An experiment in article marketing

I must admit I haven’t done many article submissions to date. A few press releases to PRWEB is the full extent of my experience.

To find out the benefits for myself, I’m going to share my experience and the results over a period of time and keep re-editing this post with updates ( I hope the system will let me). Maybe this post will become an article about article submission?

The metrics I will be looking at include:

1. Increase in average number of unique visitors per day
2. Increase in the number of sign-ups to my newsletter
3. Increase in PageRank (currently at 4)
4. Money making potential as a business
5. Degree of fun and intellectual stimulation

Day 1
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Based on a post to this forum I expanded the text to be a reasonably interesting article on Adwords and Adsense. I drafted it in Word and only included one hyperlink (with appropriate anchor text), in the html version of my bio/signature.

1. Posted the article to my web site (the only article I have there
2. Submitted a link to the article to digg.com
3. Submitted the article to contentdesk, articlemarketer, goarticles and articleuniversity
4. Registered for articlesfactory.com - a painful process compared to the others

Over the next few days I will try to submit the article to the rest of Mr SEO’s list of submission sites.

Day 2
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It’s the morning of Day 2. I’ve already had a result. My submission to articlemarketer.com has been rejected. Nothing to do with the content or style of the article.

It seems that I should not have used Microsoft Word to draft my article. It automatically replaced the letter “e” in the word “cafe” with an accented “e” .

The articlemarketer system didn’t like that special character and sent me a polite e-mail asking me to change it as well as get rid of some fancy html that Frontpage inserted in my bio/signature. All Microsoft products should have a “I’ll make up my own freakin’ mind thanks Bill” button. From now on I’m using Q-edit.

I made the edits and resubmitted this time using the special review feature that highlights any problems. Later on today I’ll submit the article to more sites.

I’ve just had a brainwave. To monitor whether or not my article gets picked up and indexed, I have created a Google Alert using the title of the article as the search term.

It’s lunchtime. I’ve just submitted the article to ezinearticles, ideamarketers, mailbiz and articles factory (my registration and profile was approved). This process is probably taking longer than usual as I have to register before submitting.

Based on what I’ve done so far, once I’m registered at the Mr-SEO recommended article submission sites, I figure I could do about 30 submissions per day in my spare time. I’ll try to do another 10 or so site tonight. I wonder what the going rate is for manual article submissions? I must look up eLance.com and find out.

If I were doing it on behalf or a client I guess I’d charge about $5 per article submitted, with a minimum of 50 articles.

In between watching the best of Family Guy on YouTube, I’ve submitted my article to several new sites. I’ve come to the realisation that article sites aren’t that much different to link farms. The only real difference is the link description text runs to 1500 words.

I’ve also noticed that a few of these article sites poo-poo SEO and Adwords and suggest that article marketing is where it’s at. Maybe they are right. Time will tell. I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m going to be a SEO by Article submission convert. Maybe this is a new career for me?

Wanted - burnt out ugly people with no social skills who can write well about anything.

Based on what I’ve learnt so far I believe I could research, write and submit an article to over 50 sites within 2 working days. I wonder what the going rate in Australia is for that sort of work?

In my pre-Internet days we used to call writing for free advertising public relations. I guess the thing that has changed is the technology. Maybe I should approach some local Brisbane PR firms and suggest that article marketing is where it’s at? Do PR firms in the USA promote their article marketing capabilities.

Day 3
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Article Marketer have sent me an e-mail saying that my article needs attention. Talk about picky. The title case is not within their standards. I had a mix of upper and lower case in my title.

They even have a nice little tutorial on how to use case in your title. Basically it’s either all uppercase, the first letter of each word in uppercase, or only the first letter of the first word in uppercase. And no full stop at the end of the title.

My goal today is to post to 10 more sites.

Update: I just received a Google Alert in my e-mail. Google has indexed the story on digg.com and on my web site. Not bad - 3 days !

I’ve reached my goal of 10 more sites today. What I’ve realised is that it’s far easier to submit 3 articles to 20 sites than one article to 60 sites. I must remember that in future. With most of these article submission sites one you hit the save or post button you are immediately invited to submit another article. It’s then just a simple matter of cutting and pasting from your open text file.

I just checked out elance.com to see what the going rate is for article submission services. I couldn’t find pure submission, but there are certainly a lot of business in article writing. Click here to see for yourself.

Here’s a guy (check right down the bottom of the page), who will write two original articles and submit them to 70 different directories for $200US. Not a bad deal I guess.

Day 4
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I’m just not in the mood to do too many submissions today. Maybe I’ll do another 10 sites this afternoon after a long boozy lunch with my friends from Optus.

The good news is that the Google alert I set up on day one is picking up my article. articlesfactory.com, 2findlistings.info and webhosting-articles.com have all been indexed (see attached screenshot).

Here’s 2 tips, if you are looking for interesting local country web sites to submit your article, go to your favourite search engine and search on “submit article” or “submit your article”. I found a couple of high PR Australian sites using this method combined with the .au domain qualifier. Here’s an example.

Tip 2 .. this is probably obvious, but it helps if you put your keyword phrase in the title of your article. Reason, a lot of these article sites rotate the article titles on their home page. These pages probably get indexed more often than their other pages.

I’m thinking at the end of this quest I will put together an article submission checklist. Any takers?

Day 5
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Saturday … not much chance of many submissions today. I received an e-mail from ezinearticles saying my article had been accepted. Here’s the reason why it’s important to put your keyword phrase in the title. This page has a PR of 6.

Just got back from a pleasant day of sailing on Moreton Bay. Guess what? My Google alert tells me that some more web sites have picked up the article and I have been able to determine that two people have already stolen my article and claimed it as their own work.

I heard Joe and Alan talk about article theft in a podcast, but I would never have thought it would happen to me.

The first thief is a guy called Larry Gomez. Here is a screen shot of my article with his byline. I sent a polite e-mail to the contact on the web site asking that the article be removed. If he had claimed to be the publisher rather than author, and left my bio details on it, I would not have minded at all. I suspect my new best friend, Larry, will be writing and submitting lots and lots of articles about Gay Pride

The second thief is a guy called Dalton. He cut and paste my article into his blog. Here is the evidence. And here’s his profile.

I left a post on that article explaining that Dalton had not written it and that I was the writer. I wonder how much article theft goes on? By the looks of it, heaps.

I guess the up side is that my article is being read and distributed far and wide. Maybe I’ll do another 10 posts this evening.

Theft update: The nice folk from webdotdev.com got back to me about Larry stealing my article. They offered to take it down and have a word with young Larry. I thanked them.

I just submitted to isnare.com
Registration was pretty easy, as was submission. Only problem is that for the free submissions they don’t allow html in the bio (meaning no back links).

They do have a paid service where you can by credits starting from $10 for 5 articles fed to 40,000 sites (that does seem like an awful lot of sites). The paid submissions do allow html in the bio. For $10 I’m tempted to give it a shot. I will make that my next research project. I’ll come up with 5 articles, submit them only to isnare and then track the results. Have any of you people out there in Mr-Seo Forum Land used this service or something similar? If so, please share.

Day 6
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Sunday morning. I submit my article to a few more sites. Nothing from my Google Alert today. I’ve noticed that many of the sites I’ve submitted to run a script called Article Dashboard. It seems quite powerful and is certainly the right price.

Seems to be very popular. I do a search on Google for “powered by article dashboard“. It’s everywhere ! There seems to be an entire industry supporting article dashboard. There are people who will install it for you, sites to download templates for it, and plug-ins to customise the software.

From an author’s point of view, it has a nice interface, allows html in the resource tags and allows you to preview before posting.

I download it and have a look. I’m thinking I might install it on one of my web sites and see what happens. It comes with some PDF documents that tell you how to install it and how to promote your site once it gets installed.

Theft update: Not only did one of the thieves steal my article, they also submitted to digg.com. Thankfully the webmaster for the thief has removed the article. Talk about hide ! The thing that really ticks me off is that the thief got more diggs than me

Day 7
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Monday morning. I probably won’t get much time today to submit my article. My Google alert tells me more sites have picked it up and had it indexed. Even I few sites that I didn’t submit to. Must be the syndication thing working. I must say I’m impressed how quickly this method works in terms of getting one-way links back to my web site from the bio.

Monday evening. Didn’t do much today. My real job interfered with my SEO work (don’t you hate that?). The good news is I got three sign-ups for my SEO newsletter today. I’m not sure if it’s the result of my article submission efforts or something else (maybe this forum post). It’s all good. I wonder how Joe and Alan cope with all “them SEO groupies”? You can 301 them my way if it gets too much.

If I can finish this bottle of Brown Brothers Tarango red wine without falling over, I may do another 5 to 10 submissions. Don’t bet on it though. X-Files series 6 is beckoning. That Scully, she is so hot

I just stumbled on a very useful site. Have a look at webconfs and enter your keyword term in the backlink builder. Scroll down until you see the add article section (see gif below). This may be another source of little known but high PR sites in your particular niche. Worth a shot.

News just in. I have found another useful list of article directories. Some with PRs of 8. Write this list down and stick it in your knickers (as my Granny would say). Nobody every stole her lists. I wonder why?

I’m thinking given the exponential nature of PR, a link on a PR 7 or 8 site is probably worth 100s on a PR 5 site. I’ll submit my article to the top 5 on this list and see what happens.

Here’s an unusual site (bpubs.com). You submit a link to an article rather than the article itself. I’m not complaining. Their submission page has a PR of 6.

Day 8
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I did a few more submissions today through sites I found using the webconfs back link builder method from day 7. One of the sites that came up was slashdot.org which has a PR of 9. I had forgotten all about slashdot.

It was surprisingly easy to submit to slashdot given the site’s popularity. It will be intersting to see if my article gets accepted.

In future I will submit to slashdot.org first, wait a few days, then submit to the others. I’m thinking any article that gets a run on slashdot will probably have better street-cred with digg readers.

Day 9
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Too busy playing in the RAAF Reserve to do any submissions today. I may do a few tonight after a few red wines. My article has been picked up by a few more sites according to the Google alert I set. Have a look at alert3.gif below for the update.

These seem to be feeds from other web sites, one of which is feedburner. I can also highly recommend ezinearticles.com. My article appears on a PR 6 page with a link back to my web site. Hopefully this will improve my site’s PR and drive more traffic to it. The stats say it has been viewed 14 times.

I did a search on my anchor text on Google for my article. 4 sites total. I suspect as Google reindexes more sites that result will improve. I certainly hope so. Two of the sites were PR3, the others were PR 0. Bottom line, just because it’s in the Google alerts doesn’t mean that it’s indexed.

I guess this is one of the Litmus tests. If your anchor text gets indexed by Google on high PR sites, then it is worth the effort.

Note to self: “search on your article’s anchor text across all the major earch engines each day”.

I just did the same search on Yahoo, Ask and MSN. MSN is the only other site apart fom Google to pick up my anchor text phrase (bless their little cotton sox).

Day 10
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I didn’t do any submissions today - too busy. The only things of interest to note was an updated Google alert, a new subscriber to my newsletter and a wierd e-mail from a web site owner who thought I was accusing him of click-fraud.

I submitted the article using his submit article link so I really don’t know what his problem is. I deleted his e-mail rather than explain. Oh well, it takes all kinds.

Day 11
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Another busy day. Too busy for much part-time SEO. I submitted to a few more sites. I must say I really like article dashboard sites. I did some searching around and found this site that has a directory of sites running article dashboard. Some of these have reasonable PR 4 & 5.

To automate the registration process I have written a macro to automatically sign me up to article dashboard sites. Works a treat. I find the process of registering at all these article sites a bit of a pain. More painful that posting the article. I guess I only have to do it once, but it is a pain.

I also took Joes podcast advice and have started modifying my bio anchor text and linked page to broaden the scope of the possible search hits.

Wow, I just checked Google and did a search on the title of my article. 307 results ! I don’t know how this will translate to PR, visits or $, but it certainly proves that article submission certainly gets lots of one-way links.

I just did the same search at Yahoo. Even more impressive. Over 500 results on my article title.

I also did a search on titles of a few of Joe’s articles. There’s quite a few sites he doesn’t mention in his magic list

Did some more searches on Google and Yahoo for my article’s anchor text. Not good. Two results in Google and one in Yahoo. Makes sense, the article title appears on the main page, the anchor text appears on it’s own page which has not been indexed yet. Remember, try to put your keyword phrase in the title.

Day 12
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I’m hooked. Not many results to speak of yet, but I am hooked on article submission as a way of getting one-way links.

Today I finished recording a keyboard macro that signs me up to article submission sites running Article Dashboard. By hitting CONTROL+SHFT+F11 I can signup with one click. The macro recorder I used is called Hot Keyboard Pro. It’s free for the first 21 days. I figure in 21 days I can sign up to hunderds of article submission sites.

I’ve just done a bunch of about 20 sites. The next step is to validate my registration and start submitting.

Out of interest I searched on the term article marketing firm. I found a company that specialises in this service. Not bad money in this by the looks of it. $700 for a “professional” article of 1500 words submitted to up to 200 sites.

Day 13
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Sunday. I’ve got about 40 new article dashboard sites to validate my registration with today. I’m submitting a new article. The format of my article writing has evolved as a result of the last two weeks. The format for my article text files is now:

Headline
Article summary or teaser copy
Article body
bio - resouce box
keywords

This format works well with most article submission sites although I do put some html in the body, I only put links in the bio-resource box section.

I suspect tomorrow will be my last update to this post. After that I will only revisit it if I have any news or seee any striking results.

Update: I’ve just invested the princley sum of $12.96 in some automatic article submission software. I got it on eBay, here’s the product description.

I’m going to test it out on a new article and report back on how it performs. I may start a new thread because I think I’ve nearly broken this posting. I’ll create a new article, install the software, run the software then share the results. I may even post some screenshots so you can see how it works.

Good or bad I’m then going to offer the software (I have resale rights apparently), to all you mr-seo forum readers for the sum of $1 per copy (I really want to get my $12.96 back so I can buy more Australian red wine.) Fair enough?

Day 14
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Update: I’ve decided not to offer the My Article Submitter software. It probably worked OK 18 months ago when it was first released, but it doesn’t work very well now. I suspect it’s just a smart macro type program. Unfortunatley a lot of the sites it is programmed for are no longer taking new articles (possibly as a result of flooding from software like My Article Submitter). It is pretty slow too. I think it waits for strings of text and if it doesn’t see them it times out.

What I have found that works very well is Hot Keyboard. I have programmed function keys to do the following tasks saving me heaps of time:

1. registering at new article submission sites (only article dashboard powered sites)
2. Logging in to article submission sites once I’m registered
3. Pasting pre-loaded text into the Title, Article summary, body, resource box and keywords sections of the submission forms.

I’m not a touch typist and it works a treat. I can now log on and submit a new article in less than 20 seconds.

Day 15
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Signed up for another 20 or so submission sites today using the new macro software. Took about 20 minutes to post the article. I figure I’ve posted to over 100 sites so far. Three different articles to 100 sites. Not a bad effort for my first time at article submission.

I searched msn, yahoo and alta vista to find some fresh “powered by article dashboard” sites that I hadn’t registered with previously.

My Google alerts tell me that the bio/resource box is now starting to be indexed from the first article. That’s a little over 2 weeks. 3 days for the headlines to get indexed and a little over 2 weeks for the bio/resource box to get indexed.

The last few days I have also been posting different titles and anchor text. I just edit the macro and away it goes.

Day 16
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A few more Google alerts have started to come in for my second article. I didn’t do anything today. I’m thinking I’m going to combine all this information into a report on article marketing.

Day 17
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This is my last update to this post. I’m in love with article marketing. Metrics 1,2,4 & 5 have been met and I assume my PR will increase over time. At the moment I’m drafting a short article on article marketing. It will be published this week. Thank you for your time.

Addendum

Here’s another few tips:

1. Most article sites require some sort of pen name when you register. Pick something unique and searchable. Rather than register as Fred Bloggs, try something like Fred_Bloggs_2007_seo_client_submissions

The idea is that you can now search on that unique string “Fred_Bloggs_2007_seo_client_submissions” and get an accurate idea of how many articles in total have been picked up by the various search engines.

It’s also a good way of showing off to your clients how successful your article submissions have been.

2. Inspired by Mr-Seo’s podcast and my new experience with article submission, I have recorded my own podcast about article marketing. If you’re sick of American accents (not Joe’s incredibly sexy New York accent of course), try a bit of my Australian twang. Crikey, the article took my baby !

It took me 4 hours to record and edit 11 minutes. I don’t know how Joe does it week in, week out. I guess it gets easier with practice. My point of difference is no chit-chat. I hate the standard music intro, chit-chat and the into the content format. Let’s just skip the chit-chat and get into it. Foreplay is for pussies. Ain’t that right Al?

I used a crappy headset mic and recorded and edited it using Audacity software. Surprisingly the audio quality isn’t too bad. I got the royalty free music intro from looperman.com

Article Theft Update

There seem to be article thieves everywhere. This time it is a 19 year-old woman from California. I gave her a rude post and moved on. The Google alert thing works a treat. Attached is her profile.

And another thief

This seems to be a real problem. No sooner do you post an article and someone knocks it off. Here’s another example

Maybe we could have a new topic that lists article thiefs? What do you think Joe?

Good News !

One of my web sites has moved from page 3 to page 1 in the Google SERPs for my keyword phrase. I suspect it is a result of article marketing and the single podcast I published. PR for both my sites have also increased from 4 to 5. I’m a happy little camper and will continue to use article marketing for my sites and my clients.

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