Our company naming and branding expert, Phillip Davis, was recently interviewed by Inc. Magazine online. They found him through his listing on IdeaMarketers.com.  The article is entitled How to Choose the Best Name For Your Business. Entrepreneurs often angst over the perfect name for their business. This guide will help you choose a defensible trademark and a search-friendly, recognizable name. To view the article go here.

Here’s what Phil has to say about being an expert on IdeaMarketers.com:

“Since becoming an IdeaMarketers Expert, I’ve gained high level exposure that has lead to numerous interviews in a wide number of national business publications such as Inc.com, Newsday, AllBusiness, TV Guide, Brand Freak and MediaPost. This has resulted in even more exposure (i.e. internet radio, guest blogging, featured expert articles, etc.,) as well as valuable inbound links to our web site. Thank you Marnie for shining the light on your experts!”

Find out how to become an IdeaMarketers Expert today!

Most people don’t realize that ideamarketers.com is more than just an article directory. We’re a Content Directory. You can promote books, ebooks, press releases and even audios and videos. In this video I explain an easy way to build your mailing list by giving away an ebook on your site and then listing that ebook on IdeaMarketers.

Anyone may post an ebook or book for free and it will appear on their profile and their articles. The video also shows you how to get prominent position on our popular home page and on all articles in the category that matches your book.

View the video on youtube here.

In an upcoming telecall on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, you can learn 5 free and easy ways to promote your expertise online — specifically by using the tools already available to you in your IdeaMarketers Writer account.  IdeaMarketers.com founder, Marnie Pehrson, will be covering:

• Article marketing
• Book and ebook promotion
• Getting search engine traffic
• Understanding & Using RSS Feeds to Save Time & Maximize Your Presence
• Become a Syndicated Columnist

This call is also a kick-off for our 10-year anniversary giveaway of a FREE Netbook! In the call you’ll find out how you can qualify to win. To register go here.

If you ever need free content for your web site, newsletter, ezine, or print publication, IdeaMarketers.com has over a half a million articles on hundreds of subjects. You can use it in a myriad of ways — via our handy newsletter builder or through RSS feeds or PHP feeds that actually stream the articles into your site. Learn more about obtaining free content.

Michiel Van Kets of manual-submissions.com brought up some critical points regarding my last post. While I don’t agree with everything he said, he did make a good point about WHY submission services link back to the original article. They’re trying to tell Google that they had it first. They’re trying to protect against duplicate content penalization and claim first use of the article. Since ideamarketers.com is the longest running article directory on the Web (Dec 1998) and it does receive several million page views per month, it is considered a high authority site and usually brings up higher search results. So, I can understand their concern.

Yet it still doesn’t give the end user a good experience to be led away to a duplicate copy of an article for more information, nor does it best serve the writer who isn’t able to “strike while the iron is hot.”

SO… I came up with a solution.  (Criticism is the mother of invention.) I’ve programmed our site to recognize if the “more information” url is a link to a major submission service. If it is, it will link to the default URL on the writer profile for more information and then at the bottom of the article, it will say, “This article was submitted by a submission service.” That phrase will then link to the duplicate copy on the submission service’s site.

This should satisfy the submission service, the author, the end user, and Google. If you use a submission service that links back to a copy of the article on their site, you’re welcome to comment below with the name of that service and I’ll add it to the programming so it will be handled appropriately.

I might add, that many times the default URL on your writer profile will NOT be the URL you want to link an article to. In this case, ideally you’d put a specific URL within your site in the blank we provide in the article-level custom resource box.

If you own or work for a submission service, you’d be better off letting the writer have their specific URL in the custom resource box and hard-code a link (using html) to your original copy at the bottom of the body of the article. This way you’d be covering your own interests and those of your customers.

Many people use article submission services to save time when submitting articles to article directories. And that’s ok. But there is one thing you’ll want to be aware of. It’s nothing malicious, but it is incredibly ineffective for you as the writer who’s working hard to churn out quality articles and then paying someone to submit them for you.

We’ve noticed a pattern among articles submitted by article submission sites to IdeaMarketers.com . Every article in our system is allowed to have a URL associated with it. We link your primary keyword phrase to this URL. We tell people to go there for more information when they read your article. This URL SHOULD link to your site for more information about the article subject. This is your chance to get people to your site to sign up for your list and perhaps one day purchase from you.

The problem with some of the article submission services is that they don’t fill in this blank with your site’s URL. They fill it in with a URL on THEIR site which contains an exact duplicate of the article being submitted.  This means someone who has just read your article is going to be linked off to read it again on another site! They don’t want this. They want MORE information about you.

If you use an article submission service, I’d recommend logging into IdeaMarketers, go to the Article/PR Admin menu, click on Edit/View and edit your articles. Make sure the custom resource box links to a URL on your site for more information about the article’s subject. Better yet, ask your article submission service if they will fill in this blank with a URL on your site.

I’ve posted a 2nd part to this post here.

Does bidding make a big difference in how much your articles get picked up and distributed or syndicated?

Answer

First, let me explain that articles on IdeaMarketers are sorted first from highest to lowest bidder and then by the expiration date of the bid (or the date the article was submitted if there’s no bid on the article). This gives top bidders prominent positioning on the most popular pages of the site – the home page and the channel pages. The top bid articles also recommended on other articles that are in the same broad channel category. For example, the top 8 bid articles in the Business category will appear on all business-related articles.

In relation to syndication and distribution, bidding for article promotion does the following:

1. increases your chances of having your article (and thus your web site) picked up by spidering search engines ;
2. increases the chances of your article being picked up by webmasters, editors and print publications, because it’s more prominently placed on our site;
3. increases the chances of having your article syndicated through our category syndication. The articles we stream out to other sites are sorted first by bid amoun and then by date. We syndicated out roughly 3 million page views each month to other web sites. Bidding helps bring you toward the top of those syndication feeds;
4. increases the chances of having your own syndicated column picked up because if you have a bid running on at least one of your articles, we promote you as a syndicated columnist on your profile, your articles, and also on www.SyndicatedWriters.com

To learn more about the bidding process, go here.

In order for your article to show on the home page of IdeaMarketers.com, you’ll have to place a bid for promotion. Our home page is sorted from highest to lowest bidder. A bid on an article, press release or book lasts for 7 days. For example, someone who bids $30 for an article’s promotion will come up higher than someone who pays $20 or $10

Assuming you have placed a bid and your article still isn’t showing, make sure you bid high enough to be on the home page. The left-hand column is what we call Group 1 and shows the top 60 bidders in the following categories put together: Business, Tech, Marketing, Finance, Travel/Tourism.

The middle column is what we call Group 2 and shows the top 60 bidders in the following categories put together: Education, Entertainment/News, Home/Family, Writing/Publishing, Life.

To see what current bids are going for, click here.

Assuming you’ve bid high enough, if your bid still isn’t showing, log into your account and go to Article/PR Admin on the menu and choose Update Home Page. To conserve resources, our home page is on a periodic update, but you can use this option to force it to refresh. After you do this, if you go to the home page, it should be there. If not, you might try pressing F5 on your keyboard to refresh your browser.

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This question was submitted by Dennis AuBuchon of www.myqualitywriting.com :

“I was reviewing my articles in the edit/remove screen and it indicated that I had 2 syndicated hits for my Free Speech and Integrity article.  I would like to know who the hits were by if that is possible.  I did not have any requests in my account where it states view requests unless I am not looking in the right location.  When you click on the view requests link on your site where does the information appear.”

There are 3 types of statistics we offer you on your articles.

1. Requests. The first is under the “Tools/Stats” and “View Requests” in your writer login area. This link shows you only the people using our Publisher’s Toolbox system who have put your article in their basket when building a newsletter. It doesn’t mean they actually printed your article or published it in any way. It only means they added it to their basket for possible publication.

2. Hits on our site(s). Whenever your article is viewed on our site(s), a hit counter is incremented so you can tell how many times someone has opened the page for your article. (Under Tools/Stats, Article Stats)

3. Syndicated Hits. Whenever your article is shown on outside sites through either our Writer Syndication or Category Syndication systems, this hit counter is incremented. If you’ve never received an email saying someone has picked up your syndicated column, then most likely your article was viewed through the Category Syndication.

We syndicate the top 15 articles in Business, Marketing, Tech, Home/Family, Personal Development, Christian, etc… The top 15 articles in each channel category are sorted from highest to lowest bidder and then by date. You must mark your articles as “syndicateable” in our system to be included in our channel category syndication program. Site owners pick up a snippet of code from us, put it on their sites and then the top 15 articles for a category will automatically stream onto their sites. This is a live feed from our database so the stream can change from moment-to-moment. Also, people who use our Publishers’ Toolbox service can select individual subcategories and syndicate those out onto their web sites.

In your situation, most likely your article spent some time in category syndication.

There’s no way for us to tell you exactly who ran your article when, but you will receive an email anytime someone picks up your personal Syndicated Column or anytime someone fills out a “Request to Reprint” form on our site.