Article Marketing - How Many of Those Article Directories REALLY Count?

15 06 2008

There’s a good chance that much of your article promotion efforts are a waste of time. Why? Your articles will be indexed only to a limited extent. Through the past year, I’ve been experimenting with many different approaches, including quadruple content and title rewriting, experiments with JetSpinner, mass submission, submitting different material to various directory types and playing with the time of submission. Here’s what I found:

  • Google and other SE’s will index the same article 4-5 times, if submitted in a close timeframe (same day/week).
  • Date of acceptance (ie. where was it published first) matters more than the PageRank of individual sites.
  • Articledashboard clones are close to worthless.
  • Google duplicate content checks use checksum algorithms rather than DupeFree Pro style word-order and phrasing comparison (my theory, and it makes sense as it’s a faster and less complicated way)
  • All the fuss about mass submission? Funny.

What does it mean for you? A couple resulting tips and pointers:

  • Write (or have it written for you) quality content first and foremost.
  • Submit your content to the 5 top ranking article directories and prefer those who give you more options for anchor text links, bio’s and which have a better hierarchy (ie. less subfolders).
  • Using DupeFree Pro a lot is a waste of time. Use it only for the purposes of rewriting for mass submission.
  • If you want to write alternate versions, write an article with 2x the content (more tips, more insight) and split it in two. Submit these entirely different versions to different sites. It’s actually all about the content, so don’t just rephrase the same thing.
  • Using JetSpinner and alike will not give you much, unless you’re in an extremely competetive and spammy field such as gambling, viagra or “instant quote insurance no medical”. Efficient but not effective.
  • Use mass submission as infrequently as possible, which means once in a month maximum. It’s really not worth that much of your time - I’d suggest you automate the entire process, and you’ll still get only limited results due to the reasons mentioned in the second bullet point of this article.
  • If you can, don’t submit all of your articles the same day.
  • NEVER EVER use submission software (huge waste of money and time).
  • Instead of wasting your time with article submission tricks, focus on building quality content which others will promote for you naturally. There are many other fronts of online promotion which yield better results, such as building expert status by getting featured on blogs, via interviews and promoting multimedia content (the last one is a BIG one).

How much time have you wasted this week? Next time, don’t.



Cheap SEO Services - Why Are They a Bad Idea

2 01 2008

A lot of people tend to think that white hat SEO and site promotion is alike to selling air. They argue that all these companies are doing is selling overpriced web design and using the same simple promotional tactics as everyone else. No wonder that there’s a tendency to opt for the cheapest rates possible and hope for the best. Unfortunately, as the old time cliche goes, “you get what you pay for”, and many people are surprised that the results aren’t showing any dramatic increase in the rankings even after a few months of “work”. There are several caveats of using cheap SEO services, promising many links for ridiculous prices:

  • Promotional strategies used by these companies are following a one-size-fits-all policy.
  • Backlinks obtained from cheap SEO services usually come from non-related sites, especially with very low pagerank scores (spam sites, automated article directories). These links have little or no value, and it’s best to put minimal effort into them if any. While they might increase short term rankings, there’s a good chance that the sites will get banned, devaluated or abandoned, rendering any links useless and potentially even hurting your site.
  • Low quality PLR articles linked to your site will create a cheap impression in the eyes of your customers.
  • There is no effort or thought put into these services.