Tips and Inspiration for bloggers, webmasters, and internet marketers

Article marketing is a great way to build traffic, build a reputation, and build links.  If that combination of benefits doesn’t make you want to article market, then you might as well quit trying to make it on the web.

Article marketing not only works good for websites and blogs, but for other things like Squidoo.  I have successfully used article marketing on a my Squidoo lenses, my website, and this blog.

What is it?

Article marketing is the process of writing articles, submitting them to article directories, and allowing others to use your articles (if they keep your author signature on the article).  All the articles that you submit must be original content.

Article Marketing Benefits

Build Traffic

When your articles gets published on article directories, people will find them.  If your signature is good, many of visitors will click through your signature links.

Build a Reputation

If your articles get published on websites, people will start seeing your name over and over, and will recognize you as an expert on your topic.  This takes a plethora of articles, but it is definitely worth it.

Build Links

Links are probably the most important part of search engine optimization (learn 70 link building techniques).  Every time an article gets published on another site, it includes your signature (which includes links), and good article directories count as a strong link in Google’s eyes.

Breaking Some Myths

When you start looking at article marketing websites or articles, some will tell you its a good idea to submit your article to hundreds even thousands of directories.  Some websites even try to sell you programs that will automatically publish your articles to hundreds of directories, which will "automatically boast your website to the top of the search engine rankings."

Doing this is completely wrong and will never work.  Many article directories aren’t even indexed in Google, and to be successful, you only need to use a few (I personally recommend only using Ezine Articles).  Also, article directories reject duplicate content.  If they didn’t, what would be the point of writing articles?  You could copy and paste an article from Ezine Articles and use it another article directory.  

Once people realize that submitting their article to a million directories doesn’t work, they tend to look for programs that rewrite articles.  I don’t recommend these because automatically written articles are often poorly written, or don’t make sense.  If you plan on rewriting articles, rewrite it yourself.  I cover rewriting further on in this article.  

Don’t put the articles that you submit to directories on your site.  Even though you wrote the article, Google still marks it as duplicate content, which will lower your search engine rankings.

Where to Submit Your Articles 

I recommend submitting most of your articles to Ezine Articles because is the most popular.  However, it might be useful to submit some articles elsewhere for SEO purposes; Google likes links to be from different sites. 

• Ezine Articles
• Go Articles
• Articles Base
• Articles Factory

By no means a definite list, but it gets the job done for now.  Try searching Google if you want to submit to other directories.

Writing a Successful  Article

Your article should be related to the website or blog you are promoting.  Feel free to come up with any ideas you want; articles can be similar to your content or completely unique; they can be long, short, or medium length.

Even though you can do whatever you want, you should have two goals in mind.

The first goal of your article is to get clicks to your website.  As I stated before, you can place links in your signature.  If these links are related to your article, you will get more clicks.  It helps if you create a good signature which I will go over later. 

The second goal of your article is to get it published on as many websites as possible.  This will help you build links (don’t expect many links from high quality websites though), build a reputation ( you will be credited as the author, thus you will build a reputation in your subject if your article is published on many websites), and build traffic ( the more exposure the more clicks).

The best ways to accomplish these goals are to analyze and experiment.  

Below all Ezine Articles articles are three headings:  recent articles, most published articles, and most viewed articles for the past 90 days.  Look at some of the articles that were the highest viewed and most published in the category that you will submit your articles to.  Studying the titles and the style of the most successful articles will allow you to write yours accordingly.

You can try rewriting the most successful articles.  This is completely fine as long as you use the articles as guidelines, meaning you don’t copy and paste the article’s content, but rewrite it differently (while adding some new info and excluding some things) while looking at the article.  This is a pretty popular article marketing technique.  

After analyzing other articles, start writing some articles.  Your first article probably won’t generate much buzz, your second probably won’t either, or your third…  Yet if you keep trying new things to better your articles, you will eventually hit a break-through.  From then on, it will be relatively easy to create a popular article almost every time. 

Creating Great Titles

Creating a title for your article is similar to creating a title for a blog post: it should draw in readers, and include a keyword (most of the time).  Titles are even more important in article marketing because potential publishers and readers scroll through a list of article titles.  To get their attention, you need to have an especially great one.  

It is sometimes a good idea to include a keyword in a title because some publishers want to get traffic from search engines.  It doesn’t have to be a high traffic keyword; long-tail keywords work too.

Once again, analyze the articles with the most visits.  Look at their titles and you will get a general idea of the title format that works.

 Creating a Signature That Sells

Write a short but sweet (your life story will bore readers) bio of you.  I recommend that you tell why you are qualified to teach about your subject; this information is much more valuable to the reader (it’s cool if you play chess, but not many people care if your website is about sewing).

Next tell about your website and why it will be useful to the reader.  Link to your homepage and to another article or post (preferable on the website you just mentioned).  This article could be a link to popular post or one that they want to improve its rank in Google or a link to an article that relates or expands on the article that you marketed.  I find that a higher click-through rate comes with the latter.

You may also want to use anchor text in your links for maximum SEO benefit.  For example, if I wanted my website to rank good for soccer guide, I would write Check out my soccer guide website or something along those lines.

Rewriting Articles

You can rewrite articles that you posted on your blog, articles that you already submitted to other articles directories, or articles that other people wrote.  

To rewrite, switch around as many words as you can, switch around the order of the paragraphs (though it still has to make sense), and add in new information or cut out unneeded information.  

Rewriting is easy, and when you use it to submit many articles, you will see great results with it.

Checking What Articles Are Published

To know where your articles are published simply type in your article title with quotes around it.  For example "why I enjoy gardening."  If your title isn’t generic (which it shouldn’t be) you should see all the websites that are indexed in Google that have published your article.  Note that this does not include email where many articles are published to and sent out to a email list.

Conclusion

Article marketing is such a great way to accomplish some of the hardest goals that webmasters and bloggers want to achieve.  Utilizing it successfully will greatly help you in your web journey.

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