Case Study: How article marketing is significantly increasing my income (Part 1 of 5)

Last Thursday, I reported on an article marketing experiment I am in the midst of conducting. Specifically, I wanted to create more passive income, so I decided to give article marketing a real try and see how it went.

All this week I will be dispensing details about this on-going experiment. For details on the beginning, click here.

Following are the sites I’m consistently submitting articles to. I chose them because they had good PR and Alexa rankings. If you don’t know what a PR or Alexa rank is, it is explained briefly below, with links to other sources for in-depth information.

1. EzineArticles.com: This directory has a PR rank of 6 and an Alexa rank of 552.

This is perhaps the number one article directory on the net. You can submit across a number of categories and the submission process is very easy.

You must create an author account to submit. The thing I like the most about this site is that you can track your articles and it gives you a wealth of information like how many ezines picked up the article, how many hits it’s gotten, when you submitted, etc.

To me, the best part of this directory is that they post your article within 4-6 hours, once you’ve achieved platinum status, which is not hard to do.

POST CONTINUED BELOW
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2. ArticleDashboard.com: This directory has a PR rank of 6 and an Alexa rank of 3,461.

Again, you must create an author account to submit. It’s easy to submit once you do this. This directory also gives some article stats (eg, how many times the article has been downloaded, emailed to others, etc.).

3. IdeaMarketers.com: This directory has a PR rank of 4 and an Alexa rank of 8,897. You must create an author account and article stats are provided.

4. EasyArticles.com: This directory has a PR rank of 6 and an Alexa rank of 52,143.

You must create an author account to submit. Beyond providing a list of articles you’ve submitted, this directory doesn’t provide article stats. The submission process is very easy once you’ve set up an account.

5. PowerHomeBiz.com: This site has a PR rank of 6 and an Alexa rank of 25,152.

NOTE: This is not an article submission site, but a small business portal of sorts. I submitted to this site because they don’t publish “fluff” articles. There is a certain level of professionalism that you must have to get published on this site. They don’t publish just anything and it gives you a certain level of prestige if you’re lucky enough to be published here.

I got good e-zine subscription rates from an article that I had published on their site a couple of years ago. The article was entitled, Why You DON'T Need National Media Attention to Grow Your Biz.

What is a PR Ranking? What is an Alexa Rank?

PR Rank: First, PR stands for page rank. Impact-Direct.com defines page rank as “A method developed and patented by Stanford University and Larry Page (cofounder of Google) to rank search engine results. Page Rank gives a unique ranking to every page on the internet. The ranking number is based on the number of quality inbound links pointing at a page and is represented on a scale from 1-10 with 10 being the optimal rank.”

In the article, “What Is Page Rank?” by Kimberly Bodane, she describes why page rank is important, as well as what you can do to improve yours.

You’ll also find a detailed article on problogger.net (“Google Page Rank Explained”) with helpful feedback from other readers.

Alexa Rank: An article on e3Server.com, What is Alexa Ranking, describes Alexa rankings as “a very powerful tool of viewing and comparing web site traffic for one site to the rest of the web.”

The lower the ranking, the better. Sites that rank 100,000 or lower are considered extremely popular.

To learn more, type “alexa ranking” in the search engine of your choice and do some reading. You’ll be able to get a full understanding by reading a few articles of detailed information.

Why I Used PR and Alexa Rankings as Markers for My Article Marketing Campaign

To be honest, I’m an SEO (search engine optimization) neophyte. I don’t like learning about technology – I’m a writer; all things technical bore the bejeezus out of me.

BUT, I have read enough about these two tools to know that they are important and that if I was going to use article marketing to create passive income, I needed to rely on getting the word out to as many as possible. This only happens via sites that are extremely popular.

How do you measure the popularity of a site? Via its PR and/or Alexa ranking are two viable ways.

It seems to me that when I didn’t update the site as regularly, it’s ranking was fine, but as soon as I started to fiddle with it, the rankings went in the crapper. I’m sure some experts can tell me why. From what I understand, Google sometimes changes its algorithms, and that can cause site rankings to shift significantly.

To find out your site's PR, go Go here: http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

To find out your site's Alexa's ranking: Go here: http://www.Alexa.com.

Show Me the Money!

Okay, all of that is fine you may be saying, but what about the money? During the first few days of my experiment, my Google Adsense earnings quintupled. That’s what got me so excited.

Well, my earnings have cooled off, but I am still, on average, doubling what I was making before I started this experiment.

Disclaimer: I had written in another post that my site, InkwellEditorial.com, had a PR of 6. When I checked months ago, it did. I checked it today (10/30/06) and it’s a 5. We won’t even discuss my Alexa ranking, which used to hover in the 800,000s; now it’s at over 6,000,000.

My blog's PR has skyrocketed though -- from a 0 to a 5.

Further, I said that I was submitting an article a day (excluding weekends) for 30 days to 25 different sites. I've missed one day so far and since not all sites were appropriate for certain articles, on some days I've submitted to only 20 or so sites. For me, this was enough to be considered "significant."

Stay tuned for Part II tomorrow.
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