Last month I started a unique experiment called 30 Articles In 30 Days. I basically took a site that was already making some money and submitted 30 articles to a bunch of sites by using Unique Article Wizard (You can read my full review here: Unique Article Wizard Review). That experiment is now officially over and I’m ready to post the results.
As I said when I started the experiment, this site I worked with made $561in the month prior to the experiment. To be honest, I didn’t get all 30 articles in before the time was up and fell two short – 28 articles went in before the end date and I stopped there so I wouldn’t mess up the results after the experiment was over. I just ran a report on that channel in Adsense, and here’s the amount for the last month:
$1043.81
Here’s a screen shot for those of you that enjoy seeing the proof (I know, I know – it’s small text):
In case you’re wondering what the huge black box is, Google doesn’t allow us to show information such as the CTR and eCPM and would probably kill my account if I did, so I have to cover that up.
$1043 isn’t a huge amount of money, but in this case the site showed an 86% gain in one month. The coolest thing about that is that it should keep cranking out more money this month, next month, and hopefully for a lot more months. It might be tough to duplicate an 86% gain for one more month, but I think I can probably add another $500 or so in income this month – only time will tell.
I know that a lot of people are going to ask about the details of how I used the articles. I’m going to give you some of that here because I know that it will probably be interesting for some, at least I hope it will be.
I basically have ten pages on the site I used that are set up reasonably well to target specific keywords. I already taught you how to do that here: How To Target A Keyword With A Post Page. The 28 articles that I submitted were used specifically to promote those ten pages (one of them happens to be the home page of the site).
The home page made $371.06 and the other ten pages made 99% of the rest of the $1043. It was pretty interesting to watch because the home page has always made most of the money for this site but this month the post pages easily passed it up and the reality is that the homepage didn’t really improve that much – it’s up from $298.98 in the previous month.
I know that people are going to start asking about how many links I pointed here and how many I pointed there. The truth is that I probably pointed too many at the home page. This page is already somewhat established so there wasn’t that much room there to improve. If I had pointed more of the links at the post pages I would have seen a lot more improvement. You do know that I used 28 articles and promoted 11 pages so the math shouldn’t be that difficult for you.
Each one of the post pages that I promoted with this experiment has a specific topic and keyword phrase(s) that the page is trying to get ranked for. The topics fall under the same industry as the topic, but are slightly different than the homepage. I’m not going to give you the absolute details, but here’s an example so that you can see what I mean:
Example: Let’s say that the site itself is about cell phones (it isn’t) and the home page is built about the topic ‘free cell phones’. The ten posts are about similar but related topics like, cheap cell phones, pink cell phones, funny cell phones, new cell phones, best cell phones, good pda cell phones, big screen cell phones, old people cell phones, used cell phones, and cell phones for women.
I used UAW to submit articles about these topics and used them to link back to my post pages. This obviously strengthened those ten post pages quite a bit and also got them some referral traffic.
There’s actually still a lot of upside here because not a single one of these post pages is currently ranked #1 in fact most of them rank between #6 and #20 for their respective keyword phrases. Once I move up more there will obviously be a lot more traffic there. Additionally, I can add more keyword targeted posts to the site and strengthen those pages over the next few months.
I’m definitely not done working with this site but for now I’m going to call this experiment closed and a fantastic success. A gain that is that large, that fast is phenomenal.
I’ve had some people ask me about doing a related experiment on a newer site so I’m going to work that out in my mind and let you guys in on it once I have it mapped out. Let me know if you have any questions!!
Awesome Court! Just waiting for payday next week to sign up for UAW and get domains registered.
I know you can’t talk about specific CTR and such, but was the increase in earnings directly proportional to an increase in traffic or did you also have an increase in CTR during the same period that also contributed to the increase in earnings?
Yeah David the site’s traffic basically doubled up.
Very nice Court!
I’ve got a question though….seeing as how you were adding 50 new incoming links every day and having that compound(100 links/day,150,200 etc…) isn’t that overdoing it and going to get your site sandboxed or de-listed?
I want to do the same on some 6-7 month old sites but am worried that I’ll get penalized by Google.
-Mike
Mike honestly it was probably more links than I would normally be comfortable with and it would be a lot safer to do like one a week per site and see how it goes. Fortunately they pointed at 11 different URLs and that will help somewhat.
I was actually looking for where the number of submissions per day were referenced. Unfortunately I read the comments from the bottom up
I’m planning on doing something similar but because the site isn’t that old I’ll start of with 10 submissions per day which will then max out at 300 per day after one month. Distributed over 10 or more articles that will probably be just fine.
Court,
I’m wondering about your SERP rankings before and after the experiment can you give us some idea of your change in rankings if any?
Well Camyden we’re dealing with multiple keywords but mostly the site move up from non-existent rankings to between #5 and #20.
I am really looking forward to doing this with a new site. Even if the results aren’t as dramatic, I think it will reinforce the point you have made with this experiment.
Court,
Great post! I’ve been waiting patiently for your update and it didn’t fail to impress.
You have probably addressed this question 1,000 times, but I couldn’t find the answer.
Do you mind showing an example of optimal ad placement for a wordpress blog?
I have a handful of niche sites, and the CTR on the html sites always seems to exceed the CTR on the blogs, even though the placement is almost identical.
Thanks!
Chris
Chris I just placed a fake ad on my example site: http://placeyourkeywordhere.com/
That’s almost always the best placement and if you aren’t getting clicks you probably need to change the look of the site around the ad.
If you have an HTML layout that gets great clicks it sounds like you need to find/create a WordPress theme that looks exactly the same. WordPress can be made to look like any static HTML site!
Hi Court,
I have a question about your post, you say your site has 11 pages 10 plus the home page. Then you go on to say that you are promoting the site’s posts. “Are they pages or posts?”
They’re post pages.
In the WordPress admin, they’re posts! I sometimes call them pages because the site isn’t a blog. It’s a WordPress niche site.
The site actually has more pages than this – there are 11 that I promoted and these 11 make 99% of the income.
Hey Court-
Thanks for all the great info you’re sharing. I might have missed this in one of the posts, but can you tell us the age of the site you used for this experiment?
Kurt
Sure Kurt the site I used is 18 months old and I got my hands on it a few months ago.
Court,
Just curious if you linked only one page per article? Or did you include a link to a page as well as a link to the homepage?
Do you recommend one over the other? Is it better to focus on one page and link it one or two times in the article, or mix it up and put a link to a page as well as a homepage?
Thx, can’t wait till the next experiment.
Ricky I used each article to link to two different URLs – sometimes the homepage and a post page and sometimes two different post pages.
You don’t want to use both links to point to the same page because it would dampen the value of the second link!
wow, I have been linking to the same article with two different keywords in the same article for a while… and.. needless to say, no wonder why I haven’t seen any results.
Thanks for the results Court. That was a great experiment. I have always done article marketing but have never done a “30 in 30″ type of thing. I also submit my articles manually and that takes forever. After reading everything you have said about UAW I think I am going to give it a shot.
Hey you’re welcome Trent. I’ve done plenty of manual submitting myself. It was a long time ago but sometimes you have to do what you have to do.
Hi Court,
I have been waiting for the results of your experiment ever since you mentioned it at the beginning of the month. That is a great improvement especially since you will continue to see that traffic from those articles in the months ahead. I am going to go look at UAW. I assume from the name that it is spinning software. Did the articles make sense after they were spun?
Well Andy it’s basically a submission service that helps you to get some unique versions out there. I honestly didn’t think it would work as well as it does when I first tried it – it was more of an experiment that just worked out. UAW doesn’t allow us to provide the details of how they make the articles unique but I can tell you that they make perfect sense and that it takes an extra 30 minutes or so to get an article ready.
You can read my full review on it here:
http://courtneytuttle.com/2009/01/22/unique-article-wizard-review/
Waita minute, I used UAW, and I haven’t even come close to seeing the results you have. I have a twin who does IM as well, but he has been seeing great results with UAW (I’ve seen them)… so I’m sure it works, and I’m guess I did something wrong.
The only thing I can guess is my linking and keyword strategy was off. I did link to the same article twice in one of my UAW campaigns. Perhaps that devalued my site and caused it to drop ranking?
I never got more than 50 links a day, so the only factors could be the quality of links or my linking strategy.
I’m concerned because frankly, my site now gets half the traffic it used to get before I used UAW.
Hey thanks Court, I too have been waiting for your results. Wow very impressive. I have a new niche blog in the works that I’ll be promoting it so UAW sounds like a good value. You’ve helped me more than you know and I want you to know I appreciate it! Keep posting and I’ll keep reading. If you had a donation button on site, I for one would use it.:o)
No donation needed Jerry, I just hope that I can help people like you as much as possible. Take care!
This is a great job Court, well done! The principles behind it are fantastic! What I’m curious about and I’m sure others are, is what your average CPC is and the sort of traffic, because selecting a Niche is great and all, but, for example, if you make an iPhone website, you will see a CPC of $0.05, which would require thousands of clicks, so at the end of the day, it’s really difficult to know how successful this way relative to these specific details, make sense?
Chris that totally makes sense and is actually something that I thought about – the difficulty is that Google warns against giving too much detail on my Adsense account.
I will tell you that when I selected keywords for the site in question, I chose keywords that showed CPCs that were between $3 and $5 for the most part. I chose a few that were above $10 in the Adwords tool but those rankings haven’t hit yet so I’m not getting any super high paying clicks as of right now.
Hopefully this helps you Chris – it’s about the best I can do without getting myself in trouble!
Hi Court,
What is the exact phrase monthly search number on those expensive keyword phrases, just curious.
Hi everyone,
I have been waiting for this for a while and to be honest, I am very impressed, thank s court for this great experiment. It’s a huge motivator, I am just waiting for my paycheck as well.
Can’t wait to get started.
You know hassan I think I wanted to do it because I could have really used stuff like this when I started out. I had to test most things for myself – even though I didn’t have the budget. Now that I can afford to do this stuff it’s really fun to share with other people. Let me know if you have any questions about the experiment and take care!
I visited the placeyourkeyword site. How do you put adsense like that. I mean at the top left of the post. Do you hard code it or do you use a plugin ?
This might be helpful:
1. http://mashable.com/2007/09/04/wordpress-adsense/
2. http://www.quickonlinetips.com/archives/2006/11/10-best-wordpress-plugins-for-google-adsense/
Google
Axio I actually pasted the Adsense code directly into the post. You will have to turn off the visual editor in WordPress to do this – you do that by going to ‘Users’ and then ‘Your Profile’.
I also had to place it in a div to get the text to wrap around it. There’s a plugin that also does it – you can read about doing that here:
http://courtneytuttle.com/2007/06/06/get-more-out-of-google-adsense-insert-ads-in-your-posts/
Why were you submitting only one article and not 2 or 3 articles?
@Axio, along these lines..
Put this inside the Wordpress loop
That’s another good way to do it as long as you’re ok with Adsense showing up on every post!
adsense
http://pastebin.com/m388a05a8 < there!
I kinda have the same question as axioblogger
would love to know how to blend the ads on wordpress themes.
Thanks a lot.
Read my reply to axioblogger and you’ll have it down!
@hassan – http://pastebin.com/m388a05a8 < there!
Thanks a lot Chris
Hi Court,
Thanks for all the great content. I’m thinking about buying UAW. If I do, it will be via your affiliate link. I have two questions about it.
I mostly blog in another language, because I live in a European country. I can write English articles, but it won’t be easy to get my targeted keywords into the article itself, because they are in another language. One possible solution that I’ve thought of is that I write the article about the English translation of my keyword and say somewhere what the translation is for my language, making that translation the link.
So first question: Do you think it’s possible (and it makes sense) to put a foreign keyword into an English article this way?
Second question: Do you also get links from just submitting the article and getting them listed in article directories, even if no website ever decides to use the article for their own website? I’m not about to write spam, but I can imagine my articles looking a little funny when I include the translation of my main keyword.
Thanks in advance!
Honestly I don’t think that people are going to look at the resource boxes when they decide whether they’re going to publish your articles or not! UAW submits to directories and to blogs and such so I’m sure you can get some approvals. It sounds like it would work to me.
Can you tell use how far you moved up in your positions for the keywords?
Did you move up a lot (like 15 to 5) or just a little (like 4 to 3)?
I’d be really interested to know that. I’m a bit fan of article submission. It’s very good. Great way to build links
Also, does uaw tell you how many versions were sent out? I’d be interested to know how many sites put a copy of an article up? Did you get 20 or 200 or 2000?
Actually I moved up a lot Matt. I wasn’t ranked in the top 500 for most of the keywords I went after. I’m now ranked between #5 and #20 which means there’s still some good upside.
Those are really impressive results. Does UAW allow you say how many sites your article appeared on?
Each article was different. The largest indexing was for an article that got into about 400 sites. Another article only got into about 60.
@ everyone…
You can use a wordpress plugin called “Who Sees Ads” which will hide your adsense to any visitor that you don’t want to see and allow it to be seen only by search engine traffic. There are lots of options also that you can set certain conditions on when your adsense, or other ads are seen.
As for the placement example that Court put on the site, you can put your adsense code into the index . php file, singlepost . php file or home . php file depending upon how you want it.
I usually put it above the loop on the main page of the site so it will only show the one ad at the top and not in each post if I have multiple posts on the front page.
I use one post per page so my ads are highly targeted to the content for that post, and use Deluxe Adsense WP Plugin to insert ads in the post.
Adsense Deluxe Plugin
Court and Mark,
I was wondering what the difference was between UAW and Article Post Robot? With UAW do you have to create the accounts and stuff and then input the info or does UAW automatically create them?
UAW creates all of the accounts for you. Article Post Robot doesn’t have a big enough list of blogs and statics to submit to right now.
Cool and sounds interesting, so all you have to do is sign up and then start creating your articles with, I’m assuming the “spinning” designations in them?
Would it be a good idea to use both services, I guess the more links the merrier? lol
Hi Court
I too will be getting UAW shortly. I have a question though. Were the articles you wrote for this basically just written to get your links out there, or were they intended to be read and get traffic from them? (or both). Thanks.
Rich
Well Rich they’re written for both. I got a surprising amount of referral traffic from them and obviously got some links in the process. The majority of the extra traffic was search traffic due to extra link juice.
That’s awesome that you made over a grand from one website!
Did you do just one link per article? Also did you vary your anchor text at all? Doesn’t it look suspicious if you have the same anchor text pointing to one page?
Two links per article and a lot of anchor variety Robert!
Hi Court,
Just purchased UAW through your link. I’ve also emailed you about the UAW video. I’m starting my own 30 day experiment in February, even though it doesn’t have 30 days…
Sounds like a very cool experiment!
Court,
Congrats on the results! I know this is the results for UAW and it sounds great but at the moment I cannot afford it. I do however have Article Marketer. Do you think the results could come close to matching using this article service? I am talking basically about the serp rankings.
The last time I used Article Marketer on my Adsense sites my CTR went right in the toilet. So I stopped using this on my money sites and stayed with using it only on my related sites for links.
Denise honestly I couldn’t have done the same thing with Article Marketer for a few reasons. #1, Article Marketer doesn’t do the same distribution. UAW will get your articles on a lot more blogs and static sites. Article Marketer also doesn’t really allow you to do variation in anchor text because you can’t use different resource boxes.
I could have still gotten growth and value out of AM but it wouldn’t have been as much.
Hi Court,
This is a very helpful post. I would like to try to duplicate your success with one of my niche blogs. Here’s my question, though.
My blog has 5 posts, with 3 of the posts appearing on the home page. My main keyword phrase for the blog, as well as a few more that I didn’t specifically target originally, now rank on page 1 in Google and I’m making some money with the site. Additional keyword phrases that I targeted with my posts are all appearing within the first 10 pages of Google (pages 3-10). The issue I have is that it’s my home page that is ranking on pages 3-10 for these keyword phrases, not the post pages themselves. So, should I submit articles with keyword anchor texts pointing to my home page and try to improve my home page’s ranking for these keywords, or should I try to improve the ranking of the post pages for these keywords like you did in your 30 day experiment?
Thanks.
Actually Jim you should use the articles to point links at BOTH your home page and the 3 posts that are currently ranking. That way when you remove the posts from the home page, they will be able to rank on their own for the keywords in question.
I’ve started leaving a single post on the homepage and part of the reason was to avoid this issue. Another reason I did it was to help to get more relevant Adsense ads for the homepage. Sometimes Adsense gets confused if you have multiple post titles and this can affect your CTR and quality score.
Court,
Are you approving trackbacks and stuff from your articles when they are posted or just delete them?
Also, how many articles per site is too many per day or per week?
too bad the UAW site is never working lately because of so many people using it…
Can you elaborate on that please?
how can possible to get the money
Hi Court, you’ve done a great job! Thanks for openly sharing with all of us. I have a few questions I’d like to ask. Your generous answers will benefit us all.
1. Are you blending the color of the ads to the color of the text/post around the ad? The standard ad link color is blue.
2. Are you solely using Wordpress as the publishing platform? Or are you experimenting with Blogger and others?
3. Are you using a self hosted Wordpress Blog or Free Wordpress Blog?
4. Did the pages that you placed adsense on have any existing pagerank at the time of placing the adsense ads on them?
5. Is it possible to replicate 10 sites by creating 10 different directories instead of buying 10 different domains?
6. Can you confirm that you only place one adsense unit per page?
7. Are you displaying ads from any other sources such as affiliate links on these pages?
8. Can you define the overall color scheme of your pages? In other words are they all jazzy with lots oc colors and header graphics or do they mimic plain wordpress blogs like the defaul themes?
Thanks in advance my new friend
That is a really cool experiment. I am currently also trying to pump out 1 article per day as well as other advertisng. Im still trying to get links back to my posts on my page. Any suggestions?
Mike
I have the same questions as Darrell…
I also am interested in how much you were earning BEFORE this experiment.
But since you’re not telling us about where the articles pointed to – pointed here and pointed there – how can we know whether or if your article posts were directly responsible for the increase in traffic? Click throughs? SERPS increases? I guess there is no clear tie in beween the articles and the $$ except an inference because both happened at the same time. Correct?
This is really awesome man! I never knew article marketing can yield such results! But now I think I am gonna try this for sure for my next site.
Also forgot to add that, I will surely blog about this on my webmaster blog!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but if your earnings for the last month were $561 and then after you added 28 articles it was $1043.81, those 28 articles earned you $482.81. Is that correct?
If it is then kudos to you! Very impressive.
Yes Patrick that’s right. However, since then those articles have helped me to make a LOT more.
Court – how has this site done since this experiment? It would be interesting to know if the maturing of the content has impacted your cash flow.
Shawn last month this site produced $2,980.60.
Court,
Hopefully you are still checking up on this! Let me clarify because I’m still a bit hazy..
You personally wrote 28 original articles and submitted them with UAW. UAW then submitted their spun articles, as well as your originals, to their list of directories. Let’s say they spin an article 3x. So you have 84 original articles which get submitted to hundreds of different sites, spread out over a long period.
So each article will be posted roughly over 10 times, targeting different keyword based pages on your site?
So it doesn’t matter that your site is being linked by duplicate content? What’s your math on making sure you don’t submit too many articles too quickly? That’s my biggest concern if I use this service.
Please respond if you have the time. Short answers can work. Thanks.
Its not duplicate content because the article is “spun.” Controlling the amount of articles you submit is probably how you keep from submitting too many articles and thus getting too many links. However, some of the directories won’t accept the articles you submit with UAW or any article submission service for that matter, so essentially you could set the “setting” to 50 sent a day and only get “2″ links.
30 articles? Do you mean you submitted 30 unique articles? or do you mean you took a few articles (3-10 whatever) and submitted them to 30 article directories? Sorry if this is a stupid question!
Any updates on this now? Were you able to increase your earnings by another $500 in the coming months then?