Wednesday, February 10, 2010

When to Stop Giving Away Your article in BlogSpot

Blogspot, previously known as "Blogger", is so convenient to use that nearly every creature in the internet world has opened an account for it. This post is mainly related to those friends who use blogspot to publish ads alongside their posts in order to gain additional income.

From the day that bloggers publish their first post, they are thinking how to best monetize their blogs. Google Adsense is again the most popular advertising program being used. Recently, Amazon formed partnership with Google, so that bloggers could display Amazon affiliate ads alongside their posts as easy as they do with Google Adsense. As you know, you need tons of traffic to produce enough ad clicks and thus generate observable ad revenue. This is almost impossible without continuous content creation and promotion efforts that usually may last more than one year. However, if you really hope to make money from blogging, this is the necessary hard work and patience that you need to invest.

Many blogger don't realize that. They believe the day they create unique content is the same day they ought to earn money. With this belief in mind, they soon think of a beautiful idea: Why should my article only reside in my blog? As long as it's my original work, I can park them in as many places as possible, either through article submission or through social bookmarking. If I do this, I'll receive at least two benefits:
  • Free back links to my blog and individual post
  • Some article directories offer ad revenue sharing program from which I can earn additional income from my articles.
Their basic idea is true. However, as I emphasized repeatedly in my previous posts, never go too far with regard to any of your ideas. Almost all originally correct things will turn wrong if one overdoes them. The same is true for your article marketing. My general points are as follows:
  • Promotion effect follows the rule of diminishing return. You certainly can get free backlinks from article submission or social bookmarking. However, the more articles you submit or bookmark to the same website, the less marginal promotion effect the article will bring to you. At some point, it won't compensate your article marketing effort any more, and that's when you ought to stop giving away your article.
  • Not all article submission or social bookmarking sites are worth your efforts. They are thousands of article directories and social bookmarking websites out there. We usually believe, the more the better. So we tend to submit or bookmark our articles to as many places as possible. An important fact we neglect is that most of those article directories and social bookmarking sites don't generate any traffic at all. The only result your article brings is free content to their website, with negligible benefit to you. Clearly, it's better that you stop giving away your content to those dummy websites and spend your saved efforts on producing more creative content and targeting your promotion efforts to those few best article directories and social bookmarking websites.
  • Most ad revenue sharing programs do not sound as good as they claimed at all. You could refer to my detail analysis given in my last posts: Things You Must Know Before Attracted By "Adsense Revenue Sharing" and Discriminate Authentic Adsense Revenue Sharing Programs From Pirates. Same as above, you are merely contributing free content without any significant promotion effect, let alone additional income from shared ad revenue.

1 comment:

  1. What can I say. You hit the nail on the head, but that said what we can do is to find niches with very little competition and write about them. That my plan.

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