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If you decide to ignore my advice and submit your articles to multiple directories, there’s a nice list of directories ranked by Alexa traffic at SEO Researcher.

The last article I posted at EzineArticles received about 20 visitors directly from their site within 24 hours, so it may be worth submitting to a couple more Alexa ranked sites just for the direct traffic.

It’s no secret that writing articles is a great way to get backlinks to your blog. You write a simple 400-500 word article and submit it to sites like EzineArticles and GoArticles. You add a link back to your blog, either in the body of the article, or in the author biography below the article. Sometimes, and only sometimes, they article itself will rank well in the search engines and you can get a decent amount of traffic directly from the article� but normally you are adding them just for link value.

There are some that say that you should submit your article to the hundreds of article directories available.� More places the article is listed means more backlinks, right? There are even services that will save you the work and submit them to 200 directories for you for $25 or so.

Is it worth it to either pay for submission or to spend a few hours submitting them yourself?

In my opinion, no.

I’ve promoted a lot of blogs and other websites over the years but even when I’ve submitted the articles to 200+ directories I’ve ended up with very few additional backlinks reported by Google. Yahoo shows me the additional links sure, but does this help? Again, no, not in my experience. I’ve never noticed any increase in search engine ranking or traffic for those articles I’ve submitted to 200 directories. They rank exactly the same as those sites where I’ve only submitted the articles to two directories.

I suspect this is because Google is devaluing the links from all those copy-cat article directories. They are, after all, duplicate content.

My advice is to continue to use articles to gain backlinks, and any bonus traffic you might get, but only bother submitting to two or three directories.

I always use EzineArticles as the first submission. I have a platinum membership account there, so articles are reviewed and listed within 24 hours. I then modify the article slightly and submit it to GoArticles. I find that within a few days the article will appear on 20 or more sites as they scrape, I mean syndicate, � content from these two sources.

I was about to stop using GoArticles due to the amount of spam articles that appeared there but they seem to have gotten their act together and instigated a better review system. The articles there nowadays are higher quality and seem to be syndicated widely.

It’s easy to rewrite one of you blog posts into article form and takes only a couple of minutes to submit.

Considering the time spent, your results will be far in excess of any other promotion technique.

The Warcraft blogger.com blog that I created in November has been getting a steady 100 to 150 unique visitors a day since soon after it was indexed. Yesterday, one of the keywords appeared on the front page of Google and the traffic shot up to 573 uniques. Today it’s back down to normal levels.

Sudden jumps in the SERPs are usually either due to Google rearranging its rankings for everybody with a new algorithm, or simple time-based changes for a new site. New blogs get a honeymoon period where they will rank higher than normal then, after a couple of weeks, jump around a little and sink to their permanent positions. Only changes to the site content or increased link value will raise them higher.

Since the chatter level in the Google forums is low, I’m assuming that it’s only the vagaries of a new site index, rather than a Google shuffle. Only time will tell if it’s a taste of things to come or just big G teasing me before it is dropped completely.

Affiliate commissions over the last 30 days have been a total of $422, an average of $14 a day. This average has been very consistent over time. Remember that this blog only took five hours to create and cost nothing. It hasn’t been updated since it was created. If Google is kind to me, there’s no reason it shouldn’t continue to make money for several more months. Let’s say it only lasts another three months. That should net me a total in affiliate commissions of around $1600. Divide $1600 by 5 and you have an hourly rate of $320. Now I realize that this isn’t going to make anybody a millionaire overnight but how does it compare with the average McJob? Work five hours and create one blog a day and it’s a viable full-time job. I’m certainly not suggesting that you, or anybody else, quits their day job and starts creating blogs before they prove it a viable money earner. Start in your spare time. Build two blogs a week and see how it goes. Some will be failures, I guarantee that. Starting out, you will have more failures than successes. If I can give you enough tips on this blog to improve on the success ratio then I’ve done my bit.

Now that Christmas is out of the way, I will start on the blog case study. The idea is to show each step, in depth, on building a money-making blog over a couple of weeks. If you are serious about making a living blogging, or at least some extra cash, follow along and build your own blog. It’s really only by doing that you will learn. If you are going to just read, nod your head, and go back to browsing the web or watching TV then you’ve wasted my time and yours.

With all these live case studies going around it would be remiss of me not to join in.

If there’s any interest, I could demonstrate all the steps to building a profitable blog over a period of a couple of weeks, right from research to the first affiliate commissions.  Maybe something to earn $100 a month or thereabout.  I know this isn’t a lot, but I understand that a lot of people are still lost as to how to make the first commission checks.  Once you’ve made the first few hundred dollars it gets easier.

One thing I would like to do is to use only completely free tools and hosting.  No affiliate links described as “essential tools” here.

Let me know if there’s an interest and what form you would like it to take.  Suggest a blog topic if you like but it will need to be fairly mainsteam so that everybody understands the terminology and keywords.

If you have an entertainment, games, celebrity or humor blog, you may be interested in using StumbleUpon to generate a few thousand visitors to your blog over the next few weeks.

Why only these types of blog? In my experience, most StumbleUpon users are “channel-surfers” who are bored and looking for diversion and entertainment rather than information. Sure, it can deliver traffic to almost any site but the real impact will be on entertainment sites.

StumbleUpon is a website discovery service that integrates social networking with peer review. It uses a tool bar browser add-in available for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. It effectively generates networks of surfers linked by common interests. Users ’stumble upon’ pages recommended by peers in their network. Users rate sites by way of a simple thumbs up or thumbs down buttons on the tool bar, and can optionally leave additional comments for the site’s review page.

It has 1.5 million users who rave about it in their personal profiles:

I am addicted to StumbleUpon! You can participate as much as you like… you can simply “stumble” and discover great sites on the internet or you can be more active and participate in the forums and/or message fellow stumblers from around the world with interests similar to your own and make friends. I can sincerely say that, since I installed the Stumble Upon tool bar, I cannot imagine surfing without it!

This is possibly the very very best thing you can download for any browser, ever. An absolutely peerless tool for the nethead culture (to which I can claim membership) to aid in the endless quest for cool sites.

The StumbleUpon website isn’t particularly easy to use and, for me, it was a struggle to find stuff I needed or how everything worked. Indeed, just by browsing the site it’s hard to work out what it’s about. The tool bar however is very easy to use - just go to a page you like and click on the thumbs up button. You can then click on the Stumble! button to be sent to similar sites.

As an experiment, I added three pages from a neglected arcade games site to StumbleUpon on November 12th around 5pm. Here’s the traffic I received:

 
The site previously had an average of around 250 a day and this had been steady for several weeks. Following the StumbleUpon thumbs up, the traffic reached 1179 the next day, dropping to 816 on the following day. Bear in mind that I only added three pages - for sites with several hundred pages the additional traffic could be significant.

A few tips on maximizing your StumbleUpon visitors:

1.  Add, obviously, your own quality pages or permalinks but also add pages from similar sites or blogs. This will give you entry to a relevant network of peers and helps you blog appear more often.

2. When you submit a permalink, make sure you add the appropriate tag.  Obvious maybe, but easy to overlook.

3. Make your title sell. “How to get 1,000,000 visitors to your blog” will attract more people than “Blogging on Blogging”

4.  Make friends. The more StumbleUpon friends you have the more visitors. It’s as easy as clicking on the “Friends” button on the tool bar then on the “Add as Friend” link in the user’s profile.  Rate sites that you friends have submitted.

If you do install their tool bar, be aware that a number of the stumbled pages you see will be paid placements. They are reticent to reveal the quantity of these paid pages but it’s believed to be less than 2%. Also, review their privacy policy.

I was inspired to write this post by a “special $27 report” I read a few months ago that told me how to get a front page position for any keyword in Google within 48 hours.  This is of course far too long to wait, so here’s my “special report” on the 15 minute Netscape version.  You can pay me the $27 later.

Netscape has something of a checkered history.  It started in 1994 and released the first Netscape browser a few months later.  They had a very successful IPO in 1995, their shares coming close to setting a record for a first day gain.  Unfortunately for them Microsoft noticed their success and release Internet Explorer which started the infamous browser wars of the late 1990’s.  Netscape was taken over by AOL in 1998 and their browser fell out of favor.  The Netscape.com website was given a complete redesign in June 2006 when it became a sort of combined search engine and social news site somewhat similar to Digg.

I have to say I had forgotten about Netscape until a comment on a social bookmark site led me to a rediscovery.  Although Netscape doesn’t get anything like the traffic of Digg and del.icio.us, it does still get a substantial number of visitors.  This is a bit like going after the low hanging fruit in the search engine world.  In a similar way to Digg, members vote on stories submitted by other members and those with the most votes rise to the front page.  Almost all of the front page stories are news, with political news featuring highly in the run up to the US elections.  There are however a number of subpages on subdomains such as books.netscape.com and music.netscape.com.  To get to the top of these subpages requires very few votes, if any.  Often the top 3 stories have less than 5 votes. Here’s an example of the top story on the music page.

To test the traffic I placed an article from EzineArticles on one of my blogs and submitted the permalink to Netscape.  The article was about choosing iPod accessories.  It was well written but certainly nothing earth shattering.  I didn’t try and monetize this page since it was intended only as an experiment.  When you submit the story you assign tags.  In this case I used the tag “iPod”.

The traffic started to arrive within a couple of minutes - it’s a bit like Digg in slow motion.  I tracked the stats for four days:

This shows 100 on the first day, 43 on the second day and falling to 14 and 13 on the third and fourth days.  Not a massive amount but remember that this was one post for one submission which did not receive any votes. 

The interesting thing about this is that the traffic did NOT come from the music page, it came from the regular search page. Netscape displays the submitted stories as the top three results.  In this case I was number 1 for the search phrase “iPod”, which matched my tag, falling to 2 on day then disappearing.  It seems as though they keep stories with more votes for longer.  The current number 1 was submitted 99 days ago and had only two votes.   Obviously you should only submit quality posts so that they receive a few votes and thus stay in one of the coveted top 3 positions. 

Would you like to be number 1 for a popular search term for 3 months?

Okay, rhetorical question.

Incidently, if you would like me to post the scoop in the Google 48 hour thing, let me know in a comment.