Effective Article Marketing Tips
Submitting articles to article directories is a proven to attract more visitors to your site, give you a higher page rankings and, ultimately, make you more money. However, search engines and article directories are getting tougher on the articles you submit. In this article we give you some tips on how to submit articles successfully.
Changes in the way search engines and article directories work in recent times mean that article marketers need to be a bit more savvy about how they go about submitting their articles. There was a time when you could write a good article, submit it to hundreds, if not thousands, of directories and watch your profits grow. These days it is not quite so simple.
The easiest way to get your article published on a lot of directories quickly is to use an article submission service. It is possible to do it by hand but this is a laborious and tedious task, unless you submit to just a small number of directories.
There are many article submission services available online, both free and paid, or you can invest in software that will do the job for you. These can be effective but there is a danger that article directories will reject your content if they suspect you are using an automated submission method. In a worst case scenario you could be banned from submitting to the directory again.
So, if you are using an article submission service check that their methods will not cause you problems with the directories. If you are submitting articles yourself, do not submit too many articles to any one directory at the same time.
Duplicate content
An even bigger problem for article marketers is that the major engines now penalize duplicate content. In the past you could submit an article to 100 article directories and the likes of Google and Yahoo! would award you for having 100 backlinks to your website. You would also be awarded when the article was picked up and used by other websites. However, this has changed.
The search engines can now recognize duplicate content. So, even if your article appears on 1,000 different websites you will still only be awarded for one backlink. You will of course gain traffic that accesses your website directly through the link provided with your article. However, this makes it much more difficult to use article submissions as a search engine optimization tool.
The only way to get around this is to submit a unique version of each article you write to each article directory. Again, if you only submit articles to a small number of directories you could tweak each article yourself so you have a number of different versions. However, if you are submitting to hundreds of directories this is out of the question.
It is not really known just how much an article needs to be changed to become unique. Some argue simply switching paragraphs within an article is enough, while others think that the text within the paragraphs needs to be changed too.
There are a number of possible solutions to this problem. Many article submission services have been quick to move to address this issue. As well as submitting your articles to multiple article directories they will also create different versions of each article for you or provide you with a tool for doing so yourself.
Alternatively, you could invest in some software that helps with the re-writing of articles. These are also known as article spinners and will automatically replace words with other words of a similar meaning. For example, the word ‘small’ might be changed with the word ‘little’ and so on. However, the software needs to be configured to do so manually. Others will simply change the order of paragraphs in articles. This can also be very time consuming and may not do enough to make the different versions unique in the eyes of the search engines.
One final option could be to get outside help. There are many websites such as elance.com and getafreelancer.com where you can post rewriting projects for professional writers. The quality of the work will vary but rates can be quite cheap.
It may be a good idea to try out these methods and see how they work for you. You will have to invest some money but it will be worth it if you find a workable solution to duplicate content.
Writing articles and submitting them to article directories can be as beneficial a marketing and SEO tool as it has ever been. However, doing it successfully is a little trickier than it was before.
Tips On How To Effectively Use Article Marketing
Whether you are marketing a product or a service, you need to get visitors to your website. Then you realize that the likelihood of making a sale is directly related to the number of visitors to your website. What should you do? Viral marketing applies to e-books which can be too lengthy to write. Link exchanging is helpful, but link farms are to be avoided. Google doesn’t like your website for some strange reason. What is a website owner suppose to do?
Article marketing. I am going to tell you all about article marketing. It’s the fastest way of exposing your website to more people and getting the type of targeted traffic that really matters.
Article marketing involves the submitting of an article to as many free article directory websites as possible. Search engines love free article directory websites. And best of all, you are allowed a resource box at the end of your article where you could prominently display your name as well as three links to your website. This would certainly generate some traffic to your website!
The trick is in writing an article that people would love to read and to subtly market yourself, product, or a service that you offer through the article. Do consider the following article writing tips in planning your article marketing campaign:
1. Write the article well. By this, I mean that you should write the article in a proven style that has been established in article marketing. Web readers are usually more impatient. In the article keep the paragraphs short, the tone conversational, and the style friendly. Avoid using jargons in the article that average people wouldn’t recognize. But make sure that the article is grammatically sound, flows well, spelled right, and is factually correct.
2. Write the article with focus. Pinpoint a subject you want to discuss. The subject of the article should be moderately related to your product, service, or website, as the point here is to generate traffic to your website. Stick with that topic.
3. If you do not have the time to write the article, you could hire a ghostwriter to write the article for you. Fees for a 300-600 word article range from $5 to $50, but the money should not be a factor if you find a ghostwriter who is perfect for the article. Additionally, the very nature of a ghostwriting service is confidentiality, so choose one whom you could trust for the article.
4. The article should be informative. Article marketing should not be a direct sales pitch, or at the very least, a blatant one. Readers don’t like ads posing as articles. The purpose of article marketing is to provide the readers with something useful, something that they would want to read.
5. Strategically place within the article keywords that are relevant to your website as well as the subject of the article. Search engines love article directory websites, and more often than not, each page is indexed separately. Making the article keyword-rich would invite those search engine spiders like crazy!
6. Format the article resource box. What is needed is a short introduction of yourself. One or two lines is perfect. Don’t go into great detail. Make it relate to your website and the article contents. Add links to different pages on your website. Most article directory websites will allow up to three links to your website.
7. Invite your readers to distribute the article by allowing them to republish the article on their website, to e-mail it to their friends, or to use it in their newsletters, provided that the article and resource box are kept intact.
8. Assemble a list of all the free article directory websites that you can find to submit to. Know the editorial requirements for each website, and if the article will suit them. Submit the article to as many article directory websites as possible.
9. Now don’t stop writing articles! Write or commission more articles and repeat the entire process. It’s still a numbers game. The more articles you have distributed, the more chances you will have of being read by a lot of people, and the more unique links back to your website you will have.
10. Practice patience. Writing articles can be difficult, but once your article is posted on multiple websites, more visitors will come. Give it time. The viral nature of article marketing will soon prove itself!
So you see why article marketing is so important. It’s one of the easiest and cheapest ways to get more visitors to your website. Article marketing also improves your website rankings with the search engines by having more unique links back to your website.
Top 5 Tips for Successful Article Writing
You may have heard by now that writing articles and submitting them to different locations is a great way to increase the traffic to your web sites and in the end increase your income. But if the articles you write aren’t getting people’s attention and they are not clicking on your links in the resource box, then you need to do something about it! Here are the top 5 tips that will help you write the most successful articles.
Tip #1: The most important thing you need to do when writing articles is to capture your reader’s attention. How else are they going to read to the bottom of your article to click on your link? How can you get people’s attention? It has been proven that people related better to stories or people they know. Adding a quote from a well known person near the beginning of your article to make people associate your knowledge with the well known person’s knowledge. Or alternatively you could retell a story that you once heard, it can be something that happened to you or a fable that you can make connections to your topic with.
Tip #2: Of course what is a great article without a catchy title?! The reason I still put that you need an article that will capture and keep people’s attention is that this will decide how many people enjoy your article. You want to keep a high level of quality for all your articles, since that will bring in the most people to visit your web sites. But of course you will need a title to get people to take a look at your article. You will want to come up with a title that describes what your article topic is, but with something of a mystery to get people to click. People respond well to lists and “top 10′s” but they also like questions or implications of success.
Tip #3: Pick a very hot topic. If you’re writing about nursing or babies, try to write an article about the latest fad in diapers or something that is related to the current world. Write articles that are seasonal or festive. Webmasters and ezine owners are always looking for an article that relates well to the current time of the year. When it’s Christmas time, relate your topic to Christmas and do the same for other holidays and seasons. If you’re not sure what else you could use, read the news, some weblogs or talk to your friends to find out the most current events.
Tip #4: Check your grammar and spelling. This might seem obvious, but articles that have bad grammar or spelling are not going to help you much. These articles might even be rejected by certain article submission sites! So take the extra few seconds it takes to press the “Spellcheck button”. You’ll see it makes a big difference.
Tip #5: Write from the heart or from personal experience. This is one tip that helps you write articles more easily which is then reflected in your articles. If you’re interested in the topic you’re writing about, you’re bound to write better articles. Maybe you found out that a certain keyword is very saught after, but you’re just not feeling motivated to write about it. Take a break and write about something that really thrills you, and think of the other topic at the same time. If you keep practicing this technique, soon you’ll think positive things about more topics and will be able to write about a wide range of topics without losing out on the personal touch you can add to each of your articles.
