Bum Marketing – My Article Mashup Method

Hey, I decided to save you some time…check your email ;-)

Good luck!

What about writing the same article 3-4 times until you get sick of rewriting and then move on to the next topic? If you want, you can always go back to the first article and rewrite but you will have had a break.

this stuff sounds like a bunch of work for “bum” marketing.

I’m impressed by your rigorous, analytical approach.

And I’ll be interested to find out how well your “paragraph rotator” technique works.

@Warrior, Thanks Sean!

@45n5, lol you’re not wrong there but I’m working on some stuff to make that easier, stay tuned :p

@Steven, Yeah so will I! The tricky thing is, I don’t know how to track the results…

@Deborah, These articles are quite short – around 400-700 words and I like to write in a kinf of ‘flow’ state. I’m not very good at manualyl moving words around so for each one I literally just wrote it again. That’s far too much work to repeat more than a handful of times. I need to use tools to take it further than that.

The thing which concerns me is that it sounds too much like duplication and with a clever algorithm it will get spotted.

For example if I wrote an essay for an English exam and then someone else took my essay and just resubmitted it as their work switching some paragraphs and swapping words – I’m sure it still would have been flagged as a suspicious piece of work.

How can you make sure that your articles don’t end up being the same as each other without actually having something new and unique in each one?

@Emma, well that is precisely the issue I am trying to deal with. By writing four original articles to begin with, each of these is totally unique but on the same subject.

By mashing them up in a way that doesn’t pull too many sections from each one there is duplication but only a small amount – just a couple of paragraphs. Hopefully that’s not enough to endure a slap from the mighty Google.

Lastly, there are tools to re-write the article for you. Sean has kindly directed me to one of them that he uses and I’m going to try that out and report on my findings.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, have you thought about using an article/content spinner? There are many out there; some free, some that cost a few $.

Something like JetSpinner can easily make hundreds of unique articles for the same amount of effort that you’re putting in now.

All the articles may not be perfect.. but they should all be human readable. Save the good ones for the top directories!

There are a lot of choices out there, just google for “article spinner”

Re: “Yeah so will I! The tricky thing is, I don’t know how to track the results…”

If you put statcounter on your site, you can use the “Came From” facility to get a reasonable idea of the referring links.

This might help.

@caroline – just a thought – because I remember from the podcast that you are a programmer.

trying to do article marketing is saturated beyond belief, there are a million and one posts like this where somebody thinks they’ve found the edge to win at article marketing, i’ve been there too, however programmers are much rarer.

plus, trying to get traffic via google is much easier done wholesale instead of article by article.

what I’m getting at is you might want to look into purchasing databases of data or hitting the product api’s and mashing up that stuff.

A hit with article marketing simply add a few dozen articles tot he search engines. A hit with a large dataset ads tens of thousands of pages to the search engines.

I’ve tried both and had much more financial success with mashing up api’s and databases.

Of course everybody’s path is different. Just a thought ;-)

@Steven, Yup that’s the basic method I’ll be using. It would also be nice to see when the articles get listed in Google and how much traffic they get, to have an idea of the click through ratio. But with so many articles, that’s a bit much to track I think.

@45n5, For my current niche I don’t think I’d find a database of articles for it though it’s something I could look into for other niches. However, I do have some programming ideas related for this – stay tuned for tonight’s post :p

@caroline – It doesn’t need to be articles, for instance most niches have many products, most have databases or api’s with product descriptions (text) and sometimes even reviews (more text) you can mashup all of that stuff to try and create “unique” pages with it ;-)

I’ll stay tuned.

Using spinners/spoolers or any other technique to automate the article writing process is normally not effective. You have come up with a well thought out process and that’s much more than most do, but when it comes down to it the true benefit of article marketing is generating interest for the user.

I would imagine unless these articles are still interesting and well-written, they won’t do you alot of good in the long run.

This brings up another point. “Bum Marketing” is a technique that has been around for years, but Travis Sago coined it as such. Many people call “article marketing” ” bum marketing” but they are not two in the same.

Bum marketing is a technique used to make affiliate sales through article marketing, press releases etc. while “article marketing” is strictly marketing with articles.

Great post and if the finished product is well-written, informational articles then you’ve come up with a great tool!

@45n5, that sounds really spammy :-) I’d actually like to create useful articles out of this process.

@Josh, Yes I agree and I do want to create articles that are genuinely useful. With my mashup method they still are, I haven’t checked out the spinner software yet butI would of course proof read and edit anything it generated.

Thanks for the distinction, I thought they were just the same thing. I guess this is Article Marketing then, but I did my logo so I’ll have to stick with it :-)

Website Content Creator works very much this way. (It does other things too)

You can take each sentence and manually rewrite it say 4 times.

The spinner will then make new articles by using one of the four versions of each sentence and put them together.

Instead of sentences you can also only use larger blocks of words.

It’s a 200 dollar investment, but it is a very great and helpfull tool.

@Andrew, Sounds cool, got a link?

I’m disappointed to see that in the pursuit of links there will be an enormous volume of stored redundant and repetitive ‘articles’. What happened to providing good value? What’s the difference between an article remixed ad nauseum to the duplicate blog posts you detest?

@Mike, Good point. The idea is to take one source article, and rewrite it for several directories so each directory would basically have the same article in a re-written form.

From the point of a person searching for information, there are two primary ways in which they would find these articles – a Google search, and directly from the article directory. I suspect that most people who use article directories have their favourite and are not likely to look for articles on many directories. And as for Google rankings, from what I have heard, only an article on EZineArticles is likely to get anywhere near the first page of Google results.

Taking a vertical slice, looking at all the submissions I made to any single directory, every article would be on a different subject. The duplication is only apparent when you take a horizontal slice that looks at all the directories.

So I don’t think that a real person looking for information relating to the keyword is likely to find more than one copy of the article. Each one is written to provide good value as is the content on the site I am linking to.

The difference between that and the blog posts is that I choose to subscribe to all those blogs because they each provide something unique that I want to read. My theory is based around my assumption that most people do not regularly peruse many article directories at once. If I am wrong there, then they will see some duplication.

I’m not concerned with your being ‘caught’ with duplicate content. If the article directories are independent from each other then one original version is enough. If Google penalizes exact copies on multiple sites, then rewriting seems like manipulating for deception.
I was just pondering the ethics of methods that connive for traffic.

@Mike, Yup I suppose it is a form of deception to avoid the duplicate content penalty.

Ethically speaking, I don’t have a problem with submitting my own work to multiple directories. I’m trying to spread my work as far and wide as possible to give it the best possible chance of being seen, and of course, picking up backlinks in the process.

I see this as being the same (ethically) as socially bookmarking a page on multiple bookmarking sites, or posting the same news story to multiple story submission sites. Not everybody reads Digg, not everybody uses delicious, not everybody searches EZineArticles so I want to hit as many services as possible. From that standpoint, I don’t see a problem with multiple submissions.

It’s not like spamming one article directory with a dozen copies of the same re-written article which I would consider to be spam.

Would you shoot me an email when you get a chance? I think you can see my email in your blog comment area, yes? If not, I’ll try to contact you via Facebook. Thanks!

@Deborah, Check your inbox.

For anyone else who needs to contact me, there is a contact tab at the top of the blog. Link below:

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/contact/

That’s generally quicker as it comes straight into my email but I have to manually login to my blog to check my comments.

Caroline, Great idea here, i’ll be interested to follow your results. I too am concerned about duplication of ideas, if not exact text. Your clarification of “vertical” vs. “horizontal” duplication is a good one, however,

For example, through some elementary detective work, I discovered a 30DCer with the same niche & keyword phrase as mine, and was able to link his real name to his niche through one of his content articles (which was a good article).

In later research on my niche, I found the mega-load of articles on my niche and lo&behold, it was the same guy!

I began reading the articles and was quickly irritated as they were all mashups with different headlines.

I quickly realized that while his original article (or six) may have been good, it was a waste of my time to sort through his articles filtering the repeat stuff from the new stuff. Sadly, his site will get a lot of links because there are links TO each mashup article…but in the end, he is not contributing valuable content to the searches in my (our) niche.

I am not ready to give up on the niche because of his “bum” techniques as I know I can provide much more value to my readers…

So in summary, submitting to multiple DIFFERENT directories makes complete sense as you have noted. Good luck!

@Suzanne, So this guy had submitted a whole bunch of re-writes to the same directory? Yeah that’s annoying.

No, it was his own website on the niche, which is rankign highly (first page) in google nothing but mashups and adsense ads. After reading 3 articles, I gave up as the info promised in the headline was not delivered!

@Suzanne, Ahh I see. Well that also seems somewhat pointless to duplicate content on your own site!

Caroline,
I had to come here to get the whole story on Bum Marketing/Article Marketing and your mashup project.

One of the things I like about you is that you share.
Experimentation is the most important thing you can do.
Sharing your “lab notes” has a great benefit: others feel compelled to share with you!

So here is a tip, submit your article to a translation service. Go from English to Greek and back to English. The resulting article will undoubtedly be different!

Although this idea is sort of tongue-in-cheek, perhaps it may inspire further research in your mashup endeavor.

Cheers,

Mitch

Hi Caroline,

Great post – I like your “outside the box” thinking with regards to creating different variations of the same article. I guess the question that still remains for me is how different does the article content need to be in order to be deemed unique by Google? At what point, will Google still be able to determine the overlap in content between these articles. It is kind of the age old question of “What is Plagiarism”? You mix around the words, but are you still plagiarizing the work?

Anyways, I would be interested to get yours and others feedback and thoughts.

Craig

@Mitchell, love the translation tip! You’re a star! I’m going to try that out :)

@Craig, well yes, my thoughts exactly. I don’t really like my own method much because large chunks (each paragraph) are still duplicated somewhere. Ideally, at this point I would use some additional tool to do some re-writing for me. This is something I aim to experiment with.

An additional thought…even if the content is duplicate and a particular article directory does not show up in the google listings, it is not you being penalized, it is the article directory site. YOu will still have backlinks to your money site which will boost it’s rankings as well.

@Suzanne, exactly. With the main directories such as Ezine articles I hope to generate traffic, but from all the others I simply hope to create a lot of backlinks which will eventually allow the static pages on the site to do better in organic search results.

Hey Caroline,

I think I have an idea that will work for you. Why not use an Excel macro to do this for you. You’ve already done the hard work of figuring out all of the permutations.

Here’s my idea.

Write each paragraph of your article in Cell.
Place a “label” cell above each paragraph with the “id” of the paragraph.

Write a simple macro that spits out your mashed up article into it’s own worksheet.

I’m pretty sure I could write this macro in about 2 hours. If you’re intersted, email me: steve@umgsp.com, or skype me Id: stevewar1, and I’d be happy to work with you on this one..

-Steve

@Steve, You should have got my email now :)

Hi Caroline,
I am envious of your achievement. I mean sincerely I congratualte you for your discipline. This is where most of us commoners are lacking. Keep it up and I hope to follow you in your footstep to success.

Hey Caroline,
I’ve been trying to turn this thing on its head by turning 1 article into 500 mabey 1000 and I’ve managed to acheive this today!
1000 unique articles to submit to only the top say 10 article submission engines.
The problem that I have created is, that I now want ease of submission to just a few search engines.
Lets face it article search engines that do not rank on the first page of google are not worth the effort of submitting to are they?
Who’s going to see them anyway??
this is still an experiment at the moment but it just has to be the way forward
best of luck
Paul