Website Building Update – Week 23
This week has been all about backlinks! I’ve taken the articles I’ve spun last week and the articles my outsourcer has spun as well, and I’m going berserk with directory submits and web 2.0 sites. It’s pretty boring, but at the end of the day, I feel like I’ve done so much stuff!
I finally earned “platinum” status on Ezine Articles after submitting 60 articles. This is pretty cool for me! Sometimes I need minor accomplishments like this to make me feel good about myself. I can now get an article approved in a few hours, as opposed to the two weeks or longer it took back in September.
Article Marketing Automation (AMA) was down again on Tuesday, which was incredibly frustrating since basically everything I’m doing right now relies on me having access to my account on their site. They seem to be having lots of problems lately. I wonder when they’ll decide they owe us a free month of service to compensate for all of their constant site errors…
Plus there was an internet outage on Wednesday, which slowed me down too.
Sales-wise, this week has been pretty slow. I came in just shy of $500 for the month of January. Only two sales from website #4 since last Friday. I’m not letting it get me down though since I’m pretty sure that after doing my current SEO activities for a solid month or so, I should be getting a butt-load of traffic and hopefully sales.
February 6th, 2010 at 3:33 pm
Well looks like your booking along faster then I am. Of coarse I have school and work and a rather demanding puppy lol. Seems like I always pick the worst people on odesk too. I finally got my second blueprint site up and I posted for the articles on odesk… hired someone .. and they haven’t logged back on in 3 days
*sigh*
February 8th, 2010 at 10:37 am
@Amanda, Thanks for commenting on my blog. Yeah, it can be hard to make time to create all these sites. Fortunately (I guess), I can’t get a job thanks to my masters degree in a totally devastated industry, which gives me more that enough time to write/spin/submit articles all over the web.
If you can, take advantage of your student status and build a student page on your school’s domain and link to your sites. This will earn you a few coveted .edu backlinks which can help a lot with your SERP’s. Also, try to find ways of taking parts of your life and turning them into affiliate opportunities. For example, you have a dog. You could probably make a dog training site pretty easily with what you already know. I just started taking Japanese classes and I’m using that as a great opportunity to get content and build a “learn Japanese” site. Why not get paid for something you’re going to do anyway?
I don’t have a whole lot of experience with outsourcing. I just tried it for the first time and have had pretty good results. If you want, contact my guy: jamesbryan2009 (at) gmail.com. He’s an affilorama member, so he knows all about everything and can format spun articles for AMA without you having to explain it all. Some of the articles I got from him are flat-out amazing. Much better than I could ever dream of writing.
February 8th, 2010 at 7:24 pm
Hi Clayton,
Nice to see you progressing again! I really need to focus on just one thing and get going as I got sidetracked again. Oh well….
Just a quick question to ask if I may:
Did you use the same articles that you submitted to Ezine and spin them then use AMA? And do you submit to Ezine first before you trying to spin them and use AMA?
BTW, apart from AMA and Ezine, are you using any other methods like social bookmarking and stuff?
Huddson
February 9th, 2010 at 11:09 am
@ Huddson, Hey! I spin the articles from my site, and then save them in “draft” mode on AMA. Then I’ll take a spun version and submit to Ezine. After that gets approved, I’ll hand submit spun versions to about 15 other article directories and Hubpages and Squidoo. Then I’ll set the AMA article “live.”
I tried social bookmarking, but I’m hoping that I don’t need to do this. It is incredibly boring and time consuming.
Right now, I’m just doing what I said above and I’m also submitting articles to about 150 other article directories using an automated software called Article Submission Helper (free). Then I’m using Free Traffic System to build backlinks to the Ezine page and a few other article pages that seem to rank well. I have to reformat my spun articles for Article Submission Helper and Free Traffic System, but it’s pretty easy. Just a simple find/replace command to change all the spinning syntax. I just started using ASH and FTS a few weeks ago, so I haven’t seen any results yet. Maybe next month…?
Keep at it and don’t give up!
February 10th, 2010 at 6:58 am
@ Huddson, yes focus is one of the hardest things. It’s taken me a while to get that sorted
Just to add to Clayton’s advice – I use HumanRewriter.com for spinning articles for AMA. Again, I have to find and replace one of the delimiters but it’s no problem.
I can recommend offshoreally.com for link building. I’ve had a part time link builder for 2 weeks now and she does soooooo much more than I could ever do.
cheers,
Keith
February 10th, 2010 at 5:49 pm
Hey thanks Clayton and Keith!!
I always thought you needed a separate set of articles for Ezine and AMA purposes. I thought Ezine would have check your %uniqueness(for duplicate content) before approving them but I must be wrong then.
Yes, keeping focus seems to be a problem for me and now I’ll just purely focus on building affiliate sites for the next few months with no distraction.
February 12th, 2010 at 5:17 pm
@Huddson, No, you don’t need a separate set of articles for Ezine Articles. From what I understand, you can even submit the exact same article that’s on your site to EZA. They are cool with that, they just don’t want you to submit articles that you’ve already spread elsewhere on the web.
Focus can be hard. What kept me going when I first started was all the success stories and the clickbank screen shots I saw over at Affilorama. I actually set up this blog to help answer the questions that I had when I was first getting started like “how long will it take for me to earn $x?” or “how long before I can rank for x keyword?” I also wanted to help inspire people as well, like some of the successes at Affilorama did for me. Unfortunately, my recent clickbank screen shots aren’t really very inspirational…
February 12th, 2010 at 5:42 pm
Thanks again Clayton,
Just a quick Q: Do you build links to each page/article of your sites?
I assume you only have anchor texts to the main domain from Ezinearticles unless you submit a lot of articles there and each article has a different anchor text in bio box.
February 12th, 2010 at 6:02 pm
@Huddson, EZA let’s you do two backlinks in each article you submit, and most other article directories will let you do three. I link to as many pages as I can with each article. I make a little chart with all my articles listed and I draw lines between them to make sure that every page gets deep linked. It’s kind of complicated, but it works for me.