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.

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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.

This quick post is to officially announce that we have removed the “2 per day” submission restrictions for approved authors. You become an approved author when we have approved 15 of your articles (i.e. when you have a bronze crown). Until then the 2 per day rule still applies for you.

We have also changed the rules of the “King Contest” as promised. We now only count articles submitted in the last 30 days instead of the last 90 days. This makes it a real contest between everyone, every month. Already we have a new challenger to Roseanna’s crown. Melissa Chappell of http://propertyinvestingoverseas.com/ is currently riding high in the rankings this month. I wonder if things will be the same at the end of the month when the rankings really count?

It could be you winning the crown this month. Expecially now we have lifted the submission restrictions. As long as we do not reject any of your articles, you can submit as many as you like, every day.

Only articles with a rating above 15 are counted in the King contest. Quality counts, more than quantity.

Your article is published with the sum of the score received by 3 moderators on a scale of 1 – 10 (minimum 9 maximum 30. A score below 3 rejects the article).   Articles also receive additional an point for every 100 unique views as well as votes from web site visitors.

The goal of your article marketing efforts should be to get recognized. At article content king we recognise the best author of the month, every month. Click here to submit your articles.

The “King” of Article Content King for November is again Roseanna Leaton. No-one really challenged her at all this month, she won by over 400 points! Our first winner Liz Canham is still in second place, despite submitting very few articles this month. Perhaps Liz is taking a break.

Roseanna was delighted to win again. I received this message from her earlier.

“Hi Dan,
Just wanted to let you know how happy I am to win the King (Queen) contest again this month.  It’s great to win for a second month.  It has been exciting to have my profile out there on the front page and benefit from the inevitable brand recognition and traffic hits.

I enjoyed speaking with John and recording the interview and know that you are providing us with the opportunity to get our message out there via another media form.

The contest is a great encouragement as it requires not only content but also quality to be able to win.  It can be difficult to write articles on a regular basis but a competition is a great incentive, especially when the rewards are as good as the one which you offer.

It makes me feel that my articles are really valued.
Thank you.  I’m proud to have won again.”

It was a forgone conclusion that Roseanna Leaton would win the Top Author again this month. She was streets ahead all month with no real competition raised from other authors. I think that is mainly down to the rules of the site and the contest… we are not giving enough new authors a chance.

So we are going to shake things up a little.

This month is going to be a lot easier for anyone to win, because we are tweaking the contest rules and lifting the submission restrictions, for bronze crown authors.

Once you qualify as a Bronze crown author by having more than 15 articles approved (yes, 15 not 5 as it is now) you will be able to submit as many articles as you like, every day.

So to recap, the changes affecting the contest are as follows.

• This month only articles submitted in the last 30 days will count in the King contest.
• Once a Bronze Crown is achieved, authors will be able to submit unlimited articles, instead of the 2 per day we allow now, as long as they do not have any rejected articles.

The aim of the top author contest is to motivate more authors to consistently submit high quality articles. The rewards of winning extend far beyond the $100 cash prize. Roseanna is receiving a lot of recognition and traffic as top author of the site. It’s recognition well deserved. Roseanna is a true expert in her field. If you have not checked out her web site RoseannaLeaton.com you really should. There is something for everyone there and some great Christmas gift ideas.

Changes to the member profile pages…

You may have noticed that we have made some changes to the member profile pages. If not, visit your own profile page or check out Roseanna’s page as an example.

Down the left and right side of the page are movable, closable boxes that display the top authors in each category of the site. If you have a large screen resolution (below 1000 px wide) the page may look a little strange to you, but I guess you are used to seeing the Internet a little out of focus at this resolution? If the boxes are in the way, you can simply move them, close them or minimise them.

We have done this to give more traffic and recognition to the top authors on the site in each category.

22 top author spots are up for grabs every month. If you win one, you will leverage traffic from every members profile page! It’s a well known fact that people (web site visitors) like to click on pictures of people. If you end up in one of the top spots, you will leverage a LOT more traffic to your profile page. Your face will be on over 10,000 pages of the site.

Now that is something worth having!

It’s disappointing to see that some authors who have won these positions have not even bothered to change their profile image. It does not have to be a picture of YOU you know, it can be anything… anything but that default profile pic? Let people know who you are, or at least what your web site is. You WILL get more traffic if you use your face however.

We are doing our best to make this a fantastic site for article authors to leverage traffic from. Please do your best to use what we are giving you here. 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.