As I mentioned, I wanted to do a thorough review of Auto Article Profits by John Thornhill because I believe that article marketing is one of the best ways to generate traffic and make money through internet marketing (it’s the one method I use consistently to do so each and every month).

Of course some months I might only get a handful of articles out, and other months I might do hundreds.

Anyway, let’s get to the review.

The salespage at Auto Article Profits is pretty standard for a salepage. Big red headline with a bold claim, which in this case is to see how John makes between $10 – $500 every month from writing just one article.

I don’t know why I always look at these headlines with scepticism (maybe I’ve been in the internet marketing game too long) but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt and keep an open mind for this review.

He goes on to say why article marketing is awesome (which I agree with) and talks about getting your one article published on over 400 different websites – which I now understand how just one article COULD go on to earn as much money as he claims in the main headline.

One point on the salespage got my attention because it’s something I definitely agree with:

Contrary to what many people think, article marketing is not about bombarding the Internet with as many articles as you can possibly churn (or spin) out. There’s a little more to it than that. When used correctly, each article that you publish can become an ongoing traffic – and profit source.

That is so true. I believe that writing quality articles will give you so much better results than just rewriting some rehashed PLR. If you put the time into your articles, you will definitely reap the rewards.

OK, so the salespage seems pretty solid. I agree with most of his claims and I’m looking forward to actually reading the report to see if it contains good information on using article marketing for maximum results.

Stay tuned for Part 2 … the actual auto article profits report review

I have to say that by far the technique that has made me the most money online and got me the most traffic is article marketing. I use articles for my adsense sites, my amazon sites, in fact pretty much every site out there that I own.

I use articles for both direct traffic and for SEO purposes.

I put them on article directories such as ezinearticles.com and web 2.0 sites like hubpages, squidoo, infobarrel and xomba (the last two I’ve only started using).

Last month (May) I made the most money I’ve made in a month for at least a year (and probably longer but I only started tracking my income properly in a spreadsheet about a year ago so can’t remember what I earned before that).

The majority of my income was from my Amazon sites which I used articles to get ranked for certain keywords.

My point is that if you are into SEO or just want to get some direct traffic then you need to be writing articles.

I know, I know, many people say they hate writing – luckily I’m one of those people that actually does like writing but don’t ask me to write anything for you because I don’t have the time.

But you can outsource your articles if you’ve got the cash. I’ve had pretty decent results with humanrewriter.com which you give them an article and they’ll rewrite it for you. An average 350 word article should cost you around $3-$4.

New customers get $5 free credit (which will get you around one article) to test out the service first if you like. Then you just buy credits from your PayPal account and order as many articles as you like. There is usually a few days turnaround (although some days I’ve got articles back as quick as 24 hours) which you get to accept or reject.

It’s not a bad resource if you hate writing, but I still think you should be writing your own articles as well.

If you are new to writing or need some help with structure and layout, then I recommend learning about it.

There are some really good threads on the warriorforum that you can read about (do a search for Tim Gorman who I think is the best article marketer on there).

Or you can get a good ebook that will teach you the techniques in one hit.  I bought I good one from Dean Shainin once.

To help you out I thought I’d review a few article marketing ebooks/courses that are currently out at the moment over the next few weeks.

The first one I plan on reviewing is John Thornhill’s new ebook Auto Article Profits because it’s only $10.  I’m hoping it’s a good resource and not just some rehashed PLR – I’ll let you know soon.

Until then, take care.

Well it’s about time I wrote another post here, even though I still have limited time online these days. (Oh by the way, I had the baby – she is now 2 weeks old and very cute).

But lately many of my online friends have had their sites deindexed due to what Google has called Made For Adsense (MFA) sites or thin affiliate sites. Of course some of these are not thin at all, they just happened to be hosted on Blogger which if you didn’t know already is going through a major cleanup right now.

I still have all of my Blogger sites for now, but then I never really developed any of them substantially and most of them are just sites I played around with, so it would be no huge loss if I did lose them (although I’d rather they stayed as most of them are true blogs about my experiences of certain life experiences). I didn’t develop them to make money – which is probably why they haven’t been touched.

Now let’s get to the mini site issue. If you’ve been in IM for a while you’ve no doubt heard of the x-factor type micro site model where you build a site around a certain keyword, usually a physical product and then use an ugly theme and a big in your face Adsense block right at the top of your article to encourage people to click your ads so you earn money.

Now the problem for these types of sites is that Google has said enough is enough, and is deindexing them left, right and centre.

Why?

Well if you look at it from Google’s point of view, or rather the advertisers that are paying for ads on Google, then you’ll realise that these are probably not real customers but more likely just people trying to run away quickly from your ugly theme. You will earn money, but the advertiser is not likely getting a true customer. If they are unhappy then Google is unhappy. If Google is unhappy then they will kick your ass right out of its index, no questions asked.

You can read more about this at my favorite blogs:

Griz – Making Money Online in 2010
Ben – How not to make money online

So why is Amazon better?

So we have established why having Adsense can be risky, but does that mean all mini sites are useless? Well no. I have quite a few mini sites but they all have one main difference – they use Amazon on them.

Why should that make a difference?

Adsense is a pay per click program. You get paid when someone clicks an ad on your site whether they are a real customer or not.

Amazon however is a pay per sale program. The advertiser (Amazon) can’t lose out because the customer MUST make a purchase before you get paid. Therefore it’s less risky and Google won’t care about your mini site as much. (They still want to provide value to the searcher, but they won’t totally diss your site unless you blatantly do something wrong).

Any pay per sale program is going to be safer for your business and your website

Does that mean you should avoid Adsense altogether?

Of course not, I still have Adsense on many of my sites, but here’s the difference: most of these sites have good amounts of content that I personally wrote (so it’s original and written from my point of view in most cases), the topics are those that I know about, they are updated fairly frequently, all have different themes (I could never do the ugly theme thing as I’m too much of a girl and like things to look pretty) and I try and provide real value.

Now, I do need to go and ‘tone down’ the Adsense on some of these because I do use ‘above the fold’ big square Adsense blocks on them which I’m now quite nervous about, but these are definitely not crap sites.

So what do I recommend for you?

If you have been using the Adsense mini site model (less than 5 pages of real content, ugly theme, big in your face ad block) then I suggest you either add loads more content (and make it GOOD content) or swap Adsense for an affiliate program or pay per sale program like Amazon or eBay. Oh and change your theme too. Make sure it doesn’t look like every other site out there in terms of content, layout and colours.

Start to try new things and don’t follow the herd. The reason Griz and Ben are so successful is because they do their own thing, try things out. If you just follow the advice of the latest ebook then it’s likely not to work long term unless it’s built on a solid business model. If you do like a particular marketer’s strategy then add your own spin to it. Mix it up.

And the biggest lesson that I’ve learnt from Griz & Ben is that if you are in the MMO niche, then for goodness sakes, don’t stick your head out and become too popular (I’m thankful that only about 3 people online know who I am).

Gotta go and feed the baby now, catch ya next time.

t xx

I’ve been playing around with the free traffic system which is a site that allows you to submit a 400 word article with two self serving links to up to 30 blogs. And I have to say I haven’t been overwhelmed by it yet.

I have just chosen the free options (there is also a paid option where you get an extra link and 10 extra blog’s per article) and while I am seeing a few copies of my articles around they are usually on very low quality spammy looking blog sites.

Because I’m just testing this, I didn’t want to send the links to any of my money sites, so I’ve been sending them to HubPages and EzineArticles that I’ve written instead.

So far the backlinks haven’t significantly shown any improvement in either the EA articles or hubs.

So should you sign up?

Well, it probably can’t hurt since it’s free right? I guess the only thing it will cost you is your time to write the articles and some extra time to put in the unique spinning syntax that they use.

Of course most backlinks in my experience usually take a month or two to show any significant movement in the serps so it could be early days.

But I really don’t think you are missing out on much by not using it.

I’ll continue to test it for a few months, but really I find much better ways to get backlinks that do seem to help.

But if you want to check it out for yourself – feel free >>

Just a quick little blog post today to let you know that I’m going to be doing the new contest over at HubPages called The Helpful Health Hubs Contest (try saying that five times fast).  I’m not going to be doing it for the prizes (I guarantee that my hubs won’t be good enough – I’m there to make money not perfect long hubs) but I still think it will be a fun challenge anyway.

I wanted to start winding down the amount of work I’m doing online this month because I’ve only got 7 or so weeks to go before the baby gets here (and in that time we’ve got to find a new place to live) so thought this might be a fun little project to do for March that shouldn’t take up too much time but still has the potential to earn some cash.

Anyway if you want to have a go as well then head over to HubPages and read the rules for their health hub contest.  It officially starts 12.00pm PT.