Day 30 - Conclusion of article marketing challenge

On the 18th of March, I threw up a new blogspot, Tassimo Coffee Machines, and then sent an article through the Article Ranks system to backlink it.

I only sent one article through the system, because I didn't want multiple articles published on the same blogs. When I retrieved the urls of the published artiocles, I bookmarked them thoroughly to ensure that they stayed indexed.

Here's the stats so far:



As you can see from the graphic, Article Ranks has published my article 53 times so far. They drip feed the articles out at 2-3 a day, and as I set the article to "unlimited" they will continue publishing the article till they run out of blogs in that category (typically it takes them 60 days to run out - so they'll be publishing for another month or so).

How has this affected my rankings in the SERPs (click the graphic below to enlarge)?



According to Ranktracker, I'm still not in the top 100 for my main keywords, but the long tails are looking good - have reached #15 for Bosch tassimo T65.

What about traffic (click the image below to enlarge)?



Despite the fact that the blogspot consists of only four pages (plus privacy policy), so there is not much scope for long-tails, I am getting steady traffic from G and Ask (none yet from Bing or Yahoo).

All in all, am pretty happy with the results of this challenge. The only real work was writing my original article with an extremely high level of spin (see this page for information on how to spin). The rest of it was on autopilot - Article Ranks drip fed the articles out. When I got my Google alert that the article had been published, I bookmarked it with imautomator (again, I just filled a short blurb for each article, and they bookmarked each at the rate of one a day for 15 days) Imautomator is a free service.

I haven't had any sales yet, but I have had people clicking through to my Amazon account.

The whole cost was time plus $2 for the Article Ranks article (you can either have a PAYG account at $2 per article submitted, or purchase a monthly unlimited account for $39.99 per month).

I think this conclusively proves that Panda did not affect article marketing. Instead I believe Panda was a way to score on-page factors. If you set up your main site right, then the article backlinks sent in will help not hurt.

Day 19 Update - Article Marketing Challenge

Just to re-cap what's been done so far:

March 18th: Set up a brand new blogspot blog on Tassimo Coffee Machines. see Day 1 for how I selected the keywords.

I then added content to the site and on March 20th wrote and spun an article which I submitted to Article Ranks. See Days 2-6 for how I went about the spinning process.

I set the article to be submitted unlimited times, which simply means that Article Ranks submits a version of it at the rate of 3 a day till they run out of blogs in that category to submit it to.

Because Article Ranks keeps their network secret, I also set up Google alerts for the article titles, to locate those articles that had been indexed. I've also been googling the titles, and found further articles on tag pages - the tag got indexed not the article, but this enabled me to retrieve the article url and bookmark it to get it indexed in it's own right.

For this case study, I've only submitted one article into the Article Ranks system. Why just one? Because if I submit more, they'll just get submitted to the same blogs within the "Food and Drink - Coffee" category.

You get diminishing returns after the first three links from a given site - and my article already has three links in it, one to the home page, and two to individual blog posts. So, my strategy has been to spin the article to a very high degree to improve the chances that each version on each blog gets indexed by G, rather than to submit umpteen new articles to the same blogs.

So what have I been doing since I wrote and spun my article? Well, every time I find one of the article ranks articles, I submit it to imautomator to get it bookmarked (I set it to be bookmarked to 15 sites over the course of 15 days). Imautomator is free, BTW. I also randomly bookmark the articles to a collection of do-follow bookmarking sites that I've found over the years, to provide some weak link juice to them.

As you can see everything is set on drip feed - the articles are drip-fed out by Articleranks. The bookmarks to the article ranks articles are drip-fed by imautomator. When I do the manual bookmarks everyday, I am careful not to bookmark a given url too many times in a given day. Slow and steady gets the best results.

Anyway, here's some stats of what's been achieved so far:

First of all, here's the article ranks stats.



As you can see, they've published my article 36 times so far (and will continue publishing till they run out of blogs). Despite my spinning to over 200%, I still got rejected three times - in these post Panda times, if you want your article to be published on good sites, you really need to spin to over 300%.


Here's where I am in the SERPs according to Ranktracker (click to enlarge).



I'm not ranking in the top 100 for the main keywords, but the individual blog posts are doing well for their keywords (the best being the Tassimo T65 which is at #25).


Here's the stats from Google analytics (click to enlarge):



Not bad for a blog that is less than a month old. The traffic appears to be targetted because I have got some clicks on my Amazon account, see below:



No orders yet, but three clicks, which means I am getting traffic that is possibly interested in buying.

What next? Well, I shall continue to retrieve urls and bookmark them to make them stick in G's index till 18th April (one month into this challenge).

At that point I shall try to build more links, but will probably use another blog network, as I want the links to be from fresh and different blogs.

The cost so far of this exercize is time plus $2 for the article into article ranks. (And one of the reasons I like Article Ranks is that they have a pay-as-you-go option - if you don't have that many sites to backlink, and want variety, the PAYG option works out cheaper than signing up for $39.99 a month.