In terms of these requirements, blog networks may just be the perfect link-building tool. In this article, I explain what blog networks are, how they work and what their benefits and drawbacks tend to be.

Note: Among the Web2Mayhem videos, there’s also a brief explanation of blog networks.

What is a Blog Network?

As the name implies, it’s a network of blogs. These blogs are all connected to one central hub, your “blog network provider”, if you will. This is usually a fairly expensive paid service that you need to sign up for (more on that, later).

What the blog network does for you is that it allows you to publish articles to lots and lots of blogs.

It usually goes like this: You log in and submit a new article, after picking an appropriate category, entering some tags and inserting a few links into the article body. This article is then sent out to and published on lots of blogs that match the subject of your article (i.e. a health-related article is posted to health-related blogs).

Using a blog network for link building is a bit like article marketing using free article directories, then. Except that it’s way better.

Benefits of Blog Networks

Here are the major advantages that blog networks offer over other kinds of link-building and article marketing:

• Full Control Over Anchor Texts
  You get to choose the desired anchor text and link location and you can also set up different variations of the anchor text (using spinning syntax) to make your link profile look more natural.
• Fewer Restrictions
  Many article directories are very strict about what kind of content they allow. They also usually don’t let you place links within the article body and are restrictive about what you’re allowed to put in your author box, where links are allowed. On blog networks, there are also rules about what you are allowed to post, but it’s much easier to “get away” with salesy content and there are generally fewer restrictions.
• More Links
  Submit your article to an article directory and you get one, maybe two links from the resource box. Submit an article to a blog network and you will see your article published to dozens, if not hundreds of sites, receiving new backlinks every time.

The Receiving End

You might be wondering where all those blogs in the network are coming from. The answer is simple: Each blog network allows you to “plug in” your own sites as well, to receive content from others.

The benefit of doing this is that the sites you plug into the network will then have lots of new content posted to them, all of it relevant to the subject of the sites. In other words, it’s a form of auto-blogging. Of course, those posts contain links to other people’s sites, but you can still monetize the surroundings of the post contents (with AdSense, banners,…). This way, you can conceivably set up a few dozen auto-blogs that will eventually generate some passive income thanks to the constant influx of fresh content.

Downsides of this System?

There can be a few drawbacks to blog networks, but this depends greatly on the network in question. For example, poor moderation and quality control can lead to a network being spammed by very low-quality content with links to porn-sites, viagra-spam etc. This makes the network as a whole suffer, since the auto-blogging end of it only works as long as the content is decent.

Conversely, the quality of the backlinks can suffer if there is poor moderation going on. Links from a bunch of sites that have been flooded and bogged down with spam will likely not help your sites at all (especially if the sites get de-indexed because of the spam).

In short: For a good blog network, good moderation is crucial.

In Conclusion

Blog networks provide a very powerful way to build backlinks and as long as the quality of the network is good, this is definitely a top-notch SEO tool to make use of.

Cheers,

Incoming search terms for the article:

• article networks
• blog networks
• blog networks for link building
• postrunner com what is
• link building network of blogs
• jason venters
• is postrunner a scam
• http://postrunner com
• blog networks backlinks
• blog networks articles reviews posting submission seo

While I’m generally not a big fan of article spinning, I still make use of the technique here and there and I’m still going to be testing article marketing and rewriting software. Enter the CRewriter. This is an online application that you can use to make the article spinning process a bit simpler. Best of all, this tool is completely free to use.

Below, you’ll find a video showing the CRewriter in action and some more details about what it does and where you can find it.

Video

Check out this video to see how to use the CRewriter:

–

Summary/Conclusion

The CRewriter is a very neat tool that basically inserts the spinning syntax (curly brackets and pipes) for you. You still have to do the actual rewriting yourself and that’s a good thing, because it means no one is going to create horribly unreadable garbage like most automatic spinners produce.

Most importantly, CRewriter lets you enter alternatives for entire sentences or any amount of text you like and it supports nested spinning. If you are serious about rewriting complete articles, you’ll get the best results by starting out with spinning large sections of text and then spinning sentences and words within those variations. This will result in the best kind of unique articles, if you can keep the overview over what you’ve spun and how the variations come together.

If it could handle larger portions of text without slowing down, this would be a flawless little tool. As it is, it’s still amazing value considering that it’s free to use.

What are your experiences with article spinning? Do you know and/or use tools like the one above or do you know a better one, perhaps? I’d love to hear your take on this!

Cheers,

Incoming search terms for the article:

• crewriter
• free article spinning tool
• free automatic spinner
• free online article spinner
• free article spinner
• crewriter source
• free automatic article spinner
• free article spinning
• free automated article spinner
• online article spinner

As mentioned in the video, I’d love to hear what your take on this whole content spinning thing is and if your experience has been different from mine, I’d be very interested to know in learning more about it.

Cheers,

Incoming search terms for the article:

• Concept Testing Market Research

Squidoo is a very popular article database. Actually, calling it an article database is a complete understatement. While the underlying principle is similar to that of an article database – you can register, publish your own content and also link back to your websites – Squidoo has a lot more to offer. What mainly sets it apart is that you can add a lot of multimedia and interactive elements to each of your pages (called “lenses” on Squidoo). From images and slideshows to videos, polls and digg-like voting elements, there is a huge selection of fun stuff you can add to each of your lenses.

Since Squidoo even allows affiliate links and encourages it’s users to make money (there’s a revenue sharing model), it’s a great resource for every online marketer or article marketer. I’ve put together a series of instructional videos that go into some detail on how to build a lens, how to add in multimedia elements and how to promote the lens to get more visitors and clicks.

You have two options to see my videos.

Option Nr. 1: You can see the entire Squidoo Video Tutorial playlist on YouTube.

Option Nr. 2: Watch any or all of the videos embedded below.

–

Video 01: How to Build a Squidoo Lens

(That is not a very charming look I have on my face in this Thumbnail…)

–

(Also check out my written report on the top ranked Squidoo lenses.)

–

–

And here’s the link to that nifty little HTML-writer: Arachnophilia

–

–

–

–

And that’s it for my first round of Squidoo tutorials. I’ll probably revisit this subject sometime in the future, but for right now, I’m moving on to the next subject.

If you liked these videos, please take a second to rate some of them. I would really appreciate that. Thanks!

All the best,

Incoming search terms for the article:

• squidoo video training class
• squidoo tutorial video
• best squidoo training courses
• video post video tutorials
• video post tutorial
• squidoo video
• Squidoo to the Top video course
• SQUIDDO VIDEO
• massive video youtube seo
• massive video tutorial

In a nutshell, article marketing is the practice of promoting a website or a product by writing articles and submitting them all over the internet. Read up on all the background info on article marketing, the benefits and drawbacks and why you should (or shouldn’t) start with it.

Example

Let’s start off with a practical example of one “instance” of article marketing, so to speak:

1. You write an article about a subject that is related to the product you are selling or the website you are promoting.
2. You add some relevant links to this article. Most typically these would be links to pages on your website.
3. You submit this article to a public, online article database.
4. Rinse and repeat.

That’s basically it. That’s what you do as an article marketer.

Benefits

• It’s free.
  Article marketing costs you nothing but time. Submitting articles to article databases is completely free.
• Links.
  You can place links in your articles. Depending on where you want to submit them, there may be some limitations as to what kind of links you can place or where you can place them, but you can always place some type of link somewhere in the article. If you link back to your own website, it can increase your traffic, because people who read your article and like it might click through.
• Page-Rank.
  One of the factors that will increase your website’s page-rank is how many links from other websites point to yours. Since you can place links in the articles, that number will climb with every new article you publish, which in turn can increase the page-rank of your website.
• Keyword targeting.
  Some article databases tend to rank very highly in search engine results. It might be very difficult for you to get your own website into the top results for your targeted keyword, but a well-placed article can get there more easily. If that article contains links to your website, then that’s almost as good as having your website itself rank in the top results.
• Branding.
  If you put enough work in and generate enough quality articles, you can get known among the frequent visitors of a database. This can help you towards building a personal brand.
• Indexing.
  If you have launched a new website, one of the fastest ways to get new visitors and to get the site indexed by search engines is to publish a handful of articles containing links to your site. Since the popular article databases are frequently crawled by search engine bots, your article will be picked up soon and a bot will follow the link to your website. This is much faster than submitting your site to the search engines and waiting for them to get around to indexing it.

Drawbacks

• It’s time-intensive.
  Writing a good article – one that is really worth reading and that will attract many readers and also motivate them to follow the link to your website – is a time-consuming task.
• It takes a lot of persistence.
  Your first article will not get many views and will not do anything for your page rank. The same goes for the next few articles your write. You will probably need to spend countless hours writing and publishing articles before you ever see distinct benefits from it (i.e. increased traffic and more sales).
• You’re spreading around content that could be a valuable addition to your own website.
  You need to keep a good balance between publishing on article sites and publishing on your own website. If you spend all your time writing for article databases but neglect your own site, you might generate a lot of traffic but the visitors will leave your site again immediately, seeing that it’s practically empty.

Where to Publish

The most popular and most highly ranked article databases are Squidoo and ezinearticles. Goarticles and Hubpages are also among the more frequently mentioned sites. Those are by far not the only choices, though. Click here to see a large list of the most popular article databases online.

Make sure to read the terms of agreement carefully, before you start writing for any of these databases. Because article databases are such an easy and free tool for marketing, they all take measures to prevent spam. You can’t get away with blatant advertising on any of them and most of them don’t allow you to publish any material on certain subjects. So make sure your niche isn’t on that list before you start writing. Generally, you have to provide good, readable, valuable and original content, otherwise you will not be published on the sites.

And that’s all the basics on article marketing. Give it a try, don’t give up after just a few articles and see what it can do for your traffic.

All the best,