I’ll preface this by saying that these screenshots indicate a problem only, and the cause of the problem is undetermined. But one possible explanation leads us back to the topic announced every week: “It looks like Clickbank is cheating me!”

A Quick Intro to PPC and Conversion Tracking

If you’re unfamiliar with PPC marketing, here’s a quick rundown on the process so that these screenshots make more sense.

It usually starts with compiling a good keyword list. I usually end up with 200 or more keywords. From there, you create your ads and measure results. The goal at this point is to separate the dead keywords from the ones that convert. I usually keep the most profitable keywords only, and will even cut off the marginally profitable ones just to keep my overhead as low as possible. This keyword paring process usually takes about 45 days, during which time I also split test ad copy. 

After this process, I ramp up spending so that I triple my spend on the top keywords. Usually this results in anywhere from a 500 to 1000 percent increase in profits, because the overall campaign spend has been increased, and because I’m only focusing on 10 keywords or less, instead of over 200. The point is, what you see in these screenshots is the campaign during optimization.

To determine profitability, you can use conversion tracking. In this case, the Clickbank product I selected enables me to add my Google tracking ID to their thank you page. So on the front side, Google can tell me what was clicked, and on the back side, any of those clicks that reach the thank you page (a sale) will read as a conversion.

The Case of the Disappearing Conversions

Okay, so the bottom line is that the sales Clickbank says I make should equal the conversions Google says I make. If those numbers don’t match, there’s a problem. I should also point out that most Clickbank publishers do not offer conversion tracking, so what you see in these screenshots you won’t be able to find in most campaigns. That is, the problem might still be there, but it would be hidden from you.

Screenshot 1: Adwords

This cropped shot shows my Adwords campaign for this Clickbank product. The conversions reported here come directly from the publisher. That is, I pass them my Google conversion ID, and whenever any of clicks makes a purchase and reaches their thank you page, the number of conversions is incremented.

So according to this, I have 21 conversions, with an average conversion cost of $35.50. This is the startup / optimization portion of the campaign. Running this campaign for only those keywords that convert brings the conversion cost down to about $24. 

Screenshot 2: Clickbank

This cropped shot shows how many conversions Clickbank has credited me with. 

According to Clickbank, I made 13 sales, and they’re going to pay me commissions on this number. As you can see, for every three conversions Google shows (i.e. the number of people who reach the thank you page after a complete purchase), Clickbank actually credits me with two.

So where does the other 1 out of every 3 conversions go? That’s the question. Clickbank can’t or won’t answer that question. Any ideas?

Short-sighted Shaving

If Clickbank is shaving, it’s short-sighted. At a conversion cost of $24 and a commission of $32.50 (what this program pays), this is a profitable campaign. It’s not a home run, but I would still run with it and optimize it. This is only about 30 days of effort. If I tripled spending on only the top 5 keywords, I’d be looking at between 150 and 200 sales per month, and Clickbank would receive their 7.5% commission on each sale.

But as it stands, this campaign is losing me a couple dollars per conversion, so it will be dropped. For 8 large commissions (under $260), Clickbank bypasses 150 to 200 smaller commissions per month ($500/month).

That actually leads me to believe that Clickbank is not shaving. After all, how stupid would they have to be to make it this easy to find discrepancies? And how stupid would they have to be to cheat themselves out of ongoing commissions?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, so my action plan moving forward is to simply avoid promoting Clickbank products via PPC. It is just not worth the hassle any longer.

I’d like to hear your thoughts. Anyone experience anything similar to this? What else could explain these numbers?

I was going through some 100-word posts that I had an outsourcer write a few months back, and I decided to plunk them down into Linkvana on a few older domains that I haven’t touched in months. I don’t pay too much attention to these domains because they’re not big earners — maybe a sale every three weeks.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but lo and behold, after dripping in a few links, each of these five domains started making sales again. After three days, there have been a total of 12 new sales, an increase of 1000 percent or more over “normal.”

So, a friendly reminder. You’ve heard of all the basic link building advice:

• Build links from relevant sources
• Don’t link to bad neighborhoods
• Watch your link speed
• Maintain an organic pattern
• Link to your home page and inside pages
• Focus on long-tail keywords, but don’t ignore competitive phrases
• Vary your anchor text
• In text links are preferable

But don’t forget link currency and don’t completely ignore those old domains. It’s obvious that Google values authority, but they also value currency, whether it’s with an aged domain or not.

For example, dominating a key phrase in days is simple with a tool like SE Nuke or Brute Force SE, but the rankings are short-lived. But you can also get the same speed of ranking by re-energizing your aged domains. 

I used LinkVana because I had the posts handy, but this is also a perfect application of Article Marketing Automation. Write and spin one good blog post, and you can point several links to a dozen domains with under an hour’s effort. And that hour might just pay off handsomely!

Ezine Articles is clearly the best. I’ve had articles in other directories bring more traffic, but on average, my best results come from Ezine Articles. Several months ago, I started timing my articles so that they would appear on the “Most recent articles” section overnight. I had a moderate amount of success, and when I heard about their premium service, I decided to give it a shot.

The premium service features very fast trunaround time for article approvals, keyword statictics at month end, and the ability to schedule posts. So I figure, what the heck, I’ll schedule all of my articles to post right at the end of the day, so I’m virtually guaranteed top position overnight.

Didn’t quite work out that way. Here’s what I observed: My articles were released at approximately the time I specified, as indicated by their appearance in the category’s RSS feed. But they never made it into the most recent articles list.

Here’s what I think happened: the most recent articles list is the result of a cached SQL query that looks something like this (irrelevant parts removed):

SELECT Articles WHERE ScheduledDate > NOW, Approved = TRUE, 
ORDER BY Article ID (or ApprovedDate) DESC LIMIT 15;

Essentially, ‘grab the latest 15 articles that are approved and supposed to be posted to this category,’ where latest in this case means either the highest article ID or latest submission time. But the problem (I think) is that scheduled articles, even though they are not yet released, have an older approved time or a lower article ID because they were submitted earlier.

So when a post is scheduled, its publishing time would put it in the latest list, but because it was reviewed and approved by an editor hours, days, or weeks ago, it never makes it into this list. It does, however, make it into the RSS feed because the feed just pulls the latest articles. That’s what I assume happens behind the scenes. 

So if you were thinking abouyt getting the Ezine Article premium membership inthe hopes that you’d be able to schedule your posts for these hot times, then you’re out of luck. I will say, however, that turnaround times for editor approval have been lightning fast. So although it can’t be automated in advance, if I begin submitting articles between 45 minutes and 2 hours before the final review time (5 PM CST), they’ve been sitting pretty overnight.

Now I use Market Samurai, and I can literally find a handful of keyphrases in just about any niche in under 20 minutes. Not just keyphrases, but good prospects, because during that time I am also able to use the SEO competition dashboard to grab some nice competitive profiles.

There were some serious limitations in the “early days” of the tool, and I wasn’t without complaints, but here we are still in beta, and this software is more polished than 95 percent of the other marketing-related software I own. And I’d call that a conservative estimate. Most of my complaints from a few months ago have already been resolved with automatic updates. And there is still plenty more to come.

Anyway, I’m getting way off of the point here. I was recording some videos for my upcoming 30-day traffic blueprint, and I wanted to re-record one on using Market Samurai. In this video, I just picked a niche at random — colon cleansing — and found 3 good keyphrases that could be used to build a niche site. Even with all of my rambling, I still went from start to finish in under 20 minutes.

That’s Market Samurai’s greatest strength in my opinion: it produces actionable data fast. It might not dig deeply, but being able to dig into a niche in 20 minutes is gold.

Learn more about Market Samura

The NextGenLinks Concept

For SEO purposes, building hundreds of links pointing only to your site’s home page doesn’t look very organic; nor do 100 links with the same anchor text. So generally speaking, when you begin building backlinks to your site, you build 50 percent of the links to your home page with varying anchor text; you build the remaining 50 percent to your top inside pages, again varying the anchor text. Fifty percent of the links will have your primary keyword, with the other 50 percent consisting of the remaining long-tails that you’ve uncovered.

NextGenLinks address this SEO concern with a system that builds as many links to inside pages as your home page. Because most sites have “money” pages with your best offers, you can also designate bonus URL’s that will get more links than other pages in the system. It also addresses the problem of relevance by making sure that links in and out are contextually relevant to the source or target. 

How NextGenLinks Works

Your first step when you join is to add your domains. I had a gold account, so I decided to load it up with 30 domains of varying types. I had a number of blogs, some conduit review sites, a StoreStacker, a few Build a Niche stores, and a few AdSense sites.

After you add your domains, you spider them with their contextual spider. What really should have been a one-click process — say a “Spider Domains” button — was a painful 48-hour exercise in frustration. Their spider has some serious problems, which I briefly mention below.

Once your domains are spidered, you grab your PHP snippet. You can either grab PHP code directly, or you can download a sidebar widget that you can add to your widget-enabled Wordpress blogs. You can place the snippet wherever you like, but it seemed to look best in the sidebar, in a 120×600 or 160×600 layout. You can define the width, but just setting it to 100% meant that it would fill your entire column, matching your layout better. You can also customize the colors in your PHP snippet so that it matches your blog, much like you can style an AdSense ad.

Finally, you individually go to each of your domains in the system and approve outbound links from your pages. You can submit up to 8 links per day per domain, but I wasn’t able to determine how your outbound links affected your inbound links. For example, outbound link building was so tedious (explained below) that I ended up with 40 inbound and 2 outbound links after a week.

So for an automated link-building service, it requires quite a bit of effort. And that effort is ongoing, as all outbound links have to be created manually. I don’t believe that’s necessarily a bad thing, as I like knowing that I can prevent links to bad neighborhoods, but it’s too cumbersome to do so. The way it works is you select each domain and then select the page from which you want to link. NextGenLinks will then identify contextual matches for those pages that you can review and approve.

This contextual matching feature is pretty slick. Most link-building services will match on a domain; but NextGenLinks takes this a step further and matches on the content of a specific page. For example, on one of my cell phone blogs, I had an article posted about the link between cancer and cell phone use. This post attracted a link from a cancer blog. That makes a heck of a lot of sense and adds to the organic presentation of the linking service.

I should also mention that inbound linking can be automatic or manual, whichever you choose. NextGenLinks recommends automatic inbound links, but after reviewing my first 8 inbound links (junk), I decided to manually review them. I ended up rejecting about 50 percent of the link requests, and only got one link that I would consider a good backlink.

The Advantages of NextGenLinks

NextGenLinks is engineered very well. In fact, in terms of site quality, feature forethought, and intuitive usability, it’s one of the easiest to use sites I’ve seen in quite some time. The dashboard views are excellent, both from a design and coding standpoint. But there are some irksome problems underneath the hood (see next section). Overall, I was very impressed with the service and its usability.

• You control your outbound links, so you can link to whomever you want. If you don’t want to link to a new PR0 blog, then don’t. Your outbound links are also contextually relevant, giving a very organic appearance to them.
• Your inbound links are contextually relevant on a page-by-page basis. This is absoluetly golden.
• Your links grow very naturally over time.
• You can specify bonus URL’s to receive extra inbound link love, which again is very organic. 
• You can build links to every single page of your site or blog.
• You can link out from only those pages you choose. For example, if you want to keep your homepage or your offer page clean, then do son. You control not just to whom you link, but from where you link.

The Problems I Have with NextGenLinks

Really, this is not an automated link-building service; it’s simply a link facilitation service. It will help you manage your n-way link exchanges, that’s all — it won’t handle them for you. That might be just what the doctor ordered for many people, but I was looking for what was billed on the box: automated, relevant links.

This next problem is not the fault of NextGenLinks, as it just isn’t mature enough yet to have a large inventory of sites, but I was inundated with junk inbound link requests. After the first 8, I turned off the auto-approve feature so that I could review them. Six of the first eight were from the same page on one site — I don’t know why I’d want six backlinks from one source, even if they do point to different pages. I’d rather use my allotment (there’s got to be some kind of allotment check) on different sources.

Several of my inbound links were from dynamic pages that had nothing on them but an error message. Pages get into the system via the spider, and then the owner must approve the outbound links, so the owner knows that he submitted a junk link, but once it’s approved (or auto-approved), you can’t get rid of it.

Out of all of the links I received (about 40 over a week), only one was what I would consider high-quality. There is a lot of AdSense junk in the system right now. I couldn’t find any sites whose numbers were comparable to mine in terms of PR and traffic, and I didn’t even add my flagship domains into the system.

Another minor issue is that there doesn’t seem to be any protection against reciprocal links. That is, I could link out to someone who had already linked into me. I didn’t try to link to a page that already linked to me, so I can’t speak to that, but there was no domain check.

The spider is terrible. Just terrible. The web-based spider is slow as molasses, and often didn’t spider the same domain similarly on different runs. Sometimes only a third of the pages would be indexed, sometimes hundreds (literally) of external pages were spidered. One of the spidering sessions took a good 12 hours to run. Six of my sites couldn’t be spidered at all — it just kept returning 0 URL’s.

There is also a downloadable spider, but it unfortunately generates zero-length CSV’s, at least at the time of this writing. Finally, you have another option: you can add URL’s individually. You need to enter a title, a description, keywords, and other relevant words. You can also fetch these from the meta tags, but there is a threading issue and it seems that the Ajax calls start to trip on each other. It doesn’t matter anyway, because the response times on the server are so slow that it often takes several minutes to perform one action. They have got to move this thing to a bigger cluster. For the limited number of members they have right now, that performance can only be explained by hosting this on a VPS account. Even a single dedicated server would have been appreciably faster.

And finally, to get the last ounce of frustration out of my stem: the UI is Flash-based. That means that the best browser innovation in recent years, tabs, cannot be used to speed up the perceived responsiveness of this process. Instead, you are treated to popups, and popups that popup other popups. It’s all very linear and entirely frustrating. 

The Bottom Line

NextGenLinks looks to be a very promising service. I know I mentioned quite a few negatives above, but in reality, much of those are the types of problems that will plague any new service.

While it’s certainly not automated by any stretch, being able to facilitate an n-way link exchange with relevant properties is gold. Especially when you consider that you can build links to inside pages as well.

But I suspect there will be some growing pains. They need more users and a bigger site inventory; they need to provide some community guidance to prevent webmasters from linking out from bad pages; they need some kind of quality guidelines or checks in place. Speaking of checks, they need some kind of reciprocal link alert or prevention function.

Considering that I was able to build 40 links to 30 sites in about 5 days time, I’d day there is enormous potential here to generate a consistent flow of relevant inbound links. Unfortunately, this flow requires a little too much effort for my taste. Time is always at a premium, and is usually the number one factor I consider when making a decision. With the number of link-building services competing for my wallet, there are others that meet my needs a bit better.

That’s why I cancelled my subscription.

Traditionally, my big winners have been Clickbank and PayDotCom products. They tend to fit in well with niche blogs, are versatile, and are easy to market. But conversions are way down. What used to convert 1 in 50 hops is now converting 1 in 300 hops. Other contextual sources added a nice chunk of income, including programs like AdSense and Chitika. But I’ve been experimenting with CPA offers for about 6 months, and they continue to bring in more money each month.

I still focus on niche blogs, rather than more traditional CPA tactics, because that’s where my strengths lay. And this traditional, information-focused, review-oriented, or customer-focused approach (depending on the niche and blog) has led to some incredible conversions. I don’t want to reveal the niches, but I can say that part of the reason these offers are doing well is due to  macro factors like the economy. That is, the offers cater to people who are looking to save money, or who might replacing high-cost activities with lower cost alternatives (e.g. renting instead of buying).

The only unfortunate aspect is that my selection of offers is limited, as I’ve never explored all of the CPA networks. So that is on my priority list, and I hope to get it done this weekend.

Anyone else noticed any kind of shifting in their marketing mixes recently? What kind of offers are doing well for you?

I have been a user of Article Marketing Automation from the day it was first released to the public. As a member of PLRPro, it quickly became my favorite article marketing tool. It shares many characteristics with Unique Article Wizard, but the approach and implementation are much different.

What is Article Marketing Automation?

Article Marketing Automation is a blog syndication tool. Although “Article Marketing” is in the title, I hesitate to refer to it specifically as article marketing. The concepts are the same: you submit articles (blog posts in this case) in order to gain the backlinks that are obtained through syndication of the content into a network of sites. The two main characteristics that lead me to refer to it as blog syndication: the blog network that consumes the posts; and the in-text links rather than resource box links.

By the way, if you’re not using tactics like this to promote your web property, you’ve really got to start. There is simply no better way to drive traffic than through article marketing and syndication. I cover some clever twists to traditional article marketing in my $7 report, Backlink Persuasion.

So, Article Marketing Automation consists of a number of things:

• The content creation and spinning tool
• The content management, submission, and distribution system
• The blog network

Content Creation and Content Spinning

Article Marketing Automation supports two types of content spinning: rewritten sentences, and phrase substitutions. Phrase substitutions are what is generally thought of when spinning is referenced, but rewritten sentences generally result in a higher degree of uniqueness. When the two are combined, it’s easy to create a 100 percent rewritten article fairly quickly. To give you an idea of how this spinning works, see the two examples below.

Sentence Rewrites

“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” could be rewritten as “The dog was laying on the ground relaxing, when all of sudden the fleet fox vaulted him in a single bound.” It has the same meaning, but is said in an entirely different manner, with an entirely different sentence structure. If your article has 25 distinct sentences, you could mix and match sentences to form many unique articles.

Phrase Substitutions

The {quick~fast~speedy} fox {jumped~vaulted~hurdled} over the {lazy~sleeping~drowsy} {dog~canine}. In this case, the sentence structure stays the same, but words are mixed and matched to create a unique sentence.

When you combine complete sentence rewrites with phrase substitutions within those rewrites, you have a completely intelligible, unique article!

Within each post, you are permitted three links, plus an optional YouTube video link. I usually try to direct those links to two money sites in order to get more bang for my buck. The YouTube video link is gravy, giving you video views and a more popular YouTube video. Any type of link is accepted, as well, including affiliate links. For example, if I reviewed the latest weight loss diet, I could embed anchor links to my site, my YouTube video, and leave a straight affiliate link. Because these links are in-text, and not in a resource box, they appear very natural.

I’ll often limit my links to just two per post, and I very often try to keep them below the fold in the post. This seems to help my syndication acceptance rate, and as a content publisher, I reject all articles that aren’t rewritten at least 40 percent, that are miscategorized, or that have links pressed together near the top of the post.

Content Management, Submission, and Distribution

When spinning your article, you assign it to a category, and the categories correspond fairly well with what you’d see in Ezine Articles. The category you select determines the blogs that will eventually receive your post. This creates some interesting dilemmas because you don’t know ahead of time how large your market is, i.e. how many blogs in the network accept articles from your category. So the tighter your niche, the more trouble you might have finding matching blogs.

What I usually do in these cases is add the post to a parent category, or cross-purpose a post. For example, one of my niches dealt with a certain type of vintage collectible toy. There were very few collectible blogs about that subject, so I wrote an article on installing track lighting to highlight a collection and submitted it to the home improvement category.

Once you submit your posts, Article Marketing Automation will begin submitting them to blogs who have decided to receive content. Blog owners are shown the full text of the article, and are also given a rewrite percentage. Generally speaking, you want your articles at least 40 percent rewritten to increase your chances of acceptance. This distribution is done on a very gradual basis, over the course of months, making these links appear very organic. Another benefit is because these posts are all going to blogs, the search engines tend to view them more favorably than traditional articles.

Again, category selection is important. For example, in looking at three articles I submitted exactly two months ago, one was syndicated to 36 blogs, one to 59 blogs, and one to 79 blogs. You want to choose the highest count category where the post is still relevant. If you post to an irrelevant category or your article is not unique enough, you could end up with a high rejection rate. Overall, my articles in popular niches are accepted over 90 percent of the time; narrower niches often rank between a 70 and 80 percent acceptance rate. This is a good sign, as it ensures you that content publishers are paying attention to posting quality, which bodes well for your inbound links.

Article Marketing Automation’s Site Network

All of AMA’s blogs are self-hosted Wordpress blogs only, so you are not affected by the whims of anyone other than the content publisher. I have actually been quite surprised at the quality of the blogs that accept my content. Of course, my articles are useful and well-written, but I’ve also had them appear on what I would consider to be aged blogs with a relatively high degree of authority. This is a huge win! These are the types of blogs that would charge $50 to $100 for a review, and now I can submit my own content directly to them as part of my monthly subscription.

You can add a blog to the network through the same site that you use to submit articles. It requires entering an author account for AMA, and enabling XML-RPC publishing on the target blog. Thereafter, you’ll get e-mails with each potential blog post.

Good and Bad About Article Marketing Automation

Pros

• Clean interface, and the entire service is very easy to use
• Two types of spinning lead to highly unique articles
• While spinning, a percentage rewritten indicator displays how unique your content is
• Article marketing works, unique content works, backlinks work. AMA supports all of these things.
• AMA’s blog network is largely filled with high-quality, niche blogs, which means targeted, relevant backlinks
• Contextual links in the post body are organic and valued highly by the search engines
• Content drip allows posts to be published a little at a time, simulating an organic pattern
• You can submit an unlimited number of articles from an unlimited number of sites.
• You can submit up to three links plus one YouTube video per post
• Even link destinations and link anchor text can be spun!
• You can build a huge number of backlinks targeting any keywords you like.
• Detailed post submission, acceptance, and keyword ranking stats are available in the dashboard
• Daniel and Marc are known for excellent service and value

Cons

• Some tight or focused niches have little coverage
• Blog owners determine if your content is accepted or rejected
• Spinning can be tricky to pick up from the start
• Error highlighting during content spinning needs to be more intelligent
• I’m not fond of monthly subscription services

Who will benefit from Article Marketing Automation

AMA’s monthly price tag is easier to justify than UAW in my opinion. It’s $20 cheaper per month at $47, but much of the reason for the value in the system is the ease of use and excellent results that can be obtained. Anyone who uses article marketing will benefit from AMA, and anyone who is looking to drive traffic and build targeted backlinks will derive benefit from the service. Anyone who has ever purchased reviews, or guest blogged, or participated in blog carnivals, etc. will find this service immensely helpful.

AMA isn’t perfect by any stretch, but it is improving, the blog network is growing, and it works very well. Like UAW, you will benefit from using Article Marketing Automation if you’re willing to put forth the effort to write and spin articles. If you are not going to use the site up to its potential, then there’s no use getting a subscription.

Personally, I still find $47 tough to stomach, even though I like the service. But I will say that out of all of my monthly services of this nature (I use UAW, AMA, LinkVana, and Neurolinker), Article Marketing Automation is the one that I will never go without.

Getting Started with the Article Marketing Automation

If you’re ready to get started with Article Marketing Automation, or if you just want to learn more about it, check out the sales page. If you want to test drive it, provide me with an article — you write the article and take a link, I’ll submit the article and take a link. We both win.

Visit Article Marketing Automation

(You might also be interested in my Unique Article Wizard review and my Unique Article Wizard and Article Marketing Automation comparison)

• Syndicate your content on multiple sites
• Build a large amount of relevant backlinks
• Provide unique variations of your content

The approach they use to go about these steps is very different.

For my money, I use both. I usually first submit my articles by hand to Ezine Articles. Once approved, I then move on to the ‘Big 12′ article directories, which I also submit by hand. I’ll then rewrite my articles, spin them, and submit them to Article Marketing Automation. Once complete, I’ll generate four to six spun articles, and use those for input into my Unique Article Wizard submissions. Sounds complicated? Actually, it’s quite painless once you get the hang of each service!

Stay tuned for my comparison of UAW and AMA.

AMA Review Here | UAW Review Here

I have a lot of good, solid niche properties scattered around these interwebs. When I say solid properties, I mean well-designed sites and blogs that provide value — not just some regurgitated PLR site smothered with AdSense. I like to make quality, plain and simple.

But there’s a trade-off: if one is willing to spend so much time developing a site, he also has to be willing to spend even more time marketing to achieve the same return on investment. As you can imagine, keeping track of and driving traffic to all of these niche sites takes quite a bit of time.

So I use productivity tools. And being a user of Unique Article Wizard for so long, I figured it was about time that I wrote a review of the product, who can most benefit from it, and what type of results you can expect. UAW is just one of the tools I use in my article marketing arsenal, but it’s a good one. . . to an extent.

What is Unique Article Wizard?

First and foremost, Unique Article Wizard is an article marketing tool. If you’re not using article marketing to promote your web property, you’ve really got to start. Favor has ebbed and flowed over the years, but there is no better way to drive traffic than through a good article marketing approach. I cover some clever twists to traditional article marketing in my $7 report, Backlink Persuasion.

Unique Article Wizard supports the creation and syndication of articles — specifically, unique articles. While the terms of service prohibit me from talking about how it goes about this, there are certain assumptions that can be made:

• If unique articles are generated, there must be some sort of spinning mechanism. Spinning, by the way, is a tactic used to combine alternative words, sentences, and paragraphs in differing combinations in order to generate multiple unique copies of the same content.
• Software-generated spins usually create horrible content that might work for search engines, but is useless for readers. I avoid it at all costs. Hand-spun content, on the other hand, is readable and provides value to end users. Because I’m a user of Unique Article Wizard, you can assume that there is a hand-spinning mechanism involved.
• Because of the name of the service, you can assume that there is a wizard-based interface available to help you generate your content.

If you were to assume those things, you would have assumed correctly! Once the content is spun, Unique Article Wizard then helps you syndicate that content throughout its network. That network consists of literally thousands of sites, but in practice, my articles generally get submitted to anywhere from 800 to 1200 different sites.

How does Unique Article Wizard work?

One you hand-spin your content and submit it for approval, an administrator looks over your article and queues it for submission. You can specify a submission rate so that these submissions “drip” in over time. It’s widely believe that this drip effect is favored by search engines because it mimics a more natural progression of link building, rather than an automated one. I keep my articles set at 50 submissions per day, which means that each article is generally submitted over the course of 3 or so weeks. Each day, you are sent an e-mail report notifying you of the submission, and you can also view your weekly stats.

This, however, is one of the weaknesses of the tracking mechanism. The idea behind Unique Article Wizard is that you can generate unique copies of your article. This is important because while there is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty as it relates to article marketing, you will not rank highly for each article if the content is duplicated. That is, Google will choose one article as the authority, and the others will be bumped lower in the search results. That’s what you try to prevent with unique content — by submitting unique content to each site, each article has the chance to rank highly in the search engines. When these “feeder” articles rank highly, they will push your target site up the results pages as well. But by generating unique content, the Unique Article Wizard is then unable to track your article’s reach. That is, if you want to track your articles through Unique Article Wizard, you must not make them unique, which defeats the purpose entirely! The bottom line: you can’t track article stats through UAW.

Like the article, you can also spin your resource box, which is like a byline for online articles. In your resource box, you will pimp your target keywords, and provide a call to action. By linking the target keywords, you will increase your site’s ranking for those keywords (do this for the search engines); and by providing a call to action, you will encourage direct click-throughs to your money site (do this for the readers). That’s the power of Unique Article Wizard: you get to spread your links (up to three per article) to hundreds of web sites quickly and easily.

Unique Article Wizard’s Site Network

The Unique Article Wizard network consists of thousands of sites, including standard article marketing directories, article submission sites, Wordpress blogs, Blogger blogs, and more. While there are thousands of sites in the network, your article is only submitted to relevant sites or all-purpose article directories. For example, your baseball article wouldn’t be submitted to a cooking blog. In practice, my content is usually submitted to 800 to 1200 different sites, but it sometimes takes some trial and error to get to this number. Without violating the non-disclosure agreement, I can say that you assign your article to categories in order of relevance — the order you select in part determines the “reach” of your article.

There are some quality directories with high PageRanks and high Alexa rankings in the submitted site list. There are also some very junky free-for-all type of article sites that accept any article submitted. Wordpress blog owners can install a plugin to receive content from the Unique Article Wizard. While many of these blogs are low-value, there are some solid blogs in most niches, and backlinks from these blogs will affect your site’s standing in the search engines.

With the large number of submissions, you can expect a large number of failed submissions, as well. I’m also a user of Article Post Robot, which is my favorite article marketing software at present, but it has an extremely high failure rate. That’s one of the things that you buy with a hosted service like Unique Article Wizard — there is someone there monitoring submissions and making changes on everyones’ behalf. So while there will always be some failed submissions with UAW, they are less than with other services and software.

Good and Bad About Unique Article Wizard

Pros

• There is a wizard and a one-step interface, so once you get the hang of submissions, they tend to go quickly.
• Article marketing works, unique content works, backlinks work. UAW supports all of these things.
• You can drip links in over a time frame that you specify, giving a more organic look for the search engines.
• Wide distribution network of not just article sites, but also niche blogs. Those relevant links are great to come by.
• You can submit an unlimited number of articles from an unlimited number of sites.
• You can create pen names and aliases so that you keep your niche sites separate from one another.
• You can build a huge number of backlinks targeting any keywords you like.

Cons

• The system is a bit clunky and particular. Expect to encounter a few headaches while you learn how submissions work.
• They have got to put this on a better server cluster. Sometimes it is slow as molasses.
• Some of the errors using the system are frustrating. It once took me 45 minutes to generate my resource boxes because it kept throwing away my results at the data validation stage!
• Monthly cost is pricey, unless you make sure to use it fully.
• There are no good submission or distribution stats available.
• Some article sites and blogs are very low-quality.

Who will benefit from Unique Article Wizard?

Frankly, I think that everyone who wants to drive traffic and build backlinks will benefit from UAW, regardless of whether you have one site or one hundred. Or even more targeted: if you are using article marketing, then you already understand the benefits of this kind of service, so you will likely get even greater results. Because UAW is a monthly subscription service, you can sign up for one month and queue a dozen articles for your one site; or if you manage many sites, you can add it to your promotion plan.

How much you benefit from the service depends on how much you use it. But if you are going to use it, be prepared to write some articles! Better yet, have four or five articles at the ready when you sign up for it so that you can immediately start building backlinks from it.

The price tag is high. Too high for me really. I use it just enough to justify the cost, but not enough that it doesn’t sting when the bill rolls in every month. So if you decide to use it, I’d recommend that you track your article marketing activity so that you can be sure that you’re getting your money’s worth.

Getting Started with the Unique Article Wizard

If you’re ready to get started with Unique Article Wizard, or if you just want to learn more about it, check out the sales page. If you want to test drive it, provide me with an article — you write the article and take a link, I’ll submit the article and take a link. We both win.

Read more about Unique Article Wizard

(You might also be interested in my Article Marketing Automation review and my Unique Article Wizard and Article Marketing Automation comparison)