{"id":10369,"date":"2011-01-27T18:14:05","date_gmt":"2011-01-27T17:14:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=10369"},"modified":"2014-02-25T13:02:27","modified_gmt":"2014-02-25T13:02:27","slug":"article-marketing-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/webmasters\/article-marketing-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly\/","title":{"rendered":"Article Marketing: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Andrew Wise<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>It\u2019s amazing that people just starting out online are able to make money. It\u2019s also no coincidence that so many people eventually give up. Why, you might ask? Well, if you haven\u2019t realized already, 96%-99% of all the information on the internet related to online business is junk. The junk can be divided into two categories: 1) The Misinformed and 2) The Con Artist. Both can cost you thousands of dollars in wasted time and money. <\/p>\n

Ranking in the search engines is one of the most important tasks an online business undertakes. It is also one of the most difficult. So, it\u2019s no surprise that the misinformed and con artists come along and provide \u201ceasy push button software\u201d that will skyrocket you to the top of Google and they\u2019ll do all of this for the low price of $37. Meanwhile, the people who are actually succeeding aren\u2019t rushing to sell their secrets to the masses because they don\u2019t want increased competition. So, as you no doubt can conclude, it\u2019s hard to find good information online. <\/p>\n

In this article, I\u2019m going to expose misinformation related to article marketing that may be costing you hundreds or thousands of dollars in wasted money. Also, I\u2019ll tell you what I\u2019ve found to be the most effective. <\/p>\n

Junk Articles and Spinning<\/p>\n

Many sites online offer to distribute content you\u2019ve created to blog networks, web 2.0 sites, and other sites promising fast distribution so that you can have anchor text pointed towards your website quickly. Fast distribution in itself, is not ineffective, and can be very effective if done right. However, many of these distribution services require you to spin content based off the misguided fear of a duplicate content penalty for having the same content on different websites. For those of you who don\u2019t know what spinning is, it\u2019s switching some of the words in an article into synonyms of those words, often done by software. You can also spin by paragraph by taking a similar sounding paragraph and substituting it for the original paragraph. Spinning usually creates junky and sometimes downright unreadable content. <\/p>\n

Who would you expect to put this sort of content on their site? That\u2019s right, junky sites. If you don\u2019t know already, sending out content to junky sites is a waste of your time. Many of them are so bad, that they are eventually deindexed by Google or never indexed at all. If the site isn\u2019t indexed, it cannot confer any benefit to your site. Of the junky sites that are indexed, very few of them are going to confer any meaningful benefit to your site. Google has a high preference for quality. One link from the Washington Post is worth more than 1000s of junky links. <\/p>\n

Sometimes, if you\u2019re lucky, you may find yourself getting better rankings because of these distribution programs. However, if that happens, it\u2019s because you were lucky enough to have one or a few good sites pick your content up. It\u2019s easier, cheaper, and much more efficient to find good sites without using spinning distribution programs. <\/p>\n

Start Thinking Like Google<\/p>\n

If you think about it, you would expect Google to discount junky sites for the most part and focus largely on links from authority sites. Google isn\u2019t stupid. They know how spam works. They aren\u2019t going to base their organic search results on garbage that anyone can get a link on. So, what should you do to get links on good sites? <\/p>\n

The most effective technique I\u2019ve found using article marketing is guest blogging using leads found on MyBlogGuest.com. Here you can find a large quantity of high quality sites interested in accepting guest blogs. It\u2019s really quite simple. MyBlogGuest is a platform that connects blogs that want guest content with bloggers who want to post guest content in exchange for a few links to their site. <\/p>\n

If you aren\u2019t experienced with article marketing, you may not understand how nice it is to have interested leads all located in a single place. Back a few years ago, the internet was much more human. There weren\u2019t nearly as many auto blogs or robot sites. If you try contacting blogs now, at random, you\u2019ll find that very few actually even respond to you and even fewer accept your article. I would be happy if 3-4% of the websites I contacted accepted my offer. <\/p>\n

Cold Calling Blogs<\/p>\n

However, I\u2019m not saying that this cold calling tactic on the internet is useless, it\u2019s not. It\u2019s just so inefficient that it may not be worth your time. However, I recently tried a tool called Ontolo which takes a lot of the grunt work out of finding good blogs in the first place. Ontolo takes keywords that you would use to search for websites, and then produces thousands of sites that can all be ranked according to the site\u2019s authority. Then, the program provides email addresses, twitter accounts, contact pages and more, taking out the time consuming process of finding all that information on your own. <\/p>\n

However, I\u2019ve personally found that my cold calling response rate doesn\u2019t justify the cost of the program. It may be different in your market. Even if you don\u2019t use the program, you can find some outsources to do Ontolo\u2019s work for you. Use Google blog search or preferably, Technorati, because you can search by authority. Also, when comparing sites side by side, I\u2019d suggest using the moz score. Page Rank is a poor indicator of ranking because it is so rarely updated. <\/p>\n

Andrew Wise is the co-founder of BrooksidePatioFurniture.com which specializes in resin wicker patio furniture<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Andrew Wise<\/a>
\nIt\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s amazing that people just starting out online are able to make money. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also no coincidence that so many people eventually give up. Why, you might ask? Well, if you haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t realized already, 96%-99% of all the information on the internet related to online business is junk. The junk can be divided into two categories…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[518],"tags":[440],"class_list":{"0":"post-10369","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-webmasters","7":"tag-article-marketing"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10369"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10369\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}