article marketing Archives

How to Use Article Marketing to Drive Traffic

Thursday, September 1st, 2011 at 6:48 am  
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Article marketing is one of the best ways to generate traffic to your website.

Here’s how it works.

  1. You write an article.
  2. You submit it to article directories.
  3. Web publishers (website owners & bloggers) grab your article from the article databases and use your article on their sites free of charge.
  4. Inside your article, at the end, you include a resource box that contains a link to your website. When the article is published, that portion must tag along and be published, too.

Your link tags along with your article and you get FREE advertising.

Want an example of a great resource box? Here’s one.

Bill Davis is the author of “How to Profit from Small Reports” – if you can write 7-15 page small reports, you can earn a living online working just a few hours each week from your home. Look for his EXCLUSIVE formula “Creating Profits with Small Reports” at http://www.profitablesmallreports.com (fictional)

That would be an example of an author bio.

Here’s another:

http://www.ladypens.com/plr-articles-how-to-choose-a-good-service/

At the end, it says:
Would you like to learn more about how to use PLR articles in your business? Nicole Dean welcomes you to sign up for her free ecourse at www.EasyPrivateLabelArticles.com If you’re ready to start shopping, just stop by www.EasyPLR.com – where you’ll find high-quality PLR articles sold in very limited quantities.

So, everyone who re-publishes that article will include the author blurb and both authors will get lots of free traffic.

There are three main ways article marketing can generate traffic for you:

  • People click your link from the article directory and end up on your website.
  • Webmasters publish your article (with your link intact) on their own site.
  • Your search engine position increases because you’ll gain more backlinks.

That makes article marketing an excellent strategy.

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Is Article Marketing Dead?

Friday, July 15th, 2011 at 5:35 am  
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A couple things today before I get to the meat of the content delivery :)

I just watched a funny video. It's good because it covers something that we're all apprehensive about but it also highlights some neat technology and covers some solid ground.

Watch it–you'll enjoy it. Love the uncanny resemblance of the nemesis to Steve Jobs. I wonder if that was intentional…?

 

On to the subject of the Title! Is Article Marketing Dead?

I'd say no, but it's clearly lost its favor among the many ways to drive traffic to your site and get valuable backlinks. Whereas a few months ago, if you were to publish a series of articles on Ezinearticles.com, your site would have gotten fair traffic and quality backlinks for doing so, now you're left with a much devalued backlink portfolio.

This is what happens when you don't OWN your own content.

You place your fate in the hands of an article directory that stands in good stead with the search engines and then–BAM!–the search engine or engines take a disliking to your article directory and all of a sudden, your backlinks suck.

Ezinearticles.com used to be an authority–get a few backlinks from it and you were sitting pretty. Now, those backlinks, while they still count–don't count for nearly as much.

It's as if your "referral quotient" went from Dr Drew to Dr Kevorkian.

So, is there a reason to even do article marketing any more? Sure. But your strategy and tactics must change. More in a later post.

Here's another–more informative and less entertaining–video from none other than Google God, Matt Cutts:

 

Anti-Outsourcing 101 or How to Write Articles Better Than a Hungarian Horse Trainer

Tuesday, January 18th, 2011 at 12:43 pm  
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Instant Article Writer is better than your outsourcerIt's not that I'm opposed to outsourcing. In fact, I recommend that YOU do it. Because when it all goes wrong, you will gladly pay me a lot of money to fix the screw ups that your outsourcer or outsourcing team caused you.

Put another way, what I like to do is virtually everything myself. I am an internet marketer. That means that I write a ton of blog posts, write sales copy, create and submit articles. I write for Scribd, I publish my own ebooks.

It's what I do. But you may be a carpet cleaner who wants free organic traffic from the Search Engines. That's where this next tool comes in. It's called Instant Article Wizard and it's from legendary automation and internet marketer, Jonathan Leger.

You can literally create an article that is suitable for any article directory without knowing a thing about your subject!

I just picked up a copy after having beta tested it for a few weeks. I love this tool!

It allows me to mash up a bunch of content from a ton of different sources in a format that's easy to understand. Best of all, the output is as good as many article writers and it's far superior to anything I've seen from a cheap outsourcer.

I'm not kidding. Instant Article Wizard will beat the pants off any chop shop outsourcing company. You'll get completely unique articles without a shred of expertise on the topic.

What's even better right now is that Instant Article Wizard is 45 percent off its retail price. Note: Instant Article Wizard is normally $77 a year (a steal when compared to how much you will save compared to even the cheapest article on Fiverr) but right now it's $47 a year.

You cannot beat that. But you can beat the Hungarian horse trainer who moonlights as an article writer.

EzineArticles.com Is Kind of Whacked

Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 at 3:07 pm  
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I write articles. Many bloggers and internet marketers do. There really are a few reasons for doing so.

  1. It keeps our writing skills sharp
  2. We get backlinks
  3. Other website owners can pick up our articles and put them on their sites.

All in all, a pretty cool deal.

Everybody uses Ezinearticles.com, too. They're the "big boys" in the Article Directory world. Think "Google" or "800 Pound Gorilla." That kind of big, relatively speaking.

They got big in large part because they control the quality of the articles they publish. I can write an article for GoArticles.com, for example, and — BAM! — it's live. It could be full of misspellings, grammatical errors, factual errors — Nobody cares there.

However, not so at EZA. It still takes them a freaking week to review my submission (I'm too cheap to buy my way in via their "Premium" service), only to have one of their reviewers come back at me with something along the lines of, "Your article is great. There's only one teeny tiny problem."

Great. Here it comes.

And that's exactly how it went down today.

I got a note from somebody at EZA requesting that I fill out one of their forms "because there was something wrong with my submission." Note that they didn't have any issue number or reference identifier at all in their email to me.

So I filled out the form. The funniest part about it was they actually asked me why I was filling out the form! My reply:

Because you asked me to.

Silly rabbits.

So I waited.

And waited.

I waited some more.

Finally, I sent them another note. This is what happened (see the screenshot  where hilarity ensued).

Here's a copy of the exchange (follow along if you're easily amused like I am — otherwise, move along, there's nothing to see here). Note that I put in bold those parts I thought were especially funny. I fully expect to be banned from EZA before the day is over.

Except that they probably won't get to it until I don't care any more.

*********************************************************************************

EzineArticlesHi Bill,

Thank you for your emails.

Please refrain from sending multiple emails regarding the same issue. We will get to your email as soon as we are able to.

Your article "How to Set Up an Autoresponder" has been placed in
problem status due to the link:

http://www.internet-marketing-muscle.com/

This is problematic as the page contains information on SEnuke, which we are not able to accept. We recommend editing the page to remove this content or linking to another site you have a vested interest in.

Thank you,

(Name withheld to protect the uninitiated)

*********************************************************************************

My reply:

Seriously? What if I said something bad about SEnuke? Just because there is a mention of it makes it a bad page?

I'm not changing my page to accommodate EZA's ridiculous policies. Sorry. No can do.

Next thing you know, my page on President Obama gets flagged, too, because somebody at EZA gets his tighty whities in a bunch. Sheesh. You guys are ridiculous!

Bill

*********************************************************************************

Now, I could have just sucked it up; after all, I shouldn't really mess with 800 pound gorillas. But I'm an idiot.

After careful consideration, I attempted to circumvent their recommendation (sort of) and put in a link to a "special" page just for visitors who got to my page through their site.

I am not going to change my website just to accommodate their "standards." I have my own. I don't need them. They certainly don't need me.

If we can cooperate, fine. All the better. But I'm not compromising my standards to suit theirs. They can piss up a rope for all I care!

 

Backlink Building Wheels

Sunday, January 10th, 2010 at 3:12 am  
Comments (2)

I'm convinced that for "small sites" like what most of us have (we're not google or wikipedia), backlinks are the key to getting high search engine rankings. Of course, relevant backlinks matter, too, but the single most important thing is quantity of backlinks.

Here's a strategy I use to get TONS of backlinks to my sites. I call it Backlink Building Wheels.

Step by step:

  1. Write an article for an article directory like ezinearticles.com or GoArticles.com (here's a good starter list of article directories). I like goarticles.com because it's quick, easy, and the search engines love it. Place one link in the body that points to a page or post on your site. At the end of this, you'll edit this article to complete the wheel. But for now, just place one.
  2. Write another article that is similar to the first one and publish it in a blogger.com blog (free easy setup). In it, place two links – one to the page you want to promote (the SAME page as in #1) and one to the actual article that gets published in #1.
  3. Write another article, this time on Live Journal. Two links – one to the same page on your site, the other to the article in #2.
  4. Repeat 5-8 times. I use GoArticles.com, blogger, Live Journal, Squidoo, hubpages, and wordpress.com.
  5. Go back to #1 and put in another link – this time to the LAST article you posted, thus completing the "Backlink Building Wheel."
  6. Using social bookmarking services like ping.fm, promote all of the articles above.

This is a very productive strategy for getting relevant backlinks to your site. It may sound cumbersome, but once you get the hang of it, you can create one of these wheels in less than 15 minutes. Time well-spent for getting quality backlinks, if you ask me.

This strategy works well with other backlink building services such as Angela's Backlinks. Simply use #6 to promote the relevancy of each backlink you get.

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