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6:46 pm
June 10, 2011
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QuoteHello,
So I have this terrible problem: I spend way too much time on my marketing articles. I have a really hard time not treating them with the same level of depth that I do my regular blog posts. Part of the problem is just that I love learning about music and the history, various connections, etc. so even when I have a short, easy to put together marketing article in my head, I go to do the basic research and 2 hours later I'm still reading about some tangent, and my goal of writing 4 articles in an hour is trashed.
Obviously I just need to focus better, but it has got me thinking about getting the most from my articles with the least effort. About 6 months ago I experimented with an "article spinner" service for some affiliate marketing I was doing at the time - it basically takes your articles and rearranges and rewords so that you get a "unique" article without having to actually write it.
My experience at that time was that the resulting spun article sounded like it was written by Borat and I'd end up spending so much time fixing the bizzarro syntax that I could have just written a paraphrased article by hand. Needless to say I dropped that experiment pretty fast.
But... now I'm wondering. These spinning services and softwares exist, so somebody must be getting something out of them. Is anybody here effectively spinning articles? Any opinions pro or con on the practice in general?
7:59 am
June 7, 2011
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Hi Daniel,
I would stay away from Spinners. They can be used to make intelligent articles but the issue is that too much of the article is unoriginal. Ezine Articles won't accept an article if they detect this with copyscape, and as Google constantly updates their algorithm to favor original content, you run the risk of having all of your traffic shut off at some point because of an algorithm shift.
My advice is to simply focus on getting a solid system in place, and once you have determined that it's profitable, outsource it. You might even try putting some training videos together and then seeing if you can't get your street team to do it for you. Maybe even an intern. Just ideas.
Having trouble with your marketing? Wish you could have an experienced direct-to-fan marketing expert look over your actual campaigns, music, or content and offer feedback? Or perhaps you’re just looking for a little one-on-one assistance so you can ask questions that pertain to your specific goals and get a second, more experienced, perspective? Click here to book a session with me now.
8:10 am
June 10, 2011
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Cool. I was guessing as much. Shortcuts are never as short as they are made out to be. Thanks for the info John.
8:25 am
June 7, 2011
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When in doubt, just ask yourself what you results you would want to favor if you were Google and you'll be fine. They are trying to reward original quality content.
Having trouble with your marketing? Wish you could have an experienced direct-to-fan marketing expert look over your actual campaigns, music, or content and offer feedback? Or perhaps you’re just looking for a little one-on-one assistance so you can ask questions that pertain to your specific goals and get a second, more experienced, perspective? Click here to book a session with me now.
12:59 pm
June 9, 2011
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Daniel,
My only experience with article spinners is that a few people have spun one of my articles over the last year and I'm kind of pissed about it.
They are blatant copies of the article with a couple of words changed. In fact some of the substituted words don't even make sense contextually, but because it's a well written article to begin with, even the bad copies are ranking for the keywords I used.
The shitty part is that they pillage my resource box and put in self-serving links, never giving me credit as the original author.
So I don't like them. I politely notified a couple of the "authors" and asked that they either create an original work or politely take the article down, and I go no response. What was really frustrating is that I then submitted DMCA compaints, but was told that they "could not see the plagiarism".
Really?
So my thoughts on article spinners is that they suck and so does the DMCA process. 🙂
3:08 pm
June 10, 2011
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Wow Steve that does suck. Well, I'm glad I asked the question then. At least now if another Insider Circle member is curious about spinners and searches the forum they will get some pretty definitive answers. Yeah the one time I tried one was to spin my own articles and it was just crappy and didn't save me any work anyway.
There is one thing I'm not clear on. Is it cool to submit the same original article to multiple article site, or say both EZA and a blog? I've heard people say submit to EZA first because they will get the best rank, etc.
4:29 pm
June 9, 2011
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Daniel,
On one hand, yes it's cool because not everybody finds their articles from the same places.
On the other hand, it is best to change things up a little (alter the title, rearrange paragraphs)
For instance, if you're doing a "top 5 tings" type article, sometimes it's good to take part of the article and submit it elsewhere as a "top 3 things" article.
A good approach is EZA and then your blog. Then ping the rss feed from your blog to get the article out to other places.
It's far better to have other websites syndicate your work and trackback to your site than to shot-gun the same content out there over and over.
10:10 am
June 7, 2011
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Daniel Crandall said:
I tried one was to spin my own articles and it was just crappy and didn't save me any work anyway.
There is one thing I'm not clear on. Is it cool to submit the same original article to multiple article site, or say both EZA and a blog? I've heard people say submit to EZA first because they will get the best rank, etc.
There are definitely different schools of thought on this and there is not an absolutely Right or Wrong answer. Some people post on EZA and their blog, others distribute to as many sites as possible.
Here is my opinion... The recent Google algorithm update attempted to thin out the search engine's real estate by sending all duplicate content into the "supplementary index", a search engine's no man's land. The consensus seems to be that they are crediting the original publication for the content. That means that you want the site with the highest page rank to be the site that first publishes the article.
Publishing the article on your blog or in other directories because it may still show up for long tail queries bases on additional content that exists on each different site, but it might also hurt the uniqueness of your site in Google's eyes.
The reality is that everyone is guessing when it comes to Google's algorithm, and even if something is true, it doesn't mean that it's ALWAYS true so my guess is just about any technique can work.
But I have personally decided to go with unique content where ever I can. It's the most natural approach and that's what Google ultimately wants. A lot of people were hurt recently when Google updated their algorithm and they suddenly lost a huge portion of their traffic that came from duplicate content. People are now figuring out workarounds, but I figure Google will constantly be updating things and I'd rather play it safe by avoiding short cuts. Unique quality content will always be rewarded.
Having trouble with your marketing? Wish you could have an experienced direct-to-fan marketing expert look over your actual campaigns, music, or content and offer feedback? Or perhaps you’re just looking for a little one-on-one assistance so you can ask questions that pertain to your specific goals and get a second, more experienced, perspective? Click here to book a session with me now.
2:36 pm
August 27, 2011
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I'm against using spinners as well, they seem to be more hassle than they're worth. Most of the strategy around them is for getting backlinks by attempting to use them to prop up secondary sites (like Hubpages or Squidoo etc) that point back to your site.
Your original problem is that you're finding it too long to write an article, might I suggest that you start working to a timer?
I'm a lot like you and tend to spend more time than I need to writing/researching. Instead of sitting down with the notion of just writing an article about a certain topic, don't start work without having a focused plan something like this (just a random example).
Write article on music for meditation
- research topic + keywords (10 minutes)
- write article (20 minutes)
All you need is an egg timer or some sort of digital countdown timer/stop watch - or the equivalent online. Focus intently and when that buzzer goes off - stop no matter how far you are and move on to the next task. This will train you to be more effective with your time.
Do not edit as you go - just write as fast as you can. When the timer sounds, put it aside and look at it the next day and finish the article (if need be) and make any edits that you need to do.
At first this will feel very unnatural to you, but you'll build up a habit of creating content that's probably just as good as what you do now but with far more quantity. With time you'll speed up, and it almost becomes a game of writing against the clock.
Most of the time management stuff I've learned boils down to having a set goal in mind and a timer to 'keep you honest' before you even sit down and have the chance to be distracted by the 1001 things on the internet (email, stats, social media).
Ed Dale shared something called "Free Writing" during last years Challenge that makes this a 30 minute daily activity by breaking it down like this:
- 10 Minutes of research reading targeted blogs to fuel up your creativity
- 10 minutes to write whatever you're most inspired to write about at that time
- 10 minutes to edit/publish what you wrote from the previous day.
This allows you to have a near-constant stream of content that you can use on your blog, article directories, pdf sharing sites - whatever.
If you have more time than 30 minutes a day - even better. Just make sure you are focused on a specific task and use a timer - otherwise you'll find that your task expands in direct proportion to the amount of available time you have.
Hope this helps!
6:42 am
June 10, 2011
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Thanks for the tips Mike. Yeah I definitely need to train myself to work faster writing articles for EZA. I'm absolutely going to staring doing the timer thing. Other people have mentioned that to me as well.
I don't mind spending a lot of time when I write for my blog because I don't post all that frequently (or even regularly lately) so I try to get it as right as I can most of the time.
But for article marketing with EZA it seem like it's kind of a battle of attrition - and I haven't been successful at generating the volume of articles needed to really kickstart this strategy.
It's a lot easier when I'm writing for my non-music marketing projects because I don't feel as connected to those and am perfectly happy getting it 80% there and hitting publish. As with everything though, and as John has said many times, it's all about developing a system and a routine.
12:36 pm
August 27, 2011
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Yeah, it's all about creating some momentum - but first starting up a new (and positive) habit is when it's the hardest.
One thing that I read about that really inspired me came from a book called The Answer that is co-written by John Assaraf. He mentions that an experiment was done on astronauts where the view from their visor was flipped so that everything would be upside down.
The astronauts had to work and live like that for 24 hours a day. Do you know what happened?
After 26 days - one astronaut had developed the ability to see everything as 'right side up' again, even though the visor was unchanged.
After 30 days - the rest of the astronauts had caught up, developing the same ability.
However, anyone who didn't stay immersed in the 'upside down visor' experiment (i.e. took the visor off and saw normally for even a short while) didn't develop this ability.
As has been repeated in this forum numerous times - this is simple stuff, but it isn't easy. It takes the commitment to push through our bad habits and comfort levels, get through the 'pain' of adjusting to something new. The difference between those who do succeed and those who don't are the successful are willing to pay the price to get to the prize and the others give up or 'take a break' and don't get the full benefits of immersion.
That's the good thing about the Free Writing concept I outlined - it's a very simple and relatively 'pain-free' way to develop a good habit. Having said that - I'm still not as consistent as I'd like.
You have a decent amount of posts already on this forum, so I don't think writing is the problem in your case.
Lastly, there's a saying that I'm really embracing because I think it's something that really affects us creative types:
- Progress not Perfection (is one Eben Pagan uses)
- Action is the highest form of achievement - perfection is the lowest. This means that we (as creators) need to put more weight upon the action of creating and sharing (in your case the number of articles written) rather than our own subjective opinion on whether it's good enough.
This is all mindset stuff - so I apologize if it's off topic, I think it's relevant. Maybe we could use a mindset section in forum?
9:16 pm
June 9, 2011
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Mike Ippersiel said:
Yeah, it's all about creating some momentum - but first starting up a new (and positive) habit is when it's the hardest.
This is all mindset stuff – so I apologize if it's off topic, I think it's relevant. Maybe we could use a mindset section in forum?
I'm all for that!
-Steve
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