Life as I find it

Ok, so you have heard that the best way to gain loads of inbound links is to write articles and publish them to article directories, so that they link to your site and bring you traffic and quality inbound links. You want those. You are willing to scribble out a few articles for that (or pay someone else to scribble them for you). However, you want those submissions to be really good, not penalized for spam.

Another feverish google hunt, multiple windows open, frantic scanning through pages to get that elusive “magic key” that will sort life out for you. Some article submission software, some article writing service….. Wait my friend, you’re on the right page. Now take a deep breath, and actually read what you have found, rather than run your eyes through this page and forget everything in a minute.

Think clearly. Why do you think Original content is valued? Submitting one article to a hundred places does not make content links. Logically, the whole piece of blood and sweat is reduced to link text - not content links. So now, what do we do? We want to get links, links…….

We do things slower and better. One article at a time. Original content each time. This is how we do it:

1. Pick a subject you get enthusiastic and talk about for hours until someone shuts you up.
2. Now, instead of talking, write/type. Ramble. Write loads, change tracks, moods, forget the original point, come back to it, whatever. Never mind the length of it. No one is shutting you up. Write till you’re done on the subject.
3. Go out for a coffee or smoke or whatever. Give your fingers a break.
4. Come back and scan through what you’ve written. No need for detailed reading, just get a rough idea of the different moods, tracks, subjects, etc.
5. Create copies of your original work and rename them to one of the different elements you found - “angry” “moody” “funny” and/or “environment” “trees” “plastic” “recycling” “anecdote” etc.
6. What we will be doing is creating a whole variety of articles from that burst of eloquence your friends shut you up for.
7. Look at the name of the file and remember that this is an EDIT. Be fast and ruthless. No getting into poetry now. Get rid of everything that doesn’t fit that title and smoothen and fit together everything that does. Mostly, you’ll find one huge chunk written together, with bits and pieces to add from in other place.
8. This is also an excellent time to take a look at the spelling and grammar. Done.
9. Do the same with each different label and edit that massive piece down to humane lengths each time - it can be a good idea to have a target word count and ruthlessly fit the edit into it.
10. Don’t worry about some parts being repeated in some versions or stuff, unless there really is a huge chunk of text that gets repeated as it (which sounds like your original ramblings were not particularly varied or long enough).

Voila. Done right, this can give you 20 seemingly original articles in the effort it takes to write three from scratch. Of course it is more effort than you ever took to write one article, but remember this isn’t one article? In fact, I have used this technique to create an entire category of articles to keep together. Done right, they are all highly individual and have their own focus and tone.

Now for the submission. You could use software, but where is the point in using a special software to submit one article to each site. Its faster to do it like this:

1. Create some dummy email address and figure out a user name and password you can live with.
2. Do a google search for article directories in a tabbed browser - Firefox is excellent. Open the first 10-20-30-50 whatever number you are greedy enough for in tabs. I have never used more than the first 20 results, but feel free. Feel free to open another heavily tabbed window for the same purpose too. Go to Bookmarks and select bookmark all tabs. Label the folder something like “Article submission” (or the username and password :P)
3. Go through all the windows one by one and create accounts with the email user name and password you had thought of. You will find that most of their register pages are exactly the same and “autofill” can handle this easily.
4. Open that email account and activate all of those registrations.
5. Submit each of those articles to different sites. I guess you could repeat some of them if you run out of articles before you run out of sites, but I usually don’t do it. I just close the other windows and keep them for another day.

With this method, I find that my content links are nicely respected, even if those articles get picked up by other sites, since the number of duplicates is comparatively lower.

When I next want to submit articles, its a simple matter of going to bookmarks and opening all links from that folder in tabs. Of course, after so many registrations, I’m unlikely to have forgotten the ARTICLE SUBMISSION name, email and password.

Please note that even with article submission software, you would have to create accounts in the directories (promoted by the software rather than search engine) anyway.