I don’t really know why, but for some reason Google have stopped displaying Adsense ads on my article directory Article Content King. This felt like a real kick in the teeth at first. For years now I have spent at least 1 hour per day moderating all the articles that we publish on the site. I’m quite strict and only accept around 20% of all the articles that are submitted, so why they have suddenly decided to stop displaying ads on the site after 6 years is a mystery.
I have my suspicions that it is down to the member profile pages. While all the articles are moderated, these pages were not and I did catch a couple members linking to adult themed websites and using pics of an explicit nature as their profile pic. But surely that is not enough to take down the entire site?!?
These issues have been dealt with, but it seems that Google are not interested in the site anymore.
This is the only site that has been affected. Even websites that I set up to syndicate (targeted) articles from article content king still have Adsense ads on them. It’s only Article Content King that they have a problem with. Oh well, their loss!
I went through the Adsense troubleshooter and gave Google a week to explain why they had removed ads from my site and to give them a chance to reinstate them, but they did not get back to me… I’m glad that they didn’t.
Adsense was paying me peanuts! In the 2 days that I have had ClickBank ads on my site instead of Google Adsense ads, I have made more money from the ad space than I did in the whole of last month with Adsense.
Oddly enough, Google search traffic has increased too!
OK, I may be hyping this up a little. The truth is that I have made one ClickBank sale… but the commission on the sale was quite high! Maybe I got lucky or maybe this is the norm. The ads have been on the site 2 days more since then and I have not seen any additional sales yet, but I am confident at this stage that using ClickBank ads instead of Adsense ads will be more profitable… especially if I can get the targeting working better.
The first alternative to Adsense that I tried was MyClicBankAds. It’s free with a upgrade option costing less than $7 per month! Free members have their ads displayed 60% of the time, paid members have their ads displayed 100% of the time and unlock some additional benefits. With MyClicBankAds you can completely customize the ads to match the look of your site, and you can create ads of different sizes to display on the same page. It really is just like Adsense! Very user friendly and does exactly what it says on the tin.
The next script that I tried was CBrocket. It’s after installing this script, that I made a nice commission through ClickBank, but that could have been just luck. CBrocket is a script that you install on your own server. It allows you to create ONE instance of a fully customisable, targeted ClickBank ad and also includes a search facility, so people can search the clickbank market place through your affiliate links. It’s a pretty decent script, that for a one time fee of less than $50 is an absolute bargain. But there are several things that I do not like about this script.
To create 4 different ad spots on each page I had to upload the script files in 4 different places. (Ok, not hard but…)
Every instance of the ads displays the same ads.
It takes several hours to pull all the products from ClickBank into the database, and rather than updating the existing database, it dumps and recreates the tables every time you refresh the database. (So it takes several hours every time and creates a massive drain on the server while it does this and slows the entire site down).
Placed on a site with tens of thousands of pages like article content king, it has introduced a noticeable drain on the server and has slowed page load time by almost a second.
If I did not have experience in installing, setting up and editing php scripts, I imagine that I would have been very frustrated by this script. It’s definitely not for the impatient, inexperienced newbie.
Having said that, there are also several things that I like about this script. It is the script that I am currently using on the site after all. For example with CBrocket you have more targeting options. Integrating them on my site is going to take quite advanced php knowledge (more than I currently have), but they are there. This is the one thing that may keep me using this script in the long term as better targeting always equals more sales.
I have room to host it on my VPS server so it’s not costing me anything extra in hosting and not slowing the site down too much. If you are on a cheap shared hosting package and you install CBRocket, you will likely have your hosting company asking you for more money pretty quickly as the script does seem to be quite resource heavy, especially when it is pulling the products from ClickBank.
This is why paid membership at MyClicBankAds is my top recommendation out of the two. Yes, it’s a monthly fee rather than a one time fee, but using CBrocket does involve hosting costs. The upgrade price of less than $7/month for MyClicBankAds is very fair considering this. Using MyClicBankAds will not put a drain on your server at all because all the work needed to create and display the ads is done on the MyClicBankAds server and not yours.
If you are using Adsense already, you can actually integrate MyClicBankAds with your existing Adsense ads so that Google display your ClickBank ads on your site when they do not have and suitable ones of their own, but if my 4 days experience of using direct sales ads insteads of Earn Per Click ads is anything to go by, you’d be better off just replacing your Adsense ads with MyClicBankAds or if you have the php coding knowledge and server space CBrocket.
Even though I am currently using CBrocket, I’d still recommend MyClicBankAds to you first. In the long run, it will probably be cheaper.
I’d love to know what you think. If you have anything to say, please leave a comment below.
Article Content King is a free article directory which I set up way back in 2005. I got the script as a part of a source code package. It’s the largest of all the sites that I own and the site that has COST ME the most money.
The script provided was called “Your Own article Directory”. Unfortunately, the code sold to me (and several thousand other people over the years) was insecure. This is the main reason why the site cost me money. It was hacked several times before I finally found a good php programmer to secure it. After finally fixing the script, I made the security patch available for free at http://www.securearticlebeach.com.
Since then I have spent a lot of money developing the site. I’ve adding social features, an affiliate program, revenue sharing, author profiles, SEO URL’s, article moderation systems and more. We have over 60,000 members registered at article-content-king and over 150,000 articles in the database. But despite all this, the site is more of a labor of love than a cash cow.
It’s not that the site does not make money it’s that it is a lot of work to moderate all those articles!
Article Content King has an Alexa rank of around 20,000 as I write this and a Page Rank of 3. It’s almost 6 years old and is listed in DMOZ.
If authors meet certain criteria, we allow them to share the revenue with the site by earning credits to display their own ads on the site.
Article Content King covers over 260 niche categories so what ever you are promoting we will have a place for you. (If we do not have a suitable category for your articles, let me know and I will add it).
We have many great authors who submit articles to article content king. If you are someone who always has their articles approved, there is no need for you to watch this video.
If however, you keep getting your articles rejected, and you do not know why, because no reason is specified on the edit rejected article page, you need to watch this video.
If your articles are rejected for any other reason, the reason why will be displayed on the edit rejected article page. Click here to read the submission rules.
Great News for article publishers (and marketers)!
We have just made full article RSS feeds available to make it easier for you supplement your blog with articles from article-content-king. The feed(s) display the full article and resource box of the latest 5 articles in each category.
Benefits for Publishers
One of the main reasons why we run this article directory is to provide the Internet with content articles that they can use on their websites. The “article snippet” feed is there so that people can subscribe to our feeds in a reader, get a quick snap-shot of the new articles that are available to them, visit the site to read and get the code for the ones that they want to publish. (This is great for us, as it brings traffic to the site).
Now we have the full article RSS feed available, you can use a WordPress plugin like feedwordpress or Drupal plugin like Drupal Feeds to automatically publish our niche articles to your blog or Drupal site. (There are other tools available for other platforms).
Either set the articles to publish automatically or pending approval. This way you save the time it takes to check the feeds and grab the code for the articles that you want to publish. They can be delivered directly to the site that you (may) want to publish them at.
If you are not using articles to supplement your website with content yet, maybe now is the time to start doing so. Syndicating full articles will not hurt your website at all, it will probably greatly help it. The more pages you have more more traffic you can potentially receive. The more information you visitors have to read, the more likely they are to subscribe to your blog.
Check out the full article RSS feeds page, I am sure you will find a category suitable for your blog.
If you are into making “automatic Adsense income sites” then I am sure that you will love this new full article RSS feed. Syndicating a “summary only” feed will make any blog look like a “splog”, providing the full article for your visitors to read is far better.
Benefits For Article Marketers
One of the biggest frustrations that you face as an article marketer is when people use your articles from article directories without giving you attribution! You spent the time to write an excellent article and was generous enough to allow other people to use it. They do, but they don’t thank you! (and they break the law by not giving you credit!)
The new full article rss feeds will help put a stop to this, because if someone syndicates your article from one of our feeds, all links and attribution is automatically included. — There is far more chance that the links will be left in tact because people can automatically publish with this feed (using required syndication tools).
And of course… because we are making it easier for people to publish your articles (automatically) they are likely to get published a lot more places! (Meaning more back links for you).
So it’s great news for everyone who read this far, isn’t it?
Respectfully,
Dan Blackburn
P.S. One of the most important things to make sure of when you submit articles to articlecontentking is that you select the most appropriate category for your articles.
You may have noticed that the header image has disappeared from the article directory? Removing it has definitely had a deleterious effect on aesthetics, (i.e. the site does not look as good), but removing this image has made a massive improvement to something that is far more important than looks.
Page Load Time!
Removing this image knocked a whopping 20 seconds off page load time (on a 28k modem), more than halving the page load time!
According to Alexa, “slow” sites can be penalized by the search engines and they are (currently still) judging Article Content King as a slow site. Removing this image should have already remedied this, but it will take a little time for Alexa stats to catch up.
I am hoping to see a marked improvement in search engine rankings for article pages over the coming months, as a direct result of me removing this large and heavy header image from the site.
Article directories are about getting traffic! I’d rather have top rankings to ugly looking pages than no rankings for pretty pages.
Wouldn’t you?
Next I am going to look into compression and cashing.
I was chatting with R Michael Stone the other day about winning the King contest and his website marketing in general and we got on to traffic. I asked him what other forms of traffic he has used, other than Article Marketing. He told me that he had tried Pay Per Click with Google Adwords, but after failing to get any real traffic from keyword bids as high as $2 per click, Google actually suspended his Adwords account.
This is not uncommon, in fact it is more like the norm. Google obviously do not rate the quality of Michael’s landing page. It’s a “lead capture page” or “squeeze page” as they are sometimes called. The page itself is backed up with links to some very high quality articles and there is some great information on the site, but Google it appears do not want Michael advertising this page through their Adwords service… even though Michael was willing to pay through the nose for traffic.
He would not have a problem with any other search engine, as all the others allow the highest bidder to take the most traffic, but Google are different. They want the most relevant ads to the best offers to get the most traffic and they don’t want pages that they feel do not meet the cut there at all. Google treat ad rankings more like search engine rankings. This is great news for you as an article marketer as it makes it possible for you to pay a LOT less for traffic that your competitors AND get more traffic than them… if you know what you are doing.
So what do you need to do?
Let me put it this way. Links to your squeeze pages fit perfectly in the resource box of your articles and your articles fit perfectly with Google’s “landing page quality score rules”.
If you promote an article on an authority site rather than a sales page or a squeeze page in your Google Adwords PPC campaign, you will pay a lot less per click. FACT!
If you promote your squeeze page in your article resource box, every reader of your article will be ready to subscribe when they click. (A lot more ready than they were after they read your Google ad).
If you run Adwords campaigns to your articles published on authority sites, instead of the sales pages of your own websites you may find that you make a lot more money a lot more easily. You’ll pay less per click, but get more targeted visitors through to your squeeze page, (fewer more targeted visitors of course).
There appears to be a rather nice side effect to doing this too. You will find that the article that you are promoting begins to rank better in Google too. Thus you end up getting the traffic that you are paying for, for free! Google deny that this is the case, but test it for your self.
Tips for doing this effectively.
Keep it short and easy to read, you want everyone to get to the bottom of your article where the link to your squeeze page is. (no more than 600 words).
Provide real value in the article. You want people to feel like they owe you when they click to your site.
Don’t push! Be helpful and make people want to know more of your “secrets”.
Use bolded subheads containing the keyword phrases that you want to rank well for. (Be mindful of SEO but do not compromise the article for it).
The speed at which your visitors read your article and how much they like what they read will determine how many people will click through to your site… ready to subscribe.
Try it and work out the cost per subscriber when you do. I think you will be pleasantly surprised. Or win the King contest and we will do it for you . The prize for winning has changed to $50 cash and $50 PPC traffic to your best articles. (Starting next King).
**Update – The King Contest is no more, but I left this post in place to give credit to Michael
King For May
The top author of Article-Content-King for May is R Michael Stone, a well deserved “crown”. R Michael Stone writes truly excellent articles on the “Psychological Smoking Mechanism” and how to quit smoking for good. I particularly enjoyed reading this article about why Nicotine is NOT physically addictive.
Reading this article really surprised me and made me think that reaching for the Marmite instead of my cigarettes could be the answer. If you have any comments about this, leave them in the article above (not below this post).
We will hopefully be catching up with R Michael Stone later in the month to chat about winning the contest.
Changes to the King Contest
R Michael Stone is the last author who will win the $100 cash prize. Future winners of the King contest will be recognized on the home page of the site, and this blog.
**Update – The King Contest is no more, but I left this post in place to give credit to Meguni
The “King” of Article Content King for March is Megumi Oyanagi, with an author rating score of 24 from just 10 articles! This makes the average quality score of Megumi’s articles 23/30.
All articles are rated by members of Article Content King, after 3 members have rated the article on a scale of 1 – 10 the article goes live with the accumulative score giving by all 3 moderators. 23 is a very high article score.
You can read more about Megumi and check out her top rated and latest articles by visiting her profile page. Megumi is looking for more contacts at LinkedIn. If you like what you read, why not check out her LinkedIn profile page and connect with her there?
As “King” of the site Megumi has won…
$100
10,000 advertising credits
Exposure on the Article Content King home page for the month of March
And of course, if Megumi wants to be interviewed about her online business and article marketing success, she will unlock more benefits from winning the King contest.
It’s no secret that we add rel=”nofollow” to all the links in articles submitted to article content king and I have explained before why we do this. It’s to help you get stronger back links from the site.
Now I am going to tell you how to use this site to get stronger back links. If you follow this advice you will help to focus the content on this site into “tight niche hubs” and greatly improve the quality of the site, while increasing the traffic you receive at the same time.
As you know, the links that you put on the profile page do not contain no follow links, all your articles link to this page so all the “link reputation” of all your articles is focused on your profile page, and from there the reputation is passed to the sites that you want to promote with your articles. i.e. The links that you add in the “favourite web sites” section of the profile page.
If you create a profile page for each “tight niche” that you write articles for, each profile page becomes a like a targeted index page for your articles and the web sites that you want to promote.
This focusing of your content should help your articles to rank better in the search engines and better optimise the “back links” that you receive from this site.
See how that works? Let me give you an example.
Let’s say you have written 7 articles about article marketing and 7 articles about how to lose weight. If you submit all 14 article under the same author name, the profile page for that author does not have any real focus. Is it about weight loss or is it about article marketing? The two topics are totally unrelated.
If you set up a separate author alias for each subject, then you basically have two “mini sites” within article-content-king. One about article marketing and one about weight loss.
We have the “index page” which is your profile page. These profile pages contains relevant links and information about each topic and are supported by all the (relevant) articles that you submit under this author name. Thus creating a “mini site” about the topic.
Visitors looking for weight loss information can find your weight loss “mini site” and people looking for article marketing information can find your article marketing “mini site”.
If you focus your content in this way then you should start getting a lot more traffic from the site, especially if you add a few links into your profile yourself.
The only potential problem with this is that every profile page needs a separate “author alias” (pen name), I know that some people write more to brand themselves and their name than anything else, so this method will not appeal to them.
For everyone else, it’s important to note, that we DO NOT accept articles from keyword phrases, or author names with numbers in them. Even if it is not your actual name, it still needs to be a believable name.
You can set up new author names and sort your older articles if you wish, but do not do too many at once because your articles WILL be removed from the site and placed back in moderation if you edit them. That includes changing the author name.
Authors often complain to me about the use of the “nofollow” tag in their articles submitted to article content king. I decided to write this article to explain why we do this and how rather than hurting your search engine optimization efforts, it actually helps them!
Yes, that’s right… the fact that we add rel=”nofollow” to the links in your articles actually helps you get stronger back links from our site.
Don’t believe me?
Here’s why. It’s quite simple really.
If you know anything about SEO, you will know the importance of getting links from IP addresses in different C Classes. Some of the “Article Directory Lists” you will find while browsing the Internet will include the directories IP address with the listing and they will not list 2 directories that share the same C Class IP address. This is because getting links from different servers is important for SEO. It is thought that this is one of the ways that big search engines like Google determine whether link growth to a site is natural.
It is also thought that getting too many links from the same IP addresses can even be harmful to your web site’s search engine rankings . It can look like you are trying to manipulate your rankings and the search engines do not like that.
I have often read that any particular site can only “vote” for your web site once, any subsequent links you get from the site don’t really have much, if any benefit in terms of search engine optimization. Some would say that the search engines could discount all your links from a site if you get too many from the same places, if all your links come from the same source or sources.
Using this logic, it seems wise to focus all the traffic and link reputation that your articles generate onto one link to your site… the link on your profile page. The links you add on your profile page do not have the “nofollow” tag in the links. Every article you submit links to this page which means that all the “link juice” of all the articles you submit is focused on this page. This makes the one vote that this site can give you count as much as possible.
If we didn’t do this, then which one link would be the one that counted? Would it be as good a link as this one?
So what about linking keyword phrases in your articles to get better optimization for those words?
Am I telling you that everything you have learned about article marketing is false and it’s not a good search engine optimization technique at all? If you can only get one link that counts from any article directory, what is the point of submitting more than one article? Is it all just to help that one back link I get have more value?
If you are asking that question (and I know that some of you are) then I am afraid that somewhere along the line you have misunderstood what article directories are for.
Article Marketing is something that has existed since soon after the invention of the printing press, perhaps even before that, long before the Internet existed. There have always been “content repositories” available to publishers and authors; places where publishers can find content to publish to their readers, without having to write it themselves and where writers can submit their articles to get recognition of their work. The Internet has made this a lot more accessible and mainstream because there are a lot more publishers now, but the concept of article marketing was born long before the Internet!
Article Content King is a content repository. A place where you can submit your articles in the hope that a publisher in your niche will pick them up and publish them. It’s a place where you can use your content to make contacts in the industry if you use your profile page correctly.
It is our job to put your articles in front of people who are interested in publishing what you are writing about. We present your article in an easy to publish format through the publisher page (linked in all your articles). You’ll notice that the links here do not contain the “rel=”nofollow” tag. That’s because when someone naturally publishes your article from our site, you have naturally earned a back link to your site. This is not manipulative at all and you deserve credit for that link. The search engines would agree.
Article directories are fantastic places to build back links to your site, but it’s not the back links you get from the article directories themselves that count, it’s the back links you get from people publishing your articles, on different web sites and servers across the Internet that really helps your SEO. The more articles you submit, the more chance there is of this happening.
So as you can see, our intention when adding rel=”nofollow” to your site links on the article pages is actually intended to help you get stronger back links from our site.
You can create an many profile pages as you like, and add as many links to each profile page as you like. We add a link to the appropriate profile page inside every article you submit. All your efforts focus the reputation on the ONE vote that this site can pass to any one of your sites and if your article is naturally published from our site, you get a natural back link.
I run several websites offering online marketing software and services and decided to set up this blog to share my online marketing experiences.
If you have any questions about online marketing, need help with any of my sites or if you would like to do a joint venture or some cross promotion with me, please open a support ticket here
. The prize for winning has changed to $50 cash and $50 PPC traffic to your best articles. (Starting next King).
