure to perform the massive amount of processing it does for every keyword analysis.

I have seen a number of new keyword research services on offer that utilize SECockpit as the tool they use for keyword research.  In these cases, the SECockpit monthly fee would be quite easy to cover and make a sustainable business model.

SECockpit Final Thoughts

It takes quite a bit for a keyword research tool to impress me, but I could see the value and worth of SECockpit from day one and having used it extensively, I can vouch for the results I’ve gotten.

One tip I would give is to not get too hung up on trying to find “diamonds”.  When I initially started using SECockpit, I discarded any keywords that didn’t have a “diamond” ranking.  This was a mistake as I was missing lots of good keywords.

I personally think keywords with “diamond” rating are generally quite difficult to rank for as the SECockpit algorithm is biased towards the number of daily searches.  That means if a keyword has a large number of daily searches and relatively low (that’s lowish for a high competition keyword) then it may get a “diamond” rating.

In general, it’s probably fair to say that “diamond” keywords are high reward, medium/high effort keywords.

While some people might be put off by the SECockpit pricing schedule,  you need to consider the power of SECockpit and the tools you are getting for your money.   At the very least, you could sign up for one month, to try it out and see if you agree that it’s the best keyword research tool available.

Bottom line is that I have no hesitation in stating that SECockpit is by far and away, the best keyword research tool I’ve ever come across.

>> Click here to find out more about SECockpit<<

Cheers

Whether you are an Internet Marketer or just have your own personal WordPress blog,  most people know that they really should have a backup, but haven’t quite got around to doing something about it before it’s too late.

Backups aren’t the most exciting thing, but without a proper backup system in place, it can hurt really hard with all the work you may loose.

Like a lot of people, I’ve been doing adhoc backups of my main WordPress sites, but had no real backup plan in place.

I got motivated to look at WordPress backups in more detail after the disk in my laptop failed (yes, I did have a backup and yes I was able to completely restore everything).

So I’ve spent the last few days trying out pretty much every WordPress backup solution I could find.   I didn’t bother with some of the WordPress backup plugins that were very old and abandonded.  I’ve concentrated on the free WordPress backup solutions, but do list a few of the paid WordPress backup solutions as well, although I haven’t personally used them.

WordPress Backup Solutions Reviewed

The following is an alphabetical  list of the WordPress Backup solutions that I personally tried out:

1. Automatic WordPress Backup
2. BackWPup
3. EZPZ One Click Backup
4. myEASYbackup
5. Online Backup for WordPress
6. PressBackup
7. Snapshot Backup
8. Updraft
9. Xcloner

Additionally, I  have included some information on the following WordPress Backup solutions that I haven’t had a chance to try yet:

1. Backup Buddy
2. VaultPress
3. WPTwin
4. Blog Zapper

The information in this review is based on my own personal experiences and on the versions of the software available at the time.  You may get different results on your server depending on the environment.

I’ll will endeavour to update any information if there are major changes to the WordPress backup software.

Backup Features

When looking around for a good WordPress backup solution, you need to keep the following points in mind:

• Is it robust?  This is critical for anyone wanting reliable backups.  I came across a few products that I wouldn’t want to rely on for backing up my sites.
• Is it easy to install and configure?  There’s no point in installing a backup solution if it is too complex and time consuming to set up.  On the other hand, it is good to have enough configuration options to make it flexible.
• Does is backup everything?  Not all WordPress backup solutions backup absolutely everything.  There’s really not much point in doing a backup if it isn’t 100% complete.
• Can you schedule backups?  Not all WordPress backup solutions have a scheduling function.  They are more designed for adhoc, manual backups.
• What storage options are available?  Some WordPress backup solutions only allow you to backup to the local server and let you manually download to your computer.  Others have options to transfer the backup to a FTP server or cloud storage service like Amazon S3.
• Security.  Some WordPress backups create a full backup that you can download, but unless you have some restrictions around that like a unique backup name and/or password protected access, it means anyone can potentially download your backups.
• Restore process.  It’s one thing to backup your site, but if you need a bullet proof and easy way to be able to restore the backup or clone the backup to another site.

Backup Storage Options

The following are the most common options for storing WordPress Backups:

1. On the Webserver

Almost all WordPress backup solutions directly or indirectly store the backups on your local webserver.  This is OK for most purposes, but to be really robust, you should have a copy stored off site.

2.  Via Email

This method is OK for smaller backups, but if the backups get too large, mail servers will start to reject them.  Additionally, it isn’t very secure as anyone can potentially access your backup if it is unencrypted.

3. To a FTP Server

This is one of the most common options to store your backups on another server.   You just need to make sure you have access to a server with FTP access.

4.  To a Cloud Storage Service

A cloud storage service is place where you can store any data you like (backups, videos, files etc) on storage servers provided by a company.  These services give you very high bandwidth access to your data and very high reliability.

The most common services are:

• Amazon S3 – this is a very popular service and is very cheap to use
• Rackspace Cloud Files – Very similar to Amazon S3

Another storage option which is quite popular is Dropbox

Dropbox gives you 2GB of free storage for storing whatever files you want including backups.

Automatic WordPress Backup – by Dan Coulter

This was one of the first WordPress backup plugins to support Amazon S3.

Version 2 of the plugin was released in late 2010 (there have been some minor updates since then) which added an easy option for restoring your backups.

You must have an Amazon S3 account to be able to use this plugin.

The screenshot below shows the options you can set with Automatic WordPress Backup.

The steps are pretty straight forward:

1. Add your AWS keys
2. Select or create an S3 bucket name for the backups
3. Set the backup schedule
4. Select which parts of the blog to back up (in most cases you want all options selected)
5. Select whether to delete old backups (not really an issue unless your site is huge)
6. Select whether you will have a credit in your footer or write a review of the plugin.

That’s all that’s required.

You can click on the “Save Changes and Backup Now” to do an immediate backup (highly recommended after first installing the plugin).

Automatic WordPress Backup has a simple menu to restore from a backup where you select the particular backup you want to restore and click on the “Restore from backup” button.

It then displays a message saying it is restoring from the backup and will be finished when the page refreshes.  This is a little concerting as you don’t get a nice bold confirmation when the restore has finished, but in my reasonably limited tested, the restore function worked just fine.

Good Points

• Simple to install and set up.
• Has an option to do manual as well as scheduled backups
• Has a simple restore function.

Bad Points

• Limited to users with Amazon S3 accounts.

BackWPup – by Daniel Hüsken

BackWPup has quite a number of configuration options.

It works by creating a ZIP (other formats supported) file of your site (includes the database and all the files) into a unique folder name under the wp-content folder.

Once the backup has been created, you have the option to send it to:

• A FTP server
• Amazon S3
• Microsoft Azure
• Rackspace Cloud
• Dropbox
• SugarSync
• Email

This gives you quite a bit of flexibility as to how and where you like to store your backups.

The configuration options are quite detailed, which may put some people off if they like the options to be simple and more limited.

The following screenshot shows a portion of the options to set up a backup job.

Good Points

• Very flexible with how you want to set up the backup.
• Supports many different methods for storing the backup.
• Good logging.

Bad Points

• Might be a little too complex for some people.
• The restore process is semi-manual.

EZPZ One Click Backup – By Joe Cook

The premise behind EZPZ One Click Backup is that you can install it and start doing backups without setting anything.

There are options for scheduling the backups, along with filters to exclude certain folders, but these are optional.

By default, EZPZ One Click Backup creates the WordPress backup on your server.  You have the option to manually download the backup or you can purchase an EZPZ One Click Backup extension for $2.95 that will enable an option to save your backups to your Dropbox account.  Alternatively, you can specify a FTP server to send the backup to.

The following screenshot shows the output the plugin generates when it creates a backup.

Good Points

• Very simple to set up and use.
• Fairly simple restore process.

Bad Points

• Limited options for storing the backup off-site.

myEASYbackup – by Ugo Grandolini

myEASYbackup is designed to do manual backups of your WordPress site with the option to send the backup to email, FTP or use a storage service created by plugin author.

On first glance, the interface looks very slick with nice graphics and layout, however I didn’t find it that intuitive when I started using it.

Here’s a screenshot of what myEASYbackup looks like:

Good Points

• Allows you to store the backup outside your web folders for better security.

Bad Points

• No scheduling option.
• Slightly confusing interface and mode of operation.

Online Backup for WordPress – by Backup Technology

[Updated details on 12 Oct 2011 with the release of new version]

Online Backup for WordPress is a backup solution produced by Backup Technology that allows you to backup your WordPress securely to Backup Technology’s storage servers.

Version 1 of the plugin only backed up the database, but since the release of Version 2, it allows you to also includes all the WordPress files (eg: plugins, images, themes etc) with the backup.

Before you can start any backups, you need to create a free account on the Backup Technology site that gives you access to 100MB of free storage.  You need to set up one account per WordPress site.

The following screenshot shows you the single configuration and backup page for the plugin:

Good points

• Simple to install and use.
• Encrypts your data.
• Includes a restore process.

Bad Points

No real bad points to speak of.

PressBackup – by Infinimedia Inc.

PressBackup is available as a free plugin if you backup to your computer or Amazon S3.  They also have a subscription if you want to use their storage service.

Setting the backups is very easy to do via the PressBackup wizard.  Once you’ve run the wizard, you can either run a manual backup or wait for the scheduled backup to run.

The interface is straight forward as the following screenshot shows:

Good Points

• Very easy to set up.
• Has a built in restore option.

Bad Points

• No support for FTP servers.
• Can’t specify the S3 bucket name the backups get stored in.

Snapshot Backup – by Jay Versluis

Snapshot Backup is a simple plugin that backups up your WordPress site and sends it via FTP.

There’s not really much else to describe as there aren’t many options as you can see in the screenshot below:

Good Points

• Simple to use.

Bad Points

• No automated backups.
• The configuration options are found under the Dashboard menu (last place I’d expect a plugin config to be)
• The backup is stored locally in a non-unique folder which means it could potentially be downloaded by someone else.
• No restore option.

To be fair, this plugin is quite new and there are a lot of features on the roadmap, so you may find some of the issues above are addressed in later versions.

Updraft – by Paul Kehrer

Updraft gives you the options of manual or scheduled backups of your WordPress site to your local server, email, FTP server, S3 Amazon or Rackspace Cloud.

The configuration options are quite straight forward and there is context help for each option.

The following screenshot shows the single configuration/backup/restore options:

Good Points

• Good selection of backup destinations.
• Easy to use interface.

Bad Points

• After playing around with the backup directory location, the Updraft got confused as to what backups were available.
• Hasn’t been updated since July 2010, although the author mentioned he’d release a bugfix in Feb 2011.

Xcloner – by Liuta Ovidiu

Xcloner is a backup and restore application  that will backup any PHP/MySQL website and is available as a native plugin for WordPress and Joomla.

The software is free and there is an option to pay for professional support.  If you don’t want to pay for support, there is a free forum available to get help.

Xcloner has options for backing up to your local server, FTP server, via email and to Amazon S3.

You can restore your backups or clone them to a new site by specifying the FTP details of the new site and database details (this part is a manual process).  The restore script then does the rest for you.

As the Xcloner works on generic websites, Joomla and WordPress, the interface is a bit different to most WordPress plugins.

There quite a few options, but it doesn’t take too long to be familar with the setup.

The following screenshot shows the main configuration page:

During my testing of Xcloner I did have some issues with the backups not fully completing.  The support for Xcloner seems to be good, so I posted on the Xcloner support forums and will hopefully get an answer as Xcloner does look very promising.

Good points

• Can use on generic websites as well as Joomla and WordPress sites.
• Good range of backup options supported.
• Has an easy option for restoring and cloning WordPress sites.
• Good documentation.
• Support forum.

Bad points

• Can take a little time to learn how to use.
• Scheduling has to be manually set up.

Paid WordPress Backup Solutions

The following is a list of WordPress backup solutions that either have a one off payment or a subscription payment.

I haven’t personally used any of these backup solutions, but I am providing them for completeness.  The information I’m giving is based on what’s available on the products website.

BackupBuddy – by iThemes

BackupBuddy allows you to backup your WordPress site to a FTP server, Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloud.

It is a complete WordPress backup solution as you can schedule backups and either restore them if your site is corrupted or migrate/clone them to a new site.

Pricing is based on the number of WordPress sites you want to backup:

• $45 for 2 sites
• $75 for 10 sites
• $150 for unlimited sites

VaultPress – by Automattic

VaultPress allows you to have realtime backups of your WordPress sites.  That means whenever a new post,  comment or any other content is changed or added to your site, the changes are synced to the cloud storage services.

Pricing is based on a monthly fee.  Currently this is set to:

• Basic – $15
• Premium – $40
• Enterprise – no pricing available at the time of writing.

WPTwin – by Jason Fladlien and Wilson Mattos

WPTwin is primarily designed to clone WordPress sites and costs $97.

It is not a WordPress plugin.  To clone a site requires FTPing a script onto the source and destination servers.

WPTwin does have a very good reputation and I haven’t seen any bad experiences with it.

As WPTwin doesn’t have a scheduling option, it is better suited to one-off or adhoc backups.   This means it wouldn’t be very suitable for auto-blogs.

Blog Zapper – by Carl Ringall

Blog Zapper works in a very similar fashion to WPTwin in that it is a standalone utility that you can use to copy, backup and clone your WordPress sites.

The cost of Blog Zapper is $37.

Conclusions On The Best WordPress Backup Solution

I can’t tell you precisely which WordPress backup solution to use because it depends on your budget, the number and type of WordPress sites you operate, the amount of data you have to backup, how often your content gets updated etc.

Hopefully the information I have given in this article will help you make a decision as to which backup solution to choose.

I would love to hear your experiences with whatever WordPress backup solution that you are using.

If you know of any good WordPress backup solutions I haven’t covered here, please leave a comment and I’ll endeavour to add them to this review.

Cheers