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Article Submission Sites

16th September, 2011

Article Submission Sites Remain Popular

The popularity of article submission sites on the internet has exploded in recent years. For some, the sites are an outlet of creativity, providing a forum for writers to display their literary prowess on the world’s stage. For others, article submission sites allow them to post informative articles that provide backlinks to their websites, boosting their marketing efforts and search engine optimizations from an outside setting. A number of article submission sites only allow articles to be posted after they are reviewed by an editor, insuring the content is not spam related, serving an information purpose, allowing for self-promotion. This means they do not pay their contributors monetarily, but allow them to post links and contact information to the site, allowing an additional marketing platform for those who are published. Others, however, pay authors for their contributing efforts, but have more stringent guidelines for article submission.

Article Directories

Article Directories are websites that allow individuals to submit articles to be used specifically for marketing purposes, allowing a company to provide credibility to their services by submitting appropriate, well-written articles for a niche service. One example of article directories is Ezine.com, which allows writers to submit up to ten articles for review during a probationary period, until they can be fully examined to verify that all guidelines have been met, prior to publishing. Articles are published in exchange for free publicity to a site, service or product in the form of backlinks, which could enhance the amount of traffic the site receives.

Article Submission Sites

Article Submission Sites

Some of the more popular article submission sites include Post Runner and Go Articles, do not limit their content for publicity trade only, but may get their articles from certified writers who are typically paid for their services. This, just as the editing process for sites such as Ezine, ensures the content provided to these sites is researched, valid and relevant to their subject matter. That is not to say each site does not require high quality content, as each site has a different set of guidelines that should be reviewed in their entirety prior to submitting articles for review. Typically, sites that offer payment for their articles do so to receive content within a specific amount of time.

Other sites, such as Suite101.com, allow individuals to post articles for purchase by other publications, allowing the writer to determine the price, while the site gets a percentage of the revenue once the article has been purchased. Again, these sites have stringent editing processes, protecting their site’s credibility from spam or shameless self-promotion, including hawking goods through articles, or services through unsponsored links within the articles.

Whether you are writing to appear in article directories, in an effort to market your products or services through networking, or showcasing your skills for a little extra cash, article submission sites can help everyone contribute to the internet in a positive manner. Begin by researching the article directories for niche categories that reflect the type of business, products or services that would provide beneficial exposure, relative to your industry. For example, if you would like to try your hand at article submission for a collision repair service, it would suit your interest to submit an article in the “Automobile” category, as opposed to “Arts & Crafts.” Topic relevancy is a key component in article submissions, as well as providing quality, original work. Do not fall into the illusion that all exposure is good exposure. Analyze the directories and their guidelines prior to picking an article submission site that works best for you. Even if you are not writing articles for submission, you may find some beneficial information from those who participate in the same areas of expertise as you.

Managing Articles

Shawn Manaher

14th June, 2011

Article Submission

Growing the Potential of Fresh Website Content

Whether you are an online marketer or a website owner using Content Authority articles on your site, there are all sorts of ways to get more bang for your buck when it comes to fully realizing the potential of the articles you purchase. Making the most out of your Content Authority article can help you to drive readers to your website by simply adding a few bells and whistles to the content you purchase.

Managing articles is simple if you develop a step by step process that helps you to maximize the potential of each piece of content you purchase. Depending upon your needs the steps can vary slightly, but the overall concept is the same. Simply accessorize each article that you purchase from The Content Authority with a few added elements and you will be impressed by how many more hits to your website you will see.

One of the most basic ways that you can “pump up the volume” of your articles is to add images. Whether you choose a single image or multiple images, be sure to add captions to each image. Well optimized image captions are a great way to draw additional views to your site. Choose keywords for your captions that not connect the image to the article but that are also frequently searched for keywords. By doing so you are increasing the optimization of your article as a whole. Having great keywords in your article and in your image captions is a win-win in terms of increasing views to your website.

Another successful way to optimize the articles you purchase is to utilize internal links to draw readers to other content already up and running on your website. Not only does this decrease your bounce rates as it keeps readers on your site, but it also helps to build your site’s reputation as a resource for helpful information. Each time a reader is able to connect with a variety of helpful information on your site, it not only cements your image in their mind but in the eyes of the search engines also. Increased time on a site and no immediate bounce back to the search engine both send a clear message that your reader has found what they were looking for when they first entered your site. This is a good tip to keep in mind when you are ordering articles too. Ask yourself what other content you already have posted on your website and then order articles that can easily be linked to your existing information. The key is to create an entire web of information on your website that visitors find useful and are likely to return to.

The same theory applies to articles that are already live on your own website. Whenever you add new content to your website, take a few minutes to update older content with links to the newly added article. Not only does this create an additional internal link to your newly added content but it also helps to breathe new life into existing content. This is also a perfect opportunity to create utilize social media to create additional inbound links to your newly purchased Content Authority article. Whether you use Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, or Tumblr simply by taking a moment of your time to create additional inbound links to your newly added article you will have significantly increased your purchasing power. One simple article purchase that is well optimized is worth far more to you than the original investment you made to purchase that article. Add a few forum posts on “do follow” websites with a great page rank and include a link to your newly added article and your optimization efforts will be well worth your time.

Think of the articles you purchase from The Content Authority like seeds in a garden. If you simply plant those seeds, chances are they will eventually sprout and grow. If you tend to those seeds by regularly watering them and adding additional fertilizer, they are going to sprout and grow at a much faster rate. Take care of your articles in the same way and the odds are pretty good that you will be enjoying the fruits of your labor in no time.

Google Farmer Tips

Shawn Manaher

23rd March, 2011

Article Submission

Hit By The Google Farmer Update? Get Tips Here

Here is a list of 10 useful tips for article marketers. The goal is to help you avoid repercussions from the Google Farmer update.

1. Spread your articles, including rewrites across a wide range of websites.

• This becomes especially important when submitting rewrites. Many content farms have set new, stricter guidelines to offset their decrease in search engine visibility.

2. Do not put all of your article marketing efforts into one basket.

• Organic search traffic is beneficial when it is executed successfully. Getting traffic from community based websites should be one of your main goals. This will ensure traffic even if your organic search results prove to be unsuccessful.

3. Do not submit duplicate articles to multiply websites. This type of duplicate content can hinder your overall search engine optimization efforts.

4. Set your WordPress RSS feed to show excerpts instead of showing the full post.

• This will help deter scrapers from republishing your articles. Most content scrapers are automated through a program. This means in order for the program to work successfully, the full articles needs to be in the email inbox for the best results. When the RSS feed sends an excerpt, the scraper moves onto a website that shares the full article under the feed options.

5. You should not approve comments from readers that are only commenting to increase their search engine visibility.

6. You should write articles that are intended to attract readers. Not articles that are intended to attract search engines.

7. If an SEO guru advises you “Do not attempt to brand your real name while using our SEO techniques,” then ask for a refund.

• We have seen major changes in Google because many of these “educational” websites promote the use of blackhat SEO methods. You do not want your real name tarnished while using blackhat seo methods for obvious reasons. These teaching methods have produced a massive amount of low quality websites. The Google algorithm change came in response to the increase in low quality content found across the World Wide Web. If you would not think of branding your name with your current marketing methods, then revaluate your methods until you are comfortable.

8. Cite your sources in block quotes to avoid duplicate content penalties from Google.

9. If your website content has been targeted then you can contact Google at Webmaster Central for help in this thread. Think you are affected by the recent algorithm change? Post here.

10. When publishing articles and rewrites use unique titles and descriptions for every separate piece of content. Using duplicate titles and descriptions content can negatively affect your search engine standings.

On March 8, at SMX West, a discussion was held about The Google Farmer. It included

Luke Beatty, VP & General Manager, Yahoo! Contributor Network, Yahoo!

Matthew Brown, Founder, AudienceWise

Tim Ruder, Chief Revenue Officer, PerfectMarket

Byrne Hobart, Marketing Consultant, Blue Fountain Media

Moderator: Matt McGee, Executive News Editor, Search Engine Land

Q&A Moderator: Max Thomas, President & Founder, Thunder SEO

Matt McGee started off by asking, what role did Google play in this?

Q: Matt McGee: What is Google’s role in this? Are they responsible for all of this?

A: Byrne Hobart: Sure. It’s not a perfect algo and there will always be an arms race. In quantitative terms, the experience hasn’t been degraded. They’re not doing multiple searches or bouncing more. CFs are probably good for Google.

We’re not typical users. The fact that we know the difference between Google, the internet, and IE probably puts us in the top 10% of Google users.

A: Matt Brown: Their business model relies on user trust and their brand. The
money coming in from CFs (Content Farms) isn’t worth compromising Google’s trust and brand.

You can find the transcript of the SMX West video below at SMX West Content Farms “How to Pour Water into a Glass Cup.”

It is worth noting that Matt Brown raises a very valid point about the intentions of Google and the recent changes made by them. Google Executives will not compromise the trust of their user’s or the image of their brand. They are willing to improve the user experience even if it means a loss to their adsense earnings. This does makes you wonder though. Bing search engine has seen a steady rise in growth over the last 6 months, and part of that growth was caused by Google users switching over to the Bing search engine. That is what the statistics are suggesting according to a Search Engine Watch article titled “Bing Grows for Sixth Straight Month.”

Over the last few months, complaints have been surfacing about Google across the internet. People are stating that Google returns poor results when searching. The statistics above provided by Search Engine Watch suggest that Bing is capturing some of the users. I think it is a combination of factors of why Google is making these heavy handed changes but we can not discount the fact that Bing/Yahoo! effort is gaining ground in the meantime.

Organic search traffic is not the only marketing component that you can leverage to increase your content visibility. This stems back to the idea that spreading your content across a wide spectrum of websites is a smart choice. Traffic gained through a search engine should be just one of the many parts to your entire marketing plan. This will keep your content visible regardless of any changes made in an algorithm.

Take part in the Google Farmer Poll below. We want to know if you have seen any changes in traffic or Adsense earnings to your content since the update was launched.

[poll id=”4″]

Google Content Farm Crackdown

Shawn Manaher

21st March, 2011

Article Submission

How Google is Affecting Content Farms

Regardless of whether you think the Google Content Farm Crackdown has helped or hindered the World Wide Web, you will want to know how your web content will be affected. I performed a small amount of research on my own that will help you determine whether the changes will impact your web content.

Sistrix.com produced their findings in an article titled, “Google Farmer Update Quest for Quality”. They found that a popular content farm called wisegeek.com has experienced a roughly 77% reduction in Google keywords that they originally ranked for after the algorithm update was launched.

So I set out to browse wisegeek.com to find out exactly why they have seen such a decrease in search engine visibility. I polled five articles at random and came to a striking conclusion. Of those five articles, three of them were found elsewhere on the web.

For example, in the picture below is an article found at wisegeek.com. I copied the first paragraph in Google then clicked the search button.

wisegeek gets slammed by google farmer update

WiseGeek.com Google Content Farm Crackdown

In the next picture, I highlighted the duplicate content of the same article found on other websites.

picture of Google search results performed on a wisegeek.com article

Duplicate Content Found at WiseGeek

It is worth noting that the date is not always the underpinning factor of who created the content first. With that said, it is hard to judge who is guilty of duplicating content and only with a record of the actual dated articles can you come to that determination.

Nevertheless duplicate content was found excessively when targeting this niche. Fixya.com has the same question answered on over 30 pages with different keywords targeting people with different styles and brands of cameras. After doing more research and if the date has anything to do with it—the answer was first found at answers.yahoo.com on Nov 9, 2009.

That would make answers.yahoo.com the winner for original content in this instance and ensures they will not be affected by the Google content farm crackdown. All the other examples are simply to make money off the original article by attaching adsense to each one of them and placing them on various content farms across the World Wide Web.

It has been said that Google is attacking websites that are “Antidemand-Media” but Sistrix disagrees and has found no evidence of it. A picture is forming rather quickly here though. This same article was copied, pasted, and leeched in dozens—actually in more than 50 instances—with Google adsense attached to every article. One could easily conclude that Google was “Antidemand-Media” but I agree with Sistrix that this is not the case. I think the bigger picture is more about duplicate content period.

We have to remember the purpose of the Google Farmer update was to stop duplicate content from showing within the search engine result pages. The Google Farmer Update is improving search quality. I have a good guess on how Google determines what original good content is and what duplicate content is considered to be. Simply put, they could easily program their algorithm to do a simple search of their own index by checking for duplicate content every time they index a new webpage. If the webpage appears somewhere else on the World Wide Web then it will greatly affect how it is placed within the SERPs.

Check for Duplicate Content

How do you check for duplicate content? All you do is copy a portion of any article, and paste it into a search engine. If other websites have published the same article, the majority of the search will be in bold lettering as seen in the above picture.

It is important to note that if you quote someone from another website then you should use the appropriate block quote tags. I even go as far as to cite my sources within the quote so the search engine knows that the quotation is not original content. World Wide Web Consortium shows you how to format a block quote citation properly when quoting your sources.

Here is a visual reference on how to cite someone else properly on the Web…

W3C Block Quote Citation Standards

Later in this series, we will look at other websites that have claimed the Google Content Farm crackdown has negatively affected them. Plus, we will look at the top 10 Google Farmer tips to to help you avoid fallout over the update. We will prove that this update is more about improving search results than it is about hurting unsuspecting people trying to make money online with their own original content.

Monetizing Your Blogger Blog

Shawn Manaher

27th December, 2010

Article Submission

You will learn how to add Adsense to your Blogger blog in this tutorial.

Last week I installed a very cool feature called Clickheat on The Content Authority Blog. Based on the results of last week’s heatmap, the Blogger link in our Article Submission Website article was very popular. Therefore, let’s look more closely at Blogger and give you something useful to start making money with your Blogger blog.

First, let’s login to your Blogger account. If you don’t have an account, that is fine, simply create one quickly, then meet me back here. (Note: If you’re thinking, “But I already have a blogger blog”, rest assured you can create multiple blogs under the same Blogger account. Today, I am going to create a new blog for a project I am currently working on.)

Under your dashboard in Blogger account, you will see the text “create a blog”, please click it and continue.

Now let’s name your blog. I’m going to name my blog ‘web content university’.
Now, once it is named, click the continue button.
Now select any theme. We can change the theme later so any theme will do.
Now click the “continue” arrow.
Now click the “start blogging” arrow.
You will see a post screen come up, let’s click the monetize tab.
Make sure the “setup Adsense” tab is selected.
You want to display ads in your sidebar and in posts, so make sure the first ‘display in’ option is selected. Please click next now.
The Make Money with Adsense tab will now be displayed.
You have two options. The first option, create a new Adsense account. The second, sign into an already created Adsense account. (Note: Due to the time constraints of this tutorial, we will cover creating a Google Adsense account in another tutorial later on. If you do not have an account, simply create one now. It is pretty straightforward for basic use. )

We are going to select the “using an existing Adsense account” option.
Enter you Adsense email then add either your postal code or the last 5 digits of your phone number. (Note: This information was entered by you when you created your Adsense account, so if you cannot remember, please go retrieve it now.)
Now click the next button. (Note: If you successfully filled in the fields you will come to the ‘Adsense is enabled for your blog’ success page. This page can be seen in the illustration below.)

Now let’s get the Adsense posted to your blog. The idea here is to maximize the highest click rate from people that will visit your blog. To achieve this, you will want your Adsense placed just below your header and on the right sidebar at the top.

Let’s click the edit layout link to start placing Google Adsense ads. (Note: The Blogger interface offers an easy click-n-drag solution.)
I want you to click the ‘add gadget’ link.
When the gadget window pops up, scroll down until you see “Adsense” gadget by blogger.
Now click the ‘+’ sign next to it and click save, the ads can be fully configured later on. This will place an additional area in your layout labeled Adsense.
Now drag the Adsense to the top of the screen until you have something similar to the visual aid below.

If you click preview it should look similar to this. Like what you see? Then click ‘save’ and that’s it, you are finished.

Congratulations on successfully adding Adsense to your Blogger blog.

Article Submission Websites

Shawn Manaher

15th December, 2010

Article Submission

In yesterday’s column we talked about content writing. I explained how you can increase your readership base by serving your visitors daily content. Today, let’s look at where you can start publishing that content at popular article submission websites. Don’t fret about the money end of it right now, because I will be covering that in great detail in future columns. Make sure you subscribe to The Content Authority Blog RSS Feed so you don’t miss out.

The question is, you have your daily content ordered and it was delivered, so what is the next step?

The web offers you multiple ways of publishing your content. The easiest and quickest way to attract readers in a small amount of time is through article submission websites. I will walk you through each in future columns. Here they are in short form so you can start the registration process with each of them.

The Content Authority offers a seamless, no hassle solution when it comes to submitting your content to article submission sites. They actually publish your articles for you at a small fee. Therefore, you can order the content, and then when the order is processed, it is posted automatically to the article submission website you configured in the settings panel. It is a huge timesaver, so make sure you check out the article submission service today! Register a free publishers account at The Content Authority and click the ‘Poster’ tab to get started with our article submission service.

Article Submission Sites

(In alphabetical order)

EzineArticles.com allows expert authors in hundreds of niche fields to get massive levels of exposure in exchange for the submission of their quality original articles.

GoArticles.com has the Web’s Largest Free Content Article Directory.

HubPages.com is your online space to share your advice, reviews, useful tips, opinions and insights with hundreds of other authors.

InfoBarrel.com is your information super database. Earn money writing by contributing to our crowd sourced content database.

Postrunner.com Is a service that allows you to trade your content for links.

Squidoo.com The popular (free) site for creating single webpages on your interests and recommendations. Even earn money for charity or yourself.

Popular Blogging Websites

(In alphabetical order)

Blogger.com is s Free weblog publishing tool from Google, for sharing text, photos and video.

WordPress.com Free blogs managed by the developers of the WordPress software. Includes custom design templates, integrated statistics, and automatic spam protection.

Self Hosted Blog Platforms

(In alphabetical order)

Drupal.org – Use Drupal to build everything from personal blogs to enterprise applications.

Joomla.org is a dynamic portal engine and content management system.

WordPress.org A semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability.

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