I received an email from a company I’ve previously bought stuff from in the past yesterday and though I swore I’d never succumb to another Internet Marketing offer, this one interested me enough to sign up for the “risk free offer” for a month.

Why not? In my experience, most of these companies do refund if asked to do so.

So, I joined something called SEO Monster. You’ll have to Google it, as I’m not into affiliate links at all these days and a link from here would imply a  recommendation, which a day after launch would be irresponsible.

The system works by essentially the user (that’s me in this case) writing articles and then adding in some alternative words and phrases that allow the system to “spin” each one into different unique content.

I had a few goes last night and wrote five unique 500 word articles based on aspects of my business that I wanted to promote.

Once an article is written, it is loaded into the “system” for others to pick up and use on their blogs. It’s a bit like something I bought many years ago and never used, but from memory, that was a lot more cumbersome and required work.

SEO Link Monster doesn’t really require work, as the system is pretty much automated.

A whole load of blogs are already loaded into the system, which then link back to up to 3 URL’s of your choice when your article is syndicated.

The sales blurb on the site says:

• The fastest and easiest way to rank #1 in Google, period!
• Which kind of links are critical to seeing a major boost in Google ranking in 2012!
• How fast you MUST build links to avoid being majorly penalized by Google!
• The best AND the worst ways to build these “right kind” of links to your website!
• How to actually benefit from the Google Panda update in 2012!

Looks impressive doesn’t it? But I’m not so sure, even at this very early stage.

You see, I know SEO and I know all about back-links. I also know from my own personal experience, that you don’t necessarily need tons of backlinks in order to get to number one in the search engines, but I had to give it a try. It’s new!

The part that interested me most was “The right kind of links” mentioned in the advertising.

I took a look this morning at the sites that published my articles. There were about a dozen of them. Every single one was a non-page-ranked site full of rubbish with no immediately determinable base subject.

My understanding has always been that good quality links must come from relevant sites. None of these were relevant to anything in my subject range.

Now, one of the things that the system recommends doing, is linking back to the blog page that the article is published on. Now I can see how that will work for the blog carrying the article. In fact, the system appears to use trackbacks and comments features in WordPress.

But the thing is, why would I want to link to a junk site? That will only damage me in the long term.

The system was only launched yesterday. I’ll give it more time, but my early impressions aren’t as I hoped they’d be. Perhaps I’ve been wrong for 14 years!

Everything works in the system and it’s very simple to use, but I really do question this whole issue of back-links. Personally, I think it’s a bit like “The Emporer’s New Clothes” because in all of my time online, I have never had the need to go out looking for back-links to my various sites in order to get them ranked highly in Google, Bing, Yahoo or any other search engine.

Before you decide that you must have tons of “quality back-links to see a major boost in your search engine rankings” and go looking for the link monster, bear in mind that if you sign up for the initial $47 followed by infinite monthly fees of $147, that’s just the start.

These guy want into your bank account and they’re good at it. The sales process for this system makes no less than 4 other upsell offers, each more expensive than the last and if tempted, you’ll be spending many hundreds of dollars in monthly fees. (I think it was about $700 total). To say I was pissed off by the time I managed to get what I wanted is an understatement.

Each time I clicked on the “no thanks” link, yet another window with an amazing video offer would appear. One dropped the price offered on the previous page by $100 – what does that tell you?

You buy into a system and then you’re told that if you really want all of the benefits promised on the sales page, you really need to upgrade to the “secret sauce” versions that costs a hell of a lot more than the system you just bought into.

Of course, there will be those who rave about this new product, simply they are affiliates looking for a share of the action. I expect there will be a lot of them and that’s all part of the hype in any product launch.

I did like this review from Dave Baker though – he’s had the system for a month and has looked more deeply into things than I have and seems to have come to a different conclusion having examined the quality of the backlinks: http://dbpmarketing.com/seo-link-monster-review/.I’ve included it here because it really is a nice piece of research and not yet another affiliate promotion.

I’ve always been of the opinion that it is important to host your own web site or sites, ever since I first started studying how search engines behave.

At the moment there are lots of free and paid web site building services, aimed predominantly at the small business and personal user sectors.

They have a place in the market, as many smaller companies and hobbyist individuals don’t have the resources to go out and build themselves a site and many more don’t have the budget to employ a company or Internet hotshot to build one for them.

I took the time and trouble to learn all I needed to know very early on, so these days, playing catch-up with newer technologies isn’t that big a deal and after more than 10 years of being online, I can still achieve top ten Google ranking for my own sites and convert those rankings into money.

But now, with so many instant site builders on the market, it’s easy to see why people will be tempted to use them in preference to employing somebody or having to learn everything from scratch.

The prospect of being able to simply log in to a web site, add some text and pictures and have a web site published instantly is tempting to say the least.

However, Yoast.com has today published a very strong argument against usingsuch site builders and highlights the case of GoDaddy, which charges its customers for using the site builder, but then adds a number of links by way of anchor text to the bottom of every web site it produces – all pointing back to them of course.

It is possible to turn them off, if you know how, but of course, we are dealing with Internet newbies here and it’s highly probable that they don’t know how to turn such links off.

It’s not illegal (as Yoast declares), but is questionable practice to say the least and of course GoDaddy aren’t the first to use other people’s sites and web properties in this way.

Google say that footer text isn’t an important factor in search engine ranking terms, but Yoast’s research along with the help of  Search Metrics suggests otherwise.

Read the article here and while you’re there, download his excellent SEO plugin – it’s the only one I use these days.

As we approach the end of 2011 and get ready for the works Christmas party (tomorrow as it happens), I thought I’d take a quick look back at 2011 and see whether things got better or worse and define what worked.

Two of the best pieces of software I have used this year have been Yoast’s SEO WordPress plugin and Gravity Forms. Both of these plugins have made my online life a lot easier and have definitely added positively to my bottom line. Those links are clean and are not affiliate links. If you’re not using WordPress, wat’s wrong with you?

Dropping the idea of starting my own domain development service in February helped me gain some focus after seeing some of the crap I was being asked to get involved with. No offense people, but honestly, 99% of the names that were put forward as being “premium”, I would not have paid registration fee for.

I realised at that point, that my development skills were best kept for my own sites, promoting my own business.

Finally getting my UK commercial property portal up and running properly in April helped a lot. It’s only now starting to have a real affect on the business and is getting noticed by some very useful people. I have resisted ALL temptation to accept any kind of paid advertising or links on the site and will continue to do so through 2012.

Buying a van was a unusual thing for me to do in June, but again, that relatively small investment helped me focus on the business more than anything else. It’s a van for business and I feel now like we have a proper one. For years, I’ve been saying that I don’t work because I enjoy what I do so much. Having a van adds a strange sense of working class somehow in a way that turning up to client sites in a Mercedes doesn’t. I think it’s because it makes my partner and I look less like sales people and more like doers – must be the ladders we have on the roof rack.

Honestly, it’s horrible to drive, but gives us an edge that others in the same profession as us don’t have and can’t convey.

Profession. There’s a word. I belong to a profession now. Not an “industry”, though for the life of me, I can’t understand what industry there is in my previous life of domaining, nor recruitment which I wasted more than 15 years doing.

Yes, dropping my “domainer” tag in july turns out to have been the most important thing I did back in July 2011. I still have my domain holdings and will continue to hold them, it’s just they are a lot more focused now. I am an end user of domains, the bloke that domainers (including myself) have been searching for all these years.

Dropping the domainer tag has enabled me to focus exclusively on my surveying business and the results in the last half of the year have reflected that. Seriously, if you want success, concentrate on a niche you’re comfortable with to the exclusion of everything else, business-wise of course. Try it for 6 months and see what happens.

My “saying no” experiment that I began in August, whereby I switch off all computers and mobile telephones at 5:30 and weekends has worked. I never needed those distractions. Emails can wait and they do. Did you know that if you don’t read an email the moment it comes in, that it’s still there the next day? It’s taken me more than 12 years to figure that one out.

So those are things that worked and continue to work. They are what I shall be taking into 2012 without too much further meddling on my part.

Our staff (even those in my partner’s other business) all have work wear now – branded with the name “BuildingSurveys.com” and for the first time ever, we are using proper printed stationary and business cards. It all feels real because it is. What started out as another domain name acquisition is now a fully fledged commercial operation and you know what? It has credibility and gets us to the top table in the commercial property world.

Domains are not the be all and end all. Developed correctly and applied in the right manner, they are a wonderful tool, but in all honesty, they are just the start of the journey.

So what didn’t work out as I’d have wished in 2011?

Only two things really. My new iPhone4 – I sold it on eBay after two days and didn’t even look at the 4s. And then there was my iPad. Yes, it works, but what’s the point really? I took it to Kenya thinking it would be useful, only to discover that a notebook is far more relevant. I haven’t used it since. It’s going on eBay I think. What a waste.

Happy Christmas if you celebrate it and if not, then happy 2012. I won’t be around again now until then!

Update Note: It took precisely 32 minutes after posting today’s entries for me to receive TWO offers from people wanting to know if I’d be interested in buying and developing their domains. I didn’t want to be rude about the names in question, but not only can’t these people read, but they also need to do some research about what makes a name suitable for development. (Clue – it’s not the domain, it’s the business behind it).