I was reading up on a forum thread started by internetmarkter99 on the warrior forum. He basically is building an empire of xfactor type sites but he has his own twist on back linking and he prefers to use wordpress blogs instead of static sites (although I do believe he is making more static sites now.)
He had mentioned that sometimes a certain market will need a specific web template and that for some niches, xfactor’s templates will reflect a higher CTR and for some niches a template more like Prosense will be a better match. I read over the thread and saw that plenty of people remarked about Prosense gives their site a cluttered feel and that they had switched over from Prosense to the Ad Flex SEO template. Now the Ad Flex SEO was in fact designed to behave very similar to Xfactor’s template but there are a few differences. Ad flex seo is set up so that anyone can customize the look and feel of their website. You can easily set it up to be similar to Xfactor’s layout or you can make your site still run and function totally like a niche blog. I love that it gives you a lot of flexibility.
Last night I went ahead and converted an older niche blog of mine over to using this ad flex seo theme. I had been using the prosense them on it for the past week with no clicks at all so I figured it needed a facelift.
Today, I am considering converting my best adsense earning niche blog over to this theme as well. Right now I do not have the best ad blocks displayed adn I think it is hurting my earning potential. I have seen that xfactor’s CTR on my xfactor sites have had a 30-50% CTR so I’m thinking that an xfactor-ish template might be able to help with this blog. Time will only tell! I will let you know how it goes.
Another piece of advice I took from internetmarkter99 is that he uses a free blog commenting software called Comment Kahuna. I have used Syndicate Kahuna in the past and have been pleased with it but the Comment Kahuna is really a fantastic piece of software. Yesterday I went ahead and submitted another article to ezines for more back linking juice on xfactor site #1 because it has been sitting in position #10 for the past 3 days. Shortly after submitted the article I decided to use comment Kahuna. I spent about 2 hours blog commenting which may result in only about 20 back links but a good half of them I was able to use my keywords as my name and they were instantly approved.
What kind of results did I see less than 24 hours after blog commenting? I have moved to #8! Now remember, my latest article hasn’t been approved yet and I can’t be certain if the blog commenting has helped or if the first run of article back links are finally showing up. I honestly don’t know but internetmarketer99 says that Comment Kahuna is his secret weapon for back links and keyword ranking so I figure I should try it out as well.
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The good thing about having Artisteer is that themes can be deisgned really quickly…..woo hoooo !
Yes, I will give you that. you can make them pretty quickly and reflect any theme.
Thanks for the tips. Both the theme and the comment software look very interesting so I’m going to check them out.
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Your welcome Ruth. let me know how they do for you.
I used the commenting software myself on my XF site that is now hiding in the SERPs LOL It did seem to help move it up to the top of page 1.
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Yea it seems to help boost sites. I am still going to test out how it works on moving the one site I am trying to move from #8 to at least position #3.
I am so interested to see whether or not WordPress themes perform as well as the static sites appear to perform. I love the flexibility of WordPress and, quite simply, do not have the time to learn yet another program!
Yea that is true. It has been a sort of pain to try and learn some CSS but once I made my template, its just a matter of copy and pasting the files for a new site.
I’ve been putting out a few XFactor sites myself, and although I’ve had some success getting them to page 1, one site in particular just won’t budge. I’ve followed identical steps for each site, so I’m beginning to wonder if the site’s TLD (dot biz) might be the culprit. I realize it’s not exactly a dot info, but still, one wonders… anyway, may I ask you for your opinion on a product which you’ve talked about in the past? It’s the ultimate keyword theme extractor, and I’m planning to use it on my dot biz site which is stubbornly hiding in the back pages of google. I plan to purchase it, but before I do, I wonder if you could shed some light on how it worked for you? Thanks in advance, and keep on plugging!
I wish all of us would hit that 5K a month sooner rather thank later. Since we all seem to be watching Mike, once he busts through that $100/day on adsense, I’m sure that would energize his readers (well, me at least) to follow suit.
Hi Stacey,
I think the Ultimate keyword theme extractor is a great piece of software. I used it mainly for my google sniper sites and definitely found it easy to help me rank my sites. I have also used it for many of my hubs. Since I am not really earning that much with my hubs, I can’t really say whether or not it has helped me rank them.
I should probably start using it again for my xfactor sites. The only problem is I have been outsourcing my content for them so I thought it might be a bit too much to give my writers the keywords they are to research and write about plus use the LSI words from UKTE. I do not doubt that it would help them.
In fact, you just encouraged me to test it out for xfactor sites. I’ll build a site this weekend using UKTE on each keyword page I am targeting. I’ll let you know if it helps them rank better/faster. I’ll probably use a keywords that has similar competition with one of my newer sites to compare it too.
Thanks for the quick response. I am going to pick up that software now. It’s now $99 (up a couple of bucks from $97), though I wish I picked it up a long time ago when it first debuted at a much lower price.
Good luck with your experiment this weekend. Do let us know how it turns out.
Hey,
Great blog! …quick question:
I’m looking at AdFlex and was going to download it but it says this:
We’re still working on the latest version of Ad Flex Blog 0.9. In the meantime, we’ve decided to publish the intermediary version 0.8.9.9.7a for WordPress 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.5, 2.6, 2.7 and 2.8.
I’m currently using wordpress 2.8.5 – Do you think it will still work?
Thanks,
Jimmy
Hi Jimmy,
Yes, it works on WordPress 2.8.5. In fact I just installed it on 2 brand new wordpress installations a few days ago with no problems.
I also just upgraded a site that runs Adflex SEO to the latest version of wordpress 2.8.6, and it is working fine as well.
Sara
Thanks Sara…
Do you use a header image?
I was wondering it would distract…
Yes, I have and prefer to use a header image on all of my Adflex sites. In fact, I prefer to use a header image over the 4 images option that will cascade under the header. I still want my header to correspond with the niche. So if your niche is about cellphones there should be an image of a cellphone on the banner. It’s confusing for your visitor if they see a picture of a house on a site that talks about cellphones. So if you have the same niche photos in the header the visitor will feel as though they have landed on the exact topic they were searching for.
I just went over to flickr and found photos that have the “Creative Commons” license on them and then cropped or cut the image with photoshop to fit one of the banner sizes I chose.
So far I haven’t noticed any performance issues. Just make sure the banner isn’t too distracting. i.e. busy or bright in color. I usually will tone down a bright banner by either grey scaling it or by adjusting the contrast so that it’s sorta darkened in the background to make my site title and tagline stand out more.
Thanks for the help Sara!
That’s great advise. I appreciate you taking the time to explain…
Jimmy
You’re welcome Jimmy!
I’ve installed adflex theme on one of my sites. How do set the background to a static color. It has lots of features but a lot of them are annoying.
To make a solid color, you will need to create a small jpg or gif file and then place it in the “Background” folder that is located in the images folder.