Web Marketing HowTo

Article Marketing Automation has really become a great success, but I see all too often people paying the $47 a month for the paid membership (adding your blogs as hosts in the content network, building them up with content is still free) and not getting their money's worth because they don't understand some of the critical features of it, in particular the flexibility and power of spinning the articles.  See my Article Marketing Automation Review here for an overview.

What Is Article Spinning?

Article Spinning is the process of taking a copy of an article and "spinning" it to make it unique.  In a basic sense, you could do this by changing the words and / or the order of your phrases and sentences, so that is no longer obviously the original article.  You could add content, mix it up with other content, and make it different in a variety of ways.

Why Is Article Spinning Important?

If you don't spin the articles, you are putting out duplicate content.  Since Google doesn't want to see multiple copies of the exact same content in its index, it will ignore duplicate content when it finds it.  All those articles you've submitted to the article directories?  You're putting out a bunch of duplicate content.  Article Marketing Automation shines by distributing different versions of the article so that it isn't duplicate content, and Google should index your articles and give you some backlink love.

Examples Of Article Spinning using Article Marketing Automation

AMA offers two different types of article spinning, with the spinning and sentence re-writing phases.  The spinning involves using a certain syntax to provide variants of phrases.  I make heavy use of this feature, so I don't usually have to do anything in the sentence re-writing phase.

To explain what pre-spinning is, we'll take a look at the example sentence "The little cat jumped on the couch."  Article Marketing Automation allows you to provide variants of content using the option group {option1~option2} format.  A simple option would be to use this sentence:

The {little~orange} cat jumped {up~on the couch}.

This yields us 4 possible sentences:

The little cat jumped up.
The little cat jumped on the couch.
The orange cat jumped up.
The orange cat jumped on the couch.

You can use as many variants in each option group that you like to really spin up the content.

The (little~orange~big~white~black} {cat~feline~kitten} {walked~jumped~climbed} {up~on the couch~down the stairs~to the window}.

If my math skills haven't failed me, that yields us 180 possible sentences!  I am not going to list them all here, of course.  Note that these needn't be individual words for options, but whole phrases, sentences, paragraphs, etc.  There is a real flexibility here.  Not only that, you can use a second level of delimiter [option1|option2] inside these to really provide a huge array of choices. I have mainly used this for my anchor text, because it can get very complicated quickly.  Having a page full of code can make things hard to read.  Consider the example where you want to refer to one of two products, each of which are at a different link.  Remember how you can put anything in as an option?  Links work, too.

{[Page1AnchorA|Page1AnchorB]~[Page2AnchorY|Page2AnchorZ]}

When I make the [|] groups links, this will give possibilities of a link to one of the two pages, either of which has multiple variants of the anchor text.  Instead of simply targeting one keyword phrase, you can have one of several randomly picked!  This helps you rank for various targetted long tail terms at once and gives variety to your inbound links so it looks more natural.  I usually do my main niche keyword in its own link, and the other two links randomly among several long tails, though sometimes I use the main keyword, options with the next two keywords, and an option with the next 4 or 5 keywords.  It just depends on the keywords I'm targeting and the relative amounts of expected traffic from each.

You can also spin your article title as well.  I usually try to provide at least 4 different article title variants.  You use the exact same option format as in your article body.

Once you are happy with the spinning, you will be presented sentences for re-writing.  You can re-write each sentence up to 10 times.  I don't typically get much presented here, as I spend the time and effort thoroughly mixing up the content beforehand.  I suppose it's a question of level of effort, how much time you want to put towards either type of article spinning / variation in Article Marketing Automation, and what personally makes more sense to you.  You may find the option variants intimidating and difficult to read and prefer to re-write the sentences, or have more variation available by using the option delimiters.

Key Mistakes People Make When Spinning Articles

• Not re-writing them in the first place.  If I see an article 0.00% re-written, I reject it.  Note that on my auto-approve blogs, I don't particularly care.  Duplicate content does not serve your purpose or mine.  Of course, the "Original Article Rewritten" factoid is a new addition as of late September.
• Not using all 3 links.
• Using all 3 links, but they're to the same page and using the same keyword.  With the spinnable links, you can easily add in a large variety of long tails quickly.
• Non-keyword focused links.  Using your www.website.com as link text doesn't help.  There's one guy in particular that likes to link to www.myparticularniche.soandsoenterprises.com as well.  His website asks people to "Please help support this website by clicking on one Google ad."  I don't think he's going to last too long.  Using "Review" as your anchor text when linking to a page "product-type-review" and while the "of product type" is not linked.
• Links only to home pages, no deep links - this reflects a "go to my home page and browse" mindset instead of a search engine focused mindset that gets individual, specific pages ranked for the keywords.
• Deep linking to a page, but using the title of the website instead of keywords.
• Flooding a niche with articles one right after the other, all pointing to the same site.  That's not stealthy.  These people also tend not to re-write at all, either.  Why don't you go ahead and put up a sign that says "I am a link farm" then?
• Misspelling your keywords, though it's possible this was done on purpose...I kind of doubt it, as sometimes the posts can be badly mangled.
• Re-writing an article, but only about 10%.  What's the point of that?
• An article with no links in it at all.  To be fair, I only saw this once.

My Article Spinning Strategy

• I try not to make any of the mistakes listed above, for starters.
• Use all 3 allowed links, spinning the keyword phrases for some variety, hitting a several long tails.
• I use existing articles from my sites as a base, tune down the keyword focus a bit, maybe remove some content and spin them.  I don't want my published articles to be competition, but I do want them to be relevant, and I want what I'm linking to be more comprehensive than what I am linking from.
• I allow my articles to be published on my own sites.  I can trust the author to do good work and they're spun 6 ways to Sunday, so there are no problems doing so.  Why write content and not use it yourself?

Article Marketing Automation gives you some very powerful article spinning options that provide great benefits, but if you don't bother to use them, you are throwing away both the $47 a month you pay for a subscription as well as the lost potential profits from not being as successful as you could be.

Splork also has some good thoughts on Article Writing and Blog Building With Article Marketing Automation that you might want to take a look at as well.  This article was inspired by some discussion on Griz's It's All In The Back Links though I'd had the thought to write this kicking around for a while.  What can I say?  I'm lazy.

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eBay is a very popular, highly converting website that has a good affiliate program you can use to help monetize your sites. Given Google's current penchant for de-indexing BANS sites, you're much better off with a regular website (WordPress or any other PHP-capable system) that adds in the eBay listings to your posts and pages, but isn't obviously the whole reason for the existence of your site. Among the problems BANS has is the high number of super-thin affiliate sites built with it, the templating difficulties, and content issues that make it more difficult to work with than other systems. Wade Wells' phpBay Pro (and the free, less fully featured version phpBay Lite) address this issue by simply and easily adding eBay auction results into your existing website. While the API version works with any PHP capable website, I will discuss primarily the WordPress plugin version for simplicity in this review.

First off, obviously you will need to sign up with eBay if you haven't already done so. Displaying eBay listings without being an affiliate is of course not all that profitable. Down at the bottom of the page you will see the link for Affiliates.

Installing phpBay Pro / phpBay Lite

Installation is simple. phpBayPro / phpBayLite installs as a regular plugin and one more file copied to the root of your WordPress install. From there, you just activate the plugin and configure your desired settings. This includes entering your eBay PID or Campaign ID. Don't forget this step!

More settings you will want to be sure to configure dictate how you want your items displayed, by cheapest first, ending soonest, best match, etc., geo-targeting options, displaying only items that are "Buy It Now" or have images, offer free shipping, etc.

Inserting phpBay Pro Code Into Posts

Once you have done this, it is a simple matter to add in your code for displaying the listings where you want them in your post like so:

What does the code inside the tags mean?
• Your search term
• The number of listings you want displayed
• eBay category number - typically I leave this empty and do a fairly precise search
• Your negative search terms - super important, see why below

Here is the post itself, using the code above:

Note that I have customized my results template; by default it returns the standard eBay format with price, bids, time remaining, etc.

phpBay Pro Tips and Hints

eBay's search will tend to return you a very wide array of results if you don't restrict it. In the above example, notice that while I searched on "ipod nano 8GB" only one of the items return fits. You must use the negative terms to narrow your search. While I put skins and cases in as negative terms, I got results for skin and case. Most of the items in that particular niche are various types of accessories. I find "for" to be a pretty good negative term in that case, but you will want to tweak your own listings to make sure you get what you want.

phpBay Pro includes the cloaked links function, so the Big G is less likely to decide you are a thin affiliate. Please, however, actually create useful and keyword focused content. You're doing yourself and everyone else a favor. That didn't happen so much with BANS, and look how that is ending up. You needn't get a Pulitzer Prize for your writing, but there needs to be something there. You can use the SEOd URLs instead of eBay Rover links and use mod_rewrite so the images aren't obviously coming from eBay as well.

Why did I mention these 2 items in particular? phpBay Lite does not use the negative terms, nor does it use SEO URLs / link cloaking. Upgrading to phpBay Pro is worth the cost, folks.

I've been using phpBay Pro for several months now and am quite happy with it. Wade's support is outstanding with a quick response time to inquiries, and there are all sorts of useful gems in the support forum, which is populated by a helpful community. For example, I discovered a method there for replacing / extending WordPress' search function so that it returns eBay results in place of, or in addition to, your WP search results. This gives a searcher a much higher chance of finding something they are looking for, buying it, and netting you a commission. phpBay Pro is a great buy for anyone with any product-focused sites.

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Many writers rely on article marketing for getting back links.  To this end, they submit articles to a large array of article directories.  Since Google doesn't like duplicate content, most of these articles will never get indexed, effectively negating the benefit of submitting to more than one directory, beyond the minimal traffic each article directory generates.  Additionally, when all these links suddenly pop up at once, Google begins to get a little suspicious that you may be buying links or spamming.  Hopefully this Article Marketing Automation review will show you a new and better way to do things.

Enter Article Marketing Automation

Article Marketing Automation is a subset of the PLR Pro network that's available to the public, even while PLR Pro membership is currently closed.  It consists of a network of blogs that content is posted to.  When you add a blog to the network, you can pick the categories of articles you want to receive, so no worries about your pet blog being inundated by weight loss posts.  Any blog that can receive posts via remote publishing API, like WordPress, Tumblr, or BlogSpot blogs, Drupal or Joomla! sites, or any other site that can use XML-RPC or Atom publishing APIs.  Note that XSitePro, FrontPage, DreamWeaver, or other vanilla HTML sites can not be used with AMA.  If you want, all you have to do is sit back and watch your blog fill up with content.

The article submission is the main benefit of joining Article Marketing Automation, though.  It enables you to submit an article and have unique versions of this article distributed across the network, all to be indexed and point their targeted links wherever you want.

When you submit your article, you select your categories, distribution start date, the article itself, and tags.  You can limit the distribution so only a certain number of variations of the article will be published, and whether or not it will be sent to any of your own sites.  This first stage is where much of your article spin can be established.  You can type in the WYSIWYG editor, though I prefer to do the main work offline first, and then paste it in and mark it up.  You can spin the title, any text in the body, links, and anchor text.  It's very flexible.

What do I mean by spin?  At a basic level, it's word or phrase substitution.  For example, let's take this sentence and see what we can do with it:  "The big dog ran down the street."  Using multi-level delimiters in the general format of {word1~word2} we can mix up the sentence.

The {big~little} dog {ran~walked} down the street.

This would yield us possible sentences with either a big or little dog, who ran or walked down the street.  But you can change it all up so much more!

The {big~large~small~tiny~brown~black} {dog~cat} {ran~walked~ambled} {down~along~to the end of} the {street~road~boulevard}.

You begin to see the power of such a thing, I take it?  I won't belabor the point, though I may do a second article just on the spinning options.  After you entered the article in, it will prompt you for sentence re-writes, where you are presented with a random sentence from the article and are able to re-write it with up to 10 different variations.  I don't typically have too much presented here as I make extensive use of spinning terms and phrases.  The time you spend creating as much variation as possible is well worth it in my opinion.  You end up with completely different articles spread across different domains and blog types with no duplicate content and tons of new, keyword focused links.  Article Marketing Automation is a winner, folks.

Once submitted, the articles are drip-fed into the content network so links show up in a more natural fashion instead of all at once.  The Article Marketing Automation crew have really thought this out well and done a great job.

Free vs. Paid

This is quite simple to explain:  the free version of Article Marketing Automation only allows you to add blogs that will receive content.  This can be quite useful to build out blogs that maybe you no longer maintain and want to write for -- Google much prefers blogs that are active.  You can create blogs that you don't have to write content for.  It's not exactly crippled, but only a small subset of the real power of the system.  Since you can do anything to the articles you receive except copy them for use elsewhere or change the given links, this means you can still monetize them with AdSense, add your own affiliate links, etc.  For this reason alone, it's a no-brainer to join.  Doesn't cost, may add profit, sign me up!

The paid version of Article Marketing Automation allows you to submit your own articles with up to 3 links to whatever you choose.  The free version will net you content, but the paid version nets you links and can be used to promotion purposes.  That, to me, is where the major benefit lies.  It is $47 a month, so you definitely want to make sure you are writing and spinning articles, otherwise that money isn't working for you the way it should.

Things I'd Like To See Improved

• When you approve an article, it's published immediately, and you get batches of articles (up to a number you can set) once a day. I'd like to see them published randomly throughout the day instead of say, 5 at once, immediately. This would appear more natural.
• It would be nice to be able to edit the content prior to publishing, either by allowing a contributor status a la WordPress' roles, or by allowing basic editing via AMA's interface.
• It kinda bugs me that your blog password sits in the clear instead of *** obfuscation. For WP blogs at least, you can create a new account with only authoring rights, to minimize possible issues. Otherwise, use random passwords or keep your more treasured sites separate.
• I could really come up with some uses for the Article Spinner for other purposes. It would be nice to have it standalone, but I could just be greedy there. J
• At $47 a month, the price will be a turn off for some, and to be honest I was a bit leery at first. But considering the power of the system, I think it's a darn good investment if you will put the time and effort in. Otherwise, the free membership is still a good "investment" too, but more limited.

Go on over to Article Marketing Automation and get signed up.  Even if it's just the free membership, you're getting a great deal of benefit from this service.  I hope this Article Marketing Automation review has opened some eyes and been of service.

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While perusing some other sites, I ran across a link to Splork's site LostBallInHighWeeds.com.  Splork is an Internet Marketer who's been around a few years.  He seems to be doing okay, but not stellar.  He does however, appear to have a pretty good grasp of what's going on out there, and muses on his various techniques.  The refreshing part is that he neither does the A-lister "I know everything" act, as a matter of fact is quite disdainful of it, nor is he an exasperated, "I don't know what I'm doing" hopeful either.

Take a look at his post, I Almost Bought Commission Blueprint to see what I mean.  Here's a couple of snippets, so you'll get where I'm going with this:

I decided not to buy Commission Blueprint. I was almost seduced by dreams of making money with Adwords. I’m glad I saved my $297 $77.

...

So you go out to the web and look for “Commission Blueprint reviews” and you come upon page after page of bullshit Squidoo Lens, Hubpages and domain name ripoff review sites that pretty much say nothing but rewrite the product’s salespage. You know, the same shit that gurus tell you to do to sell niche products. There is never a true review. Why? Because it’s too new. Nobody has used it long enough to know if it really works. Everybody is too intent on selling it.

If the damn thing was so great, don’t you think that the gurus would be working the program first instead of trying to make a few grand pimping? The product says it has made a half a million so far this year on one product. If it’s so badass why bother being an affiliate marketer? Just work the Blueprint. But no one knows if it works because they are too busy getting you to buy it.

It was about halfway through the post I really felt a sense of kinship with Splork.  I've been looking around and these kinds of overhyped sales BS are everywhere.  Even many legit products have the in your face marketing popping right out of the page at you.  I'm not sure if it's worse in the IM field or simply more prevalent.  I think you have to read between the marketing lines, because you certainly can't beleive what they say.  Even then, you can't ever be sure.  At least Clickbank has a good refund policy.

I confess to spending too much of the rest of the day wandering through his site.  Some good stuff in there, go take a look.  You'll probably find yourself adding him to your feed reader like I did.

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