With the recent release of the Article Marketing tool to beta testers I think now is a good time to revisit how to successfuly do article marketing since a good portion of feedback I get is that people still don’t see benefit of building a list of publications for submitting articles to.
Let’s take for example the recent smackdown of AdWords ads… essentially the one or two page squeeze and sales page has all but been elminated from AdWords. What could Google be telling us by all of these changes? That it wants content rich sites and pages… and further more it wants sites or pages focused on a topic or narrow selection of related keywords so much so that it was willing to give up a major portion of AdWords revenue to make people comply.
A site like ezinearticles is anything but narrow or focused, and yet nearly everyone who does article marketing just loves throwing all these articles on it and other big article repositories just like it. Let’s see what Quantcast has to say about the audience visting ezinearticles.com:
So who exactly is visiting ezinearticles? According to Quantcast other article marketers and people looking for, ahem… “love” or to lose weight. The last two are a bit of a surpise, so I guess if your have something to sell to article marketers or the health and “love” markets keep on posting your articles there. I blacked out one site since it wasn’t exactly family friendly, if your curious go check out Quantcast yourself.
Now if you want to continue using the big article directories… fine, but don’t limit yourself to only using them otherwise you are leaving a huge untapped market. Most people who think they are article marketing are currently operating that way.
Now my approach to article marketing is quite a bit different. I focus on writing articles for readers of ezines, topical sites and publications in my target markets and not on article marketing for search engine rankings.
However I fully concede that an article that comes up with for the right keyword ranking highly in the search engines can bring in good quality traffic that converts… I just find that trying to garner ranking is a long row to hoe and especailly when it can be taken down at any time for any reason and this is especially true when people find a way to game Google or put up sites that it doesn’t like. Just ask all the BANS users about that.
Yes your bio box will contain a link back to your site and the search engines are going to pick up on that and (hopefully) it will help your rankings. But I always look at this as a secondary benefit since your primary purpose for article marketing is to readers who share an interest in the topic of your article.
The purpose of the bio or about the author box is to SELL or offer a FREEBIE and basically give the article reader a very compelling reason to click on the link back to your site. It is almost like, in fact just like a very tiny sales letter all by itself.
Think about it this way… in all but the most obscure markets there are going to be a dozen or so top blogs or other information sites that will have a following of thousands of readers. One article landing on one of these sites has the potential to be read by thousands of eyeballs.
Also consider that fact that all sites are starved for content, portal sites like Yahoo and AOL rotate alot of the same crummy content and all of your newspapers syndicate content from other newspapers… sites want and need content and if you write good content you have a very high chance of getting it picked up by sites in your market.
So get out there and start building a list of your own publishers and start submitting articles to them. Yes it IS work, in fact it is ALOT of work. Nobody ever said article marketing or building a successful business would be easy.