Over the coming fortnight you’re going to hear a lot about Source Phoenix, a product being launched by Alex Becker but not something I would call an Alex Becker product. Alex has pulled together other highly successful SEO’s – such as Kotton Grammer and Dan Anderson – to show how they’re making over $300,000 per month combined.

I’ve purchased a lot of Becker’s products but have only ever promoted one (which was incidentally my first big affiliate promotion ever). Similarly when everyone was pushing Cloud PBN I was telling people to stay clear because of all the footprints it has. They did more than $400,000 with their launch but I have no regrets about leaving it alone because I didn’t think it was a good product.

The various penalties users received make me feel I was right with that decision.

In early 2007 I fell asleep on a bus home from college. I had a weird dream that I saw Jane Copland, Rebecca Kelley and Rand Fiskhin (all of SEOmoz at the time) sitting at the front of the bus. The conversation we had wasn’t very interesting, and it probably shows a very geeky time of my youth, but it does highlight one thing: Even at 16 I was crazy about SEO and the communities discussing it.

In the last 72 hours the SEO world has gone crazy about the news that PBN’s (Private Blog Networks) are being hit by Google. The one person I’ve looked up to all of this time, Rand Fishkin, was quick to label anyone involved in the practice as a Blackhat SEO. It was an interesting comment from someone who recently emailed me to thank me for the transparency I share in this space, but not one that I agree with. If I’m a Blackhat SEO now, I’ll continue to be one: Because I’m not slowing down the growth of my own private link network.

We all know that Google updates can be highly frustrating, especially when Google are never forthcoming about exactly what changed and what you can do about it if you feel you were unfairly penalised. For some though, Google changes can slice millions of dollars off the valuation of your company. When Panda 4.0 was rolled out on May 22nd, Retail Me Not’s stock dropped 10% or in other words, Google’s change helped to wipe $170 million from their market cap in a single day.

While eBay also took a hit on the same day, estimated to have lost rankings for up to 80% of long-tail keywords, their stock didn’t take much of a hit. This is likely because Paypal is the big driver in eBay’s stock price. The Yellow Pages however, trading as Yellow Media on the stock market, were estimated to have lost around 20% of their organic search traffic. Since a high in April their stock has dropped 29%. What if you could predict Google hitting other companies hard? Could you get rich trading their stock? Let’s find out…

I recently did something I’ve never done before: Whipped out my credit card in the middle of a packed club and punched my digits into an order form to purchase a WordPress plugin. It’s a plugin that has totally transformed how I look at publishing information online and something I expect to use for many years to come.

It has nothing to do with writing, however. Instead, it’s designed to help make your podcast easier to digest for your audience, and easier to grow for you. Here’s the kicker: It’s only available for 72 hours, or when 300 licenses are sold. Whichever comes first.

As a result of so much of my time being spent focused on building an SEO company and ranking websites, I’ve been fortunate to come across a number of people who are on a similar journey. Today I would like to introduce one of those people, Matt Prados, to the world. Matt has managed to build a 7-figure yearly revenue stream running his SEO business by targeting two specialist niches in the medical field.

Matt, from Southern California, is someone Diggy and I have been in touch with for all of 2014 and thought it’s about time we got him on the site to share his knowledge.

Five months ago I published what turned out to be one of the most popular posts ever on this site: A guide on how to reach 100,000,000 (that’s 100 million) unique users in just six months. The whole idea of the post was to show that people are “stealing” viral content, posting it on their site, and getting more visitors from Facebook than you ever thought possible.

I later published a follow-up article showing a reader of this website who made $100,000 in one week and I also dismissed some of the ridiculous claims by both Business Insider and a ‘Click Fraud’ video that was making rounds online. Now it’s time to do part three: What happened, and can you still make money with this model?

It still amazes me when SEO blogs blindly tout advice we’ve all heard before. “Write great content, build a quality site, don’t get shady backlinks” and so on. Of course, I know why they’re sharing the advice, but the “right way” certainly isn’t the only way that works.

Take paid links for example, an SEO tactic that has seen Forbes, JC Penney, Interflora and Expedia penalised by Google. It’s probably the first thing that new SEO’s hear not to do when it comes to link building. Surely it’s not still working, right? Grab your favourite beverage, we’re going in…

When I first started out with SEO I was determined to be as “whitehat” as possible. I wouldn’t do anything to potentially risk my site being penalised by Google. In fact, after just one year of running this website I had the opportunity to get a link from Matt Cutts, Google’s head of web spam.

Matt emailed me privately to ask that my content was only preaching white hat SEO and that he wouldn’t regret linking to me. I had nothing to hide and told him as such. Later that day I got the link I was hoping for. I’m sure that was the first and last time such a thing will ever happen.