whydowork.com

In theory, Google crawls the sites it considers of authority more often than those that aren’t. If you want to have an idea where your site is located right now in term of authority in Google’s eyes, you can use SEOMeter.com, a free SEO tool that monitors submitted sites and keeps a record of their crawl rate in time. Right now it monitors around 1000 sites, submitted by admins and users, but anyone can submit their own blog or site for free.

An interesting feature is the comparison tool, where you can compare your site with those of your competitors, and how the crawl rate modifies in time. You can add the sites of your competitors into the tool yourself if they aren’t already submitted by someone else. The submissions are approved by the admins, but mine got approved in less than half an hour, so it’s not that much of a hassle.

The Google crawl rate for sites can be used as an extra metric by webmasters in different ways. You can use it to asses the competitors in your niche, to see the authority of a site that you want to buy, if there are any problems with your site in Google’s eyes or how successful was your latest link building campaign.

You can even see the most crawled blogging sites, where ProBlogger is leader as expected. On the Top 20 page, you can see a list of different categories and what sites are most crawled in each of them. Most categories don’t have 20 sites yet, and it seems that they are added manually by the admin to these categories. That’s my only problem with the site, the fact that you can’t specify the category that your blog is in when you add your URL.

In time you will also be able to see the crawl rate over the last month or in the last three months and if it went up or down.

SEO Meter is definitely a new bookmark for me. Make sure you check it out for yourself.

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A good landing page when it comes to affiliate offers, can make the difference between a disaster and that new dual monitor setup on your wish list. And it’s not all about the copy, it’s about the look of the page as well.

This is where CSS Landing Pages comes in. It’s a relatively new site, offering to anyone in need a template for sales pages or mini site templates. Now, it doesn’t give you the sales copy. That, you need to find somewhere else. But it does offer you the graphics you need to create a page that makes the customer get out his credit card.

For a relatively small sum, you get a number of templates with a wide variety of headers suitable for different topics, WordPress themes done on those templates and graphics. So you can use them as sales pages or you can build some mini sites if you want to use single column themes.

They have a single package for sale, that contains the following:

• 7 landing page templates with different headers, each for a different topic, with a total of 136 variants, and the PSD files for them.
• 196 images that you can use to give your sales page a boost. That includes check boxes, arrows, bullets and buttons.
• 3 WordPress themes based on 3 of the layouts offered in the package

As a bonus, you also receive an ebook that teaches you how to create landing pages, “Landing Page Success Guide”.

I can’t really testify on the quality of the ebook that comes with the graphics package, but I’m feeling that the landing pages and the WordPress themes alone should be worth the current price.

A pleasant surprise was the Privacy Policy. I think it’s actually the first one that I can read without falling a sleep.

If you want to give affiliate marketing a try, make sure you check out what CSS Landing Pages has to offer. Those graphics, in combination with the free ebook on landing pages might be just what you need to get you started with your basics.

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Either as webmasters or bloggers, you probably ran into the problem of creating a good looking logo or header for your site or blog. As you may know, I have a decent number of mini sites, and unfortunately they all include just the title or a weak attempt at a logo in the header. A good logo design can bring with it a respectable touch to a site and add some extra credibility. Here’s where Logo Creator comes in.

Logo Creator is a software that allows you to create logos in just a couple of minutes. If you paid someone to do it, it would take at least a few hours and the price would probably be the same in the end. I’m talking about logos with the same quality, not the $5 logos that you can get in a forum.

You can look to the right for a few examples of logos created with this software.

A few of the things Logo Creator has to offer include:

• hundreds of possible designs with the included logos,
• the right to sell the logos you create with this software to clients,
• the ability to import and manipulate your own images to create logos from them
• reflections, 3D and mirrored effects.

It’s not free, but it does offer great quality for just $29.95. You can check out the rest of the features and example logos at http://www.thelogocreator.com

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This is the third and last free review given in the Shylock Contest.

The Link Bait is a blog about ….. yes, you guessed it, it’s about contests. A bit of an unusual name for a contest blog, but if it works for them, who am I to argue.

For those that aren’t familiar with this type of blog, it’s a place where people can submit contests, they are then announced on the blog and people that are looking to win prizes or cash can find out about them and what they need to do to enter them.

It’s a good system, that helps give your contests more exposure, and I’ve used this system myself in the past in my first contest. I don’t know how much traffic The Link Bait gets, but they should be pretty well targeted if you’re in the make money online niche. They’re probably bloggers that are looking to enter contests and win prizes, so any contests announced there have a good chance of bringing at least a few extra people.

I’ve looked around at the way this blog works, and I can safely say that it’s a nice example of having a blog with minimum input from the owner.

There are three ways of submitting a contest:

1. free submission (you write the contest announcement)
2. featured contest written by you (you write the announcement and your contest stays in the sidebar for 1 month for extra exposure) - $5
3. featured post written by the blog owner (he writes the announcement and the contest stays in the sidebar for 1 month) - $10

I love it. All he needs to do is accept the submissions from people that write the announcements themselves, and he only needs to write when someone wants a featured post, that he asks $10 to write. The blog runs on user generated content for the most part.

If you’re looking to make some extra cash or win some prizes, then December is probably the best month of the year for contests. Head over to The Link Bait and subscribe to receive the latest contests by RSS. Or, if you’re looking to start a contest yourself, you can submit it there as well, for some extra exposure.

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