Day 8 of the 30 Day Challenge – minus Traffic Bug

Well I have been careful to follow the program so far – but I fear I may break the rule for Day 8.

But I will need to find alternatives or just go all manual…

Day 8 of the 30 Day Challenge is about indexing and ranking and the use of Traffic Bug for automating part of your link building strategy.


I liked adding one of my favourite music videos to my post – I might make it a habit. You don’t need to listen do you? 🙂

Then again you don’t have to read either 😛

Now I’m beginning to get arrogant – my readers will now halve

… to just one – Me 🙂


Here’s an old favourite – Pink Floyd – Fearless

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWH01DBJxlo


Back to the plot…


I remember in the pre-season that another social bookmarking tool was mentioned – SocialMarker. However, here has been the introduction of a brand new system called Traffic Bug which has proved successful on pre-testing. The problem is there is quite a bit of backlash on the Internet over the success of this service and although, quite rightly, it may be partly expectation of what it can do I think I will put it aside.


The most evident discussions come up in both the Noble Samurai and Warrior forums here:-

http://www.noblesamurai.com/forum/topic/traffic-bug-isnt-producing-links-starting-to-look-like-a-sham

http://www.warriorforum.com/internet-marketing-product-reviews-ratings/110417-anyone-using-traffic-bug.html


Here were some of my own thoughts as I looked into it…

One reason I had for not supporting Traffic Bug is the fact that the CEO did not come back to the Warrior Forum and support it or that I couldn’t see any blog posts on it since October last year. Personally I would have wanted to ask questions, give answers or updates and not let my pet project drift away – unless of course I had no more interest in it.

Another thing that would annoy me and I think causes confusion is the fact that it doesn’t show where the backlinks are that it has submitted have gone, so you cannot tell if it just gives you a number what real progress you have had or where to check.

The real killer in my mind is the reports that Traffic Bug has submitted your links to the wrong categories in the directories. True or not – I couldn’t see it being defended anywhere.

Thinking about it – this is a very hard piece of logic for any system to handle, with so many different directory structures and different names or synonyms for the different categories you would soon get the idea that it is probably better to do it by hand anyway.

I suspect that Ed Dale is giving the benefit of the doubt to the producers of the Traffic Bug system and imagine that since opening up this system suddenly to a large audience brought in many new problems that needed to be handled. I think that the launch of the 30 Day Challenge could possibly have brought in swathes of spammers too, looking for new ways of defeating the search engines and this in itself will cause a system to stall if not protected.

It has been reported as a scam by some – but I really don’t think that was the case. It obviously got tested and approved by the 30 Day Challenge team before it got rolled out and must have produced some positive results for them to use and stand by it. I think what it comes down to is that there were real problems behind the scenes which were not handled in an open way to reassure those that were having problems – help either in understanding its true nature or indeed what is actually does. It cannot be denied that it really has been a disappointment, so unlike the Market Samurai product which has been well received and raved about in many places.


So I am going to go the ‘do-it-yourself’ route, although it is likely to get very boring.


The advantage of doing it yourself and testing each of your methods is that you don’t get caught on the demise of an idea. This is a situation often seen in Internet marketing that as soon as a method is published and discussed in well known forums many people jump on it and kill it off. I remember one of these great methods was comment posting (or forum posting) as a way of getting backlinks. Then as it became well known, spammers and their new apps jumped in. The NoFollow tag invented by Google was a means of preventing this very situation. Even though this method still works it really hasn’t helped the genuine posters who contribute to a blog, who will probably avoid those blogs that contain this NoFollow tag. On the other hand I know from experience that I couldn’t not handle the number of spam posts on my old BeyondOneWorld blog if it wasn’t for great plugins like Akismet that did go a long way to remedy this.


Another thing that occurs to me when I think about using social marketing is that many of the sites have their own systems and cultures. The only way to be effective is to understand what will work in each of these sites. I know right now I haven’t got the hang of Digg, where I don’t seem to get more diggs than myself. Either that means I must contribute more on that site or I must look at the way I am presenting any pages to make it more interesting for the users of the system.

I am certainly in favour of looking at the competition module in Market Samurai for finding what techniques other people are using in your niche and generally to do backlinking. I feel the only way to handle this is once I see a possible method, to make note of it and when I get chance then go through a try-monitor-check cycle. If something appears to work then add it to the list of processes you would use regularly.


I did notice too that Ed seemed to be getting a little angry at the whole thing – to the point where ‘bastion of bullsh*t’ and Warrior Forum were connected 🙂

http://www.thirtydaychallenge.com/forums/general-chat/18167-any-alternatives-traffic-bug.html


Let’s see how this all fathoms out…


I am no expert but IMHO I think the Warrior Forum does contain many who have a high regard for honesty and integrity and there is in there many, many golden nuggets of information. However, it takes careful digging, with reality firmly in focus. In the end, I think you just need to get process oriented … Test-Monitor-Check…

I know – me and my systems and processes…

For now I will just through my spreadsheet that I created in the Preseason and build on that for indexing and linking. Though I will need to be cautious and not try to do it all at once, pace it out

– time to get organised with a planner I think 🙂

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