For the uninitiated, Twitter is a totally free micro-blogging and social networking service that lets users keep up to date with each other’s updates, or tweets as they are known in the community. These tweets are basically short posts of up to 140 characters in length which are shown on the users profile page and at the same time are sent out to other members of the community who have subscribed to receive the individuals tweets – or followers of the person. To cut a long story short, the more followers you may have for your Twitter account, the more potential visitors a site of yours could receive if you send out a tweet that contained your URL or affiliate link embedded. The nagging question for me though, was the following: is this method really as effective as others are making it out to be? I came to a decision to give it a try and the following is a case study of the results I achieved.

The first thing I did was create three Twitter accounts and started to try and gain followers. Initially, people were reluctant to become followers of myself, but I soon found out that the more followers you gain, the more will start joining you. You see, having followers is rather like having “authority” – the more you have, the more others will respect you and be inclined to join your followers list. Getting to a thousand followers was the hard part, but once I got to that milestone, within a month I had 7000 to my main account. The other two accounts (don’t forget I opened three initially) had about two thousand followers each so altogether I had almost 11,000 followers.

But were my efforts of attracting all these followers worth the trouble? Did I manage to make any affiliate sales? The answer is no. Through various tweets I sent to the followers had affiliate links and landing page links, they didn’t convert at all. Out of 11,000 followers, only an amazing 0.003% clicked on a link – yes, only 33 people out of 11,000 clicked a link! You may be saying that there had to have been a reason for this; maybe the traffic wasn’t targeted enough? In fact, all my followers were people that were somehow interested in affiliate marketing and as so had “affiliate marketing” as one of their interests. Well, the reasons for not making any affiliate sales, in my opinion, is spam. Have a look at what I mean:

You can see that so many individuals are trying to sell one product or another that if you post a tweet with any affiliate links embedded, it disappears in a flood of other ads.

The verdict? Well, I think it’s clear. From my point of view, twitter is worthless when it comes to affiliate marketing. When Twitter first started and there weren’t many affiliate marketers there, it may have been possible to make some money from it, but now it is not so simple. You have to note though, that I’m talking about the Twitter platform, not the Twitter Traffic Machine, which I discovered to be quite good. It did deliver what it promised on the sales page and I got lots and lots of subscribers in a relatively short span of time by utilizing the methods described.

If you have been able to make an affiliate sale using Twitter, please post a comment below to let us know the details. How many people followed you? How many clicks did you get per tweet? What niche were you promoting? Etc, etc.

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Of course, if you are already making money online as an affiliate, you won’t find anything new there, however, if you are looking for ways to make money online, you will find the report useful. If you have not subscribed to my list yet, fill in the form to receive the report.

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First of all, I did away with all of the blog posts that were showing on every page of the blog due to the “recent comment” widget. This widget shows approximately five recent comments, so what I did was add five comments myself, without any links pointing to my website and hence the comment that had my website link was automatically pushed off the list. At the time I implemented this measure my website had over 1300 backlinks from just these blogs, according to Yahoo site explorer.

After this, I added two new content pages to the website and bookmarked them to get them indexed. As I expected, they were indexed in Yahoo and MSN but Google was still ignoring my website. At that time my website statistics in Yahoo site explorer looked like this:

Over 1300 backlinks and 3 web pages indexed in Yahoo. As you can see, the amount of backlinks continued to grow as it would obviously take some time for the search engine spiders to crawl the thousands of blog pages and eventually “see” that they don’t link to my website anymore. Over the next few weeks the number of backlinks decreased dramatically.

Finally, I have sent a request to Google via their webmaster tool and requested my website be reconsidered for indexing. I explained to them what had happened and what exactly I did to solve the problem. Several weeks passed, until finally this morning I launched my position checking tool and was very pleased to see that the website has indeed been indexed in Google for almost all my main keywords:

In conclusion I would like to add that I am unsure whether my website was indexed because of my request to Google for reconsideration, or because the number of backlinks which caused the original problem had decreased steadily over the last few weeks. Anyway, I am delighted the website is indexed and I can say with total confidence that posting blog comments for links building is a very powerful method. However, if not done properly, it can cause lots of problems for your website, as you well know from my experience.

By the way, you can find a huge “dofollow” blog archive by following the link: dofollow blogs

What if I Told You That You Can Make at Least $7,000 Each and Every Month on Affiliate Sales? Subscribe to my List to Get This Information for Free.

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The website has generated $2,627 so far which works out at about $850 per month just from one single affiliate website which took me only two hours to set up and about two hours to write quality seed articles for my article spinner. As mentioned in the previous part of this case study, I actually hired a person who manually submitted the spun articles to various article directories, so the total amount of money invested in this website has been $80 ($50 for submitting my articles and $30 for 3 months hosting) and the total amount of time invested is a paltry 4 hours!

I am absolutely delighted with the results I achieved from the website. If you can make $850 per month on autopilot from one single website, why not create ten or even more websites? Moreover, you do not even have to have a website to promote it using spun articles; you can use squidoo lenses or even blogger blogs instead. You can even avoid paying $50 for submitting articles if you have the time and the patience to do them on your own.

I think that this will be the last part of this case study. It is enough proof that article spinning is undoubtedly a very effective and profitable link building method which you should include in your “to do” list. At the moment I am writing some very useful affiliate marketing tutorials which will be sent to my subscribers in the very near future.

I really hope you found this case study useful. Don’t forget to subscribe to my list to get more information on affiliate marketing and search engine optimization.

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I have a small affiliate website that has been optimized for a moderately competitive keyword, which was created over six months ago. To be totally honest with you, the website is not a profitable one. It still generates a few sales every now and again, however, the money I do get from it is not substantial at all. That’s why I decided to use this site for my case study. Basically, even if the website did lose all of its search engine positions, it wouldn’t hurt my budget at all.

The first thing I did was copy all the content from this website including images, alt tags, etc. I also wrote down the names of all the website pages. I then registered a new hosting account with a new provider, transferred my website domain name there and changed the website template. This basically meant that I had a website with a new IP address and a new template.

The next thing I did was create a few pages and added the old content to this “new” site. The name of these pages was exactly the same as they were on the “old” site. I did not change the content, so this remained the same. That was all I did with this website. I left it for a month to give the search engine spiders time to crawl the website and to see if there would be an increase or decrease in the positions. A month later I checked the tool which recorded my website positions for the whole period of the case study. I was satisfied with the results I found. As always, proof is in the pudding, so here is a screenshot:

As you can see, the third horizontal red line marks the day (9 Jan) when my website’s IP address and template were changed. On that particular day my website was at fourth position in the Google SERP’s for its main keyword. Today, on February 7th, it is in the second position.

So, who was it that said that changing the website IP address or template would decrease your SERP positions? Judging by these results, I can say with total confidence that it will not affect your positions and this case study proves it. At the moment I am in the process of moving some of my unprofitable affiliate websites to a cheaper hosting service to cut down on my expanses. I will let you know if I see any serious changes in my positions; however, I’m sure this will not happen.

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There were many solutions I could try to attempt to solve this problem. One of the first ones which sprang to mind was to write a unique article for each article directory in my list. It would take me almost three days as there were more than 200 articles in my list at that particular time. I soon ditched this idea and started to Google. Not long after I came across information about article spinning and found the concept very interesting. The only thing you needed to do was write one seed article, which looks something like this:

{Hello|Hi|Greetings} {John|Mark|David}, {how are you|how do you do|how’s life}?

Then you use a special script or piece of software which spins the seed article and generates many unique versions for you. Just from the example above, it is possible to generate 27 different variations of the sentence. Imagine how many unique articles you could generate from a 400 word article? I think you’re getting the idea.
I decided to test this method on one of my websites and the results were amazing. After just one month submitting spun articles to various article directories, I was seeing lots of valuable links as well as positive changes in my search engine positions.

Before writing this post, I made a small case study. I created a new mini affiliate website optimized for a keyword that was not very competitive (about 1,000,000 competitors in Google). There were only two link building methods I used with this website: article spinning and social bookmarking. I actually only submitted my website to couple of social bookmarking sites because it is proven to be a very fast method of having your website indexed in the search engines. Almost three weeks have passed and here are the results so far:

On December 6th my website was indexed in Google at number 60 in the search results and I then started submitting my spun articles. As you can see, the very next day my website dropped to number 75 and then disappeared from Google’s index for four days. This is a normal occurrence with brand new sites, so I continued with the article submissions. From December 11th my positions have been constantly improving and there haven’t been any negative fluctuations since then. The website generated more than 400 USD in three weeks through affiliate sales. Some of these sales were from traffic that came from the article directories; however, the majority of sales are from Google organic searches.

Judging by initial results, I can honestly say that this link building method is undoubtedly worth continuing. Moreover, it has two positive aspects: first, you can get sales from the article directories because if you have written a quality seed article, so generated articles will also be of good quality, and second, you can get sales from organic search engine traffic.

To sum up, I would like to say that today there are many quality article spinning services, some free, some not. However, I have written my own simple script which I use and have decided to share it with you, so here is the link: Lorens Article Spinner. You can also find the link in the right menu. I am going to continue improving the script as best I can and as always, I appreciate your comments with any suggestions on how I can improve it. This was the first part of this particular case study and in a couple of months I will post the second part so we can all see the results.

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