Blogging to the bank 3.0 by Rob Benwell is a new Ebook I just got. I knew a lot about blogging before this, so I’m always out to learn some new things. At 58 pages, this $37 book has some solid information, but also some things I really disagree with. Blogging to the Bank starts out with important things like market research to find the right direction of your blog, and a good explanation of keyword tools and affiliate programs like Clickbank.

Step two is one I wouldn’t have put in, it’s a highly technical tutorial on installing WordPress and it’s one I wouldn’t get into for the average person. I’d recommend a mainstream host like Godaddy and have their support people simply install it for you. I’ve seen MANY people go into meltdown trying to install this themselves. The $5 a month for a mainstream host with phone support is well worth it for the newbie.

When he starts out “I personally don’t buy backlinks” I should have known something was wrong. I did try Viperlinking.com that he recommends and found out the domain was for sale because the 1,000 sites they had to provide the links all got banned by Google for duplicate content (posting many sites article and links on 1,000 sites at a time tends to do this). They let most expire and currently have the domain up for sale. The thing is, even though he has no way to provide the service, the owner knows this and is still taking orders. Needless to say, I was pretty angry to discover this.

Next I checked out backlinks.com and they own a lot of domains, but the sites I checked with Copyscape showed they had the page rank advertised, but it was just an article grabbed from scribd.com and slapped up with links from blogs at Penn university, some links showed attack sites and warnings from the browser when trying to visit them, it’s a mess. At least they’re smart enough to only rent one link at a time instead of trying to spam 1,000 sites.

It looks like they can deliver but I’d avoid viperlinking.com at all cost, he’s trying to unload that domain to some sucker because his sites got banned. Rob says he’s used that place for months, and maybe viperlinking.com did work at one time, but that’s not the case anymore. That bonus should be removed.

Rob Benwell goes into a detail explanation of Squidoo, Digg, and the social bookmarking sites which will be helpful to someone just starting out who doesn’t know what to do with places like those. The dofollow and nofollow advice is probably the best part of the book. It’s something that many blog posters don’t know about and is one of the high points of the book. Overall, I do recommend Blogging to the Bank, especially if you’re new to it.

Avoid viperlinking.com and also I wouldn’t rule out using a wordpress.com blog (he says the free ones are dead but I disagree, I see WordPress blogs scoring highly on some niche keywords all the time). I’d do this in addition to a main blog where you own the domain (which is always best), but many don’t know about the Google sandbox, and he doesn’t even mention buying used domains to avoid it.  Overall it’s a good deal for $37, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. Is it perfect? No, but it’s certainly worth the money.

On a side note, I haven’t tried the article assist or blog announcer pro that come with the book yet. I like backlinks as much as the next guy, but some of the article sites have a terms of service requiring you to grant permission to other members to publish your articles, and most times when they do, they don’t put a linkback (that’s required) back to you. They just take it, and it can be a mess to see your stuff pillaged and posted 1,000 times, with them taking credit for writing it.

If you’ve tried Blogging to the Bank techniques, please post your thoughts on it. Always love to hear from you!

Nick