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SEO / Blog Promotion Resources

  • Blog Traffic in 30 Days: get traffic fast. Proven, heavy-hitting, big results for little cost marketing geared specifically for blog traffic. Outlines easy-to-implement tactics and a 30-day plan to get visitors to your site fast. The ideas in this book will make your traffic explode.
  • SEO Bible: dry and doesn’t contain many specific marketing tactics, but it’s the most comprehensive overview of SEO available. Great desktop reference.
  • Search Engine Marketing: comprehensive strategy for search engine marketing, but much of the book revolves around paid links. Valuable content on planning and tracking a paid keyword marketing program.
  • The New Rules of Marketing: web site marketing for the 21st century. Think podcasts, viral videos, product placements, and the like.
  • WordTracker keyword tool: hands down, the best keyword research tool on the market; get a free 7-day trial here
  • Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool: free keyword research tool; only use for general research, not specific targeting
  • Keyword Elite: my favorite keyword tool. While I love WordTracker results, they can get very tedious to manage, and that’s a task Keyword Elite handles with aplomb. It also includes free lifetime access to WordTracker’s free keyword tool, which gives you Wordtracker’s great results within Keyword Elite’s powerful interface. See it in action and claim two free e-books on how to leverage it at the provided URL.
  • Six-Figure Plugin Suite: a suite of plug-ins for your WordPress blog that will help you drive traffic through referrals, social media, and RSS feeds. Completely automated-just click and go.
  • Directory Submitter: software to help ease the work involved in submitting your site to numerous web directories.
  • Article Submitter: software to help ease the work involved in submitting your articles to article directories
  • Unique Article Wizard: content spinner, account manager, unique article creator, article publisher and syndicater

Monetization Resources

Auto-Pilot VRE: my favorite off-blog monetization method is to use auto-pilot sites and blogs to supplement my blog income. As a gold member of Hyper VRE, I am allowed to distribute their software for free, so grab your auto-pilot site case study and your free software and try it out!

Six-Figure Plugin Suite: a suite of plug-ins for your WordPress blog that will help you earn money through affiliate programs, eBay, and Amazon, and also manage your AdSense ads. Completely automated-just click and go.

Recommended Theme Providers

Other Free Theme Directories

Free Plug-ins

Premium Plugins

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Blogging Tools and Resources

  • Aweber: e-mail list management service
  • InfoGoRound PLR Service: large selection of above average PLR content and tools
  • PLR Pro: best PLR content available on the web
  • SEO Elite: the leading search engine optimization program available
  • Instant Article Wizard: article research and writing assistant
  • GistWeb: research tool for article writing
  • WinSCP: easy to use FTP client
  • FileZilla: popular FTP client
  • WinZip: popular zip archive tool
  • WinRAR: popular zip archive tool

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Get Hundreds of Easy Backlinks

Hundreds and easy, yes. High-quality, not so much!

If you are a member of any of my other groups, you know that I’m not a big fan of reciprocal linking and directory submission. However, I make exceptions for auto-pilot sites.

Let’s face it. These are sites that we setup once, and automatically drip content into month after month. I generally like to carry out a 20-point marketing effort and then I let the site drift. In these cases, I use both directory submissions and reciprocal linking.

Today I have two FREE tools you can use for these tasks:

Directory Submitter

Create a project, add in several descriptions, several titles, several anchors, and then run through Directory Submitter’s extensive list of free and paid directories. When you click a directory name, you are taken to a pre-filled submission form. Click, click, you’re done. Move on to the next directory.

My favorite part is to sort the directories by Page Rank, and then submit only to the free directories with highest Page Ranks. Drip your links in at a 10 to 20 a week pace.

Ethic Links

There are several levels to Ethic Links, starting with free. You can also get free platinum access if you purchase any of JP’s products. I use Niche Video Site Builder and Niches in a Box, so I’m able to add unlimited reciprocal link exchanges to my sites and blogs. The best part is that you choose categories of links, so that they are more relevant that typical exchanges, and . . .

The higher the package level you get, the more ONE-WAY links you get. Start with the free service to see how it works.

If you decide you like the service, purchase Niches in a Box or Niche Video Site Builder and get free Platinum access. By the way, I use Niche Video Site Builder on almost EVERY new auto-pilot site I set up. It literally takes 5 to 10 minutes to add a thousand videos and syndicated content to your auto-pilot sites.

If you do choose to use a video site builder, make sure you use JP’s (the one linked below). There are others on the market that use an old version of the API, and these will cease working later this year!

Conclusion

I market all of my auto-pilot blogs in at least three steps. For my most promising ones, I follow a 20-step process. But all sites are marketed with:

  1. Article marketing
  2. Directory submissions & reciprocal links
  3. Forum marketing

So get the software above. It’s free, and it will really help you get the word out about your sites.

Good luck!

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Blueprint Steps #10 & 11: Promote & AdWords

Generating traffic is a book in itself — in fact, I currently have a traffic book in editorial review as I write this — so I won’t even suggest a full traffic plan. Rather, I’ll give you some ideas of what is very effective, and follow up on specific techniques that you might want to look at further.

1) Download Directory Submitter and submit your niche sites to directories. Free for 300+ directories; one-time fee to upgrade and submit to 2000+ directories. The free version works great, the paid version works even better.

2) Rewrite several niche pages as articles and submit to article directories. Download Article Submitter to automate the process. Free for the popular directories; one-time fee to upgrade and submit to all directories. The free version works great. Unique Article Wizard is also a fanatastic option — it costs money, but it allows you to syndciate your content, gaining you lots of backlinks.

3) Post comments on RELEVANT blogs. Or pay someone to post for you.

4) Post comments on RELEVANT forums. Or pay someone to post for you.

5) Answer niche questions on Yahoo answers with content from your site.

6) Add related links to relevant Wikipedia entries, provided your site is an AUTHORITY on your niche. Just don’t spam.

7) If you established a niche site, establish a blog and automate regular posting. If you set your niche site up as a blog, rewrite private label content and automate weekly blog posting.

8) Submit your blog to blog directories and claim it at Technorati.

9) Submit an RSS feed to all RSS directories.

10) See the Hyper VRE member area for a list of resources you can use to promote your new niche sites.

Search Traffic

If you SEO’d your niche sites properly, and used a good keyword tool to select your niches, your content should push you to the top of the SERP’s for your target keywords. If it doesn’t, then you’ve done something wrong, and the most likely culprit is your keyword selection. Back to the drawing board — use a good keyword tool this time!

Google AdWords

You will want to dominate the PPC listings as well as the organic SERP’s, but if your niche was carefully selected, this should remain both inexpensive and profitable. I’d highly recommend that you read the e-book “Google AdWords Made Easy.” If you don’t already have a copy of it, you can join my keyword analysis group and get the e-book as a freebie for joining.

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Blueprint Steps #7 and #8: Link and Cross-Promote

We’re going to look at the best way to link your niche family for search rankings and cross-promotion today.

Once you have your programs selected, we need to establish your network. The short version is that you’ll place your high-ticket affiliate products on your parent niche. The goal is to funnel lower-level niche traffic to this parent niche. This is important. This is why program selection is so important. Your lower-ticket items will be placed in the child niches.

In the below explanation, I’m going to assume you have one parent niche (P) and three child niches (C1, C2, and C3). Here’s how you’ll link your niche sites in this example:

C1 links to C2 and P. C2 links to C3 and P. C3 links to C1 and P. In other words, the children link to one other child each; and they all link to their parent. Make sense?

If you haven’t already done this, be sure to check out these two programs to help select your affiliate programs:

Free Software, Graphics, and Books

By the way, if you want to get your hands on all kinds of software and books to help you build your VRE empire, join the Auto-Pilot Premier member group. I give out hundreds of dollars worth of tools, templates, graphics, and books every month for the insanely low membership fee of $4.95!

What might surprise you is that I make next to no money on this program. Why? Because I spend almost all of those $4.95 membership fees to develop or purchase rights to products that I give to you as a member.

In essence, when you join the premier group, you are joining a buyer’s club. In fact, members get to request the types of content they’d like to see available for download!

I don’t know how I can be more fair than that. Join us today .

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Blueprint Steps #4 and #5: Create Your Sites

Today we’re going to discuss creating your auto-pilot sites, albeit very briefly. The folks at Hyper VRE do a better job than I can at explaining how to work their software, so you’ll want to leverage their resources should you need help getting started. If you haven’t yet viewed the software videos , now would be a good time.

You can also find the user manual on the computer where Hyper VRE is installed. Click Start > All Programs > HyperVRE > HyperVRE User Manual.

With your first niche family, you are now going to create one auto-pilot site for EACH family member. If you have one parent and three children, you should end up with a total of four sites. Take your time and get the site just right.

For each niche in your niche family, find the corresponding keyword list. Sort the list by KEI descending and note all keywords with a high KEI. Do the same for R/S and total searches. Hopefully you have a list of 20-30 (or maybe more) high-quality keyphrases, and a supporting list of 20-80 more keywords. I usually shoot for somewhere between 50 and 100 total keyphrases. Hyper VRE has a lite keyword tool built-in, but I always import my keyword lists, as my imported lists almost always are better targeted than Hyper VRE’s lists.

Choose whichever options you like, but I find that the magic formula consists of a mixture of custom and duplicate content. Obviously, purely custom content will work the best, but we only have one day to put this site together, so that’s not an option. Here’s what my “magic formula” might look like for a 50-page site:

  • For my five top keywords, that is, the best of the best, I create completely custom articles. I use an article wizard to create each of these articles in under 30 minutes. I don’t remember what life was like before this tool, but I can guarantee you that I will never go back!
  • For my remaining high-quality keyphrases, I use private label rights content (or here) that I rewrite and optimize for the specific keyword for that page. These usually take me about 5 to 10 minutes each.
  • I then import content from leading sites and article directories, almost always including several GOOD RSS feeds.
  • For all appropriate niches, I create video pages that consist of You Tube videos. I work hard to attract searchers, and these video pages pay off big time, but indirectly. I find that the video pages themselves generate average ad clicks; but on sites with video pages, the sites overall get more page views and visitors staying longer, which means more clicks on other page ads. I use this tool to create a solid video page in about 10 minutes time!
  • And I always take advantage of Hyper VRE’s keyword pages, even if they’re just gravy. No use leaving any potential search bait on the table!

All-in-all, this creates a site with fresh, unique content that is frequently rotated and valuable for readers.

Then upload your files, open Keyword Elite, and perform an analysis of your custom-built pages (just the ones you created manually). You want to score off the charts, so pay attention to keyword density and latent semantic indexing (LSI). LSI is beyond the scope of this group, but is a fascinating topic. Tweak your pages until Keyword Elite ranks them highly.

These steps will likely require quite a bit of time, but in a nutshell, you should be creating a new site for each family member niche; then you should be creating a new, highly optimized page for each keyword that is closely related to that niche. That’s it — it just sounds like much more when you throw in all of the other details.

I’ll give you a few days to digest this e-mail before I contact you again, but when I do, the fun really begins. After this step, the hard work is done, and it’s time to start the enjoyable aspects.

Good luck creating your sites and please contact me if you have questions. Let’s get some sites cranked out!

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Keyword Analysis Comparison: SEO, Keyword, Travis

I received an e-mail last night that I wanted to address. It doesn’t come up frequently, but I do hear it with respect to keyword and SEO software.

Keyword and SEO software tends to be expensive. It’s unfortunate, but keyword analysis and SEO is a constantly changing field, so the software must constantly evolve. That’s one big reason for the cost. The second largest factor is because the market has settled on the current price, and until one software maker lowers their price considerably, the current prices will remain.

Another service I like to use is Wordtracker, which I often plug into Keyword Elite. I love Wordtracker’s results, but it’s incredibly cumbersome to manage keyword research with their tools, so I just manage them with Keyword Elite. Wordtracker costs $60 per month, recurring every month!

Keyword Elite pays for itself many times over, but I know it can be hard to justify the cost. I also use SEO Elite, which is similarly priced.

There is another option, however. If you consider yourself a “lite” user, meaning that you run few campaigns, or only need the basic or core functionality of keyword and SEO tools, Traffic Travis attempts to find a middle ground.

The best way I can describe Traffic Travis is a slimmed down version of Keyword Elite and SEO Elite, but combined into one tool. You can read more about it at the following URL, but I’ll give you the broad feature breakdown below.

Whatever you do, I urge you to choose at least one keyword analysis tool to add to your toolkit. I don’t know how anyone can run a profitable web site or blog without one, but I can’t complain, because if everyone used them, then I wouldn’t be able to get such great results with them!

Keyword Elite

1) Analyze Pay Per Click Listings: Easily find low-cost and high to moderate traffic keywords that will make you money.

2) Create A Keyword List: Easily build 50,000+ keyword lists for your website and blog needs.

3) Select A Keyword List: Quickly grab your keyword list and prepare it for your Adwords campaigns and page builder software.

4) Analyze Keyword Competition: Allows you to quickly see how hard it will be to rank well for a specific search term. You can easily see if your competition is ranked well by “accident,” or if they’re going to be tough to outrank.

5) Spy on Adwords Competition: Monitor which keywords, and how long your competitors are bidding on them in Google Adwords. Then, take that list of guaranteed profitable keywords and plug them into your own Adwords campaign.

View Keyword Elite details

Traffic Travis

1) Create A Keyword List: Easily build keyword lists for your website and blog needs.

2) Analyze Keyword Competition: Allows you to quickly see how hard it will be to rank well for a specific search term. You can easily see if your competition is ranked well by “accident”, or if they’re going to be tough to outrank.

3) Find Candidate Sites: Find the best people to link to. This is similar to a feature in SEO Elite.

4) Monitor Positioning: Monitor your status and ranking in the search engines. This is similar to a feature in SEO Elite.

5) Misc. Tools: Manage backlinks, manage AdWords campaigns, Whois tool, create surveys

View Traffic Travis details

Conclusion

All-in-all, for my money, I use SEO Elite and Keyword Elite. But Traffic Travis is a good way to get some of the core functionality of each of these tools at a lower price point.

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Free Keyword Research Tools

Well, you’ve heard me go on and on about keyword research, and I’ve showed you the tools I use for my research, along with my reasons for using them. But today I wanted to share with you some free
tools for keyword research.

These tools are powerful, but very cumbersome. While I like the data that they spit out, they require far too much time and their results are far less actionable than the ones I get with Micro Niche Finder and Keyword Elite. However, depending on your needs, and the volume of keyword research that you do, you might find them helpful.

So here they are, in no particular order. Try them out on a niche that you’re investigating — they’re all free:

Google Keyword Metrics Tool

Searches for PPC maximum bid, search volume, competition, sample ads, and expected AdSense revenues for a niche keyword. This is one of my favorite free keyword tools, but I find that the data tend to be misleading.

http://www.technobloggie.com/keyword-tool/index.php

Google Sets

This is a neat tool from Google Labs that creates sets of keywords revolving around a main keyword. No search or competition data is made available, so you wouldn’t use this for keyword research; rather, you’d use it to make sure your latent semantic indexing was optimized (advanced search topic).

http://labs.google.com/sets

Google Trends

This is a tool I frequently use when validating a chosen niche that I’ve found through keyword research. It shows you search trends over time, so that you can tell if your niche popularity is on the upswing or if you’re too late to capitalize on it, or if your niche receives more search traffic during certain times of the year.

http://google.com/trends

SEO Keyword Density Tool

You can use this tool to analyze your pages and posts to determine their keyword density. A “natural” density tends to be around 1 percent, but for an optimized post or site, you’ll want to shoot for 2 percent or more.

http://websitetips.com/seo/tools/keywords/#freekeywordanalysis

Keyword Spy

If you are targeting a niche, type your keywords in here to see who your largest paid competitors are (those using AdWords).

http://www.keywordspy.com/

Blogging in Action’s Keyword Sheriff

“Wait, you guys have your own keyword tool, but you still use Keyword Elite?” Yes, that’s right! The biggest problem with our keyword research tool is that it doesn’t paint a complete picture. But it might provide you with just the information you need to move forward.

http://www.BloggingInAction.com/files/Keyword-Sheriff.zip

I hope you find these tools helpful. They’re certainly no replacement for a proper keyword research tool, but they can give you some additional information that you can use for research or validation.

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Keyword Advantage #2: Piggyback your Competitors’ Efforts

The topic of this e-mail is near and dear to my heart because it has saved me tons of money and countless hours of frustration over the past two years.

Google AdWords is a tremendous advertising platform. It has never been easier or cheaper to gain new customers than through the use of AdWords. But getting the most out of your AdWords campaigns can
be brutally difficult.

Keyword selection is paramount. You must choose keywords that will attract the right number of clicks, but you want to avoid those keywords with too much competition or you’ll find yourself paying an astronomically high cost-per-click rate. And it’s also imperative that you break your keywords into logically related campaigns, or you’ll have great difficulty getting your bearings.

Then you have to worry about ad copy. It takes thousands of impressions and hundreds of clicks just to test a few ads. What if you need to target several audiences? You might find yourself paying for several thousand clicks to determine which ad leads to the most clicks and which ad converts the best.

What if you could select the perfect keyword groupings, with high search traffic but little competition? That’s a few problems solved.

But better, what if you could let someone else — let’s make it your competitors — pay for testing the perfect ads for you? It doesn’t sound possible, does it? But it is, and the answer is obvious, but just as painful to carry out — unless you have Keyword Elite.

If your company is selling widgets with Google AdWords, what would you do with your worst performing ads? Ditch them quickly, I bet. And what would you do with your best-performing ads? Show them as
frequently as possible, unless you like flushing money down the toilet. Therein lays the answer. (Not the toilet part!)

To determine the best ads for your keywords, you monitor your keywords for three to four weeks, and collect statistics on which ads are displayed when searches are performed. The more often an ad appears in the search results, the more confident you can be that the ad is profitable. If after three weeks, you see that one ad shows up far more frequently than others for your keywords, you then have just the template to use as the basis for an ad.

You’ve effectively piggybacked off of all of the effort and expense your competitor wasted perfecting the ad! Keyword Elite does this automatically for you, for as many keywords as you want. You could
monitor competition in hundreds of keywords with just a few clicks of the mouse.

This is incredibly powerful. Whenever I will be doing an AdWords campaign, I start spying on the competition weeks in advance. When my campaign launches, I’m usually able to find a winning ad in under $100 and two weeks, vs. several hundred dollars over the course of a few months.

When time and speed to market are important to you, this feature is a godsend. Stop wasting time and money, and start using Keyword Elite! It will help you find exactly which keywords and which ads will convert for YOU.

I would strongly urge you to view the video of this process in action, because it will answer some questions you have and show you how easy and effective this tactic can be. Check out the “Project Number 5″ video. It’s amazing to see this in action.

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Keyword Advantage #1: Optimize your Pages Effectively

You’ve probably seen already why I love using keyword research tools so much, but in case you haven’t, I’ll recap my top reasons for using them. Of course, the sky’s the limit with these kinds of tools, because they give you access to *data.* Once you have that data, you can do all kinds of neat things with it (we’ll look at some of those things in the future). All of those things can be packaged pretty neatly into these categories:

  • You can attract more search referrals
  • You can attract higher-quality traffic (EXTREMELY important; traffic is no good unless it’s qualified — keyword research is how you qualify it)
  • You can “predict” what your readers want to see in your pages and posts
  • You can quickly and easily increase the relevance and keyword density of your pages
  • All of which lead to higher profitability per visitor (that really is the bottom line, isn’t it?)

Optimizing Page Content with Keyword Elite

Rather than getting into an overly technical explanation of page optimization, let’s just review a scenario-based description of using Keyword Elite to help you target the content of your page.

In this example, you are going write a blog on . . . creating a blog! We’re going to assume that you create your blog and are able to achieve a top 10 ranking for your targeted keywords. To keep things simple, we’ll further assume that you aren’t selling any products, but have decided to monetize your blog only with AdSense.

Without keyword research:

If you’re experienced, you’ll at least brainstorm some keywords that represent the theme of your blog. You settle on “create blog,” “blogging how-to,” “blogging for beginners,” and “build blog.” Simple enough. So you write content, deploy your blog, market it extensively, and you’re able to achieve a Google top 10 ranking. Congratulations!

Now it’s time to rake in some cash, right? Not so fast! You check your AdSense account and find yourself earning $1.10 per day. One dollar for all of your work?? What gives?

1) There weren’t many searches for your keywords; 2) there was high competition for your keywords; 3) your click-through rate hovered around 1% because your pages weren’t focused enough.

With keyword research:

You plug your four keywords into Keyword Elite and find that the most effective keywords for your blog are actually “how to start a blog,” “make a blog,” “how do I create a blog,” and “how do i start a blog.” You know these are the most effective because Keyword Elite suggested these keywords to you based on their high KEI.

The keyword effectiveness indicator (KEI) takes factors such as the number of searches and the amount of competition into account to help determine keyword profitability. Obviously, if you use keywords
that have little competition, but are searched for frequently, you’ll do much better. Keyword Elite tells you that.

After determining your top keywords, you run another Keyword Elite project to analyze your competition. Keyword Elite will review the top pages for your keywords, and let you see how heavily optimized
they are. If you see one that is off-the-charts optimized, take a look at how they did it and emulate their tactics. If you see a hole, then you’ve got a good shot at ranking highly provided you do your work.

Now it’s time to rake in some cash, right? Correct! You check your AdSense account and find yourself earning $27.52 per day. What gives?

1) You chose the exact keywords that were being searched for the most in your niche; 2) you chose keywords with low competition; 3) You created targeted, optimized content that yielded a click-through rate approaching 5%.

That’s a 2500% increase over choosing your own keywords! In this example, from one optimized site, you could earn $800 additional per month! If you aren’t choosing keywords to focus your content, why
aren’t you? And if you are choosing keywords, why aren’t you using Keyword Elite?

It’s never too early and it’s never too late to perform keyword research.

To find out more about how you can use Keyword Elite to improve your search rankings, focus your content, and earn more money, there are some great videos available for you to watch. Check out the “Project #2″ video to see the above tactics in action!

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The Top 10 Reasons Why . . . (You’ll love this!)

Let’s agree on something: We’re marketers. We have to be. No marketing = no traffic. Most of us are on the Internet to make money. Sure, we enjoy what we do, but we enjoy it more when we get paid to do it!

And the more traffic we have, the more money we make. Yes, I’m stating the obvious, and here’s why:

My Holy Grail for natural, ongoing, DEFENSIBLE traffic for all of my sites and blogs is Keyword Elite. Anyone can use it. You can use it and watch your traffic grow. And grow. And grow. Imagine checking your site stats each month and seeing that 45 degree upward angle.

And with that traffic comes . . . profit. So here’s my top 10 reasons for using Keyword Elite:

10. You’ll get your sites and blogs ranked on the first page or two of the major search engines for the keywords YOU choose.

9. You’ll get a LOT more traffic because of your high rankings.

8. That increase in traffic will mean an increase in revenues, whatever your source.

7. An increase in sales means more, and probably a lot more, money in your pocket.

6. It’s easy to use, even if you’re techno-phobic.

5. This is the exact same program that’s causing the ridiculous amounts of traffic you see in the movies on the web site.

4. If you get as much traffic as the guy in the movie is getting, and you sell a $1 product to just 1% of the people who come to your site, you’ll make $46,800 per year.

3. If you sell a $10 product to that same 1% of people, you’ll make $468,000 per year.

2. You’ll never lack for money again, because now you’ll know how to pull it off of the Internet by the bucketful at will.

And the Number One reason to get Keyword Elite is:

1. When you’re automatically generating that kind of traffic . . .

. . .and making that kind of money . . .

. . .you can do whatever you want . . .

. . .including telling your boss that you make more money than him and you do it in your P.J.’s!

Okay, so I’m a linear thinker. But these tools make a big difference, and I love the fact that there are no monthly fees — just a single, one-time payment. I subscribe to SIX (yes, six) traffic services, and they all carry a monthly fee. Keyword Elite is the ONE tool I would never be without. Keywords are THAT important.

Get it and see for yourself the difference it makes.

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