Website Building Update – Week 26
Yikes! I started this 6 months ago? Time sure flies. It seems like just a few weeks ago that I sat down and wrote five panic attack articles on that warm August day. I hoped that by this point I would be rolling in dough, but I guess this whole business is harder than I thought.
I’m not really sure how long I’m going to do these weekly updates. I’ll keep it up until I reach the 1 year mark at least though.
Anyway, this week has been all about building backlinks for website #6. I’ve been proof-reading some of the spun articles I got from my outsource guy before feeding them into AMA and posting them on a bunch of article directories. A lot of the articles are really good, but there are a few that I need to work on a bit.
Looking back on the past six months, I can see the big reason why I’m not doing better than I am. When I first started, my backlinking strategy wasn’t strong enough. Back then spinning articles was a pain in the ass because I had to do it all manually by myself. I really hated it. Most article directories and AMA let you put 3 backlinks in an article, so I figured I only needed to spin 1/3 of the articles on each site to build backlinks to each page.
But that wasn’t enough. I now know that you need to spin every last article on your site (the exception right now is the review articles – seems a little spammy to me). I think I should be caught up by the end of March. So don’t make my mistake and just start spinning like crazy!
Anyway, February is almost over. I’m not sure why, but it’s been a really slow month. I hope things pick up again in March! I’ve busted my ass and worked harder at this than I have any other month yet. I am really excited to see what the results from all this SEO will be in a month or two!
Here’s my screen shot for the week. Website #4 made a few more sales this week. The other sites just aren’t pulling their weight.
PS: As requested, I’m working on a “mistakes I’ve made” post. Should be up early next week.
February 26th, 2010 at 1:22 pm
Well I’d have to say you are doing pretty good. Generating $500 income from nothing is a feat for sure! Of course I’m sure you are spending some of that on AMA and some on your out sourcing and so on… I’ll bet 90% of this is trial an error. You obviously have learned a lot in the last 6 months! Think of what you’ll know this time next year.
I attended that webinar on outsourcing full time employees from the Philippines. I sent you the link about it on Affilorama but like me you probably don’t check it very often. I ended up hiring a full time girl who is very good at English. Not so great at conversational English but her technical writing style is out of this world. She has been spinning articles for me for a week now. She works for $200/month full time!!!!
I ended up buying the product promoted in the webinar which is a monthly training site $97/month. I was not impressed with this product at all but it did come with a subscription to onlinejobs.ph which is where you can find people to work for you. I will not continue this membership now that I have hired someone.
My current process is that I have this girl write and spin articles under my keywords then I take 2 versions of the article and send them to my guy in Canada who edits them to sound more conversational. I pay him $10/hr … takes about 2 hours to edit out 20 articles. Then I submit one edited copy for ezine then one for my site and I then use the rest of the spun versions for web 2.0 stuff and AMA/FTS. So basically I’ve got myself and this gal working full time and another guy working part time … that should generate some real results I hope!
I’ve also been researching blog commenting services. I signed up for one that is pretty fair price. They do blog commenting and social bookmarking for around .27. They offer a free trial of 10 blog comments or 10 social book marks to try out their service. I will let you know how it goes. If it’s worth while I’ll send you the URL.
Here’s to hoping we both have super awesome click bank sales next week!
February 26th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Hey Clayton and Amanda,
You guys use the same articles(spun version) for the same site and AMA?
I thought I heard from Keith that you should completely rewrite what’s on your site before spinning them and onto AMA.
BTW, if you’re allowed 3 backlinks with AMA how do you use them effectively? I thought the same like you that only 1/3 articles are needed for spinning since 3 backlinks allowed. Now that you have every article spun I suppose you only need one backlink per spun version then?
Huddson
February 26th, 2010 at 7:33 pm
Hudson,
The idea that you can not use the same article on your site as your spun article is one I have heard as well. I do in fact use the same article. The original is edited to be put on my site and then spun for AMA, FTS, and web 2.0 sites. My girl spins articles at 50% according to magic article re-writer which comes out to something like 150-200% in AMA (I’m not sure why the numbers are different). It seems to be efficient enough for Google though. I spin ever article and I use my back links for my site pages and web 2.0 pages.
Amanda
February 26th, 2010 at 9:32 pm
@Huddson, yeah, I completely agree with Amanda. You want to do your best to make sure that the articles on your site are not going to appear anywhere else on the web. Rewrite them for AMA or FTS and the use those spun versions to spread across the internet.
I still link to 3 pages on my website with each AMA article. I usually do one link to a product review, one link to the keyword phrase the article is about, and one to a related page. For example, if the article is on “how to stop panic attacks” I’ll link to “how to stop panic attacks,” “cures for panic attacks,” and “Panic Away review.”
@Amanda, Thanks for the encouragement. I guess sometimes I get too caught up in my own financial situation that I overlook the relative progress that I’ve made. If I had a job or any other source of income, I’d probably be ecstatic about an extra $100 a week ($5200/year). But this is my only source of income and $5200 isn’t much of a salary. Yeah, things will get better in the weeks and months to come. Thanks for getting my head on straight!
PS: I have a bunch of web 2.0 sites that are currently not linked together or anything. Do you know a good way to inter-link them that won’t get me in trouble with Google? I think I remember you saying somewhere that you do Blogspot —-> Squidoo —-> Hubpages —-> Website. Is that right?
February 28th, 2010 at 6:54 pm
Hey Clayton,
Great progress in 6 months. I try think of this business as planting seeds… it’s obviously very different from the whole “day’s work for a day’s day” mentality. I imagine it’s difficult if you’re trying to recreate a fulltime income, but I think you’ve made excellent progress.
This graph always gives me perspective: http://www.freedomideas.com/why-so-many-people-fail-online/
Re: AMA. I’ve been putting links in my AMA articles to EVERY page I have out there: Ezine, Squidoo, GoArticles, AND my main sites. My hope is that it creates kind of a “mininet” of links out there all pointing to my main site.
@Amanda, I’d be very interested to hear how the blog commenting service goes!
Cheers,
-Devin
March 1st, 2010 at 9:49 am
@Devin, Thanks for the encouragement. That’s a really hope-inspiring graph. I’m going to hold onto that one.
Yeah, I’m kind of doing something similar with building backlinks to articles and web 2.0 sites. I use AMA for my main website, but I use FTS for backlinks to other sites. I’ll admit I haven’t really put much energy into FTS yet since I’m still trying to get all my articles spun for AMA first. Ah… the never-ending to-do list!