30 Day Secret Experiment – Days 11-12: Ad Tweaks, Autoresponder Setup, and Article Submission

Posted by Harmony Rousseau on Apr 12, 2007 in 30 Day Experiment | 0 comments

This post is part of a 30 Day Secret Experiment. Be sure to read the previous posts to follow my progress.

These past two days, I’ve been working on creating articles for my 10 day “Mindset of Attraction” ecourse that I’ll be delivering along with the Science of Getting Rich ebook and 40 minute audio on The Secret. I’ve written 3 articles so far and set up my Aweber.com account so that when people subscribe to the newsletter, they receive one article per day (right now, they’ll get the first three, but this is my motivation to get the rest done pronto!)

Most of my articles are between 500-700 words, which is long for email. I thought about cutting them down to under 500 words (a good length is around 400 words), but I think I’ll try what I have. If people start unsubscribing, then I know something’s wrong and should spend more time there!

Each email also contains affiliate links to 2-3 products that people can buy from Amazon.com that expand on my topic. I put them in a “recommended resources” section just after the article.

Since I won’t be publishing the articles to this site, I’ve decided to also distribute some to article directories so that others can publish my articles on their site (and drive traffic back to this one.) I started out on iSnare.com today, but they were having technical difficulties so I never did submit an article to them. Instead, I submitted an article to EzineArticles.com, which will hopefully approve my article within the week.

The purpose of submitting articles is twofold. First, I want to get traffic to my site. Second, I want to start building links from other sites to raise my search engine rank. When you submit your article to article directories, anyone is free to use that article in their newsletters and on their websites as long as they keep the “about the author” section in tact. Mine included a link back to this site and a link to a “landing page” where people can sign up for my newsletter.

Building links is a tricky process when your site is as new as this one. If you submit too many articles and have lots of sites linking back to yours, Google starts to smell something fishy. They’re looking for a gradual development of links over time, and if you get too many too quickly, your site ends up in the “sandbox” (that abyss that new sites fall into where they don’t show up in search results for a few months).

At the same time, you want lots of links back to your site because the more links you have, the more authoritative your site looks in Google’s eyes. Ok, that’s a bit of a generalization – quality of links matter a lot as well. If you only get linked to by a bunch of spammy sites, that’s not going to help your rank.

In addition, only distributing one article that gets posted on a bunch of sites isn’t going to do much since Google has a duplicate content filter. That filter uses all sorts of factors to calculate which site posted the article first, and gives that site prevalence. The content doesn’t count as much for other sites that post that same article – which is why every good internet marketer tells you to write unique content if you can.

There will always be times, however, when a publisher needs new content and will use submitted articles as a source of content. And even if the used article doesn’t count much towards your ranking, you still get a link back to your website – which means you may get visitors coming from that site.

One more thing about articles, there’s a lot of discussion in the marketing world about “spinning” articles. Spinning is the art of taking an article you’ve written and tweaking it just enough so search engines would think it was a different article. Then, you’d pick a different directory and submit the new version of the article to that.

Personally, I think it’s a lot of work creating variations of the same article. I’d rather just write a completely different one and submit that. That’s what I plan to do with my article submissions. I’ll be focusing mainly on getting 4-5 articles in EzineArticles.com and GoArticles.com for every 1 article I distribute through iSnare.com. This is primarily because iSnare.com has a larger distribution than the other two, and like I said above, I’m playing it cautious when building links.

Finally, I spent some time tweaking and experimenting with Google Adwords. The initial ads I wrote weren’t getting a high percentage of clickthroughs, as I had hoped, so I wrote a few more ads to experiment. I also decided to send traffic to my landing pages rather than to the main site.

A landing page is the page people land on when they click the ad. In my case, my goal is to get people to sign up for my newsletter, so I created two variations of the landing page with none of the distractions of site navigation and content. It’s solely a pitch to join the mailing list for your freebies. You can view my landing pages for The Secret and the law of attraction to see what I’m experimenting with.

I have two landing pages because it’s important to include the keywords that people are searching for on the page. It’s also important to test different pages to see which gets the better conversion rate (that is, the number of people that join my mailing list.)

Yep, marketing is all about testing!