Are you a spammer?

I know what you are thinking: “Of course I’m not – I go by the book, providing quality content on my site and getting backlinks in the most ethical way possible.”

Yeah, okay, fair enough. However, if you do any sort of link-building at all, you are artificially inflating your popularity and that is what Google is trying to stop. If you own a site, it’s unlikely that you have never dropped a link somewhere with the intention of appearing more popular in the search engines.

But don’t feel bad, this isn’t something that you created. It is all down to the fact that the search engines really don’t have any way to gauge popularity, other than tallying the amount, and quality, of links you get. Of course, this has lead to wide-spread abuse and attempts to game the system. Unfortunately, if you want any chance at all of competing, you are going to have to play the same game. Read the rest of this entry

A few years back, all you had to do to make money online was sign up to Clickbank and Ezinearticles, write a few articles with a link to your affiliate product, and wait for the cash to come in. Really, it was as simple as that. Times have changed, though.

These days, it has to be more thought out than that. I admit that a lot of times, I didn’t even bother choosing a keyword for my article – I simply created a flashy title, wrote a 300 word article, included a decent resource box, and managed to make sales from the initial burst of traffic from the article directory itself. Read the rest of this entry

There is no doubt that article directories are taking a more aggressive position when it comes to ads and revenue. Gone are the days where you submitted your work and you could expect a 40% CTR without too much trouble. Today, you are lucky if you break 20% after your reader navigates through the barrage of ads designed to attract their attention, sell them something, or get credit for an ad click. It is too obvious the last thing the directory owner wants is for the reader to click the link in  your resource box.

I miss the good old days when there was a little respect for the author. Sure, you had ads, but they were also fair about it and they gave you a fighting chance to persuade your reader to click on your link. Today, just about every article directory throws whatever they can in front of the reader before they hit the resource box. Read the rest of this entry