Internet Marketing Magpies Anonymous » Article Marketing

Super Affiliate Challenge – half way through week 2

Clare — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 08:06:09 +0000

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.

Xfactor Site 5 goes live and EZA articles published

Clare — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 09:40:53 +0000

I’m struggling at the moment with an awful cough which is presenting me sleeping. Since I was up so early this morning I thought I’d try and get another Xfactor site live before work. An hour and a half later and I have Site Number 5 live with two keyword posts published and three articles freshly written and submitted to EZA.

Yesterday I was quite surprised to see that EZA published all of my articles from Sunday and Monday morning. I’m a platinum member so the SLA is 48 hours; they turned the last few around in about 12!

Despite the new backlinks from EZA Google is still refusing to index the sites as yet so I’m going to need to rely on EZA for traffic for now.

I’ll just keep plugging away getting the other five sites uploaded and then go from there.

Xfactor sites 3 and 4 go live

Clare — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 11:44:55 +0000

Well today marks day four of my Adsense Xfactor journey and I have just published Sites 3 and 4.

I’ve submitted three articles for each of the sites to EZA and added the homepage content to each site. It’s taken just over four hours to get both sites up and running and the articles written and submitted. At that rate it could become a Saturday morning task to publish new sites each week.

I’m slightly moving away from John’s plan at this stage because you’re supposed to work on two sites for a whole week submitting articles to EZA. Because I found 10 sets of keywords on my keyword finding day I’ve decided to just repeat the Day 1 activities until all ten sites are up and running. Then I’ll go back and submit the other backlink building articles. I figured this way they have time to settle in and hopfully for Google to index them all.

Sites 1 and 2 are still waiting to be indexed but I hope EZA will publish the article set I submitted for them at some point tomorrow and then I should hopefully start seeing some traffic.

Getting started with the XFactor adsense strategy

Clare — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 14:42:04 +0000

I first heard about John’s Xfactor Adsense strategy last year but I’d spent so much money on ebooks and courses that I never actually took any action with that i decided I should skip it.

Fast forward to last week and some of my IM friends were talking about this great Adsense strategy that they thought was one worth investing some time and money in. Of course it was Xfactor strategy! This time I decided that since some trusted friends had recommended it I would take the plunge.

The eBook runs to just over 90 pages and let me say that I think it’s 90 plus pages of gold nuggets. It took me a few days to get through as I was quite busy but as soon as I’d read the last page I fired up Micro Niche Finder and was ready to take action.

After a few hours of keyword research I came up with ten keywords that I thought fitted the bill. I couldn’t buy the exact keyword domains so I took John’s advice and added some words to the end in order to secure the dotcoms. I’ve just invested my January Adsense income into twn new domains so let’s hope that it was a good investment!

On Friday afternoon I spent a few hours building the first site (Site Number 1) following John’s instructions to the letter. I don’t have any software for building HTML sites so I had to hand code it in NotePad. I added another $25 to my expenses buying some credits from a stock image site; I could have spent hours searching for some free images but the ones I saw look professional and that is what I’m going for here.

When the site was all built I suddenly realised that I couldn’t use my usual instant backlink building trick to get it indexed as static sites don’t have RSS feeds. I settled instead for tweeting the link (which has so far had no effect) and submitting the sitemap to Google.

On Saturday I decided that a WordPress theme was in order – my CMS of choice for all of my sites – so I spent about 4 hours learning how to code a WordPress Theme from scratch. It was hard work but at the end of it I have a theme that I think looks great, a better understanding of CSS and PHP, and I can now build a site and have the initial content up and running in less than half an hour. That’s how long it took to build Site Number 2 anyway!

This morning I set about writing articles to submit to Ezine Articles for backlinks. I managed to write each article in about 15 minutes so I’ve proved that if I put my mind to it article marketing isn’t really that hard to action. John suggests that you submit the articles purely for backlinks, but I’m sort of hoping that I’ll get some traffic that way too. We’ll see.

I’m off now to submit my first batch to ezine and then to start loading content into Site Number 3.

If you’re following the Xfactor strategy I’d love to hear how you are finding the action plan and whether you’ve had any success so far.

2010 is the year for taking action