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.

Article Submission Or Bookmarking?

For those who want to promote their websites, especially those content-intensive ones, for example, blogs, article submission and bookmarking are both among the most effective means you can take. At first glance, they look roughly the same. But they do have differences. In the following analysis, I’d like to perform some basic comparison between them.

Before I start, I’d like to clarify the meanings of article submitting and bookmarking, respectively.

“Article submitting” means submitting your entire article content to article submission sites. Popular article submission sites include EzineArticles, ArticleBase, GoArticles and so on. To submit your article, you normally need to provide the following information:

• Article title
• Author name
• Author Bio (or called Resource Box)
• Article summary
• Article Body
• Tags
  

“Bookmarking” means submit your article link’s basic information, rather than the entire content, to bookmarking sites. Famous bookmarking sites include Digg, SlashDot, Reddit, Google and so on. To bookmark your sites, you normally need to provide the following information:

• Article title
• Article Link URL
• Article summary
• Tags

So, from what was listed above about article submission and bookmarking, you could easily see that the functions and requirements of the two are indeed different. Let’s try to summarize their two major differences as follows:

• Article submission gives away your content, whereas bookmarking doesn’t. After submitting your article to some other sites, your website is no longer the only place that publishes your article. The visitors who are interested in your article may not need to visit your sites. The article submission sites may publish PPC ads, like Google Adsense, alongside your article on their sites, and the ad revenues all go to their pockets. On the other hand, bookmarking only exposes the link of your article. To visit the full content, the visitors still need to come to your sites.  That means, you are still the sole owner of your article and your website is the only place that publishes your article. (Let’s ignore content piracy issue at this moment).

• The promotion benefit that you get from article submission is the resource box offered by the article submission sites, in which you could list two to three links that you would like to promote. Normally the article submission sites do not allow you to insert any affiliate link in the body of the article. On the other hands, as you only submit the basic link info, rather the entire content, to bookmarking sites, the promotion benefit you get is directly related to the article link the bookmarking sites have bookmarked for you.
  

Arriving here, you may wonder which method you should adopt. Well, there is no definite answer, since it all depends on your own judgment and biggest concern. For example, if you’re concerning about the copyright issue or don’t want someone else to enjoy the ad revenues brought by your articles, the better alternative is bookmarking. If you want your website’s link popularity to be increased more quickly, the more suitable choice for you is article submission. Nevertheless, you could always combine article submission and bookmarking to achieve a maximized benefit.