Categories
Article Marketing Paid Tools Tools

Article Marketing Automation: After a Month

Well its been month and so will I be cancelling the subscription on Article Marketing Automation which is just about to cost me another $47 ? Hell no!


NYC: Hilton Times Square – “Time and Money”
Originally uploaded by wallyg

As I reported after 2 weeks with AMA I have had a significant jump in the search engine rankings for both a hubpage and a niche blog of mine. Well after another two weeks, nothing has changed: both are still holding their new improved ratings. The count of the times that the relevant articles have been published is now up to 77 and 72 respectively. Is that as far as those sites are going to go the hubpage is ranking #5 the blog #8 for the keywords I targeted for this test.

Why hasn’t the extra published articles pushed me higher? That I have a theory about: I think most of the sites that articles are being published are very new, most people didn’t commit their existing sites to this new service. Now those sites are at most maybe 2 months old a lot of them will start to be getting sandboxed. I expect they will pop out sometime; so all I can see is an upside as my backlinks start to be counted by Google. In fact a number of the sites aren’t indexed at all I suspect because few of the links are actually showing up for either Yahoo or Google yet. So its only a fraction of the potential 70+ links which have actually got me pushed up the rankings thus far, there does seem to be a lot of potential upside still.

The only downside to date: I wish I had written more articles and submitted them! Time to really focus on that side of things I think. For those writing articles for submission to AMA here are a couple of hints which will make sure that you don’t get rejected from MY sites :

  • don’t submit a dozen similar but different articles on the same topic all at the same time. I then get presented wtih the option of 6 very similar articles I tend to pick one or two at most
  • spin the articles: I won’t consider publishing an article which is less than 30% unique

Those links again:

  • for the free version of Article Marketing Automation: allows a limited number of articles to be submitted and an unlimited number of sites to be added.
  • for the paid version of Article Marketing Automation which allows unlimited article to be submitted and sites to be added and costs $47/month

Its all about time and money for me: AMA is saving me more than its costing me, I will be a subscriber for a while longer!

Categories
HubPages Online Business

HubPages is NOT a Waste of Time!

I occasionally get the comment that I shouldn’t publish all my better content on sites I don’t own or control. The comment came up again on HubPages where I was told again that I was basically wasting my time publishing there.

Well its true at one level: the actual direct income I make from Adsense/Kontera/eBay/Amazon revenue sharing pays for my hosting: but that’s about it!. No the effect of Hubpages is more subtle than that. I have readers who actually read what I post there.

That said my best ever hub in terms of views by hubpages readers is this one high-lighting some sexy pictures of Nicole Kidman. I have a theory on this. As an exclusively English language site HubPages has a quite a number of Indian authors. India still has tight censorship laws which probably block most of the X-rated sites which are prevelent across the internet. HubPages bans “adult” hubs but their interpretation is the same as Adsense’s that is the odd American view of sex which bans (female) nipples but wet transparent clothing is fine. I don’t know for sure but I know that I have had over 200 views a day for weeks at a time, and then the views drop to a tenth of that: probably because the hub is no longer featured on the front page of “hot” hubs! So I am guessing that I will get quite good PR on that hub on the next update. BTW people looking for pictures do NOT buy anything!

My other success recently on Hubpages has been a serious of hubs I have done around the “make money online” niche.

Consistently the most commented and popular pieces are the ones which either relate to Internet Marketing, HubPages and personal experience in those areas. People seem to love to read about people’s success’s or otherwise with making money on-line. My all time comment record is the HubPages for Internet Marketing 251 approved comments: that’s not counting the comments I have spammed; anything with “marketing” in the title seems to get a lot of spam!

Categories
HubPages Online Business Rants

Making Money On-line for Beginners

Sometimes I struggle as to where I should publish. I guess I am not a pure internet marketer because sometimes I just have to write about a topic! This weekend its been around the subject of making money on-line. Yes I know its idiotic to try and rank for that term. Yes I know I run the risk of just repeating the same old. I still had to try. So I did and you know I think it came out all right. There is nothing original per se. I am following the big three as usual as detailed in my original Internet Marketing and Hubpages article.

In the end I ended up publishing not one but two hubs, over 3600 words for goodness sake! On a revenue site that I only get 60% of the Adsense, Amazon, eBay, Kontera impressions – why did I do that. Well two simple reasons really:

  • I’m starting to see more and more new people arriving at HubPages, publishing a couple of hubs and then going to the forums and asking what’s wrong I only made 5c in Adsense! I can see this trend continuing. HubPages seems to be winning the race with Squidoo and is attracting more and more people who not only want to write they want to make money online . I know the feeling its what attracted me too. But with the worsening economic crises in the US (and hubpages are predominantly American) I expect more and more people will be looking for ways to make money in a recession I would like them to find the right sources of advice before they get scammed or give up. Although I may not be able to rank for the terms in google search I certainly can in hubpages: I can get my hubs to the first page of “hot hubs” or for a specific search really quite easily by writing good content.

    Fans
    Originally uploaded by John Charlton
  • Again a couple of times recently I have seen people do “so long and thanks for the fish” posts as they depart hubpages for bigger things. Sometimes full-time paid work work so fair enough. But also sometimes because they need to concentrate on developing their own websites you know. I’ve thought about it myself but there is one thing that keeps me publishing useful stuff on HubPages: my fans! Why abandon that list? Sure its not the most focussed list on the internet but on the other I am sometimes surprised at the quality of the people who leave me comments finding my hubs useful, often soon after the hub was published: meaning that they were notified by the email.

Yeah I know celebrity is fickle! No its not that, honest 🙂 . When you become someone’s fan at hubpages you get an email every time that person publishes a new hub (you can turn it off but that’s the default). So every time I publish on hubpages 599 people (as at the time of writing) get told – is that a list or what? Now some of them are beginners: but some are not. I got a number of sign-ups to Article Marketing Automation from my hubpage review.

So if you are not already a member of hubpages get signed up and become my 600th fan: if that spot is taken its OK I will be accepting 601, 602 etc as well! Of course if you do sign up via my any of the links in this post I will get 10% of your earnings: but from the hubpages.com share. To be honest it amounts to bugger all but that’s because most people sign up and either publish nothing or just one hub! Drop me a comment here if you do sign-up and I will become your fan too!

Categories
Paid Tools Tools

AMA After 2 Weeks

Wow I am really impressed. I have been tracking the sites/pages I am promoting using Article Marketing Automation. Today I had a quick look – expecting the usual list of “not found” mean I’m not ranking in the first 1000 results and just about dropped the laptop – I am ranking wow!


Success
Originally uploaded by kevinthoule

I am promoting a hubpage I wrote a while back. The page is nearly a year old but wasn’t ranking at all well on the SERPS. I posted an article with a variety of 3 word keyword phrases on 21 September (which has now been published 53 times): almost immediately my Google traffic jumped – that could have been coincidence – I’ve seen this size jump before. But today I noticed that I was ranked for some of the 3-word KW phrases I had never promoted anywhere but via AMA – in fact sometime in the last couple of days I jumped from not in the top 1000 – to position #2 (for 2 phrases) and #6 for another!

Now hubpages may not be a fair test: I generally find I can get hubpages to rank easier than anything else I write. But I also have been pushing a niche blog of mine. Its been around about 3 months, is a .info and is bouncing around – it got to first page and then dropped out of sight to sit around the 100-300 rank mark for various long-tails, for the last 2 months. Now today its back, and boy is it back -the gain in the last couple of days is around 200-400 places so that I am now sitting position 10 and 20 for quite a number of my keyword phrases I. I submitted one article to AMA on the Sept 19 – and its been published 59 times.

People this seems to be working – I’ll let you know in another week whether the positions hold up. Those links again: AMA free version with a trial of the article submission
Or if you want to go straight for the money version – click the pretty banner on the right!

Categories
Marketing Online Business Rants

Marketing: My Struggle

Marketing and I have come a long way in the last year – its possibly one of the most important insights have got to this making money online game!


Picadilly Circus
Originally uploaded by msmail

My first degree is in science and analysis is one of my strengths. Twenty years after my first degree and I did a graduate business diploma and was horrified by some of the courses. Marketing was the worst: they had “laws” about how to sell. I remember a big argument I had with a rather shrill marketing lecturer when I challenged her contention that you sell the dream not the product. She claimed it was a law: I pointed out, correctly I believe to this day, that it was an unproven hypothesis or even just a statement, it wasn’t a law. The fact that the apple will drop from the tree is a law, that the sun will rise tomorrow at a certain time is a law: that I will buy a certain brand of toothpaste because it will help me make friends – is, to be blunt, and I was, an un-tested theory. I lost the argument though: she had the microphone and no one else in the class could understand the difference between a law and a marketing hypothesis!

That pretty much sealed my view on the marketing industry. Self-serving, lacking in rigour and a waste of space. I continued to ignore marketing and scorn it. I understand the appeal of consumer products to kids and even to those who lack the basics of life: my first car will always live in my heart – because it was my first taste of freedom! Now cars are just a form of transport: I buy the one that best fits my needs and the price I can afford to pay cash for. I am a car salesman’s nightmare 🙂

So then I decide to become an online marketer – logical right? Its taken me about a year to figure out that is what I am you see. I thought I was going to develop a website and people were going to be so impressed with my wonderful content and I would make money. How was I going to make money – well I was a little hazy on that point: but the wonderful content is still there on my over-30’s independent travel site

You see I couldn’t be a marketer, that’s as a bad as being real estate sales agent isn’t it? And remember I don’t understand marketing or think its worthwhile. Real estate I know a bit about: a lot really, more than most of the agents I have dealt with as a customer. I still use agents to help me buy property though. Why? Because the top 2% of agents that I trust are very,very good at property and know the market inside out. Sometimes they have told me to run not walk from a deal, and I have. Now they are not the agents who win the top agents awards – which are really top commission earners awards. But they are long-term agents who make a comfortable living doing it. They know their product so I turn into their repeat customer.

That’s the sort of marketer I’m going to be online. I am going to be a good and ethical one. I won’t make a $20,000/month doing it – but that was never my aim. Half that amount would see me comfortable for life. And yes you have to sell something to make a living online! That’s how you get paid ! Duh! It just took a while for me to figure it out!

Categories
Article Marketing Free Tools Paid Tools Tools

Article Marketing Automation: After a Week

Well my last post I raved about my initial experience with Article Marketing Automation so this is the update on my first week’s experience.

Just to recap what AMA will do for you: the free version of AMA will allow you to add your blogs to the network. Add your blog, select the categories and/ or keywords you want and articles from the network want posted on your blog and voila: if you allow it relevant articles will appear automatically (or wait patiently for you to approve them). This is great to build some new sites: but for me the real power AMA is the paid version.

With the paid subscription you can create articles: add them to the system; spinning it to minimize duplicate content if you want and the article is available to add to the network. You can add up to 3 keyword anchored links – anywhere in the text not stuck at the bottom in a resource box. And the keyword link can be spun too: from their own statistics says it all:

“Your articles are promoting 9 links via 55 anchor text options.”

The articles I added a week ago have been presented between 20 and 22 times and only rejected once.

The quality of the articles in the network is generally excellent I have only rejected a couple for quality reasons; some more for being in the wrong category.

So after a week the sites I added to the network at the start of the week have between 20 or 30 posts on them: and I haven’t everything offered.

Each article I add gains me around 12 anchored links A DAY. For as long as I remain a subscriber those articles keep on being distributed, though I can withdraw them if I want to. Even if cancel my membership the links I already have remain.

And the down side is: I haven’t really found one to be honest.
Click register for the free version of AMA

Click here to register for the paid version of AMA

UPDATE 30 September
One of my first articles submitted 10 days ago and now been published 30 times and I am now seeing the first few new links appearing in Yahoo

Categories
Article Marketing Free Tools Paid Tools Tools

A New Article Distribution Tool: Very Cool!

I have been planning on discussing on this blog which tools I use and why, but have been holding off until I was making a bit more money – so I had more credibility – at least in my mind!

There’s a new player in the game though and I am so excited that I am throwing caution to the wind and reviewing Article Marketing Automation my latest investment, and yes this one really is worth the price, although there is a free version too, read on.

Many of you will have heard of Article Marketing where you write a short article which includes a link back to your site. People use article marketing to develop backlinks for their site and sometimes for traffic too. Now you can choose to submit your article to a few directories: of which EzineArticles is one of the best, or you can submit your article to literally thousands of other directories. Many people want to submit to many directories, again to develop the backlinks, rather than the traffic. I have been wanting to do this for some time: but I haven’t moved further on with this for one main reason: I couldn’t find the right software/service for me.

I have my choice narrowed down to two products: one of which uses software to at least semi-automate the submission process: the other is a service which has your articles submitted manually. Both options I had serious problems with:

  • the software solution doesn’t work well for me because my niches don’t fit neatly into the categories found in most directories ;
  • the service solution had some issues with customer service; and I want someone to communicate with me if I am paying 100’s of dollars for a service!

So I sat on my hands and did nothing! Well what happened last week was exciting : I started seeing blogs I trusted talking about a new service called Article Automation Software: its different so bare with me you need to work through this to understand what’s different.

With AMA you submit articles, there is a spinner as well, to allow article variations, but you don’t have to use it. Articles must be at least 300 words. You can include your links anywhere in the article (in fact you can spin your keyword anchors in your links- to mix them up a bit) – this is important because your links are in the context of your article rather than stuck at the bottom in your “bio” or “resource box”.

Also you can add youtube videos l – and anchor link them: video is the future I’m told but I haven’t tried this option yet!

Now it gets interesting – the articles aren’t submitted to article directories: they are submitted to other blogs of people who have signed up for the network. Blogs which are hopefully focussed on the topic of your article: there is no guarantee but many people will have blogs which are niche or foccussed. The blog owner may add their own links, may alter your text, may add ads and images, can in fact do anything like with your post – but they have to leave your links: contextual links here we come!

Will Google like it? Well they probably won’t know. There is no obvious footprint: the blogs aren’t owned by AMA: they are owned by you and me. They support WordPress (self-hosted only), blogger and tumblr blogs to date. Probably others as well if they have the right API – that bit was a bit technical for me!

Are the articles edited? Are they rubbish? Well to date I have been impressed by the articles: I’ve seen worse on EzineArticles and Hubpages! There is no formal acceptance, editing process for articles but for every blog you add you can choose to either allow articles to post automatically or for the articles to remain unpublished until you approve: I do the later. I also check the links in articles to make sure I am happy linking to the site, that they are not bad neighbourhoods: they haven’t been so far. I’ve seen people say that the blogs they set for this service are now gaining comments from real people – so the quality is more than fine IMHO.

Do I know where my article is published? No, not directly – you will have to wait for the backlinks to show: or include a “signature” piece of text in each article which you can search on once the blog’s post is indexed.

What sort of blogs do you add to the network? This is important! Don’t add personal, flagship blogs. I wouldn’t add this blog! This is my flagship blog and its my voice! But I also wouldn’t include directly blogs which I make money from. I could – but I’m not at the moment because I really don’t want the other internet marketers to know which sites those are! Instead I have set up some new blogs just for this experiment.

The site itself: the interface is slick, quick and works well. Its easy to follow but they have some cool videos as well if you are the type who likes to read the manual.

OK Where Do I SignUp
There are two options: paid and unpaid.

The free version of Article Automation Software allows you to add blogs but NOT to submit articles. So if you have a whole lot of domains lying around doing nothing: throw WordPress onto them and get some free content and indexing! Also if you are curious about the quality of articles in the network this would be an easy way to check it out yourself.

UPDATE: You get five free article submissions with the free sign up – an excellent marketing ploy to let you try it out and well worth taking up!

The paid version of Article Automation Software is this link which will take you to their sales page :and its not as obnoxious as most either! The bottom line is that the cost is $47 /month – its a subscription. No its not cheap: but its good value for me. You can cancel at any time and if you cancel in the first month you get your money back.

I am an affiliate and I will get paid if you use my link – I think that’s reasonable if you found them via my link – if not hack the link to take my code out!

Categories
Online Business Rants Search Engines

Google Censors the Internet


I wasn’t intending to write this post: this is not a political blog, but I am MAD, very mad. Google has had bad press recently in Australia particularly, and in fact our competition watch dog is currently taking Google to court over anti-competitive practice. That’s kinda a given given the size of the US-based Google. That I can live with – its business.

This however makes me mad! I posted recently about Courtney Tuttle’s keyword sniping approach which is all about creating focussed websites. Its NOT about spamming but apparently someone has reported to Court to Google and now he doesn’t even rate for his name for his main site Courtney Tuttle

So what is so dangerous about Court’s site that he shouldn’t be shown if someone searches for his name? Well Court obviously thinks its because he suggested that content wasn’t King, and that getting legitimate backlinks via articles and other means would get your content ranked.

So now Court has to backpeddle, take down his most useful posts on keyword sniping and post in effect a retraction saying he was wrong! Reminds me of the Spanish Inquisition to be honest – remember how you could get burnt at the stake for believing in the wrong form of God, well this is the internet equivalent. No his life isn’t threatened, but his livelihood certainly is, as his main business is an internet marketing consultancy with his brand built around his name.

So because of some un-named, unknown, for reasons which he doesn’t know about, suddenly his business is affected. He’s now guilty and has to prove himself innocent – all because someone is jealous or worse a business competitor can’t think of any other way competing with him!
Photo Credit: saswat

Categories
Blogging Freelance Writing HubPages Online Business

Tips from the First Year On Line


Happy Anniversary!
Originally uploaded by bruno1378

Since my last post on Freelance Writing we have had a quick trip back to New Zealand for the New Zealand Dancesport Championships. This is my anniversary post. Sept 2007 was when we arrived in Perth, Western Australia and decided to stay awhile. We decided that I would try to make an online income to replace my IT salary (US$1000/week round figures) – I gave myself until December to do it – LOL

I know I wrote how my online business was going up until May – yes ignore the date time travel is alive and well on blogs.

March I found a new approach to making money on-line. Wish I could remember how I found it but I found Vic’s Make Money online site around then. He’s responsible for the name of this site because the initial idea was to buy 100 info domains.

Well I set up some sites and waited for Google to index them, and waited, and in fact I’m still waiting. Almost simultaneously info BANS sites fell out of favour with Google. I was a little pissed to say the least – in fact I cried in frustration quite literally. Everything seems to have worked for people last month or last week – but as soon as I touched it poof – gone. I was in no doubt that Vic was explaining how he made money to me – but the search engine’s rules appeared to change every time I tried what was being recommended!

I was pretty very close to giving up then – I was also participating in Vic’s trends blogging contest: where you blog about current news – which did at least make me realize that the trick to getting traffic was to write about something that people were actively searching on – duh! Vic said in one of video posts something that stuck with – “proof of life” – (according to the movie of the same name this is the first thing that hostage negotiators ask for) . So I did my own little experiment. I had already bought a info domain which was the same keyword phrase of my best performing hub page. I knew how many people searched for the phrase – because my hubpage was normally ranked #1 or #2 in Google, I knew it wouldn’t make me a fortune but I just wanted to know I could get my own site on the first page. I put a niche blog on the domain using Court’s Keyword Sniping.

Well it worked. For the last couple of months my site is regularly on page 1 or 2 of the Google results for a number of its keywords. For weeks it alternated from being not indexed to being in the top 10 pages. It seems to have settled down now. It the CPC is rubbish – it will never make me more that $1/day – and its made me nothing to date because I haven’t yet dared put Adsense on it –I want it to be more consistently on page #1 before I do that. I’ve done it I have proven to myself I can get a site indexed and ranked even on an info domain.

I was concentrated on my freelance writing when the other day I got an email saying that eBay had paid me – $10. I went an checked my eBay earnings for the first time in a couple of months and oddly some of those un-indexed BANS sites were getting clicks and a couple had made me a little bit of money. I did further investigation: Google still hated me but Yahoo loves me! And it wasn’t even that sites which I had developed properly – think of the potential if I actually put some more pages on the sites 🙂

So now after a year I can happily report that my actual website online income is about the same as it has been for month. BUT – and its a big but, I definitely feel I am at the end of the beginning at the start of the real beginning … To Be Continued the fun has just started!

Categories
Freelance Writing

Freelance Writing PAYS! Me Even!

Well its a curious thing when sometimes something you aren’t looking for suddenly starts working! After months of getting increasingly frustrated with the whole online marketing game an opportunity appeared from left field!


Origami dollar t-shirt
Originally uploaded by Vaguely Artistic

I am on record for saying that content isn’t king
 but oddly enough I now have people wanting to pay me for it! Its all Mark Knowles’s fault, he employed me to post regularly on a couple of blogs about luxury destinations and Australasian Property Investment

On the back of finally getting a positive balance in my paypal account I looked again at freelance writing opportunities. I’d initially thought about making money as a writer online but figured out that in Australia I could make more money cleaning than I could by writing for 1c/word which seemed to be the going rate on the well-known freelance writing sites.

I kept looking though and found some other options. I’ve now sold a couple of articles at Constant Content and today had an article accepted at a travel site: so if anyone wants to hire me as a writer please drop me a line!

Categories
Blogging

How did I start Blogging

Sharon over at Get Paid to Write Online asked how I started blogging: here’s how.

I started blogging on blogger – then I moved everything over to my own site continuing adventures and now I am back writing on blogger -why you may well ask?

Well Continuing Adventures was started when I was trying to figure out how to escape my corporate IT career and planning a camping trip around Australia. I started blogging in August 2006 and from March to September 2007 we were on the road around Australia. I already had my own static site: Midlife Travel but of course found that blogging was so much easier to keep updated. These sites were of course supposed to make me money and keep us travelling – well it didn’t quite work out that way – first off we got tired of camping before we could afford the $200,000 motorhome to make it comfortable. Oh and of course my sites never made me any money either – not even enough to keep us travelling in Asia never mind Australia.

Continuing Adventures was basically a journal with photos – don’t bother looking the photos are MIA since I moved hosts – it was unfocused, random and basically un-monetizable. I did some paid t-links and that was the end of its page rank too.

In the meantime I started to make pocket change from HubPages and started to understand what I could get paid for and the length of time required.

Along the way I have somewhat accidentally become a freelance writer though I am still developing my own niche sites too.

This blog I started along the line’s of Grizz’s Make Money Online original blogger blog – and to develop a more technical blog which I could write about in more detail than friends and family reading Continuing Adventures really wanted to hear about. In a similar way that no one ever wants to know what happened on your 6-month backpacking trip through Africa, no one really wants to know that you have made $20/month with Adsense either!

The reason this is a blogger blog check here and yes I still am not very keyword focussed!