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Website Promotion

How to Market your Site with Articles

A short guide on how to promote your site using unique articles and content.

Written on Sunday, July 30th, 2006 by lorien1973 :: 1 Comment so far

First off. Let’s explain the difference between “article submission” and “marketing through content”.

• Article submission is where, generally, you release a few articles about your site to a hundred different websites. This is usually designed to get links and nothing else. You can call it submitting. I call it spamming. Tomatoes, tomatoes.
• Marketing through content is where you find good traffic (and related - go figure) sites to place your articles on. Each article you give out only once and is well written (over 500 words) and informative. You don’t write 10 articles on “how to get rid of a hangnail” though. You’d do one on avoiding hangnails, maybe on one causes of hangnails. Etc. Each one is markedly different, unique and contains real information. Not generic vomit that appears on hundreds of other websites.

Article submission is most easily performed through software that pounds hundreds of article (re: spam) sites with your little treasure, hoping that you’ll get some google love (links) in return. This is bad, bad behavior. Most of these articles will either:

1. Not include live links to your site anyways
2. Be killed by a duplicate content filter
3. Never appear on the chosen article (re: spam) site anyways

So; you’ve just wasted your time and a hard earned $5 on that magnificent work! (look in the future for a comparison of copywriter quality and prices).

Embrace the concept of marketing through content. With this method, you systematically write good content that you can give to related sites. These are typically not article (re: spam) sites. Contacting these related sites isn’t always easy. Hell, it never is. But what worth doing is? And what brings results is even harder. But it’s worth it.

The only article site that I’ve ever seen drive traffic is http://www.searchwarp.com - it drives consistent traffic and it will always be a place I send my work to. I highly recommend this site; as it not only makes submission easy, but also gives you stats on how many people have viewed your articles and what search engines drive traffic and what terms bring them into searchwarp - which is a great second hand way to find keywords you may have never even considered! (see screen shots below)

You’ll see best results if you do something along these lines. On a given topic, get 3 articles written.

1. submit to http://www.searchwarp.com (allows embedded links in the html, he says limit it to 3, but I usually do less. Do the embedded links correctly. Don’t do 3 links to the same page. Do each to a different page of your site, with different keywords).
2. Put one on http://www.goarticles.com This one also allows embedded links. This one will eventually appear everywhere online. Eventually, they’ll all be caught in a duplicate content filter, so this requires more maintenance (new articles, etc) - whereas Searhwarp does not. Searchwarp will deliver traffic too. While I have seen the random visitor (and sale!) from these sites, do not expect a lot of traffic from them.
3. Place on your site (if you want) or skip it. I usually put some new content up every week or so. Keeping fresh content on my sites is a priority, but if you choose to do this or not, is obviously totally up to you.
4. Avoid the ones that won’t let you embed links other than an “authors” box. They are a complete waste of time. People who syndicate those articles won’t make the link active, so it’s worthless to you.

As I said, article submission isn’t nearly as effective as it was a year or so ago. Spammers ruin it all, unfortunately. I was probably one of the first to do it the right way and it paid off. Now everyone does it and does it poorly and it affects how well the overall system works.

Pay Per Post Review

This is a review of a new service called Pay Per Post

Written on Tuesday, July 11th, 2006 by lorien1973 :: 5 Comments so far

For this review, we’ll have to step away from a haiku format. This review will take on http://www.payperpost.com/, a service that lets you pay for a friend - essentially - and pay bloggers to blog about your site, a product offering a new movie or whatever you wanted to have them blog about.

Intrigued. We signed up and did a little experiment.

We set a budget of $1000 for the posts. We offered bloggers $10 for a post about a given product. We don’t feel the product is important. Due to fees, this equates to about 75 blog entries. Pay Per Post takes a little bit for their fees, which is totally understandale. As of this writing, there are 65 active blog entries. Pay per post says there are 74 (of the 75), but some were rejected (rightfully..more on this below) and some are pending. We will assume the pending blogs will be accepted.

First off, Pay Per Post did a nice job in detecting splogs and rejected those entries and did not pay. Whether or not the post remains is doubtful and irrelevant. The service also has a click tracking option on a post, which we did not use. We forced bloggers to include an image, which probably makes the impression tracking far more accurate.

For category, we chose “blatant advertising” - because we got a kick out of the name. We started on July 3rd and, as we said, as of now there are 65 blog entries. A decent per day average. The devil is in the details, though. As you will see:

The average home page PR of the blog entries was 1.95, with roughly 45% of them being PR 0, one had a PR of 6, and 1 had a PR of 7. The median page views of the blog entries was 38, while the average was 238 views per blog entry. Of the 65 blog entries, 30 of them accounted for 83% of the page views. The PR 6 and 7 blogs, alone, accounted for 65% of the page views. Surprisingly, the PR 0 blog entries accounted for FAR more page views than the ones that had PR 1 through 5.

The PR 7 blog entry - as well at least 3 others - noted that the entry was paid for (buying a friend), but even at that, there was a definite surge in traffic from that blog entry. Conversions were not high for that day as they were probably curiosity clicks more than anything else.

Some tips for getting your blog post on the higher PR (and thus higher traffic) blogs - pay at least $10/entry. While you will get a lot of low traffic blogs (as noted above), the higher traffic ones do delivery traffic and may make up for this in the long run.

We do have long term concerns about this idea. Some of which follow below:

• Same blog doing lots of entries may be considered a link farm eventually and while they are being paid for entries they’ll never deliver traffic.
• Buying a friend? We bring this up a few times. Will visitors to these sites think (especially if the entry is marked as paid) that this is spam?
• How long do the blog entries stay on the blogs? Will they be removed?

For now, more tests are needed to see if the service is worthwhile. At this point, we’ll give the service a mild thumbs up. More purchases will be made to see if the results are consistent and how well the service peforms over a period of time.