2. Ezinearticles reacted. Or perhaps I should say they over-reacted?

Why Care About EZA?

Ezinearticles have been a pretty reliable traffic source for affiliate marketers for a long time. In fact, they’ve been such a staple in Internet marketing, it’s almost impossible for you to be in this field for more than a few days before you learn about them.

So, what happened? If you want to get all the details, you can read up on them in this post about Ezinearticle’s reaction to the Google slap.

Here are the cliff-notes:

Basically, EZA’s reaciont to the change is to make EZA a much less attractive place to submit articles. Increase minimum character count, lower maximum allowed keyword density, disallow people from posting the same article to their website and to Ezinearticles (does that also mean EZA articles will no longer be open for syndication? not sure), more rejected articles, potentially longer review process…

Pretty much everything that would put people off of submitting articles in the first place. They also announced that they would nofollow all links, including the ones in the resource boxes. After much protesting, they seem to be reconsidering this position, though.

The goal is, of course, to increase the quality of the articles on EZA and hopefully regain their lost rankings in Google.

The Death of…?

Ezinearticles got hit hard and now their firing on all cylinders to try and recover, which is understandable. The problem is that they’re pointing the wrong way.

Their proposed solution is to increase the quality of articles submitted to EZA. Guess what? Google can’t detect the quality of an article.

Which brings me to the reason for writing this post in the first place. On the one hand, it’s interesting to see this happening. And who knows, maybe we can soon all finally write a “the death of…” article and not mean it ironically.

More importantly, there’s an SEO lesson in this. Yes, high quality, relevant content is the best kind of content to create, SEO-wise. Why? Because that’s what search engines want to deliver to their end-users. They can’t truly separate good from bad content yet, but that’s the ultimate goal. So by creating awesome content, you’re ahead of the curve, in a sense.

But awesome content does not equal SEO. And just because Google has made a change doesn’t mean SEO has changed.

SEO is this: Figure out what signals Google is looking for when placing pages at the top for desirable search terms and send those signals deliberately.

Martyrdom is not going to cut it. Google will not reward you for working extra hard and neither will it reward Ezinearticles for punishing it’s authors extra hard (unless they make adjustments specifically for EZA, which is possible but unlikely). I’m all for good content. But the bare essence of SEO still lies in finding the right tweak and has little to do with (human, subjective, elusive) “quality”.

What are the new tweaks? I don’t know yet. For now, just keep building those links.

Cheers,

There are thousands upon thousands of article directories and they can be easily found through common footprints. The problem is that most of them are broken, abandoned, hacked or completely worthless (no PageRank, no backlinks etc.). So if you have a tool that can submit articles to lots of directories, you may find that you get far fewer backlinks then expected and that those backlinks are not very useful at all.

Today, I’m reviewing Article Marketing Robot. Read on to see if it could change my mind about article directory submissions.

Article Marketing Robot Overview

Article Marketing Robot is actually more than just an article submitter. It comes with:

• Article directory account creator
• Automatic e-mail verifier
• Complete article spinning tool
• Decaptcher integration
• Backlink checking and reporting

Link Volume and Link Quality

As mentioned in the intro to this article, my main concern with article directory submissions is that, in my extensive experience, the failure rates tend to be very high and the link quality tends to be very low. So, how does AMR hold up in this regard?

At the time of writing, you start out with a database of 3758(!) directories. The first step is to create accounts for all of these directories. To do this, you set up an e-mail account and give Article Marketing Robot access to this account. You should also sign up with Decaptcher or DeathByCaptcha (recommended) and link the account to AMR, otherwise you’ll be manually solving captchas all day.

The robot then goes out and starts creating accounts. This worked flawlessly on the majority of directories. Next up, you set it to go through your e-mail inbox and confirm all the auto-confirmation messages sent out after registering to most of these directories. In my test, it successfully confirmed 2152 accounts. So, even though there is naturally a certain failure rate in the signup process, we’re left with more than 2000 directories we can submit to. That is still A LOT.

The next step is to add a spun article to Article Marketing Robot. It has a complete, fully functional spinner built in. It seems to be decent enough, but I didn’t spend too much time with it, as I’m a satisfied user of the Best Spinner. When you add your article, you also set tags and categories and, of course, include a resource box with links back to the sites you want to promote.

Once that’s done, you hit “submit” and choose whether you want to submit to all of the directories on one go, or spread it out over a longer period of time (AMR needs to be running in the background for the latter function). Article Marketing Robot is a multi-threaded application and given enough processing power and bandwidth, it can zip through a thousand submissions in just a few minutes.

In my most recent test, 1380 of the submissions were successful. If you look at how many of those submissions go to directories that have any PageRank at all, there are 283 left and if you look for PR3 and higher, you’re left with 77 sites.

This illustrates my point about article directories. Out of a pool of a whopping 3758 directories, you end up with only about 77 submissions where the backlink can be expected to pass a good amount of link-juice. That’s 2.05% out of the original list of directories.

So it’s Rubbish?

No. Not at all, actually. Article Marketing Robot is easily the best article submitter I have ever seen and there are several reasons for that.

It Does Build a Lot of Links

Those links are mostly not very valuable, but there’s merit in volume as well. While the failure rate is significant, it’s not nearly as high as the failure rates of some other submitters and the total number of directories in the system to begin with means that you still end up getting a big old load of backlinks for any run you do with this software.

The one thing to keep in mind is that you’re looking at one single set of directories, here. This means that if you submit two articles with links to the same URL, the second round of submissions will have limited link-value since the links will be coming from the same sources as the ones in the first round. The best way to use it is to do one round of submissions for every new page on your money sites, as well as for every major page linking back to your money site (i.e. use it for link reinforcement)

It Saves Lots of Time

Many automation tools aren’t all that automatic. They require lots of setup and maintenance and you need to constantly be around while they’re working and intervene yourself from time to time. Article Marketing Robot is not like that at all, fortunately. It does require a bit of setup time, but once that’s done, it is as close to a fully automatic solution as anything can get.

Link Reports

A very special feature that AMR boasts is that you can set it go check on all the articles it’s submitted for you and it will return a report of all the live links it finds. This is particularly useful if you want to feed a list of all your linking URLs into a backlink boosting system.

One-Time Price

Article Marketing Robot is available for a one-time fee of 80 bucks. That is a really good deal and it would not have been surprising to see a recurring fee attached to a product like this. That’s a big plus, since you can potentially get a lot of bang for your buck, if you use AMR often.

Stellar Support

I only had slight difficulties with the program once and contacted Vince, the creator of AMR, with a question. I could hardly believe how quickly he replied. He was incredibly helpful and offered absolutely stellar support. I honestly don’t know how he does it, with all the customers he already has. In any case, I think it’s really worth mentioning, as it shows that Vince cares about his customers and goes out of his way to help them. Big thumbs-up for that!

Conclusion

Normally, I’d make a video showing the process of setting up accounts and doing submissions etc. However, you can find videos detailing all these steps on the sales-page for AMR, so it would feel redundant if I made such videos as well.

Article Marketing Robot is without a doubt the best article directory submitter I’ve ever used. It works swiftly and efficiently and is a useful link-building tool, despite the failure rates and the fact that many of the directories provide only limited link value. You can’t expect any SEO miracles from doing a few AMR submissions, but used as a bulk link builder and link-hub builder in conjunction with a few other techniques and tools, it’s very useful. Couple that with the one-time price and you’ve got yourelf a very good deal. In other words: It’s not necessarily the first tool I’d spend my money on, but as a part of my SEO arsenal, I’m very happy to have Article Marketing Robot.

If you buy through my link, you can now get a discount on your purchase of Article Marketing Robot! Simply click the button below or any of the links to AMR in this article and you’ll be taken to the special discount page!

Click Here to Get the AMR Discount

While I’m generally not a big fan of article spinning, I still make use of the technique here and there and I’m still going to be testing article marketing and rewriting software. Enter the CRewriter. This is an online application that you can use to make the article spinning process a bit simpler. Best of all, this tool is completely free to use.

Below, you’ll find a video showing the CRewriter in action and some more details about what it does and where you can find it.

Video

Check out this video to see how to use the CRewriter:

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Summary/Conclusion

The CRewriter is a very neat tool that basically inserts the spinning syntax (curly brackets and pipes) for you. You still have to do the actual rewriting yourself and that’s a good thing, because it means no one is going to create horribly unreadable garbage like most automatic spinners produce.

Most importantly, CRewriter lets you enter alternatives for entire sentences or any amount of text you like and it supports nested spinning. If you are serious about rewriting complete articles, you’ll get the best results by starting out with spinning large sections of text and then spinning sentences and words within those variations. This will result in the best kind of unique articles, if you can keep the overview over what you’ve spun and how the variations come together.

If it could handle larger portions of text without slowing down, this would be a flawless little tool. As it is, it’s still amazing value considering that it’s free to use.

What are your experiences with article spinning? Do you know and/or use tools like the one above or do you know a better one, perhaps? I’d love to hear your take on this!

Cheers,

As mentioned in the video, I’d love to hear what your take on this whole content spinning thing is and if your experience has been different from mine, I’d be very interested to know in learning more about it.

Cheers,

Squidoo is a very popular article database. Actually, calling it an article database is a complete understatement. While the underlying principle is similar to that of an article database – you can register, publish your own content and also link back to your websites – Squidoo has a lot more to offer. What mainly sets it apart is that you can add a lot of multimedia and interactive elements to each of your pages (called “lenses” on Squidoo). From images and slideshows to videos, polls and digg-like voting elements, there is a huge selection of fun stuff you can add to each of your lenses.

Since Squidoo even allows affiliate links and encourages it’s users to make money (there’s a revenue sharing model), it’s a great resource for every online marketer or article marketer. I’ve put together a series of instructional videos that go into some detail on how to build a lens, how to add in multimedia elements and how to promote the lens to get more visitors and clicks.

You have two options to see my videos.

Option Nr. 1: You can see the entire Squidoo Video Tutorial playlist on YouTube.

Option Nr. 2: Watch any or all of the videos embedded below.

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Video 01: How to Build a Squidoo Lens

(That is not a very charming look I have on my face in this Thumbnail…)

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Video 02: Analysis of the Top Ranked Squidoo Lenses

(Also check out my written report on the top ranked Squidoo lenses.)

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Video 03: How to Add Images and Other Modules

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Video 04: Easiest Way to Use HTML for Improving Your Lenses

And here’s the link to that nifty little HTML-writer: Arachnophilia

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Video 05: How to Monetize Your Squidoo Lenses

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Video 06: Promoting Your Lens, Part 1

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Video 07: Promoting Your Lens, Part 2 – How to Get Ranked in Google

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And that’s it for my first round of Squidoo tutorials. I’ll probably revisit this subject sometime in the future, but for right now, I’m moving on to the next subject.

If you liked these videos, please take a second to rate some of them. I would really appreciate that. Thanks!

All the best,

In a nutshell, article marketing is the practice of promoting a website or a product by writing articles and submitting them all over the internet. Read up on all the background info on article marketing, the benefits and drawbacks and why you should (or shouldn’t) start with it.

Example

Let’s start off with a practical example of one “instance” of article marketing, so to speak:

1. You write an article about a subject that is related to the product you are selling or the website you are promoting.
2. You add some relevant links to this article. Most typically these would be links to pages on your website.
3. You submit this article to a public, online article database.
4. Rinse and repeat.

That’s basically it. That’s what you do as an article marketer.

Benefits

• It’s free.
  Article marketing costs you nothing but time. Submitting articles to article databases is completely free.
• Links.
  You can place links in your articles. Depending on where you want to submit them, there may be some limitations as to what kind of links you can place or where you can place them, but you can always place some type of link somewhere in the article. If you link back to your own website, it can increase your traffic, because people who read your article and like it might click through.
• Page-Rank.
  One of the factors that will increase your website’s page-rank is how many links from other websites point to yours. Since you can place links in the articles, that number will climb with every new article you publish, which in turn can increase the page-rank of your website.
• Keyword targeting.
  Some article databases tend to rank very highly in search engine results. It might be very difficult for you to get your own website into the top results for your targeted keyword, but a well-placed article can get there more easily. If that article contains links to your website, then that’s almost as good as having your website itself rank in the top results.
• Branding.
  If you put enough work in and generate enough quality articles, you can get known among the frequent visitors of a database. This can help you towards building a personal brand.
• Indexing.
  If you have launched a new website, one of the fastest ways to get new visitors and to get the site indexed by search engines is to publish a handful of articles containing links to your site. Since the popular article databases are frequently crawled by search engine bots, your article will be picked up soon and a bot will follow the link to your website. This is much faster than submitting your site to the search engines and waiting for them to get around to indexing it.

Drawbacks

• It’s time-intensive.
  Writing a good article – one that is really worth reading and that will attract many readers and also motivate them to follow the link to your website – is a time-consuming task.
• It takes a lot of persistence.
  Your first article will not get many views and will not do anything for your page rank. The same goes for the next few articles your write. You will probably need to spend countless hours writing and publishing articles before you ever see distinct benefits from it (i.e. increased traffic and more sales).
• You’re spreading around content that could be a valuable addition to your own website.
  You need to keep a good balance between publishing on article sites and publishing on your own website. If you spend all your time writing for article databases but neglect your own site, you might generate a lot of traffic but the visitors will leave your site again immediately, seeing that it’s practically empty.

Where to Publish

The most popular and most highly ranked article databases are Squidoo and ezinearticles. Goarticles and Hubpages are also among the more frequently mentioned sites. Those are by far not the only choices, though. Click here to see a large list of the most popular article databases online.

Make sure to read the terms of agreement carefully, before you start writing for any of these databases. Because article databases are such an easy and free tool for marketing, they all take measures to prevent spam. You can’t get away with blatant advertising on any of them and most of them don’t allow you to publish any material on certain subjects. So make sure your niche isn’t on that list before you start writing. Generally, you have to provide good, readable, valuable and original content, otherwise you will not be published on the sites.

And that’s all the basics on article marketing. Give it a try, don’t give up after just a few articles and see what it can do for your traffic.

All the best,