Hi friends -

If your inbox is as polluted as mine, I’m sure you’ve seen that there has been a proliferation of PLR article providers in the last several months. Since the search engines, particularly Google, are fighting spam harder every day, marketers have found that article sites have strong advantages over portals. After all, providing a quality experience for your visitor is what it’s all about, right?

I have subscribed to about 20 different PLR article providers at one point of another in the last year. Generally, being the “something new, need to try it” geek that I am, I will sign up for everything I see, at least for the first month. The quality of these services varies widely. The worse I saw looked like the provider spun each article using a tool, and never proofed them. That may work great for search engine purposes (or not) but you couldn’t read it!

One of the first article providers I signed up for, is one I’m still using, ArticleUnderground.

As far as I know, Mike Liebner of AU is one of the first PLR (private label rights) article providers to focus on quality, and limit the number of users that gets each batch of articles. It became clear to me early on that they were interested in building a good PLR business rather than just jumping on the latest internet marketing fad, making big $$, and scooting off to the next fad. And the way to build a great business is to take care of your customers, which Article Underground has been doing.

Frankly, the $97 per month cost of AU is a bargain even if you didn’t take the articles. Here is what you get:

400 articles per month - These are ghost-written articles of above average quality, on many different topics. They are written based on extensive keyword research, and are on topics that web surfers are currently searching for. They have 1-3% keyword density written into them, and are limited to 350 members receiving each set.

Article announcement blogs - This is a great feature, and is worth the price of admission alone. AU has several blogs that they have made available to members for posting snippets and links back to your sites. As of this writing, there are 23 blogs you can post to, both on specific topics and general. These are NOT spam blogs, there are quality standards for posting to them. For example, you need at least one page of your site indexed by Google before you can post a link. This helps manage the quality of these blogs. In a sample of a half dozen of these that I just checked, their Google PR ranged from three to five. Posting a snippet with links to one of your sites will generally get it spidered within a day, and will help it rank. In addition, there are about 60 blogs set up by members, for this same purpose, that are available to all members. What this feature gives us is the ability to get several quality backlinks to our sites, at no additional charge. A good number of quality backlinks in no question the best way to improve your site’s ranking in the search engines.

Members forum - AU has a private members forum. This is a good central location to find help getting started, or working on advanced internet marketing techniques.

Many helpful internet marketing videos - Mike has made several instructional videos from “getting started” videos, to more advanced topics like keyword research, LSI, building a mini-net, and many more.

Keywords - Keyword research is done for you, and lists are provided.

Support - Not that a whole lot of support is required for this type of service, but Mike is actively sharing his thoughts on the Article Underground members forum.

There is one thing all article buyers should know. Even though the AU articles are only made available to 350 people, they should still be changed before using on your sites. There has been much discussion in the last several months about Google duplicate content penalties. Whether you believe they are aggressively penalizing duplicate content, you know dang well that is the direction things are headed. I believe all article should be modified before posting to a quality site. I find that if I spend about five minutes with an article, I can change is significantly enough to avoid too much similarity with the original. I also use a writer I found on guru, that charges me a per-article fee for re-writes.

You also may be interested in reading this free article marketing e-book.

I would strongly suggest subscribing to Article Underground for the knowledge and indexing aspects of it, if not for the articles. I believe they have an introductory video on their sales site, also.

Those of you that read my reviews know I am honest, and don’t just try to sell you something. I’m sorry this one probably sounds so much like a sales pitch, but I just couldn’t find any negatives to point out!

As always, feel free to e-mail me with any questions or comments you have.

Happy article mining!

David