How Article Submission Works and Tops Other SEO Techniques

A fact that most online merchants and webmasters may use to their advantage is the constant demand of readers for information through websites on various niches. This is why subscription services are almost always a hit that is if the website is well known and established with quality content. One of the ways to enhance the chances of boosting web popularity is through article submission.


This technique is well known because of its high success rate which is actually among the top as compared to other SEO techniques available. It may not be the latest but it is certainly useful for most internet marketers. To be able to experience the benefits of submitting articles, it first important to understand what makes article submission such a good process to opt for and what is the key behind its unique significance in the field of online marketing.


Article directories serve as large depositories for an even larger amount of information in the form of articles on the web. It basically works by being the main point where writers may submit articles and webmasters may use the articles that have been submitted to fill content on their site. To keep track of the owners of the articles, there will be a box that may be used for bio or any short scripts or text. It will always come with the article when distributed through the article directories and will be displayed along the article on whichever website.


There are many article submission and directory sites. Fortunately, there is also a huge population that wants daily fresh content and searches for it primarily through these sites. To be able to be picked out from the rest, readability is crucial. It must be able to stand out through hundreds of thousands of contents on the similar topic.


Most of the top article directories will be going through all of the submitted content manually or review it through a special software that checks for grammar, spelling and thought errors. Instead of viewing this as an obstacle, it can be seen as a great advantage. Only the best quality articles are accepted. Therefore, there will be less competition and the readers or visitors who will take articles from the directories will have greater chances of seeing the articles submitted by a particular writer. In addition to that, they will have more confidence in the contents thus providing a long term relationship.


Some internet marketers use free article directory for apparent advantages. However, there will be tough competition in this area. There is a great chance of being noticed in these sites if the articles are of utmost quality and contain the some of the best or authoritative back links. Double the work and effort is required with a free article directory but it saves a lot of monetary resources. Article submissions certainly have a great deal of advantage over other SEO techniques as not a lot of technical knowledge or background is required to be able to succeed. Additionally, it is low cost yet high results oriented.

Eleanor Gibson

This writer also manage free article directory. Submit your unique articles to our article submission directory for free online promotion and passive traffic.

Article Courtesy of BB Articles Directory

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
Giving Up Smoking – 5 Things That You Should Avoid When Stopping Smoking

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.

Article Video Robot Review

Video marketing is gaining in popularity and increases targeted traffic for those who use this method of marketing. By submitting to video sites you get a new distribution channel for your content and more quality backlinks for your websites and blogs. I'm not a technical person but now I can convert my articles into videos quickly and easily.

Yesterday I heard about Article Video Robot and having tried it out free was impressed by how easy it was to convert articles into videos and felt that it was worth upgrading to the paid membership. You can see my first effort below. It isn't perfect by any means, but when you consider that it was my first try and only took a few minutes to make it isn't half bad.



Unaltered First Attempt!

You can try Article Video Robot out free before deciding whether or not it will work for you. If you have an ezinearticles.com account you can create your video in seconds by adding the link to your chosen article. Or you can input your article yourself. I think that is probably the best way and then you can adapt your article for the video and control things more.

One small problem when I was trying out the free version with an article about article directory scripts was that where I had used the initials AD for Article Dashboard and AF for Article Friendly those initials were spoken as they read. Without trying it I guess that it would be better to use A. D. and A. F. within my video article when I try it again.

You can edit your videos and add your own images to their stock images. You can also either use their selection of music soundtracks or upload your own. Their are a choice of different voices to use, or you can record your own and add that. That would probably work better if you have a clear speaking voice - with my Yorkshire accent it could be a problem except for converting my articles about Yorkshire into videos!

Video Distribution

You can download the videos to your computer and place them on video sites, websites and blogs yourself, or if you create a monthly account you get 125 credits to distribute your videos to 17 different video sites automatically - 1 credit per site. After you have used them up you need to purchase more, but if the videos are working for me I won't have a problem with that.

You can also add your videos to several different social networking sites from the distribution screen, that doesn't cost anything.

I'm pretty pleased with Article Video Robot so far but the proof of the pudding will be in how much extra traffic and sales this product generates. I will update with that once I can assess the results from several videos.

Now I'm going to have some fun and play around with it some more and create a better video!

Coupon Code

If you think that Article Video Robot is for you I can offer 20% off with the coupon code 25F481F3 just enter the code as you purchase.

Update

I made my second video and feel that it's much better. Instead of using the ezine articles link I pasted my article in and found that I had more control. I did a bit more editing and you can see the result of my second attempt below. While I was making this one I posted to Facebook and Myspace and then decided to make some changes. Those changes automatically updated on those sites without me having to upload again.



2nd Video

I think that is better and feel that with practice there will be more improvements. One of the things that I liked about this video was that the sea looked to be moving in the photo of the Blue Grotto in Malta. It looked so inviting that I could have dived in for a swim and inviting is what we want our promotional videos to be.

I think that I will make a training video for article marketing next - watch this space!

Coupon Code

If you think that Article Video Robot is for you I can offer 20% off with the coupon code 25F481F3 just enter the code as you purchase. But before making a decision have a go with the free trial first.

Update: 20th May

I should have updated this earlier but I've been busy building a new giving up smoking blog. I did as I said and made a training video for article marketing. It didn't turn out bad but there are a few errors. What I have found is that the quality deteriorates when submitted to sites such as YouTube, so I used the alternative publishing option and submitted it to my wordpress blog where you can see it in it's full glory. I tried to post it here but the size was too big for this theme.

I think that the video would have been better split into 2 or 3 parts and the sound quality isn't brilliant using their mechanical voices. I did try to record my own voice but I couldn't get my computer microphone to work. If I upgrade to the business package I will get better HD sound quality and more effects, plus an advanced video editor which will make videos easier to edit. I probably will upgrade once I've had more time to play with it and figure it out better.

In the meantime I will check to see how my videos are doing in the Google rankings. Article Marketing Directory Submission without quotes is ranked 7th but darn it the video on that site has an error message. With quotes blimey - 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 7th and 10th. That's 5 out of the top 10 and the rest of the sites have the video in it's full glory.

Now I'm going to check the other videos that I made. 'Singapore Festivals' hasn't got anywhere in the top 30, nor did 'travel for free' or 'travel writer'. Their full titles 'Travel For Free As A Travel Writer' and "How To Celebrate And Have a Real Good Time At Singapore Festivals" wiped out any competition. However those titles are less likely to be searched for than the main keywords 'Singapore Festivals', 'travel for free' and 'travel writer'.

What I have learned from that is that I need to focus on my keywords when naming the videos and my fourth attempt 'Singapore Beach Resorts' is 4th, 5th and 9th in Google rankings and the original article is in 6th place. I haven't done anything to promote the videos except for submitting them to several sites, so I'm very happy with their rankings and how quickly they got there - within a few hours.

The page I am directing the 3 Singapore videos to has had 1118 views during the last 20 days, whereas last month there were less than half those views for that page altogether. It could be the videos that have made the difference, or it could be the time of year.

I enjoyed making that video and found that by using less speech and more visuals it is more effective. I'm not happy with the sound quality so I guess that I shall have to upgrade sooner rather than later. You can see what I mean below.



Next I am going to make some videos for my new quit smoking blog. I've found some pretty good key words and I will be able to see easier the effects on a new site rather than one that has been established for a while.

Coupon Code

If you think that Article Video Robot is for you I can offer 20% off with the coupon code 25F481F3 just enter the code as you purchase. But before making a decision have a go with the free trial first.

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

Update At Last

I've been lax again about updating this blog. Been very busy with my Joint music venture with Gary Vine. Our partnership business name is JV Creations and I have built a website at www.jvcreations.co.uk for our partnership. Gary is in the process of building a music download site at www.megamusicvideos.co.uk, I am building up the original mega music site and we are building a music website design and hosting service sites. Mega Music Talent went belly up when I tried to upgrade the memberspeed software. That software could be really good but it brings so many problems that we have decided not to use it on our sites and build something else on that site instead.

XSitePro version 2 came out recently and I've been having a splendid time rebuilding some of my sites and building new ones. There are so many added features to the upgrade that I'm finding the software awesome. I've written a review about XSitePro 2 and will post that next.

My latest website is at www.uksmartguide.com I've got a lot to do but I intend to include articles, pictures and information about every area of the UK in time.

BB Articles is still going strong, over 50,00 articles now but it won't grow much for a while because I'm gradually deleting articles that have dead links. Rather than delete them all I am considering adding a link for a charity instead if the authors don't get back to me with new links.

Writing Reviews For Article Marketing

There are several review sites on the Internet and for two years I regularly submitted reviews to two of them. Reviews are a writer’s opinion of a product or service and writing and submitting them are in some ways similar but also different to writing for article marketing. In this article I’m going to make comparisons and show how I think that reviews can be used in article marketing.

Detail and Information

For me writing reviews was good grounding for article marketing. I had previously written articles for home business magazines but when I started to write reviews I soon found that I needed to add more detail and information to do well in the review site ratings and earnings, sometimes it could get a bit silly when over critical members would want to know every little detail about packaging when the site owners did not.

The more detail and information we add to an article the better. Some article marketers split their information into several articles instead of writing one information packed article. That may work better for getting quick back links but if I tried to do that I would feel as if I was selling myself and readers short. There is always the option of using part 1, 2, 3 etc in the article titles but if a site visitor looking for information found part 3 first would they bother to look for parts 1 and 2 when they can just click back to the search engine and find a full article on the subject that they are interested in?

As we are always hopeful that a publisher may use our articles as website or ezine content I suspect that if an article comes in several parts it would have to be really good to stand a chance of being chosen.

Warts And All

There is a difference between reviews written for sites like Ciao and Dooyoo and reviews written for article marketing. On the review sites you review a product warts and all. The reviews need to be honest because it is useful feedback for manufacturers and because the review sites are communities your credibility is at stake amongst other members. The rewards are not very high even for top writers, but I guess that would depend on which area of the world that you live in.

Most of the reviews that I’ve seen in article or Internet marketing are full of praise and no warts. You know that the authors are trying to sell a product or get readers to join the latest millionaire making affiliate programme. You also know that many of the reviews will be dishonest because the authors are trying to gain product or affiliate sales.

In article marketing the rewards are backlinks to your sites and hopefully syndication of your articles to get more backlinks. The money that can be earned through article marketing is greater and especially if an article goes viral, but as with review sites you don’t earn anything if you don’t get it right.

Getting Content Right

Getting the content right for reviews and article marketing is much the same. Quality, information, legibility, correct grammar and punctuation, advice, detail, layout and for me simplifying technical explanations to a level that most can understand. That last one was my idea! If a reviewer is writing about a particular model of mp3 player and that review is found in a search for information about mp3 players by somebody interested in buying one; and the reader can’t understand the technical jargon then they are going to look elsewhere for advice.

The same applies to article marketing. If your article about mp3 players is linking back to your site or blog that incidentally has adverts for mp3 players you want the reader to go all the way down to the bottom and click on your link, not click away because you have lost their understanding part way through. As a publisher looking for website content I would be more likely to go for an article that is easy to understand rather than one giving the same information but full of technical jargon. That is unless you are aiming your article towards techie sites and that’s a whole different ball game.

When you write product reviews for the review sites you don’t need to think about key words and phrases as in article marketing, though if the review sites pay per visitor click it’s not a bad idea to use them. In article marketing we learn to use key words and phrases in our article titles and article body, but when we use too many it can make an article harder to understand and read. If a publisher is looking for good content that will capture visitor’s interest and keep them on their site longer they will be happy with key words and phrases used in context with an article but not if they are too many and placed where they don’t fit.

Knowing Your Subject

When you review a product you are expected be familiar with and have used the product enough to be able to give a fair assessment of it. For instance a review about a washing machine that you have been using regularly for several months is far more credible and useful as feedback and for prospective buyer information than a review about a washing machine that you have only just bought and used twice.

The same should apply to article marketing and in many cases it happens, but there are also lots of contrived articles. The best writers can carry it off and make it seem as if they use a product or service but many writers can’t fake it. It is pretty obvious that they have gleaned their information from sales spiel and the lack of user experience in an article lowers it’s worth for readers looking for information and publishers looking for content.

My biggest bugbear is travel articles. I love reading about different places from a visitor’s point of view. Contrived travel articles are generally boring and next to useless for readers who want to know what a place is really like and are looking for tips before they book their holiday. If I couldn’t produce more information than can be found on a travel brochure I wouldn’t write about a place.

Do Reviews Work In Article Marketing

I think that there is a place for reviews in article marketing and if they are well written and show user experience they are good for publishers to use as content. Reviews can be written about almost any product or service giving a wide range of subjects to write about – as long as that product or service isn’t your own!

The author Patricia Jones writes for several websites including Mega Music Site, Articles Abroad which offers travel information and The Creative Writer

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.

Boxing Day - Problems Almost Over

Christmas day was another one of those days. I logged on to my computer and got lots of warnings saying that my computer had the worm.win32.netsky and by coincidence I don't think; 2 new icons had appeared on my desk top for spyware scans. My IE kept on opening and trying to take me to spyware removal sites - another big coincidence!

Logic told me that the computer didn't have the worm and that in fact it was a scam. I've almost finished an article about the fraud and will post it here during the next few days.

I've almost sorted out my server dilemma. I've signed up elsewhere and should be able to start moving my membership sites tomorrow. It will be a relief to get them back up and running again, I've lost a lot of time during the last few weeks due to the server problems. Thank goodness I did back ups of the sites else I would have had a lot more work to do than just moving them. I'm just leary of the actual moving, my technical abilities are not all that. I suppose that I could pay somebody to sort them out for me but there wouldn't be any challenge in not doing it myself.

Was surprised to see some articles submitted to BB Articles on Christmas day and quite a lot today. Not surprised to have to decline several, a shame because most of them were good articles if only the site guidelines hadn't been ignored. It's the time of year for holiday destination articles. I really enjoy reading them and hopefully I will have plenty of fresh articles to add to Articles Abroad once it's back online again.

I tentatively joined the new website advertising wonder Pay Per Play a couple of weeks ago. I think that it could make money and plenty of it if you have a high amount of traffic. My only reservation is that the noise from the 5 second adverts might drive visitors away. I browse with the sound turned down so it won't bother me.

The Negative & The Positive

The Negative
Calamity seems to be following me this month. My server for the new membership sites Eprofits Centre and Articles Abroad took over a week to get back up and running. The sites were extremely slow to load and when I tried to send out newsletters to apologise for the sites being down I found that all of the cron jobs were missing and I had to set them all up again. There was also regular patches of downtime.

If you have read my earlier posts you'll know that cron jobs and I don't get on so it was no surprise that I set them up wrong. Each site has over a dozen so lots of mistakes to be made. I got the Articles Abroad cron jobs sorted but 3 of the Eprofits cron jobs weren't right and emails were being sent to my inbox every 10 or 15 minutes. I was limited for time and just deleted the emails twice a day until I had time to figure out what I'd done wrong.

The time came yesterday. I tried to log on to Eprofits and found that the site had been suspended with no warning and no explanation. I could only think that either a scammer had latched on to another of my sites, or the cron job emails going into my site inbox were considered as spamming, though I wasn't letting them build up.

Another possibility was that several days before my monthly fees were due to come out of my account I got an email saying that my payment was overdue and my account would be terminated if I didn't pay. It was the second month running that I'd had that warning email and when I complained I was told that it was just a reminder. Reminders don't tell you that you are late paying, nor do they make threats.

A few hours later Articles Abroad was suspended, as there were no problems with the cron jobs that couldn't have been the reason. My 2 new ventures down twice in one month and just as they were starting to gain momentum. The server support could only say "The server just is not acting right. There are still some bugs we are fixing."

The other problem that I have with them is that it is an hosting reseller account and I haven't been able to log into my hosting cpanel since they got back up and crawling again. Fortunately it is a new account with no customers, but what I have at the moment is one site up and running out of 3 but that site is totally useless because I can't set up accounts for new customers.

So I am paying for a service that I'm not getting. 3 of my sites are not doing anything and as I extensively advertised them the suspended pages won't be doing my credibility much good. Of course I am now in the process of looking for a new server. I got back ups of the sites, but I've never moved a site from one server to another so I'm a bit apprehensive about moving even though I know that I must.

The Positive
During the down time I was able to spend more time working on my older sites. I haven't done much with them since setting up the article directory so it was long overdue.

I've also been messing around with various scripts and software and found a neat little script that builds Youtube sites with content that automatically updates. I built 3 mini sites, the last one taking all of 5 minutes. You can see that site at www.bb-articles.com/spicegirls I think it's rather neat and have a few ideas on how I can use the mini sites to aid my business.

More positive is that BB Articles Alexa ranking is now 285,386 and still rising। A massive improvement in a relatively short time. Some really good writers are now becoming regular submitters so I can only see a good future for BB Articles.

Merry Christmas

A Great Weekend & A New Business

I spent the weekend visiting my grandchildren Harrison and Isabella and had a great time. They have moved to a new 4 bedroomed house about 30 miles away. The 4th bedroom is for me when I go to stay, but 2 year old Isabella decided in the early hours that she was sleeping in there too. It was lovely waking up in the morning seeing her smiling face on the pillow next to me.

Harrison decided to give me a belated birthday party and chose a My Little Pony Cake. His gift to me was a set of 3 small spades for my ex overgrown garden. What he doesn't know is that the overgrown garden that he knows has been landscaped recently. He is going to grow up believing that his spades have worked miracles!

I have a week off work and am using that for the business. On Monday I set up a new site using memberspeed software at http://eprofitscentre.com. There are other similar membership sites but I will try my best to make it different. I set this site up because I wanted to use and test all of the software's features before developing a new JV in January with a totally different idea to what I've been doing so far. All of my new membership sites will have article directories and all will have lots of features for members to use.

With eprofitscentre.com I'm setting up my first internet affiliate programme. It looks quite easy to set up and use with this software but they could be famous last words!

BB Articles has now got an Alexa ranking of 410,990 and still rising. I'm really pleased with it's progress and the steadily rising traffic. The search strings show a healthy amount of people searching for article directories and various information - some of them are hilarious!

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.

Article Marketing Success And Sheep Do not Mix

I like article marketing and find it an enjoyable and profitable way of promoting my websites. I never plan articles, the ideas just come out of the blue from something I have seen or heard. Once I start writing the words just flow, but before I write an article there are two things that I consider.

1. Why am I writing the article?
2. Would it be of any use to webmasters for their sites or for newsletter publishers?

It does not take rocket science to figure that I and every other article marketer am using articles to benefit our own promotions, but they will be of little benefit to us if we do not produce quality articles that others will actually want to read and use.

Owning my own article directory I have read thousands of articles, many of which I would never use on my other sites or in newsletters and many I have declined for various reasons. Let us consider the rights and wrongs of articles starting at the beginning.

Attention Grabbing

Your title is your headline, there to grab attention and many people never look past the first 2 or 3 words. I could have called this Sheep Do Not Mix With Article Marketing Success but I want people who are interested in article marketing and not sheep to read it. Another type of title that will not grab me is The Top 20 Tips For Passionate Sex. It would be more likely to create interest if it was Passionate Sex My Top 20 Tips.

Writing Standards

Spelling and grammar are important. You are promoting yourself and your business and you need to present yourself as professional to be taken seriously. I write my articles in Word first and use the spell checker. I sometimes fall out with it because I am English and prefer not to use Americanised spelling.

If you have problems with writing but good information the answer is to use a ghostwriter or copywriter. There are plenty of good writers advertising on the Internet and personally I think that one good quality article will do more for your business than 10 poor articles.

Know Your Subject

Good advice for writers is that they should always know and understand what they are writing about or their articles have no credibility. I was gobsmacked last week to read an article about my own country that I knew to be very ill informed and by somebody I suspected had never set foot on our shores. The guy could not even spell Britain right and as his misspelling was in the title he sunk without trace before he even started!

Original Copy

The best and most memorable articles are purely original, thought provoking and offer different viewpoints to a subject. Some writers submit zillions of slightly changed articles about the same subject over and over; yawn. They are boring and eminently unreadable after the first one or two. There are exceptions where writers are providing updates and news about their chosen subjects. I would use those articles for my sites.

Lists of quotes from the bible for instance are not original articles. At least 90% should be your own work and quotes only used as a point of interest not as the whole article. Submitting articles on behalf of others is suspect, how do readers know whether you have filched them or not? Plagiarism, not worth going there, eagle eyes and google will find you out!

Advertorial Blues

An advertorial is an advert written in article form. They carry no unbiased information or advice that would be of any help to anybody interested in that subject. There are plenty of places to advertise for free on the Internet, so trying to fob adverts off as articles is unfair on directory site owners or visitors who want to read articles not adverts.

Link Usage

The reason most of us use Article Marketing for promoting our businesses is to place links to our websites in the author resource boxes usually placed at the foot of articles.

I like to maximise the potential and use the up to 3 links usually allowed. Many article directories allow active links, but some do not. A problem can arise when articles are automatically submitted if the script the site uses strips the html. I prefer to submit manually mostly and then I can activate the links myself or just put my website address if the site doesn't accept html links.

Links within the articles are unacceptable on most directory sites, but as you get 3 chances in the resource boxes there is no point trying to cheat.

All Keyed Up

You will be asked to provide some keywords for your articles so choose wisely. Study your content and consider what somebody who might be interested in your article is most likely to enter into the search engines. A poor example is if you are writing about search engine optimisation and your title is SEO, Internet Business Bread And Jam, you would not use jam and bread as keywords unless you wanted to attract hungry people. Apart from that your articles credibility takes a nosedive if you do not know what a good keyword is.

Readability

Finally, your article should not be repetitive and should be interesting. Short paragraphs make it easier to read, text talk makes it more difficult. All capitals in the article body or title are a no no, they only stand out in the sense that the reader feels shouted at and nobody wants to feel like that.

I hope that you have found this interesting and useful and that we get lots more quality articles to read.

Article Source: bb-articles.com

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.

What Next?

This blog is turning out to be more of a moan than a blog but I guess we all have to get things off our chests somehow.

During the last couple of weeks a lot of my time has been wasted checking articles for cheats. Something like 3 out of 4 articles submitted have been plagiarised fully or partially and the amount has been growing.

At first I felt sorry for some of the posters, I know that not everybody can write acceptable quality articles and I know that a lot of people cannot afford to pay for ghost writers. I feel that these cheats want to jump on the article marketing bandwagon and plagiarism is their only option.

I can't condone plagiarism though. I know that some article directory owners have been threatened with the law for accepting plagiarised articles and I am not prepared to put myself in that position.

Some of the cheaters have had the nerve to try it on more than once. I've deleted accounts and they have just signed up and cheated again. I have now added a notice about plagiarism to the article submit page. It is going to be one strike and they are out. I know where I can get a script to block people and I will install that if necessary.

I wonder if these people think that because I am relatively new to owning an article directory I have no experience of spotting cheats. If so they can think again, I've been writing on internet sites for years and can usually easily spot plagiarised work. There are lots of tells to look for and google does the rest.

To end on an high note my 2 and 3 year old grandchildren came visiting today. We went to the park and did lots of sliding and playing on the swings. Much more fun that checking plagiarised articles!

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!