04 Dec 10 6:31 pm
Hi Mark. it can be really frustrating, and at first, when doing it all manually, article marketing can be a real pain. It will take months to get enough manual submissions to get traffic to your site.
First of all, I would recommend some kind of automation as soon as possible. There are some free submitters out there. They aren't great, but it would still be easier than doing things one at a time. Investing in a paid submitter or network would be better. I use AMA and Article Marketing robot. Ama submits to blogs and AMR submits to article directories. then, I pay someone to build Squidoo lenses and hubpages and other social sites for me.
Also, change the way you think about the sites you are using. Think of it as your own property. These sites have a lot of authority, which your site doesn't have. Rather than focusing your efforts on trying to get your main site ranking, do some link building to those other sites. One thing I did when I was learning SEO was to build Squidoo lenses and hubpages (before squidoo changed the game, and most of my niches were blacklisted). I focused on building links to those pages, and it gave me a boost to my confidence, because I knew if I could do it for those sites, I could repeat it for my own, it just would take longer for search engines to trust me.
I know it is frustrating, but don't give up. I had a long time where I had to do things manually myself. When I was doing manually, one thing that I did was focus on less sites, but ones with more authority. Those would be web2.0 sites, and the few high authority article directories. Choose 20-30 sites, and focus all your efforts on those sites. You need the IP diversity.
Also, since you are doiing things manually, maybe you would do better using some social sites, and using the social aspects of some of the web2.0 sites. they take time to use, but will work faster than waiting on search results.
Remember also, the search engines dont show all the links that they are giving you credit for. If you think about it, this is for your protection. if your competitors could see every link you actually have, competition would be even more bloodthirsty than it already is.
you may also try social bookmarking. bookmarking and blog commenting. Although it takes some time to do it right, and you have to engage the community, it can work faster than article submussions for seo.
SEO takes a lot of time to work, especially when doing it manually. it can take months and months to see any results, depending on the keywords that you choose. The good thing about it is, once you get a page ranking highly, it usually takes a lot less work to keep it up. Also, as soon as you can afford it, invest in some automation, so that you arent doing it all by hand.
The most important thing right now is to not give up.
