Leverage Your Article Marketing Efforts

[alvinhuang]

Article marketing has been a staple traffic generation method for many people and continues to be one of the more popular methods of driving traffic and gaining backlinks. However the key to article marketing is to fully leverage each article so as to squeeze out maximum benefit. Having submitted thousands of articles, I thought I'll share some techniques that have proven to work very well for myself and my clients.

Title Selection

1. Keyword based titles
2. Popularity based titles

Here are my 2 methods of selecting titles. With the 1st one using keywords in the titles. Personally I like KeywordDiscovery.com but you can use whatever rocks your boat.

The idea is to drill down and select relatively high searched keywords with relatively high KEI as they then have the best chance of ranking well on the search engines. No point chasing after highly searched keywords which are extremely competitive.

Be sure to keep the keyword intact within your article title. And only add words in front or behind the keywords. Keeping the articles title short helps too as it keeps the keyword density of the title high.

Here's an example.
Keyword = dog training

Examples of titles can be
- Fast Dog Training Techniques
- Dog Training For Dummies

There is sometimes a compromise between selecting a "hot sexy" sounding title but I'm alright with it.

2. Popularity based titles

Another way to select titles is to go after what's hot at ezinearticles. After all, there is no point reinventing the wheel and try to think of titles that are hot.

Go to ezinearticles, use a related keyword for your niche and search.

Click on any of the titles that is related.

Scroll down and you will find a section displaying the "Most Viewed EzineArticles in the Category (90 Days)" These are the articles that are hot and what you can do is try to model your article titles after them.

Here's a picture of how it shows on ezinearticles.
http://www.alvinhuang.com/images/mostviewed.jpg

Example.
This is currently the top article for the Petsogs category.
"Clever Dog Names and Puppy Names - Find Unique Dog Names That Fit"

So you can model your article after it by changing it to

"Interesting Dog and Puppy Names - Exclusive Dog Names That Fit"

I'm sure you get the idea.


Article Submissions

There are thousands of article directories out there to submit your article. But it is highly unlikely that you will find the time to submit it to all of them.

Personally I submit to the 10 article directories listed below. They were selected based on their pagerank, alexa ranking and general strength. With ezinearticles providing the most traffic obviously.

Ezine Article Submission - Submit Your Best Quality Original Articles For Massive Exposure, Ezine Publishers Get 25 Free Article Reprints
Article Search Engine Directory: GoArticles.com
ArticleCity.com - Free Articles for Reprint. Free Articles for your web site and newsletters. Submit Your Articles to Our Articles Directory.
SearchWarp Writer's Community for Do It Yourself and Current Events Commentary
www.articledashboard.com
Article Alley - All the Best News and Articles
IdeaMarketers Article Bank - Promote your articles, find free news articles, article promotion - Idea Marketers
Self Improvement from SelfGrowth.com
Buzzle Web Portal: Intelligent Life on the Web
Free Articles, Free Web Content, Reprint Articles

Besides manual submission, I also use a mass article submission directory service with isnare.com If you submit alot of articles, their platinum service plan provides real value.

You might also want to try other mass article submission services listed below.

Article Marketing Services - Ghost Writing and Article Distribution from The Phantom Writers Since 2001
(Rather pricey but heavyweights like Willie Crawford recommended it before)

Massive Backlinks and Search Term Domination. Article Marketer
(Recommended by other IMers but they seemed to have faced some issues previously. Not very sure if they have rectified it)

http://www.submityourarticle.com
(Submits spun versions of your article to the article directories. $37 for 8 article submissions monthly. Proved too pricey for me as we submit huge amounts of articles a month)

Free Article Spinning and Content Rewriting - Jetspinner
(Allows you to spin the articles too and submits to about 400+ article directories. Tested it before but only 200+ article directories accepted my articles. Found the time spinning the articles to be too time consuming and decided to just concentrate on having new articles written and mass submitted isnare)

Articles Link Love

You want to direct some backlinks to your articles so as to increase their rankings in the SERPs and also to drive some initial traffic there. The idea is to get your articles listed in the "Most Viewed EzineArticles in the Category (90 Days)" portion. Because once your article is listed there, it builds momentum as your article keeps getting displayed when related articles are read. It sorta acts like social proof too, as people believe articles shown there are good and go on to view it. This gives your article maximum exposure and bang for buck.

I use socialmarker.com and the software bookmarking demon to build quick backlinks to the article. And I feel that they are one of the fastest ways to building up link love to you articles. Do remember it's always about getting the best return with the least possible effort/resource.

So far this has yielded pretty good results for me as a good % of my articles go on to list n the "Most Viewed EzineArticles in the Category (90 Days)" area.

Starting a blog

Since you have the content ready and submitted already. You might as well re-use the articles and post them on your blog. I love wordpress blogs and now build all my websites based on wordpress. It's important that you search engine optimize your wordpress blogs. It's a whole new topic on its own and I shall leave out the nitty gritty details on how to do that for now. But I'm sure you can find the information somewhere else on this wonderful forum. =)

I cannot cover everything here but here are some pointers.
- Remember to optimize your blog permalinks
- Rename the blog posts to use only the keywords in the URL
- Use trackbacks on every post. You can do it manually or try the plugin mentioned at Blue Hat SEO-Advanced SEO Tactics New Wordpress Plugin - PingCrawl
- Remember to use the SEO plugins.
- If budget allows, purchase the autosocialposter plugin and watch it social bookmark everyone of your blog posts.

Slow schedule your blog postings between intervals of a few days. If you churn out 10 articles a month for your niche, you can schedule them to post every 3 days and they would last a month.

Remember to setup your blog rss feed with feedburner.com and then use a RSS Submit software to submit your rss feed to the directories. Personally I use the one at ksoft- RSS Submit - Software to Easily Submit Your RSS Feeds . There are various rss submit services out there that are pretty affordable too.

Using Create text-to-speech podcast from RSS feed with Odiogo for iPod, MP3 player and mobile phone

So you got your blog and rss feed setup. Link up with odiogo.com (its free!) and it will automatically convert your blog posts into audio.

You can view examples at ChargedAudio Subliminal Success | Self Improvement

It doesn't take long to setup and your blog now has an audio portion to it for all blog postings.

Article into Video

Video Marketing is the rage now and you shouldn't be left out. Re-use your articles and convert them into power point slides. Design a standard template you can use for your niche articles and then either summarize your article or just plug them into the powerpoint. Use microsoft movie maker (free!) or camtasia to convert your powerpoints into video. Be sure to add some royalty free music in the background.

Sell your optin by listing out the bonus/free report etc and show the exact URL to get it in the video.

Done. With very little time, your article has been converted into video.

Mass submit your article videos using the free service TubeMogul.com - Online Video Distribution and Analytics (free!) Be sure to leave your url in the description as there would be a youtube backlink.

Article Powerpoints

You have the powerpoints done up for your video previously. Upload the powerpoints into file sharing websites like flickr.com and slideshare.com, include your website URL into the description box for the backlink

So there...all in all you have leveraged your articles by re-using/converting it into various formats. Submitting them and gaining backlinks across different websites. While some of the websites backlinks are "nofollow". I believe an organic growth of both "dofollow" and "nofollow" backlinks is very healthy.

Within 2-4 months time, watch your website steam ahead with traffic through the various mediums, watch your backlinks massively increase and see your website rankings shoot ahead in the SERPs.

Hope you found this useful.

Alvin Huang

[Nathan Briggs]

Thanks for a great post, Alvin.

The PingCrawl plugin is new to me, and looks really useful.

[Neil S]

Now this is some great information! I have a question for you. If you were to choose 3 tools that are indispensable for really leveraging your article marketing which would you choose?

[TeamGlobal]

Hi Alvin,


Thanks for sharing this info. I've never used socialmarker.com, but it sure seems like a good idea. I'll head over there today to check it out. Hopefully they'll have a good tutorial to get me started quickly.

Thanks again.

All The Best,


Tony

[MommyEnterprises]

Thanks for the great info. I have been trying to add article marketing to my daily tasks.

[JDSalinger]

Hi alvinhuang,

Thanks for putting this together. I am very curious about the stuff you wrote for Articles converted to video and Article powerpoints. My question is what percentage of your traffic comes from these different sources?

For example, is it like the following:
Article directories= 75%
Articles converted to vidoe= 15%
Article Powerpoints= 10%

Thanking you in advance,
JDSalinger

[carik42]

Great post Alvin,

Well done for putting it together.

Regards

[dburk]

Hi Alvin,

Nice article very useful information and put together well.

My Compliments,

[sesantek]

Thanks so much for this information.

sesan

[alvinhuang]

Thanks everyone for the comments. Glad that you found it useful. =)

I'm sure there are much more strategies that can implemented to leverage the effect of articles. So for others out there with other ideas. Please do share too.

Alvin Huang

[slashman]

Excellent strategies.

The key really is to keep a steady pace of work every month and diversify your methods. That is the key to great search engine traffic.

I would have to change one little detail and that is to never reuse content. It's a waste of time. In Google and basically all other search engines you never see the same article twice. I'm sure it causes some kind of penalty. Always opt for original articles in every step. It costs more money or time, but it's worth it.

Of course you can reuse the articles in the videos, Google can't tell the difference.

Thanks,

George Christodoulou

[alvinhuang]

Originally Posted by slashman

Excellent strategies.

The key really is to keep a steady pace of work every month and diversify your methods. That is the key to great search engine traffic.

I would have to change one little detail and that is to never reuse content. It's a waste of time. In Google and basically all other search engines you never see the same article twice. I'm sure it causes some kind of penalty. Always opt for original articles in every step. It costs more money or time, but it's worth it.

Of course you can reuse the articles in the videos, Google can't tell the difference.

Thanks,

George Christodoulou

Hi George,

Thanks for your comment. Agree with you that its all about putting in consistent work every month.

With regards to re-using content. I guess there are 2 camps on the issue of duplicate content. One side says its bad and might have negative effects. And at best be indexed in the supplemental index of google. Another side says its alright as long as it appears once on each website. Meaning no duplicate content on 1 website alone.

I would say that information on this issue is rather hazy. And I took it upon myself to test it out rather than just be a textbook theorist.

So what I did is to setup a wordpress website using only pure PLR content, which obviously is duplicate content since we all know how PLR works. And I scheduled to have 4 blog posts posted using the PLR articles everyday. The website currently has pagerank 2 and does rank for long tail keywords and retrieves organic traffic.

For those interested, the website is Self Help | Self Improvement | Self Growth

So that led me to conclude that reusing content wasn't all that bad after all. Especially if its just one of the step within the overall strategy. Of course if the content can be rewritten, it'd be much better. But then of course it'd be a decision between spending resources to rewrite content or to just get fresh new ones.

Alvin Huang

[kcgeorge]

This is a very useful resource.One of the very best i have come across in this forum...
More power to your elbow.

[Harold Hsu]

There are a lot of interesting tips and insights mentioned here that I've never thought of... I will definitely be implementing some of them! And I love the PingCrawl plugin too.

[blue19]

wow, lots of good stuff here, thanks for the info. I might get into this

[johnhoefer]

This is an oldie but a goodie. I can't believe you only got three THanks on here.