Article Marketing Advice
Writing articles as I am sure many of you know is a very popular way of increasing the amount of backward links that you have pointing to your site. In theory, the more of these backward links we are able to obtain, the more traffic our site should receive. There are however some very important things to take into consideration when writing and submitting your articles as you do not want to be wasting your time and you do not want your site to get dropped by the major search engines or put in some sort of sandbox.
The first thing to remember is that Rome was not built in a day. What I mean is if you have a new website, about for example hair loss, you may want to reach the top ten in Google for your keywords within say six months. You hear that one way to do this is by building up good number of backward links to this hair site. You think that the more the merrier and start pounding out one article after the other and are very proud of yourself after the first month because you were able to write fifty articles all pointing to your new hair website.
I believe this approach to be totally wrong. The hair loss websites which are in the top ten of Google have probably been around for quite a number of years and will without doubt have a number of quality backward links. If your site sticks around for a long time and you continue to build up its backward links it will go higher and higher in the search engines over time.
The one thing you do not want to do is to raise any red flags with the search engines. A new site which has eight hundred backward links after one month could raise this red flag. The search engines will now probably not trust this site and could easily put it in some sort of sandbox until it decides whether it is kosha or not.
In my opinion it is important to build up the number of backward links to a new website fairly slowly. When writing articles, I would personally only write one article with a link to a new website per week. Of course if you have ten websites, you are able to write ten articles if you only decide to have one link on each article etc.
I also think that it is very worthwhile to only submit the same article to around five or six of the different article directories. I would submit the article in total to around twenty-two article directories but would have around four variations of it etc. The differences in each article are not massive but are big enough to make it more original. There is a big thing being debated at the moment in webmaster circles about the potential damage that can be caused by duplicate content. From what I have read, everybody seems to have a different opinion on this subject. My opinion is that it is better to be safe than sorry, therefore why take the risk? It would be good however if the major search engines could clarify their position on the subject, but lets face it, that is never going to happen.
In conclusion, my advice is to enjoy writing articles, have patience, build up the number of backward links slowly and to submit different variations of the same article to the directories.
How Article Marketing Can Bring You Free Traffic
For a long time now there has been a lot of buzz in the online world about article marketing, but I am still frequently asked what it is and how it works. Here is a brief explanation. Like any large medium, the internet is hungry for content.
However, unlike other media outlets such as TV, radio and newspapers, which generally only use content from professional writers, on the internet, anyone can publish. Article marketing is a way of taking advantage of that freedom and using the medium as a way to bring visitors to your website or blog. So, how does it work?
You write an article. A typical article for web consumption will be between 250 and 750 words long. It will be carefully focused round a specific area of expertise; the writer’s niche. It will use keywords relevant to the writer’s intended audience and often it will contain a numbered or bulleted list for clarity and ease of reading.
You publish that article on the web. There are now hundreds of article directories, where any writer can publish almost any article. Most are free to use, but some more specialized ones charge a small fee. One of the biggest free directories is EzineArticles.com which carries the work of nearly 70,000 writers.
The directories are organized into multiple categories and the article writer must decide which category to publish under. You are also encouraged to attach a group of relevant keywords to your article and to include your personal or business details and a link to your site, in your ‘resource box’, which is a brief paragraph about you or your work which will appear at the bottom of every article. The directories employ a team of staff to approve each article before it becomes available on the web.
So how does this drive traffic? Firstly, the directories, being very content rich, have high rankings in the search engines and often your article may be spotted there and an interested reader might click on your link and come through to your website.
However, the real purpose of the directories is to provide a place for e-zine publishers to find free and relevant content. Every day, editors of a huge range of subject specific e-zines, visit the article directories and download new articles that are relevant to their audience. This saves them writing it themselves. The only stipulation made is that they must publish the article in full, without editing and always include the author’s resource box and retain the links intact.
So over a period, a single article can easily, be found in many different places on the web, each time with a valuable back link to your website, which not only leads highly targeted visitors to you but also helps to improve your search rankings.
