Watch out, Market Samurai, there’s a new kid on the block, its name is SERP Attacks. These guys must have done something right, because many Market Samurai owners have already downloaded their Free and PRO ($47, introductory price) copy of this brand new KW and back link tool developed by a Philippine team. Being a new product, SERP Attacks is updated frequently, and it works with the recent updates in the Google search engine as well.

What exactly is SERP Attacks?

Basically, SERP Attacks is a blistering fast site backlink explorer, KW research tool and overall a user friendly, powerful toolbox for drilling down into the best and most profitable niches, be it you dabble in Adsense, Amazon affiliate websites, domain flipping, or what have you. SERP Attacks is still a bit rough on the edges, but clearly shows signs of potential, if the developer does everything right. Here’s a quick glance at what you can do with this software out of the box:

The good stuff about SERP Attacks

Being a regular Market Samurai user I was awestruck by the sheer speed at which SERP Attacks operates, even in this early version (1.2.35). When loading the software for the first time I clicked OK to let it update itself, and few seconds later a neatly organized main window opened on my screen.

The user friendly interface makes it easy to type in a web domain for a backlink check, and SERP Attacks went to work immediately: in a matter of seconds it listed the top 20 domains based on my KW, complete with their external backlinks, site links and PR.

Below the results a short text in bold confirmed the KW to have a Difficulty Rating of “Moderately Easy”. All of this information is neatly arranged on one page for an easy overview at a quick glance. Note: on the screenshot I had just ran a search on the extremely competitive KW “dog training”.

A brief listing of what SERP Attacks can do for you:

• Helps you drill down into profitable and realistic niches
• Localized search competition analysis
• Supports Yahoo!, Altavista, Google, Bing and Ask (W.I.P.)
• Shows future trends for your keywords
• Helps you find good domain names
• Use it to find good affiliate products at ClickBank and Amazon
• See your site rank from different locations and in different SE
• Built-in back link spy lets you easily reveal your competitors BL
• Easily analyze how your keyword is doing in the SERP
• Analyzes your website for possible SEO improvements
• And more

That is an impressive list of features for such affordable product, although bear in mind that the price for the paid version will increase from the current $47 at some point, as it is still in development and the team is currently running a heavy discount to get it out on the market. I am guessing it will land at $97, which will still give competitors such as Market Samurai, Traffic Travis and others a run for the money.

SERP Attacks still needs improvements and polishing, but other than minor snags, which is to be expected in an early version, I am impressed by how well it runs. Some reviewers are a little reluctant in regard to how Google Adwords works in conjunction with this software; the user must type in his/her Adwords login data in order to take full advantage of Adwords from within SERP Attacks. On the other hand, if this is an issue at all, simply create a new, free Google Adwords account for this purpose.

This is my initial impression with the SERP Attacks software. It is fast, offers a nice range of tools, and developed by the same team who made Tweet Attacks, they seem to know pretty well what they are doing.

Back to the title question: is SERP Attacks better than Market Samurai? The only answer I can give at this point, is that you should download both (Market Samurai is available as a Free Trial here) and see for yourself. Market Samurai has been out for years, whereas SERP Attacks is a (pretty awesome) newbie, one that might give the guys at Noble Samurai a run for their money eventually. The PRO version of SERP Attacks is temporarily lowered to an introductory price $47 and comes with a 7 day full satisfaction guarantee. Click here for more information on SERP Attacks and a free download.

With the recent Google Panda update in mind, the question whether to autoblog or not to autoblog is still valid. Autoblogs is a hot topic in Internet Marketing and SEO forums, attracting beginners and seasoned marketers seeking ways to earn money online. For those who haven’t dabbled in autoblogging before, consider this a brief introduction and explanation on auto-blogging and some of its pros and cons. The Shakespearian marketer exclaims: to autoblog or not to autoblog, that is the question.

To Autoblog or not to Autoblog

It is a common misconception that autoblogs merely requires a quick and simple set up to run on autopilot and take care of itself from there on. On contrary, properly setting up and managing a network with many fully automated blogs requires significant effort on your part, using a number of different plugins within each blog, which in turn requires updates in order to preserve the overall blog and plugin security and efficiency .

The higher the number of autoblogs, the more work goes into keeping everything alive and updated, and even though it may sound easy now, many autoblog owners maintain up to, or more than 100 automated blogs. On the other hand: one single, properly set up autoblog covering a strong niche, or even several niches, alternating high quality, unique content and syndicated posts, is likely to be more productive than typically quick-and-dirty set up auto-blog networks.

Before setting up an automated nice WordPress blog, let’s look at pros and cons:

(The most obvious) Advantages of automated blogs:

• With a proper blog set up it is possible to achieve a near hands-off approach to making money on the Internet
• After setting up everything and with a solid system in place, an autoblog requires relatively little maintenance
• Easy: you can buy complete packages with plugins, content, e.t.c., for installing on your own domain
• Contrary to (dis)belief, Google appreciates syndicated content when used in compliance with their T.O.S.
• Autoblogs can work very well with Amazon, ClickBank, and numerous other solid affiliate opportunities

(The most obvious) Disadvantages of running automated blogs:

• Using your Adsense Publisher ID on web pages within an auto-blog is risky, and you might lose your account
• Due to vast amount of content, server and bandwidth usage, shared hosting is not a viable solution (see below)
• Without proper setup and regular maintenance, autoblog networks will be prone to security holes and issues
• Google dislikes poorly setup autoblogs, and they will de-index the domain if it is in violation of their T.O.S.
• Using a cheesy, automated content rewrite plugin with your autoblog almost guarantees a de-index or worse
• Setting up and running autoblogs is hardly as easy as many perceive
• Auto-blogging is considered blackhat, thus it is imperative that you know exactly what you are doing

“Why can’t I use my shared hosting account with autoblogs? I do it now!”"

I can’t stress this enough: by installing autoblogs on a shared web hosting account you are exploiting the web host provider. Autoblogs are resource-hogs and not intended for cheap, shared web hosting. Shared hosting servers are designed to handle small to medium websites and/or a couple blogs running a limited number of plugins. Customers using shared hosting for running their massive autoblogs risk being kicked out by the hosting provider as their autoblogs often taxes the server CPU, memory and bandwidth enough to cause a noticeable performance impact for other users on the same server.

Everything considered, it is quite possible to run an autoblog on a shared hosting server, if and only if you know how to set it up correctly, which plugins to use, e.t.c. HostGator uses solid shared hosting server hardware capable of handling a workload bigger than most shared hosting services, but running autoblogs on a shared hosting server is risky none the less. VPS or a dedicated server is recommended for this. It costs more money, yes, but a properly set up autoblog or several ones can easily recover the cost over time.

To Autoblog or not to Autoblog – the first steps

1. Find a lucrative main niche to focus on. Read more here, and here (YouTube). One of my favorite tools for market niche research is Market Samurai. Click here for the free trial.
2. Decide on a blog system, whichever you prefer. I choose WordPress
3. Install the blog software on your server (I prefer HostGator)
4. Google plugins: Google search inquiry on “autoblog plugins”
5. Visit WordPress.org for free autoblog plugins
6. This plugin is mandatory for autoblogs: WP Super Cache
7. Find a suitable theme: 10 beautiful and free WP 3.0-ready themes
8. When syndicating articles, leave the backlinks to the author intact!
9. Mix syndicated and unique content for higher perceived quality
10. Do not use auto-spin tools or plugins; automatically spun content is extremely easy to recognize for bots and human readers. When Google finds it, they will react.

If you plan to start autoblogging, take into consideration the risk factors mentioned above. Respect the search engines and their terms, mix properly syndicated content with your own, unique content and your autoblogs are more likely to be treated well by SE and achieve better SERP rankings than sloppy autoblogs syndicating re-hashed and poorly spun content.

Practice makes imperfect

When having set up and tweaked a couple of autoblogs, you will develop your own technique and feeling for which plugins works best, balancing the unique and the syndicated content, and ultimately to give your visitors a good experience, which is what Google wants. Autoblogs are far from perfect, considering they are driven by bot software and cannot interact with visitors, but when doing it right your autoblog looks just like any normal blog, and behaves almost exactly the same.

Revisiting the initial question of whether to Autoblog or not to Autoblog, I hope you have found this post helpful at all, and I hope you are successful whichever path you take.

BookmarkWiz 1.36 Update requires a New Key

Sometimes when software developers update their product, something goes wrong which affects the user experience, such as rendering the product useless for them. This just happened to Nossie’s Social Bookmarking Tool BookmarkWiz, commonly referred to as just BMW. As a result the BookmarkWiz 1.36 update requires a new key. Fortunately, and dare I say as usual, Nossie quickly came to the rescue, and posted instructions in his support forum on how to fix this.

First, for those who maybe aren’t familiar with what BookmarkWiz is and what it does: BMW is a powerful tool designed to lessen the workload when creating Social Bookmarks with emphasis on increasing the Page Rank for your web pages, blog posts and domains, build backlinks and ultimately attract more organic traffic from search engines. BookmarkWiz currently costs a one time fee of $97, and by looking around you can find discount codes to shave some off of that price.

Alternatives to BookmarkWiz

SE Nuke runs at respectively $67 and $127 per month for two different subscriptions, whichever you choose. Social Bookmarking is but one of many features it offers, but clearly it is pricey.

Bookmarking Demon is another alternative. With a one-time fee of $147 it lands slightly above BookmarkWiz on the price scale. Bookmarking Demon offers some unique features, such as being able to schedule automated bookmarking over time, adding your own Social Bookmark websites, and more.

A favorite among bloggers, OnlyWire offers a free basic membership with up to 300 submissions per month, in addition to their subscription based Pro and Enterprise memberships. What makes OnlyWire interesting is their membership plans. Below you’ll see two of their monthly plans:

• OnlyWire Pro w/1000 submissions + Captcha Solver = $13/month
• OnlyWire Pro w/2500 submissions + Captcha Solver = $30/month
• OnlyWire Enterprise w/5000 submissions + Captcha Solver = $200/month

But let’s move back on topic:

BookmarkWiz 1.36 Update requires a New Key – visiting the Forum

When I updated my copy of BMW and it told me my product key was invalid, I went to Nossie’s Support Forum to see what could be done about it. Others had already reported this issue and Nossie told us to contact Support via e-mail and ask for a new key. I promptly submitted my system ID, and a couple of hours later I received a new and working product key. Not bad at all.

A few words about Captcha Resolvers

Without Captcha Solver you will have to type in the Captcha answers by hand. This goes for BookmarkWiz as much as other Social Bookmarking and/or Scraping tools. BMW supports several Captcha Solver services, which is something you will want to pay a few dollars for, because otherwise, typing in every single answer by hand as dozens of Captcha windows pops up during a session, is annoying, and time consuming.

Following Captcha Resolve services are supported by and built into BookmarkWiz:

• DeCaptcher
• BypassCaptcha
• BeatCaptchas
• DeathByCaptcha

Other features of BookmarkWiz

Besides being mainly a pure Social Bookmarking tool, BookmarkWiz also offers some other, helpful features assisting me when establishing new domains and publishing blog posts and web articles among other things:

• Proxies: naturally, BMW supports free, public, shared and private proxies
• Blog Pinging Service (use it when publishing new content in your blog)
• Quick Index: QI moved one of my new domains to Page 2 within hours

Note: This is not a product review. I have owned and used BookmarkWiz for a while, and I am pleased with it overall. The reason I posted this update, “BookmarkWiz 1.36 Update requires a New Key,” is because the creator, Nossie, has shown time and time again that he is still working on and improving his product; new updates come out on a regular basis, old and no longer working Social Bookmark websites removed, and new ones added.

Updating your BookmarkWiz installation is as easy as locating the application folder in your (Windows) Start menu, right-click the Update icon and choose “Run as Administrator”. A moment later your copy of BMW has been updated.

BookmarkWiz is not an all-in-one solution for your traffic needs, but it takes care of the Social Bookmarking part pretty well. It is not a perfect and fully polished product, but as long as the creator continues improving upon it, and considering the price is merely a one-time fee of $97 (don’t forget the discount) and not a monthly subscription, it makes BMW an interesting choice still.

However, with the last Google update in mind I would probably use a free OnlyWire account for now, at least until I had updated myself enough on the recent update to fully understand its consequences and how it affects Social Bookmarking. I already know that profile back-linking has taken a blow with this Google update, so don’t go spending your money on lots of IM products not knowing exactly what it does.

Other than that, I will continue using my BookmarkWiz software, especially on my new domains, and I will report back here when I see the first results of my efforts.

Easy Money Central is down until I have installed a couple plugins and imported the old content and settings later today. Sorry in advance for any possible inconvenience. Also, I am currently learning more about the ClickBump Engine 4 system and how to utilize it on my other WP sites, and I will post an update with a short review on it when I figure it out.

Splinterbiz

What happened, where’d time go? All of a sudden my calendar shows March 2011, and I could swear I was still celebrating Christmas yesterday! I have been pretty lazy and/or lacking motivation for the last couple of months, and I am thankful for the semi-automated income from Adsense and Amazon. Anyway, I hope you are doing well, and that you find some interesting reading in this monster post of mine, because I am pretty hyped about the last IM products I’ve got, and for the first time in a while I look forward to get started with my next project.

WordPress Rocks!

WordPress keeps growing and improving, and what you are looking at here is WordPress 3.1 with one of the default themes, the Twenty Ten. I have not edited it any since I installed it, having been struggling somewhat with lots of various problems possibly caused by all the hundreds of lines of code that I have previously changed and played around with in my WordPress installation.

So far I am really impressed with the “new WordPress”. The custom menus aren’t new, but the overall improvements shows a lot of care has gone into improving and polishing the blog, website and CMS platform we all have grown attached to. Many marketers and entrepreneurs still prefer other and similar solutions, i.e. Joomla, however I believe WP with its strong foundation and versatile structure is bigger than ever.

I was going to just clean this slate and re-install WordPress around Christmas, but better late than never, and I will have a look at backing up the database and installing everything fresh on my server, today.

The Game called Internet Marketing

Internet Marketing is as exciting as it ever was, perhaps even more so these days. New products are being developed and released every other day, prices are more often beginner-friendly (IncanSoft makes a great example). And sometimes you simply need to buy another tool or two, if only to feel you are moving somewhere (preferably forward) with your efforts, and not just standing in the same spot as last year.

But please, don’t buy just any random and hyped-up IM product you see offered in forum WSO’s, on Twitter or wherever you may roam on your never-ending hunt for the perfect tool to aid in your efforts to make money online. Sometimes it is wise to invest a couple of dollars in a new tool, especially when it offers a lot for the money. The tools mentioned below are ones I had been considering for many months, before I finally took the plunge and bought them all. Having been paid by Google several times since I got started with Adsense, now is a perfect time to pay something back to IM product developers.

So, I went out and purchased some new IM tools in the last couple of days. I look forward to take full advantage of it, and I will share my experience with you, in case you are sitting on the fence on these products yourself, like I did for a while:

• Market Samurai ($149, see below for discount information)
• The Best Spinner ($7 trial then $77/year, see below for discount information)
• ScrapeBox ($97, see below for a discount information)
• ClickBump Engine ($97, no discount available as far as I can tell)

I’ll describe these products briefly as follows (no affiliate links, promise):

Market Samurai is the Ultimate All-In-One solution for Keyword and Niche research. The current price is $149, which is what I paid for it, having already used the free trial period last year. Honestly, the Noble Samurai team has earned my money 100% with this extremely powerful market research toolbox. I recommend nonetheless that you sign up for their free trial first, then upgrade (if you like it) to to the full version for $97.

The Best Spinner runs at $7 for a trial period, then $77 annually. It is still being regarded one of the very best article/blog spinning software solutions available today. Note that TBS is not an fully automated spinning tool, it doesn’t produce worthless crap articles that will only get you banned from article directories and worst case scenario lose your SERP ranking. It still requires that you use your grey matter, but it helps tremendously with re-writing PLR and other content into high quality spins. I hope they won’t get mad at me for sharing this, but I pay only $47 annually for the very same product, thanks to the kind Warrior Forum member kingwarrior and his discount thread here. The offer won’t last much longer, so if you read this in due time and are still on the fence for this product, I strongly suggest that you take the plunge now.

ScrapeBox is currently $97, and even though I respect the work they have done with this incredibly powerful scraper enough to not post a discount link, it suffices to say that a quick Google search will return a $57 discount price for this product. ScrapeBox is capable of producing huge lists with auto approval WP blogs with a decent PR, and build tons of back-links. Like weapons and live ammo, always treat ScrapeBox with caution, and it is generally recommended that you use it with high quality, reliable private proxies. Another thing that makes ScrapeBox cool: it has built-in add-on support, with one-click installation! I have installed several add-ons to filter out WP blogs with PR 0, no comments, to check the domain back-links, outbound links, and more. Very versatile and powerful tool.

ClickBump Engine is another $97 product made by and for WordPress addicts. There is no discount available for this product, I’m afraid, but here’s what you get for less than a hundred US dollars:

• The ClickBump Engine system
• 12 SEO-optimized WordPress templates (not themes)
• Jumpstart: with one mouseclick your brand new WP blog is 99% complete
• ClickBump SEO: reads your new posts & gives advice on SEO improvements
• Buy new Premium WP themes for only $10 each, with easy installation
• Superb, free support and updates for 6 months included, then a small $17 fee for future support and updates
• Earn up to $48,50 per sale (ClickBump Engine bundle) as a CB affiliate

Everything considered, this is a great offer. I am working on setting up a couple of new WP sites with this system as I write this, and I will come back with updates when I’m done. The Warrior Forum members have been all over this product since developer Scott Blanchard released it, and they are loving it, from what I can see. The only thing I am not too hyped about is the X-Factor-clone WP templates included with the ClickBump Engine package. I probably won’t use them, and instead I purchased some of the affordable WP Premium themes running at ~$10-15 each. These are uploaded and activated from within the WP ClickBump panel.

That’s all for now. I am going to prepare my puny WP database for the next backup, then remove everything reminiscent of this current installation, before I install everything again. Don’t be surprised if I decide to use the ClickBump Engine for Easy Money Central as well! With its powerful SEO juice plug-ins, I see no reason not to.

Take care and have a most excellent day!