Steps To Blogging Profitably

The start of a new month gives me a good starting point to conduct a new experiment on one of my blogs. There’s nothing more instructive than focusing on a specific method of SEO to get a good feel for how effective the work you put in actually is – much better than simply believing something that somebody else tells you, anyway. This time I’m going to find out for myself what the effects of a consistent article marketing campaign will have on a site and just how positive it will be for the site’s rankings.

The site I will be promoting is now 6 months old and is ranking well for a few long tails but is only ranked at around the #210 mark for the main keyword. It’s getting a consistent 30 – 40 unique visitors per day and is consistently making money. I want it ranked higher so I’m going to turn to the article directories for help.

I have written and spun an article so that it is more than 40% unique, not that it particularly matters but it raises the chances of being accepted at more directories if it is unique. I have also rotated the link anchor text so that I won’t be bombing the same links hundreds of times.

I have a list of over 400 article directory sites at my disposal and I will be spreading out the submissions to around 6 – 10 per day, manually submitted each day for a month.

One of the reasons I want to try this exercise out is because I want to have some kind of confirmation in my mind that this type of article marketing is going to be worth the effort. I know that it takes some time for Google to recognise links and I know that not all article directories publish the submitted articles. So there will be a good proportion of my submissions that will yield no fruit. But I also want to know whether I will see a noticeable change.

The niche is already profitable with just over 1,000 monthly visitors, pushing it higher up the SERPs will potentially increase the traffic to over 5,000 visitors per month.

I will return to this particular exercise at the end of July, 2009 to determine whether there has been any perceivable improvement in the site’s performance.

Starting Point

May Unique Visitors : 1,094
May Earnings : $32.35

To gauge the rankings positions I will be tracking 5 different keywords that are some of the ones I will be using as link anchor text in the Author Bio boxes. Here is a rundown of where they are ranking before the experiment begins.

Keyword 1 : pos #210 (main keyword)
Keyword 2 : pos #35
Keyword 3 : pos #9
Keyword 4 : pos #7
Keyword 5 : pos #91