Groundswell Publishing

Article Marketing Automation Review

Posted on 12. Dec, 2008 by joefission in Article Marketing, Reviews

(You might also be interested in my Unique Article Wizard review and my Unique Article Wizard and Article Marketing Automation comparison)

I have been a user of Article Marketing Automation from the day it was first released to the public. As a member of PLRPro, it quickly became my favorite article marketing tool. It shares many characteristics with Unique Article Wizard, but the approach and implementation are much different.

What is Article Marketing Automation?

Article Marketing Automation is a blog syndication tool. Although “Article Marketing” is in the title, I hesitate to refer to it specifically as article marketing. The concepts are the same: you submit articles (blog posts in this case) in order to gain the backlinks that are obtained through syndication of the content into a network of sites. The two main characteristics that lead me to refer to it as blog syndication: the blog network that consumes the posts; and the in-text links rather than resource box links.

By the way, if you’re not using tactics like this to promote your web property, you’ve really got to start. There is simply no better way to drive traffic than through article marketing and syndication. I cover some clever twists to traditional article marketing in my $7 report, Backlink Persuasion.

So, Article Marketing Automation consists of a number of things:

• The content creation and spinning tool
• The content management, submission, and distribution system
• The blog network

Content Creation and Content Spinning

Article Marketing Automation supports two types of content spinning: rewritten sentences, and phrase substitutions. Phrase substitutions are what is generally thought of when spinning is referenced, but rewritten sentences generally result in a higher degree of uniqueness. When the two are combined, it’s easy to create a 100 percent rewritten article fairly quickly. To give you an idea of how this spinning works, see the two examples below.

Sentence Rewrites

“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” could be rewritten as “The dog was laying on the ground relaxing, when all of sudden the fleet fox vaulted him in a single bound.” It has the same meaning, but is said in an entirely different manner, with an entirely different sentence structure. If your article has 25 distinct sentences, you could mix and match sentences to form many unique articles.

Phrase Substitutions

The {quick~fast~speedy} fox {jumped~vaulted~hurdled} over the {lazy~sleeping~drowsy} {dog~canine}. In this case, the sentence structure stays the same, but words are mixed and matched to create a unique sentence.

When you combine complete sentence rewrites with phrase substitutions within those rewrites, you have a completely intelligible, unique article!

Within each post, you are permitted three links, plus an optional YouTube video link. I usually try to direct those links to two money sites in order to get more bang for my buck. The YouTube video link is gravy, giving you video views and a more popular YouTube video. Any type of link is accepted, as well, including affiliate links. For example, if I reviewed the latest weight loss diet, I could embed anchor links to my site, my YouTube video, and leave a straight affiliate link. Because these links are in-text, and not in a resource box, they appear very natural.

I’ll often limit my links to just two per post, and I very often try to keep them below the fold in the post. This seems to help my syndication acceptance rate, and as a content publisher, I reject all articles that aren’t rewritten at least 40 percent, that are miscategorized, or that have links pressed together near the top of the post.

Content Management, Submission, and Distribution

When spinning your article, you assign it to a category, and the categories correspond fairly well with what you’d see in Ezine Articles. The category you select determines the blogs that will eventually receive your post. This creates some interesting dilemmas because you don’t know ahead of time how large your market is, i.e. how many blogs in the network accept articles from your category. So the tighter your niche, the more trouble you might have finding matching blogs.

What I usually do in these cases is add the post to a parent category, or cross-purpose a post. For example, one of my niches dealt with a certain type of vintage collectible toy. There were very few collectible blogs about that subject, so I wrote an article on installing track lighting to highlight a collection and submitted it to the home improvement category.

Once you submit your posts, Article Marketing Automation will begin submitting them to blogs who have decided to receive content. Blog owners are shown the full text of the article, and are also given a rewrite percentage. Generally speaking, you want your articles at least 40 percent rewritten to increase your chances of acceptance. This distribution is done on a very gradual basis, over the course of months, making these links appear very organic. Another benefit is because these posts are all going to blogs, the search engines tend to view them more favorably than traditional articles.

Again, category selection is important. For example, in looking at three articles I submitted exactly two months ago, one was syndicated to 36 blogs, one to 59 blogs, and one to 79 blogs. You want to choose the highest count category where the post is still relevant. If you post to an irrelevant category or your article is not unique enough, you could end up with a high rejection rate. Overall, my articles in popular niches are accepted over 90 percent of the time; narrower niches often rank between a 70 and 80 percent acceptance rate. This is a good sign, as it ensures you that content publishers are paying attention to posting quality, which bodes well for your inbound links.

Article Marketing Automation’s Site Network

All of AMA’s blogs are self-hosted Wordpress blogs only, so you are not affected by the whims of anyone other than the content publisher. I have actually been quite surprised at the quality of the blogs that accept my content. Of course, my articles are useful and well-written, but I’ve also had them appear on what I would consider to be aged blogs with a relatively high degree of authority. This is a huge win! These are the types of blogs that would charge $50 to $100 for a review, and now I can submit my own content directly to them as part of my monthly subscription.

You can add a blog to the network through the same site that you use to submit articles. It requires entering an author account for AMA, and enabling XML-RPC publishing on the target blog. Thereafter, you’ll get e-mails with each potential blog post.

Good and Bad About Article Marketing Automation

Pros

• Clean interface, and the entire service is very easy to use
• Two types of spinning lead to highly unique articles
• While spinning, a percentage rewritten indicator displays how unique your content is
• Article marketing works, unique content works, backlinks work. AMA supports all of these things.
• AMA’s blog network is largely filled with high-quality, niche blogs, which means targeted, relevant backlinks
• Contextual links in the post body are organic and valued highly by the search engines
• Content drip allows posts to be published a little at a time, simulating an organic pattern
• You can submit an unlimited number of articles from an unlimited number of sites.
• You can submit up to three links plus one YouTube video per post
• Even link destinations and link anchor text can be spun!
• You can build a huge number of backlinks targeting any keywords you like.
• Detailed post submission, acceptance, and keyword ranking stats are available in the dashboard
• Daniel and Marc are known for excellent service and value

Cons

• Some tight or focused niches have little coverage
• Blog owners determine if your content is accepted or rejected
• Spinning can be tricky to pick up from the start
• Error highlighting during content spinning needs to be more intelligent
• I’m not fond of monthly subscription services

Who will benefit from Article Marketing Automation

AMA’s monthly price tag is easier to justify than UAW in my opinion. It’s $20 cheaper per month at $47, but much of the reason for the value in the system is the ease of use and excellent results that can be obtained. Anyone who uses article marketing will benefit from AMA, and anyone who is looking to drive traffic and build targeted backlinks will derive benefit from the service. Anyone who has ever purchased reviews, or guest blogged, or participated in blog carnivals, etc. will find this service immensely helpful.

AMA isn’t perfect by any stretch, but it is improving, the blog network is growing, and it works very well. Like UAW, you will benefit from using Article Marketing Automation if you’re willing to put forth the effort to write and spin articles. If you are not going to use the site up to its potential, then there’s no use getting a subscription.

Personally, I still find $47 tough to stomach, even though I like the service. But I will say that out of all of my monthly services of this nature (I use UAW, AMA, LinkVana, and Neurolinker), Article Marketing Automation is the one that I will never go without.

Getting Started with the Article Marketing Automation

If you’re ready to get started with Article Marketing Automation, or if you just want to learn more about it, check out the sales page. If you want to test drive it, provide me with an article — you write the article and take a link, I’ll submit the article and take a link. We both win.

Visit Article Marketing Automation

(You might also be interested in my Unique Article Wizard review and my Unique Article Wizard and Article Marketing Automation comparison)

Tags: AMA, Article Marketing, article marketing automation, traffic