Article Marketing Stategies

You may have read my two previous posts about methods of getting traffic to your sites using free and paid methods. If you haven’t, take a look at them now:

Getting Traffic To Your Websites – Free Options
Getting Traffic To Your Websites – Paid Options

Since I wrote those posts, I’ve been investigating a few other paid methods for getting traffic. Let’s face it, if you want top results in getting traffic, you are going to have to pay for them. And one of those methods, even more popular (because it gets results) than in recent years, is article marketing.

So I’ve looked at three such paid services. All have been around for a while, and all have excellent reputations for achieving results.

LinkVana:

The first I looked at was LinkVana. In some circles, this is seen as the holy grail for getting backlinks. There is one major stumbling block associated with it: its price. It’s a hefty $147 dollars per month. And that’s the discount price. Normally, it’s $197. I have to say I balked at paying that amount for a service and decided it was not for me at the moment. Perhaps it’s something for the future.

That’s not to say the service is bad, merely that it’s too pricy for me at the moment.

LinkVana posts text snippets (with your links) to its several hundred high-PR blogs, so you do get quality backlinks from them. If a blog’s PR rating drops or is in some other way compromised, LinkVana removes it from their network and replaces it with a new blog with a decent PR. They make sure their blog network performs as well as possible at all times.

The downside to LinkVana is that you have to write the text snippets yourself and each must be unique. That could amount to taking up a fair slice of your time but if it produces real results, it would be worth the investment. Not having signed up for LinkVana, I can’t say how good it is, but members speak very positively of it and its achievements. You can have their writers create text snippets for you at $2 a pop. So that’s a possible additional expense if you want to save time on writing your own snippets.

Backlink Solutions:

While I was researching LinkVana, I came across another very similar service that was apparently closed to new members. However, I did find a back door into Backlink Solutions. Priced at $97 per month, this service posts full articles to a couple of hundred blogs. You can either post to Backlink Solutions’ own blogs or to blogs belonging to members. Currently, there are less than 200 of each.

Backlink Solutions does include a way to spin articles so, in essence, it’s very similar to Article Marketing Automation [no longer operating] which I mentioned in a previous post. You spend time preparing an article in the spinner so each version published is unique and the system will automatically post your article (with backlinks) to its blogs.

I found the system somewhat clunky and was disappointed with the number of blogs on the system. However, since they do have their own network of blogs, they have better PR ratings than the member blogs that are in Article Marketing Automation’s blog network. My feeling though, is that Backlink Solutions isn’t worth the $97 per month fee, especially since Article Marketing Automation is only $47 per month.

Unique Article Wizard

While Unique Article Wizard was the first service I looked at, it was the last I actually signed up for. There’s a lot of hype and glowing testimonials about it and that tends to set off “if it sounds too good to be true…” warning bells. However, I succumbed and signed up. The monthly fee is currently $99 though there is a pay-as-you-go plan for $9.95 per month [it was $67 per month when I originally wrote this post].

Where the other services all post to blog networks, Unique Article Wizard posts articles to article directories. Over 1,000 directories are listed in its database; some cover a wide range of categories while some are very niche specific. So your article won’t be posted to every directory but having an article go out to several hundred directories would be an average result.

Unique Article Wizard also includes a way of spinning articles. And, since these go out to article directories, each article has an associated author bio. And it’s here that Unique Article Wizard’s power lies.

Normally, people will copy and paste the same author bio at the bottom of their articles. So you get the same links and keywords used across all the directories the article is submitted to. Those more familiar with article marketing may create a few variations of their bio so different links, anchor text and phrases appear in the bio. That’s fine if you’re submitting to a handful of sites but what if your article is going out to several hundred sites?

Unique Article Wizard’s system allows you to create a huge number of author bios in a short amount of time so that each time your article is posted, a unique bio is attached to it. The search engines don’t like to see the same anchor text in every link pointing to a site. It’s unnatural. So using different keywords in your anchor text, alternating links to other pages on your site and having different phrases in the bio text makes it look like the owners of the article directories have written the author bio rather then you. The result is you get a better quality backlink from each directory.

A very nice feature is that you can get UAW to include a link in your bio that allows the reader to get their own unique version of your article rather than copying the version they’ve just read and using that on their site. Webmasters love unique content. That link is also an affiliate link, so if someone joins UAW, you’ll earn a recurring commission on their membership fee. Not only that, but the UAW affiliate program is a 2-tier one and you’ll earn a recurring 5% commission from all those who join under people who joined under you. This excellent affiliate program is a bonus.

Indeed, there’s a third bonus. UAW provide plugins for a number of article directory and blog systems so if you run your own article directory or blog, you can have articles from UAW posted on your site. This is particularly useful for people running their own blog networks (used to point at their actual money sites) who want a constant flow of content.

Perhaps the feature that elevates Unique Article Wizard above competing systems is that you don’t have to register with a single article directory. That’s all automatically handled for you. Other article submission systems require you to sign up to each and every directory they can submit articles to. That means typing in a login name, password and possibly a captcha and having to do that hundreds of times is a monumental task. UAW frees you completely from that onerous duty.

Oh, and they allow you to use any number of pseudonyms on your articles. Great if you’re submitting PLR articles on a topic you personally know little about!

Conclusion

While LinkVana may offer a fantastic service, it’s too expensive for my tastes. Backlink Solutions is a cheaper alternative but, so far, I’m not convinced that it’s working that well at giving me quality backlinks. And at $97 per month, it’s half-ish the price of LinkVana but twice the price of Article Marketing Automation.

Unique Article Wizard, on the other hand, is the one I like most. It has a nice interface, is easy to use and has the bonus of a good affiliate program and, through its plugins, the ability to have its articles posted on article directories or blogs you own. Any articles you submit through it are vetted by a human before being forwarded to the article directories. This ensures the quality of articles coming from it is high which is good for everyone.

So I’m going to keep my membership in Article Marketing Automation and Unique Article Wizard and drop Backlink Sloutions.

AMA and UAW are complementary: AMA posts to blogs, UAW posts to article directories and using both together gives good coverage of the different types of site. Besides, an article prepared for spinning in AMA can be easily converted for import into UAW so beyond some additional preparation (author bios and such) one prepared article fits both services.

Become a Unique Article Wizard affiliate – it’s free

Unique Article Wizard article directory and blog plugins

Join Unique Article Wizard – and start posting your own articles.

All the best,

Gary Nugent

P.S.: Don't forget, if you want to create an internet income of your own, here's one of my recommended ways to do that:

 

  

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