Article Marketing - manual vs automated or both

[hawkvt1]

Hi Mozzers,

Are services such as Article Samurai or Content Crooner worth the time/effort/money?

On one hand, I cannot see them generating high quality links.  But , they may be able to help on the quantity side of the link building equation.

Does anyone have any thoughts or experience with automated article submission?

Thanks,

Peter

[TheGrid]

The problem with all of this is that "automation" can lead to just about anything depending on the service you use. It IS possible to get an effective number of anchor text and contextual links with the right set up, especially if you generate your own link network that only you use, but then you have the problem of dupe content. The RIGHT way to do it is far too time consuming to make it worth your while unless you can find a legit link builder/article writer  on odesk that will make the time/cost problem go away, but even then they usually don't speak English as a first language and you end up spending a lot of time rewriting the articles because the grammar and syntax is absurd..

Also what does

"Searching for your exact topic in Google, and finding incomplete resources.  Ask them for links" mean? I didn't understand what you meant by incomplete resources. Thanks

[ResslerMotors]

There are blogs out there on how to use code on Google Docs to pretty much automate most of this process.

[hawkvt1]

I think this answer is spot-on and voices one of my deeper concerns that has been lurking in my mind:  relevancy.  Automated submission does not take this factor into account and non-relevant links will hurt in the long term as it is not a natural link profile.

I think the answer to off-load some work is outsourcing which if performed in proper fashion might be the way to go.  All of your answers have helped point me in this direction.  If I build a list of potential candidates, write the intro email etc...but outsource the actual sending of requests, this can help give me some extra hours during the week.

Thanks everyone.

[ResslerMotors]

Much better answer to the actual question!

[poolguy]

I have a client where 95%+ of their backlinks are from low-quality directories, articles, and automated link-exchanges.  They built all of these before I came on board.  This has caused long-term damage to their backlink profile and the rankings are not better because of the time/money spent.  Their quantity of links is high.  Quality LOW.  Not only am I building high-quality, legit links to the site, but I've been actively trying to remove some of low-quality links they had previously obtained.

I work with another site that is newer, music related.  We do NOT have a high "quantity" of links coming in, but they are all extremely natural and relevant with lots of branded anchor text.  We have pages with 25 domains linking in and we're outranking other pages (for very competitive terms) that have 10 times that.  We've never done any automated link-building of any kind.

So for me personally and the things I've witnessed, it is a complete waste of time and money to be going for low-quality links.

And when I say "low-quality", I don't mean a low Page Authority or a Google PageRank of zero or only a handful of backlinks pointing in.  I'm referring to web pages that have...

SPAM!!

• links that are easy to obtain
• links out to sites having anything to do with sofware stuff, web design, computer whatever, directories, loans, ppc, anything with "ads" in it, employment sites, insurance sites, etc etc
• backlinks based on automated services

But I have to say, if you do go this route, make sure you get plenty of branded anchor text, it will help you in the long run.

This is just my opinion.  There are lots of people using automated services.  Maybe an SEOmoz member can chime in with a recent success story regarding automated article submission?

[SteveOllington]

If you use automatic submission you're faced with a problem. Duplicate content. If you want to get around the duplicate content problem then you're faced with another problem, you have to use article spinning. Both of which are not good. Aside from that, the majority of the sites the auto software's submit to won't end up giving you any links and your article will still read with visibile, non-working html code in it, of the ones that do give you a link it will be either nofollow, or pass zero of anything to you because it's spammed to hell with millions of articles for being one of the few article sites that allow follow links.

Now, there might be a few sites that pass juice, but that will be because of quality levels in what they publish. So submitting to them would have to be manual only, as there's no way any auto software would get your article into a site like that.

[hawkvt1]

Thanks Ressler!  All good advice in terms of manual submission.  Regarding the duplicate content issue, I know Article Samurai guarantees this won't be an issue as they do have a spinning component as part of their service.

I'm just considering this as a way of generating quantity links while I work on the quality links using the methods you listed above.

Nothing's easy in this effort but if I can either automate some of this workload or outsource the quantity aspect of link building, I can maximize my efforts with a little bit of scale.

Thanks again

[ResslerMotors]

Article submission used to be the bees-knees (is that how the phrase is spelled?  Anyway...).  However, what you will really generate is a whole bucket load of duplicate content on the web.  To make matters worse, it's unlikely your articles will get picked up.

A better use of time is:

1. writing fantastic copy, citing sources with followed links (welcome back to high school!).
2. Emailing people in, or remotely in your industry (Real Estate Agent - property lawyer, house insurance, home inspector, etc.) and suggesting how useful this article might be to their clients.
3. Placing article on Digg, Reddit, Twitter, Facebook hoping some news companies see it, and pick it up.
4. Looking on Haro (http://www.helpareporter.com/) to see if anyone is writing about your topic, and needs a source.
5. Searching for your exact topic in Google, and finding incomplete resources.  Ask them for links
6. Make friends in some news departments, try get them to link to you (give them a couple stories every once in a while, and they will help you out).