Work From Home Online Guide

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Article marketing is a labor-intensive but effective way to get keyword anchored backlinks to your site or sites. With article marketing, you write an original short article on a subject related to the site you want to promote, and submit it to an article directory or blog that specializes in publishing other bloggers’ content. It’s a fair deal: the publisher gets free content for his or her site, and in return you get a free do-follow backlink from their site to yours.

Article links don’t carry the highest weight with Google, but they aren’t devoid of juice, either. I can say after three months of it that the sites I’ve been marketing with articles are doing three times as well in both rankings and traffic than the sites with no articles. It works especially well in combination with other linkbuilding activities–article marketing gives you quantity while direct link exchanges give you quality.

To really make article marketing work for you, it’s best to get one of the monthly subscription services that will put your article through a spinner and then mass submit it to their network of sites. The spinner takes your writing and mixes it up so it’s fairly unique but still readable. The mass submitter frees up your time so you can do other things–like get more backlinks.

The two heavy hitters in the article subscription service world are Unique Article Wizard, and Article Marketing Automation. I’ve been a UAW subscriber for three months but recently switched over to AMA to compare how they perform for me. Here’s a quickie comparison of the two which I’ll update as my AMA articles make their way out to the internet.

Article quality: UAW reads better because you spin one paragraph at a time, instead of one sentence at a time. My UAW stuff reads like it’s not spun. With AMA you can only see the sentence you’re spinning so you’re going to get repeated words, especially nouns where there should be pronouns. Ugly, but you can clean it up afterward if you’re that picky (I am).

Article uniqueness: I ran my UAW stuff through Copyscape and am getting an average of 8 out of 40 spins per article flagged for duplicate content (not counting the unauthorized scraper sites). Duplicate passages run from 20 to 50 percent of the whole article. My AMAs are too new to check, but because they’re spun sentence by sentence, I’m guessing they’ll be much better than UAW, which gives me solid paragraphs of duplicate content.

Article network: I like UAW’s article directory network a lot. Some of the pages have retained PR of 1 and 2 long after they pick up my article (the page, not the entire site), although most of the pages are NA. It’s too early to tell with AMA, but if it’s all blogs, I’m going to be a bit skeptical of the quality until I see who’s picking me up. I also question whether the AMA network will pick up everything I submit. UAW’s network would really stretch to put my stuff on their sites. I’ll post more on this as soon as I see the AMA network in action.

Ease of use: I like AMA’s shorter length requirement. It’s easier to write 300 words than 500 words. And I like AMA’s sentence by sentence spinner better than UAW’s triple paragraph spinner, even though UAW produces prettier content. With AMA I just grit my teeth and pull toward the end, while with UAW I wonder if I’m ever going to see the end. Also, I found UAW’s resource box spinner really frustrating to use–I’d screw it up and then have to erase everything and start from scratch.

Link quality: it seems to be the consensus that AMA’s contextual link in the middle of an article packs more weight with Google than UAW’s resource box at the end. You can vary the anchor text of the links in AMA just like you can in UAW, but it’s even more complicated than UAW’s system. In AMA, you have to insert some fairly basic code, while UAW uses a copy-and-paste menu.

Price: At $47 a month AMA is $20 cheaper than UAW. If you click my affiliate link here, you can get 2 weeks to try AMA out for free by signing up to carry their articles on your WordPress blog. You don’t have to accept the articles for publication, just agree to receive submissions by email.

Verdict: If I could afford to have both and had time to take advantage of them, I’d do both, because the networks are so different. UAW has given me a few high-PR links, so I’m not dumping them for good, even though the balance of advantages goes to AMA.