Affiliate Marketing Tutorials and Reviews | TrackBoost Review…Will Automating Trackbacks be Worth The Price?

TrackBoost Review…Will Automating Trackbacks be Worth The Price?

So I was able to grab a copy of Trackboost last week and I wanted to give you my initial impressions of this program. For those of you who don’t know what Trackboost is, it is basically a way to automate trackbacks to your site. So what, right? Well, let’s dive a little into this and get into the meat and potatoes of Jack Humphrey’s latest product.

To give you an idea of what trackboost does, I probably need to educate some of you as to the difference between a comment (or comment marketing) and a trackback. If you have ever made a comment on a site, what most people will do is put their name on the comment with a link. The problem with this is that most bloggers are essentially ranking for their name (which is in the anchor text) and not really what their site is about.

I know, I know…some of you more SEO savvy folks know about this and attempt to make your name something like is relevant in terms with your site (like if your site is about shoes, you may put in “Ugg boots for women”). Unfortunately, many bloggers will deny this outright because they will view this as spam.

However, with trackbacks, you get a link from their site to yours with the actual post title. Now from an SEO standpoint, this could be huge if the blog is a “do follow” site. It is actually a win-win situation, right? You get a link pointing to your site (for potential traffic) and google will give your site link juice for the keyword that you are gunning for.

There is a problem with trackbacks as some of the trackbacks have to be inserted manually making the affair a little tedious. Because of this, many social marketers get lazy and abandon the notion of adding trackbacks to sites for link juice. Also, since most blogs these days are ‘no follow’, the backlink won’t show up in google making the only good use for creating trackbacks to garner actual traffic from people who will click the trackback link.

Another problem with track backs is that most bloggers don’t optimize them the way they should. Most bloggers may link the title of the post they hope will get a trackback and stop there. However, the best way to optimize a track back is to give the link AND then write a little snippet of text underneath the link for spider food. This takes more work and hey, who like that, right? And this is where the introduction ends and my TrackBoost Review begins.

The program itself was very easy to install and even a newbie who has little to no experience can start to work the program quickly and easily.

When you first run TrackBoost, you will be asked for the blog you are wanting to use as well as the username and password attached to it. The reason for this is because trackboost will troll your site and pull all the articles from it. In fact, not to get ahead of myself, the application has a built in WYSIWYG editor installed making it so that you can create and publish the content directly from the trackboost application.

Jack has made the design of TrackBoost for even the most amateur blogger….if you know how to copy and paste, then you can make this work for you.

Find Related Posts with TrackBoost

Probably one of the coolest functions of trackboost is the ability to do a search query and instantly find relevant blogs that you may want to link to. This is perfect for someone like me that really doesn’t have the time to actually look for blogs because I am managing so many other websites. Plus, you may even find a site that you really like (I actually have added to sites to my RSS feed since using this one). You can get up to 100 relevant sites to post a track back to per search query so the sky is the limit.

The listings of the sites come complete with a PR ranking as well as a compete and alexa listing so you can find the blogs that really matter or that are the most relevant to your post. Plus, you can actually view the blog in question from the application itself. This makes finding the best and most relevant blogs to links to a breeze.

One of the problem areas that Trackboost has that I should make note of is that there are many sites such as digg that pop up in the listings as well as sites that require a log in to comment. A trackback to these sites will normally not list and therefore are useless in terms of gaining traffic. In other words, take care with what you are linking up to.

That said, you should also not abuse trackboost outright. While theoretically you could list ALL of the sites that were found, remember that who you link up to is a direct reflection on your site.

Creating and/or editing a post with TrackBoost

Once you have selected the links you want to trackback to, you can then either create a new post or edit a previous post. Like I said earlier, Trackboost comes complete with its own editor so there is no need to even visit the admin panel of your blog to post. To the write of the post you are writing, you are given several options to use in regards to your links:

  • You can add a nofollow attribute to your links
  • You can make the links open in a new window
  • You can create a table for the links to be housed in or make a list.

Since this is an HTML editor, you can also give your potential trackbacks a little headline. For instance, you could place something like “Relevant links around the web”.

After that, it is simply a copy and paste job and then you publish it and you are done.

Check Your PingBacks and TrackBacks with TrackBoost

Trackboost also gives you the ability to check back on your trackbacks to see what blogs have accepted your trackbacks and which ones haven’t. With that, I want to note that after a week, my success with getting trackbacks is around 20% meaning that for every 10 links I add, only around 2 get listed. This sucks but I can understand why. Many webmasters won’t bother to list trackbacks for one reason or another. If you are making your links “no-follow” though, there is no reason to worry about this. After all, track backs can be thought of as another funnel to your site. And since it is virtually effortless, trackboost won’t eat up a lot of your time.

No-Follow and TrackBoost

I have read a couple of negative reviews in relation to TrackBoost and the fact that most blogs and sites automatically have a ‘no follow’ attribute attached to it, making using trackboost for SEO purposes a non-factor. This may be true and if you are using trackboost as a means to get backlinks then this may not be for you.

That said, there are some other things that these guys don’t realize. From a relevancy on page SEO standpoint, you are getting keywords from these sites in the excerpts that trackboost supplies. In other words, if you want additional relevant content and potential long tail keywords without having to do the ground work, then this could be a decent solution. Just adding 10 links to a blog post can yield an extra hundred or so keyword dense longtails to your content.

The bottom line on TrackBoost

Since I have only been using trackboost for just a week, I would say that it is a little early to give this one a thumbs up or thumb’s down. However, my initial impression has been good. For those who actually understand how to properly use social marketing, this could be a godsend because of the amount of time it will save you. The fact that it takes just a few minutes to grab links from a 10 or so sites can mean a ton of traffic (and new readers for those who care about readers) over the long haul.

The only downside so far is the actual low “track back” rate that I have been getting. To post 10 links and only garner 2 track backs is not good but as I get to know this program better, perhaps I can develop a working strategy to improve the rate of trackbacks to my site.

Oh, as far as price, TrackBoost is not cheap. Jack is selling it for $197 and I think that this is a bit high for what it does but then again, what do I know? It is obviously not to support an affiliate program. I have looked high and low for an affiliate program and haven’t found one.

Things I liked About TrackBoost:

  • TrackBoost automates the track back process for you.
  • You can find relevant sites in terms of what you are talking about which in turn gives your readers a better overall experience.
  • The fact that trackboost will automatically add an excerpt to the posted link is great because you get more content which equates to more food for the robots and the potential for more long tail keywords in the search engine results.
  • You can check to see who lists your trackbacks and make revisions to your list should you choose.

Things I didn’t like about TrackBoost:

  • The program is a bit pricey which could be a blessing in disguise (less people using this means that it flies under the radar.
  • The sites that actually list the track backs are low meaning that you either have to tweak and remove those that don’t list to your site or just live with it.
  • There isn’t an affiliate program (once again, this could be a blessing in disguise).

How I intend to use TrackBoost to boost rankings

As most of you probably know, there are two ways to use these types of programs….the way straight out of the box (which most will probably use with varying degrees of success) and then the way that should help boost your rankings.

The first way is the usual lazy blogger approach. This is how it goes (and why so many bloggers don’t do well on the internet).

  • You add the links and get the trackbacks
  • Then you move on to the next post and do the same…
  • and so on and so forth….

This method may work or it may not but you won’t feel the full benefit of this. Here is the better way to use trackboost….

  • Make a post, add links…
  • Wait for trackbacks….
  • Submit all the sites that list your site to the social bookmarks, stumbleupon, ect.
  • Repeat process….

This one very simple step can yield better results for your site in the long run. You give kudos to sites that link to you and therefore give the site a little authority in the eyes of the search engines which in turn gives your site more authority because they are linking to your site. By the way, this is social marketing 101 for those of you who are new.

I will probably revisit this TrackBoost Review in a month or two and see if this product has benefited this site.

Other Sites that May Interest You

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Why You should Use Trackbacks - Many bloggers are using trackbacks to monitor traffic around their blogs and increase the activity between their websites and other sites. But exactly what are trackbacks? And why do you even need to use them? …

How To Use Trackbacks, I Finally Know :) - After much confusion and delays I finally figured out ow to use Trackbacks. I came to know about Trackbacks when sometime ago I got a notification from wordpress telling me that somebody had liked one of my posts and had tracked back to …

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10 Hot Tips To Increase Traffic To Your Blog - Use Trackbacks when posting something from other blogs this will give you a link back from their blog. 10. Re-write your posts and submit them to article directories such as www.trumparticles.com include a link back to your blog in your …

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Comments

One Response to “TrackBoost Review…Will Automating Trackbacks be Worth The Price?”

  1. Wordpress SEO on June 2nd, 2008 2:18 am

    Thanks for the detailed review.

    I was wondering if the tool worked as well as Jack made out. Not really.

    If you do your trackbacks by hand (i.e. including relevant articles in relevant posts) and not via machine, I’ve found that trackback success is closer to 50% (probably a bit under).

    I also imagine you get yourself banned as a spammer from a lot of weblogs and from Akismet for submitting too many tenuous trackbacks.

    I do like your idea of social bookmarking the articles which do link to you. That could definitely give one’s social bookmarking accounts a cleaner profile and get one’s sites new link juice. Thanks for the tip.

    And one doesn’t need Jack’s tool for that.

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