The Scribe SEO WordPress plugin appealed to me immediately. Let’s face it, optimizing copy for SEO has to be about as exciting as an episode of the Kardashian’s – painful, and excruciatingly boring.

I have a reasonably good handle on SEO copywriting, but, with a business hell bent on world domination, a 20 month old son, and great surf beaches just down the road from my house, and home office, when I finally do get some time to write the last thing I want to do is spend hours on SEO copywriting.

The Scribe SEO plugin turns the job into a five minute, easy, task. Seriously!

It took me while to find and settle on the right WordPress theme. Finally I had something stable, easily customized, that didn’t break every time there was an update, and that’s set up well for SEO optimization, at least as a platform.

The missing link, of course, is the SEO optimization of the content itself. That’s where the Scribe SEO WordPress plugin becomes a perfect companion to Thesis

How does it work?

Easy. First I write my post, with a general idea of keywords and subject matter but really quite freely and without regard to SEO.

Then, I make sure the Scribe Content Optimizer gives my Title Tag, Meta Description, and Content the green light, meaning simply that they’ve been done, then I click the analyze button.

The Scribe plugin then gives a report that looks something like…

…as you can see I did pretty well myself but with a couple of minor adjustments I get…

The Scribe SEO WordPress plugin also provides me with a set of tags I can simply cut and paste into my post and I’m done. All of this SEO Copywriting has taken me approximately ten minutes. How good is that?

If you’re like me and you know that SEO copywriting is something that has to be done, but you don’t want to spend half your life doing it, then the Scribe SEO WordPress plugin is something you should seriously consider. I’m glad I did.

UPDATE: I Googled the phrase “scribe SEO plugin” (without the quotations) at 9:30am the morning after I published the article (less than 12 hours) and found my post on the 1st page. I’m searching from Australia, if that makes a difference.

Affiliate links were used in this post.

In case you don?t know Disqus and Intense Debate are comment management systems that integrate into a number of popular blog applications, including stand alone WordPress, the technology this site is built on.

I?ve never been that keen on the standard WordPress comment system. The latest revision combined with the Thesis theme I use, and recommend, is a significant improvement, but I was looking for something that had more on, and off site integration with Social Media applications, and the ability to aggregate my comments from other sites into a single location. Both Disqus and Intense Debate do this.

I?m not going to go into a detailed comparison of the two systems, do a search for Discus versus Intense Debate and you?ll find plenty of information. Alex Popescu?s post called Commenting Services face to face… is a good place to start. But, what I found was that, although I got a sense that Disqus was edging out in front of Intense Debate in terms of overall take up, I never read anything that gave me a clear winner. I was undecided.

So I went ahead and installed Intense Debate.

Twenty four hours later I?m using Disqus, and I?m happy with it.

Here?s the thing…Intense Debate would not allow me to edit comments, nor could I edit my replies after they were submitted. That, folks, was a show stopper for me.

Ok, so you can get around it with a bit of maneuvering backwards and forwards in WordPress but that defeats the purpose. On the Intense Debate blog they cite concerns about censorship in their rationale, I’m really not sure this holds up, after all we still get a delete button – if I want to censor something, I?ll delete it.

It?s not about censorship, healthy debate and opposing opinions make great conversation and a lively blog. It?s about editorial discretion and quality control. If I want to fix a typo, repair a broken link, remove content that might be subject to a company?s confidentiality from an otherwise good comment, or any other quality issue, I should be able to.

For a regular reader, or commenter – especially if you comment on a lot of blogs – I recommend that you get a Disqus profile. You can have one for a commenter, publisher, or both. It?s free and helps you keep track of your online activity. I hope you enjoy this feature on my site.

I?m somewhat cynical about hype and sales letters but I recognize their role in the sales process, the purpose of this Affiliate Elite review is to explore the reality of Affiliate Elite versus the promise and hype.

I?ve been keen to grow my search marketing (what Chris Carpenter?s eBook Google Cash was all about) revenue alongside my website generated income, primarily because search marketing, as opposed to building and promoting a website, offers the most immediate high income opportunity available today, but, it also comes with the risk of doing your dough faster than a Lindsay Lohan trip back to rehab, so I have been looking for an edge, looking for a competitive analysis tool that will take the drudgery out of product analysis, let me know what competition I?m up against, what, and how they?re doing it, and to compete successfully with them. Affiliate Elite promises to be that tool.

In order to do an Affiliate Elite review I, obviously, had to buy the product. My last experience with a hyped up “rock the affiliate world”, competition killing, piece of software was a debacle of mammoth proportions, so I?m pleased to say that the Affiliate Elite sales and installation process was flawless, simple, and it worked right away. I?ve used two of Brad Callen?s products, SEO Elite and Keyword Elite, happily, and successfully, over the past two years and I have to say, as far as software, support, and training are concerned, these Guy?s have their act together.

Once you have downloaded the application you gain access to a series of fifteen training videos that, not only show you how to use the system but, provide strong insight into the competitive power you now have at your fingertips. What?s immediately apparent is that a lot of effort has gone into ensuring your success with the software by educating you in the practice and discipline you need to follow to bring in those commission cheques. The best thing is you can continue to revisit these videos while you develop your winning strategy.

Continuing on with the Affiliate Elite review, the software has four “projects”.

Project #1: Find Profitable Affiliate Products to Promote

The concept of Affiliate Marketing is a simple one but, the challenge is finding products to promote that you know are going to convert into commission. You really only have control over the referral stage so you want to be sure you are sending your referrals to products that are going to sell, especially if you?re paying to get them there. Affiliate Elite gives you access to the entire Clickbank and PayDotCom databases, more than twenty five thousand, high commission, products, along with the performance statistics you need to determine which of those products are selling now, which ones are worth promoting, and the one?s most likely to earn you commissions right away. Awesome!

The question could be why just Clickbank and PayDotCom? Personally I think that’s a moot point, I have affiliations with several other marketing companies because their products and services suit the themes of my websites, however, my very last sale on Clickbank was worth $US121.00 in commission to me. That?s a very healthy commission, and it came from one sneaky little link in an unrelated article! So, In my mind it?s better to focus in one area rather than add the complexity of multiple companies into the mix.

Project #2: Reverse Google Search

On the Internet the keyword rules, if you haven?t got keyword research and application sussed then you?re in the same position as an unfit climber trying to climb Mt. Everest with bare feet wearing only a pair of board shorts. You?re going to fail.

This project is the Holy Grail of keyword research. I would have paid for this feature alone. Ever since I started working with keywords I thought the whole process would have been a whole lot better if we could just find the keywords our successful competitors were using, if, in other words, the whole process was reversed. Now we can …enough said!

Project #3: Analyze Adwords Competition

Now that you have your list of keywords you can pull out the best ones, run this project, and find all the advertisers, their ads and their landing pages. This is the competitive intelligence that will give you the edge. Not only in terms of being able to quickly mimic the most successful campaigns, but, deconstructing the strategies of the most successful marketers so you have what it takes to be one yourself.

Project #4: Find Super Affiliates

With this project you can use the Merchant ID?s of the top websites for the niche you found in Project #1 to find out who their affiliates are, all of them, including their contact information. Why would you do this you ask? The purpose of this project is so that you identify and contact people who have demonstrated superior marketing skills, Super Affiliates, with the potential of entering into joint ventures or, at the very least, see how they became Super Affiliates in the first place.

So, the question is does this product deliver the goods? Here?s the thing, for the purpose of this Affiliate Elite review the product gets a major thumbs up from me, the information it provides is simply astounding, Affiliate Elite should be a part of your marketing arsenal, but consider this;

If…

X = Affiliate Elite

Y = Your innate intelligence, aptitude, understanding of marketing concepts, tenacity, determination, fortitude, etc.

Z = Time and effort.

Then…

The formula for success with Affiliate Elite will be X x (Y + Z) = Degree of Success

Brad Callen?s Affiliate Elite gives you factor X, an incredibly powerful piece of competitive analysis software that gives you the edge, Y and Z are up to you. Undoubtedly, a significant proportion of the people who have already purchased the product will be expecting it to be some kind of “magic wand” that will do everything for them, the rest will be collecting their commission cheques.

How much does it cost? Look, for what it is it?s very cheap, a one off payment and a small monthly fee, but, this is really insignificant because Affiliate Elite is itself a Clickbank product. The commission you get as an Affiliate is on both the sale, and the monthly fee, and, the way it?s structured means you only have to sell two copies to cancel out your original cost. I’ve already done it.

I hope you?ve found this Affiliate Elite review helpful, I strongly recommend this product, now excuse me, I?ve got money to make.

based on their traffic, after which they analyze their clients websites and redirect the most relevant domains to them. Sounds pretty reasonable, in fact I had often thought of buying an expired domain in an appropriate category myself in the hope that I could shorten the time it takes for a site to come to prominence (yes, it takes time…usually lots of it) but hadn’t really pursued it.

I wont go into too much detail regarding the revisitors.com sales pitch as it’s all there when you visit their site but, in a nutshell, the message, which is both stated, and strongly implied by the graphics on the site, comes down to the simple equation, targeted traffic = leads = big profits!

Let’s examine the revisitors.com promise then. First you are presented with a before and after graphic which pretty much implies that with their product you’ll see steady traffic, your PayPal receipts will grow from hundreds to thousands of dollars, and your Alexa rank will head steadily north (ironically enough you could say that although the before graph is patchy, it’s actually trending up, whereas the after graph has peaked in the middle and is now trending down…but that’s just being pedantic isn’t it?). Then they go on to emphasize that it delivers 100% genuine and unique visitors.

Show me a webmaster who doesn’t want thousands of highly targeted visitors every day, and I’ll show you a standards compliant Microsoft browser…I decided to give it a run.

TotallyAweseomeFreebies.com is my crash test dummy site, they say that you learn from your mistakes and, if that’s the case, I’ve learned a lot from this site, but I think that it’s vital to your success as an Internet marketer to have a site where you can afford to take risks, then apply the knowledge to your more lucrative sites. Revisitors.com offer a variety of traffic plans, starting from 2500 visitors and going up to the hundreds of thousands, I chose 25,000 visitors for the reasonable price of $99 or .004¢ per visitor!

My plan started on August 20^th 2007, take a look at the following stats taken from Google Analytics for TotallyAwesomeFreebies.com.

Now, when you look at the July/August 2007 column you can see the problem I was intent on solving.
Every 7 visitors to the site converted to a $1.36 average lead, but, getting them there with PPC actually meant that every visitor was costing me .06¢. I needed to get this into the positive. Looking at this extremely optimistically you do the maths and 2500 visitors a day kisses the day job goodbye, as long as the traffic is either organic, or much cheaper. That’s why the Revisitors.com offer looks attractive…but, does it work?

A look at the second row pretty much answers the question. Revsitors.com traffic actually arrives via a server called yourtrafficserver.com so Google Analytics makes it very easy to distinguish this traffic from anything else. You remember that I bought the 25,000 visitor plan, sure enough, on 22^nd September my account stated that they had in fact delivered 25,000 visitors to my site over the course of approximately one month. Google Analytics, on the other hand, reported 5978 visits from the server at revisitors.com, a discrepancy of 19,022.

Looking at the number of pages visited, and the time spent on the site, an average of one second, raises significant questions about the validity of their claim to targeted traffic. Ok, it could mean that my site completely sucks, but the numbers from PPC/Organic would seem to indicate otherwise. Then, when you look at the bounce rate, the number of visitors from revisitors.com who clicked the back button, and see that it’s 98.91% you have a serious problem. Search engines, seeing a site with a bounce rate this bad would rate it of very low relevance. I had to turn the PPC back on just so this figure would improve. There’s no point pursuing the discrepancy in traffic volume with them, the quality of the traffic is so bad it’s not worth the effort.

On another note, my Alexa rank didn’t budge.

I’ll conclude by saying that in trying this product I chose to ignore the absolute bleeding obvious; why, if you could simply buy targeted traffic in this quantity and have it convert to a respectable percentage, would there be a multi million dollar Internet marketing training industry at all? It didn’t work for me and I doubt that it will work for you, but you could always try it for yourself.

Finally, if you’re interested in knowing more about the site metrics I referred to in the table above, you might want to check this out.