I imagine that every affiliate at some point of their career resort to “article marketing” as one of the methods of promoting their websites. About a year ago I have experienced some success with EzineArticles. The downside was the fact that it was somewhat painful job, only on rare occasions were my articles approved for publishing the first time. My main problem of course was poor grammar. Of course I have abandoned article marketing. But revently I was convinced by Mike Levin to give article marketing another chance via Content Spooling Network (CSN from now on). There is a trial period of 21 with CSN, of which I am trying to take full advantage.

I hope this review will give you a better understanding how CSN is working. My experience is very limited, I have joined only three days ago. But since the rial period is limited only to 21 days, 3 days is enough time to come to some conclusions.

The main reason CSN looked so attractive to me was th fact that they offer ghostwriter services, which potentially can save some one like myself tons of time and lots of trouble. This service is not included and you will have to pay extra in order to be able to use it. They do have subscription options for this purpose which potentially can save you a few dollars. However to have an original article written for you it will set you back $5.20- this article will become what CSN calls a “seed article”. You will need to further modify this “seed article” if you would like it to be submitted through their system to their network websites as well as to the external article publishing directories such as EzineArticles. To accomplish this let say with a 5 paragraph article you will simply need to paraphrase each paragraph- this also can be achieved if you decide to paraphrase each or every other sentence. Since writing an article is a struggle on its own I have decided to both outsource the writing of the article and paraphrasing it, which set me back about $12.

During this trial period I will spend only $25 which should cover just bout two “seed articles” and three “rewrites” for each. Since I have chosen to distribute only to 7 out of 15 external directories available (see the picture on the right), by the end of this trail I will submit 14 articles to different directories.

With CSN lowest subscription plan at $29.95 per month which technically allows you to submit 4(x15) articles with additional $50 for using their ghostwriter service it will cost you about $1.33 per article. (I hope my math is correct, if not maybe some one from CSN can correct me).

Now that have the math our of our way, time line is what really concerns me. There was little delay on my part because I wanted to get out of my trial period as much as I can. It took CSN’s ghostwriter one day to write the original article and another day to paraphrase it. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the final approval of the article is on its way and it will be submitted to the directories today. So I will have only 18 days left to see the results (if any). Is it enough time? I am not that certain. From my previous experience with EzineArticles it took over two months and 12+ articles to even notice any increase in traffic.

I still believe that CSN is offering a great deal, and I am planing to stick with them for at least next three to six months. However, it would be in their own interest to maybe extend the trail period to 30 or maybe 40 days. As I have mentioned I am spending at least $25 on ghostwriter service during the trail period.

If you are a good writer and feel no need for using their ghostwriter service trying their product will cost you absolutely nothing.

If you have ever considered to outsource your article marketing task CSN is probably best service I have seen so far. Even if I think that 21 days are not enough to measure your results.

Make sure to visit CSN blog as it is a good source of information about their services.

Hittail is one of my favorite analytical tools. Since the time I have joined Hittial, it was able to collect over 5000 keywords used to find my blog on various search engines. Top ten keywords are responsible only for 9.7% of all search traffic my blog received in the past. Of course this sort of statistics can be produced by other tools. What makes Hittail unique is its ability to identify keywords for which you have a good chance to improve your rankings on search engines. In the time wen I was still friendly with Google, Hittail has produced excellent results. Now I am hoping to employ it’s magic during my extreme experimentation.

I have to admit thought that placing Hittail code on your website or blog is only first tiny step for achieving better results. The magic comes to life when you begin acting on Hittial’s suggestions. Unfortunately I failed in that respect- I have currently 67 keywords sitting in my “To Do” list. Even if I write an article a day, I have two months of work to catch up. To be honest, being that English is not my first language, I always wanted to outsource “article marketing”. But I could not find a product good enough to do what I want it… until I was introduced to Content Spooling Network. The video below explains why

I imagine that Googlebot must be some what confused with my blog lately, since it is not welcomed here while inbound links continue to grow.

The most recent page rank reduction, that hit heavily Malaysian bloggers, tells me that Google employees in charge of the “punishing stick” must be as confused as their little bot. There is no doubt in my mid that penalties are carried out manually, and I think that for the most part on a random basis, although there are claims that Google targets blogs based on certain keywords.

It has been 12 days since Googlebot was forbidden to index my website. So it is about time for some sort of update on the subject. It maybe some what lengthy, so brace your self or come back later when you have nothing else to do.

I Was Wrong

Since I have made certain prediction I shall begin by analyzing those predictions. I am happy to say that I have been proven wrong in everything I have predicted. You should take my findings with a grain of salt since my experiment is only 12 days old.

1. I have predited decrease a 30% loss of traffic to my blog. I probably could have turn out to be a correct prediction, but after my original article where I announced the Googleban had been sphan, stumbled and link to from bloggers with a huge traffic, I have actually seen an increase of traffic by at least 40% comparing to the 12 days preceding my experiment.
2. Since my website was about to removed from Google index, I have predicted a considerable decrease in the amount of spam. The simple digest report by Spam Karma 2 indicates otherwise. To my amazement the amount of spam (both human and generated by bots) almost tripled. I guess Google can take this as a compliment.
3. I predicted that bloggers, especially those unfamiliar with my blog, would hesitate to link to me since there will be no trace of my site in Google index- thus potentially indicate of my blog not being safe to link to. To my surprise I received links from blogs that have never linked to me in the past. And of course I am thankful to all those who linked to me out of solidarity.
4. Finally I did not loose my place in the dofollow community over at BumpZee, since Andy considers me one of the funders. Thanks Andy.

Things Beyond What I Have Predicted

When I have restricted the Googlebot from this website, I did not know that the penalties where yet to come. My Web Hosting Review Blog’s page rank is reduced to 0 from 2. It was reduced from PR3 to PR2 in the previous round. The interesting thing about that blog is that there is not a single sponsored review on that blog. Although that blog was listed in ReviewMe, Sponsored Reviews and TLA. I have similar websites that were not listed there and those have seen an increase of page rank, although they have nothing but affiliate datafeeds in them. Since few of these websites where listed in Google Sitemaps, it does not appear that Google is penalizing websites across the Sitemaps accounts. They do it manually and many I add they do a terrible job detecting which websites deserves the penalty and in the short term potentially hurting smaller bloggers and leaving the biggest offenders untouched.

It may be way to early to draw any conclusions from my experiment. For now I am just saying to simply not to trust Google. If you write good content and are working on growing your subscribers number you may very well survive without Google. More updates on the way.

Few days ago it was Google – today it is Microsoft. I have been running Ubuntu on my PCs for a few months. On my desktop Ubuntu is the only OS, however my laptop currently can run Windows and two versions of Ubuntu.

The only reason I was hanging onto Windows was the Widnows Movie Maker. However today or maybe yesterday, Microsoft did something that pushed my patience to its limit. Evidently the most recent Microfots update pack screwed the GRUB and I am no longer able to choose my OS on startup. I am sure there is a way to correct this but instead I went on and tried to take a closer look at Kino- the Linux video editor.

What I have discovered surprised me:

1. Kino is as good as the Microsoft Movie Maker. Actually it may be even better.
2. Kino integrates perfectly with Blip.tv.

Bye bye Windows!

Update: After writing this post I came across Dan Dennedy’s Blog- a must read blog if you have chosen Kino as your video editing software.

No? What about a new start up? Wish us luck! The video bellow is of my wife making a fondant cake. I am not sure why people go so crazy about these sort of cakes. It taste terrible. Unfortunately my wife did not tell me that no one eats fondant. Oh well.

Click To Play