John Halderman! You probably know John as the guy who usually interviews the winner of the King contest, but this month he won it himself, by submitting just two excellent articles to promote his new book “The DNA of Success Stories”.

John Halderman is a co-author of this book along with Jack Zufelf, Brian Tracy Jack Canfield and many more experts. It is a sequel Jack Zufelt’s to the #1 best seller “The DNA of Success” and it sure to be a top seller itself, it’s already receiving excellent reviews.

You can pick up the book at a great price at John’s site
http://thednaofsuccessstories.com/

I have yet to speak to John about winning the contest, and I was in two minds about allowing him to be “King”, as people may feel that this is contrived to help with the book launch, but it really wasn’t.

John does not work for Article-Content-King.com, he has never been paid for doing the interviews or helping out with the site, he does it because he is a nice guy. Really… no-one deserves to be King of Article Content King this month more than John Halderman. He has won because of his writing, and he wrote because of the book launch. It’s the members who decided, not me. I didn’t even rate his articles. So I would be totally wrong to say “Hey John, because you help out so much, you can’t be King”.

King of Article-Content-King is John Halderman. If you would like to interview HIM about winning the King contest, or just about his new book, I am sure he would oblige. You can read more about John Halderman by visiting his profile page.

Don’t forget to submit your best articles to Article Content King this month to have a chance of winning the prize next month.

It’s true that we do charge a fee to submit articles at Article-Content-King, but we also offer both Basic Membership and Silver Membership levels.

Free members can submit articles, but they must add their “author badge” to a web site. Not every web site that they want to link to in their articles and on their author profile page, just one web site.

Free members can also moderate articles and earn advertising credits for doing so, but free members can no longer use their advertising credits until they upgrade their membership.

The members first 5000 advertising credits earned can be used to pay for an upgrade to the “Basic” membership level.

Basic members get full access to submit articles under as many pen names as they like. They do not have to add their author badge to any web site, but if they choose to, they earn extra advertising credits which can be used to display their Google Adsense ads across the site.

Basic members earn 1 credit every time one of their articles is viewed and 2 credits when their profile page is viewed. (Visits only count once from the same visitor in a 24 hour period).

Basic (and free) members also earn 0.1 credits for views of  articles submitted by any author that they referred to article content king. This continues down 10 levels so the advertising credits can really build up. (Full explanation is in the members area).

• Silver members earn credits at double the rate of Basic members
• they get full control of the ad space
• and can set their ads to appear only in specific categories.

This makes Silver members advertising credits worth a LOT more… perhaps as much as 10 times more.

Our Silver membership level is for people who want to get the most possible revenue from their articles published at article-content-king. If you are not interested in making money from your articles, then Silver membership is not for you. You can still submit articles free at article-content-king.com

The “King” of Article Content King for March is Megumi Oyanagi, with an author rating score of 24 from just 10 articles! This makes the average quality score of Megumi’s articles 23/30.

All articles are rated by members of Article Content King, after 3 members have rated the article on a scale of 1 – 10 the article goes live with the accumulative score giving by all 3 moderators. 23 is a very high article score.

You can read more about Megumi and check out her top rated and latest articles by visiting her profile page. Megumi is looking for more contacts at LinkedIn. If you like what you read, why not check out her LinkedIn profile page and connect with her there?

As “King” of the site Megumi has won…

• $100
• 10,000 advertising credits
• Exposure on the Article Content King home page for the month of  March

And of course, if Megumi wants to be interviewed about her online business and article marketing success, she will unlock more benefits from winning the King contest.

Who will be King next month? Will it be you?

Click here to submit your best articles to article-content-king.com

Today I announce our first, third-time winner of the Article Content King Top Author Contest (King Contest).  Nick Mutt of ERP is King of Article Content King for another month. Nick writes and submits a lot of articles (118 in the last 30 days) and they are all of good quality, with an extra 11 points added to his author score from these 118 articles, Nick had a clear advantage and it was enough for him to retain his “crown”.

His prolific article writing demonstrates Nick’s understanding of how effective Article marketing can be, and his enthusiasm for retaining the crown shows the value of the King title.

Please check out Nick’s author profile page here and read and rate some of his articles. You’ll find some great information, mainly on health and alternative medicine there as well as links to all Nick’s websites.

Submit enough high quality articles in February and you could be the “King” for march. It’s a title well worth winning.

On another note, today is the day that we stop accepting free article submissions* and increase the price to the “full” price, which rather than being $9.99 per year, is going to be £7 per year (yes that is GBP not USD). I don’t think this will cause any problems with people NOT in the UK not being able to pay as PayPal will do the currency conversion for you.

The reason why we are doing this is not because £7 is more than $9.99 and it’s not (really) because I live in the UK where we spend pounds and not dollars.  The reason is that more authors upgraded at the $7.99 price than any other price. Almost double the number who paid $4.99 one time. And get this… the only price increase that I did NOT announce is the increase to $7.99. It seems that 7 is the magic number, whether or not it needs to have a $ sign in front of it, I intend to find out.

*Everyone with more than 3000 unclaimed advertising credits on their account will be upgraded automatically this afternoon.

It’s no secret that we add rel=”nofollow” to all the links in articles submitted to article content king and I have explained before why we do this. It’s to help you get stronger back links from the site.

Now I am going to tell you how to use this site to get stronger back links. If you follow this advice you will help to focus the content on this site into “tight niche hubs” and greatly improve the quality of the site, while increasing the traffic you receive at the same time.

As you know, the links that you put on the profile page do not contain no follow links, all your articles link to this page so all the “link reputation” of all your articles is focused on your profile page, and from there the reputation is passed to the sites that you want to promote with your articles. i.e. The links that you add in the “favourite web sites” section of the profile page.

If you create a profile page for each “tight niche” that you write articles for, each profile page becomes a like a targeted index page for your articles and the web sites that you want to promote.

This focusing of your content should help your articles to rank better in the search engines and better optimise the “back links” that you receive from this site.

See how that works? Let me give you an example.

Let’s say you have written 7 articles about article marketing and 7 articles about how to lose weight. If you submit all 14 article under the same author name, the profile page for that author does not have any real focus. Is it about weight loss or is it about article marketing? The two topics are totally unrelated.

If you set up a separate author alias for each subject, then you basically have two “mini sites” within article-content-king. One about article marketing and one about weight loss.

We have the “index page” which is your profile page. These profile pages contains relevant links and information about each topic and are supported by all the (relevant) articles that you submit under this author name. Thus creating a “mini site” about the topic.

Visitors looking for weight loss information can find your weight loss “mini site” and people looking for article marketing information can find your article marketing “mini site”.

If you focus your content in this way then you should start getting a lot more traffic from the site, especially if you add a few links into your profile yourself.

The only potential problem with this is that every profile page needs a separate “author alias” (pen name), I know that some people write more to brand themselves and their name than anything else, so this method will not appeal to them.

For everyone else, it’s important to note, that we DO NOT accept articles from keyword phrases, or author names with numbers in them. Even if it is not your actual name, it still needs to be a believable name.

You can set up new author names and sort your older articles if you wish, but do not do too many at once because your articles WILL be removed from the site and placed back in moderation if you edit them. That includes changing the author name.

Today is the last day that you can submit articles for free. Tomorrow the price increases again for the last time. Click here to submit articles to article-content-king.com

Hi everyone, this only really applies to existing members, but I guess anyone could get a free membership if they submit enough high quality articles between now and February 1st… and anyone will be able to get a free membership after the 1st if they refer enough authors to the site.

After we move to paid membership, we will still be accepting free sign ups because “article author” is only one role that new members can take on at this site and it’s only article submissions that are restricted. You do not have to pay to be a moderator an affiliate or a publisher, of course.

Your Articles Could Already Have Paid For You

Did you know that we have a “multi level” revenue sharing system in place at Article-Content-King and an affiliate program. You earn credits to display your own ads on the site when…

1. Your articles are viewed
2. Any of your referrals articles are viewed (down 10 levels).

You earn 1 credit any time that one one of your articles is viewed by anyone who has not viewed it within the past 24-hours.  Similarly, you earn 0.2 credits when any articles submitted by anyone in your “10 tier downline” is viewed. Your credits are used to display your own Google Adsense ads instead of ours.

Every time your ads load on a page, you use 4 credits. This is because there are 4 ads on each page and you use a credit for each ad. We cannot “mix” Google adsense ads from different publishers on the same page, credits are based on “ad loads” not page loads.

This is a very fair revenue sharing system that allows you to leverage income as people discover the site as an article directory through your articles as well as revenue through your articles themselves.

But it’s actually not very popular…

There are a lot of authors in the database who have not submitted any articles for over 12 months and are unaware that they have over 50,000 credits on their account, (growing at a rate of thousands per month). We also have a lot of active authors who clearly use a software and never log into the site. If they did, they would be using the 10,000+ credits they have accumulated, surely? Maybe they know and are just lazy, or don’t see it as valid income because their site does not have the same eCPM from adspace as this site.

I guess we also have authors who know full well how many credits that they have and would like to use them, but they do not have an Adsense account to participate. (We do have options if this is the case, but you have to ask… I can create up to 200 “tracking channels” to track income to worthy members).

The credits that you generate are worth money and I am willing to trade your credits for a PAID membership. The (low) estimate I give on credit value in the sales page for Silver membership (which allows you to earn credits at double the rate of a free member), is $2 eCPM that’s $2 estimated earnings per 1000 credits.

So you can “buy” a paid membership for 5000 credits (per year).Yes, I realize that this makes it 3 cents more expensive to pay with credits, but it’s a nice round number.

You can do this by getting 500 visitors to 10 articles or 100 visitors to 50, or by telling your friends about article content king (through your  affiliate link) and hoping that they all submit a few articles too. You may even already have enough credits to pay!

Now, we do not have a system in place to manage this yet so I am going to have to do it manually.

Here’s how.

If you are interested in taking advantage of this. When you have 5000 credits accumulated (you can see your credits by clicking the AD button on the menu in the members area), submit a support ticket here, INCLUDE YOUR MEMBER ID and tell me you would like to pay for paid membership with your credits.

PLEASE DO NOT DO THIS UNLESS YOU HAVE ENOUGH CREDITS TO PAY!!

I’ll then log into the database, deduct 5000 credits from your account and upgrade you to PAID. You WILL have to pay again next yet, but it if wasn’t worth it, then you won’t have the credits to pay.

In future we may allow people to submit 5 articles for free and give them a PAID membership if they generate 5000 credits from those 5 articles or from affiliate activity.

So here is what you need to do…

Log into your account and see how many credits you have… you may already have enough! If not, you can either promote the articles that we have published already, or submit some more!

OR

Create an account at article-content-king and submit your best articles before the 1st Feb.

Respectfully

Dan Blackburn

P.S. Submit your best articles here now… There are not many days left until the 1st Feb and you CAN earn a free membership from your credits before then.

This post is long overdue, but better late than never. Nick Mutt of natural-fatloss.com is King of article-content-king.com for a second month running. He is still riding high at the top of the top author list right now, but this may not be the case at the end of the month. The contest is more wide open than it seems. Remember we count articles submitted in the last *60 days in the King contest and a lot of Nicks articles will “expire” before he end of the month. For every 10 that expire, Nick loses 1 point.

*We will probably adjust this to 30 days next month.

Competition below Nick is  close, in fact a brand new author could possibly come in and steal it at the end with just one article, as no-one is above the maximum score an article can “go live” with. (The maximum is 30, and for that to happen, 3 people have to rate the article 10/10)!

It may turn into an exciting author contest this month, not a forgone conclusion like it was last month. No-one was going to catch Nick last month, he submitted a LOT more articles than the average member does and all the articles he submitted got an “above average” score. He deserves to be King again this month, but there are no cash prizes for keeping the crown. The $100 is only paid to “new” Kings.

Keep submitting your best articles to maintain a high average score and you could win it this month with just a handful of excellent articles. If you do, you will get the same exposure Nick is getting now on the home page of article-content-king and other places too.

Nick Mutt, and Roseanna Leaton and Liz Canham before him, have all realised the immense value of the FREE extra exposure that winning the King contest gives them. You will too if you win the King contest by submitting your best articles to Article Content King.

Authors often complain to me about the use of the “nofollow” tag in their articles submitted to article content king.  I decided to write this article to explain why we do this and how rather than hurting your search engine optimization efforts, it actually helps them!

Yes, that’s right… the fact that we add rel=”nofollow” to the links in your articles actually helps you get stronger back links from our site.

Don’t believe me?

Here’s why. It’s quite simple really.

If you know anything about SEO, you will know the importance of getting links from IP addresses in different C Classes. Some of the “Article Directory Lists” you will find while browsing the Internet will include the directories IP address with the listing and they will not list 2 directories that share the same C Class IP address. This is because getting links from different servers is important for SEO. It is thought that this is one of the ways that big search engines like Google determine whether link growth to a site is natural.

It is also thought that getting too many links from the same IP addresses can even be harmful to your web site’s search engine rankings . It can look like you are trying to manipulate your rankings and the search engines do not like that.

I have often read that any particular site can only “vote” for your web site once, any subsequent links you get from the site don’t really have much, if any benefit in terms of search engine optimization. Some would say that the search engines could discount all your links from a site if you get too many from the same places, if all your links come from the same source or sources.

Using this logic, it seems wise to focus all the traffic and link reputation that your articles generate onto one link to your site… the link on your profile page.  The links you add on your profile page do not have the “nofollow” tag in the links. Every article you submit links to this page which means that all the “link juice” of all the articles you submit is focused on this page. This makes the one vote that this site can give you count as much as possible.

If we didn’t do this, then which one link would be the one that counted? Would it be as good a link as this one?

So what about linking keyword phrases in your articles to get better optimization for those words?

Am I telling you that everything you have learned about article marketing is false and it’s not a good search engine optimization technique at all? If you can only get one link that counts from any article directory, what is the point of submitting more than one article? Is it all just to help that one back link I get have more value?

If you are asking that question (and I know that some of you are) then I am afraid that somewhere along the line you have misunderstood what article directories are for.

Article Marketing is something that has existed since soon after the invention of the printing press, perhaps even before that, long before the Internet existed. There have always been “content repositories” available to publishers and authors; places where publishers can find content to publish to their readers, without having to write it themselves and where writers can submit their articles to get recognition of their work. The Internet has made this a lot more accessible and mainstream because there are a lot more publishers now, but the concept of article marketing was born long before the Internet!

Article Content King is a content repository. A place where you can submit your articles in the hope that a publisher in your niche will pick them up and publish them. It’s a place where you can use your content to make contacts in the industry if you use your profile page correctly.

It is our job to put your articles in front of people who are interested in publishing what you are writing about. We present your article in an easy to publish format through the publisher page (linked in all your articles). You’ll notice that the links here do not contain the “rel=”nofollow” tag. That’s because when someone naturally publishes your article from our site, you have naturally earned a back link to your site. This is not manipulative at all and you deserve credit for that link. The search engines would agree.

Article directories are fantastic places to build back links to your site, but it’s not the back links you get from the article directories themselves that count, it’s the back links you get from people publishing your articles, on different web sites and servers across the Internet that really helps your SEO. The more articles you submit, the more chance there is of this happening.

So as you can see, our intention when adding rel=”nofollow” to your site links on the article pages is actually intended to help you get stronger back links from our site.

You can create an many profile pages as you like, and add as many links to each profile page as you like. We add a link to the appropriate profile page inside every article you submit. All your efforts focus the reputation on the ONE vote that this site can pass to any one of your sites and if your article is naturally published from our site, you get a natural back link.

Is this really something to complain about?

Respectfully

Dan Blackburn

Click here to submit your articles to article-content-king.com

After 2 months at the top Roseanna Leaton’s crown has been taken by new Top Author Nick Mutt.  Nick won the contest by  278 points after submitting almost 100 articles over the month of November.  He wins $100 plus a variety of promotional benefits including a link to this profile page on the Article Content King home page.

I spoke to Nick briefly the other day and he was delighted to have won the contest. Hopefully later in the week we will we able to set up a time to interview him about his business and article marketing approach. In the meantime you can learn more about Nick Mutt by visiting his profile page. He is a well respected author who writes mainly about health and alternative medicine, but is also the founder and CEO of Elite Informatics, an Internet Advertising Company. You can follow Nick on Twitter here.

+++

More About The Top Author Contest

Next Month, or rather this month we are tweaking the rules of the contest again to make your author score the average score of all your articles plus 1 extra point for every 5 articles we approve. This will likely be the last tweak we make.

These rules will make the contest more about article quality than article quantity. Your score could actually go down when we approve an article, not always up as it is now. For example, if we approve your first 3 articles with a score of 18, your author score will be 18 (the average). If you then submit a mediocre article that goes live with a score of 9, your author score will drop to 15!

I think these rules will find the best author on the site and encourage everyone to submit better articles, or rather not submit bad ones as well. I am not suggesting for a moment that Nick won the contest this month just because he submitted the most articles. He would have won this month even if these rules applied, but it would have been a much closer contest. I can also see how it could be possible for us to NOT find the best author on the site with the current rules.

These tweaks will be visible on the site in the next few days hopefully. Definitely before the end of the month. They apply now. Click here to submit your best articles to article content king.

Now that we have lifted the submission restrictions for approved authors, you may be wondering if it is better to submit all your articles at once, or to submit them consistently over time. This is a good topic for the next Article Marketing Tip… it’s a good one. Click here for article marketing tips #1 & #2 and subscribe to the article marketing tips feed.

The answer to the questions of whether it is better to submit all your articles at once or over time  is without a doubt, it is better to submit them over time. The reason why it is better to submit your articles over time rather than all at once is down to the “recently published” article feeds.

Lets imagine you have 50 articles about article marketing. If you submit all these articles together, then they will likely be published all together. i.e. all on the same day. This may result in a huge influx of traffic from the article directory as your articles dominate the recently approved pages, but the next day all the traffic is gone. Your articles have slipped down the queue in one big block and are now harder for the visitors to find. (Unless they made it into the popular articles list, which is doubtful, not in a day.

So when you submit all your articles together, you really only leverage traffic from the article directory on the day that your articles are approved. You’re really taking your chances of that being a good day to have your articles published.

Publishers look at the recently approved articles first, because they are looking for fresh content to publish. They also notice people who submit articles consistently because this is  the mark of an expert.

What is flooding the feed with all your articles the mark of? You pop up, they have never seen you before, then you disappear. What do they think of you? Good things or bad things?

The more times your name is seen in the recently approved feed the more likely it is for a publisher to pick up your articles. Professional publishers are looking for authors that they can trust, not necessarily an article on a particular topic. Consistency brings trust. Trust brings sales.

That is what you are really looking for when you submit your articles. Not the link and traffic from the article directory, but to leverage traffic from trusted publishers to endorse your product and your name.

Submit articles free at article content king