We’ve been gathering data on articles with bid for placement on them. Specifically, we’re trying to see what influence a bid for placement has on the number of views an article receives.

When a bid is placed on an item on IdeaMarketers.com, that item comes up higher on the site. The site is sorted from highest to lowest bidder — meaning an article with a $40 bid comes up higher than one with a $19 bid, $16 bid or $10 bid. You may also put an article into the site and not bid at all. It’s up to you. But what influence will bidding have on the number of times an article is viewed?

To give you an idea, this is a graph of 5 different articles with different bid amounts.

Notice that the article with a $40 placement gets the most traffic. That article is toward the top of the home page and most likely “above the fold” (meaning visitors see it when they land on the home page), so it does get more click-throughs to it. But notice how the $10 placement and the $16 placement get about the same number of views. The $10 placement actually slightly outperforms the $16 one. And then the $19 placement receives fewer click-throughs than both the $10 and $16 placement.

The article with no bid at all gets little traffic in comparison to any of the articles with bids.

Bidding clearly makes a difference, but why don’t higher bids always get higher results? There is one major variable at work here and that is the fact that these different articles have different titles. The title and summary are making a difference. So, which titles are pulling better?

Let’s look at them in order of best to worst performance:

• U.S. Foreign Policy on Israel – How Best to Support Israel – $40
• Deliver Your Message to the Online World: Avoid These 7 Common Mistakes – $10
• The Scent of Desperation – $16
• Marketing Made Easy: Marketing Your Message Can Be Easy, Natural and Fun! – $19

The first article is being influenced by both it’s high bid amount that puts it toward the top of the home page and by the fact that this is a newsworthy topic, being that we’re in an election year. The second article mentions “avoid these 7 common mistakes” which piques the viewer’s interest and makes them want to know what those mistakes are.

The third one has a catchy title and also pulls well. The fourth ($19) bid evidently is the least compelling of the four articles with bids.

I hope this little analysis gives you some ideas on how you can attract more viewers to your articles.

Offer a rich media experience for your audience by embedding videos into your articles that you submit to IdeaMarketers.com. The following step-by-step tutorial video shows you how to include videos in your articles on IdeaMarketers.com.

Q. I understand we are allowed to put pictures in the articles. Pictures of the product that we are reviewing. Can you please tell me how to include pictures in an article?

A. You’ll need to host the photo somewhere on your site or a hosting location. There are two ways you may include an image. First, we have a blank on the article submission form where you can put the full http address of the image, and we will include it at the upper left of the article beside the title.

Or if you want it inside the body of the article, you may reference it using HTML codes. Something like

<img src=”http://www.yourdomain.com/images/image.jpg” width=”150″ align=”left”>

As far as I know there aren’t too many content directories online that will let you embed your videos into your articles, but not only do we allow it at IdeaMarketers.com, but we encourage it. It’s always a good idea to give people multiple ways to consume your information. Some people would rather read what you have to say, but others would prefer to watch a video or listen to an audio.

For example, I’d rather watch a video or listen to an audio most of the time. I can do that while I work on something else that is mindless, but that needs to be done. In this video I’ll show you just how simple it is to add video to your articles on IdeaMarketers.com.

We operate a G-rated site at IdeaMarketers and enforce it strictly. We do not accept gambling, porn-related, adult-related, or offensive content. If we wouldn’t want our kindergartner reading it, then we will pull it.

We also insist that information entered be an actual article or press release and not an advertisement. Many people try to abuse our system by putting short keyword stuffed ads into our system as articles. This results in us removing the entire writer account and all the items posted within it. So don’t bother doing that!

While we are strict about content, we are more lenient than other content directories about how many links you can put to your site within an article or you bio. We do not set a limit, but hope that you would use this option judiciously. Too many links doesn’t help you anyway.

We also allow you to embed object code within your articles. So if you’d like to include a video or an audio embed code in your article, we are open to that. It just needs to be G-rated content.

For full list of our terms and conditions, go here.

We don’t have an approval process. All articles post instantly. If you post an article and it doesn’t appear,  your web browser may be set to block our site from setting session variables. In other words, your web browser won’t let us remember who you are long enough for you to add articles. If you got kicked back to the login screen after you entered an article, then one of three things happened:

• You took too long entering your article and your session timed out. NEVER type your article directly into the box provided, type it in another program (i.e. Word, NotePad, etc) and then copy and paste it into the form. This will keep internet glitches from causing you to lose your article. Plus, if you take too long entering your information into the form, the connection could time out and log you out of our system.
• A common reason for being sent back to the login screen and your article not being added is that most likely your Web browser security settings are set too high and are not allowing our site to create a session variable. Make sure you’re using either IE or Firefox to access the site. Go to Tools, Internet Options, Security, Trusted Sites (Or Exceptions) and add http://www.ideamarketers.com to your list of trusted sites. Uncheck anything that requires SSL or https://.
• Avoid using Chrome. It still has some glitches and won’t always work with our advanced programming.

Another possibility is that if you posted articles that violated our terms/conditions they would have been removed. Our terms and conditions are at http://www.ideamarketers.com/library/terms.cfm

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:

• increases your chances of having your article (and thus your web site) picked up by spidering search engines ;
• increases the chances of your article being picked up by webmasters, editors and print publications, because it’s more prominently placed on our site;
• 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;
• 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.

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.

If you have an article on the home page of IdeaMarketers and you have changed either its title, summary or the photo that goes with it, the change will not take effect immediately. Our site is on a periodic update to prevent strain on our servers. But, you can refresh the home page yourself by logging into your writer account and going to Article/PR Admin and selecting Update Home Page. Once you do that, the home page will refresh.

If it still doesn’t refresh for you, then you can press F5 on your keyboard to refresh the page in your browser.