Review: Blogging to the Bank 2.0
Regular readers may have noticed that I haven’t finished my review of Project Black Mask. I don’t honestly know if I will — I have many things on my plate and once I realized that the whole point of Black Mask AdSense was to create spammy AdSense sites that clearly violate Google’s guidelines, I pretty much lost interest in the whole thing. If enough of you pester me, maybe I’ll finish it, but for now I’m leaving it on the back burner.
Today I review an ebook that’s much more palatable.
Blogging To The Bank 2.0
Blogging To The Bank 2.0 is a new edition of an ebook that was first released early in 2006. I never read that book, though I was aware of it, so I can’t comment on what’s changed since the first edition.
The book currently costs $47 and is sold via ClickBank. For that price you get:
- A 61-page ebook
- An 80-slide PowerPoint presentation
- A set of 5 pre-made blogs
- Article submission software (Windows only)
- Blog announcer software (Windows only)
Note that these are “fast action bonuses”, apparently limited to certain numbers of purchasers. The pre-made blogs are for the first 100 customers and the PowerPoint presentation for the first 300. The article submission software is a bonus for the first 24 hours, the blog announcer for the first 48 hours. I will discuss each of these separately, but note that I found the PowerPoint presentation to be the most useful bonus.
Blogging To The Bank EBook
The fundamental premise of Blogging To The Bank is that you can make money by creating niche blogs. This is not a new concept, of course. There are many “probloggers” out there (Darren Rowse being the best-known example) who do just that. The basic idea is simple enough: create decently-trafficked blogs that are monetized via AdSense and/or affiliate links. So what does BTTB2 have to offer that’s new?
Here’s an interesting quote from the introduction:
After testing all the fancy software, even my own it came clear that automated blogs don’t deliver long term profits. I gave you the example on the webpage of a recent test I did using some software and my new method.
This is a good start, at least! The author (Rob Benwell) then goes on to list his “5 Blogging Commandments”:
- Imitate nature
- Add some visitor value
- Make it sticky
- Don’t let your blog die
- Market = profit
All good stuff and the kind of advice you read here and on ProBlogger.
The rest of the book is devoted to Rob’s step-by-step blueprint for highly-profitable long-term niche blogs:
- Market research (ClickBank)
- Domains and hosting
- Setting up a WordPress blog (he recommends using Yahoo Small Business)
- Methods of content creation (he recommends PLR content and outsourcing, mixed with some free articles and stuff you write yourself)
- Optimizing the blog (for search engines and humans)
- Pinging
- Promotion and backlinks (articles, link exchanges, press releases, forums postings, link buying)
- Web 2.0 traffic and promotion (Squidoo, digg, del.icio.us, Technorati)
- Outsourcing to build your blog empire (after you’ve built the first 10 yourself)
I can see this material being useful to someone getting started, but experienced bloggers won’t learn anything. The book ends with a few pages of some more advanced strategies, but again nothing earth-shattering. Of course, Darren Rowse would tell you that there’s nothing earth-shattering about what he’s doing — it requires time and effort more than anything else. At least this book focuses on white-hat techniques: there’s nothing in it that will get you banned from the search engines or from AdSense.
Niche Blogging For Free Traffic
The PowerPoint presentation Niche Blogging For Free Traffic and Exposure On The Web mostly repeats the steps described in the ebook, but with additional information. There’s a good section on interlinking related blogs, for example, which is something I’ve talked about before in my post Six Degrees of Web Separation: How to Link Multiple Sites. There’s also a 7-day blog promotion blueprint that gives you concrete steps on what to do to promote your interlinked blogs.
This presentation was written when Rob was still using Blogger for blog creation. In the ebook he’s moved away from that practice because it’s too easy for Google to shut down blog accounts. The presentation also delves into two “black hat” techniques. Actually, it’s more “grey hat” than “black hat”. The first is the mass creation of blogs, but at least Rob recommends you create blogs with real content on them (unlike Project Black Mask). The second is to use “blog hunter” software to find dead/abandoned Blogger blogs that can be reclaimed and reused. Unfortunately, the software doesn’t seem to be available and I’m not really sure it would work anymore anyhow.
Pre-Made Blogs
I’m not sure how useful this bonus really is. The 5 “pre-made” blogs is really just a collection of private label articles on the following topics: fishing, dog training, golf, quitting smoking, and wedding planning. The articles are provided as Microsoft Word files and you’re expected to insert ClickBank links into them as appropriate.
Article and Blog Submission
The last two bonuses are software applications for submitting articles to various article directories and registering your blogs in various blog directories. Both applications are semi-automated submission solutions that help you fill out the submission/registration forms on various directory sites.
Note that you can already get directory submission and article submission software for free, see my review of the free directory submitter.
Final Thoughts
Blogging To The Bank 2.0 is an OK book about making money by creating blogs, but if you’re already an experienced blogger I wouldn’t buy it — there’s nothing really new that you won’t learn from reading various popular blogs about problogging. If you’re thinking about getting started with blogs, it’s not a bad intro and some people like to have a step-by-step plan laid out for them. The bonuses aren’t enough to make this a “must have”, either.
Sponsored Link: AdWords180 is a great book about cheap AdWords advertising. I can even get you a $30 discount — just send me mail for the details.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense.
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AdSense, article directories, articles, Black Mask AdSense, blog, blogging, ClickBank, Google, Project Black Mask, review, WordPress
Comments
4 Responses to “Review: Blogging to the Bank 2.0”
It wouldn’t bother me at all if you gave no more attention to a misguided product like Project BlackHatSpamSense.
Hmm… I guess it wouldn’t do to ignore my most frequent commenter’s requests now, would it?
I am new and just learning to find my way around. At the end of your review you refer to Adwords180 and say to just mail you regarding a discount of $30. Is where I am suppose to mail my request to you or is there another eMail address for that? Like I said, I’m just learning and cannot find any other means of communication here in your blog. Thanks
Ooops, good point. Just mail me at ericgiguere@ericgiguere.com and I’ll be happy to help you out. I guess a contact page would help