I admit that I’ve been questioning the validity of this challenge over the past few days. I’ve gone from thinking I can do it. To thinking it’s too much. To thinking it’s some sort of scam! I know I signed up for some serious work, but we were told it would require just two hours a day. Last weekend I worked through the plan and wrote down all of the activities for the 11 weeks and the numbers just didn’t add up.
One week we’d be given 13 hours to write and spin 15 articles, the next we’d be given half as much time for twice as many articles! A friend and I worked out the total number of ‘activities’ and comparing that to the time allowed each day meant we’d have to do each one in about 4 minutes. ie write an article in 4 minutes, spin it and submit it to a directory in 4 minutes, create a video in 4 minutes. You get the picture? Unrealistic!
A few disillusioned posts on the SAC blog later (not just by me) and John and Matt decided to redo some of the timings and reissue week one and two of the plan. Now it feels a little more achievable…
Article spinning
One of the tasks is to spin the articles so that they are considered more unique by the other directories. I started out with a 5 day trial of the Magic Article Rewriter and I was instantly impressed. It really was so easy to spin the content and not have it come out looking like garbage.
Then I tested out the Free Article Spinner – if you’re a mac user then it’s perfect as it’s online. You simply paste in your article and add some {} around the words you want to spin. Then it takes you to the next screen where it lists them all out and all you do is type replacement words or sentences into boxes. The final article can be saved as a spun version for use with an article submitter or you can just generate unique versions within the site. Absolutely brilliant – easy to use – and FREE!
Article submitting
Next up is submitting the articles which I find so dull as it’s such a repetitive task. I tried the Magic Article Spinner which was a nightmare to install thanks to a corrupt version of the Microsoft Net Framework on my laptop. When I finally got it to work it registered me with 800 directories – and then ended up submitting my article to 6 of them 
They’re not really high profile article directories either. If you’re going to invest in the Article Writer then you might as well take the Spinner for $20 – but I wouldn’t buy it on it’s own.
So then I tried SENuke: this software is pretty impressive as it includes a spinner, an article submitter, it submits to Web 2.0 sites, and it bookmarks your links and it submits RSS feeds and video phew! It pretty much is a traffic promotion kit all in one little piece of software.
It’s easy to use – though if you’re not careful I think it’s also very easy to become a spammer. You definitely need to take time out to plan a strategy of how you will use each of the tools. I loved the way it saved the URLs from all the Web 2.0 properties and automatically carried them forward so you can bookmark and ping them. The only downside? The price tag. $127 a month! I think if you use it properly (and there are lots of people posting their strategies on the forum that you can learn from) then it would pay for itself. But right now I don’t have the time to learn how to use it so I’ll not be sticking around past the 7 day free trial.
So then I landed on Submit YOUR article – I’ve heard of this one before, I think Willie Crawford recommended it (or he might even own it??). Essentially you sign up to a number of quality and popular directories (including EZA) and input your log in details. Then you upload an article. It then walks you through rewriting the title, some sentences from the article and the bio box – to help make some unique versions. Then you hit submit and they go off and submit if for you – you can even choose to drip feed the article submissions over a number of days! Brilliant. Easy to use and it’s online too so it’s great for me and my mac 
I’m going to stick with this one ($47 a month) for the duration of the challenge and will report back how successful it was. I think $47 is a fair trade for the five to six hours a month it would take me to spin and submit these article variations myself.
Product review
Aside from getting stuck into forum posting and knocking out a further 10 articles (plus spins) Week 2′s activities also include writing a product review. Now the brothers made us a template to use, but by complete coincidence Tiffany Dow posted a guest blog over at Andrew Hanson’s blog – about how to write an product review!
So I used her guidelines and came up with this review for PING! I opted to post in on my own book review blog as going forward we’ll start to build backlinks to it and I’d rather keep the link juice than point backlinks to a blogger blog.
So there you go, some article spinner and submitters tried and tested and a top tip for how to write a product review. Now I’m off to do some more spinning/submitting with Submit YOUR Article!
Oh quickly before I go the Adsense 101 Bootcamp – I’m still hanging in there – this week Steve was teaching us how to spin articles 
RESULTS
PING! – 88 Hops – no sales
Did you discover any gems this week? I’d love to hear more about them.
