Sandra: Using Article Marketing? ...Think Twice

Using Article Marketing? ?Think Twice

I haven't followed my own advice!

Here lately I have been speaking out of both sides of my mouth, I've been feeling guilty about it, and finally I feel that it is high time I came clean to you about the whole thing! I have been instructing you to do one thing here on my blog, and here on my blog I have been following my own advice...but all the while I have been doing the exact opposite thing over on my affiliate sites! Consistently here on my blog I encourage you to create real, usable content for your readers and that you should do so on a regular basis. I tell you that this is an absolute must, and that if you do exactly that, you WILL see success in your internet marketing efforts. However, over on my affiliate sites, for some reason (I'll let you just imagine what that reason was for now...I'll tell you exactly why in a little bit), I felt the need to advertise those sites with article marketing (article marketing that was designed for the sole purpose of benefiting my SEO efforts)! What a fake! Yep, I said it! I am a fake and a moron!

WARNING: The following text contains brutal honesty from my point of view and thoughts / ideas that will conflict with the "status quo" or the "common opinion" of many internet marketers out there today. Do NOT continue reading this post if you don't have an open mind and the willingness to continue reading this entire post before you start forming your own opinions about my thoughts on this subject! You must have an open mind in order to receive the full benefit of what I am saying. Thank you.

Background & Lessons Learned

As you read this post I would simply ask you to remember that these are lessons that I've learned and the convictions that I've have felt about the article marketing that I have been doing.

First I would like to give you a little bit of background about this site. Here on MattsAffiliateJourney.com I am constantly writing to you about ways to build your website(s) with WordPress, how to advertise your sites in the search engines such as Google and Bing, and I discuss how to find products to sell on your website such as affiliate products. Since I have never received any type of formal education on any of these subject matters, everything that you read is based solely on my personal experiences on each of those subjects. In other words, the things that I am writing about are things that I have actually done, and products that I have actually used to get those things done. They are not hypothetical theories about things that "should" work. Most of the time (approx 90%), I write about things that worked for me, and the rest of the time (this post for example), I write about things that didn't work or that probably won't work for an extended period of time.

This site:
First I would like to tell you about the successes that this site has had and how I got it there, and secondly I'd like to tell you why I felt like I needed to do something different on my affiliate sites. As I just mentioned, with this site I have followed my own advice by creating the most useful content that I could for my readers. I have spent countless hours trying to make sure that everything that I have written here on my blog has been the most useful information that it could possibly be. I truly do want to help my readers learn how to build their own successful, online business and finally find the financial freedom that they have been looking for. Additionally, I have only built two different types of links to this site (and not very many of them, mind you):

Social Media Links: (E.g Links from G+, Twitter, and FB)
Relevant, in-context Links: I have placed a few links on other relevant websites via, pingbacks, leaving comments on other people's sites, etc.
Insider's Tip: I wrote about some of my site's success on my FB fan page here. Just send me a "friend" request to see some of the insider's tips that I share with my friends on FB.

...and the results are:

Within a six month period (Aug 2012 - Jan 2013), my site has received a PR 1 (PageRank 1) from Google!
As per my Google Analytics account, this site currently gets approx 1,000 visitors a week (53% unique visitors & 47% returning visitors).
My site is now receiving approx 10 new email subscribers per week. I started receiving new subscribers in late November 2012 and now have approx. 60 total subscribers to my newsletter.

Obviously Google WILL reward you when you produce relative, useful content on a regular basis! ...and Google is not the only one that will reward you. Your readers will also reward you! They will appreciate your content if it is actually helping them out and they will appreciate it if you give them new information on a regular basis. I believe that this site has proven to me (and hopefully now you), that honest, useful content that is updated regularly is the way to go!

The new SEO is (quite honestly), no SEO! Say what?!? Seriously, you really don't even need SEO! Just do "normal" stuff and Google will reward you by ranking your site in the SERPs where other people can find you. I believe that Google is absolutely sick and tired of people "doing SEO" to try to rank better. Just do normal people stuff! Its all you need! By the way, I'm preaching this as much to myself as I am you!

My Affiliate Sites -- Article Marketing Done the Wrong Way
On my affiliate sites, instead of producing the real, honest, useful type of content that I discussed above, I decided to go the route of article marketing. Article marketing can mean many different things, but in general it refers to writing articles and posting them on your main sites' blog, article directories, and other web 2.0 sites. When I started building my affiliate sites, I knew from the things that I had already learned (dating back to 2004 and even the things that I've learned recently) that my affiliate sites would need content on them and links to them in order to rank well in the SERPs. This is especially true since I chose a niche that has an abnormally high amount of competition (I chose this niche because the commission payouts per sale are great!).
This is where I felt like I broke down and made a bad decision. I do not feel that all article marketing is bad, just the kind that I chose to use. Primarily because I am still working at my J-O-B and I have a very limited amount of time, and because I was instructed to do this, I chose to purchase articles from two different article sites and post those to my sites. I took those articles, changed them around abit to make them sound like they were written by English speaking authors, adding pictures and links, posted them to my main sites, and web 2.0 sites that I own, and called it a day. These articles had been written around my niche (so that was good), and they had my specific keywords included at a very low percentage (I made sure the keywords weren't mentioned more than 2% -- so that was good), and when I posted them on my web 2.0 sites I linked them back to my main affiliate sites careful to keep my anchor text varied, just like I wrote about here.

So you are probably asking yourself, what the heck is the problem, Matt? Help me out here. I don't see what you've done wrong. Well, I'll tell you this about my article marketing efforts thus far:

My articles and all the darn money / time I have spent on them so far hasn't helped my sites rank one single bit!
However, as far as I know they haven't hurt me...yet!
I feel extremely guilty about what I have been doing because I know it's not real (It's stuff I purchased from two different article websites that are obviously using writers from overseas)!
I have not been following my own advice, even though I know that it works! (I'm sorry, but that's just plain dumb!)
I have never been one to shy away from my faith on my blog (I've mentioned it to you before), so naturally I believe that God is trying to show me that what I have been teaching here on my blog IS correct, and the reason that I feel so guilty about my article marketing is because He is trying to prevent me / save me from making a mistake in my business that will hurt me in the long term, possibly even ruin me!

How Do I Backup These Claims?

This is why I believe that the Lord has shown me these things. Actually it's common sense really... Think about it this way. Way back when Google first started, they built their search engine to value links' and those links anchor text very highly. In fact, it was the single strongest ranking factor that their search engine had. When Google was trying to determine what pages on the web to rank for a certain term or phrase, they would count all of the links that were pointing to a site, record what the anchor text of those links were and rank your site accordingly. Well, it didn't take long for man's naturally evil and greedy ways to take over, and before you know it guys all over the place had created these massive link networks, text link ad networks, they started selling links, and the list goes on and on. Before you know it, Google's search results weren't even relevant anymore because people had "figured it out". They had figured out how to "game the system", and they were actually able to rank sites for phrases when those sites didn't even have anything to do with the phrase they were ranking for. Then, all in an instant, Google shut all of them down!! Yep, it happened overnight. Absolutely hundreds and hundreds of internet millionaire's started watching their fortunes slip away because they had been gaming the system, now they were shut down, and all of their paying traffic was gone! Just like that!
My point is this: That was the game back then; Google figured it out, and they shut them down! Even though article marketing (the kind that is written by people overseas who don't speak English as their first language, and the kind that is obviously written just for its SEO benefit) is working right now for many people, and many people are making fortunes using it, what do you think will happen when the only thing that you can find in the SERPs are a bunch of articles and not real websites??? Hmmm... "Why in the devil do you think that they won't figure out this new game of article marketing (the kind I discussed above), and shut it down as well?" They can, and they will! Once the Google SPAM team (they're an actual team of real people that tracks down SPAM on the web) starts reading some of these web 2.0 and article directory sites and figures out that they were NOT written for human consumption, they're GONNA SHUT IT DOWN! So why in the world would you stake you and/or your family's future on this kind of plan? Personally, I can't and I won't! ...Not any more!

Why Did You Do It, Matt? & What Are You Doing Next?

Why did I do it?
That's a good question! I'm not really sure...and I'm not trying to make excuses here, but there really were allot of reasons (in my head at least). However, now that I have realized what I was doing was/is the wrong way to go about it (in my opinion), saying the reasons out loud makes them seam kinda' retarded. I still want to share those reasons with you just in case maybe you have been rationalizing the same way that I was. Probably first and foremost I was doing it because I was told by some guys that I really trust that it was "the way to go" and that simply "it works!". Additionally I was doing it because I simply don't have the time to invest as much effort (time writing posts) on those blogs as I do on this one...I mean, heck I don't even have nearly enough time to do the things that I want on this blog by itself, much less six other ones! There are so many resources from the internet, tutorials, and training resources that I want to create for this site, I don't even know which ones I want to do first sometimes! Also, probably the saddest reason of all...it was the temptation of "easy money". I know! I know, that is sad, but I'm quite sure that very thought passed through my little head at least once in the process (I'm just being honest here...).

What am I doing next?
Well, there's one thing for sure, I still don't have any more time available than I did before, I've accepted that cheap article marketing is not the way-to-go for me. I also still accept the fact that Google both appreciates frequently updated content and they DO still use links as part of their ranking mechanism, so obviously I need both of those things. Also, Google takes into account many other things such as Co-occurrence, on-page SEO factors, social media signals (how much traffic do you get from your social media channels, how many followers do you have, etc.), your site loading speed, and many other factors, so I obviously still need all of that! There really is only one other option that I can think of, I need to hire some help!

I just started investigating two different companies that I may start using. One company provides you with blogging services (they write relevant 400 - 700 word posts on your blogs for you), and they post to your social media accounts regularly and make sure that they are increasing your follower counts. The other company strictly provides link building services (only from relevant sites and guest posts that they write for you). After testing each of these companies for awhile, I will happily write another post in this "lessons learned" series describing how well they have performed and what the results have been for my traffic on my affiliate sites and of course whether or not I have started earning any money from them! I will also be revealing the name of both of these companies to you at that time.

Thank you very much for taking the time to read this post and I look forward to updating you with some good news on this subject in the near future. Thanks again for read this very personal message from me.

Regards,
Matt S. Vaden