Hi All,

You may have noticed that the header image has disappeared from the article directory?  Removing it has definitely had a deleterious effect on aesthetics, (i.e. the site does not look as good), but removing this image has made a massive improvement to something that is far more important than looks.

Page Load Time!

Removing this image knocked a whopping 20 seconds off page load time (on a 28k modem), more than halving the page load time!

According to Alexa, “slow” sites can be penalized by the search engines and they are (currently still) judging Article Content King as a slow site.  Removing this image should have already remedied this, but it will take a little time for Alexa stats to catch up.

I am hoping to see a marked improvement in search engine rankings for article pages over the coming months, as a direct result of me removing this large and heavy header image from the site.

Article directories are about getting traffic! I’d rather have top rankings to ugly looking pages than no rankings for pretty pages.

Wouldn’t you?

Next I am going to look into compression and cashing.

Yesterday I added all the active article feeds to feedagg.com to help drive more traffic to your articles. If you have not checked out feedagg.com yet, you should. It’s a pretty cool site where people go to find information. By adding your website feed(s) there you can get more visitors to your website and subscribers to your RSS feed.

Now that I have added the category RSS feeds for article content to feedagg.com, whenever we publish one of your articles it will update on the relevant page at feedagg.com. We syndicate our feeds to several feed aggregation websites, but thus far I have only created a dedicated page on the site for feedagg feeds. You can check it out by clicking here.

The reason I have done this is to increase the “feedagg score” apparently they will increase the feed score by 5 points for adding a link back… but I have not seen it yet. (maybe all the feeds will show a score of at least 5 by the time you click?). Increasing the feedagg score makes the feed rank higher at feedagg.com, which means more exposure on the site and potentially  more visitors and  subscribers.

If you want to help your articles rank even better… visit the feedagg feeds page, visit the your category of interest and give the page a rating. It’s likely got one of your articles on it! Better still tweet the page and add it to your favorite social bookmarking sites. Spend 2 minutes doing that now and you will help every article that you submit here in future get more traffic.

If you know of any other good feed aggregation sites like feedagg.com, please let me know by posting a comment below.

Respectfully

Dan Blackburn

I was chatting with R Michael Stone the other day about winning the King contest and his website marketing in general and we got on to traffic. I asked him what other forms of traffic he has used, other than Article Marketing. He told me that he had tried Pay Per Click with Google Adwords, but after failing to get any real traffic from keyword bids as high as $2 per click, Google actually suspended his Adwords account.

This is not uncommon, in fact it is more like the norm. Google obviously do not rate the quality of Michael’s landing page. It’s a “lead capture page” or “squeeze page” as they are sometimes called.  The page itself is backed up with links to some very high quality articles and there is some great information on the site, but Google it appears do not want Michael advertising this page through their Adwords service… even though Michael was willing to pay through the nose for traffic.

He would not have a problem with any other search engine, as all the others allow the highest bidder to take the most traffic, but Google are different. They want the most relevant ads to the best offers to get the most traffic and they don’t want pages that they feel do not meet the cut there at all. Google treat ad rankings more like search engine rankings. This is great news for you as an article marketer as it makes it possible for you to pay a LOT less for traffic that your competitors AND get more traffic than them… if you know what you are doing.

So what do you need to do?

Let me put it this way. Links to your squeeze pages fit perfectly in the resource box of your articles and your articles fit perfectly with Google’s “landing page quality score rules”.

• If you promote an article on an authority site rather than a sales page or a squeeze page in your Google Adwords PPC campaign, you will pay a lot less per click. FACT!
• If you promote your squeeze page in your article resource box, every reader of your article will be ready to subscribe when they click. (A lot more ready than they were after they read your Google ad).

If you run Adwords campaigns to your articles published on authority sites, instead of the sales pages of your own websites you may find that you make a lot more money a lot more easily. You’ll pay less per click, but get more targeted visitors through to your squeeze page, (fewer more targeted visitors of course).

There appears to be a  rather nice side effect to doing this too. You will find that the article that you are promoting begins to rank better in Google too. Thus you end up getting the traffic that you are paying for, for free! Google deny that this is the case, but test it for your self.

Tips for doing this effectively.

1. Keep it short and easy to read, you want everyone to get to the bottom of your article where the link to your squeeze page is. (no more than 600 words).
2. Provide real value in the article. You want people to feel like they owe you when they click to your site.
3. Don’t push! Be helpful and make people want to know more of your “secrets”.
4. Use bolded subheads containing the keyword phrases that you want to rank well for. (Be mindful of SEO but do not compromise the article for it).

The speed at which your visitors  read your article and how much they like what they read will determine how many people will click through to your site… ready to subscribe.

Try it and work out the cost per subscriber when you do. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Or win the King contest and we will do it for you . The prize for winning has changed to $50 cash and $50 PPC traffic to your best articles. (Starting next King).

Submit articles here

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

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

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

There are many benefits to article marketing, so to say that is it ALL about conversion is not really true, but because this is the most misunderstood and under explained benefit of article marketing, I thought it appropriate to begin this article marketing tip with that title.

Of course it is not ALL about conversion. Article marketing is a great way of building links and traffic and increasing your search engine ranking, but the increased traffic and search engine rankings mean nothing if your web site does not convert.

So what does article marketing have to do with web site conversion?

Quiet frankly, everything!

You may not realise this but the most important aspect of sales conversion, is not your headline, your graphics, your design, your sales copy or your logo. It fact it is nothing on your web site at all. The most effective thing you can do to increase your sales conversion is to influence what people see / read right before they visit your web site.

It’s the “frame”. The frame of mind that your visitor is in when they click through to your web page. That is what really influences sales conversion. Big businesses know this, that is why they spend millions per year on “brand recognition”.

Brand recognition builds trust and trust drives sales. Brand recognition is ALL about building trust. The things that we see consitantly are the things that we trust to be reliable.

It would be stupid, and very expensive for any small Internet business to blow their advertising budget on “brand recognition” advertising, but with article marketing what you have is the ability to tap into the same marketing principles that drive big businesses like Coca Cola and Mc Donalds to spend millions on advertising.

You can use your articles to build trust and to leverage trust from others.

In the moment, your article can be just as affective as 10 years of billboard advertising… especially if the visitor is referred by a source that they trust.

If you realise this, you will likely find a lot more success from your article marketing efforts, you will naturally write better articles, your articles will naturally get more traffic and more of the visitors who visit your web site will buy the product you are positioning through the article.

If you write your articles with the intention and purpose of “framing” the reader, you’ll not only get higher conversions from the traffic coming from the article directories. You’ll also likely get more traffic to your articles because your work will become more attractive to publishers. This can make a HUGE difference to your sales conversion. When this happens you leverage the trust that the publisher has already built in the market place.

When a trusted publisher publishes your articles you leverage traffic from readers are already willing to follow the publishers recommendations. That means that they are predisposed to “buy into” the frame of your article.

Can you see how it all ties together nicely here?

You see it’s a lot better to approach your article marketing as a relationship building exercise, rather than an SEO exercise and if you approach your article marketing as a relationship building exercise, you will likely get better search engine rankings too… natuarally!

At Article Content King, we syndicate all your articles to targeted publishers. Click here to submit your articles.

What is the importance of Google Page Rank?

Google has just started a Page Rank update and the SEO forums are buzzing, even though almost everyone is saying that Page Rank does not mean anything anymore?

I don’t know how true that is, it still causes quite a stir when Google updates page rank. Everyone is interested to know whether their web site’s Home Page Rank has gone up or down. They are all happy if it has gone up and disappointed if it has gone down, even though they tell themselves that Google Page rank does not matter any more.

I think it does, the basic principle that page rank is some indicator of the “strength” of a web site and that links from stronger sites can make for better search engine rankings and higher page rank for your site is still logical, if not accurate.

Some say that Google display one thing (Page Rank) and use a different system to rank websites. Whether or not this is true, Page Rank is still important, especially for a website like Article Content King. I’m really pleased that the home page of Article Content King has increased in Page rank from a 3 to a 4.

Most Article Marketers judge article directories on at least 3 things.

1. The Home Page’s Page Rank
2. The Website’s Alexa Rank
3. The quality of the content published.

Having a Page Rank of 4 instead of a Page Rank of 3 could make a big difference to this site. Even if it has no effect at all on our search engine rankings directly, it will have an indirect effect if more people are attracted to the site to submit their unique articles, which they will be, because we have a higher page rank now and that is important to them.

I hope that it is important to search engine rankings too and that you get more traffic to your articles on this site as a result of the increased page rank, but even if it has no bearing here at all, your articles will likely still get more traffic as there will be more traffic into the site. You can submit 2 articles for free, every day at Article Content King. If you’re not a member yet, click here to submit your articles for free.

Most article marketers begin writing an article with a keyword phrase or set of keyword phrases in mind. Their motivation for writing the article is getting their site ranked for that keyword phrase on Google and other search Engines like Yahoo & MSN.

They will try to use the particular keyword phrase or phrases as often as they can in the article body, or perhaps they will go to great lengths to make sure that the keyword density in the article is exactly 4.9% or 3.7% or 6.8% or what ever percentage keyword density they read was the best to use when optimising articles for the search engines.

They will use bolding, italics, even BLOCK CAPS when they use the keyword phrase in the article in the belief that doing this will help their site (not the article) rank better for the keyword phrases that they want to rank for.

This is the WRONG approach to article marketing!

The problem is, that people with this mentality often care little for the quality of the articles that they submit. It’s stupid! Yes, stupid. The value of a well written article is worth infinitely more than a link in a junk article approved on an unmoderated article directory!

Article directories are not fantastic places to get SEO back links from anymore, they were back in 2007 but the Internet changes.

What they are fantastic places from which you can “spawn” back links, and great places to get highly targeted traffic and followers / subscribers. The links you get on article directories are fantastic, but it’s not because they are the foundation of your #1 rankings on Google, it’s because interested people are finding and reading your articles, then clicking through to your site or perhaps because someone is frequently using your articles in their newsletter and broadcasting them to their 10,000+ subscribers or twitter followers.

Even if you are getting #1 ranking for your web site solely because of your article marketing efforts, I’d bet my house that you are getting more traffic from well ranked pages that you displaying your articles on other web sites (like article directories, and the blogs and newsletters who have published your article from an article directory).

Google may be your top traffic provider, but when you add up all the traffic you are getting from other places publishing your article, I bet it’s a lot more.

If not, then you are definitely doing article marketing wrong. What? You think you can generate more traffic from Google to your 52 page web site than all the tens of thousands of web site pages that contain links to your site combined?

When you search Google, how often do you find links to articles on article directories or blogs? That is some of the best traffic you can get! Targeted by Google and framed by your article before they visit your site, ready to buy.

Above all, the quality of your article is paramount. If it is junk, even if the you are achieving the top rankings you desire (doubtful), you are sure to be missing out on a lot of traffic, no publisher worth their salt is ever going to publish a junk article.

Sure, your articles may get published on some of the lower quality the article directories, but it will never be picked up… and frankly, if an article directory does not moderate their content well enough, then the links you get from those sites are unlikely to have any affect at all on your traffic or rankings. Links from junk sites could even hurt you.

With this in mind, the first thing you should think about before writing an article is not which keyword phrase you want to rank for, but how you can write something that people will want to read and publishers will want to publish. Only then will you unlock the real power of article marketing.

Don’t disregard keyword optimisation completely, just make sure your focus is more on providing quality information and portraying yourself as an expert.

If you do that, people will want to follow you, they will trust you and they will buy from you… if they want what you are offering.

At article content king moderate every article submitted to make sure it is worthy of publishing on other sites, before we publish it ourselves. Then we automatically promote each article to an opt-in targeted audience. If your articles are consistantly good enough, frequent enough and as you get ranked on the top author pages, your articles will get published and promoted by others more frequently.  More so as people begin to recognise article content king as a great place to find articles.

Is your article unique to Article Content King?

At Article Content King, we understand and accept that the majority of authors who submit articles to our article directory, submit their articles to other article directories as well. Almost every article marketer will submit their articles to a number of article directories, not just one.

Like I said, this is something we have to accept, our focus has been (is) on getting Article Content King positioned in the minds of article marketers as one of the sites that they submit their articles to first! Once an article has been submitted, we work fast to moderate and approve it so we can become of the of the first web sites to publish the article.

If we can be first to publish the article, we stand a better chance of securing top rankings for the article from keyword phrases related to the article content.

All article directories are designed to be browsed, which means that the more traffic we get into a single article, the more traffic articles related to that article will receive. The average visitor reads 3-4 articles before leaving the site. If all those articles were your articles, and the visitor came from a highly targeted traffic resource, like a specific search on a search engine, then you stand a much better chance of ultimately getting the visitor to your site, in a “ready to buy” frame of mind.

To get the most out of your article marketing efforts, you should actually rotate the sites that you submit to first and give each one a chance to claim your article as “unique”. When they have published it, and Google has cached the page, go ahead and submit the article to all the other article directories you submit to.

If you do this, you will get more traffic and stronger back links from every article site that you submit articles to. The unique content you have at each site will drive more traffic into the related articles that you also have at that site.

This is really powerful stuff… Like I said, article directories are designed to be browsed, if the second article that the visitor browses is also your article, you stand a much better chance of getting the visitor to finally click through to your site. And boy, when they do, will they be ready to listen to you!

By focusing on getting single articles ranked in at individual article directories, so each site you submit to has some unique content from you, you will find that you not only get a lot more traffic from each article directory that you submit to, you’ll find that the traffic that comes from each article directory buys a lot more stuff from you too.

Rotate your “uniqueness” at each article site and increase you the value of every article directory you submit articles to. That’s the tip for today.