Article submitting

Yesterday I was mainly working on a top 10 photography tips article. According to some info by Daniel Wagner that I heard recently, the idea is that you write an article and submit it to high PR and traffic article directories. Then you create audio, video, PDF, and slide versions of the same article and submit them to their relevant high PR and traffic directory style sites. This is meant to be an easy way to boost your SEO.

Well, it took me over a day to write the article, and then when I'd finished I realised it was far too long. So I cut it down to 5 top tips and can either use the 10 tips version for a free opt-in PDF or cut it up into other articles.

Submitting the article to the article directories isn't as simple as it sounds as they have various regulations about the number of links in an article, what HTML is allowed, and whether images are allowed.

I only submitted the article to articlesbase.com and ezinearticles.com, but both have different requirements. If you were just writing a plain text article, with <strong> tags used for headlines then submitting to the article directories would be easy.

Since I was writing about photography, I had included a lot of CC licensed flickr photos in my article, and so each of these also linked back and included text links back to flickr. But due to the article directories only allowing 3-4 links in an article, I had to remove all these photos.

I also made a squidoo page, which thankfully lets you use as many images and links as you want. However, it inserts HTML line breaks where you have a text line break in your HTML code. So I had to remove all line breaks from my HTML code. I also had to insert each section as a different block in squidoo. I added some Amazon and ebay ad blocks to my squidoo version of the article as well.

There was also a problem with squidoo that when I set my account up I hadn't actually set up a mailbox for the email address I registered with. And squidoo requires you to validate your email address before you can publish an article. So I set my mailbox up and made sure the email could send and receive okay.

But when I used the link on squidoo to resend my validation email, I never received anything. I tried a few times and decided to wait in case it was just really slow.

That took all morning and afternoon. In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek TOS with Mauser and Lad.

I checked my email for the squidoo confirmation email again, but still hadn't received anything. So I changed the email address in squidoo to my standard one, and this time the resend validation worked. So I validated my email and published the article.

I set up a facebook fanpage for the website as well, then started converting the article to a PDF. Again, because the article wasn't just plain text, this was quite a bit of work. I tried to resize and re-arrange some of the photos and text so the document would flow nicely, instead of have a line of text about a photo on one page and then a large space and the photo on the next page.

While I was doing this I was also listening to (and occasionally watching) a webinar by Daniel Wagner. The title of the webinar was something like 'What to do and what not to do to make money online in 2010'. But actually all it covered was Daniel's membership site 6 figure mentors. There was no useful content at all. It seems that Daniel's idea for what to do for success in 2011 is that you should join his membership site, and what not to do is miss out on joining his membership site.

The fact that he has integrated a ponzi / pyramid scheme (make money for referring new members and any members they refer etc.) into the site makes it less appealing in my opinion than a standard affiliate program as ponzi schemes tend to be those used by fraudsters.