Let me start off by saying that I sell tools that save you time, I love saving time. When I have a choice on what to do with my time I can think of plenty of stuff I want to do that doesn’t include sitting here.

The problem is that saving time while doing a half assed job is pointless.

Article marketing is one of the areas where this happens a lot, blog commenting is another one, squidoo and hubpages are another two.

Hubpages can be a powerful site to work with, if you take some time to create a useful hub you can get traffic for ever and a day as well as a decent backlink.  Hubpages is incredibly easy to use , just add in some unique content, then a video, or maybe a photo. Then some more text, a amazon section and another pic or three.

At the worst way this should take you no more than 30 mins.

• 30 mins for a decent link and traffic (I still get traffic from hubs that are a couple of years plus old).
• Your other option is to throw in some heavily spun gibberish and a link..

Go for the second one and there is a good chance that hubpages will can your hub, why? Coz it is junk!

I love to save time but think about whether it is the right time to save it. When they can your hub that took you 6 minutes to make you bitch and moan, but if you had spent the extra time you could have got something of long term use in your business.

Hub plan
This is a rough one but I think you will get the idea, this is by no means a details blueprint, it is more of a Paul is sitting here thinking and typing kind of print!

Prep Work

• If your site is about weddings, then set up a group in your hub account called “weddings”.
• Set up a folder on your desktop called Wedding Hubs – put photos in this and a txt document with urls of videos
• Original content, or seed articles can be put here

Work it!

Do your first hub on Monday about ‘weddings” , DO NOTHING ELSE TO IT apart from the setting up.

Wednesday – do one about wedding dresses – DO NOTHING TO IT – bookmark hub 1, go back into it and add a sentence or two, maybe a pic

Friday – Do a hub about bridesmaids -DO NOTHING TO IT – go and add something to number 2 (and more to number 1 if you wish) and bookmark number 2

I think you see the path, give them a couple of days to settle down then bookmark, rss feed submissions, ping etc

Even if your site is only aimed at “Weddings” you can still build hubs around feeder words. It is always a good to have your site getting links for a variety of terms.

Profile
Please fill in your profile, doesn’t matter if it is your real info or not as long as you put something that looks real. Use the same pen name that you use in ezine if you are sticking with that niche.

Links
Just one per hub and if you are doing 3 hubs vary the anchor text.

Hubpages is a valuable platform, it just isn’t worth abusing it by throwing up rubbish.

Article marketing works, yes I know it works. I use articles as part of my tool kit. But what about when they don’t work?

Let me explain, you produce articles to get links and traffic. What if the article doesn’t get indexed by Google? Then you don’t really get as much value from the article ,the link in it, as you should be. Sure you will still get traffic and I have sites that earn money every month even though they are nowhere near the top 50 for their keywords.

But getting the maximum leverage you can from every article you have out there makes sense doesn’t it?

I had a reasonably in depth conversation with a mate of mine about this idea the other day, which I will try and paraphrase here.

Say you want to get your site 10 extra links isn’t it easier to find 10 articles you have out there which aren’t indexed and get them indexed rather than producing 10 new articles?

Sure if you only have one or two articles out there it’s not a problem but if you have various pen names on ezine articles with 50+ articles in each then it can become a bit more of a pain. Checking the articles for indexing is one of those jobs that you mean to do but you know it will take ages so you never get it done.

It is all about maximizing the value you get from the time you took to write the article or the money you spent for someone else to write it for you.

I felt that this was so important that I was going to get a tool made to go find the non indexed articles and someone beat me to it so rather than reinvent the wheel I thought I would let you know about his tool.

Until I know which ones are indexed there is nothing I can do about it, so step one is finding the unindexed pages!

I do not know the guy who made this tool, I actually spent my own money on this tool and I am using it to improve my business.I do feel it is good enough and important enough that I am promoting it to you. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t recommend things easily.

If you would rather go straight to the page then here is the link. Oh and yes that is an affiliate link! But you can watch a video of it in action here and I throw out a few idea on things to do to fix the problems with your articles.

View the video in a larger size

Buy The Index Checker (yes this is an aff link)

Make A RSS Feed Tool

Crawlrate Plugin

Update – August 2011 – this tool still does what it was designed for. People have asked

I think I have covered everything in the video but as always please do feel free to post a comment. I hope you find this little tool as useful as I do and use it to help power up those links.

Building more links is great but make sure that they are getting noticed!