Adfero / Direct News

[lumargin]

I am about to use them for a website I am currently working on. The main advantage is that within the 1st year of your contract with Adfero, you would get on Google News.

[gadget]

I'd be very interested to hear how you get on. I'm meeting them today.

[Stuart]

Funky Monkey

How did you get on with your Adfero meeting?

Interested to hear your thoughts, I am sold on the service (and to be honest I was before I met with them for the second time), just not sold on the sales mans techniques to get me on board

They promised me the business model had changed from when I met them over a year ago, but it is exactly the same...

I will still use them when the time is right for me.

Br
Stuart

[bapages]

Originally Posted by dougs They basically rewrit content and make sure the stuff conforms to google news rules......£15 plus per article is steep, as you can get them done for a lot less. Doug

Am I out of my mind, that sound quite cheap to me?

[gadget]

Interesting meeting and follow-up discussions .. in summary ..

I think the concept is good but still have some reservations on the degree of unique content. As we all know duplicate content would murder a site. Price per article is very good but the only way they can cover costs is by volume.

The basic deal is 60 articles per month at £1,000 with a minimum of a 12 month contract.

I've asked for contact details for 2 customers to ascertain genuine testimonials but as yet haven't had the details through.

Here's the killer .. they want paying for 12 months in advance.

Originally Posted by Stuart .. just not sold on the sales mans techniques to get me on board

Yes - I know what you mean.

The danger with that of course is once they've been paid, the desire to maintain standards may decrease.

[Stuart]

Thanks Funky Monkey

Sounds pretty much same as my meeting.

I am comfortable with the service and am sure dup content will not be an issue.

My concern is committing to 12 months and 50 articles a month (they only write Monday to Friday), the service should have the desired effect on my sites and after 3-6 months it should pay for itself, however it is still a big commitment for me right now.
Shame they don't do a month by month or quarterly service.
I don't mean something where you can cancel the 12 month with 3 months notice at any time.

Br
Stuart

[russell cpanuk]

Just had these guys in today, there is no way we could write 60-120 articles each month, so we have employed them on behalf of a client. Only time will tell on the dup-content, that is our main concern.

The auto feeds sound great, not only do we get out of writing the content, they will upload it well. All we have to do is pay!

They ask for a quarterly payment, and you can cancel giving 3 months notice.

[gadget]

Originally Posted by russell cpanuk .. you can cancel giving 3 months notice.

.. but only upto 6 months, thereafter it reverts to six months notice.

Could I ask ..

What's the minimum contract you've signed?
How much payment have you had to give in advance?
Have you spoken to any other clients of theirs?

[russell cpanuk]

It is technically a 12 months contract, however you can give 3 months notice within the first 6 months, then it’s a 6 months rolling contract.

The minimum was 60 articles per month, but our client has ordered more, and yes we have spoken to others and their feedback was all positive. We also spoke to a very up-set client, however she was more up-set, at the mark-up the SEO Company had charged her.

You pay on the start date (approx 6 weeks) for 3 months worth. This is the first time we have used this service, so fingers crossed.

[Steve Jennings]

They're not bad and I think you can probably get quarterly billing if you push for it, to my mind you should also go for a picture package as apart from the SEO value it's good for keeping your site content fresh, overall the quality of pictures used is pretty good.

I don't feel it's a 100% hands off option though to be honest, it takes a fair amount of work to get the integration done really well, and then a considerable amount of work in terms of ongoing monitoring, feedback etc to get the articles 100% - but to be fair they expect this and it’s definitely one of those things where you get out what you put in.

From experience whilst similar articles may be used on other sites (around the same subject) they are specifically "re written" for you and dupe content (of article text) is usually less than 40-50% which once you put it into your own page should be far less anyway, and if you are going for a subject area away from finance I should imagine this would be less of an issue anyway.

Know what you mean about the "selling" but to be fair the service post sale is pretty good too which was one thing I was concerned about. Overall I'd recommend them.

Also have a look at:
News generation service - FeedAngel
SelectNews

Also they have bases in Manchester and Canary Warf and if you have a look on Monster there's a few ex Adfero writers for hire (would imagine it's one of those industries with a fairly high staff turnover) which is something we're considering at the moment to cover specific areas as once you get into 100's of article a month the cost is considerable.

We've done a chunk of work on integration of these types of feeds so if anyone’s got any techie questions we may be able to answer them.

We’ve also built a Ruby on Rails application/database system to handle these types of feeds, extract keywords (so as they can be added to meta tags for site search, distributed and associated by keyword etc) as well as keyword linking, dupe content checking etc, etc - this is purely for in house use at the moment but the plan eventually is to launch it for public use, so if there's some interest I could talk to our techies about timescales for releasing this for beta testing - feel free to give me a shout if you're interested.

Cheers

[gadget]

Thought I'd give a brief update on this. I decided not to go with these guys for 2 and a half reasons .. their payment terms, duplicate content concerns and their sales techniques.