How I Check My Search Rankings For Free

So to get the ball rolling we’ll start with something very easy. The problem:- You want to know where you website is ranking for certain search words/phrases. Ideally you want this information over time so you can see how your rankings are changing but you really don’t want the hassle of manually trawling through result pages looking for your website.

The great news is that there is a tool that lets you do this 100% for free, it’s called WebCEO. Once you’ve got WebCEO downloaded and installed your first job is to “Add New Site”, it’s all really simple stuff. Add your URL and a name for your website. Now your site is added you can start the “Check Rankings” tool. You’ll be greeted with a screen that looks like this:-

As you can see there are 3 things that you have to do. Decide what search engines you want to check for rankings, what keywords/phrases you are looking to rank for and finally how deep to scan each search engine. I normally scan to a depth of 4 pages, any deeper than that and you’re not “really” ranking.

WebCEO has a huge list of search engines and directories that you can check your rankings in. One of the features that I really like is that it allows you to see where you are in the various regional varieties of Google. Not being based in America this is very important to me.

Once you’re setup you can run it for the first time, WebCEO will go away and try and find your site for each phrase/keyword. Once it’s finished you can check your positions in a variety of ways (e.g. by search engine, keyword etc) There is also very comprehensive history reporting allowing you to see how things have changed.

So that’s your ranking check setup, however ideally you don’t want to have to run this manually. More good news. WebCEO has a built in scheduler, now you’ve configured your Check Ranking task you can automatically run it using the scheduler at whatever interval you choose. To be honest I tend not to check mine any more frequently than every 2 weeks - 1 month because rankings bob up and down all the time. Checking this stuff daily could drive you insane! It’s much easier to look for and try to react to trends.

The WebCEO ranking checker is actually a very powerful tool and there can be a lot more to it than what I’ve shown here. My goal was just to show you a very simple of way of monitoring your search rankings for free. Experience tells me at this point a bunch of Mac users will start whinging “what about me?” There are probably programs out there that will do the same or a similar job job but the harsh truth is that as a Mac user you are in a minority, a huge majority of software is written for the Windows platform so I’d suggest you get yourself a good emulator. Alternatively think about maybe getting some cheap Windows VPS hosting. There are a number of services out there that offer a Windows VPS for considerably less than $99 a month that you can install your own software on.

Next in the series:- I’m going to show you how to find your own valuable expired domain names so that you’ve no need for the Domain Marketplace.

Free Alternatives To Shoemoney Tools

Networking, it’s very important. Go to a conference, get together with link minded individuals and it could lead you virtually anywhere. Especially if your “friends” will go along with anything for a quick buck.

Don’t mind me, I’m just rambling.

Isn’t it amazing how popular Shoemoney Tools have become recently? All of a sudden every big name blogger has been using them and they’re great. Oh and by the way you get access for less than $20 for 1 month only. Take John Chow for example, he made more than $2000 in affiliate commissions last month by bigging up Shoemoney Tools. I have a question though, if he’s been using them since the TAC how come his PPC spend hasn’t changed that much? The main point of these tools is to help you profit from PPC, if they work for you then your PPC spend would go up, a lot?! His link profile hasn’t altered that much and he’s certainly not using the ping back method. What part of Shoemoney Tools is he using exactly? Doesn’t matter though cos it’s much easier to make money by writing a blog post for your mate and getting affiliate commissions instead. $2000 plus for next to nothing, awesome work! Especially when you’re helping out a “friend”.

This sort of ring leading gets on my tits. It’s aimed at the lowest common affiliate marketer. Somebody who can’t afford to spend $100 (no sign of that $250 a month price increase yet, shock, horror) a month but because his favourite bloggers are recommending something (entirely non biased and nothing to do with any recent networking at a convention or the affiliate commissions) they will throw a bit of money at it just to give it a go. Market research will probably show you that most people will take a punt up to around $20?

Here’s a tip for you, if you can’t afford $100 a month for Shoemoney tools then they’re not really going to benefit you. You NEED a budget to get anything of any value out of PPC, if $100 is too much forget it. Is there value in Shoemoney Tools? Certainly. But only for certain types of marketers. Do I believe that all of a sudden they are the greatest set of marketing tools on the planet because there is an affiliate commission in it? Do I bollocks! I get the impression that if one of the top bloggers took a dump in a plastic bag and tried to sell it you’d suddenly see a deluge of “shit-in-a-bag made me money” blog posts.

I can’t really do anything about all this, it’s just the way the wanky blogosphere works. What I will do though is a series of posts about free alternatives to the various elements of Shoemoney Tools. I was one of the early paid users so I’ve got a good idea of what was available. Over the next few days, weeks, months or whenever I get around to it I’ll offer up some free alternatives. There is nothing magic about Shoemoney Tools, just a bit of text parsing and hooking up to some APIs. The information is out there for free, you just need to know where to look.

To Be Brutally Fucking Honest

Once upon a time there was a young man, his name was Paul. At around age 6 Paul discovered the wonderful world of computers when his big brother was bought his very first ZX81. He was instantly taken with these fancy new toys that gave him far more interactivity than his He-Man toy figures ever could. But he was a selfish little sod and rather than playing the games that other people “wanted” him to play Paul thought he rather play his own games. So at age 7 he decided to learn how to make-up his own games for his Vic20. By age 9 Paul had written several adventure games in Basic, these were fun but what he really wanted to do was move things around on the screen, like the pros. So at age 11, on the pride and joy that was his commodore Amiga he taught himself Assembler. He then became an anti-social little git as he spent years knocking out program after program. From that point on Paul only dreamt of writing computer programs for a living, that was his destiny.

Jump forward a few years and Paul is now 17 and looking for his first job. He’s got several more languages in his locker and can write pretty much anything he wants. He’s offered the choice of 2 jobs, 1 as a developer in the government, one as a programmer in a small software house. He’s offered both jobs on the basis that he shows them 100 lines of the maths behind his recently finished GPS system. He KNOWS deep down that even though the pay is much less, the benefits are non existent and it will be much harder work he wants to work for the small software house. He LOVES programming, writing applications is his life, be it games, database systems or just the fun little applications that make peoples lives easier. It’s been his thing since he was 6 and he’s bloody good at it. He’s better than good, Paul is only looking for a job because he’s recommended to leave college a year early after one of his lecturers sees the game he writes in pure C to demonstrate how a processor works. To sit in a government office programming exactly what he’s told is not his idea of fun.

At age 27 Paul finds himself in a position where he can work for himself. His programs have become so popular over the internet that just the traffic on his software site creates a good income. He then gets his moment in the spot light when one of his programs appears on PC Pro as one the 100 greatest freeware programs ever. This is great, he now has all his time to write what he wants. BUT this is where his mindset changes. Seeing the potential money that can be made online Paul’s concentration starts to wander. Rather than doing what he loves he starts to spend more and more time doing something that he hates, writing! Before he knows it Paul has that many websites that need fresh “text” content that he’s spending all day every day just writing. He’s being a dickhead, he’s forgotten the one thing that he was truly good at - top notch software. What software he does write now is rushed and jumbled together. Paul has the freedom to do anything he wants at the moment and instead of doing what he loves, instead of writing programs that people download by the tens of thousand, instead of writing software that people link to in their thousands he’s writing this shit and trying to game links using ping backs. Yes he makes a very good living online but is there really any need to tell the world about it? He spends his time reading about affiliate marketers and MMO bloggers who with no actual “real” skills or talent at all, are millionaires. He finds himself defending affiliate marketing as a “legitimate” business when in reality he knows that it’s for scum. Tricking the stupid into parting with money for what is 99% crap. He looks up to these people, Chow, Cow, Shoemoney, Rowse, Johnson, Cruz and wants to be like “them”. From being brought up with fuck all he’s some how gone from the mentality of working your ass off for everything to just wanting the easy way. “Why write software (which requires a brain) when I can just churn out this brainless shit?” If he stopped to think for one minute he’d realise that all these people just had ONE lucky break. They’re not clever and it’s certainly not repeatable. He knows that the real “clever” marketers are people you don’t see or hear from. Paul has become a fucking joke in his own mind and his so far from happy it’s not funny.

To be brutally fucking honest this shit stops here. From now on I’m not an internet marketer, an affiliate marketer, a SEO or anything else that wank. I am somebody who makes his living writing software, not words.

For those that have read along with me for the last year, thanks. It has certainly been a step outside my comfort zone and I appreciate the support you’ve given me. My final bit of advice is simply this - step away from the internet and do something real with your lives. You’ll feel so much better for it, I promise. You could be the one that “gets lucky” with the internet but what are the chances really, you’d be better of trying to win that Euromillions Roll-over.

The $20,000 Dilemma!

It can happen. A slight miss calculation here, a change in the exchange rate there and suddenly you find yourself with $20,000 sat in the bank earning interest but burning a hole in your pocket. The question is what would you do with it? Do you invest it in the latest make money online fad, use it to put in some serious time with PPC affiliate marketing or something else?

Perhaps you buy some new gadgets or invest it in some dwindling stock?

Seeing as how the Euromillions draw this Friday is for a guaranteed £100 million jackpot maybe it’s worth blowing the whole lot on lottery tickets? Now there’s an idea!

Any and all suggestions welcomed.

Commission Videos

This is another very exciting potential revenue source for bloggers, have you ever heard of Commission Videos? Me either until last Saturday!

Commission Videos is a competitor to Google’s “Adsense in YouTube” style adverts, the difference being that instead of home movie style video that is the norm on YouTube they are offering video from top quality legitimate sources, no legal worries. Video source comes directly from respected partners such as the Associated Press and MTV for example. Commission Videos then marries this video source to some advertising and puts it in a widget of various sizes that you can embed in your blog or website.

So you’re probably thinking what is so revolutionary about this? Besides the whole “legal” thing (that matters to me) there is also the eCPM. They pay a huge $7 eCPM! So that’s $7 for every 1000 manual (your visitor presses play) video play backs. If you set the video to play automatically that rate drops to $0.50. That’s still not too shabby in my books.

Where Would I Use It?
I’ve got one class of visitor in particular in mind for this. Social bookmarking. In my experience people who arrive via Stumble, Digg etc ignore adverts. However, they’re a sucker for a bit of video in a post. A nice related news video in your controversial stumble worthy post and it’s going to be some quick dollars.

Paul Barlow - Over 18 years writing software combined with extensive SEO experience has meant that I've been able to make a good living online for many years! This blog covers the money making schemes I have and still use.

Don't Have A Website?

Quick And Easy Ways To Make Money Online