Update 27/10/2008: This is just my personal experience and it may or may not be valid for you. As I mentioned I signed up for ShoemoneyTools. I played around with the tools for a few days and I even bought a domain name through the market place. It was a domain that had some potential, with some .edu/.gov links so I was happy enough to pay an extra $15 before registering the domain, to test out this method at least. My tests are still running…
I took advantage of the $20 introductory offer, but as I didn’t know if I wanted to subscribe, I cancelled my subscription about 10 days into the program. This was in case I forgot about the subscription and spent $100 by mistake. But once I removed the subscription from PayPal I was left without access to the toolset. Every time I logged in it redirected me to PayPal to subscribe. So I contacted the support, and a guy called Mike said it was in the FAQ and TOS that once you cancelled your membership you couldn’t get back in. I could understand this (in some ways) but at the time (it has since been changed) it was not possible to see these FAQs and TOS before signed up as a member for the tools. The support guy wasn’t offering any help (even after I had submitted some bug reports about the tool. So I CC’d Jeremy and he replied almost straight away saying that he would fix things, just asking for my username. I gave him the details, but still didn’t get my access back to the tools, I even sent a reminder a week later, and still no joy. So now for my $20 I got access to a service for 2 weeks, when I should have gotten 4.
Review ShoeMoney Tools
This morning I finally took the plunge and signed up for Jeremy Schoemaker’s (AKA Shoemoney, www.shoemoney.com) Shoemoney Tools (tools.shoemoney.com). He’s been talking about it for a while, and in the blogosphere it has gotten some good reports .
The first look at the collection of the tools has left me very (very) impressed. The tools are in 3 sections, SEO Tools, PPC Tools and Link Building Tools. The one I’m having fun with right now is the Link Building tool, it offers 4 ways of finding good links for your blog.
Link Building Tool
I’ve only been playing around with this for a bit and I’ve already found some nice, new, ways to get some links. The tool offers 4 ways of getting links for your blog:
- Related Blog Posts (seeks out similar blog posts on a certain topic, and shows you how to ping them, and other nice things)
- Most Linked (shows you what domains are being linked to for a specific niche, i.e. association to other popular blogs)
- Backlink Analyzer (will perform a full report on your competitors links)
- Find Backlinks (Check where your top 10 keyword competitors are getting their best links from and displays them from highest PR to lowest)
These tools alone can show you many ways to get links to improve your website rankings. If you are committed to increasing your blogs’ presence, then this is the tool for you. Of course everything comes with a price.
The Price
Of course these tools aren’t for free. These tools require access to large databases, spiders and other technology that I don’t know. Needless to say there is some serious processing power behind it. It will cost you $100/month, and thinking of the advantages you can get with this it’s certainly well worth the money. Right now I have only shown you about 20% of what the tools can do, there are other tools like the Domain MarketPlace, has some serious money making potential. More about it once I dig deeper. You can check it out for yourself on http://tools.shoemoney.com/
