This is going to be an ongoing post that I update when I have more news about my experiences with my lifetime membership with Article Marketer. This is real and I am going to cover both the good and the bad.
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On 5/15/08 I paid for the lifetime membership to Article Marketer. I can honestly say that this was the hardest decision I have had to make in my Internet marketing career. After reading this Article Marketer review I did of the free version, I never thought in a million years I would pay for the service. The one and only thing that convinced me to pay for the service was the comment exchange made in this post from Court’s Internet Marketing School. If you go to the middle of all the comments for this post (about 41 comments down) you will see my comment (Work At Home – that’s me) asking about Article Marketer. The subsequent exchange goes on for about 13 comments and ends with mine.
According to Court the AM free service is very poor (which I most certainly verified), but the paid service is better. Customer service may not be the best but I decided that on Court’s recommendation I would sign up as I am serious about working at home.
Believe it or not, right away there were problems as I even had trouble signing up! The sign-up link was not working properly when I tried and I had to wait about a week for them to fix it. They did get around to it and I signed up for the lifetime membership at a price of $299.00.
HERE IS HOW TO GET THE $299.00 PRICE: (note – this works as of 5/20/08 but may be changed in the future) If you want the lifetime plan for $299.00 click on the tab at the upper right of the home page that says “Today’s Special“. At the bottom of the next page you will have 4 options: Quarterly Membership, Annual Membership, Lifetime Membership, and Free Membership. The “Lifetime Membership” will quote a price of $399.00 right above the button. Don’t click that button but click the “Annual Membership” button instead. Now you will be taken to a page where it asks you if you want to upgrade your account and offers a price of $299.00 for the Lifetime Membership. Click on the “upgrade my subscription” and you will get the $299.00 price. 6/17/08 Update - Sorry but it looks like this does not work anymore as there is no longer a “Today’s Special” tab on the homepage.
So where does that leave me today? I joined 5 days ago and promptly submitted about 20 articles over the next 3 days. So far I have had 9 articles approved and “queued for distribution” as seen below. I cut off most of the titles of the articles for fear the screen isn’t wide enough for most people.
I also have 13 or so articles pending review as seen below. If you submit an article it says it will be reviewed by the very next day and so far that has generally been correct. If an error is discovered by the live reviewer, after correcting the error your article will then be reviewed by the next day again and not that same day. That is a minor inconvenience and not something I am going to get too upset over.
At this point I have the 9 articles ready for distribution. So far when I click ”report” by each of the articles I get nothing which means they have not been distributed. I am happy at this point at the pace with which my articles are being reviewed by Article Marketer but that is obviously only the first step. They need to be distributed, accepted, and then published elsewhere for me to benefit from them. I will update this post when I have more news to report as I want to give anyone that is interest a real understanding of what they can expect if they sign up for this service. I will also explain how the service works and what you need to do to get your articles approved.
5/20/08
(update) I wrote this Article Marketer reveiw post in the morning of 5/20/08 and now six hours later I have 18 articles approved and awaiting distribution. Very, very good in that department and absolutely no comparison between the lifetime membership and the free version. None of the 18 articles have been distributed yet though.
5/22/08
As of today all my articles have been approved but none of them have been distributed. It seems they are getting approved faster than I can write them and that is great. But just like several of the people that have commented so far, all my articles are sitting there in the “Articles Queued for Distribution” section.
When you submit an article to Article Marketer, it first has to get by the automated computer review. Things the computer will immediately reject are:
1) Articles that are too short. All articles must be over 400 words and anything under that will be rejected.
2)If your article has ”hard breaks” which just means too many spaces between characters it wil be rejected.
3) Any HTML in the body of the article is a no no.
4)Any URL’s in the body of the article is a no no.
If your article is rejected by the automated process you will receive an email and once you go in and correct your article you will not lose any time in terms of when it is set up to be reviewed. I have found the computer will reject your article within the first half an hour or so and thus if it is not rejected in that time period, it has passed the automated process. The next check is the live person check which I will go over next time.
5/24/08 – UPDATE
I woke up Friday morning and this is what my inbox looked like. Luckily I did not use my primary email address when I signed up for Article Marketerbecause everytime an article is distributed you will get an email from almost every place it is accepted.
Right now I have a total of 26 articles I have submitted and 25 of them have been accepted. 7 of those accepted articles are still in the ”Queued for Distribution” list while the other 18 are now in a section called “Distribution to the Complete List”. Of those 18 articles, I show 4 of them have actually been distributed.
Of the 4 that have been distributed it says that they have been distributed 1294 times for the first article and 1048, 1048, and 1067 times for the other three. I have gotten 168 emails total from the article directories so I would say that out of all those distributions, my 4 articles have been accepted about 168 times. Not every article directory accepts articles right away of course so I hope that number will go up with time. I have gone into some of the directories that accepted my articles and I was able to find them. Most importantly, they did have the “author” box with my two anchored links back to my sites for each article that was accepted.
5/25/08
It is Sunday evening and all my articles have now passed the editorial review and most of them have actually been distributed. I have 26 total articles and all but 5 of them have been distrubuted. Most of them have been distributed (it says) to 1000+ sites and a couple articles to only several hundred sites. I came home this afternoon and my mailbox looked like this showing that I have gotten at least 625 of them accepted by the various article sites.
If you ever sign up with Article Marketer I strongly recommend using a secondary email and not your main email address because you will be getting TONS of acceptance emails from the directories.
I must say I am extremely relieved after spending $299.00 for the lifetime membership because the free version was so poor and it was a risk. However, I trusted Court’s recommendation and it seems he was correct that this is the best way right now to get articles accepted to a ton of sites and get thousands of anchored backlinks.
5/27/08
I now have the same # of articles as before on the distribution list (26) and I have gotten 878 emails from directories so that means my articles have been accepted at least 878 times. There is no way for me to know how many times each individual article has been accepted or to where, other than going manually through my emails to count. I have some more articles waiting to be approved by the Article Marketer real person review and I am trying to write and submit two articles every day if I can.
I hope those acceptance emails for the 26 that have been distributed will continue to trickle in. I know that many article directories accept articles only on their sweet time so I have to believe that more of my articles will be published when they get around to it.
On a seperate note, I am going to be watching to see if there is any movement on Google for some of my targeted terms in my anchored links. It is probably too soon for any change to be evident yet but that is the whole reason I am doing this: to move up and get higher in the Google search rankings for my niche websites.
5/28/08
A couple of days ago on this post I went over the computer automated review and what will get your article rejected. Once your article passes that review it then goes to a real person review. This is the review that can be more frustrating and this is because of the time lost.
With the automated review which happens right away, you can go right back in that same day and correct your errors and resubmit your article with no time lost in the que. However, it takes days to get to the real person review and once they reject your article you basically start from the beginning of the line again. The amount of days wait varies with what type of plan you have. I have tried the free service which I have said many times is worthless and very poor. The waiting time to get to the real person review is about 5 days and so when they reject your article, you then have to wait another 5 days again. If they reject it a second time you are looking at your third 5 day wait and so on. Again, I found the free service to be pretty much worthless.
With the Article Marketer lifetime plan I purchased, things have been much better. The waiting period to get to the real person review is supposed to be one business day and generally that is what it has been for me so far. If they reject your article you will then have to wait another day before they look at it again. With a one day waiting period that is no big deal and I don’t mind at all. I cannot say for sure whether the quarterly and yearly memberships have the exact same one day waiting period but I think they do. What types of things will get your articles rejected by the live person? So far I have only had a rejection for using the wrong category and as they reject it they don’t tell you what the correct category is. So, if you pick the wrong one again (or what they say is the wrong one) you can be picking categories for some time. Let me tell you, it makes me really try hard to look over all categories and pick what I believe to be the best one.
If there are two separate things wrong with your article, they will not tell you about them at the same time. For instance, you might have an article where your title is only two words (and thus too short) and you might also have HTML in the body of your article. You will first have your article rejected because of the title and after fixing that and resubmitting it you will then get a second rejection for the HTML. With the paid lifetime plan and only a 1 day waiting period this is no big deal but with the free service and a longer waiting time this becomes downright silly and frustrating to say the least.
If you have any questions about this Article Marketer review please post a comment and I will try to answer it.
5/31/08
This is an example of what the “Distribution Report” looks like. This option is not available in the free version. As you can see, it says my article has been distributed 994 times today and the real list goes on and on (I just copied the first few in the picture). That number might grow to around 1200 in a day or two. Being “distributed” is great but being accepted and published is far more important. I am still waiting for some more time to pass before I look at how many times my articles have been published.
6/4/08
I paid for the lifetime membership to Article Marketer just about 3 weeks ago and this is a summary of what has happened since then. I now have 37 articles that have gone all the way through the real person review to being distributed to the complete list. There have been some minor bumps along the way but everything has been so much better than the free version. I have had my articles reviewed on time and I would say it averages about a week from the time I type in an article to the point where it is distributed to the list. If something gets rejected there is no more than another day wait with the lifetime membership so it is really nothing to get concerned about.
When an article is distributed to the “complete list” it gets sent to anywhere from about 900 – 1200 article directories. I assume the difference is because some of the directories are specialised and the topic of your article determines which directories it gets sent to.
Now the important part: how many times is each article actually published with the all important anchored links back to your sites? As far as I can tell, I would say this number is anywhere between 35 and 50 times per article. This number is similar to what I have heard others mention and that is what I am finding as well. The way to check it is by putting your article’s title in quotes and doing a search on Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine. Actually, the 30 -50 number is only for Google as I have not checked the other search engines.
Every single one of those articles that I have gone to of mine has had the anchored links back to my sites. I have yet to find any one of my articles that was published without an “author box” or that did not have the links in the author box. The 35 – 50 number is a little disappointing as it is distributed to about a 1000 directories so that is a low percentage of acceptance. Yet, can you imagine how much time I have saved by not having to submit each article myself? If I had to type in 37 articles into an article submitting software and then submit each one to at least 50 different directories……..well that is why I paid for this service because I don’t even want to think about how much time that would take!
Let me know if you have any questions by posting in the comments.
6/9/08
All 40+ articles that I have submitted to Article Marketer have now been distributed to the complete list. I did find a couple of articles that are published in directories that do not use the anchored text and so those directories are useless. Overall though, it seems that I am getting a lot of anchored links pointing to my sites and I am satisfied in that regard.
I must say that quite quickly I learned how to not get an article rejected. There have been a couple of comments about the high number of rejections and I had a problem with that as well when I tried the (very crappy and worthless) free version. Now I just go a little slower and make sure everything is in order before I push the final “submit” button.
One area that I wish they would improve upon is the lack of a pen name feature. Right now, you pick a name and that is the name you have to go with for all articles. A pen name feature similar to the one on EzineArticles would be simple to implement it seems and be very nice to help us leave a little less of a trail.
I wrote so many articles that I am burned out right now and I need to take a breather before writing and submitting more. I have yet to see a noticeable difference in any of my Google search rankings but I don’t think I can realistically expect a change so soon. None of my rankings have gotten worse at least.
6/13/08
This is the new message that has just been put up on Article Marketer. I don’t know whether it is a ploy to get more members or whether it is really going up but I thought I would post it anyway. It says that prices will be going up on Tuesday June 17th.
6/17/08
It appears that the prices have indeed gone up and only the “regular” prices are now available. In the opening entry of this post (way up at the top) I explained how I got the lifetime membership for $299.00. Now I cannot find any special pricing anywhere on the website.
Things have not changed since my 6/9/2008 post. I continue to submit about 1 article a day on average and they get looked at, approved, and then distributed in about 6 to 7 days. I get very few articles rejected (maybe 1 in 10) but it is easy to figure out how to correct it so they get through. I am not getting very much traffic from the articles but I am getting the anchored backlinks which is what I really want anyway. Any traffic would just be a bonus. Again, I have to admit I am extremely relieved that the paid service has been so good after using the free service that was so terrible.
6/28/08
Not much new to add so I think I might wrap this Article Marketer review up here. I am disappointed that Article Marketer says they distribute each and every article to over a 1000 directories and yet it seems only 30 – 60 of the directories accept the articles. Some of the directories accept every article and others only select ones on certain topics. However, it seems this may be something that is out of the control of Article Marketer and something that would be the same with any other paid service.
I have proven one thing for sure: the free service is absolutely awful and the paid yearly service fine. Yes, the customer service could be better, but I have really had no complaints at all other than that. I know that when I submit an article it will get distributed within a week and I don’t have to worry about anything else. It beats the pants off of any of the free or paid article submission software I have tried. Enter the article once and forget about it….very nice.
I haven’t gotten much traffic from the articles but I did not expect to. The real reason to write articles and have them submitted to different sites is so you can get anchored text links which will ultimately increase your search engine rankings. I have been getting those anchored links back to my sites. If you want traffic from your articles the best place to submit them is to ezinearticles.com and in fact I always submit my articles there first before I submit them to Article Marketer. I have gotten decent traffic from ezinearticles.com and so it is a small incovenience to submit my articles there as well.
About the price: I got in for a great lifetime membership rate of $299.00. They have now raised the price to $499.00 and I see they are talking about raising it to $799.00! I am definitely glad I got in so cheap but I would probably still pay the $499.00 price today. The $799.00 price seems high and that would most likely be too much for me. There are monthly and yearly rates as well which I haven’t paid much attention to. Article Marketer does show charts on its website that show that at any price they are still much cheaper than their competition such as “isnare” and “Submit Your Article”.
I will update this post if there is ever any change to the service or anything new to report. If you don’t see an update after this it means that everything is fine and nothing has changed. If you have any questions please leave a comment or contact me throught the “Contact” page at the top of the website.
7/18/08
Just a quick note that the price are going to go up AGAIN(!!) on July 31st. The last time Article Marketer said they would raise the price they did, so they probably will again. If you are at all thinking about getting in on AM then I suggest you do it now this month because I think they are going to raise the prices significantly.
8/26/08
Well, they still have the “price is going up tomorrow” blurb on their site and yet the price has not been raised like they said it would be on 7/31/08. It is still $499.00 for the lifetime membership. Article Marketer is still a good deal at that price and I would pay the $499.00 today if I had to. Yes, $499.00 is a lot of money to most people but if you are already making money then it is an investment you might want to make. Of course you can try it for the monthly or yearly fee if you are not so sure. However,nothing has changed and all my articles continue to be reviewed distributed within a week and I almost never have anything rejected. It just takes a little getting used to the system and then it is fine.
9/3/08
The price of the life time membership has now gone up to $599.00. (sorry I haven’t been paying attention to the monthly and yearly prices but I think they have gone up as well) Unfortunately, Article Marketer appears to be guilty of using scare tactic advertising, as they said on their website for a long time that it would go up to $799.00. Then they only raised it to $599.00. Now, on the bottom of the “Prices” page they are threatening to raise it again, this time to $999.99 as shown below:
* Hey Guys…
The Lifetime Membership is about to get a market rate adjustment.
The new price will soon be $999.99 – and it’ll STILL be the lowest price anywhere.
So, they probably will raise it again sometime in the future but we know that the $999.99 price is just a bluff. Article Marketer is a great service and it is working very will for me now but it sure seems like they are doing what is so common in this industry: trying to scare people into buying things by threatening to raise the price.
9/19/08 Update
To anyone on the fence about Article Marketer I can make things more complicated for you :) Please read my Article Marketer Automation Review which is a brand new article submitting service that is worth taking a look at. It has some different twists and advantages over AM and it is just out of Beta.
12/06/08 Update
Things are back to normal at Article Marketer as I have just put in 3 articles and had them reviewed and distributed within 2 days. They also say that they are now lowering the price (I think really just keeping it the same) because of the bad economy. Now might be a good time to get in if you can afford it.
4/5/09 Update
Be sure to read the comments below this post. They are ongoing and various opinions are being expressed. Right now, all of my articles are still sailing through the review and distribution so I thing they have gotten most of their problems ironed out.
Again though, you need to slow down and check things before you push that “submit” button. I put in the time upfront to make sure my articles are correct, the links work, and they are in the right categories so that they don’t get rejected and cause me undue frustration.
Hey Bruce, thanks for sharing. I’m looking forward to seeing what happens. For 299$ it would be nice to know how well it works before purchasing it. It will be interesting to see the results.
DJN–glad you took my advice and got it for $299! I also have a couple articles ready for distribution. This is a little troubling to me because one of them has been “ready” for a week now!
I was hoping to get it out sooner rather than later.
Other than that, I agree with your opinions above and I think you will find that overall, the links you get are well worth the hassles.
I actually use my membership to add links to several of my blogs by changing the HTML author box to link to the appropriate site. I think I have written about 50 articles for about 15 sites so far.
AL
That was the hardest part – the $299.00. But I didn’t want to pay for a shorter time period, then decide I liked it, and end up in the end having to pay more! So I just bit the bullet and paid the $299.00. Of course this would be harder for someone to do that is just starting out and not making any money.
I concur with the comment that you won’t get much value from the free version. And also that the service is extremely poor.
However the bottom line seems to be that they do distribute the articles as they say they do, and it’s very handy being able to set forward dates. You can set up a complete article marketing campaign in one go. It seems to work for me.
I really love their autopost system because I can then write loads of articles on the one topic and have them spread out over time.
I’m subscribed to the quarterly deal so will really need to look at getting the lifetime. I looked at isnare but they charge per article which can get very costly if you’re submitting loads of them.
Awesome post I’ve been searching for opinions on Article Marketer other than Court’s. About the same time you signed up for your lifetime account I signed up for the 3 month plan @ $49.95, which also claims unlimited distribution. I have a few articles in queue but also none of mine have been distributed yet. Definitely interested to see how it works for you, thanks for the info!
I joined Article Marketer on 17 May on their quarterly subscription, really just to try it out.
However, having posted half a dozen articles for distribution, up until today (22 May), all are still in a queue waiting to be distributed. They have all been approved though.
So the question is, how long do they take to send them out. I would have expected a bit of movement by now.
I have this image in my head of some poor guy sitting there with a free copy of “Article Submitter” manually submitting a huge backlog of articles to all their distribution channels!.
My initial impressions of Article Marketer are none too good at this time or perhaps I was expecting too much.
It’s nice to see someone actually use one of these products and then share the actual results.
Please keep us posted as you move along. I am planning to really hit the article marketing front hard in one of my niches and info like this is VERY helpful!
I am happy with everything about Article Marketer except for the time is takes to get out of the distribution queue. Article Marketer must have a limit as to the number of articles that get distributed each day. I think that is why they get backlogged.
I am following this with interest Nuke as I watched your discussion over at Court’s about Article Marketer and wondered how it would turn out.
I really hope it works out for you. Even at the reduced 299 dollars this is still a pretty expensive piece of marketing equipment.
Keep us informed andyou never know, I might sign up… one day.
Ok, to update my comments above, my article went out for distribution on Friday, May 24. It say in the que for exactly 6 business days.
I will tell you, however, that when they go out, they really go out because your inbox gets loaded with confirmations from the different article sites.
They also continue giong out over time as new article sites join the list.
I only submit about 2 articles per month from my account, so with the 20 or so that Nuke put in, I will be curious to see the distribution times.
Finally, a tip here also: You should write articles from several different niche’s and on varied topics. (they don’t have to relate to your paricular blog, you just want the links) This is because Article Marketer has several topics that you can assign to your article and each topic is distributed to a little bit different list! This is because there are some article sites that are ONLY about “business” for example, so if you always write about “classic car remodeling”, then you will never get published on the “business” sites. See?
AL
Thanks for the update Allyn. I’m feeling a lot better about the $299.00 I spent for the lifetime membership as it seems things are happening on my end too as I have just written about in my 5/24/08 update.
Same happening with me as well. Just in the last thirty minutes or so, my inbox has been flooded with Welcome messages from various article directories.
Sort of reminds me of the old days when I used to auto submit my site URL’s to the listing directories and then get flooded with confirmation emails. Even to this day, I still get stacks of email from these sites. Good way to build a mailing list I guess.
My faith in article marketer has now been restored thankfully. I was holding off submitting any more articles until something happened with these initial submissions. Now that I can see something happening, I guess it’s time to get some more articles written.
Good tip from Allyn regarding writing articles for different niches.
I started using the Easy Blogs Pro script to pull in articles from iSnare for one of my niche blogs and I only selected to use articles from one category and even then I had to screen the articles before posting.
iSnare have a Food and Drink category but I only wanted drink related articles. Article Marketer has way more categories so articles have got the potential to end up on a lot of tightly related niche blogs/sites.
Thanks for this: I have just requested a refund on Callen’s article submitter software: it all seemed very manual and there was a high failure rate: mainly because the categories didn’t match. I acurrently playing with the free trial of article marketer except the price. Im not saying its not worth it – and I trust Court: but its scary money when you are not making any: I might compromise on the 3 month sub
Lissie I did the same and I am glad I did. Article submitter is a ton of work and now this really seems to be working for me just like Court said.
Not sure if I ever commented over here, but I’m glad this is working out for you. I’ve been keeping tabs for months; so it was interesting to watch your initial excitement with BANS, then a sort of slump, then I think you discovered Vic and got into it again, then seeing your comments at Court’s, and now a piece of software that will help you achieve your goals. So it’s good.
I think SEO Elite has some an article submit feature but I got kinda bummed about EzineA because I couldn’t really track progress like you’re doing with Marketer- so I put article’s on the back burner once I figured out how to make money with small traffic.
Price is just a hurdle that people have to get over. When they’re not making $ they sometimes can’t see the bigger picture that software can get them to a place where they ARE making $.
Great review you have here and thanks for the constant updates. I have a quick question:
You talked about each article having the “author” box. Can you change the author box for each article, or is it always the same author box?
Oh yes you can change the author box for each article you put in. For each article I do two different anchored links and that seems to be the number of links most people put in.
Again, I have checked many of my accepted articles on the different sites and they do have my anchored links and of course that is the whole point of submitting the articles anyway.
What percentage accepted articles actually end up in directories which allow html in the author box ? Compared with the text only author box: I am right in thinking that unless there is html there is no point to the article right?
Correct. If there is no html there is no point.
However, all my articles I checked have the html so I am not worried about it. I can tell you this is indeed, just like Court said, a tremendous time saver. Even if some go out without the html it is no big deal as long as most have it.
Before Article Marketer, after writing an article, I still had a lot of work to do to submit it to the directories even though I had the Article Submitter software. Now I write an article, and type it in their system and push a button. That’s it. It even makes me more willing to write articles because I don’t have to do any work afterwords.
Wow. That is pretty freakin’ cool. 300 bucks though isn’t chump change, especially when you’re just starting (or even if you’ve started for a while but have nothing to show for it).
I signed up on the quarterly plan, and so far I am NOT impressed. These guys seem to find any reason to send your article back. Here are just a few of the reasons I have had articles sent back
“too boring”
“sounds like an advertisement”
“author box mismatched name submitted”
“doesnt qualify as a review”
Plus my favorite late last week “were running behind” then next thing I know my article is put to the end of the line. So far I’ve only gotten one into the actual sumbission que out of 6 articles submitted.
Now I’m not a noob with writing, and I’m not sending in a bunch of garbage, in fact some of these have gone in finenions here as well, but so far I’m disappointed.
I have gotten the “sounds like an advertisement” once but in that case they were probably correct. I guess I am having better luck so far than Aaron is having.
Well got another one rejected tonight, this time for “wrong category” While this continues to be frustrating, I re-read your timeline here, and the posts on Courts site. I’m guessing the key here is to really have your s&^% together before putting in your article.
Submitted a few articles manually tonight, and after all the time that took, decided that this probably is the best way to go despite the issues.
Aaron,
I must admit, having the lifetime plan has made it easier for me to accept the “issues”. It has made it easier because I am in no hurry to have to have the articles accepted and published. I know that it will all happen in good time.
I also know that I will have a few things rejected but I just fix them and put them back in. The waiting times have not been bad at all and at this point I know that my article will go out within about a week.
I know $299.00 is a heck of a lot of money for most people but at this point I am glad I did it. Hope that doesn’t change!
Read your latest update…Good to see your having some success, looks like my first one finally hit the “distribution to complete list” and a 2 others finally were accepted.
How are your back links growing?
I really love their autopost system because I can then write loads of articles on the one topic and have them spread out over time.
I upgraded from a free to paid membership on Jun 15 2008. I clearly said on the website that an upgrade was a special price of $399 vs. the new $499 price. I even took a screen shot. I was charged $499 thru PayPal. I have emailed the info email sent by PayPal and posted several times on the Article Marketer (so-called) Support Center requesting a refund of $100; or least an explanation and some service. Also the special offered three free custom written articles. No response on that either.
Despite a sign on the support site promising a 2 day response time I have not received any reply as of 23 Jun. I can’t even tell if my account was upgraded. Maybe Article Marketer can submit articles, but their Customer Service is very poor, or should I say non existent?
damme I missed the special price :-) I have been hanging on to see how people were fairing before committing. So what you are saying is that for each article you submit you get around 35-50 backlinks ?
Marie,
The Customer Service does seem to be lacking in almost every respect. Doesn’t PayPal show you how much you are being charged BEFORE you push the “Pay” button? It does for me.
Vacation,
It does seem that I am getting between 30-50 backlinks for each article. Yes.
I’m actually considering Article Marketer, but 30-50 backlinks for each article? I thought they promised more than that? Well, I guess you gotta lie to kick it sometimes.
The 30 – 50 backlinks is a number that I have heard from others as well so my experience is similar to theirs. But it is a pretty effortless 30 – 50!
I guess to get the 1000+ backlinks they promise you have to submit multiple articles. It adds up. I’ll give it a try, but maybe for the quarter subscription. I hope I make some sales from this.
I just got a quarterly membership to AM and submitted a couple of articles. What I found is that most, if not ALL of the published articles that linked back to my URL had the nofollow directive tacked on the link. (Do a view source on the page to check for yourself)
Guess what. Google completely ignores these links when determining page ranking. So does Live and Yahoo. That means that your articles probably will not affect your standings in the search engines that account for over 85% of all web traffic!
I suggest you look into this yourself. I have contacted customer service at article marketer and am waiting for a response.
John,
I use SEO Quake which shows all links with no-follow in red. I did a quick search and found one of my articles on 10 or so different article sites and I only found one no-follow site: articlesbase.com. I’m just not seing that they are no-follow but I am not looking in the “view source”.
I also found several of my articles where the words were absolutely all mixed up and nothing made sense BUT my two links were intact. Wierd.
Please post any response you get from AM.
7/2/08 update – I have just looked at this some more and what I am seeing is that about 90% of the backlinks are do-follow and only about 10% are no-follow.
Hi Day Job Nuker,
A friend of mine pointed me to this post, so I thought I’d jump in and give my two cents (full disclosure — I’m on staff at Article Marketer). You’ve presented a really great review, based on facts and actual results. Nicely done :-)
I hope it’s okay that I address a couple of specific things that have come up:
–It’s true, our distribution had been running behind due to sheer volume. We’ve upgraded our servers and I think you’ll find this is much better now.
–Customer Service has been a big trouble spot for us, we admit that. We have been focusing so hard on getting review and distribution humming along, that individual tickets do have to wait too long for an answer at times. We’ve just ramped up our CS team with new trained reps, so this is getting back on target too.
–The ‘no-follow’ attribute issue really concerns us. If this happens to your articles, let us know. Our Author Advocate will go after these guys and insist that they take that no-follow off or face removal from our distribution list. That also applies to any sites where you find your links removed or altered. Another practice we see, from time to time, are sites that put their own links in the body of other folk’s articles. This is also cause for removal from our list. We want to know about this, so let us know when you see it happening.
–Finally, the issue of 30-50 links per article keeps coming up. Keep in mind that Google won’t show all thousand links unless you click the “omitted similar results” links. That might explain why the 30-50 number keeps coming up.
I invite all to visit our blog at Article Marketer. You’ll find answers for many of the issues discussed here. Learn how to prevent many things that are causing you frustration by simple preventive measures on the author’s side of the house. We want every Article Market customer to reap the best results possible from our service. Stop by for a visit sometime.
Thanks for commenting Brad. I’m glad to know there is a real person there somewhere at AM and I hope your comments will help people who read this make a better decision on whether to join.
The only thing I REALLY WANT at this point is to have the ability to submit articles under different pen names. That is important to me and to many others I am sure.
I posted the comment on the 29th of June regarding my “upgrade from a free to paid membership $399 vs. the new $499 price.
Despite a sign on the support site promising a 2 day response time I have not received any reply as of 23 Jun. I can’t even tell if my account was upgraded. Maybe Article Marketer can submit articles, but their Customer Service is very poor, or should I say non existent..”
Well, I can’t say it was fast, but Article Marketer did refund the $100 on 11 July. They even said “Sorry”, which I appreciate. So I want to report the good as well as the bad. Thank you Article Marketer for being responsible adults. I see too little of that. And I can see the articles being distributed. PS. I hadn’t even considered the “no-follow” issue, glad some else thought of that.
Wow Bruce,
What a thorough review of article marketer. I also signed up on Court’s recommendation. I spoke with him about some articles only appearing to have a few links and he said that google will never show you how many links they have for your site. They will show you a “sample” of sites that have linked to yours.
I’m also not sure you can only count the sites you get an email from. From what I understand not all of them send confirmation or welcome emails.
As for improving search engine placement. I have definitely seen it work for that! Not only for mini sites, but for my blog, and squidoo pages as well!
Yes, the customer service is horrible, but it works for what it says it does. It also appears they are aware of and working on their issues.
Jackie
Just to clarify something . . .
Many of the “directories” submitted to by these services are actually yahoogroups, googlegroups, and ezines. The life span of the back links generated when an article gets posted on these is very short usually, and not at all for ezines that don’t use the articles.
This could be why after submitting to over 1,000 “directories” you only found 30 to 50 back links.
Article Submitter Pro ($167 and you own it) submits to over 1,300 real article directories like EzineArticles.com and all the other high PR8 and under directories through their actual submission forms. You know when your articles are submitted, and you know the directory owners receive it.
You get to choose the category your article goes into, so you know it has the highest quality back links that are usually permanent.
Sure there’s work involved. But by using a software to submit articles, you can submit as soon as your article is ready. This comes in handy if you’re working a niche where you window of opportunity is limited, or if you’re trying to bolster a specific site quickly.
But in any case, there’s a huge difference between a real article directory and an email group or ezine :)
Ken,
As you can see I took out your link to Article Submitter Pro. If you want to manually (with or without software) submit your articles to where ever you want to please go right ahead. All the extra work submitting them is EXACTLY why I got Article Marketer.
While you are busy submitting your articles to dirictory after directory, I will have written another article and probably even another and have it ready to go.
I know for a fact that enough of them get to real article directories with NO ADDITIONAL WORK FROM ME WHATSOEVER and for that I am very happy I got the membership to Article Marketer. I would never in a million years go back. Unfortunately, there are those like you who never get a chance to taste the easy life and have to continually submit your articles for the rest of your life. This may all sound harsh but it is because you left your link in and the purpose of your comment is most likely that you are only really trying to sell your software.
I’ll reply without my website url even though there’s a slot for it . . .
I’m happy for you, if taking the easy way out is what you’re looking for. However some people who want to come off as professional and see their articles as something more than just back links, might have been looking for an alternative.
“This may all sound harsh but it is because you left your link in and the purpose of your comment is most likely that you are only really trying to sell your software.”
Actually I get a lot of emails from people dissatisfied with AM, so when I saw how excited you were about it, I wanted to offer an alternative.
I didn’t put any link in the comment. Just put it in the slot for Website just like everyone else.
But if you don’t want an open discussion, that’s fine too. I’ll take my 8,000 back links and go home :)
Well, this is a review of Article Marketer and nothing else and it is not meant to be a discussion of anything else.
If people want a review of your software they can go somewhere else to find a review of it. All I know is that with your software and others like it, a person will be doing a lot of work submitting even though I am sure you have automated some of it.
With Article Marketer, you write the article, submit is once, and you are done. That is what I was looking for and so far that is exactly what Aritcle Marketer has delivered.
Ok, sorry.
I thought that because you allowed comments that you were opening things up to other’s viewpoints. Didn’t realize the comments were only for praise.
So only good stuff for the product YOU’RE peddling? Ok I get it. :)
You are being rediculous now and starting to cross the line. If you had read my review (and my scathing review of the free service) you would see that there are plenty of negative’s in the review as well as negative comments. In fact, read my last sentence of this review right now dated 9/3/08.
Additionally, you have never used Article Marketer (at least you never have said that you do) and it is clear that the only reason you are here is to push your own product. Ken, I will waste no more time with you
Hi, DayJobNuker
(sorry, don’t know your name)
I got your email and come to this site as directed.
Very please to see the good results.
Nevertheless, I still have one nagging question.
I know you might not like me to bring up other product, like Ken.
But, I do want your opinion about Unique Article Wizard. I tried to search some discussion about this product on google, but can’t find a serious discusstion.
Is it possible for you to do a little comparison for IM and UWA.
I seriously want to sign up for a good distribution service.
I bought one software for $97 and get very frustated using it. Please comment, if possible.
Thanks
Henry
Henry,
I have never heard of Unique Article Wizard and I read their sales page where I found this:
“Unique Article Wizard does require you to make some adjustments to each article – on average it takes about 30 minutes to do this (and again, this can be outsourced). And then it produces completely readable, human written, unique articles.”
This sounds to me like if you join their service you will still have to do a lot of work in addition to writing your articles. I really have no idea about UAW but I know one thing: the reason I paid for Article Marketer is because I wanted to write my articles, submit them, and forget about them knowing that everything would be taken care of. Again as I have said, the free service was crap (and many other people have verified that) but the paid service is great (and many people have verified that as well.)
If you sign up for Article Marketer, I must warn you that you might get frustrated at first if they reject some of your articles. But if you pay attention to what you are submitting and learn what not to do, then you will get none of them rejected. I RARELY have an article rejected now and when I do it is because of my mistake like not finding the best category or leaving HTML in the article body or something like that.
The whole point about Article Marketer is that it is truly like they are working for me submitting my articles. I NEVER HAVE TO LIFT A FINGER TO SUBMIT THEM and believe me the time savings is tremendous.
UAW makes a big deal about duplicate content in their sales page and I think it is hogwash. If you are worried about duplicate content then I don’t know what to say. I am doing this for the links and that is what I get. EVERYTHING I HAVE LEARNED ABOUT INTERNET MARKETING HAS TOLD ME THAT GETTING TARGETED ANCHOR LINKS IS THE KEY TO GETTING MY SITES ON THE FRONT PAGE OF GOOGLE. Think about how much duplicate content CNN or NBC or any other news source has out there as their same story is reprinted thousands of times. It doesn’t hurt them though because CNN and sites like that have thousand upon thousands of incoming links. I don’t care about duplicate content and neither should you. Incoming links are what it is all about and Article Marketer helps get me those links and saves tons and tons of time and work. Good luck. Let us know if you try UAW but it sounds like a pretty hyped up sales page to me.
Thanks for your kind response. Appreciate a lot.
Hey guyz,
UAW is really a good service and I highly recommend you to join it.
And by the way,I have a group of writer who are offer their writing service to cater to UAW Submission guildlines.
UAW is a great software to boost your backlink but you will need articles to archive it.
Article Marketer has been backed up for over a week after they switched over to a new server. All my articles are in que for over 10 days and none have gone out. Until now I’ve been very happy with the service, but this realy sucks! I have lifetime memberships and 3 month memberships and I hope they intend to give credits or extend the 3 month term due to these terrible issues they’re having now. I suggest nobody joins AticleMarketer until these issues are solved. I will post here when they are running smoothly again.
AM is the best of the best but seriously Customer Service SUCKS! If I could get rid of the idiot Service center and hire some new people that actually have good manners and are professional; I would in a second. They are rude, ignorant and take their time when responding. I recently have had a problem this entire month AND I couldnt contact anyone AND the support number was disconnected. I wrote 5 contact forms from Oct29th til tonight the 17th and I JUST now received a reply.. this girl was NASTY like, make you want to wish bad karma on her, nasty. Seriously what makes these people and people like this think they can treat people like me, like that? They have no right doing that.
BBB has several complaints about their customer service. Im glad people reported them.
Hey I love AM i just hate the tactics they use when dealing with people (like me) that are legit, and do work hard.
Jesse – your right the customer service does need some tweaking. I never called them but when I send in a trouble ticket it takes a couple days for them to respond. In addition I want to let everybody know that the articles have been getting distrinuted now since the 16th but they are staying in the ‘articles qued’ section although they have been distributed. I guess theyre still having some issues after updating to the new servers. I do have to say though with all the problems its still the best service out there for a great price. I guess with everything you take the good with the bad.
Thanks for letting me post here!!
Have you reviewed SubmityourArticles.com and compared to article marketer? I have the former and trying to understand if there is a significant difference.
Many thanks
Drew,
I have no experience with SubmityourArticles.oom
Hey man, this is a great review about Article marketer, but the question is.. are you getting results??
I subscribed to the annual membership of AM last year, and I’ve got a few months left, but I don’t use it much since I don’t notice any changes in my website rankings when using the program. Right now I’m testing out AMA, let’s c how it goes.. but I would LOVE to know if you are getting results from AM.. if so, I might need to give it another try…
thanks..
Hi Ryan,
I still use Article Marketer but it is now only one of the ways I get inbound links. As you might know, it is hard to specifically point to one source of inbound links and say that that group is working. I will say that I continue to have no problems with AM and they put through my articles quite quikely now.
If you are interested, you might also check out Connect Content as another source for inbound anchored links at a very reasonable price.
So after 7 months and you don’t know if your site is going up the ranks? If these were respectable directories, you would know within a month.
For lifetime plan is just $299 is awesome, i’ll try this service, thanks for the hints to write the articles.
I’m gonna have to agree with Koi Man here, why can’t you tell after a a good 8 weeks or so if the anchored links were indeed helping?
I understand it’s hard to isolate factors, but there should be -some- way to know, even if a little.
Still sounds like Unique Article Wizard might be better.. . ??
It’s really hard to tell when you are getting links from many different sources other than article marketing. If you think you can tell the difference with UAW then go for it. I’ve been doing this for almost 2 years now and there isn’t much that I can specifically point to and say “wow, I see the difference right here right now of this link I got last month”.
I tried article marketer, and have to say I think the manual review stinks. they’ve rejected 8 of 9 articles for rediculously petty reasons.
Because of these inconveniences – it’s not worth my time because I basically have to review each submission 2 to 3 times before I submit it.
I’m sticking with Isnare. At $1 to $2 per submission, a broader distribution, and virtually 100% acceptance rate, it’s way less of a pain in the arse.
Not happy with ArticleMarketer at all.
I think if you took the time upfront to make sure everything was correct, they would not be rejecting your articles. After I had some rejected in the beginning, it made me spend a little more time upfront and now I rarely get them rejected. That’s the truth, believe it or not.
Thanks for this detailed review. It prompted me to give AM a try. Too bad the lifetime is currently 499. I would have easily gone for the 299 deal.
Anyhow, I submitted some articles last night and one has already been distributed. The others I had rookie errors that the human review pointed out so it actually helped me in the end.
MY time is limited so I need something I can just play and play in terms of article marketing. Out of all the services, AM seems to fit my purposes the best. I had a subscription to Article Marketing Automation but just took too much time to spin an article and I don’t like that I can’t see my article on the actual blogs. They could be removing my link for all I know.
I will give AM a try for a while as I’m on the quarterly plan and see how my backlink counts progress.
Thanks again for the honest review. Hard to find these days.
Cheers :)
Thanks Jay,
You are right. Almost all the articles I had rejected in the beginning were my errors caused by going to fast – you call them rookie errors. All the people who gripe about them rejecting articles just need to slow down and review them first and they will have no problem.
Of course with my lifetime plan I have more time to play with because I know every article of mine will go through and I don’t have any time crunch like you might feel with the quarterly plan.
All my articles are still going through right now with no delays so I hope you have success with them.