For years, we’ve been using email auto responder services like Aweber to communicate to readers and potential customers. One of the more popular techniques used is the blog announcement – an automated email that goes out every time you create a post. This technique keeps your readers engaged and encourages them to come back to your blog often.

Aweber has a feature that monitors the feed from your blog and when it sees a post – it triggers a pre-formatted email to your list. It’s not hard to configure and is very reliable. But if you are using your auto responder service primarily to send out blog announcements, you are paying for a service that you can get for free – using FeedBurner.

FeedBurner is a free blogger service that takes your rss feed and packages it into many innovative delivery options. If you are new to FeedBurner, it takes a bit to get the hang of what they are really offering. The best way to learn is to simply create an account and start playing with it. It’s free – and the service has been recently acquired by Google.

Burn a feed and sign up for the email service – you’ll get simple code to put on your site that allows readers to opt-in to an email version of your blog – complete with attractive layouts, links, etc. It’s totally double opt-in, and works flawlessly.

Here is what the opt-in form looks like:

Or, include a simple opt-in link: Subscribe to Data SystemsPlus by Email. Feel free to opt in to my blog list!

FeedBurner email is the way to go for blog announcement lists – it’s free, professional – looking and readers know they are not giving their email to be spammed with the one-click unsubscribe.

From: Andy Beard andybeard.eu

I was honestly wondering when someone would come up with a service like Share-A-Post, because it is one of those "no brainer" ideas that I have thought of doing, but never got around to.

When to a huge amount of disbelief I blocked some of my high ranking paid reviews with robots.txt, and hinted that syndication would be a perfect loophole in Google's penalties, no one fully understood what I meant – many SEO experts thought I was bonkers.

This is what I meant – widespread syndication with editorial control

The Limits of Traditional Article Marketing

Article marketing is all well and good, but is extremely limited

• You can only use a fixed number of links in a post
• Article directories are quite inflexible over affiliate links even if you have created
• HTML formatting is frowned upon because the articles are often intended for email use
• You can't use pictures
• Most of the articles end up on very low value sites that have no readers
• Whilst they often use categories, tag support is limited

Jonathan Ledger has come up with what at first glance seems to be the perfect service for submission and syndication of quality blog articles.

Article Submission

• You sign up and add your blog – If you are smart, you will create a new user on your blog with username and password with low level privileges – don't enter your admin username and password – I trust Jonathan, but even large websites get hacked, why take the risk?
• You make sure your blog is posting full content feeds
• You add an entry to your ping list, so that when you update your blog, your article is automatically added to Share-A-Post
• You use Technorati tags as normal, though only the first 5 will be used – that avoids tag spam
• You can add multiple blogs

RSS Article Syndication

When you are short of content for one of your blogs, you can visit Share A Post, search for an appropriate article, and have it posted either as a draft or published article directly to one of your blogs.

The service uses XML-RPC to connect automatically, just like popular blogging software such as Microsoft Windows Live Writer, but that does require a username and password – hence why I suggested precautions when setting up.

The other advantage is that when you are posting a guest article on your blog, because it is posted as a different user, it can be given different emphasis, maybe a different symbol etc.

Duplicate Content

Lots of people will be worried about duplicate content due to syndication

Syndication is a good thing, and Google does a fairly good job of determining the original author, and the link that is being given back to your post will help – it even has good anchor text – at least I think a link is given back to the permalink – to be sure, you should probably use an RSS footer plugin, and maybe even create a smart looking author byline for each article that includes a link.

If you want some assurance that syndication is a good thing, one of the most authoritative I can think of is Vanessa Fox, who until recently was working for Google on Webmaster Central at SEO and Webmaster conferences. If the "book" we follow are Google's webmaster guidelines… guess what? She helped write it!

Recently on her personal blog she wrote a great article on how to rank as the original source for content you syndicate

With Jonathan's system you are not going to be able to ensure that content gets blocked with Robots.txt, and that has a negative aspect as well, because the links wouldn't count… you do want links don't you?
You are also not going to be able to ensure a different version of your article is published, unless you somehow specify in a license that your articles can be modified, such as a Creative Commons License that allows derivative and Commercial use or better.

Hopefully you will always get a link, but just like with article marketing, that can never be guaranteed

You will find situations if you have a new blog with not much authority that Google makes mistakes – that will most often be when a high authority blog picks up your article.

In a situation like that… just be happy, you will get great links, and your content will be exposed to 100s, or 1000s of new readers, and if enough blogs pick the article up, you will get more authority quicker from all the links, and hopefully lots of traffic and new subscribers.

Proof-reading

Just like article marketing, you are going to have to use just a little bit more care before you post, as any errors you make might not be fixable if your articles get syndicated.

Hopefully anyone syndicating an article will check back with the original blog to ensure the article is up-to-date, and I suggest they do that anyway, as you want to always ensure you are promoting content from what is a reputable blog that is well established.

Competitors?

It is so obvious… but none really

• Well ok, I know Stompernet has some kind of content syndication network
• I know Jack Humphrey used to syndicate his clients article content on a network, but not blog posts
• There are various services which syndicate spun articles, but not blog posts
• There are services that have their own blogs, where you post snippets of articles
• Portal feeder has something similar for articles, I am not sure what is in Traffic Kahuna
• There are plugins which feed articles from article banks to WordPress blogs

So whilst the idea is simple, you have to have confidence in content syndication and how duplicate content works before you think of doing something like this, which is why someone probably didn't do it before.

Powertip

If you are using standard tagging plugins, they will probably output tags in alphabetical order. That isn't a huge problem for the 5 tags that will be used to catalogue your post, but it is a factor for your backlink, because the anchortext used will be from your first tag.

The easy answer? Add a manual tag somewhere within your article

If you look closely you will see that I have linked through earlier in this post to my "syndication" tag on my blog, and I have manually added rel="tag" to the link.

Hopefully when this article is posted, the backlink to my blog will be "syndication". That is fairly powerful stuff.

OK Andy, How Much?

Jonathan says the following:-

BETA TESTERS WANTED
===================

This service is now up and running, and I'm looking for beta testers
to create free accounts and try it out. I need folks with blogs
who want to syndicate their content to super-charge their link
building, and I need folks who need top-notch content to post to
their own blogs.

As a beta tester, your account will always be 100% free. Syndicating
other folks content will always be free anyway, but I'm working on
a business model that MAY charge a monthly fee for being able to
have your content syndicated in this way. Or it may stay free
for everyone, I haven't decided.

At any rate, as a beta tester, you'll never pay a dime for the
service.

So why not go give it a try right now?

I hope Jonathan keeps it free

If he doesn't, I am sure there will be competitors who will do it for free, so it is much better keeping it free and advertising supported. If needed, get some VC money to cover operations, but that is unlikely to be needed.

This is beta, I haven't yet tested everything, I am going to see if I can find a guest post on Share A Post to try out.

Another Reason To Applaud Jonathan

I think anyone else who would have launched this, other than maybe myself, would have included some kind of spammy "viral" link back to the blog article syndication directory, in the footer of every article.
I have just seen my first article syndicated on a blog, and there is no link to Share A Post – that is a cool move.

Please don't syndicate posts without minor editing to at least remove all the related posts – whilst I love receiving 10+ links every time one of my articles is syndicated, I am not going to approve 10 pingbacks – I will just flag them as spam to avoid the annoyance in the future.
Single pingbacks are fine (I don't have nofollow on pingback links), or even to each editorial link within an article – you give me a link, you get a link back.

Sign Up!

If you sign up to Share A Post, you will find this article in their library – an easy way to share Share A Post with your readers is just syndicating this article.

Special note from Andy: To add some additional incentive to try out Share A Post, if you have written a very high quality paid review recently that would be suitable for my readers, I will gladly syndicate it on my primary domain as well – oh, and I won't be nofollowing any of the links, as it will be an editorial decision to publish it.

[tags]article marketing, blog traffic, content syndication[/tags]

Another nice backlink method that does not cost a dime – and really takes just a few minutes to set up – is Jon Ledger’s ShareAPost.com site.

The site features posts from blogs covering all categories – and these authors have authorized others to use or syndicate their content.  You can’t change the wording or content of the original posts, and must include all links as the original author intended.  This is great news for those who contribute content – you can get your links, author bio published on other blogs – and that means more backlinks for you.

The ShareAPost service is automated, so contributing posts or incorporating posts into your blog is a snap.  I began offering my blog posts as content, and to date several bloggers have incorporated my content, providing me with valuable backlinks.

Take a few minutes and set up a ShareAPost account – it’s free and if you are posting useful content, you’ll be amazed at the backlinks and traffic.

Every blogger wants good-looking blog posts.  There are times when you just wish you had the same editing capability in WordPress that you have say, in
MS Word.  No problem – the folks at Microsoft have you covered with some free software.  It’s called Windows Live Writer – and for the average user, I think it’s the best thing to come from Microsoft in a long time.

Basically, you use LiveWriter to create and manage your posts and the software uploads to your blog automatically.  There are dozens of plug-ins available for free, too – that extend the functionality of LiveWriter to the point where you can post about anything effortlessly.  Maps, videos, source code, framed photos, it’s all a breeze with this fine package.  The software has a very handy preview feature, allows drafts, and has a full compliment of the usual Word-Like formatting tools and functions.

In all, this is a great package – and you can’t beat free.  Try it out. 

About The Author:

Carl Ringwall is the owner of Data SystemsPlus, a web consultancy offering a variety of e-learning offerings, software and tools. Considered one of the top blogs for forming a coherent internet marketing strategy, Carl’s online business blog is a must for anyone running a home based internet business.

Several of you have asked who designed my blog – well, I’ve been using the WordPress theme Thesis since it came out.  I was one of the first blogs to use it – and every time the diyThemes upgrades this package – it’s a new set of revelations.  Power, speed, great typography and excellent SEO right out of the box is what you get with Thesis.

You can add tons of special tweaks and codes to your blog – and with Thesis, there is no worries when you upgrade your theme.  Everything is modular, every mod to your blog has a spot where it is stored.  That way, nothing breaks when you upgrade. The way this theme is coded – it’s more like a software add-on to WordPress than just a mere theme.

You can be lazy like me and not deviate much from the main ‘look’ of Thesis, or you can change the look completely to, in the words of the Idol Judges, ‘make it your own’.  No less than the likes of Matt Cutts, Danny Sullivan and LeVar Burton use Thesis – you should, too.  Find out more about Thesis.