You know what I love about article marketing? The crazy amount of traffic just one awesome article will send your blog or website.
You know what I hate about article marketing? The crazy amount of articles you’ll write until you strike gold with just one awesome article.
Article Marketing, for those of you who don’t know, is a really simple system.
Here’s how it works:
- You write an original article (or have it outsourced).
- You submit it to an online article directory.
- When approved, people find your article.
- People smile because your article rocks so darned hard.
- These people click through your resource link(s) and come to your site.
- Other people love your article so much they they publish it as-is on their own site, complete with your active links.
- More people find your article on these sites, then click through to your site.
- You smile because your article rocks so darned hard.
- You also smile because your links are peppered throughout the Internet, giving your site some serious link love and, hopefully, a huge boost in the Search Engines.
It Seems So Easy…
Article marketing isn’t difficult. At least in theory. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist or a best-selling author to write up a couple hundred words, add a few hyper links to another site and then submit it to one or several article directories.
The reality: Creating that “magic” awesome article takes experience, skill and luck.
I’ve written plenty of articles in my time, and in the process I’ve learned quite a few little tricks I’d like to pass along to ya’ll. I’m not saying these are the end-all, be-all strategies for total article marketing domination (I’ll leave that claim to the big gurus who don’t even write their own articles), but they’ve helped me out tremendously as of recently.
Article Marketing Strategy #1: Write Clever Articles And Title
Don’t hang yourself up trying to create the next “War And Peace,” but you’ll need something captivating enough to entice readers to click your links. What would you do if you came across an ill-written article? Click the back button, right? That’s what the readers will do as well. And if people won’t read it, they won’t click your links.
Article Marketing Strategy #2: Don’t Stress Over Keywords
Yes keywords are important. Yes they can make a huge difference. Yes proper keyword research will help. But what it won’t do is actually get your articles written. I’d rather write three articles than slave over keyword statistics. Besides, after you’ve written a few, you’ll get a sixth sense for what’ll go over well and what won’t. I’d recommend getting out there, writing 10 or 20, check the statistics, then evaluating the commonalities of the best-performing ones rather than getting hung up on proper keyword analysis.
Article Marketing Strategy #3: Write Lots Of Articles
That’s write (get it? Little play on words there). Get out there and write. In my experiences, only by putting up a metric ass-ton of articles will you start getting some loverly traffic and backlink PR boosts. Unless you get lucky and score an amazing performing article on your first try (roughly the equivalent of Democrats and Republicans telling each other they are right), your real advantage is in sheer quantity.
Article Marketing Strategy #4: Focus The Best Performing Article Directories
You’ve no doubt noticed the hundreds – maybe thousands – of article directories out there, and you’ve likely read about why it’s important to send stuff to each and every one of them. In my experiences, this doesn’t do any good. I stick with two:
Ezine Articles. The search engines LOVE Ezine, and they almost exclusively out perform every other directory on the Net. That means your backlinks are heavier-weighted, and because more people find them, the traffic value is much higher.
InfoBarrel. I like InfoBarrel because, unlike most directories, they’ll share the profits they make from your hard work. Every directory monetizes its articles (you are effectively free labor in that sense), but very few share the profits. InfoBarrel actually inserts your Google Adsense code into 75% to 90% of your articles. Pretty cool, eh? Why not get paid for creating your own backlinks?
Article Marketing Strategy #5: Track Your Performance
Don’t just keep track of how many views your articles get, but also the Click-Through-Rate (CTR). You’ll probably hear plenty of people arguing about which of the two is actually more important, but I like them both. Ideally, if you can figure out what your most read articles get read, and why your highest CTR articles get the highest CTR, then combine their powers, you’re set.
Article Marketing Strategy #6: Build Backlinks To Your Best Articles
When, through utilizing my 5th strategy, you notice some great-performing articles, why not give them a little link love and help them help you? Build backlinks to articles the same way you would any other web page. Heck, you could even write articles to support other articles. Since Ezine and InfoBarrel give you two self-serving links, why not link to your “money” site AND one of your awesome articles? It’s worked for me on several occasions…
In Conclusion…
Go out there and start writing. You don’t even need to use your real name, if that’s an issue. Almost every directory allows pen names, if that’s your major hang up, which means you can hone your article writing chops without worry.
I’m sure many of ya’ll have some great success stories with article marketing, I’d love to hear them.
