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.

There is a new tool available from the IMTalk forum. I discussed this in my previous post, but now I have implemented this for my feeds and suggest that you submit your author feed using this tool.

This can greatly enhance your article marketing efforts. You are paying for article submission services one way or another. Article marketing is a proven way to produce quality backlinks to your sites. But getting your articles published is not enough. Your articles must be indexed in order for those backlinks to count. To be sure that your articles are indexed they need some backlinks as well. The RSS Submitter is a painless way to get some backlinks to your articles.

IMT RSS Submitter
This tool will submit your RSS Feed to my private network of RSS Directories/Aggregators, then it will ping each created page to 33 ping services*, which will result in many backlinks towards your URLs (web pages, blog posts, backlinks, etc.).

How To Use the Tool

This tool is provided free of charge to Nemanja’s forum members, so you will need to register for the forum to use the tool. Once registered the tool is very easy to use. You will need your RSS feed to submit. Provide a title for your feed and select an appropriate category, then hit the submit button. There is a button to test your feed, use that before you submit your feed to be sure that there are no problems with your feed.

To get your feed URL go to your author profile page on the directory. An easy way to get there is to click on your Author name on any of your articles on the site (links to your articles are included with the article accepted emails). On your profile page is a listing of your articles and an RSS feed icon and link to subscribe to your feed. Click on the icon or link and your feed page will open. Copy the URL from your browser address bar.

You can submit any feed that you have. I went through my article sites and blogs and picked up the RSS feed links. I then copied them to a notepad page. Then I went to the submitter and submitted each of them. If you have a blog or forum they will have an RSS feed available. I suggest collecting all of your RSS feeds and submitting them.

Why Should I Do This?

This tool establishes a feed page on up to 5 RSS aggregators or directories around the Internet. It then pings the existence of these pages to 33 services to be sure that they are noticed. On the created pages your articles will be listed with their URLs from your RSS feed. The search engines spider these sites regularly. This exponentially increases the chance that your article will be indexed and your backlink will be noted. The pages contain your RSS feed, so any time that an article is added to your feed it is listed on these sites. You only need to submit your feeds one time and the pages will continue to work for you as you submit new content for distribution.

This Internet Marketing and SEO Forum is relatively young, but already there is much good information available there. There are also a couple of other tools available and more to come. Membership may be of value to you in your Internet Marketing efforts. Getting full value from your Article Marketing efforts is certainly worth a few minutes of your time.

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.