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Posts Tagged ‘article distribution’

There are plenty of places where we can learn about an affiliate marketing business.  Unfortunately, it is much harder to find someone to do the actual difficult work for you.  Well, I haven’t quite fixed that problem for you, but I have discovered what I think is the next best thing.

I do affiliate marketing, although I also sell my own information products and physical products.  My online business is made up of a number of traditional sites and blogs.  I rely quite heavily on search engine optimization (SEO) to secure traffic, but that is a long term strategy.  In some cases, I have used PPC for affiliate products with success, but more often I am lucky to break even. 

So, for me, as for all Internet marketers, traffic is a very challenging part of my business.  Especially difficult are those times when I have to pass on a new affiliate opportunity because none of my websites are optimized to bring in targeted traffic for the product, so I face the age old question:  How do I send my traffic to the vendor’s site?

My approach to directing traffic to the vendor’s site is just like many other affiliate marketers, I take them first to my own site, where I ply my skills of subtle persuasion.  Then I just hope that I have been sufficiently convincing to get them to click the link that directs them to the vendor’s site so that I have some small chance of earning my commission.  I would like to make that process a bit less involved and take the prospects to the vendors a little more efficiently.

I use article marketing extensively for all of my sites.  I employ that strategy primarily for its SEO value but also for the direct visitors that are sent my way.  However, especially for an affiliate marketer, there are two major problems with traditional article marketing.  First, the major article directories don’t allow contextual links within the body of the articles.  Instead the links stand alone in a section that they call the author’s resource box, but which screams, “Commercial!” to our readers.  Second, the major article directories do not allow affiliate links or even links to redirected pages or domains.

At last there is a content syndication service thall allows both contextual linking and inclusion of direct affiliate links.  Yes, you will be able to join the affiliate program of the amazing My Article Network once you become a member of the service.

My Article Network is like a consortium for article marketers and content publishers.  (The link goes to some specific information about My Article Network on one of my sites.) 

Since I am writing for affiliate marketers, I’ll cut short the presell message and let sales page of My Article Network speak for itself.  I’ve been using it for less than two months, and I am a complete convert to the system.  I joined it for the article distribution, but I became so enthused that I set up four new blogs to take advantage of the free content in some of my niches.  {(Go ahead.  Click the link, you know you want to.)(Do it!  You know you want to click the link.  Come on…don’t you think I deserve it?}

You can effectively maximize your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) by having your article marketing outsourced when you are trying to sell a service or product through the Internet.  SEO encompasses the steps for letting your website gain the best ranking that it could get for certain keyword searches in the results pages of the search engine.  The possibility that an Internet surfer will visit your site is substantially increased if your URL is placed on the first page of the results.

More traffic to your site means that you have a better chance of selling your product or service and unique articles offer an inexpensive way to increase that traffic.  The first purpose of the articles is to allow you to place the keywords and phrases that you believe would be searched when a potential buyer of your product or service uses the Internet to look for your kind of product or service.  In this way, the search engine spiders will know that your website is focused on those keywords and phrases and will include your site on the results pages when someone searches for them.

Submitting your unique articles to those websites that collect them is a key step that should not be neglected.  These sites that collect articles already have high rankings in the search engines so that the ranking of your own site will be pulled up because of the links to your site that are included in your articles that result in more and more backlinks to your website as the number of articles that you have submitted increases.

The second purpose of the articles is the natural generation of backlinks to your site.  Search engines, particularly Google, consider backlinks as an indicator of the popularity of your site.  Your ranking in the search engine results will rise as the number of backlinks from quality websites increases.  Also, you may gradually become an expert in your specific field as you get more and more articles published on those websites.  Many people would then like to provide a link to your website so that the number of backlinks to your website will grow even faster.

Therefore, marketing with articles on tap is very important in maximizing your SEO activities.  And if you feel that you do not have enough time to write those articles, you can always depend on article writing services.  The prices offered for the quality articles are quite affordable.

First a little context.  Fewer than fifty days ago, I made the smart decision to become a member of an article marketing service.  While I don’t actually know the guy that designed this remarkable tool for online marketers, I think he should let me borrow it for my next vacation].

Because of my past experiences with this guy, I was confident that the service would accomplish for me what it promised: An innovative way of distributing my articles.  Like any Internet marketer, I could always use more traffic, and is there anyone who isn’t on the look-out for a way to add external links pointed toward our virtual real estate?  In order to achieve both these objectives–traffic and improved SEO–I rely heavily upon article marketing.

This service has some advantages over traditional submission to article directories, though.  For example, I can now put my links directly into the body of the article rather than assigning them to a resource box.  That’s something that isn’t allowed in most article directories, but contextual linking offers greater benefits in terms of search engine optimization and traffic maximization.  Also, rather than being filtered through an article directory, my articles in this system can go directly to a website that is specifically related to my niche.  Once again, great for traffic and SEO.  I can also put an affiliate link directly into the article if I choose, another “no-no” with article directory syndication.  Perhaps the greatest advantage is this:  The system has a built in article spinner so that if I prepare my articles well, each website that receives my article can publish a unique version of it (essential for any SEO gains).

After almost fifty days, I thought that I would check to see what I had accomplished so far.  Here are just a few of the highlights of my experience with My Article Network.

You need to realize that the system gradually distributes articles to websites, so every article I’ve submitted so far is still yet to be published on some of its sites and other articles have just begun.  I have submitted 58 well spun article.  Unique versions of those articles now appear on over 1900 pages on the web.  I have between one and three links in each article, so my conservative best guess is that my sites singled out for promotion through this system have received somewhere in excess of four thousand links.  Obviously, it will require additional time for some of those links to be noticed by the various search engine.  Some of my links are actually pointed at other of my articles published on article directories and some of the sites in the system to give them a little more “link juice.”

About half the articles are directed toward my newest site, which I just started building three months ago.  Alexa couldn’t even find that site when I first joined this system, and now it has climbed in the Alexa rankings more than two million positions.  In fact, it gets more traffic than some of my sites that have been around for quite a while.  Indeed on the oldest site that I ever built (that I still own), has received no attention from me in months, but I entered nine articles into this system and that site’s Alexa ranking has improved by more than 120,000 positions.  I can’t attribute that traffic growth to anything other than those nine articles–and the system that distributed them.

Okay, if you like those numbers, take a look at this.  I didn’t even think of tracking the results of this program until six days ago–yeah, I know, I’m a slouch).  During that six day period, the eight sites that I have promoted using this distribution network have risen in Alexa a cumulative total of over five million positions.  I realize that Alexa is not the finest measure of progress, but I still think that’s a very strong indication of getting my money’s worth and then some.

I actually became so excited by the whole process that I have subsequently created four new blogs to join the over 10,000 websites that are eager publishers for the content that we writer-marketers provide.

I strongly suggest that you become a member of My Article Network.  Yes, you affiliate marketers out there, you can become an affiliate–after you join the article distribution service.

For those of you who just happened to stumble onto this article and are beginning from the very beginning, I’ll begin with a brief answer to the question:  What is article spinning?

We sometimes spin articles so that we can get added benefit from the time or financial resources that we have invested into producing an excellent piece of web content.  We want to minimize the same article’s publication on too many sites, due to the fact that duplicate content will not be of any value to anyone involved.  Our prospective readers certainly don’t need to repeatedly find the same article, the websites risk getting no value from a duplicate article since the major search engines attempt to avoid showing the same article multiple times in any search results and we online marketers, in turn stand a substantially decreased liklihood of getting all the traffic or search engine optimization benefit that we might have have received from entirely fresh content. 

Spinning is simply rewriting the article, one bit of content at a time, and then using software to randomly select from the alternatives that we have written for each section to construct a large number of unique articles from our original version combined with our alternatives.  We can offer alternatives for entire paragraphs, for entire sentences, for phrases of a few words or for individual words. 

We can also place alternatives within other alternatives, using a process known as nested spinning.  As an example of this, let’s use this as my first sentence: “I love my new brown coat.”  I may decide to write two alternatives for that sentence.  One alternative might be, “I certainly enjoy the brown coat that I recently purchased.”  Another option might be to break the original into a couple sentences in this fashion:  “I have a new coat that I really enjoy.  It’s a dusty brown.”  So the computer will randomly choose one of those three alternatives for a given version of my article.

In order to use nested spinning, I give you an example using just the third alternative, although I could nest additional choices into any or all of the three options.  Let’s say that I decide to let the computer select either “really enjoy” or “like immensely.”  Furthermore, perhaps I can change “dusty brown” to “muted shade of brown” in some cases.

The more choices the spinning software has, the more versions of the same base article that are sufficiently unique (different from every other version) will be successfully generated.  (A good target is to have each version that you submit to a website be a minimum of 25% different from every other version.  I actually prefer to reach a higher standard of about 35% or more.)

Here are the two best ways to maximize your spinning efforts.

Method 1:  Rewrite each paragraph, one at a time, once.  Rewrite the first two or three paragraphs and the last paragraph a second time for each.  Now, using nesting, rewrite each sentence in each of the alternatives one time.  Next, add one more level of nesting by providing alternatives to certain words and phrases in the first two paragraphs and in the last paragraph.

Method 2:  Rewrite every sentence in the entire article one time.  Go back to the beginning of the article.  Provide one more rewritten version of each sentence in the first, second and last paragraphs.  Apply the first level nesting to selected individual words and phrases in the first three and the final paragraph.  Also provide some alternatives for selected words and phrases in those middle paragraphs.

The first approach is more thorough and will yield somewhat better results.  The second approach is faster and will usually yield satisfactory results.

If you choose to contract with a professional article spinning company, I suggest that you be certain that the service will strictly adhere to these general recommendations.  Indeed, consider sending the spinning company a link to this article.

One final tip:  As a rule, you achieve better results with longer articles, as the total number of alternatives (and, thus, possible unique combinations of alternatives) increases with the total number of sentences.  Of course, longer articles will also take far more time to prepare for spinning, so you need to weigh those variables in determining article length.