Article Syndication - It's All a Big Scam

Relationship eZines:
Open Directory - Society: Relationships: E-zines

New Age eZines:
Open Directory - Society: Religion and Spirituality: New Age: Magazines and E-zines

From a random google search:

25 High Traffic Blogs That Accept Guest Posts | Original Adventures in Internet Marketing


» 500+ Places to Syndicate Your Content

Well, not quite as painful as having Mt. Everest etched into your face, I suppose ...

Thanks very much for starting this thread, Will.

Paul has been doing this for 5 times as long as I have, and nearly every time he posts, he makes me wish I'd started earlier!

Noooooooo, they won't: it's not relevant to them at all. Only people who confuse "duplicate content" and "syndicated content" ever think about that, at all.

... the sad thing is, I truly believe syndication is the closest thing you can find to "push button riches" in Internet Marketing.

I mean, write a few 1,000 word articles, send them off to people in need of content with a willing audience, and you should see some money roll in. It is tested. It is proven.

Rinse and repeat.

Buy an Island.

Bada-bing, bada-boom.

Smack the stupid-moment smack!!

I thought I had read Mount Rushmore.

Lol, I thought the same thing. He's thinking Mount Rushmore obviously.

Don't feel bad. Cher (as in Sonny and Cher) Admitted once that she spent much of her life thinking that Mount Rushmore was a natural phenomena. (by the way for this post and the location of mountains etc. we are not all on the same page LOL) Everyone is right in their own way.

George (Avatar etched on Mount Vesuvius) Wright P.S. Thanks OP for a very informative Post. I may start writing articles again.

In response to Bobby's question:
"However I'm puzzled by this question....how then DO you manage to strike the balance of being soft on the 'sales type resource box' but ensuring that readers can still click through to your intended destination?

Thanks
Bobby"
_______________

Bobby - Great question. My personal thoughts are as follows:

One way is to make sure you tap into the reason or problem or "pain" that the reader is likely trying to address. By relating to their pain and empathizing with it, you connect more deeply with the reader and increase their likelihood of clicking through to your actual site.

For a basic example, let's use the standard dog training niche. Let's say I wrote an article about 5 of the top 10 tips to deal with aggressive behavior in your dog.

A typical resource box might include something like:
"For more tips on how to deal with aggressive dog behavior , visit...."

I have found that a better approach is to first include something like the following:

"Having a dog that displays aggressive behavior can be very stressful. I know as I've been there myself. Don't lose hope though -- there are solutions. If you'd like to explore more options, please visit..."

That is a really basic and quick example. But, the point is that you should look for ways to tap into their pain and identifying with it. It is more personal and focuses on value not selling.

What do others think? Maybe someone else has a different thought or approach?

Bill, thanks you've helped to answer my question, would you concur with this Troy?

I'm not quite grasping this properly ... You spin an article - and you manage to "maintain the readibility of the article" - over "billions" of "100% unique" copies? And you are human too? Wow! I'm impressed. And there was I thinking that spinning just produced garbage ... :rolleyes:

John.

And that, nik0, is the entire underlying irony and fallacy of your position and experience.

You're misattributing the causation.

You don't need to spin it to get the SEO benefits.

Those don't somehow, magically, change/improve just because the backlinks are attached to content that's been through a spinner.

A backlink on any given page on the web isn't magically worth any more linkjuice, or any more likely to be indexed, if the content it follows is "spun".

And it isn't worth any less link-juice if it's in the supplemental index than it is in the main index, either. Even the people selling the spinning software and services aren't alleging that.

So your "causation argument" is fundamentally flawed.

But don't take my word for it: test it for yourself, as so many former spinners do, and learn that you don't need to do that. That would be pretty good news for you, wouldn't it?!

And me.

I don't supply exclusive content. (I don't think I've ever been asked for it anyway, to be honest).

Far from it.

White-hat cats and many other felines seem to think that now's the time to start relaxing about it.



After all, Google is now going to greater lengths than ever to clarify publicly and unambiguously that duplicate content and syndicated content are two very different things, that they like syndicated content and fully understand the need for it, and that they don't even penalize "duplicate content that really is duplicate content" (not that anything mentioned in this thread really is, anyway).

As we can all see for ourselves from all the threads and posts like this one: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5273419

The people who "care" about what they mistakenly imagine to be an "issue" over that are people whose perspective has (for whatever reason or variety of reasons) led them not quite to grasp the difference between duplicate content (sometimes they're identifiable by the slightly strange way they seem to like to refer to it in an apparently affectionate, diminutive and phonetic form, as "doop", in which case you can be almost certain that it isn't, really! ) and syndicated content.

All clarified here, for anyone interested: Article Marketers - Lay the Duplicate Content Myth To Rest Once and For All | Internet Marketing and Publishing

Don't be "dooped".

Sadly, though, that description sums up very accurately a now thankfully small but still resilient proportion of the comments made about article marketing in the forum.

Just found another blog that clearly stated that an article can't appear anywhere, not even your own blog. "You are writing for my readers." As if he owns these people's eyeballs and loyalty?? Seriously?

This is such a fear-based approach. This is probably based on the whole duplicate content SEO nonsense, but it comes off as this guy sounding selfish. How would anyone on this guy's site even know it had been published elsewhere? And so what if it was? As a reader myself, it seems like it would be a neat thing to see the same article a couple of different places (and the odds of that are slim anyway). Makes it look like it's important. And you got someone else's "important article" on your site. How lucky for you!

I guess mostly I didn't appreciate the haughty nature of how he stated having HIS readers. I'm certainly not owned by any of the bloggers I visit when I read things online, and I hope I never give that impression to anyone reading my content.

Exactly so.

In general, it may help readers of parts of the thread to be aware that - as occasionally happens in forums - there can be "opinions" put forth in such discussions which may be motivated by the commercial interests of the people expressing them. In an internet marketing forum, there can be people promoting software and/or services which actually depend, for their continual sales, on people assuming that Google is the answer, rather than figuring out what the question is.

More specifically, in this conext, remember that however publicly, however prominently, however repeatedly and in however much detail Google confirms the exact opposite (and as we've all now seen, in many threads here, and with many evidential links, that's actually very publicly, very prominently, very repeatedly and in great detail), there can still be people expressing in scaremongering tones the "opinion" that syndicated content is filtered by Google's "duplicate content filter" with the inference that there's something "bad" or "dangerous" or "difficult" or "undesirable" about that, which might impliedly have some sort of threatened-but-never-quite-explained alleged negative effect on article syndication.

Be aware that "opinion" is all it is, even when it's fully believed by the people who say it. And be aware that there's an overwhelming plethora of evidence to the contrary, and a very large and increasing number of Warriors actually making a very good living out of the fact that it's actually (at best) "completely mistaken".

It's the internet, folks.

One of the ineluctable corollaries to free speech is that there's no quality control of "information". And there's no easy, reliable way for the uninitiated to distinguish between fact and the all-too-pervasive beliefs of the Urban Myth School of internet marketing.

It's very much 'caveat lector', all round.

Another burning question: how do you do your keyword research for article syndication purposes?

I've gleaned some excellent ideas on this before, but I want to get some more perspectives on this. I know we're not writing for search engines, but for ezine publishers and readers here--so how much should we be concerned about ranking in Google for certain keywords (on our own blogs first, of course, before we syndicate the same content)?

This is probably the last thing that's holding me back...I'm afraid of writing articles that 1) won't be found by ezine publishers in article directories; 2) won't be of value to blog and website owners, because they won't rank in Google for a specific keyword (if they care about keywords at all, at least as much as nurturing their readership).

In other words, I guess I'm asking: do the ezine/blog owners worth syndicating to care about keyword optimization at all? Should I, as an article marketer, care about it myself--and to what extent?

And one more thing: should I let keyword availability dictate what I write about, or should I just seek to write entertaining/engaging articles on the topics of my choice in the niche, with little or no regard to keyword research (like I would, say, for a print magazine)? If I should give a "little" bit of thought to keyword research, how exactly would you implement it in your idea generation and actual writing process?

Sorry for the long, rambling post...Just raising these questions because I haven't really found them discussed at length, and hopefully they'll give us newbies a sense of direction in our writing and marketing efforts

Oh my, if only I still believed in Fairy Tales

Hit it on the head with this one!

I have 2 niches, that I rank highly for. One of them is #1 and the other is now #3.

Yes they get truckloads of traffic. And Everyman and his dog barks on about how you must do SEO. Well I can also confirm, that the traffic we do from Guest posts, ezine publishers and a well placed guest blog on high ranking niches blogs, is far better than any money we have spent on SEO. Probably to the power of 100. No joke!

While it has taken some time to get the hang of syndication, once you know what works, ITS KILLER STUFF. The traffic, subscribers and sales we get are like magic. And automatic too.

I am not saying SEO is dead, or you shouldnt do it, because it brings great results. What I am merely saying is that there is more than one way to skin a cat. (In terms of traffic)

But this strategy once incorporated properly into your traffic reportare can bring you INSANE RESULTS!

I'm all for article syndication. I'm not all for putting a syndicated article on your own website. I think if you don't regret that now, you'll regret it at some point in 2012. You can argue either way about it, but I don't see how the upside of doing so outweighs the downside.

And just look at the thread - there are links to DMOZ's relationship and personal development categories dedicated to ezines.

What more proof do you need?

I think you mis-understood my question.

I wasn't asking for a "niche" per se.

I was asking for generalized search terms that could be combined with your niche keyword in a search query to make the search results more relative.

Any ideas?

Such as:

"Ezine" + "Your Niche Keyword"

or

"Publish With Us" + "Your Niche Keyword"

or

"Become A Publisher" + "Your Niche Keyword"

You know something like that???

Edit: Cancel that. I completely missed this earlier like a blind fool (oops): http://www.buzzblogger.com/500-place...-your-content/

Time to get to work

Let's make this real simple. The majority of people here work hard to create content, products, etc.. They have the right to see the fruits of their labor without having someone take it without offering credit or compensation in exchange.

You've outright admitted you steal content and it's okay as long as you don't get caught. That makes you the enemy. Get it?

I can assure you that if you continue to flaunt your methods, rubbing it in the faces of those who work hard to do legitimate business that there will be enough people reporting you that more than just your posts disappear. Get it?

If I broke into your house and stole your TV set, but took it home and didn't use it, would that be OK with you?

"I was asking: Do you guys have any proof that the same content distributed works just as well as spun content for ranking purposes. The only proof I've seen comes from the author of TheBestSpinner, and it looked pretty legit".

Here's the thing, how long ago was that little self-serving 'experiment' conducted? Things are changing WRT to spun, replicated or any content which appears 'largely similar' to other content.

On the one hand you have people who say: "there's no point in spinning 1000 copies, you may as well post the same article 1000 times and you'll get the same benefit"
If the "benefit" you're looking for from your efforts is back-link juice, then the above statement is technically incorrect. Content determined to be 'existing' or 'duplicate' or whatever you want to call it, is being downgraded, and with the downgrade comes a downgrade in any link juice passed along. Some people will jump up now and shout 'baloney' then get their knickers in a knot over the idea that duplicated content is somehow a bad thing. Well they're not seeing the big picture, it isn't a 'BAD THING' it just isn't going to be ANYTHING....not good nor bad, just largely irrelevant, including links emanating from it.

So if you believe that, and I'm not trying to sell you anything so I could care less whether you do or you don't, then your 'spinning' strategy might seem justified. But it isn't any more useful than sending out 1000 copies of the same article, since it's basically graded as 'junk status' anyway. It gets you nothing, unless you're smart enough to spin something that isn't flagged for what it is - JUNK.

So now, the people who say "you might as well just publish 1000 copies of the same article", appear to be on to something. Since doing so doesn't require the extra effort of spinning, and either way I'm not going to get much out of it, so I might as well take the easiest option.
But you can take that a step further. If you're going to do one or the other, and either way you're essentially going to get very little from it, then you might as well stay at home and bake some of those cookies that you guys can bake without getting arrested. I'm sorry if that sounds like a stereotype, it isn't negative since I'm really quite envious of your culture. Getting high on sh*t instead of spinning sh*t make a lot more sense to me.
Now then. To complete the picture, there will be a bunch of people who jump up and say: "I'm spinning articles and making tons of money from it" - Yep. And I'm from Wisconsin so perhaps I'll go ice fishing later today. It isn't too cold so the ice is quite thin and there's a good chance that my pickup truck may go through the ice and I may drown. Or, I might catch a big fish. Or maybe I'll go to Econofoods and just buy another pound of salmon. Which is it to be :rolleyes: :confused: