As you may probably know, Google’s algorithm has changed. The new edition of the ranking system affects close to 12% of the total queries being made and that’s a huge number!
What has exactly changed? They took into consideration the quality of the content that content farms produce. Huge organizations were built by producing tons of content just for the sake of it. Article directories were also hit, seeing their rankings plummet lower by a great factor.
But does this concern YOU?
Truth is that it depends. If you were an article marketer that used article directories and/or just created pages on Squidoo, without having a main domain to post your own content, I feel for you. The sad thing is that no one told you this thing will happen and chances are, you were caught off guard. The truth is that this couldn’t last forever. With the huge growth of the internet and the amazing marketing opportunities for companies and individuals, it’s logical that everyone would jump onto the bandwagon. Therefore, for someone without the technical know-how and techniques needed to succeed due to increasing competition, the quantity they produced, had to rise if they wanted to stay ahead.
As the average quality dropped, article directories, blogs and generally speaking the whole internet started to have lower standards as far as content was concerned and therefore, article quality of big sites was impacted.
This thing couldn’t last forever and if Google didn’t do something about it, visitors would gradually lose their trust in it. As a necessary step, Google decided to manually review sites and also gather feedback from the users too. So even if you were writing amazing articles on E-Zine articles for example, you would still see a difference.
If I have my own blog, will this affect me?
Think of it this way. If you stumbled upon a blog like yours and found the articles useful, then there’s no way it will affect you. On the contrary, you will see an increase in visits due to the fact that content farms will lose their powerful rankings.
If I have my own blog but still use article marketing to promote it?
Then you’re one of the luckiest losers of this whole situation. You will still get visitors to your main properties and at the same time be able to continue growing your Blog as a whole. The only shift in your daily routine will be that you will spend less time writing for article directories and invest more in your own properties’ content, and that’s a great thing!
If my only existence in the internet marketing space was through article marketing and all the links were promoting affiliate offers?
Then I would suggest to act now and act fast! You should get your own domain name and your own hosting account and start your own web property. Now you will have to pay more attention than ever to quality and start building from there. You won’t start from zero as if you never did anything in the past, because what I would suggest is the following:
Instead of Writing an article and sending a link directly to the affiliate in order to make a sale, you should Write the article, send the link to your main page (or an inner article page of your blog) and then start writing quality articles that make the sale. You can do the same for the existing articles too! It will help a lot. Don’t get me wrong, in the beginning you will lose even more sales but with this method you will:
- Build an audience that you wouldn’t otherwise have.
- Build an email list with readers that trust you. And by the way, a list will convert 10 times better than just an affiliate link.
- Brand your self as an authority and not as someone who just wrote another article on the Internet.
- Become your own master and never be affected by other user’s greed and sloppiness again.
You could argue with me right here and say that it would be better to start the new blog from scratch, without changing the content farm links and you wouldn’t be wrong, but the end result will be much better if you do. If you change the links destination from the affiliate site to your own blog instead, you will lose close to 80% of your sales from those articles, at least in the beginning. The benefit though, is that you will be able to grow your blog much faster than if you were starting from scratch and have visitors even from day one. Keep in mind that the affiliate links on the posts that have already been reposted on other blogs (other than the content farm) won’t be changed and therefore you won’t lose those conversions. To make a long story short, embrace the change, it would happen sooner or later anyway. It’s better now than later on in the future. If you build your new web property, you will soon find out that this was what you should have done from day one. Don’t let this change discourage you and work your way to the top with a new plan. And please take my advice, buy your own domain, host it on a hosting account, don’t take the easy way again and go to blogger or wordpress.com and host it there; you are being penalized for other people’s content already, don’t let it happen again! It will be a bit more difficult to set up your own blog from scratch, but it’s totally worth it! And if you are the last category of people who used article marketing to sell products, without owning your own blog, while writing one article in 5 minutes, well buddy you were lucky while it lasted, please don’t blame Google or Content Farms. To your success, Angel