Bum Marketing Update – Directory Submissions are GO!

Hi Caroline,

I’ve only been following your blog for a couple of days now, but you really seem to enjoy the things that you write about on here. Reading your post above though, it kind of strikes me that the project you’re planning to make money with sounds more like “work”. Am I missing part of the story? … are you having fun with that too?

Great ideas. I found you from one of the many posts that have been made about you recently and I have really like the clarity and ideas behind this blog. Keep up the good work and thanks for sharing. I have just started a new website as well so these tips are really coming in handy.

A few years ago I took a writing course. The instructor said he would do research on an article and then have the article published in a magazine. Then he would take that same research and rework the article and submit it to another magazine. Is that what you mean by your “mashup” software?

The Idea ist quite cool, but i thing that for the long term, you could get probelms.
Software is never as clever as a human, so the articles after the mashup will be quite simmilar. The same Topic, the same keywords, maybe some syninimes, bywords. The sense for a human reader will be quite the same.

For a long term think allways about humans who are “driving” their computers.

why do you want to mashup the articles? For spiders , the new articles are like a new sites, but for a human, they will allways be similar.

I’ve tried the ezinearticles myself and got a couple published but I still have to see their effect on traffic. It’s still too early to say though. I’m still crossing my fingers on that one.

@Todd, lol everything is work! But you can enjoy you work too you know! This one is a traffic experiment above all else. If it was successful I would probably try to outsource the writing of the articles or use PLR material.

@Eric, thanks very much, and welcome to my little blog :)

@Kexster, The mashup software is just doing a paragraph rotation really, I explain it in more detail in this post:

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/bum-marketing-my-article-mashup-method/

@Lernen, the sole reason of the mashup was to create more articles out of the original works. For example, I used 4 source articles and turned them into 16.

@Javi, one of the benefits of ezine articles is that many other article directories source the articles used at ezine and that results in lots of extra backlinks to your site over time.

From my experience, submitting to directories can help. I use a special software from submitsuite.com, which comes with a list of about 3000 directories. I paid some $55, but I’m not very happy with the functionalithy they offer (I find it hard to group directories avccording to my personal criteria, rather than those set by default). But it does the job, and it’s rather cheap.

I hope this helps ;)

Bummer! LOL, I love following this story.
With your programming background, I’ll bet that mashup is pretty nifty.

Reading between the lines, I think you should also advertise offline in the related teen magazines. This will free you from worries about Google slaps. If testing shows that offline advertising beats the organic traffic, then you can mash away! :)

Cheers,

Mitch

Thats great Caroline.

I now only submit 50% of my articles to Ezinesarticle…fully customized for clicks and traffic. ALWAYS make a good title because most of my articles on there now is getting over 500 views within 3 days!

I’m not sure about Goarticles though, even though they are high ranked, they don’t show us any stats. So I don’t take them too seriously.

I wish you success with this!

@Warrior, thanks for the tips Sean, you’re the expert! Which directories to you use now then?

@Simone, do you mean submitting the main site to a directory or the article? I do plan to do some general backlink building for the site eventually but for now I want to drive traffic purely using article marketing to test the strategy.

@Mitchell, Why is that a bummer? I’m releasing the tool freely once done, check out the project page here:

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/articlemasher-project/

Hello Caroline,
Nice job! ;)

In my opinions, I love to submit ads on Craigslist instead of articles.

1. More faster than articles

2. Everyone can do it (without experience)

3. It’s pretty fast

4. You promote everything you want

5. You are on the first pages of Google with ease

6. You get massive traffic with ease

I sold 280+ guides on Craigslist without paying a dime in advertising, so I prefer to focus myself on CL.

Just my opinions…

Thank you and BYE!

“Which directories do you use now”

I have about 20 AD or so that I manually submit to now:

I didn’t want to name each one, so I took a screenshot, you can view below:

Screenshot

I still submit to Goarticle though, just for the backlink because from my traffic stats, I’m not getting any visitors from them.

Wow, another great article caroline. Fantastic information again. I am going to try and start up my first niche website tomorrow, so I will be back here often for more information/help. Wish me luck. :)

Caroline – Congratulations on all the great coverage and the growing success of your blog!

Are you doing this article submissions to build links?

As you can write code, it is probably a better use of your time to write quizzes instead. Viral quizzes can generate thousands of natural links. Most of the links you get from article submissions are from scrapper sites. Their value is minimal for search engine rankings or traffic.

Are you using a software to rewrite your articles?

If you don’t mind Google slapping you, go ahead. If you do and still plan to do it, don’t mention it in public ;-)

Keep up the great work.

As a programmer my self I am slightly concerned about this article masher tool? How are you planning on making the articles coherent once they have been “mashed up”?

p.s if you ever need a hand give us an email, I am bit of a geek who likes a challenge ;)

Hey Caroline.
I personally think you’re off to a good start. It really is a numbers game. You have to put alot up and ou there to see what flies. You’ll find something that works, when you do repeat it, and tweak it. While testing along the way. Testing is a KEY ingredient. I see you’re using google analytics, have you considered tracking your static pages you’re going to be sending traffic to to see if it converts from the article sub process. I dont see alot of bloggers talking about tracking or stats. I personally obsessively track and stat everything.
You are how ever right about this: ‘making money online’ market place. Its a totally different audience than this blog. They don’t care about well thought out content, they just want free stuff!” Another funny too is this, I read alot about copywriting and that sort of thing, what I have found is that some of my crappier blogposts (written poorly with spelling and grammr arros convert WAY higher than the ones I spend time trying to get to convert, maybe its an anomaly!!
Cheers and beers Shane
Ps signed up for your feed, , like your stuff, looking forward to more !!

@Massimo, yeah I’ve seen CL talked about quite a lot, it’s another one of those ‘things to check out when I have time’!

@Warrior, thanks for that Sean.

@Josh, Good luck!

@Hamlet, Thank you! I’m writing the articles for backlinks yes but mainly to see if they can drive traffic.

Ooh tell me more about these quizzes!

I have yet to try out re-writing software, thats on my list of things to do. I’m not too worried about Google :)

@Alan, it’s only paragraph rotation.

@Shanners, so far there is no traffic to report, but as soon as there is I shall document it here. And yes the static pages are included in the stats.

Caroline: this is a fascinating idea. Is the goal of bum marketing to promote the writer, the blog, or…? I noticed that you mentioned using a pen name… do some of the articles have your own name attached to them?

I hate to sound critical, so forgive me, but this strategy seems a bit like spamming, albeit in a benign manner. Aren’t there any concerns about how the author will be perceived in the blogosphere, niche areas, etc. when some people start to connect the dots and realise that a) a lot of the content is very similar and b) it’s all coming from the same person? Again, I’m not trying to be negative, but I’m just wondering if this is a possible side-effect of bum marketing?

I enjoy your blog, glad I’ve discovered it!

Caroline,

Your blog is growing in popularity everyday. It is posts like this that just create a magnet to your blog. You are one of the best make money online bloggers out there right now.

Keep up the great work.

Hi Caroline, I am also planning to start a niche blog soon, and reading this post has reminded me how important things like searching the popularity of keyword phrases are, how saturated the niche is, who my competitors are, how do I differentiate myself from them, and how to set up a money-making system that works on the blog.

I was actually being torn apart by the decision to either be the big fish in small pond, or the small fish in big pond. Having a blog related to all things on making money online is a fascinating journey. But while I love feeding this blog, it’s not loving me back by feeding me – after receiving over 2000 page views today, it only showed an adsense earning of $1. Given my eCPM rate seems fair ($0.35c CPM), I still can’t live on $1 a day.

I thought about Darren’s comment that you should definitely choose to be a big fish in small pond if you want to earn money online. The caveat to that is if the niche market you are targeting is one which can give you revenue. There is potential in earning power in the niche that I have chosen, but would need a lot more research on my end in producing quality articles. But I am excited about it as I have found someone with the entire network of key professionals in this niche field and who can help to set up interviews with these people to publish on the new blog.

I just want to highlight a main point here (sorry for rambling), that it is always easier to market a site on a multi-channel model, rather than from a single channel. In a blog, you have only 1 channel to make money from – your blog. However, if you were to diversify your channels – create an eBook, link to real life events and opportunities like podcasts with key people in your niche – it can go a long way to building you a bigger brand. Integrated Marketing can lead to success both Online, and Offline.

Ooh tell me more about these quizzes!

Here is the post where I explain the technique in detail.

Advanced link building strategies

Cheers

Keep doing your thing, Caroline.

Have you read any Msn.com articles? They use the same articles every few weeks with different headlines.

Talk about recycle…They have mastered this art.

Msn’s headlines are so good, I find myself often beginning to read the same articles only to find out they’re old articles with new wrapping (headlines).

@Mark, the goal of the bum marketing is just traffic and backlinks to the niche website. I’ve not used my own name for any of the articles as I don’t want to reveal the niche.

With regards to the spam issue, you raise an excellent point and if you don’t mind, I’ll address in a separate blog post as I feel it deserves a more complete reply than just a comment.

@Fred, thanks Fred though that depends how you define ‘best’. Personally I would say the best are the ones that are making some money :p

@Ivy, interesting point – I have a planned post in the works about evaluating potential niches which discusses all the items you have raised so keep an eye out for that, you might find it useful.

@Hamlet, excellent, thanks for that.

@Jen, no can’t say I have. I’m not really an article reader, I’m just using these directories to submit to in order to get some backlinks and hopefully traffic.

Caroline,
It’s not a bummer at all, I was just being silly.
I really think the ideas here are good ones, as long as you are doing what you like. As well, if the doing of something teaches you valuable lessons, then that’s a good thing!

Cheers,

Mitch

@Caroline – yes, I’d love to see a post concerning the question I had pertaining to bum marketing and spam. I hope I didn’t offend you with my comment, I just wanted to point out something that I thought might be a problem. Cheers!

Hi Caroline, WRT your article mashup tool – you’re aware of the existing ‘article spinning” tools, yes? The only one I’ve used is Jetspinner (http://www.spontent.com/spinner/ that’s a direct link not an affilliate) and provided you take the time to do the setup well, the spun articles it produces are good enough quality to post. None of this mangled garbage you sometimes see :-)

Enjoying your blog a lot BTW, saw you initially on the 30DC. You’re doing a great job marketing yourself.

@Mark, nope no offence at all – the post is now live.

@Kevin, yes I am aware of those and I intend to check them out. To be honest the main reason for my tool was to get myself doing a bit of development which I was missing (I was a programmer in my day job), and so that I could try out some things like list building, tutorial videos etc, see the project here:

http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/blog/articlemasher-project/

Hi Caroline,

thanks for sharing you way of trying to see how things work. it could help to a lot of us who like to learn the real way of making money online instead of the hype way. keep it up the good work. i know if we do things passionately we won’t feel tired. even giving up is out of the question although we don’t much money for some time. as long we know it would work on the long run just go ahead do the things.

Don’t forget to find a way to submit your content to the RSS directories. Even if you have to create an RSS feed to achieve this.

Guru Bob

I’ve done some of what could be called “bum marketing” but overall I don’t like to think that way because… It’s too much work really. I don’t know if the reward is good enough for the work. But maybe I’m wrong, maybe it can snowball if you do it in the right way.

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