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Article Directories For The Most Part Suck
Article directories over the years have become havens for spammers. Most of the article directories just automatically accept the articles that are posted to it (EzineArticles and a couple of others excluded). There is often no human editor to check and see if the article is relevant and valuable.
Also, a lot of the automated tools out there usually submit the exact same article to several directories. Where's the value in that? Some of the tools will "spin" the articles to create semi-unique ones. That's getting a little better, but these methods of "spinning" are what have turned a lot of people off from doing it, and for good reason.
A lot of the spinning tools to date have put out crap. They are "spun" by a robot that locates dictionary words and replaces them with words from a thesaurus. So what are you left with? A bunch of articles that are for the most part unique. Great! But most of them don't make a lick of sense. Not so great! The robot dropped in words that were out of context. It did it's job with the information that it had but "spinning", to be done properly requires a bit of human intervention. Not a lot, but just enough to keep content valuable. We'll get back to that.
Contextual Links or Sidebar Links?
I feel honoured when someone adds my blog to the blog roll in their blogs' sidebar. It's nice in terms of getting some of their readers over to my blog, but does it offer any SEO value? What I'm hearing lately is that site wide links offer little SEO value, if any. In the case of a blog roll it really might just be best to have one page devoted to it.
But how about contextual links? It has become apparent that having related content surround a link, in the form of a paragraph or article, has more SEO value than a link added to an unordered list in the sidebar. So, for example, someone linking out to your site in a blog post, will provide great value. But what if you could control the anchor text of that link, make it do-follow, and while you are at it, add 3 links total in the post? Better yet, the extra 2 links can point to deeper pages in your site or even a different, but related, site! But who's going to take the time to devote a post just to you? Sadly, unless you have great networking skills and have some relationships established, not too many.
Getting Contextual DoFollow Backlinks
Did you know that there are blog owners that have left their blogs "open" to accept content that you supply (providing that it is unique) and that you can add backlinks to? Since you control the content, you control the relevancy. But these blogs aren't open to just anyone. They are left in the hands of Blog Content Syndication networks.
The networks categorize the "open" blogs and plus make sure they are at least indexed in Google. So, they act as the middleman between you and the "open" blog. On the other side of the coin, they make certain that the content being submitted is worthy of being posted. They also provide the tools to PROPERLY "spin" your article, allowing you to create several articles that are for the most part unique, and most importantly, provide value.
So who pays for this? Well, the content receiver (the "open" blogs) are rewarded with free, automated content. The content providers, the one's getting all of the backlink love, pay monthly for the service. They get unlimited use of the service for a nominal fee. Search engines love blogs compared to article directories.
What's Involved In Submitting Content?
There's one bit I want to mention before answering what is involved in submitting content. It's important to note that the content is distributed to the "open" blogs at a rate of 1-2 per day, and with one submission, this usually lasts for a couple of months or more. In other words, your links are being built in a slow, gradual way that is much more natural than say... blasting the same article to 100 article directories at the exact same time.
And to recap... you get your choice of anchor text, in fact, depending on the network, you can have up to 30 phrases to use as anchor text, and up to 30 URL's to link to. The system randomly picks the anchor text/URL combo to use in the rendition of the article that it creates. Also, you get up to 3 links per article, depending on the number of words. Over 450 words grants you 3 links. Also, these are do-follow links. So again, you ask, what's involved?
I hope that at this point you see the value in this. If not, the rest of this post is meaningless. OK, so what you would need to do first is write (or have written) a unique article. Shoot for around the 500 word mark. There are several ways to do the next part, but I'll explain how I have been doing it and have seen great results. What I do is write another article with exactly the same number of sentences as the first. Each sentence in the new article corresponds to the sentence in the original article. In other words, sentence 1 from the original article should have the exact same meaning as sentence 1 in the new article. That way, it wouldn't matter if we swapped them between articles, the article would still flow the same. Just change the words used in the rewritten sentences to be unique from the original, but again, retain the same meaning allowing the sentences to be swapped.
The network that you submit the article to will be swapping sentences randomly creating a bunch of mostly-unique articles which is why it is important to get the sentence-matching done correctly. The content that you submit to them will consist of the 2 articles you wrote sort of mashed together in a special format. There will be opening and closing tags around your matching sentences, as well as a separator to show where the original sentence ends and the new one begins. Note: You may also add extra rewrites for each sentence. 1 rewrite each is just the minimum, and for the most part, all I ever do when I submit content.
During the submission process, you will also be submitting keywords and URL's. You will be given tokens to use in your article that represent the backlinks. Put them where you want them to go and the system handles the swapping out of the tokens and replacing them with the hyperlinks. It really does sound more complicated than it is. Each network has video tutorials in place to explain the process, plus once you are in there, it is more clear how things are to be done. I, personally, spend a good hour, hour and a half, per submission to make sure that I get it right. It's well worth the effort that you put in now for the rewards down the road.
Where Can I Get This Service?
If you are as excited about this opportunity as I was when I first learned of it you are probably wondering where you can get in on the action? Well there are 2 networks that I work with to cast a nice wide net and they are Syndicate Kahuna and Article Marketing Automation. Using both networks isn't at all necessary. I use them just to get a different set of blogs to get the backlinks from.
Which is better? They are mostly equal as far as content submission goes in my opinion, with a couple notable difference... AMA is cheaper. SK gives you 30 versions of your article to do what you want with after submitting to their network. Since the system creates so many article renditions and it picks them randomly, the 30 articles you get might never see the light of day, so I usually take them and submit them to Web 2.0 properties like Weebly.com, Squidoo, etc. If one or more of those 30 happen to get published to a blog sometime down the road, it's not a huge deal. A couple versions of the same article that exist around the web isn't nearly as bad as what exists in the article directories.
If you still aren't sure, give it a try for a month, make one submission to get backlinks to one new site and cancel your account. Wait a couple of months to see the influx of traffic and the higher rankings in the search engines. Then kick yourself for not staying a member and seeing the first article submission through to completion (usually 2 months). Sign back up and submit like crazy for all your sites, and even to the Web 2.0 properties that link to your sites. Maybe submit 1 a week per site to see huge rewards. One bit of advice.. when adding multiple backlinks per article, use different URLs. Apparently Google only looks at the 1st link in the article when taking the anchor text into account.
Good luck!
Let me know if you have any questions, and if you have any comments, go ahead and post below.
Tags: money-blogs, blogger, work-from-home, bloggers, how-to-create-a-blog
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Fri, Jul 24, 2009
Blogging, Make Money Online, Online Business