The Challenge and More Automation For My Business

As my business has grown lack of time time has become an issue. Maybe I do things the long way round, maybe I spend too much time experimenting or getting sidetracked. Whatever, I feel every day that there are so many more things that I can do to help build my business, but I never get everything done.

Outsourcing helps. I regularly outsource article writing, but not every outsourcing experience has been good for me. However after 2 duds in a row I found a delightful lady in South Africa to help me with some articles. I can write my own, but after a couple of articles on most subjects I run out of steam and boredom sets in.

Instant Article Factory

Writing on demand is not for me, but last week I found a tool that is helping me to churn out more articles. The tool is called Instant Article Factory and so far I've got mixed feelings about it. You basically write your articles into a variety of templates with pre written text which can be spun prompting your text. It's hard to explain but you can write basic articles within 5 minutes if you wish.

Why I've got mixed feelings is that unless you rewrite the pre written text in your own words there are going to be a lot of articles around with the same basic formats and sentences and they won't pass copyscape. So it took me more than 5 minutes to write an article because of the changes that I made, but it was still quick and the templates help me to focus on articles that otherwise might not be written. I've written 3 so far, 2 from the same basic template they are at:

5 Things To Avoid When Article Marketing
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I think that they are different enough, what do you think? Maybe I will write a proper review for Instant Article Factory using one of their templates!

Article Submission

Writing my own articles and getting them outsourced is all well and good but then there is submission. I have always hand submitted to a handful of directories and then used a submission service to send out slightly altered versions. That submission service did well for me but it came to a standstill a couple of months back and not for the first time. I have a stash of articles waiting to be submitted with nobody submitting them except for my hand submissions.

I've looked at other services but I guess that I'm still hoping that my old submission service will start up again. In the meantime I decided to try out the product 'My Article Submitter' which has been sitting on my hard drive for a few years. It looked good but half of the listed directories were either not founds or changed to another use so I checked and deleted those and started adding more directories that I had signed up to. The whole process was taking far too long so I decided to search for current submission software with preloaded directories.

Article Marketing Robot

Is what I found and I am still reeling from using it! No it isn't that bad but my sense of humour is starting to kick in. The product at this moment has 1133 directories loaded on to it. It's blooming marvellous how quickly you can sign up to directories and get the sign ups confirmed, but I did it wrong and only have 175 directories to submit to - it's a long story and it's my own fault. I'm hoping that the developer of Article Marketing Robot will come to the rescue soon.

Straight away when I opened the product and saw the directory list I contacted the developer and asked him to take my travel article directory off there. Only a small percentage of those using the software will be submitting travel articles so that means an awful lot of wasted time for travel or niche directory owners like myself. He took Articles Abroad off the list but I have misgivings about just how many niche directories are on there. One is 'Guitar Playing Tips' and another is 'Free Sex Stories', I really don't think that my dolls house articles will suit them somehow.

Watching one of the training videos was vastly entertaining. Articles Abroad is being used as an example of a site that isn't working properly. The thing is that it is working properly but he is obviously using a free email address to try to sign up and free email addresses are blocked on the site and many other directories because a vast amount of spam comes from free emails. At least as my contact Nick says my site will be getting some exposure!

Anyway I submitted my first article with it last night and so far it has been published on 101 sites. That's still really good and far quicker than I could hand submit. Article Marketing Robot also has an article spinner but I'm not interested in spinning articles. Even though I'm not happy with the amount of niche directories that are on there and I have messed up with the amount of directories and  I can submit to I still think that this product is going to save and make me a lot of money not to mention time.

Note: Once I have gone through the articles I have waiting for submission I can always go through the process again properly using a different penname and get more directories to submit to.

Automated Blogs

I've also automated some of my blogs and have been trying out several different plug ins but I'm still not certain which I prefer so I will review them all more fully later.

The Challenge

I did what was called the 30 day challenge 3 years ago and learned a lot and especially how to get targeted traffic to my sites. Being aware that things constantly change on the Internet I decided to join up again this year and formed a UK group on Facebook. There are 7 of us and what a great bunch they are. We are supporting and helping each other and our first conference call on Tuesday went down really well.

Instead of it being a 30 day challenge this year the training modules are shorter and we have 7 days on and 7 days off, there are 7 pre season training videos and 49 full on training video days which makes it 15 weeks instead of 30 days.

I've completed the first week of training and although I haven't learned anything new yet the training has reminded me that I must research more and has introduced me to 6 great people and reintroduced me to a fantastic tool.

Market Samurai

I tried the free trial last year and thought that it was quite good but this year it has added features and I've used it more and it's completely blown me away. With Market Samurai you search for niches and micro niches and it uses data from the internet to help you find niches that have good amounts of daily searches and not too high competition, also if they are money making niches and there is an affiliate ad search feature. I could and have spent hours on there searching and finding!

One of the features that I like is being able to search for free content and post it to my blogs from within Market Samurai. I have a habit of building several blogs at once but not enough time to write enough content for them all so being able to add quick content to a new blog before google indexes it is invaluable.

I could go on forever praising this product but I gotta go shopping now and back to the real world.

5 Things To Avoid When Article Marketing | BB Articles

There is lots of information and advice on the Internet about article marketing. That’s great for those who are learning who need the advice – and for those of us who never stop learning! However for all of the good advice floating around it’s also good to discover the things that you ought not to do and what you should steer clear of.

The idea behind this article is to assist you to get the best out of your article marketing campaigns by showing you 5 things that you need to avoid, why you should avoid them and what you should do as an alternative if you want to make the most out of your article marketing campaigns.

O.K. then, here are the 5 things that you should avoid:


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