Anyone who’s read more than a handful of my recent entries or posts on various forums may have noticed me mention a system called Article Underground. I’ve been using them for about a month now to get content and links for my adsense sites.

Article Underground is, in their own words, an “exclusive members-only content and traffic network”. What this means is they provide their members with all sorts of tools to build, promote and profit from monetised websites (i.e. the type with adverts on them). I guess AU are mainly targeting the Adsense crowd, but there’s plenty for everyone.

The Articles

The main attraction to Article Underground is the 400 new keyword-targeted articles available to members each month. That’s right – four hundred a month! I don’t know who the writers are, but I hope they have plenty of spare keyboards! These articles are touted as highly SEO-optimised and claimed to be “ban proof”. What they mean by “ban proof” is this isn’t scraped content from other sites – it is real, human-written text that won’t be seen as spam by search engine robots.

The Link Network

The other half of AU’s system, are the 22 or so high pagerank blogs members can use to link to individual articles published on their sites providing backlinks and “Google Juice”. These blogs are heavily moderated to keep them from descending into a mess of spam. I’ve not made a lot of use of these blogs myself, but I can definitely see their worth, so long as they stay spam-free. By linking from the correct announcement blog(s) you can generate relevant, high pagerank backlinks quickly and easily.

You could create your own network of “funnel” websites, but that would be far too much effort!

The Extras.

Article Underground don’t scrimp on the extras. On top of the monthly articles, are the frequently updated videos demonstrating how to get the best from their system. There are also a stack of free ebooks to read (with resell rights on some), and programs (all Windows based, unfortunately) to help optimise your sites and your own articles. The quality varies a bit and some of the ebooks aren’t particularly great, but it’s all free and will no doubt be useful to somebody.

Without a doubt, the best “freebie” with Article Underground is the community. The forums are crammed with useful info, tips from other members. A wide range of topics are covered – far more than I could possibly list here. If you have a question about any part of Article Underground, or Article/Internet Marketing in general, it will usually be answered within a few hours on the AU forums.

Other Bits and Bobs

Article Underground only offer limited places (350 per membership round) – at the time of writing there are only 88 84 places left in the second round of admissions. This is ostensibly to prevent massive the articles being duplicated thousands of times over. If there are only a relatively small number of users then the chances of duplicate content penalties drops considerably.

Final Verdict

Article Underground offer a comprehensive system for those interested in creating niche, keyword-targeted websites for advertising revenue. Their system is better than most article marketing sites because of the more flexible copyrights to the articles you get. The traffic-building tools are invaluable, particularly for those just starting out in this field. AU has been quite a good investment for me, with my fledgling empire. It has allowed me to build a number of highly-focussed websites which are already bringing in Adsense revenue despite being only a few weeks old! Overall, I’d have to say Article Underground is one of my recommended tools for web entrepreneurs.

Visit Article Underground