Four weeks ago, I submitted my first article to article directories with Article Submitter Pro to see how the strategy would work on an article in a small niche completely unrelated to Internet Marketing.

The results were pretty dismal for the first few weeks, and now, at week 4, as I end the experiment, here are the tallies for backlinks in the major search engines:

Google: 20
Yahoo!: 21
MSN: 21
AltaVista: 22

Which leads me to ask… is Altavista going to bounce back from obscurity??

Anyway, the results are pretty promising, so I’ll be doing some more submissions in various niches, as well as another experiment with a more general marketing article in the near future.

I mentioned yesterday that I was changing the placement and colors of some of the adsense ads on my site.

Thus far, the click through rate on those pages has nearly doubled, which has pretty much kicked me out of my Adsense earnings slump.

Some day boosting revenues is going to require more than 20 minutes worth of work. I hope that day doesn’t come soon.

UPDATE:

As the day wears on, the CTR is triple my best CTR for those pages from last month.

As happy as I am, I am kicking myself for waiting so long to work on those pages. It being thanksgiving here in Canada today, I suppose I should be thankful for the money to come, rather than thinking about the money I left in the gutter in the past.

Still…. GRRRR!

After record months in August and September, it seems like my AdSense income for October will be back down to June levels. My traffic is steady, so the culprits are a lower CTR and lower bids on my major keywords. I’m not sure if it’s a seasonal fluctuation, or whether Yahoo!’s Publisher Network is eating into the advertising pie, but I decided to be proactive.

To deal with the lower clickthroughs, I moved my ads around a bit on the pages that generally show the worst ad performance, and I have three different color schemes rotating. This should keep a few more people from glazing past the ads in search of the article text.

I’ve also added about a dozen more articles to my main site, and plugged the rss feed to a few more search engines.

I don’t know if the second part of the plan will work, but already the pages I moved the ads around on are showing a higher CTR for the day than usual.

I can’t believe we’re well into October already.

It was HOT today, which also makes it hard to digest the date. We almost never had hot October days like this back in Edmonton.

In any case, I missed my third week article check-in, so here are the stats to date:
Google: 20 (last week: 17)
MSN: 22 (last week: 9)
Yahoo!: 14 (last week: 9)

Not bad. Not bad at all. If you were to submit one article a week, the backlink totals would become very significant quite quickly.

I’ll give it another run after week 4, then start a new test with a more general marketing article to see how the topic affects the distribution of the article.