Category: Article Marketing

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Article Marketing Back Links Free Tools Lis Recommmends

Wizzley Review: The Answer to the Hubpages Scam?

Are Lissie and her scams right? Well its hardly my fault that scam is a the word Google likes to give this blog authority on. Well OK maybe it is my fault! And so yes I can use it to my own benefit as in HubPages Scam, SEO Scribe Scam, Keyword Academy Scam, and of course the one that started it all SiteSell Scam. 

What is Wizzley?

Wizzley is a place to write articles and get paid via affiliate programs plus get backlinks to your sites. It has a nice set of tools which are drag drop to build your “wizzes” (yeah really that’s what an article is called, where I come from is what a little boy does when he stands up to go to the loo – but whatever!). You have to have at least 400 words, the usual topics (porn, guns, drugs) are banned as are some other rather commonly over-used topics including acne, credit card debt, forex and weight loss. 

What does Wizzley offer? 

  • revenue share starts at 50% – goes to 55% after 50 articles and 60% after 100 articles; 
  • revenue is from Adsense, Amazon, Zazzle and AllPosters – and you are paid direct by those advertisers – you know like hubpages used to be. You get paid for referrals too 10% of impressions from referral’s articles – paid from Wizzley’s share. 
  • instant indexing – I created a new user on Wizzley – added an article I’d been forced to remove from HubPages – and it was indexed within the hour! 
Stuff you should know: 
  • they have human editors, don’t submit crap – they will reject it.  
  • don’t submit duplicate content – they will reject it. 
  • minimum article length: 400 words. 
  • its a new site – it opened to the public about June 2011, therefore its not huge, and it doesn’t have the internal traffic hubpages has. 
  • you can control the urls (the default is the same as the page’s title), as the site is new, you can probably get your URL of choice. 

Wizzley Compared to HubPages

  • if you want to use the site for backlinks you have to have some advertising enabled, if you don’t want Adsense on the article, turn advertising off and then add an Amazon (or Zazzle, Allposters) module somewhere. They won’t accept articles solely for the purpose of backlinks
  • unlike HubPages you don’t have to run Adsense – turn off “advertising” on the right side of the edit page if you just want to use the other modules
  • unlike HubPages Wizzley has a nice little contents module
  • unlike HubPages there are quite a number of different ways to use the Amazon module – examples  here 
  • a brand new identity of mine on Wizzley had my first article indexed in Google inside an hour. With my 4-year old ID on hubpages recent hubs have taken days to be indexed
  • others are reporting getting keyword targeted articles on the 1st or 2nd page with little backlinking. I’ll comment when I have tried myself. 
  • Wizzley has partner sites which accept German and French articles! 

If You Make Money With HubPages You Might Want to Move to Wizzley ASAP

As of 2012 – HubPages’s Amazon modules will be paid via the HPAds programs, NOT via your own Amazon affiliate ID. If you are making good money with Amazon I shouldn’t have to explain to you why this is a terribly bad idea, and why, I have spend hours today un-publishing hubs on one of my accounts so I can move them over to  Wizzley. 

If you want to know the details of why this is a bad idea: check out my Move Amazon Earning Hub to Wizzley

Ideally of course if your articles are making money, they should be on your own sites. But I haven’t time to create a bunch of sites, so in the meantime I am moving them to Wizzley. 

On the face of it I like the layout of Wizzley and think I can use it to create a good CTR to Amazon. If the site stays in Google’s good books and pages rank easily – then as they say YAH CHING! 

Oh and here’s that EVIL AFFILIATE LINK AGAIN

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Article Marketing Back Links Paid Tools Product Reviews Search Engines Tools

Build My Rank and Backlinking Profiles

Rottnest Island, Western Australia

Build My Rank really has been a business changer for me.  Well not by itself obviously – in fact if you don’t have a plan to start of with then – you don’t need this post you need the Keyword Academy instead!

Back about a month ago I signed up  to BuildMyRank: review and  rankings were on my mind, then I was pretty excited about it. Well now I am ecstatic about it! Why? I’m seeing rankings jump and jump significantly and with them income. Will the rankings hold? Who knows – but meanwhile I’ll take the money thanks.

Have I a got detailed results to prove this? Nope – these were sites that I was previously supporting using Postrunner –  so maybe  I could have waited a month and seen the results jumping on the Postrunner submissions- I don’t know – frankly it takes a lot of time to document that type of detail and I don’t have duplicate sites: same niche, same age similar content etc to do  proper split testing. Instead  I swapped my writer over from writing for Postrunner to BMR and sat back to see what happened.

What I do know is that BMR plus my writer is hands-off outsourcing for me – and Postunner plus writer wasn’t. That’s worth not just about an hour a day of my time, its more than that because it means that suddenly there are about 17 sites I don’t have to think about more than once a month – I can focus on other stuff.  Important stuff like this:

Rottnest Island, Western Australia

Oh OK and growing my business as well …

A few days ago several people posted about a minor PR update and a Google dance in their rankings. I knew that nothing dramatic had happened to mine as my Adsense was tracking nicely to an all time record – but on the 1st I ran all my sites for rankings again in Market Samurai – I was up, almost across the board, sometimes dramatically so, sometimes just a little. Now these are all sites which have fairly similar characteristics:

  • they are mainly niche sites – less than 30 pages indexed generally;
  • the youngest are 7 months old, most are over a year;
  • most are WordPress, some aren’t (I see no difference between html sites and blogs in the rankings);

But I also took an old site – hadn’t been updated for nearly 2 years. I wrote a new page focused on a new keyword – used Impact Page Builder to optimize the on-page SEO – posted 10 back links to the new page from BMR over a week – its now ranking in the 20s for a moderately competitive term.Pretty darn impressed with that.

Do I Need Backlinks At  All?

Some will say not – some successful webmasters say they never build backlinks. They argue that you might as well spend your time building your own site rather than adding it to other people’s site. Most of those webmasters don’t make any money – so I tend to discount them  – after all this ain’t a hobby! Some of them do a lot of real-world promotion – or have even got at book to their name. I discount them – that is not a business model for me.

But some of them make money , good money, better than I do.  What do they have that I don’t? Without exception they have websites which are 10 or more years old – that age thing you can’t fake! And the site has been up that whole time, even if it started off long before WordPress and is now a blog – it doesn’t matter – Google doesn’t care about your technology – but it REALLY cares that the site has been about the same general topic for 10 years.

Which tends to mean that the sites involved – are passion sites – the person started them in 1999 because they LOVED the topic – not because they could make money from it. The clever ones make money now.  And they have backlinks, lots of backlinks,  natural, organic backlinks because they are market leaders in their niche and other people link to them – and yes every one of the sites I know about in this category are SOCIAL sites too.

If you have one of those sites – you don’t need me and congratulations. Do I really, really, really wish I’d started my passion site about independent travel in 1999 – oh yes I do!  But I didn’t and you – gentle reader – probably didn’t either. So  for the rest of us – well we need to game the system basically … you need to manipulate your backlinks. You need to build them, you need to pay someone else to do it for you.

Lis’s Views on Backlink Profiles

  • If the site is new – its more important to get authority links than it is to get bulk links. You need to get some “real” links from sites which are recognized as authority in the niche (not just PR). Some Postrunner sites will work for this – as will blogs which accept guest posts in your niche – if its a social niche that is.
  • Different niches work differently for backlinks – travel bloggers, and frugal living bloggers comment on each other’s sites ALL the time.  Niches about embarrassing personal problems and serious debt – not so much.  I suspect that Google has a “normal backlink profile” for some niches – deviate too far from it – and you will be sand boxed for a while. You will come back after a while (or any competitor could take out any site at anytime).
  • I have ranked and kept a site in position #1 with only crappy backlinks and no new content – for 2 years – its hard to stuff this up but some approaches will see results faster than others. I’ve NEVER seen a site deindexed because of bad backlinks – certainly have seen sites sent to position 500 purgatory though!
  • If your sites are in a niche which is “social” then its probably worth having some twitter and Facebook love going on around it – after all it looks normal …
  • Getting the SEO right and siloing your site so that it doesn’t have unrelated links on the page – really does seem to be significant

Lis’s Views on Backlink Services

  • All backlinking services are gaming the system: Postrunner  and EzineArticles included.
  • Gaming the system works – to a greater or lesser extent.
  • Backlink services work better with a more established site – that old thing of site age is still something you can’t fake – if you want a genuine short-cut in this game – buy an aged site in the niche you want.
  • Backlinks to backlinks also works – I think this is the major weakness of Postrunner – but you can help yourself with this with things like backlinking services to keep your links indexed.
  • Until you are making about $500/month from your sites I don’t really think you can justify paying for additional backlink services – and if your sites are less than one year old you are also probably  risking your money as well.
  • There is a risk involved with using any service –  sometimes they do die a slow death – which may be terminal if the owners don’t do something about it (basically Google discounts the sites being used over time) – don’t ever signup for a service for longer than a month. On the flip side you really need to commit to 2 or 3 months to really evaluate a service so that is the amount of money you are risking.
  • Doing ANY backlinking is never a waste – at the moment BuildMyRank seems to work exceptionally well – that may drop back to just averagely well – the point is if  I am using it to build at least 10 links a day to my sites I will outrank you if you are still worrying about whether you should backlink at all.

Sorry I went on a bit – the bottom line is – this game isn’t that hard -and it doesn’t change that much over the years – and the best info you will ever get is building your own sites and EXPERIMENTING – then you will really find out what does and does not work.

I’ve just enrolled in  a new backlink scheme too – but I probably won’t have any results before the end of the year on this one – so I’m not prepared to name it here – but it does have absolutely EVIL affiliate program so contact me if you want the link LOL – we can do a deal!

So are you building baclinks? Using  what if any services? Using your own  backlink sites only? Or do you only publish on your own site?

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Article Marketing Back Links Build My Rank Paid Tools Passive Income Product Reviews Tools

Build My Rank Review Compared to Postrunner

OK short version – BuildMyRank.com is the best thing since sliced bread –  will make you millions in your sleep without doing anything  – can’t imagine why they are giving it away at the current price – but I am sure it will go up – ACT now to lock in the currently insanely low price, BUY IT now!

SELF SERVING HONKING BIG AFFILIATE LINK HERE!

You still here? Darn – oh you want a real review ? Sorry I can’t actually give that to you – cause I haven’t been using it long enough to give you months and months of stats. But I’ve used it long enough to be hugely excited by it.

UPDATE: May 2011 – buildmyrank still works well – and I am still using – the price has gone up a little – details below. 

 UPDATE: November 2011 – I’m still using BMR and am happy with it but also check out a Build My Rank alternative that is a new service – SEO Cobra Backlinks

 

As I wrote recently – I am not 100% happy with Postrunner – mainly because of the percentage of articles which aren’t getting indexed. So when I  was checking out Build My Rank – this – from their FAQ – jumped out at me:

Do you build backlinks to my content? Yes, every time a post is distributed we do two things. First, we create an RSS feed mashup and submit to several feed aggregators. This really helps content get indexed super quick. And next we select a random assortment of social bookmark sites such as Delicious, and web 2.0 properties like Twitter, to submit links to. On average each post receives around 50 backlinks.

Not coincidentally I had been playing with ways of getting my Postrunner articles  indexed –  that involved RSS feeds and automated bookmarking … I knew what I had to do – but I hadn’t managed to automate it entirely and I was deep in the learning curve. And then I’d have to teach my outsourcer to do it… BuildMyRank had got there before me – I was prepared to pay for that!

So rather than doing a straight BuildMyRank review (I haven’t got a hope in hell for ranking for the term basically) – I thought I would do a side-by-side comparison of the two systems: the good the bad the ugly…

Page Rank  of the Network’s Sites: BuildMyRank v. Postrunner

BMR has no PR zero sites. Postrunner has a majority of PR0’s. BMR wins on this one. Here is a screen shot from my BMR dashboard after 29 posts had been published …

Is PR absolutely critical? No – but it helps – high PR sites often get better indexing and authority. Its not enough for me to buy a system though.

Distribution to Sites: BuildMyRank v. Postrunner

With Postrunner the writer has to choose the site that they want their article to appear on. With BMR you chose a frequency (or a schedule) for posts to be published at and move on. The sites are selected randomly. I don’t know how many sites are in the system (I know Postrunner has about 800) – but so far I’ve not seen the same site twice.

With Postrunner – I still get a lot of articles returned after 7 days – for no reason except the owner can’t be arsed approving them. I have to resubmit them – its a pain. BMR is a much smoother workflow as far as distribution is concerned.

Also in Postrunner those with high PR sites – get overwhelmed. The value of the page rank is reduced because your post will fall off the front page  often instantly or within hours. Often too the page rank is from a dropped domain – it will disappear with the next update.

The automated distribution of BMR means that PR5 sites aren’t hammered – they seem to get the same rate of posting as the PR1 sites – that is good for the long term potential. With the rate of posting it looks like most of my articles will stay on the front page for around about a week – which will also help indexing.

“Quality” of BuildMyRank Sites v. Postrunner

Oh the “quality” debate. Both sites have the same rules: no duplicate content, no spun content. Both sites have human review of every article published. BMR also reviews every site that you are links to before you can build any links to it. BuildMyRank won’t let me submit with typos.

Postrunner allows 2 links per a 300 word article. BuildMyRank allows a link per every 150 words ie. you can publish a 150 word article for one link, a 450 word article for 3 etc. Because I believe the second link is heavily discounted the BMR model allows me to get more links for the same amount of writing.

Diversity of the sites. I would probably give the edge to BMR on this because they are deliberately spreading out their sites across the world – and not just the US. Almost all Postrunner sites are hosted in the US – because its cheaper, and a great deal of them are hosted on Hostgator – because of the affiliate deal…

SEO quality. In Postrunner the owner of the site can mess with the post: they can change the permalink structure, they can add their links above mine in the post, they can additional links (internal and external). With BMR what I write is what its published – fullstop.  In Postrunner there are a lot of site owners changing my posts and frankly competing with me for my keywords. In BMR its a service – they are making their money by selling BMR not my running Adsense  on the sites (none of the sites have any monetization that I’ve seen) – its therefore in their business interests to make sure that the sites are well looked after from an SEO point of view-  if they lose the quality of their sites the service will go down hill (as many have before).

Oh and before you ask – all the BMR sites that I’ve checked are running privacy protection – so no its not suspicious that the one organization owns them all.

Grammatical quality – we are not even going there. Just to say if you own a Postrunner which requests “native English speakers only please” – you will never knowingly get content or a link from me…

Outsourcing with BuildMyRank v. Postrunner

Both sites allow your writer to login to the site on your behalf.  I’ve used the same writer  on both sites. On Postrunner I have to share my login. With BMR I setup a writer account and give my writer a unique login – I prefer this because if I have more than one writer I can monitor their performance separately.

The economics of using the same writer in both systems:

Postrunner: 8 articles a day, 8 links a day.

  • NB – I know I am the minority here but I seriously think linking twice from the same article greatly reduces the strength of both links – I prefer one link per an article.
  • My worklfow: My writer adds the post , tags, link. I log in – I check the grammar – tidy it up to get past the grammar nazi’s, chose a directory, schedule or submit it. It takes about 45minutes- 1 hour of my time.  Maybe 2 articles a day are rejected because a) 7 days have elapsed or b) an objection to the quality or content of the article – I have to resubmit it – make that an hour a day in total – worth US$100 to me …

BuildMyRank: 12 articles a day: 12 links a day.

  • My workflow: None – no article has been rejected yet – 36  posts to date.  I set up the rate of article distribution once for each site I am building links to, got the site approved – overhead per a site – about 3 minutes – once.

So between the 2 systems I am getting 50% more links and saving an hour a day using BMR …

Monitoring Backlinks with BuildMyRank v. Postrunner

Monitoring Postrunner Backlinks:

  • To do the stats on my previous post – I spent several hours: downloading the links built for one site: manually checking each article to see if it was indexed and recording the results

Monitoring BMR Backlinks:

  • The front page gives you graphs of your most used keywords for the month/year and also the PR distribution diagram I’ve used on this post. The grid of posts will give you where each article is published, its PR and whether its indexed. Effectively its saving me hours and hours of ongoing work with those 2 columns. However I can’t download the details – so I am captured by their system with their great stats…

Quality of Support for BuildMyRank and Postrunner

I have had great level of support from Postrunner for many months.  BMR I have tried out with some “dumb” questions and they responded within hours and very professionally.  I added a number of new sites for approval to BMR – the response was within an hour – on a  weekend (wherever they live in the world!). They appear to approve articles within 12 hours (because of my time zone – they seem to approve overnight for me so they are probably in the US).

Actual Results from BMR v. Postrunner

Well there aren’t any yet from BMR – I’ve only been a member for 5 days!  That said I have 29 articles live – of which nearly half, 13, are indexed. I have another 15 articles queued so will have some real results soon.  What I am seeing is that several people who have been doing this type of business for a while and have an Internet home business plan – like the network too.

So What’s the Bottom Line

Postrunner Costs

  • Postrunner is part of Keyword Academy which costs $33/month but the first month is free. Handy affiliate link here. Upfront costs Postrunner is cheaper – but in terms of ongoing costs of getting and keeping links … jury’s out so far …

BuildMyRank Costs

  • No commitment to join and try it out for 10 free links – which stay up even if you cancel and leave. If you buy within the first 15 days of joining you pay $59/month – if you take longer to decide the price goes up to $129/month. Pricing is now related to how many domains you want to build links 5 domains are $59 and the price goes up from there. Domains can be turned off and on though – so with a bit of planning you can rotate domains in and out of BMR for link building. Handy affiliate link here

In both cases the on-going subscription is via Paypal and to cancel you just cancel the sub in Paypal – no crawling back to the comapanies involved.

Neither system limits the number of sites you can build links to. Both sites limit you to the English language and “Google friendly” topics.

Both system allows you to schedule posts into the future. BMR limits the number of posts for any one of your sites to a maximum of 10 a day.

In both cases these are two of the lowest cost backlink systems out there. I have paid over $120/month for a similar service to BuildMyRank – which offered less in terms of reporting.

Which Am I Going to Use

  • I am using both going forward – for the moment anyway. The hands off outsourcing is just too good to ignore.  There are some sites in Postrunner which are developing authority and I will use them selectively.
  • You can never have enough diversity in your backlink profile – that much is certain …

What Are My Recommendations

You are making

  • Stick with Postrunner and the TKA system and get your income up there.  Get backlinks from a variety of places: HubPages and ezinearticles still work!

If you are using an outsourcer already:

  • The ability to have them use BMR “hands off” from you – priceless in my view;

If you are making $500/month and you are building at least 10 links a day

  • I’d consider buying BMR – but only if I really thought I was going to submit the content – all of these systems require you to actually doing the work.

I will back with some updates on BuildMyRank as the results start to show. I am going to be using it exclusively on quite a competitive term – I’ll be interested to see what it comes up with in a couple of months

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Article Marketing Back Links Case Study Paid Tools The Keyword Academy

Keyword Academy Case Study – PostRunner Tutorial

Wellington Airport from Khandallah
Wellington Airport from Khandallah

UPDATED: April 2012 Check out my Postrunner V2 Review .  I will update this these once the new Postrunner is live

OK I am seeing quite a few questions about Postrunner – The Keyword Academy’s link building tool – so I thought I’d throw an extra post into my  Keyword Academy Case Study series detailing the how and, probably  more importantly the why of using the PostRunner system (formerly the Guest Posting System, GPS). Even if you aren’t a member this might be helpful if you don’t understand why some of us get excited about giving away our content for free!

This post is about Postrunner from an article submitters point-of-view. If you are interested in being a Postrunner Review for  publishers – see my second post about Postrunner– Adding a Site

Wellington Airport from Khandallah
Wellington Airport from Khandallah

What is Guest Posting?

There are lots of ways to get links – but high on most lists  is “guest posting”. You contribute as a guest on another blog and in return get a link back from the site and maybe some traffic as well. Here’s a  guest post I did recently: Building an Online Income.

Now, finding places to contribute  guest posts, if you are in the niche of  freelance writing or make money online or similar, is not really that hard. I don’t accept regular guest posts here – but  many other sites do. Frankly sites like problogger.net would have disappeared long ago – but for the guest posts!

Why? Because the niche is dominated by people who think its important to publish regularly to make your blog popular. Its not – but that’s another post.

But what  if your niche is not make money online?  Have you ever tried finding blogs to guest post articles about college education or health? Now these are popular subjects – but its still hard to find blogs that will accept your free content. What if you write about tap washers or  hair loss in women? Gonna be harder, a lot harder.

Its not impossible – there are a number of sites that I regularly use to post content to – I highly recommend Post Your Own Articles. You can sign up for free – but read the instructions to authors.

Wizzley works too, so does InfoBarrel and other Web2.0 properties, again they all have different rules and you need to be familiar with them all.

Do you see where I am going with this? Every site is run by a different owner – has different rules and you need to be up to speed with each of them. If you don’t find that a pain – you obviously aren’t doing enough guest posting!

The sites I’ve mentioned above are all great but once you have an article link from each of them what’s your next best use of your time – multiple links from the same site – or links from new sites? I think the later which is why I think PostRunner is worth the cost of the Keyword Academy alone.

What is PostRunner?

Technically its an interface  written in WordPress which allows you to submit guest posts to participating blogs. Practically its an enormous time saver.There is exactly one set of rules for PostRunner – here they are:

  • content must be at least 300 words long;
  • content must be unique and written by a human (no article spinners please);
  • no more than two anchored contextual links are allowed per an article

You add articles in a “normal” WordPress interface – which you should be familiar with. You can chose to either publish a post immediately or schedule it  for the future. You then select a  site to publish to and hit submit.

Your article will only appear once the site’s owner has approved the post. This can take up to 7 days. If there has been no response after 7 days the article is returned to you and you can resubmit to another directory. You get an email notification when you article is approved/declined/returned.

You can use the interface to see which articles you have published for which of your sites and where these are published. You can also filter the list by status (not sent, sent, live (published), scheduled). You can export a list of the article titles, urls of where published and site linked to from the article.

Set-by-step adding a Post to PostRunner

  1. Click “Add Post” and cut and paste your article in as you would normally. Don’t forget to add your links! (Sometimes I do). To add a link just select  the text you want to be anchored on e.g. blue widgets click the link button and cut and paste the url of the page you want to link to);
  2. If you don’t want the post to appear as soon as its approved  click “edit” next to “publish immediately” and change it to the date/time you want (I think the dates’ time are on Utah time);
  3. Click “choose publish location”. This will bring up a new screen listing available directories – the default shows all the “General” category directories but you can use the top right drop down to select from other categories (Health, Shopping etc). For each directory you will see PR – a title – which you can click to go the  site, any links you may already have from that site. Use the select button on the right to chose the directory you want.
  4. This will disappear the directory selection screen and you will be back on the basic WordPress post screen.
  5. Now click “check and save draft” – this should come back with a  message saying you have passed all the tests. If you haven’t passed they will tell you what’s wrong.
  6. Once you have passed the checks you click the submit to directory and you are done.

How I Chose a Postrunner Directory

When I am building backlinks for a website I am trying to get as natural a link profile as possible. Most websites are PR0, PR1 at most.  So although I look at PR when I am choosing a directory I am not exclusively interested in high PR – I am just as likely looking for the 80 PR0’s to balance out the PR4 or PR3

I am looking for sites that are indexed. Now all of them should be – but ocasionally we get a bad one – if its a new site I will google site:sitename.com just to check. If you do come up with a site which is not indexed report it to support.

This google  listing will also tell me some other interesting stuff like:

  • how many pages are indexed, less than 10 I move on – its a bit new for my taste, otherwise more is better;
  • click “options” and look at the “latest indexed” option to see if the most recent articles are indexed – if they are that’s good – if they aren’t and the latest article is more than 10 days old that means the site is not being crawled by Google very often;
  • if I am worried about the speed of google crawls I will check the cache (again just google http://sitename.com – and click “cache”). If the cache is more than 2 weeks old and/or shows a completely different site I don’t use it. This tells me regardless of the PR the site has probably just been set up and Google  isn’t visiting regularly so my article won’t get indexed easily, and the PR may well disapear in the next update too;

The site’s front page design. Page rank is all about page not site rank. If your article will never appear on the front page it will be harder for it to get indexed and to get PR. I don’t use sites which have static front pages on which articles don’t appear – I don’t mind a single static post with other articles below but I am not interested in ones that don’t reference articles at all on the front page – not even the title.

I couldn’t care less whether the site has an atrractive design or not – but if they haven’t set the permalink structure to be postname or similar I again move on and find another drectory.  Whether the directory has advertising or not doesn’t matter to me either.

Does that cover most of your PostRunner questions? If you have any other questions about guest posting or Postrunner in particular do please drop me a comment below so I can clarify – I have been using this for so long its hard to remember what confuses initially and what does not.

Categories
Article Marketing Back Links

Article Marketing Submission Software: Update

What’s the future of article submission software? When I was originally looking for a solution to the bulk article submission problem and I wasn’t impressed by the results I saw.

Internet is a series of tubes
photo credit: eirikso

I used to be a Business Analyst and I one thing I find on the internet that some of the standards of software and services offered are, quite frankly, amateurish. I am actually quite happy to pay for software as I know enough to know it takes a lot more time and effort to develop reliable software.

The hardest software of all to develop is software which needs to interact with a 3rd party that the developer has no control over.

This is the reason that software for article submission is particularly difficult. Every directory is slightly different and even the smallest change to the submission process means that the submission software will An alternative to automating submission is creating a service which employs people, presumably in lower wage countries, to do the work itself. This approach has issues too, anyone who has run a business with staff knows that management is no easy job – and of course even more difficult if the workforce is in another country..

One of the reasons I started with a service that submits to blogs I knew that is was fundamentally an easier piece of software which only had to interface with one other piece of software – WordPress – and that software is open source so that the inner workings are available who can understand what they are reading – which certainly isn’t me!

I noticed over at The Keyword Academy, Court is also interested in the concept in his recent Article Marketing Update post and is having problems with the service with the submission service he has been using. I’m afraid I am not terribly surprised because I think managing a workforce long-term really is beyond 99% of internet businesses.

Categories
Article Marketing Blogging Search Engines

Getting Paid to Blog

I have been having fun over at a newish website which is offering free WordPress blogs – a bit like the free wordpress.com site really.

But not. WordPress.com you aren’t allowed to make money so you can’t link to evil, wicked money making sites, which means that when you do blogs often get shutdown. But of course some of us crazed money making types are always looking for new place to develop my own backlinks.

So when I heard that a new site was offering not only free blogs but also offering a $1/post I got interested – the rather long review is my blogging for $1/day hub but the short version is:

  • get approved (live in the right country the usual suspects plus Australia/NZ/Western Europe/India),
  • write a post 100 words minimum, original content, not illiterate,
  • get paid.
  • Get second blog, repeat, get paid a total of $2/day. I

It won’t last for ever, eventually you will have to get some traffic to continue being paid but its a nice little business model – from my point of view anyway!

Now $2 is hardly a massive income: but the cool thing is this: the links are do-follow and you can of course anchor them. So far I have not had any posts rejected and have placed up to 3 “self-serving” links in them!

Slight caveat once the post is approved for payment its locked and you can neither edit it or delete it, you loose the rights to your content. If however you post an image they don’t take the rights: only on the words.

As a freelance writer I can trade 100 words for a free backlink and $1 – hell I can even trade 250 words because those tend to get indexed in the big G!

Another thing that is rather cool is that your blog is a subdomain and there are some nice name still available: one of my blogs is Australia Today (check the url).

In the interests of fair play: they do pay for referrals so if you sign up via the flashing thingy on the right or via one of my today blogs (click on the “get paid to blog” on the right) I get paid – well actually I won’t unless you actually put some effort in and do 10 posts – its not hard – that’s a total of 1000 words for goodness sake – I can do that before breakfast! And you have 3 months to do it in. And then I get paid and you get paid – and you get a blog and backlinks and you can do with it what you want. It really isn’t a bad deal.

Of course if you don’t want me to get the commission that’s cool too – I’ll get over it eventually – probably ….. 🙂

Categories
Article Marketing Paid Tools Tools

Article Marketing Automation: After a Month

Well its been month and so will I be cancelling the subscription on Article Marketing Automation which is just about to cost me another $47 ? Hell no!


NYC: Hilton Times Square – “Time and Money”
Originally uploaded by wallyg

As I reported after 2 weeks with AMA I have had a significant jump in the search engine rankings for both a hubpage and a niche blog of mine. Well after another two weeks, nothing has changed: both are still holding their new improved ratings. The count of the times that the relevant articles have been published is now up to 77 and 72 respectively. Is that as far as those sites are going to go the hubpage is ranking #5 the blog #8 for the keywords I targeted for this test.

Why hasn’t the extra published articles pushed me higher? That I have a theory about: I think most of the sites that articles are being published are very new, most people didn’t commit their existing sites to this new service. Now those sites are at most maybe 2 months old a lot of them will start to be getting sandboxed. I expect they will pop out sometime; so all I can see is an upside as my backlinks start to be counted by Google. In fact a number of the sites aren’t indexed at all I suspect because few of the links are actually showing up for either Yahoo or Google yet. So its only a fraction of the potential 70+ links which have actually got me pushed up the rankings thus far, there does seem to be a lot of potential upside still.

The only downside to date: I wish I had written more articles and submitted them! Time to really focus on that side of things I think. For those writing articles for submission to AMA here are a couple of hints which will make sure that you don’t get rejected from MY sites :

  • don’t submit a dozen similar but different articles on the same topic all at the same time. I then get presented wtih the option of 6 very similar articles I tend to pick one or two at most
  • spin the articles: I won’t consider publishing an article which is less than 30% unique

Those links again:

  • for the free version of Article Marketing Automation: allows a limited number of articles to be submitted and an unlimited number of sites to be added.
  • for the paid version of Article Marketing Automation which allows unlimited article to be submitted and sites to be added and costs $47/month

Its all about time and money for me: AMA is saving me more than its costing me, I will be a subscriber for a while longer!

Categories
Article Marketing Free Tools Paid Tools Tools

Article Marketing Automation: After a Week

Well my last post I raved about my initial experience with Article Marketing Automation so this is the update on my first week’s experience.

Just to recap what AMA will do for you: the free version of AMA will allow you to add your blogs to the network. Add your blog, select the categories and/ or keywords you want and articles from the network want posted on your blog and voila: if you allow it relevant articles will appear automatically (or wait patiently for you to approve them). This is great to build some new sites: but for me the real power AMA is the paid version.

With the paid subscription you can create articles: add them to the system; spinning it to minimize duplicate content if you want and the article is available to add to the network. You can add up to 3 keyword anchored links – anywhere in the text not stuck at the bottom in a resource box. And the keyword link can be spun too: from their own statistics says it all:

“Your articles are promoting 9 links via 55 anchor text options.”

The articles I added a week ago have been presented between 20 and 22 times and only rejected once.

The quality of the articles in the network is generally excellent I have only rejected a couple for quality reasons; some more for being in the wrong category.

So after a week the sites I added to the network at the start of the week have between 20 or 30 posts on them: and I haven’t everything offered.

Each article I add gains me around 12 anchored links A DAY. For as long as I remain a subscriber those articles keep on being distributed, though I can withdraw them if I want to. Even if cancel my membership the links I already have remain.

And the down side is: I haven’t really found one to be honest.
Click register for the free version of AMA

Click here to register for the paid version of AMA

UPDATE 30 September
One of my first articles submitted 10 days ago and now been published 30 times and I am now seeing the first few new links appearing in Yahoo

Categories
Article Marketing Free Tools Paid Tools Tools

A New Article Distribution Tool: Very Cool!

I have been planning on discussing on this blog which tools I use and why, but have been holding off until I was making a bit more money – so I had more credibility – at least in my mind!

There’s a new player in the game though and I am so excited that I am throwing caution to the wind and reviewing Article Marketing Automation my latest investment, and yes this one really is worth the price, although there is a free version too, read on.

Many of you will have heard of Article Marketing where you write a short article which includes a link back to your site. People use article marketing to develop backlinks for their site and sometimes for traffic too. Now you can choose to submit your article to a few directories: of which EzineArticles is one of the best, or you can submit your article to literally thousands of other directories. Many people want to submit to many directories, again to develop the backlinks, rather than the traffic. I have been wanting to do this for some time: but I haven’t moved further on with this for one main reason: I couldn’t find the right software/service for me.

I have my choice narrowed down to two products: one of which uses software to at least semi-automate the submission process: the other is a service which has your articles submitted manually. Both options I had serious problems with:

  • the software solution doesn’t work well for me because my niches don’t fit neatly into the categories found in most directories ;
  • the service solution had some issues with customer service; and I want someone to communicate with me if I am paying 100’s of dollars for a service!

So I sat on my hands and did nothing! Well what happened last week was exciting : I started seeing blogs I trusted talking about a new service called Article Automation Software: its different so bare with me you need to work through this to understand what’s different.

With AMA you submit articles, there is a spinner as well, to allow article variations, but you don’t have to use it. Articles must be at least 300 words. You can include your links anywhere in the article (in fact you can spin your keyword anchors in your links- to mix them up a bit) – this is important because your links are in the context of your article rather than stuck at the bottom in your “bio” or “resource box”.

Also you can add youtube videos l – and anchor link them: video is the future I’m told but I haven’t tried this option yet!

Now it gets interesting – the articles aren’t submitted to article directories: they are submitted to other blogs of people who have signed up for the network. Blogs which are hopefully focussed on the topic of your article: there is no guarantee but many people will have blogs which are niche or foccussed. The blog owner may add their own links, may alter your text, may add ads and images, can in fact do anything like with your post – but they have to leave your links: contextual links here we come!

Will Google like it? Well they probably won’t know. There is no obvious footprint: the blogs aren’t owned by AMA: they are owned by you and me. They support WordPress (self-hosted only), blogger and tumblr blogs to date. Probably others as well if they have the right API – that bit was a bit technical for me!

Are the articles edited? Are they rubbish? Well to date I have been impressed by the articles: I’ve seen worse on EzineArticles and Hubpages! There is no formal acceptance, editing process for articles but for every blog you add you can choose to either allow articles to post automatically or for the articles to remain unpublished until you approve: I do the later. I also check the links in articles to make sure I am happy linking to the site, that they are not bad neighbourhoods: they haven’t been so far. I’ve seen people say that the blogs they set for this service are now gaining comments from real people – so the quality is more than fine IMHO.

Do I know where my article is published? No, not directly – you will have to wait for the backlinks to show: or include a “signature” piece of text in each article which you can search on once the blog’s post is indexed.

What sort of blogs do you add to the network? This is important! Don’t add personal, flagship blogs. I wouldn’t add this blog! This is my flagship blog and its my voice! But I also wouldn’t include directly blogs which I make money from. I could – but I’m not at the moment because I really don’t want the other internet marketers to know which sites those are! Instead I have set up some new blogs just for this experiment.

The site itself: the interface is slick, quick and works well. Its easy to follow but they have some cool videos as well if you are the type who likes to read the manual.

OK Where Do I SignUp
There are two options: paid and unpaid.

The free version of Article Automation Software allows you to add blogs but NOT to submit articles. So if you have a whole lot of domains lying around doing nothing: throw WordPress onto them and get some free content and indexing! Also if you are curious about the quality of articles in the network this would be an easy way to check it out yourself.

UPDATE: You get five free article submissions with the free sign up – an excellent marketing ploy to let you try it out and well worth taking up!

The paid version of Article Automation Software is this link which will take you to their sales page :and its not as obnoxious as most either! The bottom line is that the cost is $47 /month – its a subscription. No its not cheap: but its good value for me. You can cancel at any time and if you cancel in the first month you get your money back.

I am an affiliate and I will get paid if you use my link – I think that’s reasonable if you found them via my link – if not hack the link to take my code out!

Categories
Article Marketing HubPages

Knol: Competition for Squidoo and HubPages

Today Google launched their new service Knol. Speculation has been that Knol is an attempt of Google to take on Wikipedia at first glance I think Knol is actually closer to Squidoo or Hubpages.

Knol appears to be ambivalent on the commercial appeal of the site. Wikipedia has been robustly and adamantly non-commercial- deleting any page which is “commercial” in even the broadest terms. Knol of the other hand specifically allows knols that are about a commercial subject.

Knol even has Adsense and allows authors to keep 100% of Adsense revenues: but the placement of the single Adsense block is far right and below the fold, about as bad as you can get.

Knol seems to have a bit a flawed launch too. Some features appear to be glaringly missing: you can tell exactly how many versions of your knol that you have saved but there is no statistics and no way to link to Google’s Analytics.

Although they claim to want international authors: the only way to become a verified author is to have a US address associated with your credit card or phone number. I have a verified Adsense account – why is that not good enough for Knol? It’s not like they are ever going to add my New Zealand credit card to a database anytime soon!

Its also totally unclear as to what the advantage of being a verified author: though only verified author’s appear on the surprisingly static front page of featured knols.

Read my full review of Knol and Hubpages here