You know, there’s been a lot of talk on various forums about some of the changes happening over at EzineArticles.com and how it will affect Article Marketers or Bum Marketers as they are also called.

If you’re not familiar with what Chris Knight is looking for in new articles, read this post by Chris: http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2009/10/from-my-desk-to-yours-3.html

He also sent out an email today where he said:

Get this: Over 142,000 articles are currently in “Problem Status.” Of those, 41% are under 399 words. Compare that to those that are over 750+ words which account for 1-2% of the total. That means you can significantly increase your chances of having your article accepted purely by increasing your word count to the 400+ range. Watch for a full blog post this week with the details on this internal stats study.

While I for one think it’s a good thing that Chris is increasing the quality standard of the articles, many think it’s the “death of Bum Marketing” and EzineArticles.com as we know it.

I wouldn’t necessarily go that far since there are several quality options available for article marketers. Travis, Mr. Bum Marketing himself, created a video addressing this and now recommend ArticleBase.com as an option:

ArticleBase is certainly a decent option as they have an Alexa rank of 589, which to my knowledge is the 2nd highest ranking of the article directories (with EzineArticles swooping in at #124). ArticleBase.com’s rankings will probably increase as more and more bum marketers make a switch over and start promoting their articles (in other words adding a ton of additional inbound links to ArticleBase.com).

Just to give you and idea of where EzineArticles.com and ArticleBase.com rank in comparison to some of the other popular Blog and Article platforms, here’s a current list (the numbers refer to Alexa.com ranking):

7. Blogger.com
18. WordPress.com
76. Livejournal.com
124. EzineArticles.com
272. Hubpages.com
304. Squidoo.com
589. ArticleBase.com (ArticlesBase.com)
607. Xanga.com
1050. Weebly.com
1271. Vox.com
1471. Buzzle.com
1877. GoArticles.com
3439. ArticleAlley.com
3763. ArticleDashboard.com

So, if you haven’t used Blogging platforms for your article marketing, perhaps it’s time to take another look?

Have fun!

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

The Death Of Article Marketing (or is it the death of EzineArticles)?

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Over the past couple of years several people have asked me my thoughts on Spinning Articles.

Before I jump into the meat of this article, I wanted to make sure I explain what spinning content or article spinning is (or at least my interpretation of it)… Article Spinning / Content Spinning, also referred to as content spooling or content evolution, generally deals with taking a "seed" article (can be an article you’ve written or a PLR) and running it through a piece of software (or through outsourcing) to change the content using semantically related keywords, synonyms, changing whole sentences and paragraphs…

I guess I ought to set the record straight and mention that I DO NOT endorse traditional article spinning. I personally think UNIQUE CONTENT is where one ought to spend time (on a daily basis). Unique content is WAY MORE PROFITABLE in the long run (on so many different levels) and it’s a better investment of your time and money.

However, there is a time and a place for spinning content, and I use the technique I am about to show you below for generating additional content when building a MiniNet for linking / traffic purposes (and DO NOT submit these articles to article directories), such as my Social Media Linking strategy that I wrote about.

The technique I use has to do specifically with changing whole paragraphs at a time…

As you probably know, articles generally have three components:

With this in mind, I re-write each section three to five times (or as many times you want) by:

• Focusing on the keyword phrases you want to target – generally a 3rd tier keyword (long tail keyword)
• Introducing semantically related words
• Industry jargon or slang – specific language used within a niche (you know the secret language that we all use in our hobbies)
• Synonyms

• 3 – 5 Introductory paragraphs
• 3 – 5 Article Bodies
• 3 – 5 Concluding paragraphs

This way you can get anywhere from 9 – 125 articles by using combinations of each component.

The fancy software I use for this particular method of software is a "super duper ninja tool" called…

…Microsoft Excel.

If you don’t have it, you probably have a spreadsheet program on your computer or you can download OpenOffice for free (which has a spreadsheet program called Calc). I use Excel for a couple of very pragmatic reasons. For one, it’s gives me great visibility of what I’m doing and it’s easy to use.

In any event, after I’ve written each of the paragraphs it may look something like this:

The section in column "B" (with all the A’s) illustrate my "seed article". Column "C" and "D" show the re-written paragraphs. Once I’ve written as many paragraphs for each section as I can stand, I start combining them, like this:

What I’m illustrating here is the most basic level of this process, since I’m only switching the paragraphs laterally…

If you write more robust "intro / main / final" paragraphs, you can start mixing the section diagonally as well. 

Just to give you an example, here is what that would look like (without the fancy graphics): 

This method will obviously make a lot more spammy articles, and I DO NOT recommend you submit them to article directories. However, you can completely get away with submitting articles with the "lateral method" on almost any directory. Although I personally wouldn’t do this for the big directories though (it’s worth it to write good quality articles for EzineArticles, GoArticles and SearchWarp etc.)

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Article Spinning – The “right” way

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Most of the readers of this blog are probably either familiar with or have done some bum marketing (or article marketing).

When I first created this site I had a whole video series on Article Marketing here… but since then I’ve removed them in favor of this blog. I had every intention to put these videos back on the site, but never quite got around to it…

Then a friend of mine came up with a more "clever" idea.

She said:

"Steven… Instead of confusing these article marketing videos with every other topic that you cover on your blog, why not take the time to create a separate site dedicated to bum marketing?"

So I did… (Thanks, Liz!)

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working extremely hard on several new projects. And the first of these projects was this site. It has finally come to fruition (so to speak)… And I’ve named it: Article Marketing Reports.

This site is fully dedicated to Article Marketing, or more specifically Direct-to-Affiliate Article Marketing or Bum Marketing, and is a 100% free resource for anyone to take advantage of. In other words, you can watch all of the video tutorials there completely free of charge.

It is set up in a "blog style", so you can comment and ask questions below each of the videos.

In any event, I hope you take advantage of the site.

To our success,

[tags]bum marketing, article marketing[/tags]

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Is running a successful online business or earning an income through affiliate marketing just hype?

This is a question I’ve received on several occassions over the past few months.

You know, for the longest time I was wondering the same thing… but for some reason it still came as a surprise when I saw these emails in my inbox.

Personally, I think that the "hype" about online success is no larger than people buying into the "hype" of entrepreneurship and developing a successful small business. Whether it’s online or offline is really irrelevant.

The massive attrition rate that you often hear about in regards to starting an online business is not any higher online than starting a traditional small business, which show a failure rate of over 90% within the first two years (according to some statistics). Even more businesses fail within the first five years… And the investment that people put into these business are in the tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars (trust me, I’ve been there…).

In contrast, online marketing is easy for people to get into and has a relatively low cost of entry (often the only requirement is "sweat equity"). Hence the numbers of those who fail are proportionately larger that those who fail with small businesses.

This is also the downside of online marketing (and the home business industry in general) as many are seduced by the promises of quick "easy" money…

As we all know, success rarely comes easy… and I can share with you that I’ve crashed and burned countless times with various business ventures. However, I have also experienced phenomenal success both in the home business industry (network marketing) as well as starting and running a traditional "brick and mortar" business… and of course I’ve now realized this online as well.

So what did I learn from my mistakes and experiences over the past several years?

1. I needed to learn each facet of the business myself
2. Develop a "battle plan" (preferably following someone else’s already successful business model)
3. Determination – Stick to it without fail and don’t lose focus). For instance, when building content sites, don’t develop ten sites at once but concentrate on one or two at a time.
4. Duplicate the success – See if I can repeat the success of my last project
5. Automate / Outsource – duplicate the process at a faster rate by hiring freelancers for mundane tasks

Of course, there are many ways to skin the cat when it comes to internet marketing. But the principles above always remain the same.

But the question still remains, "Is starting a successful online business a pipe dream?"

Well, this may tick some people off, but in my humble opinion, there is no reason why anyone can’t develop a business where they earn $100 / day on the average within a relatively short period of time (2 – 4 months of work) provided you have a plan and stick to it.

Let me give you an example:

About a year ago I has burned out a bit on content site generation and wanted to focus my time on something else. Around the same time, I had several people on my now defunct list ask me what I would do if I was just starting out with little to no money to invest…

I usually had a pat generic answer back then, which was: "build websites and monetize with Adsense" or "Use Adwords and sell Affiliate Products" then proceed to point them to a few resources.

But since this required start up capital, I decided to take a different approach.

Early in the year (early 2006) I came across a report by Captain Tim Gorman on driving traffic to Adsense sites using Article Marketing. I had followed his step by step method at the time and knew it worked well.

So, I decided to "tweak" the method and applied it to a "direct to affiliate" sales process using article marketing…

In other words, it was a method that’s essentially the same as "bum marketing". Of course, this method had been around for a quite some time… I just didn’t know about it. Apparently Travis Sago released his "Bum Marketing Method" around the same time as well… unfortunately I didn’t even get a chance to read this until after I had gone through and finished my own "case study" (some of you may recall my report and the video tutorials I released earlier this year).

In any event, I applied this method relatively consistently over a four month period of time and averaged over $100 per day with this strategy.

Although it’s not a ton of money, it was something I developed "out of thin air" with hardly any expenditures that I still keep getting paid on (albeit it has dropped slightly over time since I haven’t maintained it).

Personally I don’t think Bum Marketing is the best use of ones time and resources particularly since you are not controlling your own virtual real estate, but it’s a method that has proven to work. Not just by me but by countless of individuals who have read Travis’ report.

In case you’re wondering what steps I followed to achieve that level of income, here are the simple steps:

- Niche and Keyword Research
- Choosing a Product
- Article Marketing: Write and syndicate 10 – 25 articles (or more) every single week.
- Rinse and Repeat Ad Nauseum

That’s it… (For more on these topics, I recommend you watch my videos in the Affiliate Marketing Video Tutorials section).

So, when people ask me if it’s all hype OR if they "missed the wave" of internet marketing, I just shrug my shoulders and point to all of those who: stop searching, focus on one method and put in a consistent effort over time to achieve a decent income in a relatively short period of time.

Direct to Affiliate Article Marketing is just one method that can get you there…

To your success,

P.S. If you want to learn how to go beyond Bum Marketing and profit from your own small niche blogs using similar principles, I urge you to check out: Andrew Hansen’s Niche Marketing on Crack (I know, it’s a terrible name, but a great ebook nontheless).

Written by: StevenR -  AffiliateMarketingDiary.com : Your  Resource For Internet Affiliate Marketing
Original Article: Successful Online Business – Fact or Fiction?

[tags]bum marketing, article marketing, affiliate marketing, successful online business[/tags]

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Successful Online Business – Fact or Fiction?

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Since releasing my article marketing videos at the beginning of the year (and yes, I’m still planning on releasing all of them here) I’ve had a "flood" of questions pertaining to this topic.

I have addressed many of them by email as well as on various forums, yet I’ve never taken the time to address them on this blog, until now. So, I’ve decided to address some of them over the next few posts.

On to the first question…

"Can mass article submissions / distribution using software or submission services get me a flood of free traffic?"

Not everybody is going to agree with me on this, but if you are looking for a "flood of traffic" I think your time is better spent elsewhere.

Article submission services where you submit a single article for distribution to hundreds of article directories are really better suited for you to receive backlinks to your pages, not to drive traffic to your site. And since they distribute the same article across hundreds of article directories, the chances are that many of them will land in Google’s "Supplemental Index", which means that the links will carry little weight as a backlink as well as in the search engines.

However, some of the mass submitted articles will stick and create inbound links from reputable directories (hopefully), which will in turn give you a better placement in the search engines (depending on your anchor text for your links etc.)

OK, so what’s a better alternative? How can I better use my time and resources?

A good question. Here are some ideas:

• Use the money you were going to invest in article distribution (whether through a service or a software) and have unique articles ghostwritten for you (see my article on hiring a ghostwriter).
  • Submit these unique articles to a handful of Tier One article directories (see below). Using one unique article for each article directory (in other words, don’t submit the same articles to each site).
  • Use the ghostwritten content and develop pages on Social Networking sites such as Hubpages and Squidoo. Yes, (contrary to popular belief) Squidoo still works provided you use good content…
  • Use this high quality content by submitting them as linkbait to Social Voting sites like Digg (whenever it’s appropriate)
• Outsource link directory submissions (hire someone to submit your site to link directories) OR invest in a semi-automated software solution such as Link Directory Submitter.
• Invest your money in software such as Jack Humphrey’s Web2Submitter to automate your social bookmarking and submissions to web 2.0 media.
  • Be sure to bookmark every page of your site with the most popular bookmarking sites. All of these methods ought to be used to diversify your link profile for each of your pages.

However, some of the most immediate things you can do as far as traffic goes is to leverage Web 2.0 and the submissions to the Tier 1 Article Directories.

How do we know what Tier 1 Directories are?

Even though, high Page Rank directories are great, this does not always translate to higher search engine ranking. So, what I do is to focus on the directories that come up when doing searches on Google.

Here’s a Tip: Start paying close attention to Social Media sites and Article Directories that pop up when doing long tail keyword research on Google. They generally pop up when doing searches using quotation marks "" (exact phrase match). These are the sites that you ought to focus your time on. You do this by: writing articles for submission to the more "popular" directoires; bookmarking to the popular bookmarking sites; or by developing pages on networks like Squidoo.

In any event, here are the ones I consider 1st Tier  Article Directories(+/- a few):

•     EzineArticles – PR6 (www.ezinearticles.com)
•     GoArticles – PR5 (www.goarticles.com)
•     SearchWarp – PR5 (www.searchwarp.com)
•     ArticleDashboard – PR6 (www.articledashboard.com)
•     Buzzle – PR6 (www.buzzle.com)
•     ArticleCity – PR6 (www.articlecity.com)

[tags]article marketing, article submission service, bum marketing, squidoo marketing, web 2.0 marketing, directory submission, affiliate marketing[/tags]

Written by: StevenR -  AffiliateMarketingDiary.com : Your  Resource For Internet Affiliate Marketing
Original Article: Flood Of Traffic With Article Submission Services?

Post from: Affiliate Internet Marketing

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