We encourage serious bloggers – both those who are already established and those who are new but highly motivated to succeed – to apply for acceptance in our private blog collaboration known as the Secret Blog Club (SBC) by leaving a comment in this post.

UPDATE: When Murray’s blogs were hacked the forum stopped working and to date we have not found anyone who can fix the problem. We ARE still working on that and I will notify everyone when we get it working again.

I know how very busy everyone is and that there really is no time for yet another thing to do or community to join; however, the Secret Blog Club that Murray Newlands started has already taken off and is providing benefits to early members.

What we are doing is a combination of the blogging buddies concept popularized by Darren Rowse and Social Networking collaboration where members support each others’ efforts and visit related blogs regularly.

We also use the forum to teach best practices and the very best ways we can benefit each other. One of those is to work one-on-one with members to hone in on who their target audience is and how that audience would search for them. My post about building traffic through proper use of anchor text explains that process.

We also have a special section where we post recommendations for what we actually use (hosting companies, list managers, Themes, etc.) that includes member’s affiliate links so that other members can support those who assist them in making conscious decisions when buying anything that offers affiliate commissions – especially when they have recurring payments. Experienced members also assist in implementing what they recommend.

Members know that information in the forum is to be kept private between members and the content there is not indexed in the search engines or viewable publicly.

Some of our early members have strong sites from PR3 to PR6 and some have 20,000-30,000 followers at Twitter. Just having Murray link to a specific phrase for me from his blog immediately allowed me to make the first page of Google for the target phrase.

One of our most recent additions is a compilation of Blogs by Niche. Imagine the power of having multiple major bloggers with numerous blogs willing to provide related incoming links for your most important searches.  We will soon use this information to create niche regular guest blogging schedules that will be key to driving the member blogs under 30,000 at Alexa.

We have done our best within the limitations of using a forum to make it fast and easy to benefit. We are also actively seeking someone to create Social Media Marketing tools to make these processes faster.

Here is the kind of information we compile at SBC:

• Blogs by Niche
• Direct contact information
• Preferred Anchor Text and Landing Pages
• Recommendations on Hosting, Themes, Products and Services
• How-to Information

If you would like to join please leave a comment in this post with a link to our primary blog and a valid email address. Your blog does not have to already be optimized – participating in SBC will assist you to do that much faster.

Any blog that offers quality content will be considered. Applicants will receive a reply via email with a link to join. If you have questions or are unable to comment contact GrowMap for further information or assistance.