Write right

(or my take on article marketing)

Meh, most mmo blogs aren’t really giving stuff away anymore are they?  I mean internet marketers out there are simply turning a profit from rebranding the same old tired shit again and again and again and creating false demand based on fear alone.  It’s getting about as bland as Article marketing isn’t it?  But it does get you some backlinks and it does get you some more exposure.  And even if you get sandboxed, you can still pull in some daily traffic from your articles alone…….like what has happened to my site on Georgina Baillie…..coded, up, running, article submitted, indexed in a flash and sandboxed two days later….. lol  meh, someone’s gotta get a little link love from that whole festering arse-up of a publicity stunt.  And it might as well be me.  I’m not in this one for the money, cause I have no idea how to monetise a celeb site, even one that has the added allure of kink in it.  But it will give me another farm blog to play with and link from.  See what I mean?  Why is nobody talking about farm blogs?  Why I ask you?

Anyhoo…..article marketing is a bit of a pain in the arse.  It gets soooooo dull: browse, login, cut, paste, submit, browse, login, cut, paste, submit, browse, login, cut, paste, submit.  You know how it goes, because you’ve done it haven’t you?  Of course you have.  The underbelly of internet marketing practically forces you to use ezinearticles or goarticles or a host of other directories.  And the thing is, they get tons of content.  So much so, that I’m thinking I need my own article directory.  Shit.  Did I just give away an idea.  I mean talk about a bucket load of content for free.  Damn it.  Not since I gave away the best free internet marketing experiment of all time has such an idea been put forth.

Anyhoo, I got bored with submitting articles, so I thought I would take some time off my rabid link building of the past week to do 2 things:

1) Start coding up a wordpress theme.  Always wanted to do this so I thought I would give it a go.  Seems like fun, and it falls into a master plan I have for mid next year.

2) Write an article submitter.  Shit, I don’t want to pay someone else for a glorified browser with a few automated bits.  How hard can it be to code up one of these puppies?  Not very as it happens.  I’m writing a small and very basic submitter in c# at the moment, and I am genuinely surprised at how easy it is.  Maybe when I’m done, I’ll release it   and charge for it or alternatively, just inject links to my sites ever 50th article or so.  Woulth that be immoral? But hey, think about it, you purchase an article submitter to whack out your hand crafted puppy to however many gazzilion article directories.  Do you ever check that the article got submitted properly?  Do you ever validate the links?  Do you ever think that maybe the guys who coded that little beast might inject their own links randomly?  No?  you bunch are very trusting aren’t you?  (As an aside, and at the same time, /* begin slightly shady section */ I looked into Markov chains a bit, but it looked too bloody booooooooooring to code one up so I think I’ll just hack something together from other bits and bobs floating around there.  There must be a Markov chain wordpress plugin somewhere with a cron job to automate the process, but I haven’t bothered to look for it /* end slightly shady section */.  And again I ask, why is nobody talking about farm blogs? hmmm?).

By the time I’m finished writing it, though I expect article marketing will be so passe that no-one will be doing it any more.

oh well.

Who’s flogging what today?

(or where I consider how to ask)

So, I don’t know about you guys, but I got an email yesterday asking me to write some articles for a “new” site called dev grow.  I’m not linking it up, because.  Well I’m just not.  I suspect a fair number of you also got the email because I would be surprised if these guys found me through a search engine given that my blog is so new and all.  So I rekon at least some of Upstart Blogger, Clog Money, The At Home Couple and Avon Blake got a similar email.  A form email toboot.  There’s no “Hey, I’ve read your site and particularly like the blog you posted on blaa blaa blaa, would you consider expanding on the topic bla bla bla”.  Nope, they obviously hit me up, strolled over to my woefully inadequate about the underdog blogger page, grabbed my email and left.  So I snoop around a bit.  Seems devgrow used to be a web 2.0 social application that didn’t make it.  May as well re-launch eh?  It’s a nice enough domain name.  So what are they flogging?  They want me to write them an article related to designing, developing and growing a website…..they get free content, I get a free backlink.  Sounds like article marketing to me.  Just in a blog format rather than an article directory.  I checked the code and so far the backlink isn’t a nofollow (I’m such a suspicious asshole aren’t I?).  Now I’m going to go all primadona and rant a bit.  I think they would have done better to leave some pertinent comments on one of my blog posts to pique my interest…..I haven’t seen any comments on anyone else’s blog either so I don’t think these guys are too much into caring and sharing here….more of a sneak night time hit and run, fire and forget tactic.  The way they’ve approached it is “come and leave stuff on our blog and contribute to our community, but we aren’t gonna extend the courtesy of joining in the debate on your blog”……which is a bit of a wanker way of going about it.  Unless of course you are already well established with huge pagerank.  I mean, let’s not kid,  if a prominent blogger with good pagerank invited article submission, with or without hitting up my comments, I would be all over it.  I would work with them to make sure it met the tone of their blog, and that the content was relevant.  But these guys?  I should feel privileged to write for them with a big fat pagerank of 0?  That’s the same as my pagerank.  Pfffft!

So it’s a nice looking site.  I sniff around a bit more.  Read the site.  Nothing groundbreaking, but what the heck, I’ve got nothing against the content that is up there already.  But the underdog smells some shit.  Monetisation.  Of course they are going to monetise the site.  It’s all set up.  There’s a little link inviting you to advertise on the blog.  You can contact them for rates.  Not even pretending to have a courtship with their readers before milking the mooolah.  So I shoot them back an email asking for a bit more info.  Like if they plan revenue sharing with the authors (ok, a bit cheeky, but what the heck), what advertising they plan to allow and how they plan to promote the site.  Fair questions I think for a new site.  I mean you want to know what kind of bedfellows you are lying down with right?  I think a day’s grace is enough to respond to an email expressing interest in the site, you know to take into account time differences and such.  But nothing.  No response.  At least they could make an effort and pretend they like me before they fuck me.  So I’m going out on a limb here and calling bullshit.

One thing for sure, I figure dev grow got themselves a nice spike in traffic.