Article Marketing Strategy: How To Get The Biggest Return Out of Your Articles

Article marketing is the original form of website promotion that has been around since the dawn of internet marketing. Many people believe that it has lost its effectiveness, but that is simply not the case. It just takes a little more work then it use to.

Article marketing has the ability to drive traffic to your site and boost your search engine rankings at the same time. When done properly each article you write has the potential to drive in hundreds of visitors to your site every day.
The average person will submit one or two articles to one or two article directories and sit back and wait for the traffic to start pouring in, and when that doesn’t happen they give up and dismiss article marketing as an effective marketing strategy.
They don’t get the results they were hoping for because they did not give their articles enough exposure to be effective. When you write an article, you want to get it in front of as many people  as you possibly can so you can generate as much traffic as possible to your website, sales page, opt in page, etc.

Here are the Steps to Explode Your Article Marketing Campaigns

1. Write a great article (350 – 500 words). Don’t just say anything or put down nonsense, really add some value for the reader. You want to build trust and respect in the readers eyes so that they want to hear more from you and become much more responsive to your sales letters.
2. Develop a good author resource box directing traffic back to your site using your target keywords in your links
3. Submit your article to EzineArticles.com for approval (can take up to 2 weeks) then once its approved bookmark it on all the social bookmark sites out there.
4. “Spin” your article so you can submit a unique version to other article directories
5. Submit your uniquely spun versions of the articles to as many article directories as you can find, but not until it is approved and posted on EzineArticles.com. Then, social bookmark those articles as soon as they are approved.
6. Submit a unique version of your article to social media sites like Squidoo.com and Hubpages.com and be sure to include a link back to your site using your target keywords. Then social bookmark them as soon as you get them posted. Notice a pattern here
7. Contact related blog owners and ask if they would like unique content for their blogs and give them a unique version of your article to post and then, yep you guessed it, social bookmark the articles as soon as they are posted.

You are probably thinking that is a lot of steps and must take a lot of time to complete, well your right. If you were to try and do all this manually you would probably never finish. Just manually setting up one account on all the social bookmark sites can take a full day.

But, don’t worry I am going to show you how you can get all this done in a mere fraction of the time it would take to do manually, but first you need to understand why we are going to all this trouble in the first place.

What do you mean by “Spin” my articles and why do I need to do that anyways?

It would be great if you could just write an article and submit it to as many places that would take it. Unfortunately, Google has something called the duplicate content penalty, that penalizes sites that display the same content that is found somewhere else on the web word for word. Many article directories are human moderated and reject articles that are already displayed on another site.

There are two ways around this problem.

• You can write a different article for each article directory you want to submit to.
• Or you can “Spin” your articles so that they are not picked up by the duplicate content filters.

The first solution is extremely time consuming or, expensive if you out source your article writing and is not a practical way of doing it.
The second solution is still somewhat time consuming, but in about the same time it would take to write one brand new article you can literally turn your original article into thousands of unique articles that you can submit all over the web with out fear of the duplicate content filter. That is what Leveraged Internet Marketing is all about, getting more return for less work.
Spinning an article means to rewrite it in a way that it will not trigger the duplicate content filters.

Submit, Submit, Submit
The next step would be to start submitting you unique articles to as many article directories as you possibly can. This can be a painstakingly tedious and long process when done manually and even if you use an article submission software that helps automate the process, you still have to spend hours, day after day, submitting articles.
I would venture to say that you don’t have that kind of time to devote to submitting articles, no one does.




Fortunately There is a Better Way
There are a few good services out there that will submit your articles to thousands of article directories and blogs all over the web, automatically. All you have to do is upload your spun article to their site and they do all the work for you. Asides from them writing your articles for you as well, it doesn’t get much easier than that.

• Unique Article Wizard: Submits articles to primarily article directories, but also to blogs and other sites that request articles from them for content for their sites. They send daily submission reports and weekly search engine index reports so you can keep track of the whole process. Each article I have submitted so far has gone out to 1000+ directories and other sites.
• Article Marketing Automation: Submits articles to only blog and other content sites, no article directories. They offer the same tracking and notification services as UAW. Articles submitted here usually go out to around 500 – 1000 sites.

Why do I use both services? Because by using UAW and AMA together guarantees my articles complete coverage across both the article directories and blog networks maximizing its exposure and my benefit.
On a side note, it is a good idea when using services such as UAW and AMA to set it up so that they submit your article at a frequency of about 50 per day, so that you build back links over time to appear more natural to the search engines.

Bookmark Like Your Business Depends On It. Because it Does
The next thing you need to do is ensure that your articles are found by potential buyers and the search engines.  The easiest way to do this is by social bookmarking your articles across all the social bookmarking sites.
This ensures that your articles will be indexed by the search engines quickly and allow your articles to start ranking for search terms as well as start passing the link juice back to your linked sites within the articles and help it rank for its target keywords even faster.

There are 3 ways this can be done

• Manually sign up for all the social bookmark sites and then manually submit all you articles on all the sites that they appear on. Doing it this way would eat up every last second of your time, every day and just isn’t humanly possible.
• A better alternative to manual submissions is by using the free service at SocialMarker.com which helps to automate the process so you can submit one site across about 60 social bookmark sites in a period of about 15mins. But, you still have to manually sign up for memberships to all the sites and you still have to be involved throughout the entire submission process which still eats up a lot of your time.
• The best way to get all your articles bookmarked is by using an automated submission software. I currently use Bookmarking Demon and love it. This software save hours upon hours of my time. It automates every aspect of the submission process. I can create multiple accounts across about 100 social bookmarking site in a matter of minuets and it has the ability to submit multiple sites at once completely hands free. It also has a built in feature that allows you to bookmark from RSS feeds and randomize the accounts it uses to submit your sites to. This helps keep you from being banned from the bookmarking sites for being a “self promoter” and help your submissions feel more natural.

Well that’s it for now, I hope that this article on getting the most out of your article marketing campaigns was helpful and allows you to kick some article marketing ass,  get more traffic, and make more sales in the process.
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A Good Article Marketing Strategy

I have a very love-hate relationship with article marketing. On one hand I come from a public relations background, so I’m a big fan of focusing on building visibility and authority status in a niche. Article marketing does that. On the other hand I hate seeing the Web filled with spammy, rehashed articles that people obviously wrote only for the backlinks. Article marketing does that too.

So where’s the line? How can you reap the benefits of article marketing without cheapening your own image on the Web? Let’s start with the basics.


What is Article Marketing?
In its simplest form article marketing is really nothing more than publishing articles. The marketing aspect refers to the fact that your by-line and / or a link to your website are included in that article. This way the articles bring name recognition, demonstrate expert or authority status in a niche, and might also bring in backlinks (for better search engine rankings) and targeted traffic.


Basic Article Marketing
When most people hear the phrase “article marketing,” they tend to think of article directories. Here’s what basic article marketing might look like:

1. You write ten articles in your niche.
2. You run those articles through a spinner to get five different versions of each (optional, but common and why basic article marketing can come across as search engine spam).
3. You add a resource box to each article with your name and link.
4. You publish those 50 articles to an article directory like EzineArticles.com.
5. You wait.

Once your articles are published to article directories, you give other people the right to publish them (as long as they include your link). That gives you 50 backlinks from the article directory (and you’d probably submit them to more than one article directory), plus more links over time as publishers and bloggers pick up the articles. The strategy is straightforward — it’s all about quantity.


Advanced Article Marketing
What I refer to as “advanced article marketing” is really nothing new. It actually predates the now more common form of article marketing. In the past it was just good old fashioned PR — still is.
Here’s the key difference: You focus on quality rather than quantity. You also have to look beyond the Internet alone (and yes, you’ll still get links — higher quality ones at that). Here’s what an advanced article marketing campaign might look like:

1. You write ten high quality, authoritative articles in your niche or industry. You have two options: features (evergreen material that won’t get outdated) or timely stories (playing on the news value). In some cases you’ll complete step two here before writing.
2. You compile a targeted media / publication list (trade magazines, industry websites, blogs, etc.). If you’re serious, you’ll even take the time to find personal contact information for the appropriate editor and you’ll review any writer’s guidelines they might have.
3. You write a brief pitch letter.
4. You pitch your articles to those publications.
5. They publish your articles (usually first rights, but sometimes exclusive rights).
6. You wait.

Most people I know who frown on this approach don’t like it for two reasons: they assume it will be too much work, or they can’t get over the difference in quantity (10 articles published versus 50 published in more than one place). Then again, I’ve never known someone to try this approach, do it right, and go back to basic article marketing (and I’ve helped quite a few clients do just that). Here’s why:
Advanced article marketing might mean fewer pieces are published, but there’s value in exclusivity. If you can be found on every Tom, Dick, and Harry’s website with the same content published and the same links tossed in, you’re really not contributing to the niche beyond the first article on a topic. Readers do get around, and if they see the same material all the time it becomes unsolicited clutter — search engine spam basically.


Advanced Article Marketing and Building an Authority Status
When it comes to building authority, it’s not about the number of sites your articles are posted to. It’s about which sites (or offline publications) pick up your content, and what their reach is. Let’s look at it this way:
We need to pick a niche, so let’s say you’re a personal trainer (there seem to be a lot of them publishing on article directories). You want to publish fitness articles to promote a new workout DVD series, or book, or whatever amazing new weight loss product it is you’re trying to unload at the moment.
What’s going to bring in more sales?

1. Publishing 50 articles (plus lots of reprints on sites barely anyone reads) to get quick incoming links, in a spammy kind of way that can make you look like a sleazy salesman to some members of your market, or…
2. Publishing ten unique articles on high traffic fitness sites or women’s sites (let’s face it, weight loss products sell like hotcakes with a female audience)

Hmmm…
Experience tells me quality will get you much further. Even if you focused on print publications the same is true. Why? Because they’ll often include your URL for readers to check it out, and if nothing else you’re credited (and authoritative publications and sites do much more to build your own authority with your audience). On top of that many, if not most, print publications also have a Web presence these days where they’ll post resources from their print editions (and sometimes even republish the print article online in full).
So let’s examine it again: 50 links from Susie Q’s blog and similar unknown sites looking for free content or ten articles found by readers in places like Self, Woman’s Day, Fitness magazine, iVillage.com, maybe a relatively high traffic network site like a fitness site on About.com, and a few top blogs read by women or those looking to lose weight. Which makes you look like a more authoritative source? I’ll give you a hint. Nobody cares about Susie Q’s blog in comparison. If you want authority status, you need to target true authority sources in your niche (and of course you have to actually have expert knowledge and not just rehashed content).


Advanced Article Marketing Leads to More Targeted Traffic
For the same reasons I mentioned above, you can see how advanced article marketing can lead to more traffic. More importantly, the traffic is often better targeted. That’s because Woman’s Day, for example, has a certain type of readership (and a nice-sized readership at that). When people really trust a site or publication, they have a better reason to trust you because the editors thought your information was worthwhile.
Let’s look at it this way: Now we’ll talk about doctors. I’m always amazed at how many doctors think they’re doing anything good for their credibility by spamming the Web via article directories in a desperate search for attention and links. Yuck. Does that really make you respect someone as a medical professional? Not me. In fact, they immediately lose credibility points with me if that’s where the information comes from. Why?
Article directories have no serious editorial control (and I don’t mean the auto-rejections if you have too many keywords — I mean real editorial control where you can be assured the information has been fact-checked and reviewed by another professional before being fed to consumers as the gospel truth). What that means is this: anyone can publish anything on an article directory. It doesn’t speak to their authority in the slightest if a kid down the street could reword their article (copyright infringement in some places so don’t do it unless you have permission folks) and publish it as their own “expert” knowledge. Without the backing of an authority source (as in the site or publication releasing your article), you really don’t know who’s doling out that medical information.
Therefore when people come across those types of articles, they don’t necessarily carry as much authority. That means they don’t instill as much trust. And that means your chances of getting targeted traffic who actually trust you after reading your article and who click your link and who then go on to buy, well, they’re just not as good.
Will you get traffic? Yes. Will you make sales? I’m sure you will. But you won’t likely maximize your return that way. As a businessperson it’s your responsibility to get the most out of everything you do, and advanced article marketing does that — it gives you more. And of course there’s that little thing about authoritative sites simply having more targeted traffic to send your way to begin with.


Advanced Article Marketing for Better SEO
SEO is about building awareness / gaining visibility. It’s really nothing more than basic PR — raise awareness, start building an image with audience (it starts with even simple things like your choice of title and description), and build a relationship from there.

Credit: Svilen Mushkatov (vis Sxc.hu)

Awareness isn’t about quantity any more than authority status is — at least not in terms of how many backlinks you get. What’s far more important is that you go back to quality. Yet again, articles on authoritative sites with larger audiences tend to have more value than the smaller types of sites that will pick up content from article directories. And that goes beyond the fact that relevant authority links can help your ranking more than other types. Here’s why:
In basic article marketing you essentially treat the article directory as the “authority” site. It’s not though. It might have a high pagerank, but that’s not enough – it’s not a truly relevant link (not to mention that your article will likely be pushed into the archives relatively quickly). You do it because you hope others will see it there and re-publish.
You do the same thing with advanced article marketing, but the results can be much better. Let’s say a major site in your niche publishes a timely article by you. Chances are very good that others in the niche are then going to see it and potentially cover that topic. That generally involves linking to the authority source to cite it, and then adding to the conversation in some way (if they’re not just passing the link along as an interesting read).
The more authority your original article has (based on where it’s published and your credentials), the better your chances are that the article will go viral. You’ll also likely have your name credited on those secondary, trickle-down sites leading to more exposure. Those links also increase the rankings of your article itself (if online), which means your own backlink there may eventually carry even more weight and also lead to more targeted traffic as more people are directed to your article (and therefore directed to your site).
Not too shabby for ten articles and some pitching, is it?

Advanced Article Marketing Challenge
Advanced article marketing isn’t for everyone. If your article marketing is designed to drive traffic to a relatively generic MFA site for example, then you may simply not have the credentials to get picked up in larger publications. In that case, hey, stick to basic article marketing if it does what you need it to do. I don’t advocate it unless you can manage to do it without spamming the search engines with repeat garbage, but I’m not naïve enough to think most people will stop. If, however, your site makes any effort to focus on readers rather than solely rankings and ads you can benefit (even if you just target more popular blogs than your own with guest posts).
For those who do have real credibility in their niches and who want to focus on article marketing tactics that will help them improve their image, forward their authority status, reach more targeted readers, drive higher quality traffic, and build higher quality and more relevant backlinks, I challenge you to give it a try. You may just be surprised where you could be published.
For those who do want to give it a shot, here are a few final tips for you:

1. If you’re not a decent writer (decent enough to be published on those larger sites, in trade magazines, etc.), then hire a writer. Preferably, hire a writer who specializes in your niche.
2. You don’t have to spend money on expensive media directories to find trade publications and their editors’ contact information. Get a copy of the latest Writer’s Market instead (or subscribe online at www.WritersMarket.com for a few dollars per month). It’s a less expensive option that targets writers who want to sell articles to these publications. Your edge is that you’re offering the articles for free. It’s a good resource for telling you how certain publications and websites like to be pitched.
3. Always read the writer’s guidelines of a publication before submitting anything. They’ll tell you what word counts they need, what topics they do and don’t cover, and what their policies are about self-promotion in the article. You won’t have a problem finding publications and sites that let you include a URL and your company name.

Now go ahead. Give it a try. Pitch even one publication. The worst that can happen is that they say “no,” and you learn something about pitching. Talk to a publicist if you need help with pitching, or try to find a pitch letter template you can adapt. In time though, you’ll get the hang of it and you’ll find it easier to get accepted. Use your credentials to your advantage. Remember, you’re looking for the best return you can get when promoting your business, product, or service. If you could be doing better, then it’s time to do something about it. Give advanced article marketing a try.
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