Pennies for Wink Publishing

Most of my article directories are set up in conjunction with a full site as a way of adding regular niche related content to those sites. One is set up in its own sub-domain space. This is my general article directory and is somewhat of a mirror of the Submit Your Article site. The category list is the same as SYA and I accept articles in all categories to this directory. All of my SYA authors should have content published in this directory.

My article directories are all in the range of eight months old at this point. This general directory has accepted nearly 30,000 articles in that time. I have a site map script that generates a sitemap for the directories and these have been submitted to Google. In addition, I ping through a number of pinging services offered by Ping-O-Matic whenever I add content to the directories. I also promote my sites through directory submissions and other common means.

The sub-domain site is easy to track because all of the content is part of the article directory. I have alluded to trends that I see there in my previous posts, but have not provided any concrete numbers. The numbers border on embarrassing but I would expect them to be in line with many of the smaller article directories to which your content is submitted. I had not paid close attention to the number of articles indexed before the Panda/farmer update to the Google algorithms. I didn’t check immediately after for a couple of weeks until I came to realize the effect that it might have on my sites.

When I first put up the sitemaps, before the update, there were about 480 titles indexed by Google. I don’t know what the low point was, but when I checked a couple of weeks after the algo update there were on the order of 70 titles in Google’s index. Today, when I checked there were 766 titles listed as indexed. Google is indexing/reindexing content on the article directory sites! This is good news for the article marketing community.

I ran across an interesting post on the subject of the farmer update by a lady known as ThePotPieGirl. I was going to call attention to this post earlier, but all I could get at the time was a 403 Forbidden error. This seems to be a well researched post and has drawn many comments. I think that it is well worth the few minutes that it will take to read this post.

Ultimately, the Panda/farmer update is about quality. It does seem to me that farmer can have a dual meaning in regard to article marketing. When man first transitioned from the hunter/gatherer culture to the producer culture he had to learn how to farm efficiently. He soon learned that for crops to do well he need to cultivate the crops rather than just throwing the seeds into the wind and hoping for the best. This meant saving the best quality seeds for the new crops and planting in places where the seeds had a good chance to grow and flourish. It also meant caring for the crops from planting to harvest by making sure that there was enough water and reducing competition for the real crops.

The analogy that I see to article marketing would indicate that you need to start with a quality article that gives the reader some good information on your subject. An article is not a sales letter. Then, if you want the article to bare maximum fruit, a little nurturing along the way would be a good plan. This would include building some second tier links to your articles through bookmarking, pinging, and submitting your author RSS feed to the feed sites. Writing the article is the first step. Going the extra mile to improve the chances that your article is indexed should be worth a few minutes of your time. Submitting your author RSS feed to some feed sites is a one time effort. Pinging that feed through a service like Ping-O-Matic takes only a few seconds once it is set up. Bookmarking your URLs may take a couple of minutes, but could be stronger than the feed options. I have included a +share button on your article pages to facilitate bookmarking your articles.

Thank you for your content and I wish you all great success in your endeavors.

These are turbulent times in the article marketing sphere. There was a blog post that I ran across in my reading on the farmer update that was interesting. I just located it again via a Google search, but the site now returns a 403 Forbidden error message. The post may have generated too much of a good thing. The post was on the PotPieGirl Blog and seemed to be well researched and thought out.

The research indicated that it was certain classes of content that Google took exception with. Unfortunately many of the big article directories were saturated with this content and suffered big time. She had observed that Squidoo was not affected to the extent that many of the major article directories were affected. She had used Squidoo and knew that they had clamped down on certain subject matter in 2009. They made me mad enough to delete my account at that time by first rejecting a new lens and about a week later complaining about my only lens that drew any traffic. I followed all their links and found nothing that should condemn either of those lenses. They were checking by software and I think their algo left something to be desired, but their offer for appeal said that I should expect to wait at least 30 days, so I voted with my feet. It does appear that their decision was right even if their algo was not crafted as well as it could have been.

Now onward to some brighter news. I have one article directory, my biggest, that is relatively easy to track. It is the sub-domain directory at informationplease.heresthesite.com. I accept content only from SYA for all my directories, and IPA is set up to accept all categories from SYA. I have made a few suggestions both through the ‘Article Accepted’ emails and through this blog about ways to enhance the effectiveness of your article marketing efforts.

I did a search this afternoon in Google for informationplease.heresthesite.com. I found over 13,000 returns on the search (this site is only about six months old). Some of these are due to my promotional efforts, but the majority of them are due to your efforts! Thank You! Weather you are following my suggestions or just doing what you know needs to be done, it is working.

Since the update I have been keeping an eye on this site via webmaster tools. Pages are being indexed on a daily basis. I have the site rss feed on several directories and I ping the feed  to a number of rss aggregators whenever I update the site via Ping-O-Matic.

I have suggested bookmarking your articles and have added a +share button to the pages on the sites. Many of the returns in the search results were from bookmarks you have placed. I suggested grabbing your author rss feed and submitting it to the rss submitter at IMTalk.org. Weather that free tool was used or via some other means, I saw that some had taken advantage of the option.

Over all I am impressed with the progress and optimistic for the future. I do believe that these things are more important than ever. To those of you who have been promoting your articles I say Thank You and keep up the good work. To those of you that haven’t gotten around to promoting your articles I say there is no time like the present to get started. A few minutes of your time may improve the value of your article marketing efforts.

The SuperCharged Bookmarking Service, a paid service, at the IMTalk site is getting rave reviews. The developer has expanded the network so that you now have the option to include 50 bookmarking sites. People are seeing their pages propelled toward the top of the search results pages after using this tool. The tool is designed with a dirp feed so that the links appear naturally and some are reporting significant gains when the program is only half way through its course. Check out the Forum Thread or take a look at the SuperCharged Bookmarks page for details. This is a private network put together by a savvy internet marketer.

I had advised against updating to WP 3.1 because I thought that All-in-One-SEO had been broken with the update. I checked faithfully for an update to AiO, but none was forthcoming. I had gone to their forum to see if there was any further information. There was a post that seemed to deal with the situation, but it had not been approved for publication by the forum Admin. I thought that they must all be off on a Ski Vacation and that no one was minding the store.

What had caused me to think that there was a problem was the sudden appearance of an editor box for AiO-SEO that I had not noticed in the past. It has space for post title, description, and keywords, all of which are blank. I did not realize that this was an editor box and thought that it indicated a problem.

This evening I made a post on a blog that I had updated. Everything went smooth. I checked the source code finally and found that the title, description, and keywords were there in the head section as they should be. I then went to other blogs and checked source code and again found no problems. But whenever I updated to 3.1 the editor box showed up.

I went to a blog that had not been updated and noticed that the layout was different. I looked further and found that the editor box was there, it was just so far below the fold that I had not noticed it in the past. With the update WP cleaned up the UI and moved the default position for the AiO editor above the fold on my monitor. All-in-One-SEO was not broken by the WP update, so there was no need for an update at this time.

I am now sounding the ‘All Clear’ as far as the WP update is concerned. I am about half way through the process (I have lots of blogs). As soon as I finish this post I will go and complete that task. Then I may come back and write up the saga of the scrambled database.

I checked and at the time there was still no update from All-in-One-SEO. I still expect an update shortly.

Last evening I stopped by their forum. There was a post about the problem, but it was marked as still waiting admin moderation. This could mean that the team is very busy scratching their heads and trying to figure out how to fix what WordPress broke. Of course, it could also mean that they are on a skiing holiday.

If you don’t post more than once or twice a day to your WP blog you should probably go ahead with the update. WordPress updates generally have some security enhancements as well as bug fixes. If you use AiO-SEO expect a few minutes extra per post to handle the work that is usually automated.

I had done the update on two of the blogs to which I post a good bit of content. Actually only one of those is very active, the other only draws one or two articles a day on average. It takes three to five minutes extra per post for me to prepare these articles for publication. With a higher post count this extra time can add up. I am glad that I caught this before I updated some blogs that are even busier.

I will keep you informed of the situation through this blog, so check back for the latest information.

To bookmark your article at I Found It! you do need to register on the site. When you open the page in the upper right corner there is an option to login or register. When you fill in the registration form a verification email will be sent to you.

Click on the link in the verification email and you will be taken to your profile page on the site. There is probably a space for a website address there. Fill in any information that you want.

In the nav bar there is a submit new story link. Copy the link to your article from the article accepted email and paste it into the box on the submit new story page and click the continue button.

The script will pull some information from the site. You can edit the title or description. You should add some keywords in the tags box and select a category. Then continue with the preview and submit buttons.

Once you have registered it will only take a minute to submit your bookmarks in the future. Please consider checking the upcoming stories and vote by clicking on a star for any titles that you find interesting. The script counts the votes and moves the stories to the front page when they get a few votes.

Bonus Tip: If you add the I Found It! site to your favorites once registered it will only take a minute to bookmark your articles. A bookmark is a second tier link that can help your article, and your links,  get indexed.

What are second tier backlinks?

These are links pointing to your backlinks. The RSS feeds that I have recommended provide second tier backlinks.

Why should I have second tier backlinks?

A backlink is only of value to you if it is indexed. You produce articles and have them distributed to get backlinks. This is great in theory and does work, but not all content on all sites is indexed. A second tier backlink can improve the chance that your content is indexed and provide you with the backlink that you have worked to get.

How can I get second tier backlinks?

There are many ways to get second tier backlinks both by manual means and by using various tools. Social bookmarking is a good way to get a second tier backlink. You can do this manually or you can use a social submitter tool. I am looking into putting a bookmarking button on your article pages that will help you or your readers to bookmark the page. I will probably set up a social bookmarking site in the near future, watch for an announcement.

You have an author RSS feed available through your profile page. Pinging the RSS feed whenever you get an article acceptance email is quick and easy. You can also submit your feed to RSS aggregator sites. The quick and easy way to do this is by using the RSS submitter tool available as a free service to members of the IMTalk SEO Forum. The tool will build pages on 5 RSS aggregator sites. These pages will pull your RSS feed so any time that a new article is published it will show up on these pages. This is a set and forget operation and is worth the few minutes that it will take to set it up.

The Admin at the IMTalk forum has just released a new service. This is available to members through a credit system. It is not a free tool, but the design and implementation make it a good value in my opinion. There is an introductory price offered at the present time. I suggest that you look over the offer page at:  http://www.imtalk.org/cmps_index.php?pageid=IMT-Supercharged-Bookmarks This is not a long sales letter filled with hype. It is a description of the tool and what it can do for you.

I have been a member of this forum for several months and have used all of the available tools. I was invited to beta test the SuperCharged BookMarks tool. While there has not been enough time to fully evaluate the results, the early information looks very promising. I submitted a site on the fast track 24 hour submission schedule. Two days later I did a search for the site url in Google. I found listings of three of the submission sites in positions 21, 22, and 23 out of over 39,000 results. This proves that the sites are getting crawled and indexed rapidly.

There is a rapidly growing thread in the forum announcing the tool. The reviews by those who participated in the beta testing are listed there as well as general questions and comments. If you are interested in further information the thread would be a good read:  http://www.imtalk.org/f42/1589-imt-supercharged-bookmarks-boost-your-backlinks-rankings-sales-|-low-%240-01-per-backlink.html

Do you have any other suggestions or comments on the topic of second tier backlinks? Leave a comment!

There was a second quick update to Akismet, and now All-In-One-SEO has been updated. I have too many WP blogs!! I need to visit many of them anyway, so this will only take an extra few minutes of my time.

I am also doing beta testing of a new bookmarking solution. I will let you know the results. If it lives up to its expectations I will feel confident in recommending it to you.

Update: This is the first time that I recall that AIOS has pushed out an update that did not require that you re-enable the plugin after the update. I suspect that the reason for that was to walk you past the donate button one more time. I did not think that it was a particularly friendly approach, but I do believe that developers should get paid.

There is a relatively new Internet Marketing and SEO forum that you may wish to check out. It is the IMTalk.ORG forum.

The Admin there, Nemanja, has developed some tools and offers them to the members of the forum. He has just released his third tool today.

The website submitter submits to various sites. The purpose of the tool is to get a new or updated website some bot attention. There are over 2,500 sites to which your url is submitted. Some have reported very heavy bot traffic to their sites soon after submitting a url. This is a completely automated tool and is available to all visitors to the forum.

The second tool is for members of the forum only. It is a directory submission tool. There are over 2000 directories in this tool. As much as possible it is automated, but there is some work involved as well. This tool has the potential to produce some directory backlinks. It is probably worth the effort to submit because it adds diversity to a linking campaign. This process takes some time, and many of the directories do check the links instead of auto approving them. For directories with a Captcha the tool retrieves the Captcha and you fill it in to complete the registration. You should also check the category as the auto selected category is not always the best.

Today Nemanja released his third tool. This is an RSS submitter. This one has a good deal of potential to build backlinks through RSS feeds. You can also build a feed for static sites or other backlinks using a service such as IceRocket and then submit that feed through the submitter tool.

Soon to be released is a social network submitter tool, and a tool that will not be completely free, a blog network.

There are now over 4,600 members and the numbers are growing. The quality of the members seems to be improving as well as the word gets out to the community. I suggest that you check out IMTalk!

I established this blog over a year ago, but there has not been much activity. It is time for a spring cleaning and a new beginning for this space.

I have several article directories up and running. Whenever an article is published I have set the script to send an email notifying the author that their article has been published. I can edit the email, but need to do it in many places. If I am sending the same message I can format the message in a text editor and paste it into the emails.

I am going to try posting my news and tips on this space and link through the emails. By using this space my tips and advice will be accessible to new authors as they sign up and submit articles. I hope to provide some useful information that will help the article marketing efforts of my authors as well as improve my sites. Most of the tips would work anywhere so may be of value to the article writing community.

From time to time I may reprint some articles directly on the subject of article marketing. This will improve the library of knowledge that I intend to build on this blog. These will be in addition to my observations on successful article marketing.

The news items that I publish here apply to my sites and authors directly. The hints and tips may be of value to the article writing community at large.

While this site is not directly a part of the Pennies for Wink Publishing sites it is a site that I have built. I have added an article directory script provided by Article-Exchange to the World Soapbox site. I will be publishing some articles through my interface there.

There are reputed to be over 200 sites in the Article-Exchange network. There is a list available to members of all of these sites that are situated on a top level domain. I will be checking that list out to see what some of the other sites look like. I have seen several instances and only the name is changed on most of them. I have two instances of the script up and both look different, both from each other and from the rest of the pack.

I intend to use a pen name for the articles that I distribute through this site. Watch for articles by Art Walters to be published to the network of Article-Exchange sites. This will be an experiment and I will be observing the results. The possible advantage with this network is that articles get posted to a database and all of the scripts that are in operation pull their articles from this database. That means that the links in the resource box could provide many backlinks to the sites promoted. Unless an article is picked up by a webmaster or email list operator most article directories only provide one backlink.

There are two sides to the backlink coin. One is shear numbers of backlinks. The other is the page rank of the sites on which the links are displayed. The article directories in the Article-Exchange network are very likely to be unranked or low page rank sites, while many of the major article directories enjoy a relatively high page rank. I don’t know how the link juice from a lesser number of high page rank links compares with a high number of low page rank links. At some number they are probably equal. I have no idea weather that number is ten or ten-thousand.

At any rate it will be an interesting experiment. While I always attempt to write good, informative articles, there is no vetting process in place for the Article-Exchange. It may be possible to post articles that would not make the cut on some of the major sites, but still provide the link juice. I have a post about this system on the Money from the Web blog and have promised a follow up post there. You could check that out and subscribe to the RSS feed so that you will not miss the follow up.

Do you think that this system will work? Tell me your thoughts in a comment.