Friday 18 March 2011

Taking part in the Alex Whalley article marketing challenge

Alex Whalley has announced he is taking part in a 30 day article marketing challenge to see whether article marketing can boost a site up the SERPs post the Panda update.

I've decided to try the challenge too, but with two small differences: 1) instead of using UAW, I shall be using Article Ranks for my articles and b) I'm too much of a chicken to point spun articles directly at my domains, so I decided to create a brand new web 2.0 blog on blogspot (I know! How very 2007 of me!) and try to rank that instead. If it works, I'll buy the domain and use the blogspot for backlinks.

I've just set up the blog literally half an hour ago - here it is: Tassimo Coffee Machines.

Google's keyword tool says that Tassimo coffee machine gets 1000 exact match searches per month, the majority of which are from the UK, and Google insights for search confirm the UK bias (I guess Americans use the term coffee maker rather than coffee machine). Therefore I shall be trying to rank on Google UK (which hasn't yet been hit by Panda, but will be shortly), and monetising with Amazon UK, and John Lewis (who I am an affiliate of through Affiliate Window).

I shall also be targeting brand-related keywords. Here's what I'm going for:

Tassimo coffee machine
Tassimo coffee machines
Braun Tassimo coffee machines
Bosch Tassimo coffee machines
Buy Tassimo T Discs

Looking at what ranks for Tassimo coffee machines on Google UK, the #1 spot is a site owned by Kraft (who make T discs), and are also promoting Bosch tassimo machines. I notice they have also bought adwords for this keyword (in fact there are 11 ads on the search page, which means this term is lucrative). The rest of the organic serps is taken by the big branded UK retailers - amazon uk, argos, comet and so on. So I've got my work cut out.

A bit about Article Ranks

The article backlinking will be done through Article Ranks. This is a service where you can either pay $39.99 a month to submit unlimited articles, or simply purchase an article submission either by submitting sites into the system or by purchasing an article for $2 a time. They allow you to either manually spin the article using their software (extremely easy to use) or you can use spinning software and simply paste your spun code into the submission form.

Articles need to be over 300 words, and they recommend you spin to over 100% to get the best out of the system. They then drip feed the articles out, two per day and if you have set it to unlimited, they simply drip them out till they have run out of sites to submit them to.

I will be purchasing credits at $2 per article for this experiment.

Anyway, to start this journal correctly, here's what's been done so far:

Day 1: Friday March 18th

1. Chose my keywords and set up a blog on blogspot

2. Adjusted the template to "wide" because I shall want to fill the space with a lot of gorgeous pictures of coffee machines.

3. Wrote my first post explaining what a Tassimo machine was, and also put up a privacy policy.

4. Submitted the blog to the backlinks forum indexer tool, which submits the site to about 2533 web appraisal sites like alexa, some of which give you a weak dofollow link and some of which are no follow. It helps with indexing.

5. Cost so far: a bit of time

I will add some more content to the blog tomorrow, and start the article markerting once my content is up. That's it for now.

Click here to read about Days 2-6 of the 30 day article marketing challenge

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