article marketing Archives

Great case study on hiring Filipinos and outsourcing

Tuesday, May 31st, 2011 at 10:52 am  
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Hey everyone,

I woke up early while my kids are still sleeping because last night John Jonas sent out an email with a case study that I wanted to watch.

I always learn good stuff from these case studies, so I prefer to watch / listen when I won’t be interrupted.

Go watch this awesome case study on John’s blog with a guy named Eric.

Eric talks about his particular business (local SEO work for local companies), and how he hired his first few employees, what worked out and what did not. Hint – his first hire did NOT work out and he explains exactly why. I’ve seen this happen before. Eric also has a great mindset about what work he wants to do himself (almost none) versus what he wants to leverage his team to do (almost everything).

Go watch Eric and John talk. You’ll learn something.

Doubled my Amazon Earnings Recently

Saturday, April 30th, 2011 at 11:04 am  
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I wanted to write up this quick post because it demonstrates the power of following a plan and setting it on autopilot using outsourcing.

As many readers know, I’m a member of John Jonas’ “Replace Myself” program and I hire full time employees to work for me in the Philippines.

For the time being we’ve stopped building Amazon sites simply because I have a few other high-priority projects and I don’t want to dilute my team’s work too much. But I have a total of something like 15 separate sites promoting Amazon niche products and nearly all of them make some money. A few are total duds, and a few are really profitable.

I won’t disclose exact numbers but I’m really serious when I say that you can build a handful of these and easily cover the cost of a full time employee. You can hire one person to build these sites for you, completely, and you’ll probably have your “handful” done in two months, and you can then either build more or downshift to “promotion only” while having your employee working on other tasks for you.

So that’s where I am now. I have about 15 of these sites and we’re concentrating on about 10 of them to boost rankings and revenue.

I have one employee who spends about 1/3 of her time writing a SINGLE article set every day. It is submitted to Unique Article Wizard, which is where the magic happens. UAW builds links for us in a very stable manner. It submits variations of the “article set” to hundreds of article sites over about two weeks (we set the rate). It attaches a RANDOM resource box to the end of the article based on a file that WE created. And obviously we created a slew of resource boxes to build links to the review pages that we want to promote, using anchor text that represents a variation of our keywords.

Two months ago I made that decision to stop building out new sites and instead focus on simply growing what we have. Every day we submit one article for one site, and we rotate through the 10 sites we’re focusing on in weeks.

This single task has doubled our revenue from Amazon. It’s actually up more than that, but I have one site that is somewhat geared towards summer products so I’m not counting the growth there. That’s more of a seasonal effect, but surely still helped by our UAW efforts.

The lesson in this is to come up with a system that you can manage, understand how it works and then set your guys in the Philippines out to execute on the plan. Be the manager and just guide them, while you come up with new money making projects. It’s great fun and it’s profitable.

Here’s more info on UAW in case you’re interested in using this. I joined because John Jonas recommended it and it was a very good rec.
Chris

Answers on Building Amazon Review Sites

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011 at 9:01 pm  
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The following question was sent to me regarding the outsourcing of Amazon review sites. Rather than email the answer directly I figured it would make a good blog post, so here goes:

The Question:

Hello, I read your blog post on outsourcing Amazon site’s.

I hired an outsourcer from Freelancer a couple of weeks ago to create 5 Amazon Review site’s for $600. They were due to start working on the project on 25th December but he emailed me yesterday saying that his Dad has become ill so he asked me to give him until 15th January to start.

I’ve got a couple of questions;

1. Is it worth paying the monthly fee for OnlineJobs.ph considering i only want to create around 20-25 site’s. Would it be better to stick to site’s such as Freelancer and Elance?

2. What is the best way of having backlinks created for the site’s? Jan Roo’s recommends 3waylinks.net in his ebook but i heard that if you unsubscribe from 3waylinks then you lose all the backlinks created.

As i intend to have around 25 site’s, i don’t want to spend many hours creating backlinks manually. What would be the best way to have the backlinking automated?

My Answers:

If you are hiring a freelancer rather than hiring a full time employee, I would seriously consider hiring 2 or 3 of them and give them the exact same job (different websites obviously). For example hire 3 guys to build 2 sites each. Pay via Elance escrow or something like that, and make sure the terms are clear to avoid disputes over what a “completed” site looks like. Do not do this unless you have created your own review sites in the past. How else will you know how to answer any questions they ask you?

You asked about joining OnlineJobs.ph, and if it is worth the fee. There is no monthly limit to OnlineJobs.ph – you can hire someone and cancel the next day if you like. That’s your call, but if you think you will need someone full time *permanently*, then yes, join the site. If you want someone temporarily, do not join. These people are looking for permanent jobs, generally not freelancer jobs.

Building backlinks: John Jonas teaches you how to build a mini-net (or more correctly, how to outsource the creation of a mini-net) inside of ReplaceMyself. That strategy involves labor, but no cost since all of the sites you’ll use are free. This is definitely a good option.

Another option that he recommends, and one that I 100% agree with and use myself, is Unique Article Wizard. It is SO worth the $67 per month fee it’s not even funny. You will never “lose” the links because this is article submission done correctly. It’s article marketing on steroids. It really REALLY works and I use this strategy with all of my review sites. I have no experience with the 3way links system.

Go check out Unique Article Wizard for yourself. I hesitated for the first couple of months on this after joining ReplaceMyself and I even emailed John Jonas to ask him, “Is it really as good as you say” … he replied, I bought, end of story. It’s fantastic.

Now let’s talk about your desire to have 25 sites. Ask yourself this question – why do you want to have 25? Why not 50 or 100? Why not 1 or 2? If you do not have a solid reason for picking 25 (and I expect you do not), then forget about the number.

Do this instead …

  1. Build a few sites and make sure you post quality reviews
  2. Market your sites according to SOME marketing plan. Mini net + UAW submissions, you pick what you do here.
  3. Monitor your results as you keep building a few more sites. Track your keyword ranking, traffic, and sales for each site
  4. Analyze each site’s results to determine where your time and money is best spent going forward. What I mean is this: Say you have 10 sites and 2 of them are ranking really well, get tons of traffic but have massive bounce rates (meaning people hit the back button). This is a sign you can improve the quality of your content (or the look of the site) to improve bounce and make more sales. This is WAY easier than creating a new site. But you might have another site that gets almost no traffic despite putting in a lot of time and energy. In that case you wouldn’t want to invest more time in it … just leave it behind and build something else.

So your decision to get to 25 sites should first be based on getting to 3 or 4, and then if you feel you’ve maximized the potential (or are busy waiting for enough statistics to make decisions), build more sites. The more you have, the more “real estate” you have to analyze and renovate. Always renovate your winners (improve them) when the ROI (return on investment) will be better than building a new site (breaking new ground).

But most important is this – if you THINK you’ll end up with 25 sites then you better be planning on making profits, and you better be planning on training a team (even if a small team) to help you maximize those profits.

That’s why I love ReplaceMyself. It teaches you how to build systems so you can live the 4 hour work week.

Article Marketing Help: Are You REALLY Article Marketing, or Just Pretending?

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 at 2:28 pm  
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There is a distinct difference in the types of questions newbies ask versus those who are more experienced. On forums, I constantly see people new to IM asking about article marketing. I think people see the appeal of article marketing because it costs nothing to get started. You can write your own articles, submit them for free, get backlinks, and make money.

The typical questions I see are:

  1. How much it costs to hire an article writer to write an article for my site?
  2. Is this a fair price for a 500 word article?
  3. Where should I find freelance article writers?


Those are fine for “starter questions”, but there is a bigger question to ask.

Specifically, you should be asking yourself if article marketing is a hobby or a business. If it is a real business, then you should be investing in having somebody do it for you on a full time basis. You should consider hiring at least one full-time writer to work on content creation for your website. Here is a brief list of all the “things” you can get a full-time writer to do for you, without having to pay by the word:

  • Write feature stories for your blog
  • Write helpful articles to submit to directories, for traffic and backlinks
  • Learn to do keyword research for your niche, to optimize article titles and copy
  • Follow other related blogs via RSS feed in order to come up with story ideas
  • Join some related forums and drop helpful comments along with links to your blog posts, to get backlinks and traffic
  • Create free reports that you can use as list-building material


Hiring a full time writer is NOT that expensive.

Well, it doesn’t have to be. Sure, you can hire an American writer. I don’t know what minimum wage is in the USA, but in Canada it equates to about $20k per year. Say you have to pay $15/hour for a young but “decent” American writer. That’s $30k per year. Certainly not “hobby” money in most people’s books!

Instead, consider the Philippines. They all speak English and they do their schooling in English. Books are in English. TV and Radio is in English. Signs on the street are in English. They are familiar with American expressions. You have to dig a bit to find great writers, because most of them will have small quirks about their writing that make it less than perfect (at least in my experience). But there are excellent people out there with great writing skills. They are smart, hardworking, and willing to learn.

There are two options, really. The first option is to hire someone who is lower cost, but where the work needs to be edited slightly. For $300/month you can certainly hire a full time writer with good research skills, and decent writing, but it won’t be perfect. You’ll either edit it yourself, or you’ll hire a native speaker part time to do the editing.

The second option is to hire someone who is able to write in perfect English. Generally you’ll spend perhaps $450+ for this per month, but the work will not require any editing. As you expand, what you can do is have at least ONE full time writer who you consider to be a “perfect” English writer and use him to do your editing or your “less than perfect” writers.

Also, in terms of editing, I would not bother doing much editing to articles that you submit to article directories, or forum comments. Just allow a decent writer to post them unedited. If, on the other hand, you are putting the content on your website then you should have it properly edited. You need to project a very strong image on your site.

Freelance versus Full Time

When you hire a freelance worker you have to realize that this worker is not only working for you. You are not taking on that person’s full time working hours. You are not benefiting from the learning that this person does in your niche market over the long run. But if article writing is a hobby for your website, then you can get along well with this.

When you hire a full time writer you get to teach them what you want, and you get to benefit from their expertise as it develops within your niche market(s).

Say you were going to be happy paying $0.02 per word at Textbroker. A 500 word article would cost you $10. It would be well written by an American. As a comparison, you could probably have several such articles written by a full time writer in the Philippines (say 4 articles per day, because they do take some research time). If your Filipino writer was making $450 per month this is $20 per day. Your articles are now costing you $5 instead of $10, and as the writer becomes more familiar with your topics he or she will get stronger.

The economics of hiring a full time writer seem obvious to me. How about you?

Article Marketing Resource Boxes: An Awesome Free Tool

Sunday, November 28th, 2010 at 2:54 am  
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If you do article marketing then you know about the importance of resource boxes. If you are new, article marketing means writing articles and publishing them in other people’s article directories. You get to include an “about the author” section at the end of the article where you can include links back to your websites.

This gives you the opportunity to get clicks on your articles (traffic) and it also gives you a backlink to your site which helps search engine rankings.

In case you need help creating resource boxes, here is an awesome free tool.

This tool, which was created by John Jonas, allows you to make a whole variety of resource boxes pointing to different URLs and using different keywords. This is particularly useful if you are using Unique Article Wizard (which is what I do).

Bottom line – this tool ROCKS and you should use it. You should give it to your outsourcing team also.

If you are at all confused – just go take a look at the tool and you’ll understand.

Another Real Example of Outsourcing a Business Plan

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010 at 6:35 pm  
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Today I thought I’d describe another example where outsourcing + having a plan = money. The inspiration for this blog post came from this thread over on the Warrior Forum.

The original post, by “The RedFox” describes how he build a $5,000 per month business by creating about 200 websites and generating revenue via Google Adsense. In case you aren’t sure what this means, he is setting up wordpress sites, posting about 5 content-rich articles, and then placing Google text ads on the site.

The Process:

  1. Search for keywords that have a CPC (cost per click) of at least $1. Below this it is hard to make enough revenue to justify the investment in a site.
  2. Filter the keywords so that you are left with phrases that get at least 1000 searches per month (exact match)
  3. Determine if the keyword presents an opportunity for a top 10 ranking. Figuring this out will seem complicated if you are a novice, but within a couple weeks you’ll have a very good feel for what is rankable and what is not.
  4. Purchase a domain where the exact keyword is in the domain if possible.
  5. Setup WordPress on the site. Do all of the usual SEO setup for the site (takes very little time)
  6. Publish 5 articles to the site. Each article goes after the main keyword. I assume these are published as “posts” and not “pages”. At least that is what I would do.
  7. Monetize with a large rectangle add directly below the title of each post. Also put a 160×600 skyscraper in the sidebar and a link unit near the navigation bar at the top of the page.
  8. Build a few links using article marketing and/or Web 2.0 sites. Personally I would use Unique Article Wizard for this.

The Economics:


Spending: He spends $10 on the domain, and about another $50 for all of the articles that go on the site. He generally outsources this but sometimes writes them himself. Doing the work yourself is a good idea for the first site, just so you understand what is involved. But once you understand the tasks, it is much more sensible to hire someone else to do it for you.

Income: His budget is about $60 per site and he considers it a success if the site does $15/month in revenue. Seems like small potatoes, right? Yes it does, but remember he has built about 200 of these sites now. So his average income per site must be about $25/month. If you think about it, this translates into perhaps 1 click per day from each site. This is reasonable if there are 1000 searches per month (30 per day), and you are on the first page of Google. Maybe each site gets 5-7 visitors per day and one single click. That’s a rough guess.

Return on investment:His payback period (time to get is $60 back) is no more than 4 months. At that level, his return on investment is 200% per year. There are not too many stocks or other investments that can give you such as strong return.

How I Would Improve the Process

What RedFox has done is prove the model works, so now it’s about scaling it up. As I said before, if this were a new strategy for me I’d do everything myself for the first site. If I completely sucked at writing I would outsource only the articles but I would do the keyword research and site building myself. This equips you to teach it to someone else later.

Then I would ramp it up so that I had ONE employee working on this for me full time. I would expect him to be able to finish one site every 2 days including 5 original articles on the site and two articles used for promotion via Unique Article Wizard.’

Total cost $450 for 10 sites. After one month I should have about 10 of these sites built (average 21 working days per month). My total outlay would be about $100 for domains ($10 per domain x 10 sites) and another $350 for the employee salary (typical for a decent writer).

Income expectation of $150/month. Let’s say we achieve only $15/month on average for all sites. Some are flops that earn nothing, and some earn $30+ per month. So $15 is a nice average. RedFox is clearly averaging $25 based on his comments. I’m being more conservative.

Scale it up with more writers. I would add a 2nd employee for the 2nd month such that we’d now be launching a total of 20 sites in the 2nd month. The costs for month 2 would rise to $900 and be offset by $150 of income from the sites that were built in month 1.

After two months we should have 30 sites in total. We should be doing $450 in monthly revenue which more than pays for the first employee. At this stage, you’d still be cashflow negative because you invested $450 for the first 10 sites, and $900 for the next 20 sites ($1350 total) but only generated cash of $450 in those two months. So you have a working capital decision to make.

Do you flatten out and only build 20 sites per month? If you do, after the fourth month you’ll have 70 sites active and earn about $1050 per month, clearly putting you in cash flow positive territory. Every month that goes by creates more passive income.

Or do you double up again? Start building 40 sites per month at a cost of $1800 per month. If you do, you’ll have 430 sites (first 30 sites + 40 x 10 months) after the first year is up. You’ll have spent about $19,350 in site building costs and you should now have monthly income of $6450.

Does the upfront investment scare you? Fine. Stick with building the first few sites yourself and then hire ONE person to grow your business. You’ll still build 120 sites in the first year and you’ll be well on your way.

Tools to Consider

First, you need to think about hiring employees, and I recommend using OnlineJobs.ph

Second, you need to be able to build WordPress sites quickly, such that they are Adsense ready. The FlexSqueeze theme is absolutely ideal for this.

Third, you need an article marketing strategy to promote your sites (building backlinks). I recommend Unique Article Wizard for this. It’s what I use.

How Long Should it Take My Writer to Write Articles?

Tuesday, November 2nd, 2010 at 2:04 pm  
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Every so often I see forum threads talking about this topic. How long should my article writer take to write a 500 word article? How many articles a day should I expect from my writer? How long should article rewrites take?

Here is my answer:

If you really want to understand how long a task should take, do it yourself. When it comes to article writing, you should spend a bit of time doing it yourself so you understand, and appreciate what is involved. Only then should you feel you are qualified to “judge” the work you get from your outsourced workers.

I recommend using Unique Article Wizard for article submission. I put my money where my mouth is. I have writers that are paid to create article to go into this system. So how do I know if I’m getting my money’s worth? Simple – I have done article myself and I know what to expect.

Here is an example from today: I actually thought of doing this blog post because I had just finished writing one article along with 2 re-writes of the same article. I wanted to know how long the whole process took me to complete.

Stats: My article was written on a topic I know very well, and required zero research. Add any research time to your expectations. My original article was 320 words. The two rewrites were 437 and 388 words each.

In case you are wondering, Unique Article Wizard uses 3 versions of an article in order to give you the human-written “uniqueness” when they are submitted to hundreds of directories and blogs.

Time taken: The original article took me 20 minutes to write. That does not include any proof reading or editing. I’m a very fast typist, I knew the topic well and it just “flowed” rather easily. I expect someone I hire should probably spend 45 minutes on this.

My rewrites each took me 10 minutes. I timed them with a stopwatch.

What’s left: As I write this blog post I have 3 finished articles. I’ll now need to go into the Unique Article Wizard portal and paste them, pick categories, add keywords, and spell check the articles. I’ll also need to create the resource boxes that I want to use (to get my backlinks). I expect that process will take me about 15 minutes.

Adding it all up: If you add up the entire workflow I described above, you get 55 minutes. Let’s call it an hour. That is the time it took ME. I would expect someone not as skilled at typing / composing articles would spend at least 50% more time on this, so let’s call it 1.5 hours per full article set.

Now let’s get realistic. What I shared with you above included only the actual working time. Guess what? I was having a cup of coffee, so between re-writes I drank some coffee. That naturally leads itself to a bathroom break. I also took some quick mental breaks between re-writes. Heck, I stopped to change gears by writing this blog post (something your outsourced employee obviously should not be doing during work hours). But my point is that your employee will require mental and physical breaks. Nobody can be expected to sit at a computer and crank out content without stopping.

Take your time and triple it. If my non-stop-time would be 1 hour then I have to adjust to account for 1) my employee won’t be as fast as I am; 2) we all need breaks. So I would expect my employee can finish an entire article set + submit that article set within 3 hours. If any research is required then again you need to pad this number further.

My conclusion is that if I’m asking my article writers to work 8 hours per day then I should expect about 3 article sets per day of work. Anything more that this is probably unsustainable, poorly written, and demotivating for your employees.

I use Unique Article Wizard, and clearly I think you should do. Please consider using my link for it if you are going to join. If you do, I’ll send you the same bonus package that I describe here. This will help you hire and train writers.

Promoting ClickBank Products: Does Gravity Matter

Sunday, September 19th, 2010 at 10:45 pm  
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I decided to write this post in reply to a question that occasionally pops up over at the Warrior Forum.

Basically, the question is whether or not to promote products that have high gravity. There are lots of newbie guides that tell you to focus on high gravity. The reason they suggest this is because high gravity is a proxy for high sales. Low gravity, conversely, is a proxy for low sales. It is not a perfect measure, but is a good rule of thumb.

It’s All in How You Promote

The distinction I want to offer to you in this post is an important one. It’s about HOW you plan to promote the product.

There are many way to promote something, but let’s focus on two that are very different. First, we have the “conduit method”. I’m borrowing that name from Chris Rempel, who named it very appropriately. The second method is what we’ll call the “keyword focus” strategy.

Method 1: Reviews

The conduit method involves writing a review on the product and getting organic traffic from people who are researching the particular product. This website is a perfect example of the approach except that I’ve taken it to the next level by offering a bonus. This entire website is designed to rank for the product name “Replace Myself”, an outsourcing training program by John Jonas. If I do my job properly, then people who search for information about that product will find my site (and specifically, my review page).

If I was going to promote something through a review, and if I were focusing on getting traffic from people tying “Product name review” into Google, then I would want to be sure people were actually searching for information about the product. If it was a ClickBank product with low gravity, I wouldn’t bother because it would tell me that not enough people are searching for information on the product.

On the other hand, if the gravity was HUGE then the competition would be too fierce and I’d never get any organic traffic without a big investment in SEO. So my goal would be to pick products that had a decent gravity, but without too much good competition from people who have written review.

Method 2: Niche Keywords

The second method was the keyword focus method. Again, let’s stick with the “Replace Myself” product that I’m promoting here. If I wanted to promote it on a blog I probably wouldn’t name the domain Replace-Myself-Bonus.com. Instead I’d pick something more general like OutsourcingStrategies or whatever.

Then I would be writing great content to suck in traffic on relevant keywords in that market (but not product-specific keywords). In that case, what would matter to me was the quality of the product and the quality of the sales page (or the quality of the opt-in content given away). In that case, a lower gravity is probably indicative of LESS competition and an easier way to make money. But a massive gravity doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t compete. If the market is huge, like the weight loss market, then there are so many keywords you can focus on that you can always find a way to compete if you are creative.

Links Matter. Here’s What I Do:

Regardless of the promotion method you use, if you want to boost your rankings for particular keywords I recommend Unique Article Wizard. I’ve been using it along with the conduit method mentioned above for a variety of products (ClickBank and non-Clickbank). It is proving to be very profitable.

Here is a great post that I wrote describing the specific strategy that I’ve been using.

The Economics of Article Outsourcing

Monday, August 30th, 2010 at 12:38 pm  
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Today I want to talk a bit about outsourcing as it pertains to article writing and the economics of doing this. I see countless posts over at WarriorForum.com, or other places, asking about how to get started outsourcing article marketing.

Obviously, article marketing can be a powerful way to promote your business. You get backlinks from your articles, and you get potential traffic from people who read your articles.

So let’s talk about your options when it comes to outsourcing article writing:

1) You can go to a freelancing site such as Elance or oDesk. Here you can probably hire someone to write articles for you either by the hour, or more likely, on a per-article basis. You generally spoon feed the person the exact keywords and other article requirements. They work for you but they also work for many other employers. They get paid by the article and they crank out whatever they crank out. You might get lucky and find a great person through this method, but it’s not easy. They have no real incentive to learn about YOUR business, and do anything to help you succeed beyond writing articles. They are not truly working for you.

2) You can hire your own writers to work for you full time. This is far more effective, in my own experience, because you are able to set expectations for how much output a person creates in an average week or month, while paying them a salary. This means they aren’t looking to crank out garbage. You can also teach them exactly what you need accomplished. You can show them how to do keyword research so that they know exactly what to write about without you needing to explain it on every single assignment. You can earn each other’s trust and you can give them your login details for article marketing accounts, so that they submit the articles for you. You can get them to track your rankings for keywords. There is FAR more value in having a dedicated employee than hiring a freelancer.

The Economics:

I use Unique Article Wizard, so whenever I have a writer do articles for me, I get 3 versions of the article along with a resource box file that we submit to the UAW service.

Imagine that on a typical day my writer takes plenty of breaks (you go nuts writing all day), and outputs a total of 3 article “sets” each day. That’s actually 9 articles, but only 3 topics because each “set” for UAW has 3 versions like I said above.

There are an average of 22 work days in a month. That’s 66 article sets per month. Say the salary is $400 per month. You can hire people for less, but I’m using numbers that are very achievable for you.

This works out to a cost of $6.06 per article set. Oh, and since my writers also submit to the Unique Article Wizard Service for me, this means that I’m getting a lot more than “just” an article. I’m completely outsourcing article marketing so that my time is free to figure out what the next growth path will be for my business.

Do you need a full time article writer?

If you are not sure, then you probably don’t have ambitious enough goals. With one writer on your staff, full time, you should be able to pick 3 niche markets, setup blogs within each niche market and find products that you can promote using a feature box in your blog (or the “What Would Seth Godin Do” plugin).

Then, you train your writer to follow the news on each niche market. You have your writer write one article per day for each of the blogs, and post to the blog. The writer then creates the 2nd version of each article and submits to EzineArticles.com (and perhaps other directories). Then, the writer creates the 3rd version of each article and submits the entire set (all 3 versions) to Unique Article Wizard.

If you pick niche markets that actually have buyers, and you promote products that actually sell, then you should have no problem making a solid profit with this strategy. And there are many variations of it.

For example you could have your writer do product reviews and write articles to point backlinks at your reviews. Go to some of the affiliate networks where physical products are promoted. CJ, ShareASale, LinkShare, etc. Find products that look like they sell very well (check for real user reviews online).

When you find a great product that you think you can promote, check the top 10 organic listings when you query the product name in Google. Look at the number of search results using phrase match (product name in quotes). Look at the average page rank of the top 10 listings using broad match (no quotes, the way people actually search). If you think you can get ranked for the product name, publish a review. Then start sending articles to the review using Unique Article Wizard. You’ll be surprised how many awesome products there are to sell out there once you move away from Clickbank. Even Amazon has a TON of stuff out there, but you need to focus on expensive products given the 6-6.5% commission cap.

The point is this: Hiring an article writer in the Philippines is very low cost. If you have ANY aspirations for making money online you better learn how to manage a few employees and you better learn how to do article marketing.

The side point is this: If you are willing to step up to the plate and hire a dedicated employee for a few hundred bucks per month, then using a service such as Unique Article Wizard is a no-brainer. It’s like buying a car for $30k and not paying an extra $5k to be able to drive faster than everyone else.

Where to hire writers

My top recommendation is to use John Jonas’ training over at ReplaceMyself.com (make sure you claim your bonus through me)

Making Money with Article Marketing and Product Reviews

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010 at 1:21 pm  
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Today I want to give you another simple case study about article marketing + blogging. This is a story about how I got a first-page Google ranking for a profitable keyword within one month. It will generate me auto-pilot income for (likely) years to come. It took some up-front investment in time, but it is easily outsourceable and repeatable.

Got your interest? Good. Let’s move right along.

Important side note: When I say “article marketing” I’m specifically talking about Unique Article Wizard, which is by far the easiest way to accomplish these results. It is not free, but as you’ll eventually learn throughout your marketing career, you need to pay for good quality stuff if you want to succeed. If you subscribe to this service using my link I will give you the same bonus package that I offer to people who join Replace Myself. See this page for info on the bonus package, and then just come back here and use my link to join UAW.

About the Product I Promote:

I chose an information product that has a recurring monthly fee and pays a decent commission. It’s something I feel very good about promoting because I’ve seen the content. Pick stuff you feel good about. Be ethical. Enough said.

The Keyword:

My goal was to rank very highly for the product name, and for variations such as “product name review”, etc. When people are searching on a product name it means they are interested in buying, but they need more information. It’s a great area to start with your marketing efforts.

Just so you know, the product name I want to rank for is two words. It’s harder to rank for two-word phrases compared to something like “Captain MonkeyUncle’s Large Brown Underwear”. Duh.

Assessing the Competition:

I don’t believe in huge keyword research. Keep it simple. Type the keyword into Google within quotes to reveal the number of pages with a phrase match for your keyword. Reminder, if the keyword is “Stinky Shoes”, you want to know exactly how many pages say those words in that order. You don’t want to skip the quotes or you’ll get a total number of pages that says “stinky” and “shoes” anywhere on the page.

In this case, my competition is about 90,000 pages. Certainly not child’s play, but definitely not rocket science to beat.

Now we look at Page Rank. Type the keyword into Google again, but without quotes this time. This is how your prospects type stuff, so copy them. Look at the top 10 results and get the page rank for each page. I use the FireFox plugin “SEO4Firefox” to do this. Average it out. If it is under 2 you should be in good shape. Above 2 and it will be harder to compete.

In my case, the average worked out to 1.1 (a few zeros, and a few pages with PR 1, 2, 3, and even a 4).

The Work Involved:

First, I setup a WordPress site. As usual I made the static home page the sales page. I then created a “blog” page and set that up so that’s where the blog posts go. Pretty ordinary so far. I have a guy who sets up sites like this for me and it takes him about 45 minutes to install WP, add the plugins, setup the pages, install the theme, etc. From there anyone can do the posting (myself or an employee).

I started publishing some decent articles as blog posts. Nothing huge, just stuff that I could whip off easily. I’m up to about a dozen posts on that blog over the course of a month.

Next Comes the Promotion via Article Marketing

I wrote a whopping total of 2 articles with educational information about the niche. I didn’t even mention the product in the articles. I just wrote for the reader, and I provided links back to my site in the resource box. It took me about 45 minutes to do each article, including the “re-writes” needed for the Unique Article Wizard system. Making the resource boxes took 10 minutes.

I submitted the articles separately (about 2 weeks apart) using Unique Article Wizard. I made sure to use a variety of titles and a variety of anchor text and resource boxes.

Ok Let’s Get to the Good Stuff … The Results!

At first I was nowhere to be seen on the first 3 pages of Google. I wasn’t even cracking the top 30! That is typical. I had no backlinks yet, and my site was pretty new. Remember, the articles had not yet been submitted at this stage!

About 2 weeks after I submitted my first article I was on the 2nd page of Google if you typed “product name review” (no quotes). But still nowhere to be seen for the product name alone. Mind you, my first article was still in the process of being drip-fed out to the directories.

That’s when I submitted the 2nd article. Again, I waited another two weeks. Every day the Unique Article Wizard would submit my articles to blogs and directories. I could see the pingbacks coming to my site each day, so I knew I was getting about 10 new backlinks per day (I set the articles to drip out to only 20 sites per day). BTW, I don’t keep the pingbacks. I delete them. But I like to see them come in since it tells me that backlinks are being formed.

After a total duration of four weeks, my rankings had significantly improved. And I mean SIGNIFICANTLY. I’m now showing on the first page for the main keyword. I’m ranked #8 as of this writing. If you add “review” after the keyword then I’m ranking #6.

Do you think I plan to stop there? Of course not! I’ll just submit another fresh article into the wizard every couple of weeks (or maybe every week if I’m aggressive) and I’m very confident I can get to the #2 or #3 spot (the top spot will probably always be owned by the product vendor’s site).

Very Important SEO Point: Results do NOT come instantly. Quit thinking that you can post something today and rank for it tomorrow. That’s definitely true for non-competitive phrases, but if there is even only mild competition it will take some time. Just be cool with that concept and plan to build a business around it.

The Money:

The site I’m referring to has brought in a few hundred bucks so far. Nothing huge, but remember that it’s still new and my rankings are still being built up in Google. I expect that making $1000 per month is very doable from this site. That’s just ONE site. Keep that in perspective when you think about the $67 cost for Unique Article Wizard.

Also remember that the time investment is only modest up-front, and then very light going forward. All I need to do is keep submitting a new article every month to ensure that competition doesn’t creep up behind me and push me out of the way.

Outsourcing These Projects

In this particular example I wrote the website content and articles myself. That’s because I know the market better than anyone who works for me. Plus I actually enjoy writing (as you may have noticed), so I pick topics that I want to write about and I outsource other topics. There are plenty of projects where I do none of the writing. I just manage the process. I have someone else setup WordPress. Someone else writes reviews. That same writer will do the articles and submit them to UAW for me (I literally don’t touch them).

Then my VA keeps track of analytics to see what’s getting traffic and what’s not. We’ve done this on tons of products and sometimes you get “easy rankings” with only a few backlinks.

If you know the rankings are coming quickly and the product converts, you can then go back and improve your review, add more content, add a bonus offer, or whatever. That’s the power of outsourcing. You can test a LOT of stuff very cheaply with someone else’s labor, and then you can go back and re-invest in the stuff that is working.

This way your efforts are concentrated on only worthwhile projects.

UAW Bonus Offer

I think you can tell that I’m pretty passionate about the power of Unique Article Wizard. If you buy it through my link I’ll give you the bonus package that I created for Replace Myself members (outsourcing stuff). The bonus covers a lot of important concepts involving UAW, outsourcing, and hiring English writers, so it will definitely be useful to you.