IM Advantage

IM Advantage offers a comprehensive and cost effective suite of tools, training, and support to help you perform keyword research, get backlinks to your website to improve search engine rankings, and market your site through paid advertising programs. The tools are simple to use and the help desk is very supportive when problems or questions arise. A highly interactive user forum is also available. Many people participate, from raw beginners to advanced full-time marketers, and anyone can benefit from the discussions there. New training minicourses or tools are added each month, so the value of the program is always growing.

IM Advantage was created by Steve Clayton and Tim Godfrey, who are best known in the community for their Commission Blueprint and Niche Blueprint products. IM Advantage itself has been one of the best kept secrets in the business. Until recently, it was offered only to their existing customers. Now, membership is being opened up to a wider community of marketers - grab your spot now!

The key components of IM Advantage are:

Keyword Blueprint. This keyword research tool is remarkably fast and very easy to use. A competition analyzer is provided that presents green checks numbered 1-20 and gold stars to tell you which of your keywords are easiest or hardest to rank with in the search engines. I've been very pleased with the competition analyzer. My experience so far is that the competition tool gives a good estimate of which keywords will be harder to rank without a team of SEO specialists at your disposal. I can say it is more accurate than one or two other competition analyzers I've examined. The tool also tells you at a glance how many competing pages there are in the Google. Of course, the competition analysis for Keyword Blueprint takes more than the number of pages into account. The precise algorithm used is proprietary.

Blog Blueprint. This is a network of blogs that members can exploit to get quick backlinks to their own websites from domains with good pagerank (PR). Blogs in the network all have PR2-5 on their home pages and are retired after a few hundred posts have been entered. Members have complete control of all text in the posts, including the all-important anchor text. Members can use Blog Blueprint to create one-way links to as many different sites as they choose! The product is akin to Linkvana, but is cheaper. This part of IM Advantage can be purchased separately from the rest of package. In my experience using the system, posts are reviewed promptly and get indexed quickly by the search engines.

Link Blueprint. This is a community-supported system to get one-way links to any website that runs on a credit basis. You first earn credits by completing link requests for other members and then request links for yourself by adding your URL and anchor text to the master list of requested links. A second member can then claim your link to earn credits for himself. The Link Blueprint software checks each day for the presence of the link. If the link cannot be detected after several days or the site is unavailable for several days, then the credits for that link will be refunded to you and you can request another link to replace it. Link requests require different amounts of credits depending on the pagerank desired for the linking page. This is a much easier way to build links than pleading with other webmasters to link to you, particularly since many people believe that reciprocal links don't help much with search engine ranking position these days.

Article Blueprint. This is a spinner and automated submission system for your articles. Start with an article of at least 400 words and four paragraphs. Next, make two additional versions of the material within Article Blueprint. Either spin the articles manually or use an external tool for this. Your articles will next be reviewed manually by the IM Advantage team and then sent to a private network of sites. You will have to manually submit any articles to Ezine or other public directories, however.

Social Bookmark Blueprint. Recently released! This tool is intended to speed up social bookmarking of pages such as your Blog Blueprint posts. Bookmark Blueprint currently provides bookmarks from a handful of social media sites. It is integrated seamlessly with other tools in the IM Advantage program such as Blog Blueprint and Link Blueprint to make it easy for you to bookmark these pages. Users apply for accounts at different media sites and the bookmark blueprint system places bookmarks for you at each of the media sites from a couple of different accounts selected at random. The tool is designed to place bookmarks while avoiding a footprint that would be created by, e.g., having you place bookmarks from accounts all created from one IP address. New bookmarking sites are being added.

Authority Hub. Authority Hub is a backlink analyzer. After you enter a keyword phrase, it collects backlink information from the Yahoo site explorer for the top 10 ranking websites. Any backlinks shared among two or more of these 10 sites are identified and displayed in a window. Such sites may be viewed as authority sites in the niche by the search engines, thus these sites are good places to try to get links from yourself.

Offer Evaluator and Hippojaw. Offer Evaluator helps you assess whether or not a PPC campaign would be profitable. Hippojaw makes it easy to monitor your Adwords campaigns and adjust bid prices so you don't lose your shirt trying to get a few sales. Hippojaw was not created by Steve's and Tim's team, but was licensed for IM Advantage members.

Backlinks Database. The database includes a large and growing set of do follow blogs and forums as well as sites to get profile links. The number of do follow domains is now over 2000. For some of these, comments are autoapproved and these are noted explicitly in the database. This resource provides you with places to go get your own links; it is separate from the Link Blueprint system. Blog comments and profile links are not part of Link Blueprint and such links cannot be used to earn credits in the Link Blueprint system.

Cheap Clicks and High Volume Keywords. This is a list of keywords with CPC (cost per click) under $0.20 and high daily searches.

Training. The training area features videos and articles on selected topics such as link wheels, Facebook advertising, CPA (cost per action) marketing, and landing page design.

New tools. Special, smaller software tools including an affiliate site builder and a tool to help you optimize targeting of ads on the content network are also available and being added on a continuing basis.

Complete courses. Some of Tim's and Steve's best selling products are also available in the members area. Recently, Niche Blueprint 2.0 and Commission Blueprint 2.0 have been added. If you don't have one of these, get it now by joining IM Advantage!

Help Desk and Forum. These are the places we go when we're stuck, or want to share a triumph. The forum is quite active and Steve Clayton participates regularly himself. Members of the help desk team are generally prompt, knowledgeable, and courteous in their replies. What more can you ask?

You can learn more about IM Advantage or purchase it yourself here. The first link gives you access to the entire program. If you do not want the entire program, but just want a parts of it then there are options for this as well. SEO Blueprint includes Blog Blueprint, Article Blueprint, and LInk Blueprint. Click Blog Blueprint if you are just interested in a cheap blog network product or Article Blueprint to get only the article publishing tool. The full package includes many other resources and tools such as Social Bookmark Blueprint and Hippojaw.

I am an affiliate for the IM Advantage program. I also use the IM Advantage tools myself and my review and opinions are based on my personal experiences with the product.