Catch Up

It's been too long again since I posted here. Too much to do and too little time. The good news is that BB Articles has now got an Alexa ranking of less than 200,000. That means more traffic and hopefully more article reads. I aim now to get the Alexa ranking below 100,000 within 12 months. It will be hard work but from the beginning I said that BB Articles was going to be one of the best article directories and I like to keep my word.

A couple of months back I removed the sign up form because agents of a company who paid their agents to submit plagiarised articles were spamming BB Articles and other directories with so many cheat articles that it was costing me 2-3 hours a day to check and delete articles and the many new accounts that they opened up every day. I work in a full time job besides run an internet business so some days all that I had the time to do after work was deal with these submissions and my business was suffering.

Last week I was able to put the sign up form back because of a nifty add on created by Bob of www.bjc-computer-services.com The script allows me to check all of the pending articles and delete the offending ones that ring alarm bells with one magical click - the whole process only takes seconds. When you think that it's deleting something like 100 articles a day you can imagine how much time and stress that the script is saving me. I just worry that some of the genuine articles might get caught up in it.

In my last update I talked about my newest site www.uksmartguide.com I've developed that quite a lot and the traffic has grown substantially in a short time. That's thanks to the article marketing that I've been doing and also to the content that I've added regularly. Apart from my own additions a lot of that content has come from BB Articles and my travel article directory Articles Abroad. It's great having so much readily available content that I can use to build a site quickly, but I would still like more content about every area of the UK and especially reviews from those who have actually visited or live in any part of the UK.

Articles Abroad has been doing well too. I love that site - I get to read about lots of different places every day, trouble is I want to visit them all. I designed a new cheerful header last month, professional designers will probably think it's naff but what the heck I like it.

One thing that I have noticed especially about articles submitted in the travel niche is that some of the authors mess up by using bad titles for their articles. What I mean is titles like 'car hire in Istanbul' or 'holiday rentals in Spain'. You click to view the articles expecting an article about car hire or holiday rentals and find a description of a place with no mention of car hire or holiday rentals until you hit the author resource box. Basically the titles are aimed at the resource box and misleading to readers. If I was searching for information about car hire or holiday rentals and hit on one of these misleading articles I would click away annoyed and certainly not click on any links in the resource box.

Thats enough for today I think.

The Article Marketing Handbook – Will it Help Article Marketers?

This review is my personal opinion of 'The Article Marketing Handbook' I'll tell you:

1) What it's about
2} Did I learn anything?
3} Is it worth the asking price?

I’ve read a lot of articles, ebooks and forum posts about article marketing and have found that the information and advice offered can be conflicting and confusing to new article marketers. As an article marketer I have studied the results from my own campaigns and come to my own conclusions. As an article directory owner I can see from studying the site stats month after month which articles are working for the authors. I can also see from Google searches which articles have been found on my site and republished on blogs or websites.

With the double insight of article marketer and directory owner it can be frustrating to see articles being submitted that you know will not be effective for the authors. On the other hand you learn to recognise articles that are going to do well for the authors and your directory.

With this in mind I was curious to read ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’ written by Allen Graves – an experienced article directory owner and article marketer. I’ve come across Allen in forums and have to admit that we don’t always agree, but it is plain to see that Allen cares about article marketing. Because Allen has been involved with article marketing longer than I have I hoped that I would learn something from his handbook. I also felt that as he had the same opportunity of double insight as I have albeit for longer that ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’ should be as good as if not better than anything that I have previously read. My expectations were high so lets see if the handbook lived up to them.

The Content

At first I was impatient to get to the ‘meat’ of the ebook and wasn’t happy with the long introduction and theorising in the first couple of chapters, but then I saw that Allen was expressing why it is important to get your article marketing campaign right. It isn’t just information - it’s plain common sense that every article marketer should consider before embarking on a marketing campaign and worth reading.

Allen then guides you through selecting your niche, ways of discovering what information your readers are searching for and spending money on and how to find the best keywords. All useful information and if used correctly should help you to write more effective articles.

You learn why you should use pen names and how to select them. How to write titles that grab a reader’s attention while appealing to search engines. How to best summarise your articles and how to format the article body to capture the reader’s attention and keep them reading. Some tips are also included on how to write your author resource box to gain higher click throughs to your website.

Did I learn Anything?

Yes I did. I was particularly interested in a chapter explaining how to find the best places to submit your articles to and why. Also how to get more click throughs by promoting your articles after your submissions have been accepted. Both ideas are so obvious that I wondered why I hadn’t thought of them.

There are several more article marketing tricks that I have noticed used by authors who submit to my directories and hadn’t really thought about. To find out if they work I checked my site stats and sure enough those articles were getting more than the average hits. That could be a coincidence or those tricks could be working for the authors and my directories.

What I Think

There is a whole lot more information but now I’m going to tell you what I think about ‘The Article Marketing Handbook’. The ebook is well written and in a no BS style that I personally like. For anybody familiar with article or Internet marketing it’s easy to understand, but those new to the field may struggle without more basic information about for instance the importance of keywords and phrases. But, that and other basic information can be readily found with an Internet search.

Is It Worth The $47 Asking Price?

For most ebooks I would say absolutely not. That is because there are thousands of ebooks available on the Internet free or at incredibly low prices and that muddies the water on perceived value. The Article Marketing Handbook is different in that it provides a lot of information and advice that I haven’t seen before in any article, forum or ebook. Information and advice that I know from experience is correct even if I hadn’t thought about some of it before reading the handbook.

The Article Marketing Handbook is by far the best guide I have read on the subject of article marketing, so I wasn’t disappointed. As Allen will be providing updates as the market changes I would consider the one off $47 payment to be a good investment for ongoing success in the article marketing field.


The author Patricia Jones writes for several websites including The Creative Writer and Make Money From Writing

Visit Eprofits Centre for free digital downloads

Music Articles and Reviews Wanted

Wow I didn't realise that it was so long since I had posted here. As always I've been extremely busy building websites. At present I'm working on 2 music sites megamusictalent.com and megamusicsite.com in partnership with Gary Vine, a business associate and friend from way back.

I'm enjoying putting it together and it's great because I get to watch music videos and read some really good articles. Of course I will have to write some articles myself about music for article marketing but that should be fun.

I will also be looking for good music articles and reviews for site content so get writing.

Progress

I've been very lax with this blog lately, too much to do and not enough time to do it in. I've made lots of progress which I will tell you about.

I rebuilt my membership sites Eprofits Centre and Articles Abroad on my new server. It was very time consuming, but the good news is that an upgrade of the Memberspeed software had just come out with added features, so the result is that the sites are now better than before and with more features still to be added.

I've been adding articles to both sites and there are now quite a lot of free digital downloads on Eprofits Centre. I made some products available for visitors to access which is good for rebrandable ebooks of my own and site members. So far there are just 2 levels of membership and one is free. Soon I will add another level of membership where those members can resell memberships at 100% profit should they choose.

I've noticed 2 things with the more developed site Eprofits Centre. First of all the articles are getting more hits than on the main directory. I think that is because the site is optimised for business and computer related articles and the software also lets me optimise the individual categories as well as each article. Another thing is that when I posted a mini review or comment to one of the articles hits shot up. I don't know why but in the software sales bumff you are told that it has been especially designed to add stickiness to sites built with it.

The review manager is an excellent add on. Members can review and give feedback or add information to articles, products, audio and video. Reviewers can set up a profile with up to 5 of their website links included, though I might increase that.

I'm still finding my way around the Memberspeed software but I'm glad that I splashed out for it and can see that it will help me to fulfill many of my business aims.

A Busy Autumn

It's been far too long since I updated this blog and a lot has been happening. At the beginning of this month BB Articles was given a Google page rank of 2. I thought that was quite good for a 4 month old site.

Traffic has been continuously rising and already the November figures up to present are higher than all of Octobers traffic figures. Search strings for anything to do with article directories are starting to heavily feature, which is probably a result of the rank.

Unfortunately I am declining more articles than ever. It isn't a matter of me changing the guidelines. The only guideline that I have changed is that I no longer accept articles with gambling links. It's more a matter of me being more thorough in sticking to them myself when approving articles. Many article submitters do not read guidelines, or if they do they ignore them. The guidelines are there to set standards and maintain a high quality which benefits authors as well as myself.

This week I set up a new niche travel article directory/membership site at www.articlesabroad.com Using memberspeed software. At least I can start as I mean to go on with quality articles.

The Sun Came Out And So Did My Spare Domains

Lots of sunshine this week and everything seems brighter. More new writers for my article directory and the plagiarism has declined but not completely stopped. I stopped smoking but I must admit that I got stressed one day and caved in and bought a pack of 10 cigs. The next day my mouth tasted foul so I guess that taught me a lesson.

Instead of smoking I started to build a new site around an unused domain that I had at www.cashwrite.info It's not brilliant but I was experimenting with designing ads with adobe photoshop and using several smaller ads instead of an header. I had only used photoshop once before so for a beginner I'm quite pleased with the results.

I've decided to give the article directory a new look next month and I might use the same type of ads on the site to make everything look more coordinated. I didn't alter the design much when I installed the directory because I had never worked with anything like that before, but now I feel more comfortable with making alterations.

BB Articles has seen a steady increase in traffic. Quite gratifying considering that I've not had a great deal of time to promote it. Realising that you can't sit still I've been looking into ways of increasing traffic and came across a new traffic exchange programme that I actually totally understood and because it involves advertising the traffic that you get is targeted rather than random. It's early days for seeing how well it works.

One of the things that put me off the traffic exchanges that I've seen before is the feeling that untargeted traffic is worth squat and that I'd rather have visitors who are interested in my sites and are more likely to spend time on them and of course spend.

Another good thing to happen today was that I found a use for another spare domain www.dumpthatad.co.uk I got it a few months ago when I was trying to figure out how to get an advertising media that I used to run offline on to the internet. The idea is fun but a bit complicated for the internet, so I used the site for playing around with ads. I've been a bit stubborn and haven't been cloaking my affiliate links, but today among the masses of products that I own I found a link cloaker with a website and decided that the dump that ad URL would be perfect for the link cloaker site.

I've decided to give the link cloaker away free as an incentive to opt in to my mailing list. Lots of work to do there because I have a few ideas to add to it.

I've got some more spare domains lying around, I just hope that I can get everything else done before I happen upon a use for them!

Banging My Head Against A Brick Wall

Today was the pits. I got home from a hard days work, logged on and saw more new writers and more new articles than any day since I stopped automatic submission. I should have been pleased, I was pleased until reality snuck in.

Despite adding a paragraph in red above the article submission page about not accepting anything that is plagiarised etc. 27 out of 36 articles submitted I suspected were plagiarised. Some of the same writers that I had deleted their accounts for that reason signed up again and submitted more plagiarised articles. 6 of the articles were not written in English and as the site is all English I had to decline them. 3 decent articles left and a heck of a lot of my time wasted.

I have come across article directories that have suspended submissions because of spamming or plagiarism and I don't blame them.

Because so much of my time is being wasted I have less time to promote the site and write my own articles. That will have an effect on the genuine writers and of course my business. One little ray of sunshine is that I found a very low cost article writing service which I am now recommending to the cheats. I've no doubt that most will ignore me, but maybe some will get the message.

Newsletter and Forum

I have been so busy moaning that I haven't added the highlights to my month. I started a newsletter at the beginning of the month and it was quite well received, no complaints anyway!

I'm only going to send the newsletter out monthly, that's enough. I get newsletters from some companies almost daily and have stopped bothering to read them, but I still look at the less regular ones. Apart from the newsletter being about article marketing I want to encourage new ideas and will give anything new developed by subscribers a mention in the newsletter.

I have plans to publish an online magazine in the future, but I need to free up some serious time to develop the idea properly.

I will also be adding a forum to the site in the near future. I wasn't really into forums until I joined a really good forum last month. You get free advertising for posting and I've learned quite a lot and made some good contacts there too.

I'm looking around for a good script, may even get one made if I can't find exactly what I want in the meantime I'll continue getting free ads on my favourite forum.

Fresh Start?

Thankfully the automatic article submissions stopped but only when I took the script out. Articles are still filling up my inbox despite me emailing the article submission company several times asking them to stop sending them. I have deleted hundreds of articles, a waste of my time and I wonder how many good articles I'm losing because of this.

I've tried blocking the company but the email address they are sending from is hidden and with my email account used being on my domain you can't get at the source as you can with hotmail.

What I feel like at the moment is pulling the site down and starting all over again. A new design and far less articles. If I did that it would take time but the pros are starting to outweigh the cons.

Less articles would mean that the site would be faster and all of the functions would work. I would be able to get rid of articles that I don't want, for instance about weapons. Reduce the amount of categories and have all of the articles in the correct categories which would be better for the rss feeds and better for the writers. I would also lose all of the articles with incomplete resource boxes. In hindsight it would be like that now if I hadn't opted for the automatic submission company doh.

The only con really is time. I would have to save the old site on another server and gradually move the articles submitted manually and the best articles to the new site. But, I have been spending a lot of time moving articles to the correct categories etc. and I would guess that if I continue it will take me longer to go through all of the articles than start afresh.

It would be nice to have a fresh start so maybe I've talked myself into it!

Up To My Eyeballs In Articles

What an hectic week. An enormous amount of articles were waiting for approval on Tuesday and every time I approved some more came in. Most of them didn't have category suggestions so the approval process took longer because I had to figure out what category they belonged in. Some of the articles were pretty obscure which made it harder.

There was such a huge backlog by Friday that I pulled the automatic submission script and started to email members to ask them to post manually, hopefully that will slow things down but not bring things to a standstill. I realised that a lot of my time was being wasted unnecessarily and I was struggling to find time to promote the site or make improvements. My other sites are so neglected they might as well not exist.

Other problems that the automated script brought was that html was being stripped out of the articles resource boxes, that I got fixed with another script. Then I realised that the automatic submission was creating lots of unnecessary categories, for instance doubling up with computer and computers. It also created a main category called Speaking and sub categories under that of religion and online auctions - weird!

I'm now trying to sort out the categories and have already deleted quite a lot. I've decided not to accept any more political articles or articles about weapons. I don't think an article directory is the place for political debate and I don't want links to sites selling weapons on any of my sites. I'm toying with the idea of not accepting any more articles about religion too. I find some of those articles interesting although I'm an atheist, but some of them are just plain preaching and can hardly be called articles. I'll just refuse those for a while maybe.

The only bit of light relief this week was when I looked at the article website statistics. A searchstring that was - how to use covert hypnosis to get women to sleep with you - I laughed when I saw it but now I'm going to search to see if there is anything like that on the site. The thought of some creep using hypnosis to get sex makes me shudder, surely that would be classed as rape. Then it could be BS, and I don't think it's possible. However if it's on the site it won't be for long.

Wow nearly 40,000 articles

There have been times when I wondered if I was taking the right step with an article directory, but now I know that I have. Who would have imagined that there would be so many articles within 2 weeks of launching? I certainly didn't and more are still coming in. The articles mostly arrived through joining a company called Article Marketeer who submit articles for you.

They have 2 options, by email or with a nifty script. I chose the email option because it sounded easier. My mistake, my inbox was flooded with subscriptions and articles and I had to place these on the site. I was going bogeyed with the effort and decided to try out the script. Despite my fears it was easy to install and the subscriptions and articles are coming in automatically now.

I was worried that the automatic members wouldn't visit the site but I am seeing that many are and some are posting articles by themselves.

Another worry is that I wasn't getting to check the articles before they were posted. Article Marketer check them for you but I have thrown some out that I have seen. Either for being unethical or just complete advertorial with no personal experience or advice. I don't see the point in advertorials. Most readers will see that they are just ads and not what they are looking for when they do a search about a subject. Apart from that if they want to purely advertise they aren't getting a freebie.

Many of the articles that I have read are informative and of good quality. That I find pleasing but I have to admit to some cynicism as regards some who call themselves as Internet marketing experts. My cynicism arose when I read some of the articles giving advice about Internet marketing. What I couldn't understand was if they are experts why do they not use keywords appropriate to the articles?

Some just use a couple of words from the title. For instance the title might be 'Put some jam on your bread' they would use jam and bread as keywords. I am not an expert on Internet marketing and am reading the articles to gain more knowledge about that area, but even I know that somebody putting jam or bread into a search engine will not be looking for advice about Internet marketing.

Ok that's a wild example and I will be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong. If I'm right then I'm not 100% happy about advice from those who are not walking the talk.

Anyway on the bright side the site is getting lots of hits from unique visitors. More in the last 2 days than in 2 months on my other sites. It remains to be seen if it makes more money. I'm going to be good and wait a while before checking the various advertising sources.

What next? Unfortunately the category section on the home page has been messed up somewhat with the input from Article Marketer. I will be working on fixing that and making some improvements over the next few days. Then I will push the boat out with promotion. I have lots of articles kicking around and will be flooding other sites with them to get back links. That will be stage one and a continuing process until www.bb-articles is blasted all over the Internet. It looks like the Busy Bee is back in spades!

Welcome to my blog

What a frustrating week I've had trying to set up my article directory. I'm terrible at understanding technical instructions and had to do many a google search before what I have done so far clicked.

I had 2 false starts when I tried to set a directory up on my own webspace. First of all I tried to install an article beach site and couldn't get it working properly. Then I tried Article Dashboard. I got everything on the site and started to customise but realised that the email confirmation for new joiners wasn't working. After many hours of searches and hair pulling out I realised that a thing called cron jobs exists and couldn't find any mention in my cpanel. I emailed the guy that I bought the space from and was told that they didn't allow cron jobs because of security issues. I understood but when I looked at the advertisement that I bought the space from cron jobs was there large as life.

For those of you who I am baffling with 'cron jobs' it's something to do with the site automatically sending confirmation emails, newsletters and news of posts etc. If you want your own article directory type site then make sure that you get a host that offers cron jobs.

Anyway I wasn't too bothered because I didn't pay much for unlimited space for life and already have something like 7 personal sites hosted there and the ability to host myself. I decided to pay a monthly fee for hosting the article directory with the recommended hosts.

I bought the space and started to publish the site. Every step of the way was more difficult and time consuming with the recommended hosts than with my own space. I finally got there and guess what? I couldn't get the cron jobs to work when I signed up for an authors account.

I joined the article dashboard forum and went through every recommendation posted by users. Nothing worked and I would have been bald if I had literally torn my hair out. I was almost ready to give up but emailed the recommended hosts first.

It turned out that I was using an hotmail account for the test author sign up and hotmail was filtering out the confirmation emails as spam grrrr. I might have thought about that one earlier if I hadn't signed up as an author on the Article Dashboard site and received the confirmation email with no problem. I added the BB-article site to my hotmail safe list and now everything is working great - I hope! Just got lots of customising to do but the site is ready for posts.

What I find strange about Hotmail is that they filter out emails that you want to receive as spam, yet the only spam I have received in that account in 7 years must have come through hotmail selling the address to spammers and scammers. I know that because I used it as a private address for 7 years.