How I Got Rich

Unique Article Wizard: First Impressions

Warning: this post is riddled with affiliate links!

Last week I signed up for Unique Article Wizard. For those that don’t know this is a service that lets you post articles to the blogs and article directories in their network. It’s web based so you log into the site and then enter your article and they do the rest of the work. This might sound pretty simple but their interface isn’t that great.

You can paste in an article in spintax form that you have spun somewhere else, perhaps in The Best Spinner or you can submit an article and two rewrites of that article. This is the option I have used so far and is probably the best for people who don’t like spinning or don’t own any spinning software.

What type of Content can you Submit?

When it comes to submitting an article and two rewrites into Unique Article Wizard the articles and rewritten versions need to have the same amount of paragraphs (seven plus). The paragraphs are then interchanged to make lots of different articles. For this reason paragraph one in each article and rewrite must be on the same topic but written differently. Same for paragraph two and so on. You also need to submit lots of unique titles to help improve the submission rates. For one of my articles I ordered two rewrities of an article I had previously ordered from The Content Authority. This was quite expensive so for the second article I hired someone from Odesk who charged $5 to write a 500 word article and then do two rewrites of it. Both articles got accepted so I guess the cheaper one from Odesk was good enough. Unique Article Wizard also offer an article writing service and charge $9.99 for an article and two rewrites. You could always write them yourself though!

Inserting Links

You can put two links in your article with at least one going in the resource box. This means you can put a link in the body of the text but when I tried this I found that some of my articles had this link removed. For this reason I recommend you put both links in the resource box. You can spin the resource box and the links so you can link to lots of sites and/or pages in one submission.

Submission Rates

You can choose how many times a day you want your article to be submitted. The minimum is 20, I’m not sure what the maximum is but for my articles, so far, I have chosen 50. In the future I think I will do 20 to make it look at bit more natural. It takes a few days for the submission to kick in after you have entered your article but then each day you get an email with a list of the submissions that have been made. So far I have only submitted two articles and both have gotten about 160 submission.

Index Rates

I’ve only submitted two articles so far but for the first article it went down like this:

• Submissions: 162
• Indexed: 95

and the other one went like this:

• Submissions: 159
• Indexed: 99

These are only after a few days of the job being completed so there is a chance more could get indexed over the coming days and weeks. You could always put the URLs of the non-indexed articles into a pinger or indexer and speed things up a bit. A good old fashioned Scrapebox or Xrummer blast probably wouldn’t hurt either.

SERP Movement

I used one submission on a new site and linked to a set of Web 2.0 sites that link to my site. Therefore none of these links went directly to the money site. That site hasn’t moved in the SERPs.

For the other submission I used it on different site. I used one link to link directly to the money site and the other link was spun and linked to one of 10 Web 2.0 sites that link back to my money site. This site moved from #7 to #4 in the SERPs. Although until the recent Google update that occurred mid-October it had been #1 for this keyword.

Final Thoughts

So with nearly 100 indexed posts for each article, and as each article contains two links I got 200 new backlinks to my sites for each submission. This sounds pretty good. But looking at the sites the articles are submitted to, they aren’t the best and if you are not writing the articles yourself it could get quite expensive especially when you factor in the $67 per month subscription fee.

If you have already hired a virtual assistant with time on their hands this might be a good way to keep them busy. Or if you have a cheap source of content who is able to do spinning or rewrites then you could make the most of this tool.

Doing it on the Cheap

One approach could be to write and spin/rewrite a load of articles. Sign up for one month and submit all those articles. Get them published then cancel your account. The articles should stay where they were published and you will have gotten your links and only paid up for one month. You might want to check how many articles you can submit a day and what does happen to your articles once you leave the programme.

I’m going to stick with it for a while as I am using it to try and rank my new Adsense sites but I’m not entirely convinced so far. But the proof will be in the pudding and if it gets my sites ranked and they make money then it will have worked. I guess it all comes down to results and if you can make the most of the tools you are using…

• Link to Unique Article Wizard: http://www.uniquearticlewizard.com/

Alternatives to Unique Article Wizard

A cheaper alternative would be the Article Marketing Robot which does a similar job but is installed on your computer and runs from there rather than being web based. It has a much larger list of sites you can submit to but it will take up your machines resources as it does so. It is a one time fee rather than monthly subscription and they do offer a free 5 day trial so go check it out.

Monthly Round-Up: August 2011

My third month as a full-time affiliate has ended and my new role as full-time-stay-at-home-dad has also started as my girlfriend has gone back to work after her maternity leave.

While we were both off work I had plans to try and do five hours of work a day but that never really happened. I’ve now scraped that plan and no longer have a timetable, I just do a bit of work when I can. Some days I do nothing and others I do maybe up to an hour. This probably isn’t enough to help me reach my (current) goal of £2000 per month but its the best I can do at the moment and I prefer this approach as it means I don’t beat myself up when I don’t reach my target hours of work per day. When the baby is a bit older I might hire a baby sitter/nanny for a couple of hours a day so I can pop over the road to Starbucks and do a quick bit of work each day. They only charge 2 quid an hour so its not going to break the bank!

Less is More

So what have I been doing with my limited time? I haven’t got time to write my own content or find good links so now I have to pay for these. I’ve got a couple of content writers which I am using for content to use for links (Web 2.0s & Articles) and to put on my sites. I’d rather write my own stuff for my sites, at least for the important pages but I haven’t got time and this is better than nothing. I’ve heard the term LSI Content be mentioned a few times but am not really sure what it is, anyone know about it?

Backlinks

I’ve bought lots of types of banklink over the past few months and I think I have found out what works for me from the things I’ve tried. Right now blog posts from blogs with PR seems to work. I’ve tried Web 2.0s, social bookmarks and other stuff like that but what seems to work most of them time is a blog post on a blog with PR (3 or 4) with a link to my site. If you can find such blogs who are willing to let you post then good for you but if you can’t you will have to pay for it. Sometimes the boost in the SERPs stick and something it doesn’t and your site drops down again but while the site is number one I make sales so it is worth the money IMO. It gets hard to find new providers though so once I’ve used the couple I know about and need to rank a site for other keywords I don’t have anyone to turn to. If you know anyone selling blog posts or a service that will let you post to blogs/sites with PR please leave a comment.

Social Bookmarking

As I just said blog posts are working for me at the moment. But they don’t always work, as a competitive niche can be hard to crack. It is also worth mentioning that I rarely just use the blog posts on their own. The blog post seems to be the icing on the cake that moves the site but before I use the blog posts I will social bookmark my pages, do a few Web 2.0s and maybe a directory submission. I was buying social bookmarking services but at abou $10 for 100 bookmarks it was getting quite expensive consdierng how many sites I have (40+?). I’d heard good things about Social Demon/Bookmark Demon but it sounded like a fair bit of work to setup it up and as I’m tight on time I thought I’d leave it for now. I then signed up for the trial of Social Adr which is touted as a lazy persons social bookmarker. The trial expired and I didn’t cancel the service so am still using it but can’t say I’ve tested how effective it is but it is very easy to use and does get you bookmarks. Whether they get indexed or not is another matter.

Xrummer and Scrapebox

I’ve not had much luck with buying Xrummer (forum profiles) and Scrapebox (blog comments) blasts that link to the above bookmarks and blog posts. I’m not sure if I’m doing it right but it doesn’t seem to make much difference to my sites ranking when I do it.

Adsense

So far I’ve made all my money promoting physical prodcuts from places like Amazon. But now after reading Trent’s blog, the Online Income Lab I have been persuaded to start making some Adsene sites. Trent has made good progress in a few months so I am following his approach to try and diversify my income a bit. I used a tool called SECockpit to find my niches which made it very easy. Even if you are not making Adsense sites and are just looking for niches in general I highly recommend this tool. I’ve setup one site so far and have registered three more domains which I am setting up now. These sites are quicker to setup than the Amazon type ones I have been doing so far so they could be a better use of my time. My goal is to get 10 setup before the end of September and then see if any of them make any money.

Earnings for August 2011

Last month I earnt £1186 which was quite a drop from a few months ago hwere I made £1840 but this month was a bit better.

My earnings for August 2011 were: £1500

I was pretty pleased with this as its £50 on average per day and movement in the right direction. My goal for September is £1600 and my goal for the end of 2011 is £2000 per month.

How was your August 2011?

SECockpit Keyword Tool

Since starting to read Trent’s Online Income Lab and following his move from Amazon product niche sites to Adsense niche sites I have been thinking more about starting to make some Adsense sites of my own. The main thing that attracts me to them is that they should be easier to outsource than the type of product based sites I am making at the moment.

Adsense Keyword Research

The main thing that stopped me from taking the plunge was finding some good keywords to get started with. Using the Google Keyword Tool I found it very hard to find keywords that matched my criteria of getting over 3,000 exact match local searches a month, had a CPC of $1 or more and weren’t in too competitive niches.

SECockpit

After reading a review on Trent’s site for SECockpit (aff. Link) and seeing that they had a $1 5 day trial offer on I thought I’d give it a go. SECockpit is like the Google Keyword Tool taken to the nth degree! It not only looks up your keyword but also analyses the competition and gives it a niche ranking. I think this is similar to what Market Samurai does but SECockpit is s web app and is apparently much faster and quicker to use.

Why I cancelled the SECockpit Trial

Although I loved SECockpit I decided not to sign up to the full service once my trial had finished. The sole reason for this was that I had found about 35 keywords that I think I can build sites for. This will keep me going for a while and then once I have used I will probably sign up for the full service and find more niches. SECockpit is not only good for finding Adsense niches but also the regular product niche sites I make too so I think it definitely be a valuable tool to have.

TO find out more about this keyword research tool visit the SECockpit website now.

Anyone using SocialAdr?

I’ve recently signed up to the trial of Social Adr (affiliate link) which is an automated social bookmarking tool. It seems to be working in the sense that I submit a site and it submits them to various social bookmarking sites. Out of the sites/pages I have submitted so far most have so far been submitted to over 50 sites. There doesn’t seem to be a way to see these submissions though so doing anything to get them indexed might not be possible which is a shame.

Edit: after having a look around you can see where your bookmarks have been submitted and as they are submitted with other people bookmarks to active accounts on the bookmarking sites some of the earlier ones I checked had already been indexed.

There is a free version but you have to do some manual work. The trial I have signed up for is the fully automated AKA lazy version where you just submit the page url, title and description and it does the rest. The service isn’t cheap and the trial isn’t really long enough to see if the links actually do anything so I am not sure whether to sign up to the full version when the trial finishes.

So has anyone out there used this service? If so please let me know. At the moment I am paying $10 for a site to be submitted to 100 social bookmarking sites via someone on Wicked Fire. This does seem to be a cheaper alternative but do the bookmarks created by Social Adr count?

If you want to know more or even sign up for the trial go here: http://socialadr.com/ (aff. link)

BackBlasts Goes Live

The other day I did a mini review of a new backlinking service I was trying out called BackBlasts.com which you can read here. If you were interested in the service you will be pleased to know it is now live and prices start from $10 a month.

When I tested the service I used it on two sites.

For one site I linked directly to my site and spread the 1000 links a day over three URLS from my site and used four keywords as the anchor text.

For the other site I set it up so that the links BackBlasts created were linking to some blog posts that then linked to my actual site. The 1000 links a day for this site were split over 10 blogs posts so each got 100 backlinks a day.

After about two weeks of this my sites had moved up the SERPS.

Project One (direct linking) was targetting 4 keywords on my site and this is how they moved:
kw1: #8 to #6
kw2: no rank to no rank
kw3: no rank to #28
kw4: no rank to #43

I’m pretty happy with that. It is an old site (~2 years) which never got any backlinks and never really ranked so its good to see it get some exposure in Google now.

Project Two (using blog posts as buffers) was targetting 2 keywords:
kw1: #7 to #6
kw2: #25 to #20

Not a massive jump but its heading in the right direction. Will be interesting to see if this continues.

The blog posts I am using as buffers have no page rank and I doubt the blogs are that high quality so maybe this played a part? Would it be better to point the links to some more repuatable sites like Squidoo or Ezine etc?

Now that Backblasts has gone live I’m going to sign up for the $10 100 links a day package and point them directly to one of my sites as a test. 100 links a day shouldn’t draw any unwanted attention to me from Google should it?

• http://backblasts.com/

New Backlink Service

This is just a quick heads up to let you know about a new service called Back Blasts that is close to being launched. It is a montly fee service that builds profile and comment links to your URLs so if you are not into that sort of thing look away now!

I think there is a free trial running which you can find out more on their site. So far I have used it on a couple of sites. I have been pointing the links to some blog posts and Web 2.0 properties that link to my main site and I have seen a rise of a few places on page one for the sites after about a week of use.

It is early days so far but I will report back later once I’ve tried it for a bit longer with a proper review.

• http://backblasts.com/

Getting Ready for Linkamotion

After my month long subscription to IM Automator Pro my appetite for an online directory submission service was well and truly whetted. Although IMA didn’t quite cut if for me it didn’t put me off similar services and after hearing good things about a new service called Linkamotion I’ve decided to give that a try next.

Linkamotion Pricing

I’ve not signed up yet as I’m waiting for my mid monthly payment from Affiliate Window but any day now I will be ready to subscribe. It only costs $47 (£28) per month which is a lot less than other similar services like Linkvanna.

100 Word Submissions

The main thing that caught my eye was that each article you submit only has to be 100 words long. Each submission can only contain one link but as they don’t have to be long it’s not really a problem. How long does it take you to write 100 words on a topic? Your submissions are checked but there is a 24 hour turnaround so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

Writing Articles for Linkamotion

I’m quite glad there is a delay for me being able to sign up as it has allowed me to get writing my articles. I am going to write one article for each of my 50 or so sites targeting their main keyword if they are not number one in Google for it or another keyword I am trying to rank for if they are already number one. So far I’ve only done 8 but at only 100 words I don’t think it will take me long to get through the list. Then, once I sign up I will be ready with content to submit meaning no time of my subscription is wasted. After I’ve done that I will start again targeting related keywords. I might even hire someone to write 150 word articles specifically for this service.

Linkamotion Interface

I’m hoping the interface to Linkamotion is as easy to use as IM Automator Pro was. If it is then there should be no reason I can’t get my money’s worth. If it is as fiddly as Article Marketing Robot then it might end up being another tool that sits on my virtual shelf gather dust. Fingers crossed…

Linkamotion Review

Once I’ve signed up and have had some time to use the service I will report back with a Linkamotion review.

For more information head over to the Linkamotion website now.

Free Links with Dripable.com

There are a few sites that are offering free services to help you get a few more links to your sites. So far I’ve tried:

• IM Automator: free social bookmarks
• Social Monkee: another free social bookmarking service
• 24/7 Backlinks: gives you a lump of backlinks each day

You can see the other affiliate marketing tools I use here.

There are some other backlinking services which give you a free trial and Dripable.com is one of them.

Dripable is a new service that has just launched and creates links for your sites from a range of sources such as “blogs, comments, forums, guestbooks, photo galleries, basic comment pages, and everywhere else online”. This is good if you are looking for a diverse backlink profile. You can schedule the number of links to be built each day and it is very easy to setup.

You simply create a new project and then paste in the list of urls you want the links to point at and then in another text box enter the keywords you would like those links to have as anchor text.

As this is a new service which I didn’t know much about I decided to point the links to about 10 Web 2.0 sites which were in turn pointing to my main site. This was instead of pointing them directly to my main site.

I chose two keywords to target. The site I was trying to get a boost in the SERPs was #7 for one keyword and #44 for the second keyword.

Dripable.com Results

Once my 7 day trial was up I was pleased to see my site had moved up one spot for its main keyword to #6 and up 14 spots for the other keyword to #30.

• KW1: #7 to #6
• KW2: #44 to #30

I can’t tell if the links got indexed or stuck at all but I wasn’t really interested in that. I was looking for a movement in the SERPs to show some tangible results that increased my sites rankings and that is what happened.

It is not a massively competitive niche by any means but a jump in the SERPs in seven days is not to be sniffed at. I wish I had longer to test it and see if there will be a further increase but at the moment I am not sure if I can justify the cost, which isn’t loads (from $47 per month), but there are lots of other tools that have caught my attention recently and I’m having a hard time choosing one. When my earning are a bit more consistent I think I will add it to my set of tools but for now I will put it on the wish list.

If you want to try the free 7 day trial of Dripable.com click here today.

If you do try it let me know what results you get as I would like to see some more test data.

Disclaimer: there is a chance I will get an extra 7 days on the trial for writing this piece but what I have written is all true, I swear!

IM Automator Pro Review

A while ago I signed up for a free tool called IM Automator which lets you bookmark your sites and pages to about 15 social bookmarking sites for free. I liked the interface as it was easy to use, you just paste in the URL and IM Automator extracts the title and description from the page and puts it in the form on their page.

There is a pro version which is $50 a month but when I signed up for the free version it was full as they are limiting the number of people who use the service. But after a few weeks a couple of slots came open on the pro version so I signed up. It was the most expensive tool I have signed up for but it was easy to use so I thought I will probably use it a lot and get my money’s worth.

IM Automator Pro Review

With the paid version you can:

• Submit 25 URLs to 57 social bookmarking sites per day
• Submit 10 RSS feeds to 13 feed sites per day
• Submit 15 articles to 59 article sites per day
• Submit 10 sites to 10 directories per day

So as you can see you can get a lot of links from this if you use it to its potential. Articles must be 500 words or more to qualify for submission to all 59 article sites and can only have two links in a resource box at the end of the article with no links allowed in the actual article.

How Many Links a Day?

If you submitted the maximum amount of 15 articles per day you could be looking at quite a lot of links each day: 15 x 59 x 2 = 1770. You can set the number of articles to be submitted each day so as not to dump 1770 links on a site in one day.

Great for Lazy Affiliates

IM Automator’s main strength is also its weakness in my opinion. The thing I like about it most is that you don’t need to spin or change your articles. You just paste it in and then click submit and the same one gets submitted to all the sites. This is great for lazy affiliates like me but even I would probably rather put in the extra work and do something to make the content a little more unique by doing something like spinning them. Unfortunately this is not yet an option but is something I think they will be adding soon. If you are submitting the same article 59 times will Google count all those links back to your site as unique?

I Can’t Do It 15 Times a Day

I never managed to submit 15 articles in one day but I did submit about 26 in the first month which is less than one day. Told you I was lazy! You don’t get a list of URLS of your submitted articles but it is easy enough to find them by searching on a sentence from your article. From doing a few random checks I found that about 20 of my articles were indexed from each submission. Perhaps more will be indexed over time. Or maybe Google will ignore them as they are duplicate content? Once you’ve gotten the list of URLs from Google you could then blast them with some profiles or blog comments if you are into that sort of thing.

SERP Movement

I’ve not seen any noticeable jumps in SERPS for my sites I’ve tried this on. Some have moved up and some haven’t but nothing that I can directly attribute to this service. I’m sure it helps build a diverse backlink profile if nothing else.

My first month using IM Automator Pro is about to end and I’m thinking of cancelling my subscription. Mainly because I am not using it enough to justify the $50monthly fee and because there is another article service I want to try called Linkamotion which costs about the same.

How to Use IM Automator

In the future when I have a team of outsourced workers or Virtual Assistants as people like to call them I will probably sign up again and have someone writing articles just for this tool and submitting them. But as it stands I don’t have the time or inclination to write 500 word articles on something I’m not sure how effective it is.

Have you used IM Automator Pro or Linkamotion? How do you rate them?

For more details of the pro version click there: http://www.imautomator.com/info/proversion

If you are quick you might be able to catch my slot when I cancel my account.

Check out the other affiliate marketing tools I use

Monthly Round-up: May 2011

Last month was my best month in affiliate marketing so far and it gave me high hopes for April. As the month started it looked like I would not be disappointed. My daily earnings improved on last month and by the end of the first week I was on target to make over £2000. But then disaster stuck. On about May 8th one of my main sites got struck down by Google and was knocked off the first page for most of its keywords.

Possible Sighting of Google Panda

As I just mentioned up until May 8th I was doing pretty well and then one of my main earners got dumped out of the SERPs. It was an exact match domain which was ranking at number one in Google for the domain and also the plural of the domain. A few of the other pages I had built for this site were on page one and getting some good longer tail traffic. So overnight between May 7th and 8th I went from getting about 150 hits a day to around 30. The main keyword which was in the domain dropped to the bottom of page one and all the rest dropped right out of sight.

I had been working on the site right up to when it went down in the SERPs. I was adding new content and building links so it is possible I did something to upset Google or maybe it was to do with the Panda update. I’ve read there was an update to the Panda rollout around this time so perhaps it was.

I carried on adding content after the drop and managed to eventually get back to the number one spot for the keyword in the domain. The plural of the main keyword brought me the most traffic and after a while it did bounce back to page one for a few days before disappearing again.

The top line is the keyword in the domain and the other main line is the plural. Notice how lots of sites disappear on 6-May and never return. Brutal!

As this was one of my main sites it hit my earnings quite hard but I managed to limp on until the end of the month without going broke. I’m still working on the site and hopefully it will rise from the ashes back to where it once was.

New Tools

I had been using the free version of IM Automator which is a web based bookmarking tool for a while so when a slot came up on their paid-for Pro version I snapped it up. At $50 per month it was more than I’ve spent so far on a monthly subscription but I like the ease of use of the free version and I figured I’d use the extra features of the Pro version. The Pro version includes more bookmarking sites to submit your pages to, an RSS and directory submission service as well as an article submission service. I signed up mainly for the article service. You write one 500 word article with two links in the resource box and it submits it to 60 article sites which should all accept it. It doesn’t need any spinning so you can just write and submit. I wasn’t sure how good this was as how valuable can having links from 60 copies of the same article be? Surely they will all be duplicate content. You can submit about 20 articles a day so could in theory get about 2400 links a day. Writing 20 500 word articles a day isn’t that easy and I never managed more than a few each day. Plus if they are all from the same 60 sites how useful this is I’m not sure.

The sites I tested it on didn’t make any jumps in the SERPs and although I might be judging it too quickly I’m not going to sign up for another month. I guess if you had someone writing content for you each day or you had a backlog of content to get rid of and could take advantage of the maximum number of submissions per day it might worth it but for me at the moment its not. So I’m going to look for something else to spend my hard earned pocket money on. I’ve heard good things about Linkamotion of which you can read a review of here.

Outsourcing Mission

My plan is to outsource as much as possible so I can do other things with my time so I have been thinking of ways to do this. I am a bit nervous of handing over the reigns of my sites just yet so I’m currently looking to hire people to build links for me and write content. Using this template on sitey.net I managed to hire a couple of guys to write 10 articles of 500 words for $10 from Odesk. It’s not the best writing in the world but it is grammatically correct and makes sense. I wouldn’t put it on my main sites as I have another guy who does that but it will be good for building Web 2.0 properties and submitting to services like IM Automator Pro should I go back to it.

Linkbuilding with Web 2.0s

I am always looking for ways to get links but have only recently started doing this so am a bit behind the pack when it comes to link building. People have been using Web 2.0 sites like Squidoo for ages to get links and although the boat might have sailed a bit I’m giving it a go. I’m going to build out 10 or so Web 2.0 sites with multiple pages, images and videos for each of my sites and link to that site. Then I will build smaller Web 2.0s and do lots of other link building things and point those at my 10 big Web 2.0s. At least that’s the plan for now until I get any better ideas.

Things to Do

I really need to get a new laptop. This netbook has done me well for two years but it’s too slow now and I need something with more power. I’d like a mid range 13” one with 4GB of ram and a 500GB hard drive.

Nothing fancy just something that can get things done.

I need a new layout for my site as a lot of them aren’t really converting very well and not even earnings £1 a day even though they get 1000+ hits a month.

Things I Didn’t Do

I didn’t get a VPS due to lack of funds and time. I didn’t try out SEnuke X due to lack of time and a slow netbook. I didn’t use Sick Submitter once, apart from the pinger so think I will cancel this for now.

Earnings:

Well I think that pretty much sums up May 2011. I better post the bit you’ve all been waiting for: how much I earned.

My (gross) earnings for May 2011 were £1840

I am very pleased with this and was only aiming for £1700 this month (which is £100 more than last month) but was very happy to exceed this.

Goals for June 2011:

Last month I said I’m aiming to increase my earnings by £100 a month and I’d love to go for £1900 for June but in the last week or so of May I was lucky to get £50 a day on a good day so I’m not holding my breath. To get £1900 I will need to bring in £63 per day which is pretty hard when one of your main sites has been tanked by Google. To be honest I will be happy for anything over £1500 for June.

Last month I was mainly watching The Shadow Line, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret and Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle.

What did you get up to in May?