Offers which aren't SEO friendly to you; Article Marketing pays off - a little

Two topics today.

One was an offer I received recently and ultimately turned down. It was cash money on the barrel-head to put simple text links on three pages I had. A one-shot payment just to keep about five links there. When I said I'd like to have "no follow" links to preserve my own page rank, this was where the deal fell through.

I've gone over this before. Every link on your site should be monetized. Either to your products or to affiliate links. (And affiliate links are "cloaked" in meta-refresh from your own page so that people can't easily take you out of the food-chain.") All out-going links are "no follow" so that the spiders don't take your pagerank and give it to someone else. Your products will/should give you repeat sales. Affiliate products should give you income for every lead you send their way.

That offer fell through on two points - she wanted my page rank, and I had only a single time to monetize those links. Literally, that deal sucked (pagerank and income). What should would have had to do to get the sale was give me a decent affiliate percentage from her sales, not just offer to siphon off my pagerank.

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Better news - just ran SERP Scope (from iBizResearch), which is a nice little program. Ran it on my main site and found that I get some 1200 links from about 7 article directories plus my Lulu storefront. Fascinating. These are PR 3-6, so that's some nice PR coinage I've just invested in my own site.

For all the hundreds of article directories I've submitted to, its interesting that only 7 show up with recurring links - meaning I've got some sites with automatic no-follow and should quit submitting to these if I also don't get subscribers. Interestingly, I get more subscribers from Lulu.com book sales pages than I do from articles. And only about 7 unique article directories are sending me traffic to my most popular opt-in. (Lulu IS PR7, afterall...)

I've only got about 7 months of statistics, since they either weren't turned on, or I wasn't live then. But I can already see what articles I should "republish" to top directories and which should be part of an ebook of "greatest hits".

So articles are interesting in that you want to submit to the top few and to the lower many as well. That way, you can see what your best articles actually bring you traffic and where there is a possible few article directories which are sending you page rank.

The reasons you submit articles are mainly:

1. Get credibility (increased Google standings)
   
2. Get subscribers.
3. Get pagerank.

If article directories aren't doing one of the above, then you may want to weed a bit. If I'm getting subscribers, then I don't care if they don't show up sending me page rank. If I'm getting pagerank, then they also should stay on that list. But that last one is also where my credibility is coming from (although you can search on Google to find the top twenty or so that are sending you robot links - even though they aren't sending you traffic).

So: robot traffic, pagerank, subscribers - this is how you weed your article directory list. Make a list from SERP Scope (or similar), your server logs, and top search engine results. Combine these and you'll have where you are getting your best input from.

This changes what I've been saying, based on what I've absorbed from others. But metrics are metrics. The time you save is time you can invest elsewhere. And time can be translated to money.

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