OK, got that off my chest! Let us continue.

I have been buying and using Pete Drew’s stuff for a few years and, to be honest, most of them were a tad flakey, good ideas, which is why I bought them, hoping they’d work, but I got used to being proven wrong. A while back he came up with a set of individual tools that were pretty handy, made it easy to set up pages on ‘parasite hosts’, that is places where you can put your own web pages or sites on other people’s hosting. WordPress.com or Squidoo.com would be examples of parasite hosting.

For a change these things actually worked most of the time and I bought and used most of them because they helped me to do what I did - I promote a particular kind of affiliate product in a particular way. My method depends upon getting multiple pages into the front page of search engines for the keywords that I want to chase. I was already building sites all over the place to promote my own ‘money pages’ and sometimes even to get sales from the network pages.

It was obvious that Pete Drew had discovered the same tactic and needed to automate his process. That was a couple of years ago and the techniques still work and probably always will, they are fundamental to the internet, no black magic here.

So, when Brute Force SEO came out I was very keen. I was among the first to buy it. I even set up this site to promote it. Then I lost interest…
The software simply was not reliable enough, did not fit with my work patterns and was not making me WANT to use it.

I dropped in and out over the next few months, checking out the thing as it developed but nothing.

A while ago though I subscribed to Brute Force SEO EVO 2. Now, at last, Pete and his coders seem to have cracked it.

Stable at Last, Details Work!

Previosuly I found it was too easy to cause Brute Force SEO to crash. Error trapping was not too good, the macros doing the work were too sensitive, especially when using only one computer to run Brute Force and one’s other jobs. Worse yet, Captcha solving was really bad. It was better to sit and do the Captchas by hand and that, in truth, made using BF almost pointless, after all, I can make a basic WP.com site in a matter of minutes anyway, why hang around while the Captcha goes unsolved and then have to solve it by hand anyway?

NOW with EVO 2 the details are right. I have, as yet, been unable to make EVO 2 crash. I can play around with the sites EVO 2 is working on and everything works, the worst that happens is that EVO 2 will skip to the next site. Perfect!

Captchas work almost always but I do not need to babysit like I did with Brute Force SEO’s earlier versions. Now I CAN leave the software and let it run.

So, What Does Brute Force SEO EVO 2 DO?

Loads of ‘reviews’ will tell you about how EVO2 will create accounts, send emails, resolve Captchas, submit articles, mash up RSS feeds and the like. EVO 2 does all this, but the truth is that this is all kinda what we can take for granted.

What EVO 2 is really doing is automating the work that we needed to pay other people to do! Most of us were never disciplined enough to do what EVO 2 does anyway, so unless we paid others to do this stuff it never got done!

EVO 2 replaces people!

There is no need for me to tell you how well Brute Force EVO 2 will help you rank in the SE’s. We all should know that building lots of incoming links with relevant anchor text is going to do that!
There is no need for me to tell you that Brute Force SEO will increase your traffic; we should already know that good rankings tend to get more of any available traffic.

I don’t even need to tell you how effective multiple results on the first two pages of the major search engines is, that should simply stand to reason.

So, do not buy Brute Force EVO 2 for any of those reasons. If you are running an internet based business and reading these words then you should already know how this stuff works and how to do it.

Buy EVO 2 automated SEO because it replaces people! If you do not employ anyone right now but are running out of hours in the day then get Brute Force EVO2. It will give you back your life!
If you currently pay guys to build your links then stop doing so, chances are they are already using Brute Force SEO or something like it anyway.
If you have multiple people in your employ then get a Brute Force EVO 2 licence for each desktop and look forward to a quantum leap in their effectiveness.

One thing to note, Brute Force EVO 2 is a mindbender. You will probably need to rethink your work patterns. Check out my post on the topic here: http://bruteforceseo.org/living-with-brute-force-seo-evo-2

EVO 2 is not perfect. I would like to see some kind of progress meter. I’d love to be able to stop the process and restart it. I wish that if it stopped that the software could generate a report of its completed work but these are niggles. The fundamentals and important details are all good and I have to say that ten minutes setup time plus 30 minutes writing and spinning a short article is a great way to get a new page from nowhere to first page overnight; or a new page in a fiercely competitive niche onto page two in a matter of hours.
Bottom line, EVO 2 does what it is supposed to do and the results are in line with what we can expect from doing lots of this kind of activity.

If you are running out of time to do the things you know that you need to do then I strongly suggest you take a look at Brute Force SEO (EVO 2).

Something that not many people have commented upon is how does one incorporate Brute Force SEO (EVO2) into one’s workflow. I am not suggesting that I have all the answers but I am sure that a large part of the success, or otherwise, that users have comes from how they work with the toolbox.

Firstly I should make it clear that EVO2 will NEVER work with all the sites in its database. There are many reasons why this is so but a major part is minor changes made by the webmasters of the sites that Brute Force SEO uses. There are always going to be many sites that DO work and for sure there is no way that one could hope to accomplish all the work of EVO2 by hand without spending huge amounts of time so this a non-issue for me.

Brute Force Is A Mindbender

Because of the scale of Brute Force I found myself sitting down and rethinking my promotion strategy. From the outset I knew that as long as the software worked on a technical level, ie that it did not have too many bugs, that I’d get good results because, in truth EVO 2 is doing nothing that I was not already doing by hand or with seperate tools before and getting very good results. I was accustomed to getting 10-16 slots in the first two pages of Google for promotions that I was interested in and so doing the same with Brute Force was no surprise.

The mindbender, for me, was the time the software takes to do a run and the time it takes to get set up.

In talking of time taken I exclude the research time as this is going to vary hugely according to one’s business model.

Peter Drew talks of EVO 2 taking about 10 minutes to set up. I’d not disagree, assuming that one has already written articles for distribution (if one is going to use original material within Brute Force - I certainly think one should do so!)

I have found that each run of EVO2 can take between 5 and 8 hours. When I first started using Brute Force I was using it on the same computer as I did the rest of my work. This is perfectly feasible in technical terms. EVO 2 will not slow down most modern computers, however what does happen is that one tends to become a babysitter for the software and that means that one gets less work done than one should. Also, if one wants to turn off the machine to take it somewhere else the software is going to be unable to work. Obvious really, but most of us are not used to working with tools that take many hours to run.

Solving the Brute Force Babysitting Problem.

When I understood that the issues connected with living with Brute Force were more about me than the software I did some more thinking. I had come to know that the software is now very relaible, Captchas are are completed accurately, the software does not crash and error trapping to catch quirks and traps set up on host sites works well. Thereis no need to watch the thing work!

I came up with two solutions, the first was a technical fix and the second was about how I have started to concentrate my time.

Technical Fix

In order to make sure that I’d not disrupt the activity of Brute Force SEO I went out and bought a cheap desktop PC and a widescreen monitor. Bear in mind that I normally work with a laptop and and an external monitor. I bought a Compaq CQ 2200 SC PC which came with a decent Compaq Q2159 21.5″ wide screen monitor for an all-in cost of less than $550.

Next I went and set myself up with a copy of RealVNC which is remote control software for computers. With this I can have the new computer running and control it from a window on my laptop. This means that the Compaq can run unattended for days on end and I can set up my EVO 2 promotion rnruns from my laptop wherever I am that has an internet connction. All the software is on the new Compaq. When I am in the office I keep a window from the desktop visible on my laptop, actually on the new monitor and when I go to bed Brute Force is chugging along. When I go out, Brute Force is chugging along and I can start a ne project with my preset articles, URLs and keywords that I set up according to my new workflow plan.

The Workflow Fix

As I already hinted, working with Brute Force SEO imposed some changes on my work flow. For example, I normally tend to do the whole of a promotion process in one go. I start out by researching/choosing my keywords then I create content then I start doing article submissions, blog network posts, blog comments, rss feed submissions etc etc etc. I found that now I was working with a tool that already did most of this work for me but took a long tiome to chew though the work that I now needed to do the research and content generation up front and have it ready to roll when BruteForce was ready to roll.

In the time before I figured out this simple trick I was wasting ages because I was waiting until BF was ready and THEN starting work on the research and content - madness.

Now, I have, for each site that I am working on, a list of target keywords, the URLs that I need to promote and the content pre-prepared. Actrually I added an extra wrinkle, ine that I should have cottoned on to before but managed to miss. I use a blog network to build decent quality and relatively permanent backlinks to my sites. The network I use is Article Marketing Automation (AMA) this tool has a nice rewriter tool built in and a preview system that spits out rewrites based upon the spins I have set up. What I now do is set up my blog network posts ahead of time and then I take spins from the AMA rewriter and paste them into Brute Force SEO. In addition, I also take the spin template that AMA makes and paste it into ArticleBot from Incansoft which posts to hundreds of article directories. In this way I can have hundreds of different versions of the same article floating around and all pointing at my money pages.

If you are feeling very keen, then I would suggest getting a copy of Scrapebox this tool will help with keyword research, on top of Pete’s own tool but more importantly it will allow you to ‘promote your promotions’ very quickly. Have a look at the sales page, it tells no lies! Using Bruteforce and Scrapebox together you will have no problem in building a huge and diffuse network of pages and links all feeding link love and ‘authority’ to your money pages. If you DO get Scrapebox as well as EVO 2 then I’d strongly suggest a few practice runs to get used to the software and then do some serious thinking about how to build your linking network. I know that with these tools a one man micro business can punch well above its normal weight!

Hmmm…

That was NOT a review of Brute Force SEO (EVO2 ), I hope that it is useful for some who are thinking about buying it, or even those who already have it. Seriously though, in its current form, EVO 2, this is stable and effective. If you have pages you want to get noticed then this software is capable to do the job. If you get past the babysitting the software stage then you will find it very productive.

Oh, you want to check out Brute Force SEO (EVO 2)? Try here!

Anyway, one of the more interesting parts of this process has been that he has been enrolling early bird list signups as affiliates.
So what?

Simply this, Peter is offering that every person who signs up as an affiliate to Brute Force SEO will be offered a low price for the membership to the system. These early affiliates will also get to make a profit on their sales.
Problem is that he is limiting the number of affiliate slots (and early bird signups) to just 1000 people.
So, in order to get an assurance of the lower price subscription you need to sign up as a Brute Force SEO affiliate - simply signing up for the early bird notification list is not enough!

Yesterday he sent out an email telling us that of the 1000 affiliate slots only 200 are still open. This means that even if you already signed up to the early bird list that you really should get on the Brute Force SEO affiliate list while you can.

To sign up you simply need to go to BruteForceSEO.com and sign up as an affiliate. You will need to pay $1 through PayPal but this registers you on his affiliate system and you will get immediate payouts of affiliate fees without any waiting.

The Brute Force Web 2.0 Account Creator looks pretty useful, it enables users to rapidly set up new accounts with a whole host of Web 2.0 (user generated content) sites. It covers four types of sites.
1. Social Bookmarking sites
2. Rss Aggregators (Not yet including my own Rss Aggregator site though)
3. Video sites
4. Article Directories

I can see this being a very useful addition to the toolset in BruteForce SEO. I did not see a facility to use proxies for signups but in my opinion this is not too important if one is using social sites correctly. It is only if one is spamming Web 2.0 sites that large numbers of accounts are needed and I do not abuse them.

This is a tool that will, if maintained by the Brute Force team, make life a lot easier.
My only query is that as Pete adds more and more tools I can see the price climbing higher and higher - with the amount of stuff in there I can imagine a scary price but at the same time Pete knows his market so I am sure he will offer a mass market price and, for sure, 1000 users is quite a lot of people.

I’d urge readers to sign up to the early bird notification list as Peter has said that his next email will outline how to make sure of a place, no matter how busy sales get and I guess that he will be offering an early bird price deal as well.

The claims that Peter Drew is making for his new product are far from subtle and the imagery is certainly refined.

His website at BruteForceSEO.com is, at the time of writing, pretty bare apart from an earlybird signup form ( I recommend signing up ) and a link to the feature set of the software.

The first reason for signing up to the early bird list is that only 500 subscriptions will be sold.

Anyway, the software…
What does Brute Force SEO actually do?

Well, it seems to me to be an amalgamation of his previous products that have for some months been on sale to thousands of willing buyers. I will go into more detail shortly but in essence the system is designed to create basic sites on a number of host sites, what some people call ‘parasite hosting’.

When the sites have been created a linking structure is set up so that each page can expect to rank well in its own right as well as linking, ultimately to the money pages.

Next the system submits all the rss feeds from the original site and the newly created ones to some 20 rss aggregators, this helps with getting spider activity to the new pages.
After this the articles added to the system are submitted to a network of article directories where they will be read and, hopefully, syndicated onward.
If video has been added to the system then Brute Force SEO will forward it to 20 video directories.

Apart from actually adding the site content to the system almost all the foregoing is hands-off. Of course where captchas are needed to show that a human is at work then we users need to do some work.

The whole process to set up an entire network is about 30 minutes (according to Peter Drew, I have not yet had chance to use the whole system.)

A point to note is that BruteForce SEO can handle several projects at once so one can spend a morning setting up several networks, interrupted only by the need to add captchas and review progress.

Pete’s claim that a user can ‘dominate’ the first 3-5 pages in Google with this system is, in my opinion entirely feasible. I have used manual systems and obtained similar results using similar techniques to those of BruteForceSEO. My biggest caveat and warning to users is this: I was able to get to be among top affiliates for some big name launches without using an email list by using techniques very similar to those Pete recommends, but I was doing so in circumstances where the big name marketers were not actively working on website visitors. I always thought this very lazy and have made very good bank from their short sightedness, but I can only imagine what would happen if a substantial portion of the users of Brute Force SEO all latched onto the same product or launch.
In my opinion users will need to work to find appropriate niches and make careful choices about which products to support, or to accept that in the final analysis, even a tool such as Brute Force SEO needs skill and care to get the best from it.

Another point to bear in mind is that in the past some of Pete’s stuff has not always worked as well as buyers might wish. I do not think this is going to be an issue here because BFS is built from established components and, as a flagship product, Pete’s reputation is on the line here!

When I found out about Brute Force SEO I signed up as I can see a lot of potential here. Success will demand care and skill but it will, as long as the software functions as it should, give those people willing to learn its potential a significant advantage in the competitive internet marketing SEO marketplace.

Please sign up and take a look whilst it is still possible!

Some readers might remember Traffic Equalizer, some may have used PortalFeeder, others probably tried many of the less successful imitators.

So, now Peter Drew is having a tilt at the target. The question is this: Has he got what it takes wrapped up in the form of his Brute Force SEO system?

To be honest, at the moment we do not have much to go on but what we do have seems positive.
Firstly - and to my mind (coz I am big headed) he is doing stuff that I have already done and know works. That means his toolbox simply has to deliver what he claims because the strategies and techniques DO work.
Let me explain…

A couple of years ago I came up with a set of tactics that enabled me to earn very good money from certain kinds of product launches. I was able to take over search engine rankings for a whole raft of keywords that I KNEW prospects and buyers of these products would be using. I was showing colleagues results where I was getting 16 of the first 20 results in Google for absolutely key terms. If you wanted info on a product in which I was interested then you were coming to one of my pages!

My system was time consuming and almost entirely manual, but very profitable.

Then, a while back Pete Drew started selling a set of tools that duplicated some of the stuff I was doing by hand. I bought them as they came out. All the time I was wondering when he’d get around to packaging them all up as a single toolkit.

Well, he just did - and more. It is called Brute Force SEO

Anyway, gotta go.

Next post we will start to look at just what Bruteforce SEO has to offer us.