More Steps to Get Your Article Declined

Here are some other faults I've come across with submitted articles that can get them rejected.

Problems With Pen Names

If you submit articles you've written on the different article directories around, you will more than likely find that these allow you to have a username, which you use to login, and at least one pen names, which are shown as the name of the author of the article. Now, I've seen a few faults here.

The initial fault is usually caused when you already have an account at an article site, then join an article submission program such as iSnare. The distribution service will generate you a new account, and in some cases, if the pen name you use with the submission service is the same as one you already have at the site, you may end up with a blank as the distribution services pen name, as the identical one is declined. This means that the ability of search engines to spider your articles is significantly decreased, as there are no links to "About the Author" or similar pages. Some directories will decline your article should this happen.

Next, using your site URL as your pen name is often not appreciated either, so just don't do it. In addition, quite a number of sites will reject articles written by something other than First Name Last Name, so, although conditions do alter from site to site, it's doubtful that any will object to a pen name of, for example, "John Smith", whilst will reject or remove articles by "mysite.com" or "The SEO Guru". Just stick with a standard name, even if it's not your actual one, and you will avoid any problems like this.

Bad Usage of Article Spinners

You may not have heard of services such as these, or you may use something similar without realizing it. There are a number of different versions around, but what they all have in common is that they are designed to take one article, and make a number of different versions of it. The differences may be only minor, but the concept is to make a variety of "unique" articles to avoid duplicate content filters.

Now, there is nothing wrong with doing this, but there are wrong ways of doing it. If the spinner replaces words or phrases with variations, for example, "In the beginning" could also be phrased as "To start with", after doing this for an article and producing a number of variants, read each one through to make sure they still make sense. It's quite easy to produce gibberish if you don't, and most decent article directories don't like to publish gibberish. If an article needs tweaking, do so manually. Far better to make sure you spend a bit of time now on the article, then having to fix it after rejection.

The next problem is if you generate a batch of 20 variant articles, submit each article to a different site. Therefore, 20 articles to 20 sites. Or submit them to groups of directories, one article to 10 sites, the next to a further 10 etc. Don't submit all 20 variants to the same directory. That will probably just get them rejected, and you may get your account deleted for annoying the site owner.

Submission guidelines, and what an article directory or site will accept or decline do change, sometimes quite substantially, from directory to directory, but if you are cautious, you'll get less articles rejected.

Adrian Kennelly runs DirectoryGold Web Directory and Article Directory. See it for more articles on Writing Articles.

Promoting Your Blog Feed

If you have a blog, it's going to have an XML, Atom, or RSS feed. Mine, for this blog, is http://egdcltd.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Now, one type of place you can promote this is forums. Some forums, for example DigitalPoint and VileSilencer, allow you to add your blog feed to your profile. Others will allow this also. Both of these forums run on vBulletin, so check those out first. Not all blogs are compatible though. Current ones supported, as stated on DP, are Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress and MySpace.

Go into your User Control Panel, and, usually, look for "Edit Options" link. Click this, and where this feature is enabled, you will see a box that allows you to enter your feed URL - see the first picture. Enter your URL there.

Your last post will then be displayed, with a clickable link, under your username, avatar, etc. everytime you post - see second picture.This may drive traffic to your blog from other forum members clicking the link, and, if the forum is popular, can also drive search engine spiders, and thus traffic, there also.

How do I get Visitors to my Site?

I've been answering this question a lot on myLot, so I thought I'd post up my responses here for reference.

Simply building a website is not enough, you need to get people visiting it. I wouldn't suggest using thinks like Google AdWords if you're new to it, it's far too easy to lose money on. Start getting links to your sites, one place you can do this for free is by adding a link to it from free web directories. A good list is here: http://info.vilesilencer.com

Try to build reciprocal links with related but non-competing sites; no matter what SEO experts say, you can still get good, relevant traffic to your site from them.

Add a blog, or an RSS feed (say, of your newest products). Everytime you get write a new blog entry, or add a product, ping the site feed using sites like this: http://pingates.com

Write articles (or have them written for you by authors you can find at places like Scriptlance) with links to your site in the resource box. Distribute them using services like Article Marketer.

Add a link to your site everywhere you can without causing problems; eg forum signatures and profiles.

Paid to Click Programs

What are Paid to Click programs? Well, the concept is fairly simple. Members join the site, then click on advertisers links. The member then has to wait and view the advertisers site whilst a timer counts down to zero. The actual time needed to wait can vary, but is usually not more than 30 seconds. After the visit, the member is then credited for viewing the advertisers site.

Most programs will also allow you to earn from your referrals website visits too. The amount of referral depth can vary, but a lot of the current programs only have one level of depth - that is, you will only earn from members you have directly recruited, and not from their referrals.

What is Contextual Advertising?

I have referred to BidVertiser and Google AdSense/Adwords as being examples of Contextual Advertising. Another example is the Yahoo Publisher Network (which is currently only accepting sites that have a predominately US & English base). So, what is it?

Contextual advertising is advertising that is dynamic and changes to reflect the content of the page it's displayed on. For example, on a page where the primary content is about mobile/cellular phones, the advertising displayed will typically be for mobile/cellular products. e.g. ringtones, screensavers, wallpaper, or for phones themselves.

This should result in a higher clickthrough ratio than traditional banner advertising, because surfers are (hopefully, it doesn't always work quite right) only viewing ads specifically targetted at their interest. If they are viewing a page on mobile phones, then it's supposed they are interested in mobile phone products.

Indirect Links are Bad

Similar to the concept I mentioned in Reciprocal Linking is Dead, you likely have come across this too. An indirect link is a link that doesn't go to http://www.yoursite.com but instead passes though some other script firs, e.g. http://www.someothersite.com/out.php?yoursite

For the same reasons that reciprocal linking is considered worthless, indirect links are also; namely, they don't improve your search engine rankings. And, for the same reason that reciprocal links still have value, so do these. Indirect links, from somewhere targeted towards your site's niche or market, can still generate useful traffic.

Reasons Why You Should Use a Redirect Link When Promoting an Affiliate Program

When you promote an affiliate program, there are a few ways of linking to the program, for example, when you use it in emails, articles or on websites. A couple of these ways are to use either your actual affiliate link, which could look something like this http://www.affiliateprogram.com?affiliate_id=123456 or using a web page with a meta refresh.

Why should you use a meta refresh instead of the affiliate link? Well, here are a couple of reasons:

First, say the affiliate program changes their affiliate system, or software. This then changes your affiliate URL. So, any articles, autoresponder emails etc where you have promoted the program now have the wrong link in them. And changing all those links ranges from difficult to impossible, especially if you're trying to change every instance of an article, which you may have marketed via an automatic submission program. This will mean that a good chunk of your marketing efforts may very well now have been wasted.

Secondly, and this is definitely a worst case scenario, the affiliate program ceases. Again, you have a whole bunch of links pointing to a defunct location, with the same problem regarding altering them. If you use the meta refresh method, you can at least point people to a new URL promoting a different program. Okay, the number of people who will join or buy from a different program to the one they thought they were going to visit is probably very low. But I guarantee the number who will join or buy from a defunct program is zero.

So how do you do a meta refresh? Well, you'll need to make an html page an a site you own. Then, use the code below:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<!-- Send users to the new location. -->
<TITLE>Affiliate Program Name</TITLE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh"
CONTENT="1;URL=http://www.affiliateprogram.com?affiliate_id=123456">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
</BODY>
</HTML>

Change "Affiliate Program Name" to the name of the affiliate program you're promoting, and "http://www.affiliateprogram.com?affiliate_id=123456" to your actual affiliate URL. Save the page as, say, programname.html in the location you want it, perhaps in a recommends directory, eg http://www.mysite.com/recommends/programname.html

Now, if something does happen to the program, or your affiliate link changes, all you need to do is change the two details on that html page. Use the link to your page in all your promotions.

Finally, if you have some decent tracking software on your site, you may well be able to track where people came from who visit your redirect page, so you can see what part of your marketing is working the best.

Reciprocal Linking is Dead

If you are at all involved in promoting a site on the internet, especially using links, you will more than likely have come across this claim. The reasoning behind it is simple; search engines no longer count reciprocal links towards your sites' search engine rankings, therefore a reciprocal link will not increase its' ranking, and is thus worthless.

Completely true - up to the worthless bit. Reciprocal links won't boost your search engine rankings, but anyone who claims that makes them worthless is missing the point. The objective when promoting your site is not boosting your rankings, but increasing traffic. Higher rankings do result in increased traffic, but that assumes that the only traffic a link will create is that from the search engine. A good reciprocal link to a non-competing but relevant site has a good chance of creating quality traffic in itself. The traffic may even be of a higher quality than the search engine traffic, because it's more likely that the visitor who clicks on your link is looking specifically for your product or service.

This doesn't mean you should just build reciprocal links with every site that will have you of course. Look for sites relevan to yours, that don't compete with it. For example, a web designer could look for web hosting firms and SEO firms, as a user of one of those services is very likely to use the others too.