So far, it has been a flop. Not because the system doesn’t work, but because I didn’t work the system. I got busy with other stuff and after setting up the first hand-full of articles, I didn’t do much of nothing. I am keeping an eye on the articles, ehow pages and hubpages I set up, but so far only one of them has been ranking at all and then only on the second page of Google which brings close to no traffic.

As far as stats….

So far I’ve had 83 hops resulting in 2 clicks on the Clickbank.com order form and 1 sale.

What we really want and need to make this work are Page 1 of Google rankings, preferably in the top 3, ideally in the #1 position.

Since I’ve discovered that you can promote affiliate products directly in your author resource box with Ezinearticles.com provided you use a domain (and redirect to your affiliate link), I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a set of articles, submitting them there and see if I can generate some commissions that way.

That’s the plan for this week. I’m going to use the steps I outlined in 30 minute article writing system and write a minimum of 10 articles promoting the Copycat Recipe Ebook from Clickbank.

I’ll check back in at the end of the week to let you know how it’s going.

I sat down and started to do a little research to pick a good keyphrase for the article. The one I ended up choosing was “grandmas frugal recipes”. As you can see in the image below, it should get approximately 15 searches per day which isn’t bad for one little article that took me about 20 minutes to write.

I also took a quick look at google and the competition for that term didn’t look too stiff. I sat down and wrote and posted the article. An hour later, I did a search for “grandma’s frugal recipes” to take a look at some of the pages on the first page of google results to get an idea for how many links I might need to get to that article to get it to rank.

And guess what…

My article is already #2 for my keyphrase. Talk about quick results. I honestly didn’t expect the page to be cached yet, let along rank on the first page of google. Here’s the screenshot.

Of course there’s no guarantee that it will keep that ranking, but it’s an awesome start. By pointing a few decent links to that page (by writing an article, commenting on blogs or even just bookmarking the page on some social bookmarking sites), it should be fairly easy to keep it on the first page of google.

How that’s what I call fast seo rankings!

P.S. In case you’re interested, here’s a link to my “Grandma’s Frugal Recipes” post. (and yes, this is a sneaky way to get an extra link to that page :) )

The Challenge runs for 90 days from September 1st (yikes, I’m already a day behind) through December 1st. I will lay out my content marketing plan below and give you frequent updates throughout the month on increase in google response (how quickly new posts are indexed, and how often the site is visited by google bots in general), visitors to the site as well as how many links are pointing to the blog.

Let’s start by looking at the current stats:

Caching of The Site

I have the google toolbar installed and the page rank feature enabled. Next to the pagerank bar you’ll find a little arrow. When you click on it you’ll see the following:

Click on “Cached Snapshot of Page” to find out when google cached your page last.

I will do this for the home page and a cross-section of posts throughout this case study.

At this point none of my individual posts have been cached and the cached version of the home page is from before the installation of this blog as you can see here:

Incoming Links

I am using yahoo site explorer to keep track of incoming links. To follow along go to Yahoo.com and type the following in the search box.

site:www.mywebsite.com (obviously you’ll need to replace mywebsite.com with your own url)

Under “Inlinks” choose “Except from This Domain” to get a report on only links from other websites that are pointing to yours (as opposed to internal links which are links from within your website i.e. the home page linking to one of your posts).

Here’s what’s coming up for Affiliate Treasure Chest at the moment:

Website Visitors

I installed Google Analytics (which is free) to keep track of how many visitors are coming to the site. Over the course of this case study, I’ll share both total visits and unique visitors with you as well as various other data on where they came from etc.

For now, let’s just take a look at a simple traffic screen shot from my google analytics account (told ya this site wasn’t getting much traffic yet).

Ok, now that we have a baseline of metrics established that we’ll check on throughout these 90 days, let’s plan our content creation  and distribution plan.

Content Marketing Action Plan

I am going to divide the tasks by type of content and also note frequency.

ATC Blog

• Write a minimum of 5 blog posts per week.
• Conduct keyword research for each post. Choose a good keyphrase for the topic and use it in the title of the post and the content (this will not work for every single post, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind).

Article Marketing

• Write and submit 2 articles per week to various article directories. Keep keywords in mind for those as well.
  I will update you along the way on what article directories I’m using etc.

Guest Blog Posts

• Write and submit one guest blog post per week.

Commenting

• Write and submit at least 10 valuable comments to relevant blogs per week.

Social Media

• Encourage readers of the blog to tweet, digg, stumble etc.
• Set up several social media profiles with links to this blog and update several times per week. (more details on this later).

My action plan is slightly different in formatting from Trish’s simply because this format works better for me as far as organizing the content goes. If you are following along (I sure hope you do), pick a system that works for you. You can read Trish’s Action plan here.

P.S. Please leave a comment and let me know what you’re planning to do and let’s keep each other accountable to get this stuff done throughout the next 90 days.