How many guberus say to write articles to market your VRE? Just about all of them, correct? OK, how many guberus have written special reports, posts, ebooks, salescopy, webpages, lenses, etc. about duplicate content? Just about any be or wannabe guru right?
OK, so for every guru that says to write an article, they say it will do you wonders in a few ways: 1) Backlinks to your website, for whatever that is still worth. 2) Make it appear that you are an expert in your chosen niche topic. PLR pretty much makes that bullshit but I’ll concede the sentiment. 3) The oddball click of a link in your resource box. 4) My favorite. People picking up your article from the article directories and posting it on their website for their own “fresh” content.
Is this not like talking out the side of your neck? So the gurus say to write articles. And they say to distribute it to the article directories. However, they counsel that duplicate content is bad. But they are saying that they hope other webmasters use your article thereby perpetuating duplicate content on the web.
We want you to write stuff. We want you to distribute it. Remember, dupe content is bad. But we hope your article gets picked up by other webmasters anyway. WTF?
So as a webmaster needing fresh content and not always in the mood to write it, exactly what message should I be listening to?
I’m not really that stupid. I use OrwellPro to snag articles from the directories all the time and post to my blogs. I write a crappy little commentary. Split the post. Etc. People still visit the site. The post gets indexed. I still write fresh stuff and post to my site and the directories. No big deal.
I just find all the mixed messages and nonsense from these marketers interesting and sometimes pathetic.
Random Nonsense:
I picked up a WSO on the Nintendo Wii. The content was abysmal so I had to do quite a bit of modifying. Actually I did a lot of deleting. None of the articles were worth salvaging except the idea. The idea being I have an article pack from PLRPro on the Wii so I’m going to be building out that site. The thing is the WSO was cheap and I thought the design of the site was a good place to start on my own VRE site. I’m always on the lookout for an idea that provides a bit of motivation.
Everybody is all exited about the free Portalfeeder tool, Comment Kahuna. I used it as Comment Feeder when I was a member of Portal Feeder. The tool is OK. I used it and didn’t find it did much of anything for my website traffic. Others say it is the second coming and their servers are bursting into flames every time they post a new comment. I think any link you can drop anywhere on the web is a good thing. And yes I downloaded it and am using it. Just don’t get caught up in all the hype about how great this tool is. Besides I’m cynical enough to think that if the tool was that special and effective they wouldn’t be dropping it for free on the web at the expense of people paying, what, $200 a month for access to tools like this. Then again, maybe it will end up like OrwellPro: effective as a freebie, but eventually a paid version with more features will eventually be released. Not saying it’s bad but there may be potential for money to be made here.
Finally, I had some mad money I wanted to spend. I bought a couple spam tools to create even more links to my money pages. They were some cheap WSO’s by Peter Drew. They started at $10 and went up as people bought them. Anyway, the tools build pages on MSN Spaces, Geocities and Blogger. Crazy stuff. Lots of opportunity to (easily) spread my links far and wide: Squidoo, MSN, Blogger, Geocities, MySpace, even Comment Kahuna. I am enough of a hypocrite to not exactly be above doing questionable things to get my web pages seen. This will be fun.
9 responses so far ↓
April // Dec 11, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Don’t waste your time with too much re-writing. Buy a thumping big link from a trusted site. I’ve bought a couple from internal pages on a PR7 site. A week or so later loads of pages come out of supplemental and traffic goes up.
It’s not rocket science.
Steve // Dec 11, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Hi,
I had to laugh (and agree) with your initial comments about the benefits of article submission vs. a duplicate content penalty.
Since I’ve had a directory of article directories page for quite some time (my name here links to it), this is something I’ve looked into. And more than a few ‘gurus’ that have been straight shooters in other areas have posted their doubts about any penalties for duplicate content.
In my opinion, a person using this method should submit their article(s) to one of the top directory sites and then wait a couple days or so - to ensure the article gets spidered and indexed there - before submitting it to other directories.
That should ensure the best place (re: traffic and Google PR for inbound link ‘juice’) gets the credit for the article, and subsequent discovered placements by the SEs will be considered the duplicate content.
…And even if those sites *don’t* provide PR, and they may very well, then there’s the benefit of inbound eyeballs for anyone who reads the article or readers to any website or newsletter whose owner may post your article to their viewers.
So imo and from what I’ve read, there’s no need to worry about penalties if your article gets posted to more than one place. The worse that can happen is that you would receive Google PR or other SE credit from every placement, but would still potentially get real life visitors from all the places it appears.
Again - feel free to visit my article directories resource page for some high PR directory sites and also niche directories which are really good if there’s one or more that fit the theme of your own article.
There’s also a link near the top for a new PPP income system that apparently one of the ‘Big 5″ search engines is supporting. See the ‘Free’ graphic near the top. If you have websites that get decent traffic, then PPP will pay for every visit you get… really!
That’s my 2 cents and hope it helps!
- Steve
Splork // Dec 11, 2007 at 2:03 pm
I don’t spend a ton of time re-writing. What I make sure and do though is re-write the title. Also I re-write the first paragraph and the summary. The middle gets re-written depending if I care about the site and just how bad the facts/content is. I can get through a re-write fairly quickly anymore.
Anyway, your link buying is a good tip. The game is all about links. I’ve built numerous Blogger Blogs and have the links all pointing to my Squidoo lens. My lens rank increases greatly with each click to the lens. Once the lens gets popular then Yahoo takes notice. I point the links on Squidoo at my “money pages” and get quite a few clicks and a couple sales that way. Google is only involved at the end indexing the money page.
That said, it’s one of the reason I bought Pete’s tools. I want links pointing to my money sites. I don’t care if Google takes notice or not. I want the 100 or more clicks each day (on each niche) from bored people surfing on Geocities, MSN, Squidoo, MySpace and Blogger clicking to my various money pages. Links and clicks.
PortalFeeder information » Article Writing is a Catch-22 // Dec 12, 2007 at 12:23 am
[…] Article At: Lost Ball in High Weeds Bookmark to: Filed under PortalFeeder by Tags: niche topic, backlinks, vre, catch 22, weeds […]
April // Dec 12, 2007 at 6:19 am
I’ve just noticed that the site I bought from has been downgraded in PR. They were posting an awful lot on the link sales section of DP forums so Google probably downgraded them by hand.
It will be interesting to see if this is purely visual or if it has an actual effect on my sites. So far things are still looking good.
Aloysius // Dec 13, 2007 at 2:31 pm
A freq reader from the Far East here. Absolutely love your site.
On your latest post, are all your sites linkng to Squidoo and yr money sites sitting in the same ip? What’s your view of class C IP address penalty and all that?
Splork // Dec 13, 2007 at 7:39 pm
The Far East. That is so cool. Where?
All my blogger blog sites link to Squidoo. I link to my “money sites” from Squidoo.
blogger>squidoo>website
All I know is I get a ton of traffic to Squidoo lens and it keeps the lensrank high. Which in turn keeps them ranked pretty well in Yahoo…for the time being.
Google cares not for Squidoo but drives traffic to the Blogger blogs. I have analytics on the Blogger blogs and they get some really nice traffic from Google. It’s mostly oddball keyword phrases and not main keywords like what I get from Yahoo via Squidoo. Then when people get to the Blogger blogs they tend to click to Squidoo.
The clicks from the Squidoo lenses to my main sites has increased traffic by around 100 visitors a day. Not huge but enough to drive a couple of affiliate sales a week. Plus each lens and blog has affiliate links too. It’s all a nice symbiosis.
All that same IP stuff is really only a concern if you are spamming. You could have 1000 websites on the same IP and if you were serving up good content that people would link to I doubt the search engines would care one bit. I use subdomains despite years of outcry from the guberus and get clicks just fine.
Thanks for reading Aloysius.
Matt // Dec 28, 2007 at 3:52 am
Splork, you’ve nailed the contradiction in the advice of so many gurus re article marketing perfectly.
It’s something that’s bothered me for a while. As someone who is intending to promote my blogs and sites through articles, I’ve often wondered how best to do this.
I think I’ll take Steve’s advice and post an article to a high quality directory first, then wait a while, rewrite it and post to other directories later.
Chris // Dec 29, 2007 at 4:57 pm
Great post Splork, and long time no see! I am starting to get back into the game.
I look forward to your results from Pete’s programs. Update us soon!
Chris
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