Days 2 - 6 - 30 Day Article Marketing Challenge

Here's what's been accomplished so far (click Day 1 for the first write-up).

1. Have increased the content on the site, reviewing two coffee machines so far

2. Submitted the first couple of posts from the Tassimo coffee Machine site to Social Monkee, which is a free social bookmarking site that allows you to submit one url a day to 25 different social sites in their system (with three versions of the blurb so that there is more chance of the bookmarks being indexed). [Edit: I removed the link to Social Monkee, as I don't think it is helping with ranking - see my note at the very bottom of this post].

Also submitted the posts to imautomator another free social bookmarking site which allows you to submit 10 urls a day, each of which is submitted to 15 bookmarking sites.

BTW, the site is indexed - that indexing tool described in Day 1 works.

3. Wrote a spun article distributed through Article ranks.

Here are my top tips for how to write a spun article:

I always write the main article in notepad and then paste it into the form in Article Ranks. Then I press "Save as Draft" and the articleranks manually spinning page pops up.

They allow you to spin everything, titles, links, phrases.

Start with as many titles as you can think of. Most people go for standard titles as though they are addressing a real reader. However, the aim of this exercise is merely to get the page indexed, not read, and the best way to accomplish this is to go for really unusual titles. It doesn't matter if no-one in their right minds would search for that particular phrase - as long as it is unusual, G will index it, on the off-chance that someone, somewhere might be looking for it. Whereas if you go for a standard title, G will decide that as it already has 800 other pages in it's index with the same title, they don't need one more, especially from a weak blog, and your article will go into the supplementals. So exercise the grey stuff between your ears and be creative with your titles.

Next, when spinning the body of your text, again, be as creative as you can.

The standard way of spinning is to simply replace words in a sentence with synonyms. Here's an example:

There are [several|many] different [types|kinds] of [coffee makers|coffee machines] you can [buy|purchase|order].

The problem with the above is that a) the syntax is the same and b) the sentence length is exactly the same.

b) can be a killer - what happens when 100 spun articles are published all of which have exactly 317 words?

You are better off manually spinning so that the structure and length of the sentences are completely different. Here's an example:

version 1: There are many different types of coffee makers you can choose from
version 2: Coffee makers come in a vast variety of types, allowing you to select the one that suits your personal tastes best
version 3: Coffee machines come in so many different sizes, types and costs, it is hard to decide which one to choose.
version 4: When buying a coffee maker it is easy to become bemused at the choice on offer. They come in so many different sizes, not to mention prices and functionality

It will take you about two hours to manually spin an article so that it reads well no matter which version is produced. But it is worth it, as it increases the uniqueness of each spun article, and it will ensure that every single article has a different length. Notice that version 4 actually has two sentences - it's always worth throwing in a few extra sentences - that way, not only will your articles have a different word count each, they will contain a different amount of sentences.

Article ranks allow you to produce ten different versions of each sentence (and you can then go back and edit so that nested words in the sentences vary too).

I would really go to town on the first paragraph in particular and try for ten versions of every sentence there. G excerpts the first few sentences in the SERPs, and if you want your article to be indexed, you need the uniqueness of this part to be high.

You are probably tired just reading this, and asking, is this amount of work really worth it? IMO, yes. You want most of the articles produced to get indexed and stay indexed, and spending two hours now can save you loads of time later.

Once the article goes live, article ranks publish it at a rate of three spun articles a day.

They tell you the number published, but do not disclose the urls to protect their network. I always create google alerts for all the titles in my articles, and then when I get the alert, I check that the article is mine and that the link has been followed by viewing the source code (occasionally you get rogue webmasters who no-follow your links - if this happens, simply report them to article ranks - this happens less frequently in this network than others). I then submit each url to imautomator, to get them bookmarked over a period of 15 days. In my experience this helps them stay indexed.

Cost so far: Time, plus $2 for one article submitted to article ranks.

Short Update 29th March 2011: I had been a little lazy and while I submitted my first two blogposts from the Tassimo site to Social Monkee for bookmarks, I didn't bother with the third. Just as well! Checked my stats, and I am ranking at #35 for "Bosch Tassimo T65" (the third post), but at #195 for "Bosch Tassimo T40" (the second post).

Both the Bosch tassimo posts have links from my article ranks submission: Article ranks allows three links in an article, which can be placed anywhere, and I linked to the home page, the Bosch tassimo T40 post and the Bosch Tassimo T65 post. So the only difference between the two Bosch tassimo posts is the social monkee bookmarks, and the post that has them is not doing well. The post with just article ranks links is fine.

Finally am getting some search traffic from ask and Google UK - and someone clicked through to Amazon on the Bosch Tassimo T65 link! They didn't buy, but at least they are clicking!