Archive for 'article marketing'

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:

 

Getting Your New Post Ranked: Article Marketing Method

Wednesday, October 27th, 2010 at 3:07 pm  
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In Google Basics: How Google Indexes and Ranks a Site, I shared with you the 3 factors it takes to get a web page ultimately found on Google's search engine. You need to have that page or post:

  1. Crawled
  2. Indexed
  3. Ranked

{{{*}}}One of the quickest and most effective ways to get a new page or post on Google is to write an article and submit it to one of the popular article directories (ezinearticles, go articles, or SearchWarp, my favorite because it's the fastest).

Here's how it works (and this is really simple).

Write an article about a topic that is relevant to your site. In the resource box at the bottom of the article, include a link back to the post or page you want Google to 1. crawl, 2. index, 3. rank.

In a matter of minutes, you'll find that your web page or post is already on Google. You can check by performing the following search at Google:

In the search box, simply type in the full URL to the post or page you inserted in the resource box of your very recently-submitted article. Make sure you include the http:// part.

I know, super simple.

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!

 

Quick Hits: 5 Simple Ways to Drive Traffic to Your Blog

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010 at 7:24 am  
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Five Easy Ways To Get Traffic To Your Blog

A blog without readers is pretty much useless. If you’ve been blogging for a while and have only been getting a trickle of viewers to your posts, you need to put a traffic building plan into action. Building traffic is just as an important skill to bloggers as writing quality posts is. Many bloggers are terrific at creating content but don’t know a thing about building traffic. Here is a quick guide to the five most popular (and most effective) traffic building techniques.

1. Get SOCIAL!

Social networking and blogging go hand in hand. Your blog posts can be distributed across social networking channels in many different ways. Sign up for Twitter and tweet about your posts as soon as they are added to your blog. Update your Facebook status with a link to your new blog posts. Submit your stories to Digg.com, Reddit.com and StumbleUpon.com. Remember that in order for social networking to be effective, you need to participate with other people on your list. If you visit their links and respond to their updates, they’ll be likely to do the same for you.

Check out the bottom of this post. See the little icons underneath "Share and Enjoy?" That's the "Sociable" plugin for WordPress. I also employ Hootsuite to automatically update my Twitter status and my Facebook fan page. I'll put together a tutorial on how to use Hootsuite for this purpose if you express an interest.

2.Get SEEN!

Find blogs in your niche and start following their posts. Make sure to add insightful and interesting comments on their posts. Not only will the blog owner take notice and visit your blog, other commenters will visit your blog to get more of your great insight into the topic. Don’t spread yourself too thin with blog commenting, but make it a point to comment on a few related blogs each week.

Not only will you get direct traffic, but you'll also get valuable, relevant backlinks from commenting! Win-win, baby!

3.Get SYNDICATED!

RSS feeds are a way to syndicate your blog’s content so that it is sent to many different people in their own blog readers or on their own sites. Most blogging systems have RSS feeds automatically included but you can add a lot more functionality to your feed by using a free service like FeedBurner.com. With FeedBurner you can add things like sharing the feed via e-mail so it will pull in new readers and encourage previous visitors to come back to the blog again.

See the little icon in the upper righthand corner of the page? That is the RSS feed link for Internet Marketing Muscle. You should click on it :)

4.Get PUBLISHED!

You may think that by being a blogger you can ignore article marketing. However, you can get a lot  of traffic to your blog by tweaking some of your popular blog posts and adding them to article directories. You can post your popular posts as articles with a link back to your blog in many different article directories. Not only will you get a valuable backlink but your article may also be used by ezine owners which will bring you more traffic.

Plus, your article will get direct traffic from visitors at the article directories. Another win-win. Except this time it's win cubed – you get a backlink, direct traffic, possible syndication, AND you will become known as an expert in your field. But don't call yourself a guru! Let others do that :)

Oh, yeah, you also get to leverage content you've already written! That's 5 benefits to article marketing! Very powerful stuff.

5.Get BACKLINKS!

Speaking of backlinks, you should work to build backlinks to your blog through several different means. By creating backlinks to your blog, you’ll improve your blog’s ranking in search engine results. You can get lots of traffic from search engines if you are within the first group of search results for your keywords.

Check out 5 x 5 A System for Building Backlinks for a simple backlink-building system.

These five ways of building traffic can be used over and over again to help build traffic to your blog and increase your readership.
 

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