Has anyone used the firm, Brafton "Custom News Marketing" for their website's blog & news article needs?
October 11, 2010 9:47 AM   Subscribe

Has anyone used the firm, Brafton "Custom News Marketing" for their website's blog & news article needs?

Would retaining the services of Brafton be a good choice for a small e-commerce business? Aside from writing fresh and relevant articles Brafton is supposed to also perform in-bound link generation and other valuable marketing techniques like getting the said article posted to sites like "Ezine Articles" and the such. At $2000 per month for 50 articles each month and a minimum 6 month commitment, it's a considerable amount of money for a small business. Has anyone had any experience with them? Can they really play a significant role in improving a small business' Google page rank?
posted by lorebella to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)
 
Best answer: I think it really depends on the nature of your business, and what your competition is doing. For our clients, we've found that posting 2 ezine articles per month (with a combined total of 4 keyword/url links per site), plus some reposting on GoArticles (2 articles) and Squidoo (2 articles) for a combined monthly total of 6 articles is enough to raise their Google Search rank. We can do that for well under $500. Our clients are in a competitive environment, so it does take a bit of work. But we do help them.

50 articles sounds great, but I kind of wonder if it's overkill. The rule of thumb for SEO and article marketing is write for your audience first, not a search engine. In other words, quality is key (I'm sure other internet users who come across your Ezine articles would really appreciate that, too), and 50 articles means nothing if the content is crap or is not considered to be relevant by Google.

Indeed, too many inbound links from the same domain can actually hurt your Google Search ranking, although I'm pretty sure that, for whatever reason, Ezine Articles is not penalized as much by Google - they seem to have some sort of of relationship with that company.

As for creating fresh content, Brafton seems to have a really interesting (and really expensive) custom news marketing offering.

The question is, once again, is it relevant to your business? I think that, if you could afford it, their service would be really valuable - if what they produce is relevant. The Google MayDay/Caffeine updates all use social media and custom content such videos and blog posts to help determine Google Search ranking.

Caffeine also places an emphasis on fresh content, so, if you can afford it, and if the the content is both of good quality and is relevant, then Brafton's service would seem to be really useful.

I would question their ability to generate quality, organic inbound links other than from Ezine articles. These links generally come from folks who find your content useful and link to it, and no one can promise that.

In summary, I guess Brafton's usefulness can be determined by your budget, and by the relevance of the content they are providing.

They seem to be providing services to larger companies ($50M+/year) with larger websites as opposed to small businesses.

I think the best thing to do is, if you think you have the budget, just talk to them. They should be able to let you know if they can help you.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:05 AM on October 11, 2010


I think it really depends on the nature of your business, and what your competition is doing. For our clients, we've found that posting 2 ezine articles per month (with a combined total of 4 keyword/url links per site), plus some reposting on GoArticles (2 articles) and Squidoo (2 articles) for a combined monthly total of 6 articles is enough to raise their Google Search rank.

I should also say that another key piece is actual SEO - making sure that each page of your website contains a relevant keyword and is optimized for search in other ways. I would say that less than 20 percent of sites, even SEO marketing agencies, are optimized for search. If you can overhaul your site, I would do that first.

However, Brafton's efforts to refresh content on individual pages of the site looks really interesting.
posted by KokuRyu at 10:07 AM on October 11, 2010


I've worked with Brafton and found them quite good, but it was for a much larger business. MeMail me if you have specific questions I can help answer.
posted by judith at 10:47 AM on October 11, 2010


Response by poster: Hi KokuRyu,

Thank you for your thoughts. What you said makes very good sense. We've already had a phone conference with Brafton and they provided us a walk-though of what it is they do via the net. The companies that they work for certainly are quite big which is why it was kind of curious that they reached out to us and contacted us first by phone. Our company would absolutely be considered small (although we do sell our wellness products nationwide)...but maybe Braftson is attempting to expand into small business.

We did explain that relevancy would be ultra-important to us and that fluff pieces would be unacceptable. They confirmed that the 350 full-time journalists are very capable of writing technical and pertinent articles.

We did explain that a 50 article package per month as a minimum seemed a bit much. They explained that they could compromise and reduce to 30 articles monthly which sounded more reasonable. But it still makes us wonder whether we need that many. We don't have the kind of traffic that would warrant or justify 1 article daily...however I suppose that much of the value that comes with publishing articles is in the fact that Google recognizes it as fresh, new and relevant content even if no one reads it right away. Is that a fair statement?
posted by lorebella at 11:19 AM on October 11, 2010


I guess it depends on where you are in terms of SEO. Is every page optimized? Is every page optimized for a particular audience and the conversion you hope to get from that particular audience?

If you've hit the wall, and you feel there is nothing else you can do, then it may make sense to consider Brafton. However, what is the ROI? If the ROI is acceptable, then, as a business, are you even able to take advantage of that ROI, or, if the orders start flooding in, will you be able to source and ship product?
posted by KokuRyu at 1:51 PM on October 11, 2010


Ask them to provide an ROI or some conversion figures. They won't do it because there is nothing to show. I fell for it and signed up against my better judgement. They did not drive any traffic or improve SEO in any meaningful way. I wasted 18K over the course of 9 months.

This is quite simply an article scraping service. The content I got sucked. They basically wrote quick fluff pieces that were of no value to my clients, in fact I was embarrassed to have it there.

Once I spoke to a British "Sales Manager" I should have been alerted what kind of company I was dealing with. Talk about a swarmy unsophisticated guy. You could just tell everything out of his mouth was a lie and he knew less about Internet Marketing than I would have hoped someone in his position would have.

They mentioned getting my site into Google News and it never happened. I did some research and Google is not letting any site with this kind of content in any more. They kept making promises that they knew were not going to happen. Check the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5xP-pTmlpY

I did manage to negotiate the terms down to a one month billing period and two months cancellation notice as opposed to the ridiculous terms they wanted.

With the changes Google is making I dont think they will be able to provide any results going forward. Only going to get worse.

Just a horrible experience in dealing with this company.
posted by morrismilk at 9:25 PM on April 11, 2011


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