Search Engine Journal Doesn’t Suck

I hate risking looking like I’m one of those people who are against everything and provide no solutions or alternatives. Search Engine Journal is a fine alternative to reading the sites on my shit list (as yet to be printed).

Specifically this great post on alternatives to mass syndication of articles.

Also, for a real news site more akin to thinking people, you should give Sphinn.com a try.

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Tags: article syndication, search engine journal, social news sites, sphinn

Content Spooling Network Review

Note 6/13/08:  I am changing this review.  I should have hit the trash button after all.  No longer using this service as all I got were unrelated, spam “articles” ala 2004.  They may have fixed the service, but I’m no longer using it.  People keep asking me how to get ahold of them, so it looks like this service is effectively no more.  At least support is.

Please don’t ask me how to get ahold of these guys.  I have no idea.

If you want to syndicate your articles, there is only one choice I recommend.

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I was asked recently to check out the Content Spooling Network for possible review. I was half a second away from hitting the trash button on the message because of the use of the term “content spooling.” It brought up images of black hat tactics of putting the same article on the web all over the place with just a few changes to each occurrence to fool Google into thinking it wasn’t duplicate content.

Which, I have to say, I’ve changed my mind about over the last few months. It’s Google’s job to try to weed out duplicate content, but it’s our jobs as marketers to make sure people see our excellent products and know we exist. That give-and-take, push-pull dynamic is a fact of life on the web and, ironically, is what makes for balance on the web.

Something made me hesitate and take a look, lest I miss something good under the surface. I quickly found out I would have regretted passing the Content Spooling Network up without a second look.

What is the Content Spooling Network?

This is a community of writers and site owners who are using CSN resources to

1. get more exposure for their articles, and

2. gain more high-value content for their sites in the form of relevant, targeted article directories.

What struck me about this service is their attention to specifically making this not about trickery or underhanded, black hat tactics. They are really focusing on quality marketing here.

For instance, I have my directory up here. And I am still waiting for articles to post to the directory from the CSN group, although I could be putting my own articles in there right now. The reason there isn’t an instant directory of 5000 articles? They would be 99% crap, spam, or just plain amateur throw-away articles.

The guys at CSN are taking steps to ensure that we, as article syndicators, get good, quality, relevant syndication for our work and that we can build equally high quality pages on our sites filled with the same relevant, good content our visitors will actually get something out of.

I will update on Content Spooling Network once my directory starts filling up and I see how the traffic reacts to my calls to action, which are obviously to download my free guides and buy stuff if they like what they get out of the free stuff.

For now, I am very impressed with how this thing is set up and see no reason that it won’t increase traffic and sales for FTR.

Tags: article directory, article syndication, content spooling, content spooling network review, csn

Submit Your Article Releases Article Leverage

SubmitYourArticle.com has just surpassed all other article syndication services by leaps and bounds with the release of “Article Leverage.”

What I consider the premiere article syndication service on the web has just gotten a lot better.  Already highly regarded for great hands-off syndication (you submit your article and press a button and it is on its way to hundreds of article directories automatically) SubmitYourArticle.com now has a duplicate content prevention tool that gets your article noticed in more than just one or two places by the engines.

Article Leverage allows you to take the same article and change portions of it to create many different versions to defeat the duplicate content filter.  By spending an extra few minutes during your article setup in the system, you make a few tweaks to your writing and the system compiles several different versions of your article to send out to the network.

This way you are not sending the same exact article to hundreds of sites, but several versions which will help you get link love from multiple directories rather than a few or only one once the engines start seeing the same content in different places.

This is a VERY big deal.  I am getting far better link popularity results now than submitting the same exact article around the web.  And I was getting good results before!

Article marketing may not be as sexy as Web 2.0 marketing, nor as instant in its ability to attract traffic, but it is not dead by any means and should be a component of any healthy link building campaign.

Tags: article leverage, article syndication, submit article, submit your article review

Video Syndication Equals Free Targeted Traffic

Remember When Article Directories and Syndication Started?

When article directories became the rage a few years ago, now with hundreds, even thousands of them all over the web, article syndication became a serious business.

A very serious traffic-driver. Still is today, though much less so than in the beginning.

Once we had several hundred sites to submit to we were more than eager to find solutions for article syndication that didn’t require us to submit articles by hand to each article directory.

And the solutions came screaming at us. Now it is unheard of to submit your articles by hand to all the important directories. Services abound to help you with article syndication today.

Enter Web 2.0.

Video is all the rage, YouTube.com sells for a billion and change, and video search engines are popping up everywhere.

Everyone wants to be next. And they are throwing free video sharing and streaming at their visitors to attract a following.

Video is coming into its own now and people are marketing their sites by providing content in video, but not nearly as much as content that’s still provided via the written word.

Here is where it gets exciting.

The cost of entry into the video production and syndication world, financially and learning curve-wise, is always going to be a bit higher than article creation and syndication.

Everyone and their sister can sit down and bang out an article like this one. Everyone has access to and knows how to use word processing programs.

Video is a whole different beast.

You have to know how to shoot it, how to do screen captures (for how-to videos), how to produce a video that looks and sounds good, and how to get that video into the growing list of places that organize that medium exclusively.

Frankly, people will always be scared of the jump between article marketing and video marketing. This leaves a much smaller number of people competing in video search engines for eyeballs than there are now in article directories.

Watch Out For Your Competition!

I see a massive upsurge coming in 2007 in the number of people creating and sharing how-to videos and viral videos to promote their sites, but nothing like the article marketing explosion in the last few years.

It’s that barrier of technology and a higher learning curve that will keep the weekend promoters at bay for a good while, until video production and marketing is as common as article marketing. (If that day ever comes.)

My tip for 2007

Get into video. Learn about how to produce it and syndicate it. Find out what’s going on at YouTube.com and how people are generating massive video subscriber lists and traffic back to their main sites with video.

It will take some surfing, some thinking, and some creativity, and that is exactly why you want to know everything you can about video marketing.

Because most people simply will not take the time to learn about video marketing until those of us who are doing it now are so entrenched, it won’t matter!

Resources

Free Video Sharing Sites

Video Syndication Service (The very first one of it’s kind and I love it!)

Video Production

Tags: article syndication, Video Marketing, video sharing, video syndication

Free Links and Search Engine Submissions

I have updated the Free Non Reciprocal Link and Search Engine Submissions page with new resources for website promotion fanatics.

Should be easier to get to the important free resource posts in The Friday Traffic Report now that all of the free traffic and listing resources are in one place.

I will keep updating the Free page with more resources as we get them put together.

Free Links and Search Engine Submissions

Tags: article submission, article syndication, linking, links, non reciprocal links, search engine submission

Aww - Thanks Willie!

Willie Crawford posted a great recommendation to this blog awhile back and I never thanked him.

So thanks, oh syndicator of massively useful, well thought out articles about internet marketing tactics that actually WORK!

Tags: article syndication, authors, Blog Marketing, blog promotion

Directory of article directories - a comprehensive list of places to submit your article!

Click Here to submit your article to the top article directories on the web, or use our growing directory of article directories below.

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Arcana Web is one of the only places that keeps an updated list of valuable article directories and hubs where you can submit your articles.

I have played around with the idea of having my own list here at FTR, but Arcana spends a lot of time keeping up with pagerank and traffic and making sure links are live all the time.

I just couldn’t do a better job or bring anything new to the project, so I link to Arcana when people ask me where the best database of article directories is located.

You’ll notice there aren’t THAT many. You may have seen lists of hundreds of places to submit your article.

Well, that’s because Arcana only includes the ones that MATTER. Article directories with good traffic and search engine rankings are all you should focus on because that is still a huge job making sure your articles are on those sites.

Top Article Directories

• EzineArticles.com
• GoArticles.com
• ArticleDashboard.com
• ArticleCity.com
• IdeaMarketers.com

Article Directories Submitted by FTR Readers

• http://www.articleinfoguides.com/
• http://www.articleland.co.uk
• http://www.raz-sports.com/articles
• http://www.articledirectory.ws
• http://infopool.webverve.com
• http://www.articolando.com
• www.submityourarticle.com
• http://www.article-zine.com
• http://www.virtual-casino-gambling.org
• http://www.mycommunicationarticles.com
• http://www.netarticlesonline.com
• http://articles.inviso.ca
• http://www.alternativeenergybase.com
• http://www.aokarticles.com/
• http://www.redarticles.com
• http://www.ezineauthors.com
• http://www.energyarticles.net
• http://adwords-articles.com

Just Added…

This article directory contains over 80 places that accept HTML articles!

Tags: article directories, article directory, article syndication, Content Syndication, directory of directories, submit your article