Article Marketing Experiment

Article marketing is a big part of many peoples link development strategy (including my own.) But I think most of us are often "working blind" somewhat as far as what is working and what is not working. So I've decided to create a bit of an experiment to compare & contrast the effectiveness of some different article marketing strategies/services.

The four methods/services I am comparing are:

1. Article Marketing Automation
2. Unique Article Wizard
3. Submit Your Article
4. EZineArticles.com

How am I comparing them?

I'm creating four different Squidoo pages (I'm doing all four them today so none will have an "age advantage" over any others) all focused on the same main keyword. They all also have a different secondary keyword (this is so Squidoo doesn't see all of the pages as being the same.) They will all be marketing my diet product (see sig) which will allow me to see which Squidoo lenses lead to sales.

Each article marketing method will be assigned to one (and only one) of those Squidoo pages. I will then submit one article which links back to it's Squidoo page using each method. I will be sure to link back in a similar fashion for each (using the main kw about 50% of the time in each case.) I will submit each of these articles today.

I will probably end up doing more than just one article but I will start off with the one to see how that goes.

I will not link to these Squidoo pages in any other way (that includes no other social bookmarking or anything else like that.)

How to judge?

1. Backlinks (as checked by Yahoo Site Explorer)
2. Traffic (as seen in my Squidoo account)
3. Sales (of my diet product)
4. SERPS (do any of the Squidoo pages rank for the intended KW, and if so, where?)

Other considerations

Article Marketing Automation, Unique Article Wizard, Submit Your Article, and EZineArticles all have their own built in advantages and disadvantages. EZA is free. The other three all have monthly membership dues. AMA is $47/month, UAW is $67/month, and SYA is $37/month. AMA & UAW allow for unlimited use. SYA only allows 8 article submissions per month. Because AMA, UAW, and SYA all call for article spinning - they take much longer than does EZA. I will also try to time the process to see how much time I am actually spending with these different methods.

Updating with results

I will be updating here and on my blog with results as they come in. I'm actually very curious as to what kind of results I get with this experiment as it could be very valuable in knowing where I should spend my time in the future to be most efficient.

 

I will follow this thread
always wanted to know, how well does the article sumiters softwares work
I personally only use ezinearticles, but this is a great thread!

 

make sure you do this constantly over a period of time and follow a strategy.. you can track your links using tracking links to your squidoo pages etc.. if you want an article spinner use jet submitter its free and you can spin up to 100 articles at a time.. i've included a strategy in my first sig link that may interest you in conjunction with what you are testing.

One thing many people also forget is to ping your article pages and squidoo lenses.. It works very well, and is part of a full strategy i have in beta with 30 testers at the moment..

here is a minor part of the strategy to try that yields excellent results..

I'm assuming you have main site.

1) create a squidoo lens and link it back to your main site
2) create a hub page and link it back to your main site and your squidoo lens
3) create 3 articles (maybe take 1 and spin it)
4) submit one article to 'ezine' and link it to your squidoo lens
5) submit one article to www.articlecat.com and link it to your hub page
6) submit one article to www.articlemotron.com and link it to your main site

Do this over a 5 day period. 1 per day. repeat for three weeks starting on the same day for each week..

Socially bookmark each of these with:

# Propeller.com
# Furl.net
# Digg.com
# Technorati.com
# Del.icio.us
# Stumbleupon.com
# Twitter.com

and ping each after it has been posted / published..

One of my test sites I've used with my full strategy rank at number 3 / 4 (indented) within 2 weeks and that was in early testing (october 2008) and it still in the same position and here is the search traffic:

Results 1 - 100 of about 4,570,000 for

I'm above wiki / amazon and all the other big guys apart from 1 major brand who has like a million links that will take a wee bit longer..

if you need more info pm me

 

syanide - thanks for your input but these services (Submit Your Article, etc) all include article spinning and article submission to many sites at once (which theoretically makes them much more efficient.) I'm not looking for new strategies so much as I'm looking to get real information about how well these services work.

That being said, I'll take a closer look at everything you've suggested (although most of it looks like stuff I already do) when I've got some spare time.

 

I'm just starting to get some early results back: Article Marketing Automation & Unique Article Wizard are the first two to get my Squidoo pages indexed.

Again, I'm not doing any other linking to these pages... that includes no social bookmarking. This is to keep my results as "scientific" as possible. I want to see exactly how much effect each of these services has.

***Answer To CrystalsQuest***

I'm responding here to keep the latest poster someone other than me

Each service has different requirements for article length. EZA = 250, AMA = 300, UAW = 300, SYA = 400. I usually shoot for a little bit more than the minimum. I don't think super long articles are necessary (in fact I think they may even be a detriment.) AMA is different than the others in that you are actually including your links within the body of the article. This is because their articles are submitted to blogs, not to article directories (where you can only include links in the resource.)

And yes I usually include my keywords in the title. This is another area where AWA is best actually - because they have no rules about content. I can be very promotional if I want (including in the title.) Some of the services (such as SYA) are very particular about content (no promotional content) so I may not be able to include my target KW in the title (if I'm promoting a certain product for instance.)

Because these are spinning services (other than EZA) - I can create many different "long tail" titles.

I don't worry about keywords in the body of my articles - I don't even think about it. I think it's best to just write naturally - I don't think the search engines really care that much about that, and you're more likely to get penalized for keyword stuffing than to get any benefit. The key is to have the KWs in the title if you can (and then at least once or twice in the article, but that usually happens naturally without trying to do it.)

 

I'm definitely going to follow this thread, but I'm curious to know: how long are the articles you're creating, generally, and are they written to include your keywords in the title/ top body/ through text?

Thanks.

 

good question CrystalsQuest!

I usually use my main keywords on the title and on the first paragraph.

 

Great idea for testing. I am just getting started with article marketing and many of the journals I have seen don't have a very tight plan so i wonder what really worked or didn't work.

I agree with you on your keywords theory. I wrote a post on my blog once and really focused in on using my main keyword. The post was at number 5 on Google the next day but only stayed on the first page for two days then dropped like a rock. I wrote another post with the same keyword but used it very frugally, it took 6 days to get to the first page but it stayed there for nearly three weeks.

 

Exactly. This is all about testing. Obviously this isn't the best way to go about getting a site ranked high or to get the most traffic to it. I'd be doing social bookmarking and linking to the pages from all of the article marketing services for that (and that's what I'm doing with my SEO projects right now.) This is all about testing the services to learn exactly how effective they are without any other stuff to dilute the accuracy. This way I can find out if any of these services are actually duds and not worth the money I'm paying for them.

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One more thing I want to mention about these three article submissions services (Submit Your Article, Article Marketing Automation, & Unique Article Wizard) is that along with article spinning, they also provide the ability to "drip" your articles out so that your links grow in a more "natural" way.

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***EDIT***
Response to cowsgonemadd3:

I've been article marketing for years (I thought it was made pretty clear from the start that I'm an experienced article marketer when I said that article marketing is a big part of my link development strategy.)

The point of this exercise is not to make sales directly but to test the ability of these article marketing submission services to create backlinks and to help with SERPS. I've just started using two of these services (Article Marketing Automation & Unique Article Wizard) so I'm particularly interested in how well they do. I already know that Submit Your Article & EZineArticles are worth using (and worth the time and money.)

If I make any sales with this, that would be a cool bonus - but again - it's not the point. I wouldn't be doing it like this if that's what I was trying to do. I've set it up in this way so that I can give each of the article submission services an even shot.

 

So how many sells have you got so far? Is this your first time article marketing?

 

Three of those programs include article spinner software, and EzineArticles is just the best of the article directories - and for the record, the EzineArticles owner has spoken against article spinner software.

It is not really a fair comparison test, is it?

 

I'm not really catching what your point is?

What does "fair" mean? All I care about is which method brings me the most back links and gets my sites to rank the highest. That's what this is about... I am aware that EZA and these programs have different ... goals. I think what I'll find is that it's best to use all of them in conjunction.

Also - I don't really care what the owner of EZA thinks about article spinning - that has nothing to do with this at all. I don't submit spun articles to EZA so I don't see what his opinion has to do with what I do with other services.

 

Even if articles are spun and they cannot tell with all of the software they use then it should be unique enough so they would not be penalized at all by search engines.

 

What exactely do you social bookmark and ping? The squidoo/hubpages/main site or the articles you post to the article directories?

Thanks, Mads

 

I second mads' question as well.

I am going to be watching this thread with incredible interest because I recently have been looking at using Article Marketing Automation to build backlinks to a blog and couple of sites I own. I also wonder what results you're getting in terms of direct traffic? I know thats not your goal with this test, but if you have any stats on that I'd be interested to hear them if you're willing to share.

 

So far I'm not getting a lot of direct traffic. EZA leads as far as that goes.

All four of my Squidoo pages are now indexed in Google - which means at the very least the backlinks from these articles have at least some power.

I don't have a lot of information yet on backlinks... I figure it will take some time before I start getting real info on that.

There's another thing to consider that I haven't really mentioned much yet: Ease of use. There's no doubt that it's far easier to submit one article to EZA than it is with these article submission services (since they require much more work for article spinning etc.) The real question is which of the article submission services is easiest to use? Which one takes the least amount of time to use? So far I think that SYA is the easiest and fastest and UAW is the most difficult and takes the longest - with AMA being somewhere in between.

I'm sure part of it is a learning curve. I'm used to using SYA because I've been using it for many months - I'm new to the other two.

 

Has anyone submitting the same articles to different article directories after they've been approved by EZA?

The great thing in this strategy is that you can first link back to your own domains from your article bio and then use the same articles to link to a squidoo page (for example).

 

when you create the squidoo lens, is the backlink to your site in the article text, is it a link at the bottom of the article or is it in your squidoo profile - like an article directory author box ?

what's a hub page ?

so you create an account on each of these (or use one of the bulk social bookmarking submitters) and then you go to your squidoo lens and bookmark it. does this give you another link back to your main site for every bookmark ?

what do you mean by ping ?

I realise that my questions here are very basic - I'm trying to get my head around how this part of the whole SEO thing works. Responses from anyone that elaborates on this stuff would be much appreciated. Thanks.

 

Have to try this. I am just not quite understand why to create backlinks to squidoo lens and hub pages instead of direct links to your website.

 

Good question. Here are three reasons why:

#1 Google is fickle. Sometimes they'll penalize your page for no particular reason (or at least it seems that way.) If you put all of your eggs in that one basket, it's going to hurt a lot if this happens.

#2 The more "landing pages" you have, the more likely some of them will be in the first page of the Google results. You could even have multiple pages in the first page. There are some keywords where I have 6 or 7 of the top 10 results (from my own domains and Squidoo, hubpages, EZA, etc)

#3 I almost always link these other landing pages back to my own domains, so I'm also building up a more powerful backlink to my own domains by building up the power of those landing pages. (ie: I can get a PR 3 backlink instead of a PR 0 or PR 1.)