From my last post you probably figured out that I like content marketing. I like it because I’ve learned how to write like a bloody speed demon. Plus content is an everlasting legacy online.

You can stop all other forms of marketing… the web can evolve from 2.0 to 3.0 and beyond… and if you’ve done your content right, your infoproduct business can sustain itself through all upcoming changes and trends. For free, might I add.

So I like fiddling around with different article directories and content marketing tools. This past month I decided to give Article Marketing Automation a try.

Now in case you’re not familiar with it, Article Marketing Automation (hereby referred to as AMA) is a web based tool that takes your articles and distributes them to targeted blogs. That’s the simple explanation.

What AMA Really Does

It actually allows you to spin the words or sentences within your article, so that each blogger gets a different version of the article. For example, if you’re writing a piece on dog training, you may have one sentence that reads like this:

If you want your shih tzu to perform tricks, you must find out what motivates them.

The sentence can be spun to look like this:

If you want your shih tzu to do tricks, you must discover what motivates them.

Most of you probably know about the whole article spinning thing as it’s a well-known online marketing technique.

But for those of you who don’t know, when you spin your content it helps site owners feel more comfortable about running your article, because it’s not the same thing that appears on dozens of other web sites.

So Article Marketing Automation allows you to spin your articles, and it offers those different versions to a list of targeted blog owners. You don’t know what blogs they are. And each blogger has the option of accepting or declining your article.

With AMA you’re not supposed to include a resource box at the end of the article. However you can include up to three links within the actual article.

No biggie to me. A link is a link. That’s all I’m concerned with.

Two Week Results

I decided to give Article Marketing Automation a fresh test with one of my reader’s e-books. I became an affiliate of hers, and wrote an article to promote her $97 e-book. The e-book centers around a rarely used online marketing tactic.

I uploaded the article to AMA on September 30, and 31% of the 475-word article was spun.

As of today, the article has been accepted on 12 blogs, which represents 41% of the total number of bloggers it has been presented to.

According to the AMA handbook if your acceptance percentage is below 50%, you should probably add something more to the article. But I’m not going to change it just yet, as that percentage has come up significantly over the past five days, and there are still bloggers who haven’t made a decision yet. (The article is trickled out… it’s not presented to all targeted bloggers at once.)

From those 12 blogs, I’ve gotten a total of 42 clicks and 0 sales for the month of October. Now keep in mind that I haven’t promoted this e-book using any other marketing techniques, so all those clicks are a direct result of AMA.

Will I continue my $47 a month subscription?

Definitely. In fact, I’m going to add another article to promote that e-book.

That test article hasn’t even generated 100 clicks yet. I like to see at least 100 clicks under my belt, and preferably 200 before I start tweaking. For example, if at 100 clicks I don’t see any sales, I might add a landing page between the article and the e-book sales page.

And although I haven’t gotten any sales for this particular e-book just yet, I have gotten four sales for another one also promoted through an AMA-run article.

Actually I’m pleasantly surprised by the results either way. Sometimes you can submit to dozens of article directories and not get the same number of clicks within a two-week span for a single article.

Have you used Article Marketing Automation? I’m curious to know what your experiences have been.

Filed under: Bullet Point

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