I’ve just finished reading the June module for Tim Gorman’s Article Marketing Lifeline product (see my Article Marketing Lifeline review here) and one of the things he talks about is Article Clustering.
I had never heard of article clustering before so was really intrigued by this strategy for building links and getting both your articles and website ranking better on the search engines.
Basically the technique is similar to a link wheel in which articles, blogs and web 2.0 sites are linking to each other to provide more juice to your money site. But the linking strategy is much more complicated than a simple link wheel (which just links once to your money site and once to the previous web 2.0 site).
The article clustering strategy takes it a step further by interlinking these properties much more extensively so each property essentially get’s a boost in rankings making the links to your main site much stronger.
So how can you incorporate this into your article marketing and SEO plans?
While I haven’t read the main product that introduced this technique, it seems that the quickest and simplest ways of incorporating this is to:
1. Create your main money site
2. Build approximately two articles linking to EACH page on your main site
3. Build a Web 2.0 property (hubpages/squidoo/blogger) that links to both your main site and also to one or two articles. Do this for each page on your site.
4. Write one article pointing to each web 2.0 site you create.
5. Create another web 2.0 site that links to your money site, the first web 2.0 site and one of the articles.
6. Continue as often as you like to improve rankings
Essentially what you are doing is building a spider web/pyramid type structure whereby each new article or web 2.0 site is strengthening the sites above it. It’s like a pyramid scheme on steroids! And like a pyramid structure, whatever is at the top is generating the strength from those below it.
If you want to take it even further you can build supporting sites instead of using web 2.0 properties (or even use a combination of both).
Now that may seem like a lot of work (and it is) but generally for most low to medium competition phrases you won’t need as many links as you think you will. You might only need one or two supporting sites with articles pointing at them and your main site to achieve the rankings you want.
And of course this doesn’t have to be all on the one day, you can write one article per day, or create one mini site/web 2.0 property per day over a period of weeks and months depending on your time schedule.
Each week check your rankings and see if you have moved. If you haven’t then write more articles/ build more supporting sites. Interlink some of them (cluster them). Rinse and repeat.
Time is actually on your side with this because as the sites and articles age they will get stronger naturally anyway (especially if they all have backlinks to them pushing them up).
I actually did this to one website I have without even knowing that was what I was doing (it was one of the first websites I created and I also created articles, a squidoo lens and a blogger blog all linking to each other and the main site). That site ranks number one and brings some really good sales for the term I was targeting (before I even knew what I was doing!) – so this method does work very well.
Tracey,
I use Blogger can you tell me how I can link one blogger blog to another. I am not sure how you do this linking stuff.
Thank you.
Hi Ann,
As a start, try some internal linking (that’s a link on your blog to another page on the same blog). So if you want post A to rank in the search engines for ‘blue widgets’, make a post B and place a link in that post using the words ‘blue widget’ back to post A.
Once you’ve interlinked some of your pages then you can either write and article or start another blogger blog and create more links using the term you want to rank for.
Tracey
Hi Tracey,
Your still finding time to blog even with your new arrival!
That was a really good post, thanks for sharing it.
I am not very good at article writing, need to get my finger out and start creating my spider!
Sally
@ Sally,
Not a lot of time LOL – Although she does sleep occassionally.
Hey your internet millionaires seminar sounded interesting, I’ll have to find out more about it later. t
@ Tim
No problem, I enjoyed reviewing it. I’ll be doing more promotion once the warriorforum offer has ended – right now the WSO is ranking too high for me to compete, but you’ll be happy to know I’ve had lots of clickthroughs for ‘article marketing lifeline’ so people are interested in finding more about it. I’ll definately be asking more questions in the future, right now I’m a little time poor (just had my 2nd bub) so mainly working on my niche sites when I get a chance to get online. Talk/email soon. t
Tracey,
Wanted to stop by and say thank you so much for your extensive review of Article Marketing Lifeline and I hope you are enjoying the monthly module updates. There will be more good things to come in the future updates.
I’ll be the first to admit that the price for AML is a bit high but that’s based on the unlimited email consultation and lifetime monthly module updates.
What I’m seeing as the creator of this product is that once folks get over the initial price of the course and find out they get the benefits of a continuity program without a monthly fee they have no problem making their purchase.
Please don’t hesitate to ask me anything related to article marketing or IM in general. I’m always glad to be of assistance to anyone that needs a helping hand.
Respectfully,
Tim
Hi Tracey, just wanted to say thank you to you and Tim for the review. At the moment, I can afford to buy the product, but I have heard a lot of positive things about Tim. It was in the review where we were allowed to download the May module, that I read about Info Barrel for the first time and I have since signed up. So thanks for that and thank you for your very thorough reviews about products.
Hi Yasmina,
That’s fine, I certainly don’t want anyone paying for something they can’t afford! But if you have any questions about article marketing that you’d like Tim to answer then let me know and I’ll ask him for you.
Good luck with InfoBarrel, I’ve only got one article there at the moment but plan on doing more there soon.
Take care, Tracey
Sorry mean’t can’t afford!
Hi Tracey,
this is a great post and I think it will improve the way how I create backlinks, but could you please be more specific on each of 6 points of this pyramid scheme?
1. Create your main money site
– This one, I get.
2. Build approximately two articles linking to EACH page on your main site
- So, for example, in the current site I’m doing I have 7 pages which includes the home (index) page. Does this mean I’m creating 14 different articles (2 each to the 7 different pages)? Or does this mean I’m creating 2 articles and submitting them to 7 different directories, whereby I change the resource box for every 2 to point to a different page on my site?
3. Build a Web 2.0 property (hubpages/squidoo/blogger) that links to both your main site and also to one or two articles. Do this for each page on your site.
- Am I building 7 different Web 2.0 properties, each having a link to one of the 7 pages on the site and one of seven different articles?
4. Write one article pointing to each web 2.0 site you create.
- This I will understand more once I understand the details of step 3 above.
5. Create another web 2.0 site that links to your money site, the first web 2.0 site and one of the articles.
- Is this one Web 2.0 site or multiple, different ones?
6. Continue as often as you like to improve rankings
- Understood.
Thank you for your time @ take care,
Trevor
Hi Trevor,
Let’s see if I can answer your questions:
For the purposes of simplicity lets say that your money site has 10 pages.
Write 2 original articles for each of the 10 pages (so 20 different articles altogether). Submit them to ezinearticles. (Once they get approved by EZA by all means spread these around to other article directories (no need to change any of them)).
Start a new hubpage (or lens, or whatever your preferred web 2.0 property is) for every page on your website. This hub will link to your webpage on your money site AND also to one (or both) of the articles on EZA that are also linking to that site. (Boosting the link juice).
So now you should have 1 money site, 10 hubs and 20 articles that you’ve written.
You could stop here, because this is already a lot of juice, but if you want to continue you could.
Write another article and link them to two of your hubpages. So 5 more articles and use the two allowed resource links to link to each of the 10 hubs (2 different hubs per article). Submit these to EZA. (Again feel free to submit the exact same articles to other article directories once they get approved by EZA).
If you still want to continue (and you may not need to because chances are you might already be ranking well) then ..
Create some more web 2.0 sites (perhaps use squidoo or snipsley this time) – on each article include one link to your money site, one link to the hub that points to your money site, and one link to any of the articles you want to that you’ve already written and published.
and on and on and on.
Hope that helps!
Tracey
Hi Tracey,
thank you for your clarification, it’s helped a lot. However, I’ve heard something, which is contrary to what has been said here. I’ve heard or read somewhere that you get link juice from a domain from one link only, if there are more links that come from the same domain (=site), only the first indexed link on this site will be taken into consideration by Google and you will get juice from. It seems logical to me. What do you think of it? If it is true, it might be better to post the 20 unique articles to 20 different directories and then spread them around…
I hope I type understandably
Take care,
Trevor
Hi Trevor,
Yes and No. G will only count one link per PAGE to another PAGE. So there is no point putting two links to the same page from another page (so if you used EZA you should point your resource box links to two different pages to get the most juice).
But domain wise, you still get juice no matter how many links are pointing at your site. However, not all juice is created equal. Every link gets a teeny tiny bit diluted depending on how many links to that page (again, think pages and not domains) you have. So the first link will get around 100% juice, the second link might get 99% and so on. After about 50 to 100 links it does diminish quite a lot and it’s worth pointing your links at a different page on your site or use a different domain.
Does that make sense?
Tracey
This is really very good way of improving page rank. I will try this.