Writing and submitting articles is one of the best ways to generate massive Internet traffic for your web site or blog. Used correctly, article marketing can dramatically boost your SEO and turn you into an "authority" in your niche. Learn how to do it the right way.
If you are working hard to herd huge amounts of online traffic to your blog or website, then you certainly want to consider article marketing as one of your principal ways to achieve that. There are many article marketing websites just waiting for your article and, in most cases, it costs nothing to submit articles to them. Whether you write the articles yourself or pay another person else to compose them for you, there are some things that you should realize before you begin:
1. Benefits of Article Marketing - On the plus side, the most important advantage to your traffic-generating campaign will be the backlinks you will reap in the process of submitting articles. Google and the other major search engines count how many backlinks you have pointing back at your blog or web site. The idea is that if you have a lot of, one-way, inbound links (backlinks) then your site must have a lot to offer in terms of content.
Not all backlinks are created equal and article marketing is not the only way to obtain them. However, article marketing is a splendid way to create them. Links coming from so-called “authority” websites are ranked much higher by the search engines than backlinks you might make by, say, posting a comment on a small or unknown blog. That's not to say to say that you shouldn’t also be posting comments on related blogs and forums: It’s just that links generated through major article marketing sites have more SEO clout in terms of backlink credits.
2. Submitting Original Material - The articles you post to these article marketing sited MUST be your own, original work. If found to be otherwise, you may have them declined, be asked to remove them or, worse, you could end up battling plagiarism charges. From a SEO point of view alone, you should appreciate that these articles will show up (as articles) in the search engine listings independently of any web site or blog.
The search engines want to see original material because they think it to be more beneficial to their readers than an article that has been copied and kicked around the Internet for a while. Therefore, if your article content is not original, it is a lot less likely to be visible. Its links won’t be clicked on if they aren’t visible to the public because the articles are buried deep down in the listings.
3. Keywords and Staying on Subject - Your articles must be pertinent to the topic of your website or blog and this applies to the links you leave at the end of those articles, too. If your web site is about bird cages and you compose an article concerning plumbing services that has a link back to your bird cage blog, you are wasting your time. Instead, your article ought to be just about bird cages and any links that are attached to it should point to your bird cage site or another site on the same topic.
Further, before you even start writing, you should be aware what the best keyword or keywords are for your website and use them in everything you write including the article title, the article summary, the article body and the keywords listing. The keyword saturation (frequency) inside the article body should be around one and four percent of the total number of words, no higher and no lower. Be careful not to use your keyword to the degree that it makes your article read badly. You don't want a sentence that says: “Find the best bird cages at our bird cage site which is a favorite bird cage site of interest to bird cage lovers that is on the subject of bird cages.”
4. Submission Requirements - When you submit an article to an article marketing site, you will be asked for at least some, if not all. Of the following information: The article title, a brief summary of the article, the body of the article itself, and a listing of keywords that are separated by commas with no spaces after the commas and no comma after the last keyword. In most cases, you will be provided with a “Resource Box” where you should put in a short biography of the author in addition to the allowable number of self-serving, usually 2 or 3. If not, position your resource entries just after your article in the article body area.
The summary should be no more than 2 or 3 sentences. The article body should be at least 400 words long and less than the maximum number of words allowed by that particular article marketing website. The keywords will be subject to a maximum number of characters. The resource box will usually be the only place where you can leave self-serving links and the allowable number of links will be stated.
5. Author Guidelines and Approval - To prevent having your articles refused, you should study the author guidelines of each article marketing site and conform to them. Your articles, in most cases, will be read and then approved or refused by a real, live staff member who is aware of all the rules of that article marketing directory.
6. Keeping Records - Maintain a record that shows a list of all your articles, the dates they were submitted and to what article marketing sites they were submitted. There could also be a column where you can indicate that the article was approved or refused and a column for any comments you want to record. That will stop you from submitting the same article more than once to each website which is a “no-no.”
7. Article "Spinning" Software - Most article marketing web sites will ask that you submit original articles specifically for them and state that you agree not to submit those same articles to other article marketing sites. Adhering to this precisely, of course, would greatly mushroom your amount of work and severely reduce the effectiveness of your efforts.
There are many article “spinning” computer programs to be had that promise to create many unique versions of your original article. These article spinners are made to use as many synonyms for as many words as possible. The output is always unreadable trash unless you, the author, can take control over which synonyms will be employed and when. You will discover that a synonym that makes sense in one context, make no sense in another. The software is unable to know the difference.
8. Manual vs. Automatic Submission - I suggest that you take the time to submit your articles manually, rather than relying on widely-available article submission programs. Such software is only designed to submit the same version of your article to every site, which is counter to the idea of submitting only original material. Further, each article submission site has differing rules and ways of entering data and a few even contain a “Captcha” entry box in order to make sure that the article is being submitted by a person and not automatically.
If you want to pay money for them, there are professional article submission sites online that will do all your submissions on your behalf for a price. If you decide to go this way, for the reasons stated above, make certain that they will be submitting by hand somewhat unique versions of your articles to each website in the correct format for that article marketing site.
As you can see, article marketing is a lot of work when done the proper way. It is also one of the most effective means to promote your blog or website. If you write well and pick interesting subject angles to explore, you will, in the years to come, position yourself as an “authority” in your marketing niche, who knows his or her subject area and whom can be trusted enough to buy from.
Your articles will stay on those sites and in the search engine listings for years and, during that time, the backlinks they produce will multiply like rabbits. A single article won't achieve what you want. You must be typing and submitting articles on your topic all the time to as many directories as possible.
© 2011 Robert M. Gillespie, Jr.
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