I meant to post an update a while ago, but you know how busy things gets and how fast time flies! Last time I posted I wrote about my process for building email lists on my niche sites, and I’ve noticed a few things working so far.

My Newest Niche Email List

The main list I’m focusing on at the moment (aside from my PLR lists) is a niche site that I abandoned for a while. I suddenly realised it was actually ranking number 1 for a lot of great keywords and getting consistent traffic. My main problem with this site is the content is crap and the site is very poorly monetized.

It’s actually a personal development topic I’m interested in, so I decided I could take this site a lot further. And one thing I wanted to do to improve traffic and monetization was to build an email list. I did all the steps I outlined in my last post:

• Found suitable PLR content (in this case one eBook to give away right away, then further articles to use in follow up emails),
• Added a web form to a prominent position in the sidebar,
• Installed Subscribers Magnet and installed it at the bottom of every post and in the comment form.
• (I also meant to add a newsletter page with details of the free eBook, but I still haven’t gotten around to it yet. So all I have at the moment is words along the line of “subscribe and get my free eBook” – not perfect but it’ll do for now).

Getting Subscribers

I haven’t done anything apart from the above to get subscribers for this list, but I already have 112 within a few weeks. I know this isn’t earth-shattering, but for me it’s pretty good for little to no work. In fact, to get the first 112 subscribers for my PLR site, I had to work a lot harder on the freebies and advertising the list with a WSO. For this, I’m pretty much doing nothing! I’m getting a few new subscribers each and every day. I have also noticed (from my Aweber stats):

• 65 out of those 112 subscribers signed up using my Subscribers Magnet forms,
• 47 out of those 112 subscribers signed up with the sidebar web form,
• So 58% of all my subscribers are signing up from within the bottom of individual posts or comments!

This is interesting because, firstly, my Subscribers Magnet form is far more basic than the other form, and contains less text info about the free bonus guide. Secondly, it suggests that most people sign up after having read the content already, rather than just seeing the opt in form near the top and subscribing for the freebie.

I did say above that my content was crap. It still is, though I’m going through and improving it slowly. Because it looks like my subscribers are signing up after reading the content, I think this is really important.

Changing The Way I Write Emails

In the past I’ve worked on building lists in a handful of my niche sites. They do have subscribers, but they don’t really respond to the links.

I have decided to put more effort into the style I use for my emails. Although I still use PLR, I either edit it and chop it up, or include personalized content before and after the PLR. I write more personally, about what’s worked for me in the past, and how I feel about certain topics. I also address my subscribers personally, and invite them to respond.

So far I’ve only added 2 follow up emails to my latest list sequence (I should have done more by now!) but straight away I was getting emails from my subscribers thanking me and asking questions, making suggestions for future content etc. I’ve never had this for my niche sites! It shows me that I’m actually providing value and building a relationship with people. That makes me really happy!

What’s Next?

You may have noticed something big missing from this post – monetizing my list! I am not working on making money from this list yet. So far I have included one link in each email to try and get my subscribers used to clicking on my links. But I’ve only linked to my own free blog content so far. Once I start figuring out the best ways to monetize these emails I’ll post another update.

Last week I made a decision to get rid of the ads in my sidebar that relate to make money online courses. I had a few different courses on there and they were all rotating alongside WordPress theme ads etc. in about six ad slots.

The Ads That I Decided To Remove

After my shift last week about focusing on focus, I thought to myself that my blog doesn’t really represent what I’m writing. Here I am writing about how I can not get distracted any more, yet I’m trying to advertise all these shiny new products to my readers.

It’s not that the courses don’t work – I would never ever put an ad up if I hadn’t used it and didn’t think it worked – but the fact is that we’re all on our own path and I don’t want to be responsible for distracting you and making you deviate from what really needs to be done.

And, the truth is, no course provides all the answers. All the courses I’ve bought have helped me reach where I am now, but I just decided that I won’t blatantly push them in your face anymore. I think we get used to seeing ads and pushy affiliate sales pitches everywhere and it all perpetuates the idea that there’s something else we need to try, that we’ll miss out if we don’t (-not true).

What About Affiliate Links/ Reviews?

I’m not going to edit anything I’ve already included in this blog, but I pretty much never push affiliate links anyway so I don’t think it’s a problem. I’ll still use them if something comes up in the course of my updates. And I’m not saying no to detailed reviews, either. In fact I will be reviewing Tiffany Dow’s latest product next week, which is about selling PLR rather than affiliate marketing, though not here (I am starting a niche site about how to sell PLR).

In short, I’d really rather not push anything on you. Plus, it helps reaffirm the fact that I’m not buying into shiny new guides any more (Tiffany’s product is a bit different, and will already fit into my PLR business plan). But I’ll be happy to give my advice if it’s ever requested.

The Ads That Are Staying

I decided to keep a few of the ads though, on second thoughts, after a first draft of this post I decided to get rid of them too. You will find a select few recommendations (services and WordPress themes) on my recommendations page. My sidebar is now ad free!

My Newsletter

Lastly, I have a bit of extra space for my “newsletter”. In reality this is a way to stay up to date with my blog, by getting notified about the latest posts but in a little more personal way than subscribing by email or RSS (which you can also do if you want) – and with the bonus of a free article every week. I set this up last year and got a small number of subscribers, though I ended up neglecting it. But I love connecting with people here, and decided to start it up again.

This really is a friendly way to connect, rather than a list of people I want to promote to. I will let you know about my latest PLR packs in my Friday email where I will give you your free PLR article. Since I have a few subscribers now, both here and for my PLR site, I decided one weekly free PLR article would be a good way to say thanks. But it really is mainly just a way to connect.

A Question for You

Before I ask – I just want to say that there is nothing wrong with ads on your blog, this is just my decision. So, on that note, What do you think about the idea of removing sidebar ads? and What else could I put in that space that’s actually useful? Do I need anything at all?

Today I thought I’d mention some other backlinking and traffic generation techniques I’m planning to try. Although these are more time consuming than things like forum profile backlinks, I am hoping they’re more powerful and definitely more relevant.

Guest Blogging

I’ve known for a long time that guest blogging can be extremely powerful, but for some reason I’ve always ignored it for my niche sites, as if the topics aren’t suited to guest blogging. But honestly this isn’t true. I’ve just had to think outside the box a little.

For example, if I have a product review about a tumble dryer, there’s probably not going to be a blog (that’s not a review blog like mine) that would be willing to accept guest blog posts, or that would be worth submitting to. Instead, I have to look for general cleaning blogs or household tips to submit to.

My Progress Today

So basically today, this is what I’ve been doing. Typing things like “general niche”+ submit article/ guest blogging into Google to find sites that would be willing to post my articles. This is more time consuming than it might seem! I found a few sites after some searching, but discarded a few because they had low page rank or just didn’t seem to get much traffic (judging by blog comments etc).

I’ve narrowed down a list of about 5 blogs in the general niche that accept guest articles and allow links. I’m going to try and write 10 articles for these (or outsource them, not sure yet) and submit them off. If they don’t all get accepted then I want to use them as blog posts as they’ll all cover different aspects of my niche. I would try to find other blogs to submit to but honestly there aren’t many available in this niche as far as I can see.

Future Backlinking Strategies

I also want to try press releases and have wanted to for a while. One of those things on my list that I haven’t gotten around to yet. The only trouble with this is that you need to come up with a newsworthy angle for the release, but if that’s possible I do think it can be a very powerful marketing tool. So I’m hoping to test this method some time in August as well.

Like I have said a few times recently, I’ve been writing longer articles and review posts in the hope that they’ll be more search engine friendly and attract visitors for more long tail keywords. The reviews are 1,000+ words, and include a lot of LSI keywords that I researched through various keyword tools. They also contain images and Amazon affiliate links within the text. These reviews are genuinely useful – they took a while to research!

Anyway, now I’ve written five of these long pages, three on one site, two on another, I decided I’m going to submit some articles to backlink the individual pages. This was part of my strategy before, except I only did it for random blog posts, whereas this feels a little more planned to me.

Today I wrote three Ezine Articles, to cover links to all five of those pages (plus one extra link since it’s two per article). And now I’m going to submit them through Unique Article Wizard, but only at a slow pace of say 10 per day, to keep the links building steadily. This will keep the links building even though I may not have lots of time to work on them (I have got a lot more client work to do this week).

Anyway, I’ll try to stay updated here to keep myself accountable and moving forward!

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.