These are crappy times for a lot of people. The financial markets are falling hard, retail and service industries are seeing declining profit margins and missing projections, and real people are having to fight harder every day just to get by. Some have seen their hours and benefits cut back at work, and worse still many have lost their jobs–and a lot of “experts” are saying the worst has yet to come.

So, other than stating the obvious what’s my point?

I’ve noticed something that I feel is despicable over the past few weeks as times have taken a sharp downward turn for so many… several well known Internet Marketers have suddenly began ramping up with product launches and messages to their email lists.

Is the timing coincidental? Maybe for some, but there’s no doubt in my mind that some are also foaming at the mouth over these unfortunate economic hardships striking so many people because times like these create desperation, and desperate people are easy targets when you’re selling promises of fast or easy Internet riches.

Seeing people fighting to get by and worried over feeding their families truly pangs me, it’s no secret that I have a bleeding heart. But seeing Vultures preying on those struggles and desperation sickens me.

There’s nothing I can do about the creeps out there, but after talking with several other folks whom I work with often on projects there is something I can do for anyone within my reach.

Content is King! Unless you’ve been under a rock you’ve heard this a million times.

But creating good quality content can be a giant obstacle for lots of people, and if you’re worried about paying the light bill next month you can’t be in a position to pay writers to create original content for you.

The Group–my associates and I who work together often but have never bothered coming up with a spiffy name for ourselves–has a tool that can help with this.

It’s not a crappy rewriter program that randomly replaces words from a thesaurus database… or something that just shuffles around sentences and paragraphs to rewrite articles.

It’s a serious tool which automates the process that good Internet Marketers are already doing, and we’ve (the group) decided to provide free access to it in the hopes that it will help some of you to do better, and do it faster.

When a marketer enters a niche or starts a campaign they need content. Usually after a little research on the product they’re promoting and the keyword they want to target they will sit down and write several dozen pieces of content to use for blog postings, articles, Web 2.0 sites and etc.

And if you’ve been doing this for a while then you know that most of those articles will be about the same idea, just presented in unique ways to avoid being duplicate content. For instance you might write a group of articles such as:

1) Curing Your Acne
2) Getting Rid of Acne
3) 5 Steps To Being Acne Free
and so on if you’re promoting an anti-acne product…

What this tool does, using your input–every single word comes from you–is produce over 2 dozen original pieces of content on whatever idea you’re writing about that are each typically between 40% and 80% unique and will be 100% natural reading. They come from your brain and will read as though you manually wrote each one out and put serious efforts into them.

BUT — they won’t take you hours and hours to create like if you did it by hand, they’ll be created in a matter of minutes.

You start with 1 original piece of content that’s between 300 and 500 words, follow the instructions for formatting it, then press “Submit” and you will have over 2 dozen pieces of unique and original content that you can use anywhere.

It depends on how fast you are with the formatting, I actually haven’t used the tool all that much myself even though it’s been available to me through the group for a while, but even still I can prep an article and run it in about 15 to 20 minutes. So that’s less than 1 minute per piece of content produced… not bad at all in my opinion.

Is it ethical?

I know I’ve posted about ethics lately and talked about content spinning. In my opinion this tool is a little different from common rewriters because of how it works. Every word, punctuation point and letter used in the produced content comes from your mind, so essentially you are still creating the content and it is still original to you. This tool just automates the process of getting it from your mind to printable/publishable text.

Still, the question of ethics is one you really have to decide upon for yourself. I’m not going to make the case either way on that here.

My only intention when I approached the group about releasing this was to help some people overcome 1 large obstacle that they may face with online marketing. I’ll leave any moral debates on it for a later time.

As I said, this is freely accessible and with no strings attached. You don’t even have to signup for some email list to use it.

You do have to join my forum here, but you don’t have to participate if you don’t want to.

I wanted to prevent people from running auto-scripts on this tool so it’s only accessible to registered members of the forum who are logged in.

The forum isn’t really full of lively discussions anyway, it’s just a good format for myself and a few other members of our group to share tools and information with others away from prying eyes (or bots), but there’s rarely much actual discussion going on there so it’s completely okay if you don’t want to participate on the boards. Just jump in to use the tool if it can help you.

I’ve also made a posting on the forum with a step by step method for using the article factory tool without spending a penny on domains or hosting or anything else that you can use to test niches for profitability and make some real money.

Again, this is with no strings, no fees, and you won’t be added to any lists.

If you’re a regular reader here then you probably know I’m not about exploiting people for my own gain, and despite having this blog about working and making money online I don’t really work in the “Make Money Online” market. My newsletter list readers know that my messages are always long and full of information, yet rarely contain any promotions at all.

The bottom line, whether you have faith in my sincerity or not, is that this is only about one thing to me and that’s giving a small gesture that I can to counter the malice of some others out there right now who will take advantage of these tough times.

I’m not promising riches and wealth… I’m not selling anything nor collecting leads.

I, and the group, am offering a useful tool along with a guide for 1 way that tool can be utilized to produce results. If you’re comfortable with using this kind of tool then bring a willingness to take action and give it a spin.

In these crappy times, that’s the best that I can do–but I hope it’s enough to help someone else along.

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Technorati Tags: article tool, content production, rewriting

I’m going to stray away from my normal topics today, because I had this conversation with a friend last night who is trying to create a career in writing for herself. She’s incredibly talented and has completed several full length novels, as well as numerous short stories and even a screenplay. Still, outside of her personal blog nobody knows about her or her writings.

Knowing what I do for a living she asked me for advice about promoting her writing online, and what follows is a summary of what I offered to her.

There’s two basic reasons people engage in article marketing. First, to promote (or market) their web sites and business. And second, to create a writing portfolio and readership following. This is widely underused by a lot of people, but there are many success stories–including pre-Internet times–that start with aspiring writers publishing articles to build their portfolios, reputations and readerships.

The Internet has just made this practice more accessible for unknown writers to carve out a niche for themselves, but with the new access and technologies comes additional responsibilities and requirements on the writer.

For example, many writers have developed their skills through rejections. Print editors often take the time to write a personal letter of rejection to an author they feel shows future promise, and include constructive criticisms that a smart writer can use to refine their talents.

With online publishing you don’t always have an editor between your writing and the public, and even when you do they rarely take time to offer more than a boiler-plate letter of acceptance or rejection. In other words, there’s less helpful rejection available to writers online and if something you create that really shouldn’t reach the public yet gets out there–there’s no taking it back.

Still, there’s ample opportunity for aspiring writers to use online publishing across platforms that accept free submissions, and even some that will pay small fees to authors for their works. And these platforms can build your reputation and readership following quickly.

As a brief example, some time back I was involved in a political project online and penned several articles about the current political climate in America. I published those articles as op-eds on a free, but trusted and respected platform.

Two of the pieces I wrote eventually reached the front page of Google news and resulted in thousands of visitors to our project web site, as well as hundreds of subscriptions to my personal author’s mailing list that the online publisher I used provided automatically to writers.

I never had any intentions of running a mailing list for this project and so never used that list, but imagine the power of gaining hundreds of mailing list subscriptions from just a few articles like that if political writings were my full time focus?

After a couple dozen quality articles I’d have had a huge, targeted mailing list where I could… sell my political book… promote my causes of choice… or just use the list numbers to convince publishers that they wanted to pay me to write for their brand. Any author who comes to a publisher’s door with an established following is not going to be turned away without a meeting.

I read the blogs of many talented people who want to make a career writing. Some writing fictional stories, some writing non-fiction and even some who are chasing the journalist bug. Unfortunately it seems a lot of them have focused strictly on their own blog as the only online publishing path to that goal.

I understand why that may seem viable, after all there are some pretty famous bloggers out there today who’ve seemingly done it this way. But they are the exceptions rather than the rule, and I bet if you did a little research you’d find most of them also published online in places other than just their blogs at some point.

I know the term, “Article Marketing” may conjure up images of online sleazy car salesmen for some. All I can say about that is the people I look at who’ve been successful all seem to get past that perception for themselves.

Writers are marketers, they always have been. That’s what those press junkets and book signings are all about. The bottom line is you could write the deepest, most inspirational prose to ever be composed but if nobody knows about it–nobody will read it. A writer has to market themselves, and online there’s no easier way for anyone to do that other than article marketing.

There are plenty of resources out there, many free to submit and some that will pay you a modest fee for submitting (never pay anyone to have your writings published!). Research them, find the ones that fit your genre and use them to your benefit. Provide your best efforts even though these aren’t going to be on your own web site or blog, because that’s what will bring you the best results.

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Technorati Tags: article marketing

For a long time people have been using other’s writings for content. I’m not talking about theft here, but rather the republishing of RSS content, articles from directories that have reprint rights attached and the likes. However, as search engines have become more aggressive in not giving weight (love) to sites using this type of content via what are referred to as duplicate content filters it has grown increasingly harder for webmasters to fill their site pages.

I’m not really going to touch on the moral or ethical questions over duplicate content too much. I tend to agree with the search engine positions for the most part, that republishing content just for the sake of “fluffing” up your web site page totals ultimately isn’t good for the end users and shouldn’t be rewarded in the SERPs.

That said, there are times and places where republishing other’s writings is absolutely ethical and warranted–and if done correctly shouldn’t cost the republishing site(s) any loss of favor among search engines.

Here’s one example. Lets say you have a site about Dye-Sublimation Heat Transfer Printing and you want to create a content page on a specific new model of Heat Press machines but haven’t actually used that model yourself, what can you do? Well, you could find what others have written and then just rewrite their opinions. That would give you original content in the search engine eyes, however it isn’t really original since you’ve just rewritten other’s works and it isn’t very ethical to do that.

Another option would be to pay someone to write the content for you. Again this leads to original content for you and is (if you hire the right person) going to be purely original and not a copy of other’s work. But, it can be costly to do if you want to build a lot of pages.

Or another option–and this is where an ethical use of republishing comes in–would be to collect 2 or more articles on the Heat Press model that have already been written by others and are available with reprint rights, place them all on your content page and then write an original and thorough summary introduction which clearly states that the following information has been collected (with permissions) from various sources in order to offer the reader a broad range of details and opinions on this new Heat Press model.

Make sure that your summary encompasses and explains what the reader will find in each individual article that follows, and what your thoughts on each article are. The goal isn’t to review each article you’re republishing further down the page, but to just summarize each one separately so that the reader can decide which one (or all) they think will best serve them to read.

In doing this you achieve several positive things with your page for yourself, the search engine bots and most importantly for your readers: The summary introduction is going to be at-least several paragraphs of original content at the beginning of the page, and that makes those search engine bots smile. By making the bots happy your pages will be more likely to get indexed and rank among the search engines (and not be ignored for the use of duplicate content), and you’ll not only be giving your readers relevant information on the topic, but choices of sources for the information that are well summarized to allow them to quickly get what they want or need from your page.

I know there are some who take a hard-line approach that any republishing of content is bad. I disagree with that to the extent that I think having 100 people all writing the same information–even in their own unique ways and writing voices–is equally congestive, not to mention the wasted time and energy of all those people testing and writing about the same thing. So, in my opinion when several sources already exist and can be used in a manner that doesn’t just collect and regurgitate, but actually adds something of value for the reader in presentation–as the summary introduction I’ve described does–I believe it is an ethical and correct application of reprint rights.

Still, if you’re absolutely against (or afraid of) republishing article content, this same method can still be used with a slight twist to build your site content pages. Simply find several articles on the subject that already exist, write extensive summary reviews of each article and instead of having the actual articles republished on your page, link to them as the original sources. Basically, you’re reviewing the individual articles for your readers and offering them the opportunity to read the original materials if they want. An important thing to remember is that in doing this you must write an actual review of each article and not just copy-n-paste from it and call that your summary. That’s unethical and will still be considered duplicate content, however an honest review in your own words of the author’s piece that includes a link to the original article is perfectly acceptable.

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Technorati Tags: Articles, content, duplicate

I read a great blog posting by Steven Aitchison this morning for beginning affiliate marketers titled “Your first $400 with Affiliate Marketing” where he really breaks down the entire process and clears up the misconception that only insiders with secret knowledge can make money through affiliate marketing.

I’ve linked to the posting above and really urge you to read it if you’re interested in affiliate marketing at all.

There are a few points I don’t necessarily agree with Steven on, for example I don’t think someone just starting out should stay away from certain markets like losing weight just because of the existing competition. In my experience, if you’re passionate and/or knowledgeable on any topic you can create content that builds a following of traffic to your site and converts into revenue for you. Seriously, if you’re really passionate about a topic you can bring something to the table that the most experienced marketers probably aren’t, and that will resonate with people online and allow you to carve a piece of the niche out for yourself.

Something that I don’t really disagree with anything Steven said on, but do think is a bad idea for someone just starting out is to use Google AdWords for driving traffic to your pages. Google AdWords can be a very effective way to gain visitors, but it’s a complicated system with literally tons of nuances that you must master before you’re going to do well with it. Most people lose a lot of money in the early stages on AdWords, and even experienced marketers will have campaigns from time to time that don’t break even. In my opinion, focusing more on some basic SEO for your site pages, perhaps generating some buzz for your site among online social communities and some free article marketing are the best methods for a beginner to use. Plus, the lessons you learn about your target market, site traffic (how it flows and converts), as well as how people are finding your site and responding to the content of your site and those articles you published will be of great value to you in moving forward for getting even more free (natural) search traffic and save you money on AdWords or other PPC campaigns you may run in the future.

Remember, article marketing is all about targeting keyword phrases that guide visitors to performing specific actions on your site (making a purchase). You can learn an awful lot about the market you’re trying to sell to and the keywords that work best if you track your articles, watch which ones generate the most traffic to your site and which ones tend to send the highest percentage of buying visitors to you.

One key point in Steven’s posting that I think everyone should read twice is the portion on Landing Pages. He not only hits the nail on the head in explaining what they are and how to best use them, but actually gives a live example. It’s rare for folks to share so much and I applaud Steven for his transparent approach here.

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Technorati Tags: AdWords, affiliate marketing, Steven Aitchison

ContentCaboodle.com is an article content directory that pays authors for submitting their quality articles. Its a great way for freelance writers or article marketers to add another stream of revenue to their article writings.

I’m really excited about this site. If you’ve visited my blog before you probably know that I make a large portion of my income with Internet Marketing through the use of article marketing. Its one of the fastest and easiest ways for reaching a targeted audience, and costs nothing to do.

Still, there are some draw-backs to article marketing. First, you’re creating quality content that gets published on a site you don’t own–and even if you get high click-thrus from your articles to your sites with Author’s Resource box links, you’ve still generated a fair bit of traffic that didn’t click-thru and benefit you for the publishing site. I’ve never really minded that as an article marketer, but I know a lot of people who do.

Another draw-back is that many Internet Marketers who use article marketing prefer to use direct affiliate links in their Author’s Resource boxes to avoid having to own and setup landing or sales pages and many article directories won’t allow these direct affiliate links anymore. Now, sometimes it pays to pre-sell traffic on your own pages, but if you’re promoting a product or service that already has a killer sales page you can drive traffic to its counter-productive to force visitors to make additional link clicks prior to converting.

This is what has me so excited about Content Caboodle, it addresses both of these issues perfectly.

Content Caboodle is paying authors for the page views their articles generate, so not only do you get the traffic that does click-thru to your own sites but you also earn revenue from all the traffic that visits your article pages on their site.

Also, Content Caboodle does allow direct affiliate links to be placed in the Author Resource boxes (though not in the article body text). This way article writers who want to send traffic straight to affiliate sales pages can do so.

Content Caboodle is new so the SEO benefits of publishing articles there may not be equal to some other article directories yet, but that will come naturally with time and meanwhile authors can earn some nice extra cash on this platform.

In the interest of full disclosure I want to make clear that my company is a financial supporter of ContentCaboodle.com and I personally have been closely associated with the planning, development and launch of this project. When the opportunity to become involved with a new article content platform opened up–given my personal interest in article marketing and article content directories–it was a no-brainer for me.

I believe we’ve created something that offers article writers an additional advantage and resource, and since I know many of my readers are also involved with article marketing I’d really appreciate hearing your feedback and suggestions for Content Caboodle.

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