Monetize Your Site

iSnare is one of the major article directories on the web. They offer a service to deliver articles to your WordPress blog installation. You add a file to the blog directory and articles begin to show up as drafts in your posts list.

I set up several blogs with the iSnare service. When I first set these blogs up the service was a bit spotty and the targeting of the articles was not too good. This is not too serious with this program because it is a delivery service and not an auto-blogging package. You make the final decision on publishing the articles.

As I mentioned, at first the delivery was spotty, but then it stopped completely for several weeks. I was not sure if they were just out of articles or if they had discontinued the service. The service has now resumed and it appears that they were doing some serious tweaking to the system. One of the sites has had about 130 articles delivered in the past week. I just went through those articles and only found three that were not on some phase of my target topic. The three that I rejected were loosely associated with my topic and possibly belonged in the general category.

I have looked at the articles delivered to one other blog and the new articles are similarly well focused. I don’t think that I have seen one that I had to reject on that blog, but I have not gone through them all in the way I did with the other one.

Since the iSnare service seems to be running well at this time I am discontinuing the WP-Article Fetch service that I had set up on a few blogs. The quality of the delivered articles was poor when it worked at all. The idea is good and the price is right, but the implementation leaves something to be desired.

I have been fussing with the Deep Link Engine for about a week. It is not everything that I hoped that it would be, but it does collect links and add them to your posts.

I have all but quite fussing with the interface except in the rare instance that the generated keyword list is too short. I had tried deleting various keywords. It now appears that the only control left over the plug-in is to add some keywords to the list produced by DLE.

This software was developed as an introduction to a product, auto content cash, that the team has just launched. While the plug does gather links there is no manual control as was mentioned on the download page. I suspect that the intention when developing the plug was to give the manual control as stated. The plug-in needed to be fully automatic for use with the various auto-blogging packages including their new offering. This means that the meaningful search is done after the publish button is clicked. What is really needed is a manual/automatic switch in the options. This could default to automatic, but give us the option to manually select the blogs to which we wish to link.

In using the plug-in I have seen some immediate results. Most of the immediate results that you will see are the better blog operators visiting your blog to see who the heck linked to their blog. This is low quality traffic, but it is a traffic boost. I have seen the trackback on a few blogs and they have all been nofollow. Anyone interested can still click on the link, so there will be some incremental traffic produced. With enough of these scattered around there could be a long term traffic boost. How targeted that traffic is remains to be seen, but could be improved with the ability to hand pick the links. It is too bad that is not currently possible.

I discontinued using the plug on this blog and any of my blogs where I am producing most of the content. If I could hand pick the links I would use the plug-in here. I do have it installed on several blogs where I am populating a good bit of the content with iSnare articles. I have found that they have a good automated content distribution system, and most of the articles are of reasonably good quality. The resolution of the articles sent is not as good as it could be because of the limited number of categories, but they do not auto-post, so you do have control of what you print. This is the best distribution system that I have found to date, but I have not searched long and hard. If they could set it up with some keyword filters it could be significantly improved. I intend to set up two more blogs using this system this evening.

Do you know of other content distribution systems? Please tell us in a comment.

I researched the free auto-blogging software that I had run across. The developer admits on the Warrior Forum that the software is black hat. They use scrappers to pick up their content and scrub all the links out of the posts. It does function and the Deep Link Engine does work with it as best that it can.

I also found an alternative that I like better in some ways. There is a bit more work involved but the result conforms to the article marketing terms of use. The author’s resource box is retained and the article keyword list is supplied. This is a free service of iSnare, one of the frequently mentioned article directories. There is a free script that you put into your blog folder that populates article drafts into your database. You are free to choose the articles that you use.

I had tried a similar service from ArticleUnited, but was very disappointed with the results. The iSnare service seems to be much better. I will be adding it to a couple of other sites this week. I added it to the MC Rally site this evening. That is one on which I had the other service installed. There were only three articles that the script ever pulled and they were not well targeted. The new service had pulled at least a half dozen articles when I checked this evening. They are primarily on one topic, so I may spread them out a bit.

I will test this a bit more and then provide the links, but Google knows now if you ask the right questions.

I have made several posts about the Deep Link Engine. I also mentioned a free auto-blogging plug-in. I have given the Deep Link Engine enough publicity and am still not ready to publicize the auto-blogging software.

The Deep Link Engine was provided as an incentive to sign up for a mailing list on what is known as a squeeze page. The developers have their own auto-blogging plug-in that is offered in a program that went live today. I suspect that part of the reason that DLE works the way that it does is so that it will auto-populate links on the auto-blogging sites. This should improve the performance of the blogs.

The grand experiment of the title is an emulation of the new program offered by the DLE developers. It is not as fully automated as their program, but it should be a fair test of the potential in some ways. I put a blog up on a sub-domain space. Sub-domains are not as good as top level domains at drawing traffic. I picked a popular niche. While it will be harder to promote the site in the competitive environment the potential for reward is high. Clicks on ads in competitive markets return higher payouts and there are many high paying affiliate programs. If I am able to drive some targeted traffic to the site there is a chance for a payout. My only expense for this is the time involved in setting it up and overseeing the project. I already have the hosting space and a sub-domain is just a special part of an existing domain.

I have now looked at three of the initial articles that were returned. The first one has almost no content. It appears to have started life out as an affiliate text link with the affiliate link stripped out. The second was either written by a seriously non-native English speaker or was scrambled by the spin software on the article server, or perhaps a little of both. The third article is perfectly readable and of reasonably good quality.

I did have a bit of a problem getting the plug-in to work on the new blog. I jumped through a couple of hoops and was able to get it operating. I then tried to add the plug to a couple of other blogs without success. I jumped through all the same hoops but there was no joy in the end. I have some work to do on the new blog and then I may investigate the difficulties with the other instances. It may be that only one instance can operate on the server. Perhaps a reseller hosting plan would work differently.

Have you tried auto-blogging? What were your results? What software did your use? Leave a comment about your experience or thoughts on the subject.

I have deactivated the Deep Link Engine plug-in on this site. I have tested the plug to some extent and have some complaints regarding the way that it operates. There appears to be no control over the blogs to which a post links. The plug-in initiates a search when you hit the publish function and actually does the full treatment at that time no matter what you have told it you wish to do. Deleting blogs in the plug-in grid does no good because the final search is carried out after you hit the publish button.

This plug-in would be fine for an auto-blogger who does not want to mess with the content at all. If you are generating original content and would like to display only relevant blog posts this is not the plug-in for you.

I peeked at the net through Google’s eyes and do not see much in the way of negative comment. There does not appear to be enough experience with the plug for glowing comments either. While looking at some commentary I ran across a free WP auto-blogging plug-in. I think that I will go and try the two of them out together. If I hit the mother load I will let you know! Off to do a little research.