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Free Online Article marketing Strategy
This article on Article marketing strategy and system discusses the benefits of article marketing which includes increased link popularity and traffic.
It provides Article marketing success tips for getting the best results from your article marketing campaign and a manual article spinning strategy you can copy.
What is Article Marketing
Online or Internet Article marketing is a type of advertising in which businesses write short articles related to their respective industry. These articles are made available for distribution and publication in the marketplace.
Benefits of Article Marketing
Free article marketing online is one of the best methods for building backlinks and increasing traffic to your site.
This is because when you submit your articles to directories, webmasters and ezine publishers can republish it without adjusting the article including your resource box where you have links pointing to your site.
So if your articles offer real value in no time you'll have different sites republishing your articles and therefore linking to your site and readers from different sites clicking through to your site.
You can also make money with article marketing. Some article submission sites allow you to put ads, could be adsense and/or amazon products display, and share a percentage of the earnings from such ads with you.
This is a good benefit and could really add up eventually but my purpose of writing an article marketing help is to help you maximize the two major article marketing benefits which are generating lots of backlinks and traffic to your site.
Article marketing takes time so you want to be sure that when you're doing it you do it in a way that you maximize it benefits hence these guidelines. The article marketing tips provided in this article is the exact article marketing strategy or system that I follow.
Whether or not you benefit and how much you benefit from the submission of articles to article directories and submission sites depend on the following.
The 5 Article Marketing Strategies for Article Marketing Success
The article marketing strategies below are what some refer to as article marketing secrets but really there are no secrets to article marketing. Just work with this easy article marketing guide and you'll get the best results.
- The Popularity and traffic level of the Article marketing directory or directories you use
- The value your article offer and how you present it
- The way you use your resource box
- The way you create your links in your resource box
- Your strategy for distributing your articles
Article Marketing Strategy 1
The Popularity and Traffic level of the Article directories
A big bonus of article marketing is that others can use it and promote you and your site for free on their sites.
When you use low quality directories that get very few traffic then you most likely wouldn't get people reading your articles and republishing it.
You don't have to use 1000 directories to enjoy its benefits. If you use just one with good popularity and traffic the benefits to your site will be more than using 50 low quality sites.
How do you know the popularity and the traffic a directory gets?
You can judge by it Page and Alexa Ranking, though this doesn't really give accurate data but you can work with that.
How do you get the PR and Alexa of a site?
Luckily you don't have to do that yourself, Ralph Wilson has prepared the top 25 article directory sites according to their Google PageRank and Alexa traffic rank.
Note though it is an old list prepared May 2007 so while all the sites listed most likely will still be reputable, their Page and Alexa ranking would likely have changed. It's still a good list to work with though.
If you want to focus on just one directory then make it ezinearticles.com they are known for their good credibility with the search engines and good Alexa ranking. And they offer vital statistics that lets you know what's happening with the articles you submitted.
Article Marketing Guide 2
The Value your Article Offer and how you Present it
It's all about value. Quality content rules the web and the one who can offer it gets many offers for free without necessarily asking for it.
No one will be interested in re-publishing your articles and promoting you and your site for free if your article offer no value. If you offer low quality content, the benefits of article marketing is almost already forfeited.
Moreover most of the sites that re-publishes directory articles are low quality sites. So for a chance at authority sites re-publishing your content it must offer real value.
Offering value is not enough, you have to make it user-friendly.
Use intriguing headlines (I am still struggling with this).
Use bullets when neccessary to make your content scannable.
Break your content with sub-headings.
Break paragraphs into shorter lines of text.
Preferably keep articles short.
If possible write fresh content (not re-writing existing articles on site) but that relates to specific articles on your site so you can link to them. Though you can spin already writing articles to create unique articles that are almost highlights of the content on your site.
Article Marketing Strategy 3
The Way you Use your Resource box
Article marketing is give and take. You use the article body to give and the resource is where you take. Promote yourself, your website and your business in the resource box.
The resource box is not where you start listing your achievements, hobbies or the number of kids you have, honestly no one is interested in that. You could briefly say who you are and what you do but focus on benefits.
The question your resource box must answer is: "Why should I click on your link to your site?"
Write your resource in third person starting with your name.
I recently started doing this, add a brief copyright notice at the end of your resource. Doing this ensures you continue to get credits for that article.
If Mr. A gets it from the directory and publish it on his site with your full resource including your links, it means Mr. B who could be an impressed reader can copy and publish that same article on his site including your copyright notice too.
It will continue to spread like that and you will continue to get backlinks and traffic as a result.
If you don't add a copyright notice, Mr. B finding the article on Mr. A site wouldn't know the article is free for use by anyone who so wishes as far as the content and resource box is not tampered with.
Here's a sample of how I write my resource boxes:
Karo Itoje is a full time online infopreneur with interest in online home based businesses. Presently she provides step by step article guides on blogging for beginners at http://www.blogging-the-beginners-complete-guide.com with the aim of helping beginners to blogging make the right decision, start right and succeed.
You are welcome to subscribe to the 'Beginners Blogging Guide' newsletter on her website to get free mentorship and a copy of her ebook 'Blogging at a Glance' worth $40. You must see the book if you are new to blogging.
Copyright: You may freely republish this article, provided the text, author credit, the active links and this copyright notice remain intact.
Now not everyone that republishes the article will do as you've asked but some will.
Article Marketing Help 4
The Way you Create your links in your resource box
This is very important because if you don't create your links well, all your efforts and goal for distributing your articles will be wasted.
I used to create all my links in the resource box as anchor text that reads a text instead of the link but not anymore because I later realized that most people who republishes my articles submitted to directories just copy and paste to their sites.
So as I had all the links in my resource box as anchor text pointing to my site, it means that I'll never get increased link popularity or traffic from others republishing my articles because when they copy and paste to their site, my anchor text links becomes just a text without clickable links below them.
So you need to include among your links in the resource text URL like this http://www.blogging-the-beginners-complete-guide.com .
The benefit of doing this is that when such link is copied and pasted, it most likely will turn into a clickable link to your site so you can still benefit on incoming links and traffic.
But for SEO purposes you need at least one anchor text link. So what I do is, if a directory accepts two links in its resource box, I add one link but in two different forms, one as an anchor text and the other as a text URL.
So say I am allowed just 2 links in my resource and I want to link to an article with the keyword "how to start a blog" on my website I would create my links as:
See the article how to start a blog at http://www.blogging-the-beginners-complete-guide.com/how-to-start-a-blog.html for a detailed information on each steps involved in creating a successful blog.
Both links are the same except that one was created for SEO benefits with the keyword of an important page on my site that I wish to rank for and the other for those who copy and paste to republish my articles.
I wish I could include more than 2 links (few directories accept more than 2 links in resource) so I could also make a link to my home page and/or newsletter page.
But well, its better to have one useful link than create 2 or more different links that may offer no benefits, that is if it's just being copied and pasted.
Possible links for the Resource box
Link to home page. If the article you are submiting to the directory is not related to any specific page on your site, then just link to your home page.
Link to specific articles.
I think articles on directories that link to specific pages on their sites that relates to the article discussed in the directory tend to get more clicks because if the person is interested in that article posted in the directory, and you asked to click on a link for more information on that same topic then it is more likely he or she would click on it.
Link to a freebie or newsletter subscription page offering freebies for sign ups on your site.
Article Marketing Strategy 5
Your Strategy for Distributing your Articles
Manual or article submitter or submission Software?
Article marketing can be said to be the best and easy way to build lots of links to a site and increase traffic too because directories are free to submit to and it leverages on your time and effort.
So you can get tempted to want to over-do things like submit to 100-1000 directories using an article submission software.
Now the saying that too much of everything (even when they are good things) is bad is very true.
Mass submitting articles to article directories could harm your site because most likely many of the directories would be of low quality and so many links pointing to your site (even if they are from high quality sites) at once may raise the eyebrows of the search engines.
But article submission software have some good benefits.
They save you a good amount of time by:
Helping you create different unique versions of 1-3 original article written by you.
Submit the different versions created to hundreds and thousands of article directories and submission sites.
So it could create thousands of links for you within days, which is where the harm lies with using softwares to submit articles.
The success of article marketing doesn't lie in submitting to hundreds or thousands of websites.
It lies in submitting articles to quality sites with good traffic record because you want webmasters and ezine publishers to find your article to re-publish, and they only go to quality sites where they are sure they will find quality articles.
So what do you do if you have 5-15 quality sites you will like to submit your articles to and you don't want to have to write completely different articles for each site?
How to Manually Spin your Articles
I learnt this article spinning strategy somewhere and I have used it once or twice for spinning my articles. It's a very workable article marketing strategy.
Manually spin your articles in 5 steps.
STEP 1
Write a unique article. Could be on a different keyword you've never written on or highlights of an article already on your site.
Step 2
Break your unique article into 3 paragraphs and open 5 text files (notepad).
Step 3
Move the first paragraph of your original article to one of the text files.
Move the second paragraph to another text file and do same with the third paragraph.
In your first text file where you moved your first paragraph to, add two new versions of the first paragraph to the file. That is re-write that first paragraph twice to now have 3 different versions of it. The three different versions will be in one file.
Do same for the second and third paragraphs.
Now you have two text files left.
Write three versions of your resource box including links to your site and a copyright notice in one of the remaining text files.
And write three versions of your titles in the final text file.
You may also open another text file to write three different versions of your article abstract or summary. Some article directories require you to enter an abstract of your article.
Step four
Decide on the quality directories you want to use and bookmark all of them for easy access. Then sign up to them all.
Step Five
Start posting your article to directories. Simply click to go to each directory from your bookmark. Click on submit an article and open all text files that you previously created.
For your first directory make it 111. That is first paragraph of paragraph one, first paragraph of paragraph two and first paragraph of paragraph three.
Remember that you broke a full article into three separate paragraphs and you added two different versions of each paragraph to them. So you have 3 different versions of paragraph one, 3 different versions of paragraph two and three different versions of paragraph three.
For next directory, 112, next 113, next 211, 212, 213, 311, 312, 313 and so on. You can keep going and have up to 50 articles that are almost unique.
Remember the goal is that no single article is completely the same so you are not seen as spamming because if it's an interesting article several other people will republish it. You don't want to have 100 articles that are the same on the internet.
When you have mixed up the article body, pick one resource and one title to use. Keep changing and mixing them up.
While it is tempting to keep going and going with this technique using one particular article, I mean using different versions of an article as many as 50 times, it is better to submit to say 5-15 then write another unique article and repeat the process.
When I used this article marketing strategy I submitted to 9 quality article directories.
Creating the different versions after writing the unique article doesn't take more than an hour or two at most. And after creating them posting to each directory doesn't take more than 10 minutes. The time is worth sacrificing for the benefits that will come out to it.
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