Article marketing is one of the most effective methods of traffic generation. Having been around since the dawn of Internet Marketing, it is often ignored by new marketers in favor of new whiz bang techniques. Article marketing still works and is still very effective, if done correctly.
B.G. (Before Google) all you had to do was post an article with a link to your website on an article directory and you’d be right at the top of the search engines. As Internet Marketers worked out this was a good method of dominating the search engines, so the search engines changed their rules.
Now it is a constant battle between marketers and search engines to stay ahead of each other.
The principle of article marketing still applies – you write and article with a resource box and submit it to an article directory, which benefits you in two ways:
Firstly, you get backlinks to your website, which helps you rank higher in the search engines.
And secondly, you get traffic from the search engines themselves.
There are hundreds of article directories on the Internet that you could submit to. In a moment, we’ll talk about them directory.
Before that, let’s just cover how to write a good article.
The first step in writing an article is to know which keywords you are targeting in that article. You need to pick three or four keywords for your article. You don’t want too few as you don’t want to “keyword stuff” and you don’t want too many as you don’t want to dilute the power of your keywords. Your keywords are how your website is found in the search engines by your potential customers.
Most article directories require 400 to 500 words for an article. Ezine articles requires only 250 words. Don’t write an essay – if your article is getting too long, then split it into a number of different articles or tell people to come to your website for the rest in you bio box.
It is vital that your article is written for humans to read and not machines. Too many people write articles for the search engines and forget that the search engines don’t have credit cards!
Include your keyword in the title and then at least once in each paragraph. Don’t go overboard – mentioning your keyword every other word will not do you any favors as that is keyword stuffing and not appreciated by the better search engines.
Your article needs to be informative, interesting and contain information that establishes you as an authority on your subject area. Write articles with titles like “5 tips to …” or “10 ways to …” or “The secrets of …”
These sort of titles really grab attention and pull people in to read them. You need to be experimenting with different article titles and notice which bring you the most traffic.
As a last step, you need to create a resource box. This is the box at the bottom of the article that says “click here for more info” but in a far more profit pulling way. Check with the individual article directories for their resource box requirements, they vary significantly.
Your resource box is designed to make people click through to your website and so needs to be well thought out and well written. Test different resource boxes to see which gets you the best click through rates. This can make the difference between a mediocre article and a highly profitable one.
Your resource box needs to include some of your keywords as hyperlinks back to your website. This will help your website rank higher in the search engines for those keywords. Here’s an example of a resource box that got a 25% higher click through rate.
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There are two possible strategies for article marketing and which you choose is entirely up to you. I would recommend that you test both methods and decide which is the best for you. Both have their benefits and both have their drawbacks.
The first method is to submit a unique article to each directory you use. This would mean you need to rewrite or spin all of your articles to make a unique copy for each directory, which could take some time or cost some money.
Whilst this can take some work, it can be very rewarding, particularly if you also change your resource box. Search engines are having a love affair with unique content and if each article is unique then you will get much more love from the search engines.
Submitting the articles will take longer and is more labor intensive, but it is much better for you in the search engines. You can hire someone to do it for you at somewhere like www.rentacoder.com or www.elance.com or do it yourself.
The second method is the one most marketers use. They submit the same article to every directory. This is quicker, cheaper and allows you to use automated software. You may get affected by a duplicate content penalty though, which means only one article is actually listed in the search engines whilst the rest are banished to the supplemental listings.
There is a third method which is becoming very popular, and this is just submitting your article to www.EzineArticles.com. This is because they are one of the largest directories and are well known for not only providing high quality articles (they are very strict about what they accept) but are also much loved by Google. You get good reports on the performance of your articles and can get a lot of traffic too.
Test the three different methods to find which is best for your available time and budget, but at a minimum, submit your articles to EzineArticles.
The method you will choose is entirely up to you – it depends on your budget and available time.
However, don’t think for a moment that article marketing is dead and buried. There are people making thousands of dollars a month from article marketing. It is still incredibly effective and is one of the many strategies you need to be using in order to rank high in the search engines.