DPR Affiliate Marketing Blog » search engine optimization

Content – A Professional View of the Rehash Racket

Stephan Miller — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 22:52:24 +0000

Image via Wikipedia

Professional content writers have been looking at the “automated rehash” market with a jaded eye and some amusement. For those who write SEO materials in particular, it’s like the fabulous copywriting software which was so popular for about 5 seconds a few years back. If you’re writing content for a subject like IT services in Brisbane or furniture hunting in Reykjavik, it just doesn’t work. Rehash is rehash, and internet users don’t like reading “encores” of higher ranking materials they’ve already seen.

Auto rehash is based on the same basic premise as grammar software. It doesn’t and can’t contribute content value. It may rephrase well or indifferently. It can’t add content values, unless someone gets in there and physically adds content. Historically, “manual rehash” didn’t work too well, either, until professional content writers were given these jobs.

If you’ve ever tried rewriting your own or someone else’s material, an important process kicks in automatically- Critical evaluation. If you have to rewrite a 700 word technical article to 95% new text content, translated into English so people can understand it, you become extremely conscious of the need for clarity and depth. The entire spectrum of the piece needs to be re-evaluated for that purpose, keeping the exact values of the information for readers.

Software can’t do that. It has no basis for re-evaluation of content matter. It can’t make the distinction between grammar and readability, either. It can’t relate to the readers. Sure, it can rephrase, but so what? “The cat sat on the mat” and “The cat is sitting on the mat” may be equally electrifying, life-changing reading, but who cares? Do people read articles for these things? Of course not.

SEO and rehashed content

If the above isn’t a death sentence for rehashes, there’s a double whammy for rehashing that is- Rehashing something written for SEO means dealing with the SEO values, keywords and Copyscape scenarios. A rehash simply can’t have the same values as the original. It also suffers by comparison with the prior piece.

SEO materials are written by professionals. The rehash is written by a piece of software. SEO writers and content writers are classified somewhere between technical writers and web specialists in terms of how they compose content and expertise. SEO articles are written for specific, tailored purposes for websites. Of any group of auto rehashes, most will be useless in terms of meeting SEO needs for that reason alone.

It doesn’t matter how you rehash or where you rehash, you’re already behind the eight ball.

It’s also possible to trash information with rewrites. Rephrasing can lose the sense of a sentence, or distort it, pretty easily. If you’re writing technical materials, the software may or may not know how to handle jargon, brand names or the sort of highly abbreviated IT-speak. If you want to do an article on computer repairs in Brisbane, it has to be case-specific, current, useful, and not just a cosmetic piece.

Web content clients simply don’t need rehashes. They need value for their sites and SEO. Rehashing is a racket, and it’s an unkind trick to play on people needing real content.

#171 Rehashing (bryherhill.com)
Getting Paid to Write – It’s More Than Just Writing (growmap.com)
How Your Worst Enemy Can Become the Key to Your Blogging Authority (copyblogger.com)

Eristoddle.com Now Has An Article Directory

Stephan Miller — Mon, 09 May 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Image by National Library of Scotland via Flickr

A New PageRank 3 Article Directory with Lots of Age

I have had eristoddle.com for a long time. Longer than this domain. Longer than the domain with my name on it. This was in the time before I just bought a new domain to put a new site on, so it has gone through some changes from a marketing blog to a forum to a writing links directory.

Well it is still a writing links directory, I just have to find a new directory plugin that will work with it to put the links back up, so if anyone has suggestions chime in. I am working with one now, but things are not turning out the way I expected. I like keeping the writing directory up, no matter how little traffic it gets because reading and writing are two of my biggest loves. So I will find a way. Plus, it’s what get’s the site listed in DMOZ.

But, in the meantime, it was easy enough to add an article directory to the site. I did this a couple of weeks ago and I am the type of developer that throws sites up as I am working on them, just so Google and Bing get in there a bit quicker. Well, these days they got in there quicker than I could get everything quite ready. Submissions started rolling in after the first week and there seem to be enough decent content to publish 10-20 articles a day currently.

So I figured I’d announce it somewhere. Why here?

My Article Directory’s Category Structure Mirrors Clickbank’s

I figured a lot of you coming here will be promoting digital products from Clickbank. It also mirrors PayDotCom’s category structure. I skipped the gambling category because the site has Adsense on it.

This means you can pick a category that matches your product and write an article directly related to it in a category that fits. Now I won’t be taking straight product reviews at the directory. And articles titled like “Sergenti Sunglasses” that are just blantant product names.

But I do allow you to get creative. If those Sergenti Sunglasses have some special new eye protecting technology, you could write a post with a title like “How Magic Tint Sergenti Sunglasses Beat Polarized Lenses Hands Down.”

And instead of posting blatant product reviews, you can post an article on how a feature of your product fixes a problem. For example, if you are promoting link building software, don’t write about it. Write 10 articles on how different type of link building can help you rank. Then after the article, in your signature, link to your product with the product name or keywords. Or even link from keywords in the article to pages on your product site that fit that keyword.

I don’t care how you do it, but articles come in fast now and this should only grow with time. I have to apply fast heuristics when it comes to approving them and I look at the title first and delete half.

I do give you up to 3 dofollow links from anywhere within your article, so I am pretty generous. Just hold up your end of the bargain and make sure your article are truly human readable. After the title test I do scan the content of each article before it gets published and am pretty good at spotting spun content and nonsense phrases quickly.

Starting An Article Directory After the Panda Update?

I guess some would call be an idiot. But with biggies like eHow and eZineArticles getting the smack down, I could think of no better time to do some experimenting. Learn from this Panda Update and build a better article directory over time. If people owning $40 million dollar sites can’t figure it out, than maybe a little SEO and content thinking can.

Plus, I am not a million dollar company and my site cost me hosting and domain costs. If it doesn’t get massive traffic, no biggie. I only have one family to feed and any traffic is good traffic. I have more sites to play with after this one.

But I do plan on building more traffic into the article directory and finding a way to mix content together and use WordPress to make it more useful and more than just an article site.

20 Link Building Methods and How to Use Them (famousbloggers.net)
Steps to create Money with Article publication sites (eristoddle.com)
Unique Article Marketing Strategy (thelostring.com)
Article Writing Methods for The Very Best Results (preciseinternetmarketing.com)

Bull-OK Links Through Email Bull-It!

Stephan Miller — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 22:18:13 +0000

This is a guest post by Flodner

When I first got the email about guest post called “What “Sandra Bullok” Taught Me About Building Links Through Email” I was excited. Was there something special? Is Sandra Bullok capable of teaching something related to link building?

Like everyone who spends a lot of time online I get tons of spam. Sometimes I read it, sometime spam can be creative or funny. Once I’ve posted the text of the funniest spam I ever got and since then I don’t remember any interesting spam or anything which I can make lessons from.

To be honest, the guest post written by Brandon Hopkins did not impress me cause I found nothing new. Just general guidelines which I’ve seen many times. No doubts that this post was written as a part of link building, but I decided to continue the experiment.

So I wrote to Brandon Hopkins, using his guidelines. Here is this mail:

Hey Brandon,

I wanted to let you know that I really liked your latest post about Sandra Bullok. I really liked the part about Company Name. That’s much more important that the total number of letters.

The reason I was emailing you was to see if you wanted to sell some advertising on the page, http://flodner.com I have a website that would fit nicely and give your readers some additional information about Sandra Bullok resources.

My budget is fairly small, I’m just a guy with a website .

Let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Alex Dombroffkin
vice deputy of music promotion consultant at IndieBands Media (http://indiebands.ws)

p.s. your photo of Sandra Bullok is really cute! How old is she in that picture on the site?

This letter was sent on March 27, 2011. Now it’s been more than 2 weeks and no result – no reply. Usually you just forget about these cases. But I decided to analyze “errors” as experiment continues)

Don’t be Generic. Be extracreative unless you want to buy something.

In my letter I was not generic, I used the name, even if it is nickname, not real name like mine. This did not affect the result. So I would suggest writing something really creative in the beginning of a letter. From my experience such kinds of letters have much bigger response ratio.

Use a company name only if it is recognizable.

If the person you contact did not hear about your company – it is not important whether you mention it or not. Sometimes it is better to write a letter from individual, cause web is overloaded with brands, names and nobody cares about them. In this example – Indie Bands Media did not impress Brandon.

Use your own style of capitalization and punctuation.

Don’t pretend to be too formal or too professional in your writing. Be yourself. Even if you make some mistakes – don’t worry, web has its own rules. I’ve never got problems with my style. But of course if you are not native speaker (English, I mean, in particular case) – you need to have good level of language. I used to correspond using google translator (writing in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian,etc.) and had no problems with that. Moreover people were happy to know my passion of languages and that I try to speak their language. In this example I used the form which Brandon showed but this did not lead to the result.

Features and Benefits

You can be “selling” yourself and your web-site. But if the person is not willing to buy (or is not capable) – you won’t get any results. Like in this case – Brandon “sells” himself and his services and is not interested in buying similar services. But I will add that even non-material and non-financial thing can be a benefit. (I.e. good mood, joke, etc.)

I hope you appreciate this post as well as my sense of humor.

Flodner runs a team of freelance link builders with the one goal of getting my website to rank #1 for my terms. Contact Flodner at flodner@gmail.com to discuss data recovery, traffic increase, indie music or other issues.

How to Run a Successful SEO Campaign for Your Make Money Blog

Stephan Miller — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:21:59 +0000

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

This is a guest post by Dalirin from BlogSND.com.

Everyone will run their search engine optimization (SEO) campaign a little different yet in many ways they’ll be similar. When you are considering starting your own SEO campaign there are many things you’ll want to consider.

SEO seems to be a never ending process, so be prepared to spend some time on it regularly. It will take a lot of time to run a successful SEO campaign but it is something possible to do. When you’ve decided you are ready to run a SEO campaign there are several things you’ll want to consider doing including some of the following:

Develop a goals to reach
Develop a plan on how you’ll reach those goals
Make any necessary adjustments to reach your goals
Start your campaign
Run statistics regularly and track them
Complete an analysis of results

When you do the above things you’ll have the ability to develop a SEO campaign that will meet your needs and avoid any ruts in the road along the way. It can be quite difficult dealing with a pause in the middle of your campaign as it will slow things down. You can avoid this from transpiring by having a specific plan of action and stick to it, just ensure you give yourself a few days of leeway time just in case unexpected events do occur.

With a SEO campaign you are going to have a few ups and downs along the way as you determine what is working and what is not. There are a few things you’ll be trying out when you are doing your first campaign and guaranteed on the next one you’ll make a few changes to the campaign you’ve utilized. Once you determine a method that works great you’ll guaranteed re-use it for many more campaigns and it will become a true assist to your SEO marketing methods. Just make sure that you keep abreast and make the necessary changes to any new tactics that are implemented by search engines (especially Google).

Every business and person will have their own ideas and methods when it comes to running a SEO campaign, but with those six steps you can really start your way to having a successful SEO campaign. It will take some time to learn proper methods to do things, but it will happen in due time. SEO takes time and patience so prepare yourself for a lengthy road. Your site won’t have good SERPs over night. It could actually take a few months before you see amazing results. Depending on your keyword, it can take longer time to get a good SERPs. But when you achieve your goal of getting to the front page, you would be rewarded dearly.

Dalirin blogs at a make money blog. He loves writing articles about how to make money online

Affiliate Marketing Options and Prejudices

Stephan Miller — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 17:30:54 +0000

Affiliate marketing can be a pain in the ass to learn sometimes. It’s not hard but it is work. But I am not talking about that part.

The problem is with the options. There are just too many. If you look at the post I wrote just the other day, you will see why. I listed over a hundred ways to promote your blog. Do they all work? Yes. To some extent. But when you are faced with a list like that, at least when I am, I freeze. Too many options gives you no clear place to start. And I promise, that list is only a start. I have used some of the methods and know what has worked for me. And some of the methods are based on your blog as a whole while others focus on posts. And some methods are good to use when you start a blog and others will only work after your blog has at least a little bit of a presence online.

But that is just promotion methods. Have you chosen a niche yet? How about an affiliate program or products to promote? Add these two variables to the mix and you have even a bigger mess. How do you solve this?

First you need to know what you want to write about. Can you write about it? Are you an expert? Do you have enough material for the niche? Now you don’t have to be an expert. I happen to think that one of the best times to start a blog is when you are learning something new.

If you are learning SEO, keep a blog about what you have learned each day. Try some SEO software. Write about it too. Not one post. Try to find out everything it can do and start listing things. If each item on your list can be it’s own article, then write an article about each topic. Take screenshots and use them in your post (and upload the photos you use to flickr instead of your own server. It can only help spread your network further). Take screencasts of you using the software for one post and then post your video wherever you can. Even simple niches can contain lot’s of material for posts.

That didn’t help much either. I just made every option a little more tempting. If any niche is worthy of creating a blog about, there is no narrowing down with that last paragraph. I am no help. You see, I look wide and far for options, techniques and methods. The problem with that: eventually you have to chart your course and actually do the work.

Just do it. Okay, I lifted that from Nike. But it applies to so many things including affiliate marketing. You know what you can write about whether you admit it to yourself or not. Don’t worry about products to promote. They are out there. Just choose your topic.

And I will let you in on a little secret about the methods you use to promote your niche blog. Gurus and experts play favorites. They also have comfort zones. They also are prejudiced. I have lurked and traveled in a lot of marketing niches online. For the most part, the email newsletter expert knows nothing about Adwords, the pay-per-click expert knows nothing about SEO and the article marketing expert knows nothing about social media marketing. And when someone doesn’t know how to do something, they tend to devalue it’s worth. Now I am not talking about all the experts or any specific experts. I am speaking generally. But just take everything you hear and read with a grain of salt, including this post.

Free PDF’s For Affiliate Marketers and Bloggers

Stephan Miller — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 04:05:48 +0000

Most of the time, there is really no reason to pay for an ebook because there is so much free information available out there. Today I spotted a PDF search engine on popurls. So I did some searching.

It should be pretty easy to figure out a few more.