My Recent SEO Success and Failure

Grand | Nov 19, 2009 | 0 comments

I meant to write this post long time ago, since I’ve actually stopped promoting my old landing page in organic results.

This was a typical lander with a story-type presell on the main page and links to the product I was recomending. I’ve analysed the market and found other competing products that solved the customer’s problem. Next, I wrote a good presell and added blog to feed my lander with some articles for better QS on Google.

The offer didn’t really take off in search ppc, so I paused campaign after analysing it and seeing no potential.I’ve made some sales however, and not a single refund.

In October I’ve decided to give this site another chance and started to pick keywords for my SEO. I’ve analysed a bunch of different keywords using Market Samurai tool and cross checked everything manually. What I found is that one of my main keywords is actually my domain name! Cool, it’ll be easier to optimise this site then…

These 2 keywords had over 300 searches total per day (if my site is in top position) and the competition isn’t pretty hard, yet I needed to build some good backlinks to my site to get it to the top.

My strategy was pretty simple.I’ve decided to add content to my blog and use the same rehashed articles for article marketing.

I outsourced 20 articles on Getafreelancer.com – 3$ per 400-500 words article + 1$ per rewrite (2 rewrites) =5$ per article and 2 rewrites. Total cost 100$.

In 3 days I got all my articles written and started spinning them using Jetspinner free service. Usually it took me under 20 minutes to create a spin and I saved 50+ spins every time.

Article 1 – my blog post with 2 links: 1 link with my main kw to money page, I link with secondary kws to the previous blogpost.

Article 2 – I posted it to Ezinearticles with 2 backlinks to my money page with main kw and to my fresh blogpost with its main kw.

Article spins – I used them to submit articles to article directories using services like Article Blueprint and UAW. All backlinks were 1 – to my money page with one of 2 main kws and 2 – to my recent blogpost with it’s main kw. Each submission gave me around 400-500 uniqe backlins from different article directories.

Initially I was intended to post my 20 articles each day, and spend total 20 days for this site promotion, however…

1 – I got lazy

2 – I got other stuff to do

3 – I had to go to another hospital and didn’t have notebook for several days

So over a month (to November 3) I’ve submitted only 5 (!) blogposts and made only 5 article distributions. 15 other articles are still waiting …))

My second part of SEO was finding good high-PR one-way links to my site. I quickly found several hundred backlinks from blogs and submitted comments with 2 main keywords and my sites URL. I pinged every blog post I’ve commented in Pigngoat.com. I was lucky to add several dozens of PR 2- PR 6 1-way backlinks to my site.

Over the month, my site finally hit the top 10 in Google for both of my keywords.

I’m not doing any SEO with it now but it’s holding it’s positions for over 3 weeks already.

I’ll tell you the reason why I stopped promoting this site later, now it’s interesting to look at the daily traffic trends to my money page:

I see a spike of visits (over 100 visitors) on November 12, but then the average # of visits returns to 20-30 visitors daily. Not uncommon for position 8 in Google, espaecially when there are several adwords ads as well, so the traffic volume in the bottom reduces significantly. What I see however, the spike in traffic correlates with jumping to position 6 in one day, which is seen on SERPY tool as well.

I’ve checked backlinks and found that Yahoo counted only 97 backlinks to my site, mostly from the high PR blogs, and Ezinearticles and some other article blogs from my article distributions. As you can see, each article I submitted, was distributed to approx 700 directories – uniqe article version to each directory. Assuming that say, 200 directories reject the article, I should have 500*5 articles=2500 backlinks min. I have only 97, and most of them were from my manual link building.

So, even if you do article distribution, son’t forget to submit your spins to MAJOR article directories:

1. ezinearticles.com

2. goarticles.com

3. buzzle.com

4. articledashboard.com

5. articlecity.com

6. searchwarp.com

7. isnare.com

8. a1articles.com

Whenever I analyse the top 10 rankings for different keyowrds, I see lots of articles from these article directories, that means google loves them and each their backlink counts 10X more than 100 backlinks from unknown sites that your articles are distributed to.

When starting promoting this site, I calculated that in case of at least 200 visitors to my money page daily and 1% conversion rate I could make 1-2 sales a day and earn 600 to 1200$ a month (commission was 21$). But on November 3 I’ve decided to click on one of my affiliate links and boom – I’ve seen an error message…

After contacting Clickbank, I found that the vendor simply removed his product from Clickbank, so I’ve spent 1 months of efforts and 100$ in vain.

Would you promote low-gravity products anymore? Me never!!!!

Did you fing this post useful? You can get more useful and interesting affiliate tips from me by following my future posts

Tweet This Post