Okay long time coming but here we are…. The Official winners of competition prizes are.

1 - Edward Seward with 3,655 points
2 - Andrew Kelly with 2,716 points
3 - Timothy Solosa with 1,978 points
4 - Roue Yecpot with 1,628 points
5 - Geoff Ford with 1,583 points
6 - Haiming Jiang with 1,502 points
7 - Chris Morris with 1,009 points
8 - Michael Shook with 1,005 points
9 - Susan Odea with 937 points
10 - Patrick Loh with 896 points

Congratulations to the winners we will be contacting you via email with instructions on how to claim your prizes.

Keep a look out as we will be announcing another competition very soon for a different aspect of AMA. Already the growth and results generated by the network are astounding.

This is all thanks to you guys in supporting us and AMA

Keep up the fantastic work…. Onwards & Upwards.

The AMA Team

We added a new feature to AMA that will make it much easier for you to check the Google rankings of the hyperlinks that you are promoting via your AMA articles.

When you go to your Articles section, you will notice a new green button called, “Rankings”.

The system takes all the anchor text options that you use to promote a specific hyperlink, and checks the position where the hyperlink is displayed in the Google search results for each anchor text option.

You can track your progress by printing the results and comparing them with the new results every few weeks.

We trust this will make your life a little easier, and add even more value to your AMA subscription.

Hey AMA’niens (yes I made that up we are now our own classification),

I have to tell you, the AMA network has been exploding, not just in terms of size, but in terms of results for members…

That’s not why I wanted to chat to you today though, we have put together a “little” competition for members of AMA, and it’s as simple as this, who can add the highest number of sites into the system.

The results of the AMA network are driven by 2 things, it’s size and strength… now we are adding our own sites into the network here as well, but we can’t be including ourselves in the competition that would be cheating

Now, it’s my birthday tomorrow, and it happens to be Marcs wifes birthday too, so we were going to have this competition and give away a bunch of PLRPro memberships and AMA memberships and stuff that is fantastic, but it isn’t… real… not like cash is anyway.

So Marc and I kicked around the idea of putting up $3k in cash and prizes for grabs.
Its time to lay down the rules for the AMA Site Smackdown Competition.

Here’s the really cool points.

1. Free & Paid members can compete
2. There are some really cool prizes
3. All you need to do is add your sites into the network to get prizes.

For every site you add into the system you will receive 1 point, if that site is on a unique ip address you will receive 5 points.

The top 10 point winners will win the goodies.

Click Here To Register a FREE Account on AMA

So lets lay down the prizes.

Prize #1 - $1000 USD in cold hard cash to help you with your Internet Empire + 1 Year FREE PLRPro Membership Valued At $1164 (includes AMA FREE Also) + 1 Pro Version Traffic Travis + 1 WP SEO Sniper Professional WordPress plugin

Prize #2 - Sony PS3 + 1 Year FREE PLRPro Membership Valued At $1164 (includes AMA FREE Also) 1 Pro Version Traffic Travis + 1 WP SEO Sniper Professional WordPress plugin

Prize #3 - 8GB Ipod Nano with $100 in Itunes vouchers + 1 Year FREE PLRPro Membership Valued At $1164 (includes AMA FREE Also) 1 Pro Version Traffic Travis + 1 WP SEO Sniper Professional WordPress plugin

Prize #4 - $200 in cash + 1 Year FREE PLRPro Membership Valued At $1164 (includes AMA FREE Also) 1 Pro Version Traffic Travis + 1 WP SEO Sniper Professional WordPress plugin

Prize #5 - $100 in cash + 1 Year FREE PLRPro Membership Valued At $1164 (includes AMA FREE Also) 1 Pro Version Traffic Travis + 1 WP SEO Sniper Professional WordPress plugin

Prizes #6 - #10 1 Year FREE PLRPro Membership Valued At $1164 (includes AMA FREE Also) 1 Pro Version Traffic Travis + 1 WP SEO Sniper Professional WordPress plugin

You can see the top 15 people via points in the sidebar, so you know how close you are to nabbing a top 10 position.

Competition End Date is Midnight, EST (New York time), on October 10th 2008, so you have 14 days to go nuts adding sites.

Click Here To Register a FREE Account on AMA

Remember a unique IP is worth 5 points.

Mark Ling & the guys over at http://www.traffictravis.com have also donated 10 copies of their latest SEO software valued at $99.95 per copy.

Dewald Pretorius over at http://www.wpseosniper.com donated 10 copies of his WordPress SEO plugin software valued at $97.00 per copy.

Good Luck…Have Fun & Win some prizes

AMA Team

Update: Site points are recalculated once every day.

If you’re receiving emails with error messages that read, “CURL error: Operation timed out…” despite the fact that AMA has published a post on your blog, then log in to the WordPress admin panel of your blog, and please check the following:

Go to Options/Settings, Writing, and look at the list of ping services in the “Update Services” text box.

If you have a long list of ping services there, then that’s probably the reason why you’re getting the error messages.

Pinging all those services is taking so long that the AMA software times out while waiting for your blog to respond back to say that the post was successfully published.

Please remove some of the ping services until you don’t get the error message. You really only need http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ in the list, and that one alone won’t slow down publishing on your site.

The AMA system cannot wait indefinitely for your blog to respond, otherwise we would never be able to get through all the publishing that the system must do.

If removing the ping services does not solve the issue, then check if any plugins are slowing down the publishing process.

If your blog runs WordPress 2.6 or later, you must explicitly enable the XML-RPC remote publishing interface, otherwise AMA won’t be able to publish to your site.

Log in to your blog with the admin account, and go to Settings, and then Writing.

Check the box next to “XML-RPC” on the Writing options page, and save the settings.

If you are one of the (un)lucky people to have received emails from the AMA system with errors that were detected while publishing articles to your site, then please take note of the following.

If you receive an error message and the article was actually successfully published on your site, the most likely cause was a plugin on your site that either crashed or generated PHP warning messages.

Some plugins run after WordPress has published a post. When we publish to the blog, we expect a well-formed XML document back from WordPress to tell the AMA system that the post was successfully published.

The trouble is, if a plugin (or any other PHP script) generates errors or warnings on your site at that point, those error or warning messages are included in the response we get back from WordPress.

That extra content breaks the XML, and then AMA cannot understand the response we received from your site.

Check the “error_log” of your site for any PHP error or warning messages generated by plugins. If possible, please deactivate those plugins.

You can usually find the “error_log” file in the root (home) folder of your site.

We’ve noticed that the OnlyWire plugin is one of those that crashes the XML-RPC interface on some blogs.

As you know, the anchor text that you use in the links in your articles is very important. They tell the search engines what topic the link is about, and that helps your site to rank for those topics (or phrases).

You can go the easy route, and insert just normal hyperlinks (3 at most per article), which means all the copies of your article that are published on sites are going to contain the same anchor text on the links back to your site.

However, there’s a better and more powerful way to do it… by submitting spinnable anchor text inside the article.

Here’s how to do it.

Your normal hyperlink would look like this:
<a href="http://example.com">anchor text</a>

To spin the anchor text, write your hyperlinks like so:
<a href="http://example.com">{anchor 1~anchor 2~anchor 3}</a>

Here’s an example:
<a href="http://example.com">{fish tackle~tackle for fishing~fly fishing tackle}</a>

When AMA distributes your article, it spins the anchor text before it publishes the article on a site.

Hence, on Site 1, your hyperlink would say:
<a href="http://example.com">fish tackle</a>

On Site 2, the link would say:
<a href="http://example.com">fly fishing tackle</a>

Etc…

It’s very important to make sure that every anchor text option makes sense within the context of the sentence where you’re including the link. Reading the sentence back to yourself with every anchor text option helps a lot to ensure that an option doesn’t break the sentence grammar.

There is no limit to the number of options that you can put between the { } characters.

It’s important to note that you cannot do this via AMA’s assisted rewrite feature. You must insert the spinnable anchor text options before you submit the article on the new article submission page in AMA, and then rewrite the article using the assisted rewriting feature of AMA.

You could stop here if you wanted. It will already give you a lot of power with hyperlinks.

But, you can go to the advanced level and really mix things up. Note, mix things up, not mess things up.

You are generally going to have more blog posts on your site than the number of articles that you’re going to submit into AMA.

What if there were a way to insert a link to “blog post #1″ in one copy of the article that’s distributed, and a link to “blog post #2″ in another copy of the article that’s distributed?

Here’s how to do it.

Step 1 is to spin the hyperlinks themselves:

{<a href="http://example.com/link-1/">anchor</a>~<a href="http://example.com/link-2/">anchor</a>~<a href="http://example.com/link-3/">anchor</a>}

Step 2 is to spin the anchor text inside those hyperlinks:

{<a href="http://example.com/link-1/">[anchor 1|anchor 2|anchor 3]</a>~<a href="http://example.com/link-2/">[anchor 4|anchor 5|anchor 6]</a>~<a href="http://example.com/link-3/">[anchor 7|anchor 8|anchor 9]</a>}

Note that in this case, the hyperlinks are spun by the { } delimiters, and the anchor text is spun by the [ ] delimiters. Do not include { } inside { } delimiters. It won’t work.

With AMA, you can spin text at two levels, by including [ ] delimiters inside { } delimiters.