That's the second time I've seen Scribd mentioned today. I never really thought about submitting PDF's to them before, but I may give it a go now.

Thanks for the heads-up!

Believe it or not scribd and social bookmarking is still very powerfull on the web today. I have seen social bookmarking alone catapult videos from being burried under pages in big g to on page one.

I've used scribd quite a lot for offline clients and yes it can provide quite a lot of traffic.

I agree Scribd is a great place to generate traffic from and unlike article directories, you don't have to worry about them micro managing your work.

Also when I was freelancing, I also used it as a portfolio hub. When a client wanted to see some of my work I just sent them the link to my Scribd page. They could just scroll through the pieces at their leisure.

I live killing two birds with one stone!

Am sure on the social bookmarking. Still powerful imo.

I like scrib'd as well. I have uploaded a few small eBooks onto their and they generate some pretty steady traffic.

I should do more though, thanks for the reminder.

Wow, every second I refresh my profile, I saw increasing 10 to 20 traffic. This is nice.

This is current stat.



I'll post the stat for 5 minutes later

This is 5 minutes later.


Wow, more than 300 visits within 5 minutes.

I'm always looking for ways to get more leverage out of my articles, it takes me long enough to write them after all!
Are you getting many click throughs to your site?

I've used Scribd in the past but have moved away from it recently for whatever reason....

That's amazing traffic though, are you experiencing clicks to a site affiliated with the document?

I don't expect you to give away what niche your writing about, but everyone can benefit from a post like this.

Thanks!

Goods stats.

If you submit an article which you've already submitted to an article directory, do you have to use the same pen name for it to get accepted by scribd?

Hmm...I don't know if there is a way you can go in and edit the document to include a highly visible link, but with that kind of traffic if the content is engaging enough I am sure people will make the effort to visit the site.

It's never a bad thing to drive that kind of traffic in 24 hours...

Thanks for the heads up, I'm gonna take a look at it now.

I couldn't help but feel jealous. Scribd has actually been one of my reliable traffic sources.

Anyway, thanks for sharing your success with other warriors.

Does the traffic actually convert from it though? Or are you just getting junk traffic out of it?

Allow me to tweak that for you...

1. Convert one text article into .doc.
2. Generate a tracking link to your lead-capturing website from either AdTrackzGold, HyperTracker, LinkTrackr, Prosper202 or any other conversion-tracking system.
3. Insert the tracking link into your Word Doc (feel free to cloak it in case you change providers later)
4. Convert the .doc file into PDF
5. Uploaded to scribd.
6. Ta-da! Now you can measure your optin conversions for that one-unique article.
7. If the ROI is there, rinse and repeat. If it isn't, move on to another traffic source or try changing the format of your article.
8. (Optionally), on your website, insert a one time offer immediately after optin to attempt to monetize the traffic.

Never heard of this before now. Very interesting and something I'll look into as I'm developing my first blog aimed at monetization soon.

Until now I have been an article writer for other people's content. I will try this out when I have my own.

OK, I put up a test document to see how it works. The PDF has embedded affiliate links with a funky call-to-action promotion at the end of the document. Will check it later to see if it generates any clicks/sales and will post the stats here for you all.

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nice work.

I have had some success with scribd.

But here is the real kicker. You content obviously worked killer, and it is something people looking are after. So just create similar more high quality content and get more traffic. Simple really.

Good luck, but if you keep testing and track, and getting results you will not need luck now will you :-)

I don't know what niche are you in, but I've tried this with a sub-niche in health niche and haven't got single click from it.

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Good advice thanks for sharing.

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I will be using this on my lunch break for work today. Thanks!

Why don't you still do this? Just direct people to a squeeze page and get them to sign up. Building a list is a great long-term strategy and you could make even more cash.

Just sayin'.

Rob

Thank you for your sharing.
It's really a good motivation for me.
I have ever tried it few times but the traffic is not as amazing as yours.
Reading your share makes me want to try again.
Good Job, my friend

D@mn. why the #E!! didn't I even DREAM of that!? OYE! Thank you for placing this thread, OP. I REALLY need to try it and get real live PROOF for myself.

I am wondering if I can write a meaty article with a link over to my blog WHERE the CPA offer sits. Not mentioning anything about such offer in the doc sharing sites, so I can float under the radar of these guys. Just a cloaked link letting them click their way into my site in a couple, not many spots.

It's great for getting traffic. However, if you've written any good ebooks then you'll probably find them up there too. Scribd are pretty quick at taking your (stolen) content down if you send them a DMCA - and they provide a handy template to copy and paste into the email.

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Holy crap! I cannot believe I underestimated the power of scribd. Thank you so much Raja for this post. I was looking for an extra way to get traffic for a while. Cheers!

Ireally need to find a good either CPA offer and plant it on my SITE where the traffic will follow a link into. Or maybe some affiliate product to place at a site where the traffic will slide into from a plain link on the Scribd document

Thanks for the info. Had Scribd on my list of places to try. Will have to move it up to the top now.

This is a site I have wanted to do more with. Thanks for the info! Worth a test!

This thread has inspired me to try scribd as well. I have never really felt like putting the effort into putting an article on scribd but it seems like it is an easy process that generates results. Stupid laziness!

Question: What niche was your document about? Anyone
know if this will work in highly competitive niches?

I did it, too. The views I think from rank up on Google. After I compare like: shareslide, authorstream, brainshark, etc. Scribd very fast rank up than the others.

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OK guys, seriously I feel a little bit annoying when there are bunch of people telling me he had try scribd but have no success !

Guess what? I asked him, how many document you uploaded, and he said, ONE !

What???
One, and you expect to get thousands of traffic !


So, here my suggestion to him and to anyone here :

1. Upload 100 or 200 of documents. I know, it's pretty crazy much of work, but hey !
It's worth it !

2. Make sure the niche are varies, so you can trace, which niche are good to go for scribd !

I don't want to spill the bean here, but here a hint for ya !

Every website have their own level of readibility.

Find what level is Scribd into, and find the suitable niche based on that


All the best !

Scribd is one of those websites that can generate you alot of traffic fast. I would find a way to incorporate it into your daily marketing plan, and collect alot of leads from all the traffic you're getting from this site.

Yup, it's definitely one of the better "article directories" out there, but it can be a pain to convert your text file into a PDF. I use an online converter that allows X per day (forget which one it was).

They are great but still don't rank as well as Squidoo and Hubpages, which also have revenue sharing. Food for thought.

Yes, I have been using scribd from last year.. most precisely right after the Panda update and having a lot of success with it in my affiliate sales.

Does Panda has anything to do with scribd?

I agree the op lead me to believe 1 document generated a grand flow of traffic. Yea I would like a refund 15 minutes of my time and the cost of some ice cream I just ate to get over the disappointment.

I put up a bunch of PDF's on scribd a while back and same thing, ton's of views, very few clicks on links. Good articles, great titles, bio/link at end. Might be tweaked, but not encouraging for me.

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I read somewhere (sorry, can't remember where) a while back, that it's better to put the link at the top of the doc just below the heading rather than at the bottom. It might be worth a try.

Do you know if this traffic is coming from scribd pages ranking in Google or people going direct to scribd itself?

I knew slideshare was quite good for traffic, so might give this a go for a low competition niche.

Only thing about them is that they will stop your links and it is someone else's property just like squidoo you never know what they will do. Just keep that in mind i hate to be negative but people should not put all their hope into a site like this.

However you should use these sites as backlinks they're great for that

Raja Kamil the idea man...you're awesome! I love to read your stuff

Where you put your URL? In the document?

Thanks Raja,

Didn't came to my mind before, I just went for it , I think I will upload more files

MS Word has a free add-on that creates PDF files as well.

wow, i never thought using scribd for something like this.. awesome..

thanks for the article! I posted to slideshare and suddently one of my powerpoints received a couple hundred views and some received only a few. I wonder what made the difference?
Do you how many views are real people or are there lots of automated bots that people setup just producing views?

I have a couple of ideas for getting people to click over to your site. I'll report back after testing. In the meantime, for creating unlimited PDFs for free, try a little program called DoPDF. You can download it free from download.com

You can save all texts right from word as PDF...i might give this a try. Might also upload some free ebooks/reports and see how it's going.

706 reads and what is the traffic you got to your site? 5-10% of that???

Great post, found it very helpful!

Alex

Yea, I've recently begun trying Scribd and DocShare and a couple others, I definitely like that I can easily turn my articles into PDFs and just use that as extra leverage for each piece of content I create...however, I don't know that I would ever take time to specifically focus on these doc sharing sites. As has been noted, while they certainly get lots of views and clicks (I have to say that I'm very impressed with your stats), in my experience at least it hasn't ended up with too much in the way of actual traffic to my website.

Again, I fully admit that I could be doing something completely wrong, just my experiences. As an additional way to leverage each article, it's great, but not as a primary source of Traffic.

Yeah I have used scribd quite a bit and it is certainly a great resource. It can be a little tough to convert the traffic though.

Raja..

Did any of the .doc's you posted have similar text? (duplicate content in the body), or was everyone unique?

thanks,
Liz

yes it is true scribd, docstoc and issuu.com are very good place to get free traffic. The main thing is that.. content should be good to get nice conversion.

I like Scribd and have a number of articles there. Carefully read their terms though and play by their rules if you want to keep your account.

Best bet is to post original work (re-published PLRs and such will get you booted) and don't ever use a link shorter/cloaking service. Don't link directly to a sales page either.

Ernie G

wow hell yeah bro I never knew that thanks for the post

I guess when it comes to internet marketing, it never hurts to use any tool in your arsenal. You never know what might work and how you will get traffic.

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I've been investigating submitting pdf articles to document sites a fair bit lately, because I was told that it would result in backlinks from these sites as well as traffic. The prospect of traffic interests me, of course it does, but as far as the niches I'm involved in go, I would not expect users to want to do much more than read the article on the document sharing site, so the prospect of generating backlinks interests me more.

However, using AHREFs, I have yet to find a single one of the sites promoting themselves on scribd.com etc with any document sharing sites in their backlink profiles. There are no backlinks from document sharing sites to backlinktopia.com either, or to documentmarketingrobot.com. I appreciate that documentmarketingrobot.com is pretty new and would not be showing a lot, but I don't see any backlinks from document sharing sites to seolinkrobot.com either. This is a product from the same people, so I'd imagine they'd be using document sharing sites to generate traffic if they are as crash hot as they claim. For generating backlinks though, what I'm seeing so far forces me to conclude that document sharing sites are pants. I really want to be proved wrong on this one. Anyone?

I am not disinterested in the idea of generating traffic in this way though. I'm aware that it is not possible to click on links in articles on at least one of the document sharing sites without the user downloading the article first, but enough people seem to be reporting positive results for the method to be worth a try. However, there are not enough hours in the day here for me to want to do it manually. I'm just at a bit of a loss as to which software to go for.

I think that in order for a document to stand out and get clicked on, especially once things get a bit more saturated when the method catches on now there is software around to create and submit them, the best policy would be to include an eye-catching image. As far as I know, this is possible with Backlinktopia, but if it's possible to include an image using Document Marketing Robot then I am not seeing it in their sales copy. Backlinktopia includes more sites to submit to too, but in the course of my research I have come across a few people that say the software stinks. I already own SEO Link Robot (from the makers of Document Marketing Robot) and am reasonably happy with it, but I am put off the idea of purchasing Document Marketing Robot because of the limited amount of document sharing sites and the apparent inability to include any images.

If anyone can shed any light on this or has any other suggestions, I'd be grateful. I have a feeling I'm giving this more thought than it's worth now, and am starting to get in my own way.

Edited to add to the above that I have now found Rank Whizz, another document sharing submission software. Investigating now. Forgot to mention that I'm looking for software which features scheduling too. I don't want much, really..!

I think I'll probably go with Rank Whizz. As far as I can see, it has all the features I'm looking for and more besides.

In addition, while the Rank Whizz site is not showing any links from document sharing sites in it's backlink profile, the site shown being promoted during the sales video actually does. Just a few, and none from any of the big guns, but it is some small proof at least that the owner of the software uses it for his personal sites, puts his money where his mouth is and it appears to be working for him.

I realise I've had a bit of a brain dump on this thread, but I think it's ended up being of use to me and I hope it's of some use to others too.

how do you get links into your articles on scribd I was considering doing this but couldn't work it out Thanks

Raja,

Can you PM me the software you're using as well please?

James Scholes

Gee, thanks, Raja.
It has just looked too boring, but I think you've talked me in to it.

Great inspiration.

LifeIsGood ~ It's About To Get Even Better!

Raja,

thanks a lot for an idea. I've never used Scribd before and actually I don't know why.
I'll try it immediately and will post my results in this thread if you don't mind

Paul

I implemented this strategy last night. I converted all of my articles to PDF format and uploaded them. Before doing so though, I ensured that I set the properties on all of my files (author name, keywords, subject matter etc) and only then uploaded.

During the upload process it prompts you for additional information about the file, (title, description, keywords etc).

In total I uploaded 23 documents and in less than 24 hours Ive had 139 reads.

Whats really interesting is the speed in which Google indexed my documents. Some were indexed and ranked before I had even completed filling out the required information within Scribd. Absolutely mind blowing.

I now have numerous articles (PDF's) sitting first page for many keywords. Some ranked as high as 3rd.

The only downside is Im yet to see any of this equate to actual traffic to my site, altough it may be too soon to tell.

Ive just checked analytics and dont see Scribd listed as a referring site.

Ill monitor this further over the next week or so.

Thanks for information I'll also try my hands with Scribd now

This sounds very interesting! I'd totally forgot about Scribd. I will take a look at this a little more when I get a spare minute.

Thanks for the info!

Hi Raja,

Excellent result with your articles - you seem to be getting a lot of traffic. I'm not very familiar with Scribd but must change that now!!

Are you seeing much Clicks through to your main site from these docs??

Hey guys, its now been 3 days since I experimented with this strategy and unfortunately Im yet to see any referring traffic from scribd.

I have had quite a few reads of my PDF's however, but no-one seems to be clicking through to my site.

I guess as a thought I could include more of a call to action within my PDFs???

Anyone else finding similiar results?

I just wanted to revisit this thread with an update on my experiences.

I uploaded a total of 23 PDFs, and whilst some of them have had 20 or so reads, the others arent doing so great. On average, probably 8 reads each.

My observations on this method are...

1. Scribd documents will be indexed within Google IMMEDIATELY upon upload.
2. Scribd documents will rank very HIGHLY, even for tough keywords
3. Scribd documents (in my case) dont appear to see too many click throughs in terms of driving traffic to the target site.
4. Scribd documents dont have a long stick life. In that, they rank highly, then disappear within a fortnight. Most of mine are long gone in the SERPS.
5. View counts on each document ARENT unique. You can refresh the page and the count total increments. Bit weird I thought.

Thats about it kids.

Not too sure if Ill revisit this approach.

Thanks for your sharing.

Been using scibd for years and get great traffic from it.. well worth doing..

You might wanna check the free version of my software I released yesterday that generates pdf's, auto creates accounts and auto uploads to scribd + repdf..

Thanks for the thread... Scribd is great. One thing to do is make sure that you are keyword optimized in your title. The big G loves these sites and you can get your article on page 1 for your keyword if you do it right

Some great info here,did any particular niche come out on top and did you get any sign ups or customers from this traffic.
Regards
vivi62

Another update on this one guys.

This morning I logged into my Google Analytics account and wanted to get to the bottom of this "(direct) / (none)" referral traffic that keeps hitting one of my sites.

Infact, all of my sites have this "(direct) / (none)" listed as a traffic source and although Ive never really given it much thought before, its been bugging me.

Why?

Because, I really dont think that that many people are typing my URL directly into the address bar every day. (although that would be nice)

So today I found this article...

Google Analytics Blog: Back to Basics: Direct, referral or organic - definitions straight from the source

If you take note to this snippet below...

(direct)[(none)] - Visitors who visited the site by typing the URL directly into their browser. 'Direct' can also refer to the visitors who clicked on the links from their bookmarks/favorites, untagged links within emails, or links from documents that don't include tracking variables (such as PDFs or Word documents).

AHA!

I know when I uploaded my PDF's that I didnt install a trackable URL.

So.......

This *could* potentially mean that scribd *might* be sending me decent traffic. I just cant see it!

Just thought I would share this.

I'm kind of free this weekend (it's already Friday here), so I thought about uploading 50 articles for any of you.

Just what I needed is :-
1. your scribd username and temporary password
2. your url and anchor text (only 1 url and 1 keyword only)

What I'm going to do is, I'm going to use a special software that I'm using right now to uploading random documents to Scribd.

Means that I'll create random article and have your link there.

And I'm doing this for FREE, just for the sake of thanking all of you for supporting this thread and sharing even powerful and valuable tips.

Of course I can't afford to do this to everyone, for time being, I'll try my best to help first 5 lucky warriors.

Just PM me the particluars I wanted, and I'll get to you soon. Free and nothing hidden agenda here.

I'll let you know when the slot is finish and when I can fill more slots.

That's it...thanks;
Happy weekend !
Regards;
Raja Kamil

Docstoc was better than scribd in terms of getting free traffic. But when all marketers came to spam the scene, they disabled clickable links in documents. I think scribd will do that too soon enough.

So instead of uploading bulk no. of documents, why don't you guys just upload a few good documents and make use of their services for longer rather than just raping the site??