There has been one development that has made the experiment so far very worth while. I’ve had to go through my server and create a list of all my sites and then see how they are performing. I am not the most organized person in the world and some sites that don’t perform well in the first few weeks tend to get abandoned or fall through the cracks.

Because I need to go and prepare work for the 11 people I am now employing I have to get a system in place. So I’ve needed to create a spread sheet of all my sites, list the keywords they are targetting and see how they are ranking. I now use this to decide which sites to work on next

During this process I’ve found several sites I’ve not looked at for a long time and noticed that they are by some miracle ranking just outside the top 10 a quick push and they should be top 5 within a few weeks. With luck I’ll get a few number ones.

Additionally i’ve found several of my articles at ezine articles are ranking very highly for competitive keywords. Once again a quick push in the form of backlinks and they should rank at the top. This is one of the excellent things about ezine articles, I’ve got lots of PR 6 articles that just need 20 or 30 good quality links and they will sit at #1 driving traffic to my site.

i’ve noticed that the more jobs I post the better the quality of provider I am getting, I assume it’s becise i know what to ask and I know how to test them with small jobs to start with. The Article writers I hired last week have proved to be excellent so far.

I’ll get together some stats next week and see if i can quantify how thigs are going although it’s still to early to tell what effect all the back links will have as they can take upto 8 weeks to take effect.

Finally If you missed the last post. WordPress Goldmine 2.0 is being released next week. I am switching to a subscription based model to allow me to add some cool features and courses I’ve wanted to include. This is your last chance to get in for a one time only payment. (you’ll also get to see the videos I’ve created for the outcoursing step by step course I am running at the moment)

The costs for the first week were $156 and for that I had 72 hours work done for me. In those 72 hours there were 20 articles posted to 25 sites each giving 500 back links. There were 3 links for 4 different sites posted to 150 high PR sites. So a total of 1800 links. 2300 potential backlinks for $156 is not a bad deal especially when 500 or them are articles which could generate lots more links for many years to come.

It’s a bit too early to tell how the links will impact on the sites but initial results are quite encouraging. With just an extra 4 high pr links showing up for one site the pages the links went to had risen by up to 300 places in Google. Getting into the top twenty of Google is relatively easy. The difficulty comes moving into the top ten and up to position 1.

One interesting thing I’ve managed to do for a site that was already #1 was to get positions 2 3 and 4. Position 2 is now a second page on the site and position 3 and 4 are 2 or my articles from ezine articles. Just a few links to an article can have a very positive result.

Financially, which is what really matters, it is too early to tell if the links are having a genuinely positive effect. My Adsense earnings is up by about 20% over last month so that’s good. I’ve also made some sales from sites that haven’t made sales for a few months. All of this could be coincidence. Time will tell

Overall I am happy so far, so much so that I now have 10 people working for me. I took on 4 article writers today. They are all native English speakers and the rates range from $1.67 and hour to $4.44 an hour. I’ve asked for a minimum of 3 250 word articles an hour and created a video to show them how to do it. I’ve also given them a copy of the article I wrote about how to write an article in under 10 minutes.

The reason the rates are so low is that you’ll often find new providers on Odesk are happy to work cheaply so they can build up feedback and experience. That then allows them to charge more later on. I am more than happy to increase rates and give bonuses when work is completed well.

I’ve given all 4 new employees 2 keywords today and asked for at least 6 articles. If everything is Ok and they get accepted by the article directories I use I’ll give them 10 hours work next week. Finally I’ll choose the best ones and give them more hours.

As I’ve said in the past articles, break your outsourcing down into small manageable chunks. The last thing you want to do is to have to pay someone for 40 hours if their standard of work isn’t good. Start small and increase the hours once they prove they can work accurately and to a deadline.

It’s been a few days since I updated you on the outsourcing experiment. During that time the learning curve has been steep but I’ve learned a lot. Here are 3 tips that i learned.

1 . I mentioned in the original post that the first thing I learned was to break the tasks down in to small simple tasks , i.e don’t advertise for someone to submit articles and backlinks. Instead advertise for someone to post backlinks and someone to post articles. Since then i’ve learned more.

2 . Rather than hire 1 person to do 40 hours work it is far better to hire 2 3 or 4 people to do 10 or 20 hours each. You then have the option of increasing the hours of the good workers and reducing the hours of the ones that are so good.

3 . The next tips is to advertise for people who have done the work in the past, so if you are using backlink packages from of of the well know suppliers then say in your ad that preference will be given to people who have done this work before. You don’t want to pay to train someone if you can avoid it.

Feel free to haggle with providers but the rates that seem to be standard so far are

Back linking $1.50 to $2.00 per hour
Article submission $2 -$3 per hour.

I have had several bids of below $1 and a low bid of $0.67 but I declined these

By far the best person I have employed is costing me $2.94 to post articles but she does almost twice as much as the other person doing the same task.

Both the article posters have shown initiative, some of the article sites I asked them to post to were having problems so they submitted new sites , in fact both of them provided me with lists of sites they had submitted to before.

I am about to take on 2 more people today which will bring my “workforce” upto 5 people giving me 80 hours of work a week for less than $150. I only need 5 of the 25 sites they are woking on to make 1 extra sale to justify the cost.

Stay tuned to see what happens next.

Finally If you are building your twitter followers then check out Twitter Organizer. This is a brand new site which will add followers and delete people that don’t follow you back while you sleep. It takes 30 seconds to set up and then runs automatically. The sales page isn’t the best in the world but watch the video and you’ll see the power of it.

If You answered yes to one of those questions then isn’t it’s time you did something about it?

It’s June 1st today so why not dedicate the next month to laying the foundation of a long term business.

I am not suggesting that at the end of the month that you’ll be able to retire but I am saying that you’ll have a usable system in place that you can build on. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is an Internet marketing career. I’ve been doing IM for over 4 years now it’s only in the past 9 months that I’ve finally got myself organised so that I can work a few hours a week if I wish and still maintain my income.

If you are willing to sacrifice 30 hours this month and $30 then you can succeed.

The first stop you should make is ezinearticles.com. Ezinearticles is a great place to research business models.  There are loads of categories here find one that appeals to you. Once you click on a sub-niche you’ll see a link to the top Authors in each niche. Follow this link and you’ll get a list of the Top Authors in that niche. Now all you need to do is to click on some of their articles and look at where their resource links go.

This way you’ll get to see the business model they are using, and believe me if they have bothered to write lots of articles it is working. Follow the process to the end and see all the tricks and tactics they use

It’s now down to you to replicate the business model.

Even creating your own product can cost less than $30.  The graphics on my Twitter Tips and Tricks Site cost me  $17, the domain cost me $9. I wrote the book in less than a day. Although I am giving away the product at the moment I could start to charge for it or even sell it as a complete business package via a site like sitepoint or digitalpoint.  Check out the graphics at www.twittertipsandtricks.com

Go On do it now!!  Build For Your Future

So what is a website promotion exercise? Simply put it’s selecting a keyword phrase which doesn’t have many competing pages and using as many methods as you can think of to get pages ranking for that phrase.

So For example say we took the Phrase “Website Promotion Exercise” and decided to see if we could get it ranking there are several things you could do.

1. Place a post on some blogs with differing Page ranks and see which ranks higher the highest Page ranked site or the most relevant site. 

2. Use clipmarks and twitter and see which brings the best results.

3. Add a squidoo lens and a Hubpage 

4. Use services like Zimbo, Gather and Wetpaint and see which one outranks the others.

I could go on but I am sure you get the idea. Only when you’ve run tests like this will you know exactly what works and what doesn’t. I would recommend repeating the tests every 6 months or so as google tends to favor certain sites for a while and then move on to others. 

To  make it more fun you could challange a friend or group of friends to a competition and see who gets ranked highest.  Give it a go today it will really pay off the next time you build a site.

I gave my self a new site The Article Marketing Blog (apt eh?) I used 1 article 1 Article distribution tool and a maximum of 1 hour. In that hour I had to create an article and work some magic on it to ensure that the distributed articles were teated as unique.

You can see the first 2 videos and reports If you look at the posts which were posted under The lab Category. The final video is below.

Before I discuss the tool I used it’s probably worth while having a look at the final video.

The results are quite Impressive and I’ll definitely be using the the tool for the next few months. It wasn’t all perfect and I came a cross a few problems which have since been sorted out. Below is an excerpt of the review I wrote for the site member. As with all product reviews I try to highlight the Good parts as well as the Bad parts.

Article Market Tool Review

Unique Article Wizard

UAW uses a different method of making every article submitted unique than most tools in that it doesn’t rely on synonyms and the article actually turn out reading like original articles. When you sign up you are required to sign an NDA so I can’t reveal it here which is a bit strange as I have used exactly same method in another easily available tool.

Cost: $37 month 1 and then $47 from the on (thats a special at the moment not sure when it goes upto $67)

The reason it’s a monthly cost is that they manually review your articles before submitting them and it is server based so there is ongoing costs. I don’t usually like monthly payments but In this case I can accept the logic behind it. Plus you get the benefit of having your articles verified by a human.

Value for Money: Pretty good. Even at $47 or $67 per month I think this is good value. I try to submit 2 articles per day so it’s less that $1 a day to get a unique article sent to 200-300 sites. Once on the sites they also get picked up by website owners..Try buying 200 links for that much.

Does it Work: Yes, so far. The new site I tested with was indexed quickly and there are now lots of links to the unique authors name I used.
“Results 101 – 144 of 144 for “rune danton”" that is after Just 11 days…(including 5 days when there were problems- see below) If you’ve watched the vieo above you’ll have seen how that has grown in just another few weeks.

Additionally I can track 1 affiliate sale to an article I distributed I need to create a better tracking method. (Now 3 sales)

The adsense sites I distributed articles for are also performing better. One that had an article submitted 10 days ago made $3.96 yesterday…. It had been making that a month upto then It’s already made 91cents today.

Time Requirement: It takes about 50 minutes to 70 minutes for each article. I have been recycling old articles to speed things up. Compare this to writing an artice for your site and 1 for ezine articles and it’s not too bad.

Unexpected Bonuses. You can grab unique articles from the software to send to ezine articles and also to put on your site as well as the distributed articles as there are thousands of articles created. I would recommend submitting to ezine asap.

Problems: There were some problems to start with.. My articles were going out to only a few sites (60-70) and for 2 days none were distributed. I contaced the help desk and within an hour the article had been sent out and a bug had been found. They now go out to about 300 depending but the actual amount varies depending on the Topic.

They had to change their system last month as before they were submitting to article dashboard sites but they ran into a bit of trouble with some owners. This was because they could distribute the articles to the sites without the owners permission.

This was overcome by creating a plugin that the site owners have to install to get the articles. The number of distributions are now seeming to increasing almost daily. They are also working on a WordPress plugin (how useful will that be!! unique content direct to your blog!) and I’ve personally given them my plugins for ArticleMS so they can hopefully adapt them to be used on the 100 or so ArticleMS directories.

Documentation: The documentation is very good and consits of a number of videos If you are using the step by step wizard you have access to contextual videos.

How I use it: I recycle old articles and submit them for adsesne sites and affiliate landing pages. I then add unique content thats been created to my sites…so I not only get backlinks and traffic I get fresh new content on my site.

Recommended for: People who have time to submit an article a day and spend around an hour preparing it. There is a wizard that takes you through it step by step and this is all done online or you can just upload prepared articles. You can also outsource the article creation.
Not recommended for: People who don’t like writing articles or outsourcing You might use it for a day or two but then you’ll give up!

Affiliate Program: There is a 2 level affiliate program paying 40% on the first level and 10% on level 2 sales. 3 sales will cover your monthly fees.

[tag] Article marketing, unique article wizard, site promotion [/tag]

I checked this morning more out of hope than conviction that the site would be indexed and i was very surprised to see it was.

The day 4 tag is a bit misleading so here is the timeline

Sunday Day 1 _ created the site.

Monday 3pm CET uploaded 1 article
Tuesday 7.25 am CET recieved notification of review and submission (this is sent automatically at the time of submission)
wednesday 11am ..site is in google and author name is showing in google.

Time from the notification being recieved to indexing is 28 hours so indexing could have been anywhere from 16-28 hours. Which isn’t too shabby!

The focus now is on seeing how many links we get back and how many times the authors name appears.

I’ve recorded another video so you can have a look at the results.

[tag]article marketing, site promotion [/tag]

That was a total of 47 minutes. At 3 PM central european time the article was distributed. so all there is to do now is to site back and wait and to keep checking the logs and the search engines to see if it’s been indexed yet.

[tag] article marketing, website promotion, [/tag]

I am about to embark on an Article Marketing Experiment. Article marketing is one of the best ways to promote a site and drive traffic to it but it is getting more and more difficult as submission times are getting longer at sites like Ezine Articles.

I’ve been looking at number of methods of getting articles submitted and I think I have come up with the Ultimate Article Marketing method. I am going to try this out this week and let you know the results.

This is how the experiment will work.

I’ll create a Blog and promote it using only the method and tool I’ve discovered. I’ll use a unique name and submit just 1 article that points back to the site. Oh and to make sure it’s not too easy I’ll only give myself 1 hour in total to spend on the Article Marketing

I’ll use no other method of promotion and create a video of each step. I won’t reveal the tool until the site is indexed and the author name is appearing in the search engines.

So Lets Get Started :

Day 1.

I am just about to purchase a domain and build a blog. I’ll create 1 unique post and no more until the site is indexed. As a further test I am targetting a keyword that has over 1.6 million competing pages so it will be interesting to see how we rank and if our ranking increases.

[tag]article marketing, website promotion, internet marketing [/tag]

You will need a domain and the ability to build using xsitepro or something similar dreamweaver, frontpage etc. The site should take about 10 minutes to 30 minutes to build. The ability to do a bit of site promotion using articles etc would be useful. A bit of technical ability and an Imagination are prerequisites!!

If you are interested and can be trusted not to reveal the details of this experiment please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

Thanks To all the volunteers, check back later for the results…