Using PLR Articles for Web Site Content


Michael Campbell: Are PLR articles dead? Are they a good source of content for your web sites? What about duplicate content filters? Do you need to rewrite the articles extensively, or you can just use them as is?

Now, what about getting links? Our web site content alone, is not enough for good search engine rankings, so how do we get links to our sites? Plus, are all links created equal? What types of links will get us the link popularity and PageRank in the search engines, and what kind of linking practices will make us sink like a rock?

Today, I'll be chatting with Mike Liebner, founder of the Article Underground, about PLR articles, best linking practices, and SEO -- that's search engine optimization -- so you can get free traffic to your web sites.

So, Mike, are you there?

Mike Liebner: Yes.

Michael: Great. Thanks for being on the call with me today. So, tell us about the Article Underground. Is it mostly PLR articles, a series of 33 blogs, SEO strategies, training videos, private membership site? Or is it all of the above? I have to admit that, when you first told me about it, I didn't get it.

Mike: [laughs]

Michael: I thought it was complicated.

Mike: But you got it now. [laughs]

Michael: I get it now. So tell me about the individual components that make up the Article Underground content and traffic system.

Mike: Absolutely. Happy to. First off, if I could just give a real quick background on how it came together and then that'll go straight into what it's really all about. When I was originally putting this together as a product, I kept seeing all these other membership sites that were out there, and they would focus more or less on one thing or the other. They were pretty much targeted to more individual-type tasks and areas, such as either on traffic or on content.

And as a businessman, I was thinking also, if I do launch that's a membership, that it's really important to give more than enough, to give so much value, and so many benefits, that I would keep the people and not lose them.

So I decided to not only give them content in the form of PLR articles -- articles they could use on their websites -- I thought it was really important to also include the traffic element, and to actually give people more or less of a one-stop kind of a solution that addressed many, if not all, of the needs that a web publisher has when they're trying to build websites and attract people to the sites and then actually make some money. So it's a lot of the things that you mentioned, and so much more.

And since it's been around a while, it's grown and really taken on many new flavors, and there are many more benefits that have happened over time. But in general, PLR articles -- articles that people can use on websites in many, many different ways -- and perhaps even more importantly, many methods that they could take advantage of to get traffic to the websites.

Michael: OK. I guess we should back up and tell people who might be just beginning, or starting out, what PLR articles are.

Mike: OK.

Michael: And how are they different from regular articles that you might snag from an article directory?

Mike: OK. Well, PLR, private label rights, in general, it's not a new phenomenon, because if you go back to, certainly, the beginning of the web, and actually, if you go into the other medias -- entertainment, television, radio -- there has always been content that was shared and reused and syndicated. And the PLR phenomenon is very much like that. And in my case, it's articles that are written by writers who give up basically all of the credit; they're called ghost writers.

Michael: So they're giving up their copyright to you, so you can go ahead and sell these or use them.

Mike: Correct. I'll explain more later about how I came across these writers and how I stumbled onto the articles in the first place. But the basic premise is that they write about what I'd like them to write about -- I give them research which steers them in the right direction -- and then they write content that is very good quality content and in areas that they're interested in. And I take the content and I provide it to members who can use it in almost any way that they want to. There's a few exceptions, of course.

Michael: So they can slice it, dice it, post it, host it, do whatever they want, except resell it?

Mike: Yes. And as you know, I like to say there's a million and one different ways they could use it. There really, truly are so many different ways to use a text file with all these great words on them.

Michael: And they can add to it. They can take away from it. They can edit it. They can interject their own comments. So there's a lot of different ways they could use that content.

Mike: That's the beautiful thing about it. And compared to the articles you may get from an article directory, or even if you have a writer write for you, the flexibility is so much greater because, basically, it's a tool. It's something you could put in your toolbox and you could use it in so many ways. Whereas, if you get an article from a directory, you have to print it exactly the way it is. You have to give credit to the writer. You have to include, depending on the terms...

Michael: The link to their website, all that kind of stuff.

Mike: Yeah, and you don't get credit. And in many cases, that doesn't really come across as very personal, because somebody will find an article on mortgage insurance, and it's written by this guy, and maybe you don't really agree with it 100%, or it covers something that isn't perfect for you. But you take it because that's all you have to work with, and you deal with the terms and conditions of wherever you're getting it from, and you use it on your site.

But, one, a lot of other people are using it. Two, you can't modify it or do anything to the article, other than put it on your page. And as a result, PLR articles, or the articles that I provide -- I like to refer to them as keyword optimized articles; they're actually a little bit different than the traditional PLR articles -- but basically, you could do anything you want with them. And that's what's really powerful about the content that you get with Article Underground.

Michael: That's great. Well, how many articles do people get per month with their membership?

Mike: Currently, we have a monthly membership, and each month on the 16th we release a new set of 400 articles.

Michael: 400. Wow, that's a lot of articles.

Mike: Yeah. And the really interesting thing about it, and it's come under fire from a few people. But I think when you think about it and it's explained, people understand why we do it this way. We release the articles in one zip with 400 articles. They are not categorized. They're not put in neat little folders where people can go in and just grab all 20 of the mortgage articles and build a website with. We provide articles that are written about keywords, and they're optimized for the keywords, and then people can go in and build a website using their own creativity.

So it sounds like a lot: 400 articles. That's a lot of content. But I think what a lot of Article Underground members do is they cherry-pick the best content that's appropriate for their websites. And some people have multiple websites, or they use them for different purposes, so they're not just taking that folder of 400 articles and publishing a site with 400 articles. You're not going to go out there and find 350 sites with those same 400 articles on them. And that's the beauty of the approach of just giving them tools and letting them do with it what they want.

Michael: So your method is to let people do it a la carte, that they can go to the salad bar and pick what they want, as opposed to the whole thing being delivered to their table and saying, "Here's your salad." So the membership really grows and adds value over time, because if you get 400 assorted articles each month, then after a period of a year, no matter what subject you needed to look up, there's got to be at least a half a dozen articles for use on your web properties.

Mike: Absolutely.

Michael: Now, these other private sites, I've seen them give a subject, and they give you 20 articles. But then everybody in the membership is all going to be blobbing up websites that are identical to each other.

Mike: Exactly. You're going to suddenly see 300 basket weaving websites, with the same 25 articles and the same article titles and filenames and God knows what else. And if you look at it and analyze it a little further -- I'm not really intending to slam the competition -- but a lot of the articles that you get from other services are just written on broad topic: basket weaving or mortgages. They're not necessarily written for keywords specifically, and as such, they cover a broad area.

And there's a great benefit when you have an article that is very focused on a phrase, or a long-tail phrase, or a keyword, as opposed to getting a folder of possibly inter-related articles. You don't have that focus that we have when we have the writers writing one-off articles.

Michael: Oh, it must have been really hard to find all those good writers.

Mike: It's interesting how Article Underground came together. And if you have a moment, I could tell you a little about that and how the system came through.

Michael: Sure.

Mike: Basically, in the early days, I went through a number of phases. And the earliest phase, in the early days, was I would write articles myself. And I actually like to write. I don't mind writing, so it was always fun to write, and I would write about things I was interested in. And those websites that I used my own content on always did well, and I made a good living doing that.

But there was a period where I kind of got caught up in doing some of the gray hat tactics, or you may even call them black hat tactics, where I would do these mass, automated sites. And they weren't written with real content; I like to call it "real content" when you write your own article, or you have an article that has something valuable for the end user.

So I went through a period where I was doing that. And then Google, as you know, caught on, and suddenly all these sites got banned and were dropping like flies. So it was at that point that I realized, "OK. Obviously, this isn't working."

I spent all this time building all of these websites. And sure, you could spend a day and you can crank out 5,000 pages. But a week later, Google would ban it, and they're gone. So you do all this work, and there's no long-term benefit.

Michael: Right, the old portal building thing.

Mike: Yeah. And that's where I kind of went back to the beginning and said, "OK. Obviously, I need to create my own content." Well, as you know -- you write a lot, too -- you have a limited, finite amount of words you can get onto a page. It's just a matter of time. How much can you do? And if you really want to make a lot of money, that's the big limitation: how much can you write, and how fast can you get them on the pages?

So I did a lot of thinking. What I decided to do was to try to find a service, or a company, or people that could write for me. And that process, in itself, was so frustrating that when I finally did create a system to get writers -- and I'll tell you a little more about that, but I'll just skip ahead to the point where I found people that would write for me and give me what I wanted...

Michael: And their names are?

[laughter]

Michael: I guess that list is gold now, huh?

Mike: Well, actually, I have a pool of like 33. And it's a freelance arrangement, so one month, some will contribute. Another month, there will be different ones that contribute. It all kind of fits into the Article Underground strategy of having diversity. There's a lot of different people contributing. But right now, we're up to like 33 different ghost writers.

And basically, what I did was I came up with a method where, instead of going to these companies that were charging 20 bucks a page, or putting an ad out and getting all these writers... I don't know if you know anything about people out there that write -- I'm a writer, too, but I'm a little more of a businessman -- but, a lot of these people have these inflated egos, and they're not really easy to work with. So just going out there and finding a writer is not enough to really get what you need.

And very often, a lot of these places, one, they're expensive, and two, they were giving you these educational-type, scholastic papers. They weren't the kind of stuff that I wanted to put on my websites, because I had websites about entertainment and music and all kinds of cool stuff. I wanted fun stuff for people to read.

Michael: Not chemistry.

Mike: Yes, and not what, perhaps, a professor would write on a paper. So I actually took the opposite approach. And I found that these people, one, were difficult to work with, they were expensive, and they weren't writing good stuff.

I decided to go after regular people, and instead of finding one writer or two writers writing for me and hiring them, I decided to get a stable of writers. And that's why we ended up with like 33 writers.

It was a nightmare to gather them and weed out all of the people that were not qualified. But once we got the pool of writers, now we have a dream system, and it's really a self-flowing process where, every month, we get more than enough articles, on the right topics.

Michael: Well, that's excellent. Now, speaking of the number of 33, you said now you also have 33 announcement blogs. I remember when you first told me about a couple of years ago, I think you had half a dozen.

Mike: Yes.

Michael: Now you're up to 33 places where people can submit their articles. So how do the blogs fit in with the articles? How do people submit their sites to the network of blogs? What exactly is the process?

Mike: Well, the blogs, as you know, are part of the overall value of Article Underground. And when I was creating it, I thought, "OK, I have these great articles, and I want to put together a product that I could share with people," because initially I had so many articles.

Suddenly, when I was getting all these great articles, it was so exciting. I was accumulating hundreds. Suddenly, I had a thousand. Suddenly, I had many thousands of all these articles with all these great keywords, and frankly, I just couldn't use them myself. And that's when I put together the membership.

But I kept thinking, the one missing link, the thing that is really preventing this from being a full-use product, is helping people get traffic to their websites, because the biggest problem for somebody is, you build a website, and people do not naturally come. I mean, you actually have to do some work, and you have to put in some effort, to turn a website from a 10-visitor-a-day website into a thousand-visitor-a-day website.

So at that point, I had already had a very large network of websites. As you know, kind of like you, I almost collect domains. And I had accumulated all these hundreds of domains.

Some of them I had built websites on. Others I just had placeholders. And when I started Article Underground, I just decided that I'm going to take the sites from a diverse group of IP addresses. I had like nine different dedicated servers, and they were spread out all over the world, and I probably had a good 40 or 50 diverse Class C IP addresses.

So I took some of the sites that were already seasoned and developed and already had PageRank and already had a history, and I put WordPress blogs on them. And I decided to share them with the members of Article Underground, that that would be the traffic system. It's the traffic part of the membership, that people would put the articles on their pages, and then they would announce them to the world by using these blogs.

Michael: So they don't put the whole article on the blog. They put the article on their own web property...

Mike: Right.

Michael: Then what they do is they just submit, what, a summary and a link?

Mike: Yes. It's actually great that you point that out, because I think a lot of people, when they look at this, they go, "Oh, do I have to do blogs? Or I put them on my blogs?"

The general idea, as a web publisher, is to find content that has great words on it, put it on your websites, your domains, your places that you're going to showcase them. And then, if you want to get favor with Google and the other search engines, the missing link is having back links, having web links, hyperlinks pointing at your article pages.

And with Article Underground it's really easy because -- I know you run across this and have run across this in the past -- but you know building a site is not enough. The moment you finish building it and putting up your content, you suddenly have to go out there and roll up your sleeves and get links. And it's not a fun process.

And the great thing about the blogs, right now we have 33 Article Underground blogs that I provide that are of good reputation, have been around for quite awhile and have some good juice. And then there are over 80 member-contributed blogs.

So right now there are over 100 places that you could go to and you could summarize your article exactly like you said. You could say, "Hey, I had this great article on ant farming. You know I was visiting my aunt in Louisiana last week and I had this great idea to do an ant farm and do this and this. And I wrote this great article and here is my article on ant farming techniques," or whatever the keyword is.

And you link to it. And there are over 100 places that an Article Underground member can easily link to their article pages, in all of these blogs.

Michael: And how many times per day or how many times are members allowed to post? Is there a certain amount of blogs that they can only post to? Or are the blogs all on different topics?

Mike: That's a great question. Normally I would prefer not to do limits, but it's really, really important that the blogs remain a valuable resource. So I put together a whole system of rules, and limitations, and basically suggestions that members follow to ensure that the blogs retain their power, strength, and good reputation.

Because the last thing that we wanted it to turn into was a blog-and-ping type of thing where people go in and are suddenly blasting out thousands of links to pages. It's too easy for Google to look at a site and say, "Holy moly, there are a thousand links in a 24-hour period pointing to this domain. That's spam." So we don't allow that.

Basically -- back to your question of how many -- members can post as many announcements per day as they want, as long as they don't post to a domain more than five times in one day, per blog.

Michael: OK.

Mike: So with the AU blogs, there are like 33 of them that I provide, and then there are over 80 that the members contribute as well. The thing is, we can discuss this more later of course, but it's really important to show Google natural patterns, and a natural growth when they look at a website. So the rules are in place to basically prevent someone, a spam type of a person, from coming in and just dumping a bunch of garbage in there and blasting it off and revealing the patterns.

So the general idea, is to do it a little more slowly, a little more naturally. You write an article. You announce it in two or three different blogs. And you have nice links pointing directly at the keywords, sending them to your page. And then you do more content. And then you know the next day you go to a few different blogs. Right now there are over 100 of them so it allows you tremendous flexibility to get links.

Michael: So you start small and you grow your site naturally over time.

Mike: Yes.

Michael: For example if you have been an Article Underground member for six months and you have a jobs site, you would go and search your hard drive for resume, or resume tips, and you'd find a dozen different articles you could possibly use.

Mike: Yes.

Michael: And then say this week, you might put up these two articles on your website, and then link to them with keywords that you announce on the individual blogs, and there might be four, five, six, 10 blogs, that might even have a category that you could use.

Mike: Probably more.

Michael: So you could get multiple incoming links to your new article on your site. That's fantastic.

Mike: Yeah.

Michael: Hey, in addition to the blog network now, you mentioned to me an additional component, something about how Article Underground members can contribute their own WordPress blogs to the network. Exactly how does that work, and what are the benefits to the person contributing the blog, and to the membership as a whole?

Mike: Well, I'm glad you asked about that because it's really growing fast and it really happened out of a member saying, "Hey, I love your blogs. Can I give you one too?"

And sure, you know, we announced it in the forum, "Hey, member Joe Bob just contributed a blog, and here's another place to get links." And after a few people saw and took a look at these blogs and saw how they were sites that were naturally growing with content, suddenly more and more members said, "Hey, I want to have a blog in there too."

And as they came together -- suddenly we had, I don't know 40 or 50 or more of those things -- it became very clear and apparent to me: why not tap into the power of all the members, their websites? Because they have servers located all over the world. And the beautiful thing about the Article Underground blogs is that they are not just a cluster of websites on one server.

The Article Underground blogs themselves are spread out over 11 servers on over 30 different class C IP addresses, so that when Google sees links coming from multiple blogs, it doesn't set off any red flags because they are coming in naturally, just like they would in the real world.

Michael: So do people get one password and it works with all these blogs, or how does that work?

Mike: Yes. It works with all of the Article Underground blogs. And then when you factor in the member blogs, and there are over 80 of them that they have contributed for Article Underground members to use. You can't just find these on the net. The only way you can find them, is if you log into our private members only forum and then there is a list of blogs. And each member can set their own rules.

Now me, I have my own system of what I think is right for SEO purposes and my set of rules. And my rules are, like, you can't link to a domain more than once per blog, you can only link five times per day for a domain. And I have a few other rules. You should have good titles. You can't reuse the same excerpts, stuff like that.

Now those 33 blogs are the best of the best websites to get links from. Now the members, it's really up to them. It's their website so I allow them to create their own rules, and manage them in the way that they want, but most of the people follow the Article Underground rules because they know they are good for their blogs too.

But basically you go into the forum and there is a list of 80 additional blogs that you could use to get links anytime you want to.

Michael: Well, that's great. Another source for links, that's fantastic. Now, you were mentioning some SEO strategies -- and this is a big part of the membership of your private site -- that you're not only are getting 400 articles per month, and the 33 blogs, and the network of member blogs, you're also giving people training videos. I think the last time I heard you were over 20 hours. It's probably more now.

Mike: I've lost track.

Michael: Yeah.

Mike: It's significant.

Michael: So let's talk a little bit about some of these SEO strategies and things of that nature. Now, something that many people worry about are the dupe, or duplicate content filters.

Mike: Yes.

Michael: Some people are certain they exist and others such as Dr. Neil Shearing, in his recent posts, say that they are a myth.

Mike: Yes.

Michael: What exactly has been your experience with duplicate content?

Mike: I like to say it's an urban legend because, the first thing is, when people talk about duplicate content, they are talking about many different things and they are trying to label it with that one phrase.

"Oh, be careful of duplicate content."

Google and the other search engines are far more sophisticated than that. They don't just look at things as either "it's duplicate or it's not," there are many shades of gray. In fact, when they rank a website, and you know as I discuss in many of the training videos, there are a million factors that could make your page go up or down in the rankings.

Just doing one thing wrong could shoot you down the page. Doing one thing right could shoot you to the top. And duplicate content is nothing more than a factor.

It's just one of the filters or algorithms that Google has, and it's not as overblown or as much of a problem as a lot of people seem to think it is. It's just one of those little scores that happens to figure in when they look at a web page.

And I know you have a lot of experience. I've read some of your stuff on it too. So you have a lot of experience and ideas about duplicate content as well. But in general, I know from my experience, it's not as overblown as a lot of people like to make it seem.

Michael: Yeah. It's like you said, there's a lot of shades of gray there. And for example, Dr. Neil, in his experiment... Or it could have been Dr. Andy Williams. I'm not sure.

Mike: It was Neil.

Michael: Yeah. They posted an article to their website, and then they posted it to the article directory. And the article directory has the exact same content, but the directory was listing it higher than on Neil's own website.

Mike: Yeah. That was Dr. Andy, actually. You were right.

Michael: Yeah. And my thing, I think it was two years ago when we discussed this, and I said, "Well, why are there 367,000 occurrences of the Gettysburg Address?"

Mike: Yes.

Michael: Obviously the thing is, what, 200 and some years old? And Lincoln said the same words. And now, why is it on over a quarter million websites when it's almost identical?

Mike: Yes.

Michael: Exactly. So I'll share my knowledge of what we call the "K family" of filters. I won't tell who the name is, but it's named after the person who invented these filters. K1 we call it, it parses the templates. And basically, all Western music is based on 12 notes of the piano, but there's millions of original songs. How can that be?

Mike: Exactly.

Michael: It's the intervals and durations of the notes that let you recognize patterns, and that's what my geeky buddies refer to as the K1 filter. So, if I walk up to any piano in the world, it doesn't matter, if I play in the key of C or G or F or whatever, and if I go [singing] "One, one, five, five, six, six, five," you'd recognize "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." And it's the same way that the K1 filter can recognize any templates and shingle them off.

Mike: Yeah.

Michael: Depending on how they flip the switch, they can either penalize you for it or they can award you for it.

K2 checks commute time. Now, you've talked a lot about IP addresses and things of that nature. Now, what that's referring to is, how long does it take the spider to travel between this website to that website?

Is it a single hop, or is it three or four hops? So it's determining how closely related these links are to each other. And if they're all coming from the same C-class block, meaning that the sites are all lumped together on the same hosting company, they can quickly filter that out as being something trying to artificially inflate your linking strategy.

Mike: Exactly. Well, part of what you were saying, the fact that Google would notice that these two share the same characteristics, that in itself does not cause a ban or a major penalty. All it does is they'll say, "Oh, OK. 'The New York Times' has this article on kayaking, and Michael Campbell's website has this article on kayaking." It doesn't make them do anything drastic just because they noticed it, just because they're looking.

Michael: Exactly. They'll just look at that content and go, "You know what? I've got that stored already from a better site. So this one is a duplicate. I'll still put it in my index, but it's not going to be parked near to the door of the mall. It'll have to be outside." So with this K3 filter, it checks for dupes in the same directories, not over the whole site.

Mike: Yeah.

Michael: And usually, it was set at a 90% threshold. It might be down about 80% now, but they can flip the switch however they want. So basically, it looks for duplicate content within the same folder in the same website.

So if you've got a site about pets, you want to put your cat stuff, and your dog stuff in different folders on your websites, so it's not pulling everything all pet-related from the same directory. The same goes if you're selling shoes. If the only difference between the shoes is "blue, red, green," don't put them all in the same folder, just line list them on the same web page.

And the same goes with geographical areas, like travel sites or things of that nature. So each state, like "CA" for California and "OR" for Oregon, would have its own folder, so you're not getting so much duplicate content within the same website. And that's the way that you can sort of spread it out to avoid dupe content within the same website.

Now, that's where it's really the worst. But if you've got duplicate content across a wide array of IP addresses, then there's nothing really that wrong with that. It's going to be the one the most relevant.

Mike: Right.

Michael: It's going to be who published first and what's the PageRank of the page on the article or the link that appeared to the article.

Mike: Yeah. And there's nothing wrong with doing that. In fact, like I was alluding to earlier, the model of syndication in general, when a television show or a network, or across the country, there's different networks that are showing "Mannix" or whatever the TV show is, they are all syndicating the same thing.

Newspapers syndicate articles, so many of them may be running the same or similar articles. Google doesn't just automatically say, "Hey, 'New York Times, ' you're out of the game. You're using the same thing."

So using the same stuff, in general, is not necessarily a problem. It's just the way of the web. That's what people do.

Michael: And if you take the article and publish it first, and you happen to link to it with a couple of PR4, PageRank four or higher pages, then it's going to see that occurrence as being more trusted than all the other, later occurrences of that same content.

Mike: True.

Michael: OK, let's talk about links.

Mike: Can I ask you real quick, Michael, to expand upon that just a little bit?

Michael: Sure.

Mike: We could talk about that topic for hours, and I won't do that to you. But I like to refer, because I offer PLR articles, articles that are used by more than one person, it does often come up, and people will say, "If I'm using that article, and 20 or 50 or 100 people are using that same article, how can we all rank number one on Google?"

And a couple of things come to mind real quick. And one of them is I want to point out Neil Shearing, who you had mentioned. He's been a member of Article Underground since day one. And the really interesting thing about Neil is -- and he just came out with his series on passive income -- he created a website and he did not modify the articles in any way. He just built a website, categorized them, put them on pages, did very little work on them, and he's getting a number of top rankings.

He documented on his blog very recently, about how he's ranking for number three, I forget what it was, "martini glass" or something like that. And he's making good money, really decent money, with AdSense. Regular money, as much as, I believe it was like 80 bucks a day or something like that.

And that just points out that you can use the same content as somebody else. The same, identical content, and you could still make money. You could still get traffic. You could still provide value to the people that come to the website.

Michael: Sure. I'm doing it as well.

Mike: Yes.

Michael: I've got a human resource management site. And there's not that many people that have human resource management sites, so I was able to go into your list of articles, because I've been a member for about a year and a half now, and I was able to find several articles on employment, and I was able to put them onto the site. And I did not modify them at all.

And because that site is a PR3 and it's got a couple of links from PR4 and five pages coming into it, it's going to see my posting of that content to be of a higher weight, or more relevancy, than other people that might post exactly the same articles.

Mike: Yes. So in that respect, you can use the articles as they are. But now, the thing about Article Underground and our approach, we offer you training and make suggestions so you don't have to do that. And I actually don't encourage that. I'm not saying it's bad to do that.

But there's a couple of ways to look at duplicate content. And I like to say there's a difference between similar content and exact, duplicate content. So, many people, when they use the articles from Article Underground, they're going to tweak or modify the articles in some manner. It could be as simple as adding an introduction, a middle part, and a conclusion. And that in itself makes your web page different.

Michael Yeah. I like to do that as well.

Mike: You blow up that duplicate filter which everybody is so worried about, with just those simple things. And then if you want to take it many steps further, the beautiful thing about the PLR content, is the fact that you can slice and dice them, mutilate them, do anything you want with them. And it's just so easy to take a sentence, and put it in your own words. Maybe they'll say, "In the South in December we had lots of acorns." You could say, "I have found, from my experience, that acorns are more prominent in the South, blah blah blah." It's so easy to do that.

So we encourage members that there are many different ways to use the articles and make them so they are not exact duplicates. It's too easy to do that.

Michael: Yeah. I've got a report about that, in my free marketing ebooks download page, and it's called "The 200 Page Challenge." I use your articles extensively. I talk about how I slice them and dice them, and I use different verbs and action words to describe things.

I like to interject my comments directly into the article. I put my stuff in a different color so that they can see my voice as opposed to what the author said. And then, I like to disagree with them and then present a different point of view. And then encourage the other people submit their comments.

Mike: Exactly. Why not? It's so easy, and it's actually fun. It can be fun if you like that thing. But the point is, it's easy. It's not really that big of a deal. I think some people just say, "Oh boy. I don't want to write articles. I'm buying them so I don't have to write!" Well, it's not the same as writing an article from scratch. As you mentioned, all you have to do is disagree with them. You just said the tea pot was black. It's not.

Michael: OK. Let's talk about some links and linking strategies. Traditionally, where people get links from are link exchanges, directories, article directories, and press releases, but all of those sources, seem to be getting less and less weight, or ranking juice than they used to. How are the links from your blog network different than, say, a regular link swap or link exchange?

Mike: Well, the first few you mentioned are the ones that can get your website and your web pages in trouble. I've seen this happen a few times with Article Underground members.

Some people, for example if you submit an article to Ezine Articles, and you have an author box, Google is first going to see that article showing up on Ezine Articles. And then, suddenly, some other people are going to use that article on their website, and Google's going to see links from other websites coming to your web page from your author box.

But the big thing that gets people in trouble, and they don't realize this, is that the exact same page, with the exact same bio box and the same links with the same link text, will be pointing to your web pages, and suddenly Google or the other search engines are going to say, "Hey, if there are 10 or 50 or 100 and they're all identical, those things can't all be good."

You can actually shoot yourself in the foot. If you submit too many articles and you don't have any variety, in both the link text and the author boxes and even the words on the page, Google notices patterns like that.

That applies to directory submissions. If you use one of those automated programs, and it has a list of 400 or 1,000 SEO-friendly directories, and you input your site title and your description and it points at the page, and suddenly Google sees hundreds, or thousands of links and they're identical, you're shooting yourself in the foot.

The solution is to integrate other links. Integrate some kind of variety in the links that Google sees pointing at your web pages. And Article Underground has 33 blogs and then the 80 plus member blogs. It gives you 100 plus opportunities to throw a wrench in there, to get diversity coming at your website, to have more IPs pointing at you. You can be creative.

Now, the difference when you submit to a directory, or you do any of those mass submission techniques, is that you're stuck with that one, the link text and the description. As you know, when you announce it in the blogs, you can put any words you want on those pages and you can be creative. You can surround it with really powerful words.

If you have an article about blenders, maybe you can work in LSI, and have similar words and related words. That way, Google will see the link is not only coming from the blog on a diverse IP with a good amount of PageRank and they trust this blog, but the page that link is coming from is loaded with all kinds of great words.

Michael: And the other part is you don't have to reciprocate that link.

Mike: That's true also.

Michael: Meaning that with the link exchange thing, "I'll link to you if you link to me," that is given so little weight these days and the search engines can just filter that out like nothing.

Mike: It's OK to do it. It doesn't hurt to do it, but if you're banking on your page getting number one with 1,000 reciprocal links and that's all you have, or that one directory submission blast that you did, it's not going to work.

Michael: It'll help with directories like Yahoo!, or things that are older technologies that rely on just link popularity, where it's just how many links you can get. Google uses something a little bit different like PageRank. Now, PageRank is just websites voting for each other with their links. Pages create the PageRank, and links distribute it.

Now, I saw a video you did the other day that had some really good tips about showing a site that's faking its PageRank. Would you like to share that tip with the listeners?

Mike: Yeah, absolutely. First of all, a lot of people, when they discover that links have such a great impact -- and they really do. Good links pointing at your website, and in particular your deep, inside pages, can have a significant impact on the kinds of rankings you're going to get from, in particular Google, and also the other websites.

When people discover this, they tend to go out there and try to get all kinds of links, and start doing mass automated exchanges and trades. A lot of times, especially when you trade with people, you will run into people that are either evil, or somebody uses a system and Google may not even recognize the link.

I think the example you're referring to was I illustrated with Ezine Articles?

Michael: It was an article directory that you were referring to. And what they had done is put a question mark in their URL.

So it was theirdomainname.com, question mark, this article's submission. And the article submission page was actually showing the PageRank of the home page. So, the tip that you gave showed that the PageRank from the home page was actually being displayed on the article page, but yet the article page did not actually have any PageRank of its own.

Then you went to a service called digpagerank.com, and you pasted in the URL of that exact page, and you showed that that article submission page had zero PageRank of its own.

Mike: It said N/A, I think. It's not available. And if you think about it, think about an article that is added to the directory. The day it's added, it suddenly gets a PageRank of six? It's just not possible.

But unfortunately, I'm not sure how Google does that. They probably don't care. In fact, Google doesn't even really want us to know what the PageRank is of the pages, so they don't care that we're out there getting fooled.

Michael: Yeah. They don't update the PageRank very often. I think (at the time of this podcast) the last time they did it was between four and six months ago, as far as I can tell, because I've got some pages that are even eight months old and they're still not indexed. I mean, they're indexed, but they still don't show any PageRank.

But that might not necessarily be a bad thing, because you had another really good tip. That tip was that if the main page, the index, or the home page, is indexed in a search engine and it links to a page, but that page is still gray -- showing unranked -- it might be a good idea, if you have the chance, to get a link from the page that is unranked, because you can see that it's actually linked to, from a PR six page, and it's just a matter of time before all that Google juice spills over into the page that's linked.

Mike: Yeah. That's actually kind of a stealth tactic. Sometimes when you trade with people, they're trying to give you as little as they can, and you're trying to get as much as you can. The good thing about Article Underground is you don't have to worry about those things, it's a level playing field.

But it is OK to go out there in the real world and trade with people, but you just have to understand that some people are not always going to give you everything that you want, or even be honest about what you're getting.

So -- Michael's suggestion -- that's a great way: if you're going to trade with somebody, at the very least, you should insist that the page your link is on be linked from the home page.

Michael: So you can type in "site:" and then the domain name ".com" to make sure that any particular page is indexed.

Mike: Absolutely, that too. That's tremendously important. That's the problem, when you're going to do a lot of these. I think your time could be better spent then using submission software, and submitting to all these reciprocal directories automated. Because a lot of the times, these people are just going to create a links page, and it's going to have 1,000 links on the page. It's going to be called "links HTM" or whatever, and it may do all kinds of other things.

Google is so smart; those guys are sharp. There's a reason they're so successful, because they deliver really good results. They know that the link coming from that page with 1,000 other people, and the name "links HTM," and maybe it's not even indexed. They're going to figure out when links are really worth something, and when they're not.

So it's just important that you know the links are getting. At the very least, they have to be indexed by Google. You have go too and do what Michael said, search "site:" and your domain name, and then you'll be able to figure that out.

Michael: Right.

Mike: You want good links, you don't want just any link. It's quality that really counts; that's what Google rewards you for.

Michael: Right. Another good tip that you gave was to look at the Google cache. So for example, you showed that on your blog, the pages getting spidered almost every hour. So if a page is getting spidered every day, or every few days, now that's the kind of site you would like to have linking to you.

Mike: Yeah.

Michael: What other tips can you give us? Like what else should we be looking for to get clean links incoming to our pages.

Mike: Well the number one tip and absolutely the most powerful thing -- as much as we like page rank, and we do love page rank -- reputation is so important, and relevant content. If you can get a link, if you can go out there easily get a link that has the same or similar, or even your words that you're targeting within the body of that web page that's like -- I like to call it -- "hitting a grand slam home run," when you have a web page that your link is surrounded by words, and the title of that page, your keyword appears in the title.

So, I guess that's relevance. You want pages that are relevant, and as much as possible surround your link with really good words. That's the best way to zoom up to the top.

Michael: So, it's your topical neighborhood. So, you want to get links from people who are in the same topical area as you are.

Mike: Yes.

Michael: I guess we should mention too about, make sure that the link is clean HTML. There's no JavaScript, no nofollow or anything.

Mike: No question marks, or redirects, or any of that tricky stuff that people do. And that's a whole course in itself. You really have to do a little research, and learn about those things. I actually have a video that covers a lot of those things, that Article Underground members can check out. But, yeah you're right. Make sure the link is a good clean link.

Also keep in mind there are many shades of gray, like we keep talking about all these different shades of gray, topical related. I think you were going to continue, but I interrupted you. But you were going to discuss about the different ways that the topic can relate on the page and the links.

Michael: I was actually just going to remind people about keywords in the anchor text, how important that is.

Mike: Yes.

Michael: So anytime that you can control that, it's wonderful, and to have a topic drift in there as well. You don't always want a link to your page with the exact same phrase, you want to be drifting around in synonymous keywords, that help explain the overall topic of your page. When you can control that, such as in your system in the Article Underground, when people post that little snippet of the article to the blog, they can actually control the words that are in the linking text. They can go to the next blog, and slightly modify that linking text by submitting to...

Mike: Yeah. Or they could make the mistake of not having link variety, and then Google, their filters will catch that. So that flexibility is really important. When you submit in mass automated ways and you're relying on other people, they're probably just going to reuse the same link text. You want to have flexibility when you get links, so that you have lots of variations of your links.

Now that's a whole long discussion in itself, because there are probably better ways to look at that. You want to make sure that you have a good proportion, a large percentage, of those links with your main keyword, but you also want to have some variety in it as well.

So, the problem I think sometimes is when people hear things. Like we say, "Oh, you want to have link variety." They'll go out and they'll have 1,000 different link variations, that's not necessarily good. You want to have 700 of your main phrase, 100 of this other secondary phrase. So you want to do things with variety, but try to avoid the excesses and revealing those patterns.

Michael: Yeah. I call that a "topic drift," and I usually have around 30%. So, I try to keep within 30% of synonymous words to my main phrase. So I like to use my main phrase, my main keywords, about 70% of the time, and just rearrange them in different orders, so "icy blue widgets" and "blue widgets icy" whatever.

Mike: Yes.

Michael: Then add ancillary phrases to surround those, and use synonymous words in the link itself. But keeping a tight proximity of those, say, 10 keywords very near to the link.

Mike: Yes. Like I said we could talk about this forever, but it's really important. First of all, you've got to decide what you're going after. That's one of the great things about the article Underground Articles, is that the file name will tell you what the article is written for. If it's "mortgage insurance premium," that's the phrase that is prominent within the article.

So you want to get links that are pointing to your page with that main link, your first-tier link, and you also want to have secondary keywords that are variations of it, and so forth. So what I've noticed when I analyze a lot of sites, the sites that rank for the more competitive keywords, what they often do is that they have that main phrase "mortgage insurance." But if you want to rank number one for mortgage insurance, it's really important that you have other links that have "mortgage insurance, " plus other words in them.

There's different percentages, and as you call it "drift." But almost every time you see somebody in the top 10, the one common thing I see, is that they have variations of the main phrase, but the main phrase is within a good amount of longer-tail variation.

Michael: Right. So unlike old search engines that like Yahoo!, which relies on slurp technology.

Mike: [laughs] Yeah.

Michael: Which they acquired from Inktomi several years back.

Mike: Yes.

Michael: It's just link popularity. It's like whoever gets the most links wins. I know they're working on it. But if they had spent more time acquiring good people, as opposed to buying up web properties, than they might have been a different search engine then they are today.

Mike: Yeah.

Michael: Now, Google works very differently. Its foundation comes from PageRank, and Reputation, and Topic. Reputation being off-page factors, what the links say your page is about. And then the Topic, which are on-page factors, such as your page title, your headlines, the proximity of keywords in bolded text. They all determine what's known as the "Topic" of the page. So you've got your off-page factors of the incoming links, and then your on-page. For best results the Reputation of your page and the Topic of your page -- both the on-page and off-page factors -- should be in agreement.

Mike: Yes, but with enough variety that you throw off any patterns that could work against you.

Michael: Now can I tell people about this tool that you have, your keyword tool that allows people to determine more...?

Mike: Yes.

Michael: OK. Now, it's at http://www.articleunderground.com/keywordtool. Is that correct?

Mike: Yes. You could also search for AUKDAT and find it in Google real fast.

Michael: So that keyword tool will show you, you can submit your article URL to that. It will tell you exactly what keywords and keyword phrases are used in that article. Then you can use the most popular phrases, and use those as links to get that topic drift.

Mike: Yes. I think one of the biggest mistakes that newcomers make, is that they don't... There's a couple of things. One is they don't put enough words on their pages, really good words. So it's really important when you put a page on the web, you want to target a good phrase of course, and you want to write number one for that phrase. But you also want to have lots of other related, really good words on that page for a number of reasons.

One of them is what I call the "oddball search combos." Because if you have lots of good related words, the way people search on the web, it doesn't necessarily follow a pattern of formula. They search in a very random, chaotic way. When you have all those different words on your pages, you're much more likely to get all those long-tail, odd combination rankings, and that will bring you a ton of traffic.

Now the tool you mentioned, what it's really good for, it's really good for helping you look at your page and seeing what phrases are already on there. Then you could use that as the basis to either add more words to your page, or as what Michael was alluding to before, you could use the words that are already on your page as link text, and then that's really, really powerful.

Michael: Yes. You can identify the topic of your page, and the main phrases on your page. Then in situations where you can actually control what the incoming links say, you can build your reputation to match the topic of that article.

Mike: Yes. A lot of beginners will say things such as, "How am I going to rank for the term 'internet marketing?' How am I going to rank for 'refrigerator cooler,' or whatever? Those are just too tough for me." Well anybody that wants traffic, the simplest, easiest thing to do is to take an article that's targeting those master phrases, those big money phrases, or even moderate money phrases, and then finding the long tail variations of it: related phrases, synonyms, longer versions of the phrases with additional words.

That's the great thing about the PLR articles. You could add sentences, and within your article page, that have those words, and then you could link to them either in the blogs or through other methods. Suddenly you've got many different combinations of words, long tail, that you're getting traffic for. It's easy for a beginner to do that. You don't have to be a rocket scientist, such as you do, to rank for a creditcard or something really difficult.

Michael: Right. So, what are some linking pitfalls to avoid? Things like link farms, and paid links. What else can we look for? What should we avoid when it comes to bad linking habits?

Mike: The number one bad linking habit is: do not act like a machine. Now some people rely on machines, and I'm not really saying... to avoid automation, or automated-like behavior. But for me the number one thing is to work some common sense into it, to add some variety in variation.

So you just have to be really careful that you don't sit down and say, "Today I'm going to work on links for my page." You suddenly do a thousand links and then Google says, "Wait, what's going on here?" There's these blogs that have 1,000 links coming in, and they all came in on one day, and then after a day or two, there's no more links coming in." They're going to say, "OK, well that was a pattern." Something happened that was not natural.

Michael: Up goes the flag: too many links, too fast.

Mike: Yeah. I know a lot of people are eager to make money. They want to get on the fast track, and they want to automate it. But the number one tip that I can give to anybody, is to try and take a step back, and look at it from Google's perspective; they're trying to get quality in there. Look at the things that would alarm them, and give them a tip that what you're doing may be with the intention of getting a ranking.

So, you want to do things naturally as often as possible. By naturally, you want to have a variety; you want to have many different kinds of link text. You want to link to many different places. You want to link from many different websites all over the world, not just your own sites or from one server. You want to have them coming from all over the place, and a lot of the other things that we discussed.

Michael: Sure. Links in the footer or the partners page, which you had mentioned.

Mike: There you go. Well, boy! You have some really good ones. Yeah, we could talk about those.

Michael: Yeah.

Mike: They notice those things. If all of your links come from a web page that is called, "links.HTML" or that says, "Sponsored" above it or "Link Partners," Google is really, really smart: they notice those kinds of things. So, pay attention. Pay attention to where your links come from. Try to employ a variety; try not to act like a machine.

If you're going to do something that's automated or in large batches, just be really aware that those patterns, footprints, those common things, they're going to see. It may not be apparent on the surface, but Google is really sophisticated. They notice those things.

Michael: Yeah, and one more thing I could add is to avoid the session IDs. So, in other words you don't want to have more than five numbers in a single string, in a URL.

Mike: Yeah.

Michael: Google just has trouble indexing those. It looks at those and thinks, "Well it's just going to be red shoe, blue shoe, green shoe, and it's just looking at different session IDs of all these different make and model product numbers."

Mike: Yeah.

Michael: If you've got these big long numbers in the URL, it has difficulty. So, it's better just to shorten up those URLs.

Let's talk about trust, Google's TrustRank.

Mike: OK, I trust you.

Michael: Yeah. People often think PageRank is everything, but forget that it can be gamed and spammed quite easily. Now, I kind of think it's like the mall and the parking lot, where the cars that Google trusts get to park near the doors, whereas everybody else has to go sit outside. So you don't even get to play, if you don't have trust.

Mike: [laughs] Yeah, that's true.

Michael: So the whole TrustRank thing is to increase the ranking of pages that have a high probability of being good, and to demote the bad. It flags bad sites for human review, and it helps prevent page rank spam from purchased links, and link spamming that targets the RageRank algorithm specifically.

Mike: Yes.

Michael: So is there anything else you would like to tell us about Google's domain trust, and how to gain that trust?

Mike: Well, there's two aspects of it. One, there's the trust of your site itself, and then there's the trust of the websites that are pointing to you. Unfortunately beginners, when they start a brand new site, they don't have a lot of trust accumulated. Probably from a strategy standpoint -- knowing that your site is brand new -- it's probably smart just as a strategy, not to go after the really super competitive stuff right off the bat. That there alone will open up the income possibilities for you.

But you have to realize that it's going to take a little time for Google to say, "OK, this site's been around three months, or a year, or two years, and we only notice this many negative factors. Boy, over the course of a year we've seen X number of links coming from respected, trusted sources."

Michael: That's one there that you mentioned is, "How long, how many years has this site been around?"

Mike: Yes.

Michael: The other second important one you mentioned is, "Links from other trusted sites." So, those would be sites that are hard to game or difficult to spam.

Mike: Yeah.

Michael: So it would be something like PRWeb, where you have to spend several hundred dollars to even make a press release.

Mike: Good point.

Michael: Or it could be Mozilla, which is edited by human editors. Good pages don't link to bad pages. So if you're being a good site, you don't link to link farms.

Mike: Yes. Now, I reluctantly want to use that to promote the Article Underground blogs, because {that's) part of the strategy when I set up the blogs in the first place. And a blog, in itself, is not unique. It's not the reason that Article Underground members are getting good rankings.

Part of the reason is because, in my particular situation, and I know in your case and some other cases, is that we've had these domains for many, many years, and that there already has been some level of trust for Google. Incidentally, Yahoo! Loves older sites.

Michael: Mm-hmm.

Mike: It's much easier to get the benefits from Yahoo! Because of links from older sites, and then also aged sites.

But in any event, the domains that the blogs are on, from Article Underground, are all seasoned. They've been around a while, and they've had a history of PageRank on the pages, and I try to minimize the mistakes that a lot of people often make, so hopefully not very many penalties. So they are good, trusted websites.

Michael: Yeah. They don't show any history of spam activity or anything like that.

Mike: Yes.

Michael: So they get more trust that way.

Mike: Now, how does a person attain these things? Well, one, I could make a recommendation right off the bat. And I hear a lot from new members, they'll say, "Oh, I don't want to get too many domains. I only want one site, and I want to focus on that one site."

Well, I suggest to people that they get five sites; they start out with a minimum of five sites. And even if you're not going to use those sites immediately, at the very least put up a placeholder page, maybe a couple of article pages, and start gaining a history with those pages. Gain some trust from Google.

Michael: That's a very good point. You put a couple of pages up and then get those pages spidered, and that becomes the date from which that page became active.

Mike: Right. And then you have something seasoned. So you may start off and say, "I can't work on more than one or two sites at a time." But plan for your future. If you're going to do this as a web publisher, and your goal is to get free search engine traffic, you could do it on one site.

I'm not bad-rapping people that go with one or two sites. But if you're going to be aggressive and you're going to try to do things that are going to gain rankings, there is a good likelihood that you might make a mistake, or get a penalty, or maybe even a site would get banned; that's the worst thing that could happen.

But why bank on just one website, when you could have several or a couple or five or 10 or whatever? And you also have those in the pipeline for when you're ready to expand. Those sites are going to be ready to rank immediately. They don't have to season.

Michael: Yeah. And it's something that you can do as a hobby. I've got several sites that have to do with health and fitness, some with jobs, and they just grow a little bit every couple of months.

Mike: Yeah.

Michael: I might think, "Oh, I haven't added anything to my fitness site for a while. I think I'll put on a couple of articles." So it gives the spiders another reason to visit, and I've just added some more content.

Mike: That's another important factor, but it's not going to kill a site. Freshness will help Google. It reminds them that you've got stuff coming out. And they do love sites that have regular content.

In fact, that's why the blogs do so well, because the Article Underground members are keeping them loaded with content, so they see a regular amount of activity with all these great words on the pages. So those links are going to count a little more than other links.

But like you said, as long as you add them at some interval -- every month or two months -- that's good enough. You don't have to add five pages a day.

Michael: Yeah. Well, we're going to have to wrap this up. We've gone over an hour and 15 minutes already, and I'm sure everybody just got a whole lot out of this call. Gee, we talked about PLR articles, blogs, how to increase the rankings on sites.

You've helped me shed a lot of light on some of the mysteries of SEO, like link popularity, PageRank, TrustRank, and the single most important thing when it comes to Google rankings, and that's how to link effectively, and get the most ranking points for those links.

I've got to thank you so much for being with me here today. But I'd love for you to summarize the Article Underground for me now. You get how many articles, how many blogs, how many hours of training and audios? And for how much?

Mike: It's ridiculously cheap. [laughs]

If I could just summarize real quickly, I'd like to say that it's really important. We get bombarded with all kinds of information out there.

You and I, Michael, we get all this great information from a number of different sources: ebooks and courses and systems and different methods to do this and do that. What I recommend that people do is to pick a system. Stick with it. Do the things that make you the money. Try to avoid getting distracted on all the millions of different ways there are to do it, and try to find one way to do it.

Michael: Focus.

Mike: Do a bunch of different things, but focus on a handful of things to do. And the things that I think are important for people to focus on, are building web pages with great words on them, and getting really good, quality links to point at those web pages. And if you want to do those things, you have to do them a lot, and do them regularly. And that's the way to succeed: you focus on those things.

Of course, you're going to do other things that are a little more strategic and going to enhance what you're doing. But those basic things will set momentum going for you. And then you can analyze what you're doing, look at your statistics and stats, watch AdSense and see how many affiliate products you sell. And then you repeat the things that work, and you continually gain a stable inventory of things that are working and making you money.

Michael: So stick to those fundamentals of creating pages, get links to those pages.

Mike: Yes. And Article Underground will help you, because, one, it's going to keep you focused because that's what the system is about. It's going to provide you training for all of those areas so you know exactly what the ins and outs are. You know those little things that you should avoid, and you know those little secrets, and when you do them....

And another thing that we didn't mention is that Article Underground has a great community of people that love to share and love to help other people. The private members forum is loaded with great people in the industry, well-recognized people, as well as members who are happy to share within the membership, what they're doing, specifics. They show case studies where, "I did this, and I built X number of sites. And this is the way I did it." And another guy will say, "Oh, boy, that's great. But I did this, and I did that."

So one of the things you get is a community of like-minded people, that are trying to do the same thing; they have the same goals. And it will really help you utilize all the tools and the benefits.

And it's $97 a month. It's a recurring membership, so each month, it's going to cost you $97. But... you get 400 brand new articles every month. You get to use the blogs as long as you want for linking. You get the forum. You get brand new training all the time. There's a lot of tools, and people regularly say, that they're almost overwhelmed by all the stuff they get. That's basically a summary of the benefits of Article Underground.

Michael: So, $97 a month. You get the 400 articles per month you can chop, slice, use however you want.

Mike: Yeah.

Michael: You get a series of 33, and growing, membership blogs.

Mike: Right.

Michael: Then you've got 80-some blogs from the outside world pointing into this whole network.

Mike: Yeah.

Michael: You get SEO strategies, training videos, MP3 training audios.

Mike: Yes.

Michael: And then, if you get stuck, a private membership site with people going through the same stuff that you are. All of the above for $97.

Mike: Yeah.

Michael: That's absolutely fantastic.

Mike: And you could give your URL and not be afraid. It's not like the real world (forums) where you go out there and you could start a flaming contest, with people that are criticizing you and telling you how dumb you are. This is a people of your peers, people that love to help each other. So that aspect alone is really quite valuable.

Michael: OK, Mike, thank you for being with me today. I've really got to thank you. It's been Mike Liebner, founder of the Article Underground traffic and content system. And we look forward to chatting with you again soon. And I'm sure the readers have learned just so much from you today. Thank you for being with me.

Mike: Thank you.

Michael: Bye-bye.

Mike: Bye, Michael.