New SEO tools – Unique Article Wizard and TextBroker
It’s been a while since I last wrote about how I go about doing my daily SEO efforts. As I pretty much spend all of my time outside work coding on my various projects, I struggle to find time and energy to do a lot of off-page optimization for my own sites. The core basics of the on-page optimization is already nailed pretty well on all my sites, but as most know by now it’s the off-page stuff that really makes the difference – especially when it comes to more competetive areas in search. Recently I have come across some new tools that seems to be doing all the work for me, with little effort and potentially great results.
Unique Article Wizard
Over at AntPhilosophy, Mikael Rieck mentioned Unique Article Wizard as he has decided to give it a try. He has written about his tests of the service and I got intrigued. Basically UAW is a article distribution service. You submit articles that you would like to have submitted and distributed out to sites that run articles on various subjects. You could do this yourself but it takes a lot of time, and you would not be able to get the spread that these guys can do. On my latest submission it went out to more than 900 sites and directories. Wouldn’t want to do that work manually 
The concept is quite simple and smart: When submitting an article you are asked to write three versions of the same article. Paragraph by paragraph you need to create three versions of the same text (in meaning). The same goes for title. So take an original article and paraphrase it twice. Same number of paragraphs with the same meaning kept in the other two versions – just using other words. As one of the big issues with article marketing is duplicate content – when you distribute the same article out to many sites, UAW is dealing with that by taking these three versions of the same article and combining the paragraphs into unique new articles. Let’s say you have written an article about “Places to buy dog food online” and it contains 8 paragraphs. You will then write two more versions of each paragraph. That means you now have 8 x 8 x 8 possible ways of combining those paragraphs into unique content/articles. Unique Article Wizard will do that for you – combined with the three (or more) different titles for the article that you submit. Not a bad approach to fighting the duplicate content issue, huh.
In each article you submit you can include a “resource box” which is a small piece of text that will be attached to the end of the article. It contains information about the author (you or your pseudonym) of the article. In this you can include up to two links that you completely control. You can create multiple resource boxes to be used on each submissions allowing you to spread the texts used as anchors. This is where the value of the article work is! This is your way of getting great keyword rich text backlinks to your site. All sites that run the article are forced to show this resource box along with the article and thereby giving you some good one-way links.
I signed up for the service early last week and with a 30-day money back guarantee I think of it as a risk-free bet.It costs $67/month so the results it brings better be good. Besides the article submission service, they also include a daily newsletter with some great tips on how to improve quality of your articles, seo and in general online marketing. Really good stuff.
TextBroker – article writing
Initially I thought I would write the articles I was going to submit myself, but actually realized that I didn’t have the time or the desire to do that, so instead I went hunting for people who would do that part of the work for me. Amongst others I found TextBroker and immediately liked the look and feel of their website. Went digging a bit more and found a lot of people saying good things about them. TextBroker is an online service for bringing people who are looking for writer together with *tada!* writers.
You create a job for an article you want written – you just need to define a title and any specific requirements you have, and it’s then published on their marketplace for the writers. A writer picks up the job and writes an article on the title you have provided. You can define deadline, word length, writing style, quality level and more for each job. On the first five articles I requested I got something back within 24 hours. And the quality so far have been nothing short of excellent! All of them were on SEO related topics, as I have started out with promoting my free SEO service. The articles I got back was really really good. Properly researched and written in a nice style. When creating a job on TextBroker you specify the quality of writer you want and that dictates the price of the work done. Basically they have set a price per word for each writer level (there are 4 – ranging from $0.010 to $0.067 per word). I have gone for the middle level paying $0.020. With articles of 300-400 words that comes out at $6-8 per article. I think that’s actually a very reasonable amount for the quality of articles I’m receiving.
The rookie mistakes
As I had found both services I was eager to get started, and quickly got an article written through TextBroker. An article on “Top 10 tips for better search engine rankings”. I went to Unique Article Wizard and started the submission process only to find out that my one article wasn’t enough. I needed the two rewrites as well. “*Sigh* – why didn’t I check that before I commisioned the article work?” So I had to write the two other versions myself as I didn’t wanted to pay 2 x $8 more. $24 for an article ready for distribution was too much.
Out of the first five articles I got through TB some of them were standing out in terms of writing style. They were both written by the same author, so I contacted the writer through TB and asked if the writer would be interested in writing more articles for me – but with the two rewrites included in each job. And I wanted the work done at a fixed price per article + rewrites. The writer was more than happy to do that and we agreed a price of $14 per article including the rewrites. This is a price point that works for me. I have just commisioned ten more articles from this writer and can’t wait to get them out through UAW.
One of the key things when working with articles is NOT to write about yourself and your awesome product or company. Write about stuff that people are actually looking for information on. Once you have given great advice or insights on a subject you can then let the reader know about your service or product through the resource box. That way you get quality traffic coming through as well as good inbound links. Double up on the good stuff
What about the results?
Like I said, I just joined UAW last week so it’s too early to tell whether this actually works in terms of generating better rankings for SEOsupporter, but so far I’m very optimistic. I have submitted two articles so far, and both have generated +10 links within the first two days. That’s 20 genuine one-way links with keyword rich anchor texts. And more will be coming as the articles are only submitted to maximum 50 sites every day – out of the +900 available. I will be monitoring my SERP rankings very closely the next weeks to see if any change happens on the targeted keywords – and in the mean time I will keep submitting new articles 1-2 times a week.
If you are willing to spend some money on your SEO, then I (for now at least ) recommend both Unique Article Wizard and TextBroker as a great way to get into article marketing.
Please post a comment if you have experience with any of them, or have questions.
Shopping domains for sale
Yesterday I spent some time running through my “ideas for projects” list and tried to weed out the ones I know I will never get around to doing. Out of that came a list of domain names I own, that I want to sell of. So here’s your chance to get your hands on some very nice Danish shopping domains.
All domains have been active for minimum 1 year and have content on them. Please keep in mind though that I’m only selling the domain name itself. No code will go with it.
Here are the domains:
- Billige-Ferier.dk
Minimum bid: DKK 5,000 - Billig-Fladskaerm.dk
Minimum bid: DKK 2,500 - Billige-Kameraer.dk
Minimum bid: DKK 3,000 - Billig-Laptop.dk
Minimum bid: DKK 3,500 - Billigt-Modetoej.dk
Minimum bid: DKK 3,000 - Billige-Sko.dk
Minimum bid: DKK 3,500 - Billig-Smykker.dk
Minimum bid: DKK 2,000 - Film-Online.dk
Minimum bid: DKK 2,000 - Film-Tilbud.dk
Minimum bid: DKK 2,000 - Gadgets-Tilbud.dk
Minimum bid: DKK 1,000 - Mp3-Afspiller.dk
Minimum bid: DKK 4,000 - Musik-Tilbud.dk
Minimum bid: DKK 3,000 - Online-Udsalg.dk
Minimum bid: DKK 3,000 - Tilbud-Dvd.dk
Minimum bid: DKK 2,500
Traffic data are of course available for all domains at request. Domains are currently hosted with One.com, but will be transferred to a host of your choice.
Bids are welcome on mail@kwigger.com or in the comments below.
Let the bidding begin
Krise hos TradeDoubler?
Der snakkes næsten ikke om andet end finanskrise for øjeblikket – især her i England, hvor den har ramt meget hårdere end i Danmark. Indtil fornylig synes jeg heller ikke jeg bemærkede nogen nedgang i forhold til de affiliate projekter jeg kører, men det har så sandelig nu ændret sig. Jeg har lagt mærke til at der er flere og flere af butikkerne hos TradeDoubler lukker deres affiliate programmer ned, med det resultat at jeg selvfølgelig har færre produkter at tilbyde de besøgende jeg tiltrækker til mine websites.
Normalt er den naturlig til- og fragang af butikker på TradeDoubler’s netværk, men indenfor de sidste tre måneder er det for alvor kun gået én vej – og det er nedad…
Her er butiksaktiviten på TradeDoubler siden starten af december 2008:
1. december: Fashion Factory lukker deres program
4. december: e-takeaway lukker deres program (grund: problemer med betalingerne)
11. december: e-sko.dk lukker deres program
11. december: your-sneakers.dk lukker deres program
30. december: Avis, Jubii Dating og Booking.com lukker deres program
Og jeg kunne blive ved…
Senest har ParfumePlus.dk, ÆrligeBent.dk og Lotteryuniverse valgt at lukke ned. Samlet set er det vel ca. en 15-20 butikker der er forsvundet fra TradeDoubler. I samme periode er der kommet en 7-8 nye butikker til. En noget skæv fordeling.
Gad vide om TradeDoubler’s dyre setup for butikker begynder at kunne mærkes?