Article Distribution with Unique Article Wizard

A while ago I blogged about article marketing for link building as part of my AdSense project. I was using traditional article marketing to build backlinks to my niche sites. However now that I have closed that project I now wish to use article distribution to promote this blog and specifically, my Bloggers Bible course.

This post is the first in a series of several I have planned on the topic of article marketing. Be sure to subscribe to my RSS feed to get the rest in the series!

Article Distribution v Article Marketing

In the original article I discussed how other people like Josh Spaulding use article marketing to drive traffic. Traditional article marketing is mainly about getting the SEO right within the articles themselves. The idea is that you target specific high traffic / low competition keywords that you want to target and your entire article is built around that keyword phrase. By submitting your optimised article to authotitative directories such as EzineArticles, they should rank well in the serps and thus bring in lots of traffic to your article and in turn to the links in your resource box.

However to make this technique work you need to find keywords that you can rank for. This is relatively easy in all those obscure little niches but for me in this Internet marketing niche I find it rather difficult and simply too competitive. So I prefer to ignore the whole keywords issue (there’s another reason for that too which I’ll explain lower down) and instead focus on volume – using mass article distribution to get an article out to as many places as possible and build thousands of backlinks in the process.

The thing about backlinks is that they vary hugely in quality – a single high PR link embedded in a relevant post with good anchor text of the keywords you are targeting is probably going to be worth more than thousands of PR0 links on non-relevant sites. Articles in prominent directories such as EzineArticles can build good PR over time but many of the smaller directories are not that powerful. However, my experiment here is to see if volume can have a positive effect.

I want to know if using mass article distribution to bring in thousands of potentially lower quality links to my site is worth the effort.

Automated Article Distribution

So, my main priority then is quantity of links and that’s not something I can feasibly do manually. Previously (on my AdSense Project) I was manually submitting an article to about 30 directories and that took a very long time – longer than it took to write the article. I can outsource this stuff but after just a few articles that gets very expensive. What is really needed is a service that handles the article distribution for you automatically. I had previously tried some software to do this but it was really poor!

On the recommendation of Courtney Tuttle who ran a very interesting article marketing experiment recently I joined a service called Unique Article Wizard. This costs $67 a month which isn’t a lot for what it does. The service boasts a top secret technique that promises to turn your article into thousands of unique versions without using any keyword substitution techniques that make the result non-readable for humans.

You even have to agree to a non-disclosure agreement not to reveal the technique when you join. However, what I will say is this… Once upon a time, over a year ago I wanted to start with article marketing ( I called it bum marketing back then) and I came up with a technique which I called the article mashup method. I never got around to finishing it and always wondered if anyone else would do the same thing…

Anyhoo! I wasn’t too bothered by the whole unique content thing as people like Josh swear that the duplicate content filter doesn’t matter. There is endless debate raging on the subject and whilst its obviously better to have unique articles, that wasn’t the top priority for me. What I really wanted was something that would distribute my articles on auto-pilot for me, to lots of places, not just 30 or 40 and on my own schedule – not all at once.

Unique Article Wizard does all of the above and boasts a database of over 11,000 places to submit your links and you can set how many links you want submitted per day. I’ve started experimenting with this and I have set my articles to be submitted at a rate of just 10 per day. My first one is up to 200  now and I know it’s working because everyday I’m getting a ton of pingbacks to the pages of this blog that I am promoting and I’m seeing all the articles come in via a Google alert that I set up.

Promoting the Bloggers Bible

I have to admit, I don’t like writing articles that I don’t have to write. I really hated working on my AdSense project and I have never done any article marketing to promote previous products like Traffic Rush because the thought of it makes me groan. However I do like writing unique content such as these blog posts and of course the content for my actual courses as that is all fresh material on a subject I know intimately. I also find it infinitely easier to do a re-write of something that I have already written then to write something new from scratch.

So I got the idea to use my Bloggers Bible content to promote the course itself. The course comprises 49 text-based lessons that don’t have any multimedia content embedded in them and therefore  they make ideal article fodder. Furthermore, each of the lessons is a completely self-contained unit other than a few references to previous lessons so re-writing these things is easy. Plus, most of them are very long – in excess of 1000 words so in some cases I am actually getting 2 or more articles out of each lesson! You usually want to aim for around 500 words for an article for most directories.

My plan then is to re-write all 49 of my core lessons plus bonus lessons as articles and submit them using UAW. Each one should be able to generate at least 1000 links over time so even if they are poor quality, hopefully they will still be useful. The only way to know for sure is to try it but I’m hoping that 50,000 links, even poor ones, is worth something.

This takes me back to the topic of writing articles for direct traffic – using this method the vast majority of my lessons would not be good candidates because they simply don’t rank for any good keywords and of course I don’t want to have to try and fiddle with the content on the lessons to work around specific keywords.

Am I Giving Away The Farm?

Some of you might be thinking that if I use the content of the lessons to create articles that are spread all over the web that I will lose income because freebie seekers will seek these articles out instead of buying my course. Well to start with I give away the whole thing anyway – it just takes about a year to get through the course! But secondly, the lessons are highly structured to be worked through in order and if somebody was trying to hunt down the articles on the web they would lose that structure.

Having said that, if I was to submit the articles in order of the lesson numbers it would be very easy for people to find my account at one of the article directories and subscribe to it. Therefore I’ll just submit them randomly out of order. It’s still going to take me a long while to get all these articles out (not quite a year!) as this is something I’m just doing fairly slowly. I’m aiming for about 10 articles a month so it will take a minimum of 5 months to finish the whole course.

Measuring the Results

This is going to be a little bit tricky because I can’t use Bloggers Bible sales as a measure here as that is promoted throughout this entire blog, new people sign up to the free lessons every day, there are affiliates promoting it and so on so there is no way to isolate additional sales made as the result of this article distribution experiment.

However this experiment is actually all about backlinks – it’s really an SEO experiment. As you probably know, backlinks are important because it helps the page rank higher for it’s chosen keywords. I am specifically targeting my Bloggers Bible Fast Track page in my resource boxes. Every single article will have a link back to that page with varying anchor text and the most important keyword that I want to rank for is “make money blogging”.

At the time of writing, that page has PR2, and currently ranks at position #49 for the term so it has masses of room for improvement. For the experiment to be deemed successful I would want to see this page rank move higher in the serps and thus bring in more search engine traffic.

Conclusion

I’ve dabbled briefly in article marketing before but the biggest barrier to me has always been, “what on earth do I write?” I had a real issue with the idea of writing unique content for article directories because I felt like if I was going to go to the effort to write something new and fresh then I wanted that content on my own sites and not in random article directories.

So the idea of re-using existing content appeals to me because the original is already in place doing it’s work and then the article are there simply to promote it. You can extend this to just about any text based product that you have, including freebies such as a free report that you might be using to entice people to join an email list for example. Setup a landing page for your freebie and then make sure that in your article resource boxes you link back to this page. I’ll discuss more about the technicalities of how to do this in a follow up post.

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