I meant to update more often this week but, as you can see from the title, I’ve been working really, really hard.

I rent a flat and my landlord has given us notice to leave (unfortunately they’re moving back in) so we have to find a new place. I’m trying to find a private landlord to avoid all the agency fees, but nothing’s come up yet. If we go with an agent we could be looking at lots of fees, plus other costs involved with moving and the deposit, it really is crazy. Unfortunately I just paid off a £1000 overdraft which I used a lot of my savings for!

So I have a while to look for a new place, it’s really distracting so I’m hoping I’ll find one soon so it doesn’t take up too much time. I’m also taking on extra work to raise a bit of extra cash and make up for any time I’ll have to take off when I move. But I’m trying really hard to make sure my passive income efforts don’t go neglected.

Update on My Article Marketing Backlinking Strategy:

OK so a couple of weeks ago I wrote about my article marketing plan. I never got fully into it. Before yesterday I’d only submitted two articles to Ezine Articles and nothing else. Now I have:

• Submitted three more articles to Ezine articles,
• Submitted spun versions of those through Unique Article Wizard (5 in total),
• And submitted spun versions of those 5 articles through Hubpages, Infobarrel, Xomba and Squidoo.
• I also set up a twitter account for this particular niche blog and set it to automatically tweet the link to each new blog post and each Ezine Article.

The reason this took me so long is that I spin it manually. I will never bring myself to submit meaningless rubbish that’s been done by a computer, so I rewrite it manually. The article content stays the same, I just change the words to help give them a boost in search engines.

Each set of article includes two links to two blog posts on the site. In total I’m submitting 10 articles, which means linking to 19 posts plus the homepage from all those different sources. I’m really hoping this is going to give my site a boost!

Other Projects:

I really want to start some new sites but I am really holding myself back since there’s still loads to do on my current sites! I am just going off now, though, to write content for one of the “hot” niche sites I talked about last time. This is an Amazon site, I’m going to make it as useful as I possibly can, which means a lot of research but I think it’ll be worth it.

I plan to have the 10 article backlinking strategy completed next week after which I’ll monitor results. I have no idea how fast I can expect results, but I will apply what I learn to some of my other niche sites. I really want to be able to come up with a solid backlinking plan like Michelle posted about earlier in the week.

I’ve decided I really need to kickstart my marketing efforts. As I mentioned at the end of last week, I’ve been writing a lot of content for my blogs.I have about 15 blogs that I’m actively working on adding content to at the moment, and all of these are about two months old or less. The only marketing I’ve done for them is submitting the RSS feed and then maybe an Ezine Article and a UAW submission. This is because I wanted to focus on making sure they all had at least 20 posts to start (so much writing to do!)

But simply putting up new posts doesn’t really increase earnings. It’s not that I think new content is a waste of time, most certainly not! But when it’s new, it needs a push to make sure it starts getting found in the search engines. To start with, I’m going to use article marketing to do this.

Testing With One Site

With one of my sites that was built in April I’ve been getting traffic every day but not much. So I’ve decided to try and give it a boost by writing 10 unique articles. I got some good PLR and rewrote all 10 articles today, and included keywords, as a starting point. This is what I’ll do with each of these 10 articles:

• Submit each to Ezine Articles. Each one will link to different blog posts on the site.
• Then I’ll spin them all to a high level of uniqueness using Magic Article Rewriter (making sure they’re all good quality and make perfect sense!) This will take some time, as I want to make them unique enough that I can use them in quite a few different places.
• I’ll submit these spun versions of the 10 articles to Unique Article Wizard, and eventually to sites like HubPages, InfoBarrel, Squidoo and Xomba (and maybe some other article directories like GoArticles and ArticleBot).

Like I said, I’ve already done the first version of these. I don’t know about when is the best time to submit to Ezine Articles, but I’ve decided to just space them out and submit them on various days whenever I think of it. Since each article will include links to different blog posts, I’m not too worried about submitting too many articles to the same link.

So I’ll see how all of this affects (a) the ranking of my site (b) the number of backlinks showing and (c) any direct traffic from the article sites. I’m trying to use longtail keywords that maybe have less searches in the hopes that they will rank without me having to backlink the articles themselves.

The Results

I’ve got no idea what the results of this will be – it’s just a test. I haven’t even made any sales of the product this particular site is promoting, so I don’t even know how well it converts, because I haven’t had enough visitors yet. But hopefully I’ll know soon whether this product does convert or not. It’ll also give me some more ideas about marketing my future sites.

If this new Google update (you’ve probably seen people talking about this everywhere, so I won’t go into detail now) has taught me anything it’s that I’m on the right track trying to get lots of content on all of my sites. It’s not easy, and I will admit I do feel nervous about my efforts paying off, but the key is to keep going and keep building my sites anyway.

But I do also need to find a balance between creating new content – which is very time consuming – and marketing those sites. I really want to get started with article marketing to try and give a boost in traffic to my new websites while they still find their real place in Google.

My plan is to work on content and marketing one after the other, at least every other day. So one day I might write 10 new blog posts, the next I might submit 5 article marketing articles. I’d wanted to focus on marketing 100% but I can’t do this right now – I still have sites that need more blog posts scheduled.

So far I haven’t really seen any increase in earnings as a result of my new sites, but that’s to be expected. I’m really hoping that now I’m going to start marketing things will start to move forward (despite the fact my Adsense has been pretty low these last few days).

Tomorrow I’m taking my “holiday” break of three days. I’ll work on Friday but then I’m going to London for the weekend. So these efforts are really going to start on Monday (and you won’t hear much from me ’til then). I’ll let you know how it goes!

I feel as if I’m getting a little better at picking keywords lately, but I know I still need more practice. The good news is that a lot of my new sites have appeared on page 1 without any work as soon as I put them up. But, and this could be a sign that my keyword research still isn’t great, I seem to need to give them a kickstart before they move up slightly and get some traffic.

Basic Ways to Kickstart the Site

I’ll start with the basic things I do, because they’re so easy. I have products from Incansoft that can submit to RSS feed directories automatically, can social bookmark and also submit to web directories. This software is not perfect, far from it, many of the submissions fail – but it’s cheap and it’s automated so I start with this. Sometimes I get a little social networking traffic but I don’t normally notice the effects straight away.

My Article Marketing Plan

I find that this first batch of article marketing does make a real difference to sites that are indexed but not yet getting much traffic. The traffic usually starts straight away (of course, I get more traffic for some sites than others). I’ve never been good at separating the different marketing I do to show clear results, but recently I’ve become pretty much sure that this two step plan works to kick-start the site:

1. I go to Ezine Articles and search for an article in my niche. I scroll down to the end of the article and take a look at the most viewed articles in that category in the last 60 days. I pick a similar topic to write my own article on.
2. Then I spin this article for Unique Article Wizard (I do this ‘manually’ though I do have Magic Article Rewriter which is great if I need it spun more times). I don’t really care about using a keyword in the UAW article, since I don’t expect the articles themselves to rank – I care about the keywords I use in my anchor text. One anchor text link includes my main site keyword, and the other links to another page/ post.

(Sometimes I do this the other way round i.e. write for UAW first then submit the “spun” version through Ezine Articles. Both methods are fine under the terms as long as they’re under the same pen name).

I’ve really noticed traffic starting to come in and rankings building as a result of these steps, so I’m planning to do this for each new site I set up (unless it ranks perfectly well on it’s own). Unique Article Wizard doesn’t come cheap, so I try to subsidise the cost by selling article submissions, but hopefully this new tactic will also help me make the most out of it.