yfs1 uncovered

So that's 2 votes for Mella uncovered and 1 for yfs1 covered?

 

Padawan, my business isn't SEO / webmaster related but I'm open to discuss my experiences with internet marketing of my business with a zero marketing budget!

 

Good! I'm looking to cover a variety of areas rather than producing a lot of very similar interviews.

This sounds like it could be of interest to many people. I need a little time to think of some probing questions to put to a few people - I'll PM you shortly.

 

We typically do not accept articles that are purely sales for a specific company. It is a case by case basis though as each situation is different. I think you will find T0PS that believe it or not you won't get the most benefit this way. I have written 100's of articles and experimented quite a bit.

What you can do is talk in general terms in the article and then do a bit of selling in the author box. Articles that get distributed widely (and sell) are ones that are general. For instance, say you were selling Widgets. An article along the lines of "What to look for when buying a widget?" does very well. In the author box you metion that you offer these widgets. The article itself has value because it is giving solid advice on the subject with no Spam whatsoever and the author box converts because it isn't pushy.

Its this mix that works best.

We have accepted, for instance, a lot of articles like "Guide to choosing the best hosting company". We like them because they are packed with great info and the submitter likes them because they can put a few lines in the about the author box that close the deal.

 

yfs1, how many articles do you refuse?

it says you get 2000 submissions every 2 weeks, and yet you say you have 2500 on the site....thats a lot of refusals.
(unless its been open 2 1/2 weeks)
whats the 'conversion %'? submitted/declined

 

We have actually been fully up for around 3 weeks. The refusal rate is probably only in the 1 or 2% range.

We are having a slow down now though because I think most DP members have submitted all their articles they had kicking around

PS. We have been adding new features all day so if it seems like things are a bit off (like the urls in the articles), this will be sorted within the next few days.

We added a simple "Last 50" page to further entice quick indexing of new submissions

 

thanks mate...i thought you had been going a lot longer than that already

you're gonna need a few pairs of eyes to read all the submissions if it takes
off. (i appreciate that you know that already )

 

yfs, I know Im been a lazy arse, but do you have many travel articles, or are they all seo / webmaster based?

Padawan, no problem - anytime.

 

Here is a direct link wwhomes

Travel Articles

Feel free to add your own if you like

 

Nice one yfs.. just moving my new website over to a more reliable server so it's outta action, but I'll submit them later in the week!

 

Darren I wanna go on your holiday forums so I clicked the link but it won't let me. It says I'm not authorised to view your page why not?

 

Thanks for your insights. I'm not familiar at all with this article submission and I'm not aware at all of how an author box is used. I'll have to (have someone) look into that in more detail.

Thanks again.

 

Mella, I've taken the travel-rants site down whilst I move it over to my new hosting company sorry! it'll be back soon! I've had to move bcos the numpties at the other hosting company didn't have GD library on it's servers (sorry I'm geek speaking now!)

 

Thanks to everyone that PM'd suggestions. I believe we have implemented nearly all of them. The biggest which concerns publishers is our Terms and Conditions for use.

Going by the response we got we decided to have the terms at the end of every article. This way we know for sure that users have read them.

There is an example at the bottom of this page

Those of you that are using Anchor text, please keep doing so. Even though the link doesn't go live, they will be in the next week. I always suggest also including your url in the author box. This will ensure you get your live link if people are cutting and pasting your content.

Upcoming Features
Anchor Text Accepted
Report this Article (To ensure quality)
Email this Article (This will email it in html format for ease of use)
Mod ReWrite (Hasn't been needed yet so will be activated if that changes)
RSS Feeds

Thanks for the feedback so far!

 

Feedback followed by implementation - here's a webmaster that's passionate about his project

 

Lee, allow me a couple of days to get back to you with the A's.

 

It took me two weeks to get the final product to him so Lee has a lot of patience

 

No problem TOPS

 

So in general, people can take the articles from the article site and use it right?

Are they obliged by the T's & C's to copy the 'Authors Box' with it?

I know it might sounds selfish/spammy but I'll only get our quality PR guy to write articles if I know for pretty sure we'll get something out of it. If people start using our copy without the links etc. I'll be quick to stop the efforts.

Just trying to understand how these sites operate.

 

Yes, in order to use the article any live links must stay that way. My experience with article sites in general is if the article is used 100 times, 80 of them keep the live links, 98 of them keep all the info intact and maybe 2 people might mess around taking out the acknowledgement.

Those 2 people are just the way the web works. I have people stealing images and content from my sites all the time as there is no way to really stop them.

You can usually search via Google using a unique snip of your article and check that people are using the content correctly. I have sent one or two emails before and the situation has always been rectified.

The up side is that some of the links generated can be very high profile. I have found my sites in some pretty good e-zines that brought quite a bit of traffic.

I would be willing to change the wording of the Terms if you believe we are leaving something out