How to Succeed at Article Marketing

I have written about it before, but there has been sort of a resurgence of interest in article marketing lately. I have noticed several posts around the “make money online” and internet marketing blogosphere discussing the benefits of using article marketing to increase traffic and links to your site. I covered this a bit about a year ago in an article discussing a free report by Ewen Chia, but since it is something I do on a regular basis, I thought I would write an article about how to get your articles to the front page of sites like Ezine Articles and Go 2 Articles.

You can spend ten minutes writing a total crap article and place it on a few article marketing sites, hoping for a few links. You might even get a few links, but you really won’t see a huge change. I know this because I tried it at first.I soon discovered that the key to really making article directories work for you is one simple thing: submit high-quality, original content. Just pretend you are writing an important article for your blog and you’ll be positioning yourself perfectly to hit the “featured articles” section.

An Article Marketing Case Study

This last week I submitted a batch of articles for some new sites I’m working on. The submissions were made Monday night. On Thursday morning, I received a notice that one of my articles had been selected by the editors as a featured article. This means that my article hangs out on the front page of the Ezine Articles site for part of the day, I receive an “exerpt author” status and the article is also submitted to their special RSS news feed.

That night when I checked my stats, there was no doubt that article marketing can create a huge burst of traffic and readers. You can see the dramatic results in the picture of my stats on the right. This is a new-ish site that sees very little traffic because I haven’t marketed it very aggressively. With just one quality article being highlighted by Ezine Article my traffic increased 1000%. Incredible really. And all for free.

Every time I submit an article to a directory, I can see the results within a few days. It isn’t always quite as drastic as this particular article, but think of the results you can get in the long term if you submit a series of articles linking back to one site. Article marketing really could be the tipping point for a blog or website.

The Trick to Successful Article Marketing

As I said above, there really isn’t a trick. In fact, it’s trying to be tricky that gets folks in trouble. If you write quality articles that are filled with fresh, original information then you will almost always succeed with article marketing. As a blogger, you should have a plethora of new ideas for your blog posts, right? Just dig into those and sacrifice a few to the article directories.

What? You don’t keep a list of article ideas? You write your blog posts on the fly? Well, no wonder you are reading an article about increasing links and traffic!

The very first thing you need to do is open a new document and start keeping a list of ideas that you could use for blog posts. I can’t tell you how much time and work this will save you later on. I use a Google Docs Spreadsheet so I can easily search and sort my information, but even a plain old text document will work. You just need to be able to write down ideas as they come to you, take a few notes if necessary and move on. There will be times when you are in the middle of something and an idea will hit you. When this happens, you don’t want to completely break your train of thought, but you don’t want to lose your great idea either. If you have this document open at all times, you can easily capture your idea while still staying on track.

Creating a Successful Author Resource Box

Even though it’s just a few paragraphs, the author resource box can make or break your traffic and linking success. There are two main rules I apply when writing a new author resource for an article marketing site.

First, do not treat an author resource box as though it is an about page. It is not. This short blurb needs to tie in with your article, telling readers why they should visit the site to which you are linking. Something like: “Sara is a business systems analyst who lives in the Pacific Northwest with her two beautiful cats, Sadie and Fiona. She likes karaoke, sushi and long walks in the city.” is not going to make people click. Why should they? They read your article because they were interested in that particular topic. Unless your article was about cats or sushi, this author resource box is not going to convince people to move on to your site.

The second rule I apply to the author resource box is really an extension of the first: make sure the site to which you are linking relates to the topic of your article. One of the main objectives of submitting an article to a directory is to establish your expertise. If you want to increase traffic to a site about fishing, your article should showcase your expertise on fishing – not speed reading, cooking or cats. Again, this is about convincing readers that they need to click through to your link. Here’s an example of one of my current Ezine Articles resource boxes:

——————————————————————————
Information Overload? Visit Pajama Professional for straightforward
information and resources for social networking, internet marketing
and blogging success. The road to maximizing your online profits
begins at . . .

www.pajamaprofessional.com
——————————————————————————

It’s really nothing fancy, but when an author resource box like this is attached to an original, helpful article about internet marketing, social networking or blogging, it is a very effective way to grab people’s interest and get them to click through to my site.

Article Marketing is a Long Term Investment

When you first start writing articles for article directories, it may be painful to part with them. You will think: “This is so great, I ought to save it to my blog.” If that is what you are thinking, then it is definitely an excellent fit for article marketing. This means that, not only is it good enough to qualify as blog content, it is on-topic. So don’t start to reconsider. Submitting a unique article to an article directory is a great way to get a nice surge of traffic (like the one you can see the image above),and is also one of the best ways to build links. Building links helps increase your site’s authority – meaning you could see a boost in page rank. It is for this reason that your time and content are not being thrown away, they are simply being invested.

This all goes back to quality content, though. Taking the time to research, write, revise and submit an article to a directory is only worth it if you are going to submit fresh, interesting information. A rewritten, rehashed, boring article that you wouldn’t even consider for your blog is pointless. If you try that route, you will be spinning your wheels.

The other piece of this that makes submitting crap content ill-advised is that this article and its links can follow you around for a long time. Trying to use an article directory just to get a few linkbacks to the blog itself is the wrong way to go about this. Sure, a few clicks never hurt anyone, but they aren’t worth going through this process. What makes it worthwhile is that you can be benefitting from these links – and links created by those who decided to re-publish your article for a long, long time to come. You want this article to be a strong reflection of what visitors would get from reading your blog. If you have a high-quality blog, you want to show that off by providing an article that represents that quality.

I want to give you one last piece of advise on the article itself. It is in your best interest to make an article submission as evergreen as possible. What I mean by this is that you want your content to be as fresh as possible for as long as possible. An article about something that is happening next week might be useful up until the event, but it will be useless after that.

This is sort of the same situation you can find yourself in when trying to employ linkbait tactics. When choosing a topic for an article directory submission ask yourself if you want to capitalize on breaking news or other timely events just to grab a ton of quick links over a short period of time. Or would you rather write something that can be applied by readers for months, years or forever? The outcome for which you submit articles is really up to you, but my belief is that if you are going to take the time to go through this process correctly, you might as well maximize the longevity of your benefits.

A Checklist for Article Marketing Success

Just to recap, here is a checklist for article marketing success:

• Keep an ongoing list of article ideas
• Write an article that is original, high-quality and shows your expertise in the topic
• Choose a topic that relates to the site to which you are linking
• Write evergreen content
• Create an author resource box that is relevant, intriguing and well-written.

To receive the best (and longest) benefits from article marketing, you can’t cut any corners. You have to run the whole race, but in the end you will often reap rewards worth far more than the time and work you invested. If you have any killer tips for article marketing, please share them in the comments.