Tag: article marketing

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Paid Tools Product Reviews Rants The Keyword Academy Tools

Postrunner Review: The “Quality” Debate

These cars aren't Quality - but tourists now pay a premium to hire them in Berlin!

UPDATE: April 2012 – Postrunner V2 Review

If your response to my title was WTF is Postrunner – then check out my earlier post. If you are a member of The Keyword Academy you will know  that Postrunner is system used with TKA in order to create keyword anchored links for your sites.

I’ve compared to BuildMyRank to Postrunner – and Mark is now trying to differentiate Postrunner from BuildMyRank and similar schemes.

His argument is that Postrunner needs to evolve:

  • needs “better quality” sites in Postrunner.
  • the reason more “quality” sites aren’t in Postrunner is because of the “quality” of the articles being sent to them.
  • his proposed solution is an author scoring system which will reward the writers (or buyers) of superior articles.

The Argument About “Quality” Articles

As soon as the thread started in the forum the predictable grammar Nazi’s (Nazis’? Nazis’s ??) were out in force. Too many trailing commas – FAIL. Use of nonstandard spellings FAIL. To be fair to Mark, in the seminar he specifically mentioned that he wasn’t concerned about grammar and spelling problems, he was more worried about the articles being relevant and having a point.

Its all looking like this will be seen, by many, most of whom haven’t hit the $10/month income level yet, in the community, as an opportunity to FAIL all of those authors who use too many commas in a sentence…

I have two sites in Postrunner at the moment – one is a niche, passion quality site, the other one is a general site full of trashy Postrunner articles, which I just put back in during the webinar yesterday – inside 12 hours I have received over 7 articles.

These cars aren't Quality - but tourists now pay a premium to hire them in Berlin!

What I Look For When I Get Postrunner Articles on My Quality Postrunner Site

I put my Independent Travel site into Postrunner – basically to get content when I couldn’t be arsed writing, and to see what keywords people were trying to rank for in the travel niche – a niche that is my passion but pays me very, very poorly. Now it gets about 2/3 posts a week – which is a nice number. I reject at least a third of those. So this is how to get your well-written, gramatically perfect article declined from my site.

  1. The site linked out to – only consists of a “hello world” post (seriously its happened).
  2. If the site linked to is a general postrunner site, or similar article directory – this is a new automatic DECLINE  I picked up from Build My Rank.
  3. The 2 anchored links are in the the last words in the article – normally on separate lines -I don’t know who the hell is teaching this – its certainly not TKA – but please stop it – it looks stupid and its a loser for SEO duh!
  4. The two links are to the exact same page on the site being promoted (less of this seems to be happening these days).
  5. Write about all-inclusive vacations – like duh! The site’s main keyword is not a secret! If you have glanced at the front-page you know I, and my readers, are not interested in all-inclusive vacations!
  6. Write about timeshares – timeshares are IMHO (and its my site so my opinion rules) – an investment scam – not a holiday option.  (Note to Mark – I would explain this to the timeshare peddlers if I could have a longer site requirements description).

Hmm note how I haven’t actually read the article yet -all I looked for was the links and followed them. If I have to actually rate the article for the author score you are adding work for no good purpose here…

Now the following points – won’t get you automatically declined – but a number of them together will:

  1. The article is 301 words with 2 outbound links (doesn’t apply if there is only one link).
  2. Site still has the default header image from the default WordPress theme.
  3. If the site is selling a product but has only Adsense I am likely to reject the article.
  4. If the site is using one of Court’s old SEO themes  that have been done to death and are probably on G’s watch list.
  5. The title and sometimes the entire article is only loosely related to the anchored text of the links. Let’s get real here people – I want to rank your article – its good for you, its good for me! After all I thought you WANTED an authorative link! So don’t give me an article about packing tips and then link to fashion bags for ladies! This is probably the hardest judgement call sometimes I will get an excellent article – but with a bland generic title – frankly I rewrite the title – so we can both benefit.
  6. I rarely reject for grammar and/or spelling – sometimes I lightly edit.  If its embarrassingly bad language which is hard to read I will reject – but I do it very rarely.  Any automated grammar and spelling check would fail many of the perfectly good posts on the site – because some are written by native Englishmen, in fluent English,  some in fluent American, some in fluent English written by non-native speakers – all of the English is acceptable – and the quality can be great – but no automated system will ever deal with the complexity and depth that is English – certainly not Google.

What I Look For On My General Postrunner Site

Within 10 hours of reinstating this site into Postrunner during yesterday’s webinar, I had 8 articles! Hand on heart I do NOT read every article. I scan – if its appears to make some sense, is not badly spun and relates to the anchored text I’ll take it.

I do however check every link – and reject any article whose site fails the first 4 points above! In other words – what the article links to is FAR more important to me  than whether the nouns and adjectives are in agreement. I also reject any site promoting anything to do with owning or using firearms.

I will probably move this site to some other category – its starting to make money and I will focus on the niches that its ranking for.

Which is the Quality Site of These Two.

Well if you want passion and love and age – then midlifetravel.com is it – its my original site – its started off as an html site developed in Dreamweaver in 2007. Its been up in several forms over the years. It ranks #1 for my original keywords “travel over 30s” – unfortunately no one actually searches for the term LOL.  Its a PR0. I keep it, I love it, I post to it and I link to it. However this is a hobby site not a real money making venture.  Most of the content on it was written by me, a genuine expert, and has no outbound links.

The site that accepts practicably everything? Is just over a year old, has had very little link building to it (by me). Well its a PR2 and in the last month (when I published nothing new on it) made about $1/day – its on its way. I’ll start building out the content for which its already ranking for and adding more posts without outbound links on similar topics. In other words I will make it legitimate! Will I go back and fix the grammar and spelling -nope!

Still reading – you must be bored …

I have gotten a little fond of amplify. I started using it – because Griz did but I’ve found a use for it.  I use it to share the stuff I find genuinely interesting (or funny) in the weird and evolving world of making an online income – if you already follow this blog on Facebook (like in the footer) you will get my amplified updates – but otherwise follow Lis Sowerbutts on amplify directly. It also allows me to tweet without ever going anywhere near twitter – all good!

 

Categories
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
Back Links HubPages Passive Income

What is InfoBarrel? Passive Income Reviews

Infobarrel for Online Income?

InfoBarrel is yet another site which offers writers a way to make passive income or residue income online. Its a site where you post your content and then you make money based on a percentage of the advertising revenue.  Authors are free to write on almost any topic, there is no up-front payment for writers and no editorial control over content submitted to Infobarrel. 

Continue reading “What is InfoBarrel? Passive Income Reviews”
Categories
Making Money Online Online Business Passive Income

How To Create Your On-Line Business For Beginners

Follow your dream to an online business

Many people dream of making passive income online  or starting their own online small business, probably home based, how to make money online they ask?

Follow your dream to an online business
Follow your dream to an online business

Let’s face it there are an awful lot of us who dream of firing the boss and working in their PJ’s.  Few succeed though the figures often quoted is that between 95% and 99% of people who start a blog or website fail to make any money doing it.

I guess that’s why some people are looking for the “business in the box solution”. The follow this plan and all will be well. After all most of us who are trying to make money on-line are doing it after spending years as good little employees. You know do what the boss tells you what to do, when to do it by, and then praises you for getting it done correctly – or not.

Business isn’t like that. On-line busines is different from real world business – but not as much as many people believe.

Why Do Small Businesses Fail?

Apart from cash flow issues, most small businesses fail because they can’t get enough customers. There is no demand for their service or product. Think of the local lady who makes beautiful handicrafts, but no one buys. Think of the coffee shop that makes great coffee – but is 1/2 empty because its tucked away in an uninviting backstreet. Or the geek who can fix your computer just like that – but doesn’t know how to explain to potential customers what he can do.

Now consider the on-line business version of these businesses:

♦the blogger who blogs about their passion for Ancient Roman Gladiators  sports – they have a beautiful blog, with lots of great information and pretty pictures: but no one wants to buy anything there because they cam looking for information which they got in spades on the site;

♦the site which provides great baby gear at the right price – but no one can find the site because the site is called “Kute Kiddies Kool”, all the links to the site are by its name – and people who search search for “cheap baby clothes online” or “cheap organic cotton baby clothes”

♦the site which is developed by a design specialist – its full of cute visual effects and great graphics – but the search engine doesn’t know that the site is offering  computer setup support in the Bay Area because Google can’t read flash or images.

Luckily on-line its very easy to work out whether you will have customer for your site or not – we call them searchers.

Simple Steps to Make Your On-line Business Work

  1. Decide whether or not you are in business. If you just want to make a few dollars from a blog – then you are not in business, you have a hobby.
  2. Work out which business model works for you: provide services (writing, technical, whatever) to others,  develop sites which bring you in passive income, or use your on-line business to support, funnel visitors to your real-world business.
  3. Focus your website on keywords which a) get traffic and b) are buying keywords – terms people search for when they are looking to buy something not just for information.
  4. Check that there is not too much competition for your search terms: either use free tools or something like Market Samurai
  5. Decide on your method of monetization: either funnelling traffic to your real world business or getting paid by eBay or Amazon affiliates, other affiliates, promoting an e-book, promoting your own services or Adsense.
  6. Build a website which focuses on your chosen keywords: whether you use WordPress, handcode html, use MyStarterBlog or Dreamweaver – doesn’t matter – just do it -its the easiest part of the process. Make sure you on-page SEO focuses on your keywords i.e. get the keyword in your title, sub-headings and content.
  7. Get your site ranked in the search engines: get it ranked for your keywords by getting backlinks which anchor that term. Get backlinks from article marketing and supporting sites like today, hubpages and squidoo. Submit articles to ezine articles.
  8. Rinse and repeat.

So I have a question for you guys: what bit is so hard and scary that you can’t get started? Which bit makes people search for the simple, one process fits all, turn key system. This is being in business people; its scary, there is no one-size fits all that will work for everyone – otherwise no business would be able to hire an employee.

If you are looking for a supportive membership site which will help you succeed check out my review of Keyword Academy Video Crash Course

Photo Credit

Categories
Online Business

2009: The Year I Make it?

balls_prioritesWell this is my New Year’s post – we had a great holiday and no  I didn’t run out of things to do or find any stunningly cheap internet – so no work got done.  Time to take stock:  the back story is here if you care from when I started this blog in April. What have a learnt in the last year.

Biggest challenges of the year:

  • “getting” the marketers mindset.  Understanding that I am in the business of selling things – but reconcilling that with not wanting to rip someone off. BTW I just noticed someone bought a Asus eeePC from one of netbook review hubs – that made me smile – because I love that little notebook!
  • focus – I keep on getting distracted and I need to balance where I want to get to and new ideas which keep on coming from left field!

Biggest Wins of the Year:

  • managing to make some affiliate sales and being able to sleep at night. I have decided that   I will only promote on this blog what I use myself and find useful and explain why  I use it and why. This does seem to convince the occasional person to buy from me – I thank you 🙂
  • finally being able to rank a site based on the keywords I wanted to rank for – it doesn’t sound like much – but trust me it was the “proof of concept” I really needed  – sometimes you just have to do it yourself to understand that it will work for you – dumb but human I think.

So 2009: what is happening going forward.  I am torn, and have been for 6 months, between being an internet marketer, a freelance writer, and more recently a blogger. Unfortunately I am instinctively more comfortable in the social role of blogging or the contractor/employee role of writer  – but where  I need to be is an internet marketer.

Internet Marketer

I have learnt a few things over the year  and now have several sites developed and slowly starting to make me money.  There is money to be made, though at the end of the day its not content which is King, but links and search engine rankings.  That said I still try to make my sites to have some useful content in them, and so far  I have not had any issues with them being taking down as spam so  I think I am doing OK there.

Freelance Writer

Ironically I have made around 60% of my online  income by writing for other people. This was an unexpected development as I never thought of myself as a writer  but like any skill the more the do you the better  I get, and understanding something of how search engine works is definitely an advantage in this area. At the end of the day  Freelance writing is hardly passive income   – as any writer will tell you. Instead I am using it as a way to buy leverage for my main business that is sites and yes content too.

Blogger

I got involved with today.com, initially anyway, because I thought that I could get some easy backlinks to other sites and make some money on the referrals.  I was right on both counts  – but also found that I quite enjoyed the interaction and given that  I was being paid for traffic directly  I could play with some of the social networking stuff such as Entrecard.  Both blogs  I started in November are now PR3 Australia News is more a trends blog while Travel Over 30s is turning into a general travel flagship/social blog.  Basically the idea with both of them is to use them to not just get backlinks but maybe attract a few would be entrepreneurs over to this site or to my hubpages cotent.

Goals for the first 1/2 2009

  1. Get more organised and focussed on the important stuff so that I can achieve the following:
  2. Develop at least 10 more niche sites developed and promoted and ranking in the top 10 for my keywords
  3. Develop at least 1 e-book out a month  – to be also promoted via my own website which involves learning a few technical bits and a hard thing – how to write a sales letter!
  4. Maintain this blog, Passive Income on a regular basis – sorry can’t promise better than that –  I try not to post unless I have something to say – or a question to answer – so if you want more posts ask more questions 🙂
  5. Maintain my two today.com blogs – trying to blend social blog with trends to get a lot more search traffic to them – and do some entrecard dropping at least in the short-term.
  6. Uses AMA more frequently to support my money sites and other blogs.
  7. Maintain and diversify my freelance writing income – probably to replace the part-time, real-world job I have, which is looking very shaky at the moment – mineral exploration anyone?

Hell that’s rather a long list!  The bottom line is though –  I need to start making a decent income – which around here is at least A$1000/week and I am not close yet! But  I will be!

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 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
Paid Tools Tools

AMA After 2 Weeks

Wow I am really impressed. I have been tracking the sites/pages I am promoting using Article Marketing Automation. Today I had a quick look – expecting the usual list of “not found” mean I’m not ranking in the first 1000 results and just about dropped the laptop – I am ranking wow!


Success
Originally uploaded by kevinthoule

I am promoting a hubpage I wrote a while back. The page is nearly a year old but wasn’t ranking at all well on the SERPS. I posted an article with a variety of 3 word keyword phrases on 21 September (which has now been published 53 times): almost immediately my Google traffic jumped – that could have been coincidence – I’ve seen this size jump before. But today I noticed that I was ranked for some of the 3-word KW phrases I had never promoted anywhere but via AMA – in fact sometime in the last couple of days I jumped from not in the top 1000 – to position #2 (for 2 phrases) and #6 for another!

Now hubpages may not be a fair test: I generally find I can get hubpages to rank easier than anything else I write. But I also have been pushing a niche blog of mine. Its been around about 3 months, is a .info and is bouncing around – it got to first page and then dropped out of sight to sit around the 100-300 rank mark for various long-tails, for the last 2 months. Now today its back, and boy is it back -the gain in the last couple of days is around 200-400 places so that I am now sitting position 10 and 20 for quite a number of my keyword phrases I. I submitted one article to AMA on the Sept 19 – and its been published 59 times.

People this seems to be working – I’ll let you know in another week whether the positions hold up. Those links again: AMA free version with a trial of the article submission
Or if you want to go straight for the money version – click the pretty banner on the right!

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
Free Tools Search Engines Tools

Qassia – what is it?

Qassia is not only a useful word to know if you want to win at scrabble and are stuck with a “Q” but not the “U” but also a way to get free do-follow links to your websites or blogs. You earn “Qassia $” (unfortunately not convertable!) for adding “intel” which are short (200 word typically) articles, or by screening other people’s submissions or by referring people to Qassia. You then spend the Q$
to get “do follow” links for your websites: as many sites as you like and you can change the allocation as you please.

It’s a fairly new site and but seems to be doing well and now has a PR5 ranking for its front page. I suspect its one of these places where being in early might well be good: I go to ezinearticles and get depressed about how many excellent articles there are on any imaginable topic: there is a lot less competition at Qassia! Qassia is still in beta testing so the only way to get on is to follow my personal invite to join Qassia