How to go about with article marketing in 2015?

18 replies
Hi guys.
I want to attain traffic with article marketing and hence I was wondering you all to provide me with some special advice how I should go about it.
Thanks
#2015 #article #marketing
  • Profile picture of the author discrat
    Hello Akif,
    Same as it has been for many years now. Through Syndication.
    Here is a great Post to take a look at on Article Marketing. Alexa Smith, within this Post is the one to go to and
    study
    http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...marketing.html
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    • Profile picture of the author agmccall
      you would be amazed at what the search function here at the Warrior Forum can do

      al
      Signature

      "Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work." Thomas Edison

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      • Profile picture of the author NoMoreWords
        Originally Posted by agmccall View Post

        you would be amazed at what the search function here at the Warrior Forum can do

        al
        The sort of the search feature doesn't work, at least for me. I want to show the posts that have the highest rating/most views/most posts, but it just doesn't happen. But anyways, yes, it can do miracles (everything is already explained 10 times)
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  • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
    Banned
    Originally Posted by Akif Rahman View Post

    I want to attain traffic with article marketing and hence I was wondering you all to provide me with some special advice how I should go about it.
    Reading through these six posts might help you, as a starting point ...

    One-post overview of article marketing: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5035794

    How I write articles: How to increase likelyhood of article syndication?

    How I find publishers for them: How to Find Article Syndication Partners?

    How I approach them: Questions about Content Syndication

    How article directories work: How do Article Directories work? (Article directories have almost nothing to do with article marketing, really, but this post also contains links to several other threads about "how articles can be used to generate traffic", and those ought to help you).

    And here's a post about "Where to submit articles": http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post9418843


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  • Profile picture of the author ContentedRich
    Hi Alexa,

    Firstly, thanks for all the great information and advice you've given out on here! It's been pretty useful reading for me in nailing down a marketing strategy for a new site I'm working on.

    Just one question though, as I didn't see it addressed in any of your other posts (apologies if I missed it!) - how would you recommend tracking the success of referrals from publishers through to your site? I'm not just thinking about numbers, but quality too, so that individual publishers who send the best quality referrals can be prioritised.

    I imagine tracking links would make the content (and the link back to my site) less appealing to the publishers, so I was considering creating permanent redirects for each article and publisher (so that it looks like any standard link, but can still be tracked). I'd then send out a separate email for each publisher, manually editing the link each time. Obviously this would create a lot more work for each article though, and could potentially become unmanageable. Further, the large number of redirects I'd eventually build up over time could look bad when it comes to SEO.

    Do you have any thoughts?

    Thanks,

    Rich
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    • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
      Banned
      Originally Posted by ContentedRich View Post

      how would you recommend tracking the success of referrals from publishers through to your site? I'm not just thinking about numbers, but quality too, so that individual publishers who send the best quality referrals can be prioritised.
      With apologies, I'm the worst person in the world to offer anything like "technical advice".

      And "technical advice" is what you're really asking here, if you feel you need a way of monitoring that.

      I don't see how it will help much, myself.

      What exactly would you do, to "prioritise" them, having worked out who they are? Call me a skepchick but I don't really see the benefit. If a publisher has a magazine/newspaper/blog/ezine/website that's relevant to your niche, you should just send your article there and try to add him to your syndication-list. Once he's already published one (the situation you're asking about?) he's on your syndication-list, and you'll offer him future articles and build a relationship with him. It doesn't really make any difference what his traffic's like and how much of it there is, does it? The point is that there's no downside. So I'm struggling to see why you'd want to "prioritise" some? The difficult thing - the time-consuming part of the business - is finding as many as possible.

      I suppose in a sense, it would be be great to have so many that you need to think about which ones are the best (though I still don't really see how it would help you), but that's probably not going to happen.

      The time-consuming issue most people find is identifying and successfully approaching more/enough places, not in somehow "classifying"/"categorising" the ones they've already found.

      Originally Posted by ContentedRich View Post

      I imagine tracking links would make the content (and the link back to my site) less appealing to the publishers
      Sorry if I'm missing your point altogether (wouldn't be the first time ) but how would it help you?

      Originally Posted by ContentedRich View Post

      Do you have any thoughts?
      Only confusion, sorry, Rich. I can't immediately understand why this would be helpful to you, at all. What did I miss here? Tell me more, and I'll try to answer again: at the moment I don't quite see what benefit/purpose you're driving at; sorry!


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      • Profile picture of the author ContentedRich
        Originally Posted by Alexa Smith View Post

        What exactly would you do, to "prioritise" them, having worked out who they are? Call me a skepchick but I don't really see the benefit. If a publisher has a magazine/newspaper/blog/ezine/website that's relevant to your niche, you should just send your article there and try to add him to your syndication-list. Once he's already published one (the situation you're asking about?) he's on your syndication-list, and you'll offer him future articles and build a relationship with him. It doesn't really make any difference what his traffic's like and how much of it there is, does it? The point is that there's no downside. So I'm struggling to see why you'd want to "prioritise" some? The difficult thing - the time-consuming part of the business - is finding as many as possible.
        Prioritise is probably the wrong word in all honesty... I mean that once you highlight one publisher that is sending high converting traffic, then you can start working with them a little more. With the data behind it, then you can understand how much of your time they are worth.

        E.G. You could follow up after you've sent a high performing publisher an article and they chose not to publish it to ask why and how you could maybe tailor future articles in order to encourage that publisher to publish more of your articles in the future. Perhaps, if they are particularly good at sending conversions, then it might even be worth occasionally writing fresh content for them.

        Originally Posted by Alexa Smith View Post

        The time-consuming issue most people find is identifying and successfully approaching more/enough places, not in somehow "classifying"/"categorising" the ones they've already found.
        You could use the data that you collect to understand which kind of sites to approach next. If an ezine on celebrity health and fitness fads (for example) is sending a lot of conversions, then you know that you should find more ezines on the subject.

        Personally, I'm undecided on whether it would be worth all the effort, but I certainly think it's worth trialing such tracking every now and then, if only to see whether it's worth continuing with it or not. I just can't work out how to do it without it taking a huge amount of effort.

        Originally Posted by myob View Post

        establishing metrics for measuring effectiveness should be applied to every stage of your marketing efforts, not limited to just article response. For example, continually track the sales process such as traffic source, funnel system, filters (lead qualification), follow-up, product mix, repeat sales rate, etc."
        Fully agree with you.

        Originally Posted by myob View Post

        Every publisher in my syndication network was assigned a four-symbol alphanumeric code, and every article also had a unique identifier such as a modified Julian date. For example: mysite.com/?ABCD4091801 indicates the originating source and which article (first article written on 1/10/2012) resulted in the call to action click.

        While not exact, the revenue from sales extracted from each publisher source was amortized over the number of articles submitted, giving a general average ROI of the articles. The more successful articles were then submitted to other outlets such as relevant websites, ezines, blogs, and offline publications."
        That seems like a very workable solution - thanks for explaining it. The only hesitation I have is that it might put some publishers off from running an article - with a clearly trackable link, it's suddenly very obvious that you're considering this a campaign. That may well be me over-thinking the matter though...

        Thanks to both of you for your input on this - it's really appreciated!

        Rich

        P.S. I can't work out how to add the 'user says thanks' feature under your posts...
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        • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
          Banned
          Originally Posted by ContentedRich View Post

          P.S. I can't work out how to add the 'user says thanks' feature under your posts...
          Don't worry about it (you haven't made enough posts yet - the button for it will appear, eventually).

          I was thinking about "myob" as I made my post above, and how different his perspective would be from my own, so it's good that he posted quickly, to give you another viewpoint!


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          • Profile picture of the author ContentedRich
            Originally Posted by Alexa Smith View Post

            Don't worry about it (you haven't made enough posts yet - the button for it will appear, eventually).

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            Just got it!
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        • Profile picture of the author myob
          Originally Posted by ContentedRich View Post

          That seems like a very workable solution - thanks for explaining it. The only hesitation I have is that it might put some publishers off from running an article - with a clearly trackable link, it's suddenly very obvious that you're considering this a campaign. That may well be me over-thinking the matter though...
          In my experience, using a tracking system in the resource box link rarely is an issue for publishers as long as it is kept fairly short and unobtrusive. They already know exactly why you're writing articles, so don't think you're fooling them by trying to make it less obvious.


          Originally Posted by ContentedRich View Post

          ...Further, the large number of redirects I'd eventually build up over time could look bad when it comes to SEO.
          Just as an FYI and commentary on this business model of article syndication, SEO has never been a concern at all for me in writing articles. Nearly all traffic was driven directly from articles published within my network of syndication partners.
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          • Profile picture of the author ContentedRich
            Originally Posted by Alexa Smith View Post

            Don't worry about it (you haven't made enough posts yet - the button for it will appear, eventually).

            I was thinking about "myob" as I made my post above, and how different his perspective would be from my own, so it's good that he posted quickly, to give you another viewpoint!
            .
            Thanks Alexa! I am still torn on how much work it will take to track everything in all honesty though, but I suppose the best way is to test!


            Originally Posted by myob View Post

            In my experience, using a tracking system in the resource box link rarely is an issue for publishers as long as it is kept fairly short and unobtrusive. They already know exactly why you're writing articles, so don't think you're fooling them by trying to make it less obvious.
            Good to hear that - I thought I might have been being slightly paranoid!

            Originally Posted by myob View Post

            Just as an FYI and commentary on this business model of article syndication, SEO has never been a concern at all for me in writing articles. Nearly all traffic was driven directly from articles published within my network of syndication partners.
            I get what you're saying, and I'm glad to hear that. However, I'm also a little anal about starting off with the best strategy possible - at this stage, if I can help it, I'd like to leave as many traffic generation avenues open as possible. I may never earn anything from search traffic, but then again I may find it suddenly starts to become a big earner without really focusing on it at all, just because I made sure in the initial stages that other strategies didn't compromise SEO.

            Again, thanks to both of you - Alexa and myob. You've really have helped me today - thanks!

            Rich
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    • Profile picture of the author myob
      Originally Posted by ContentedRich View Post

      how would you recommend tracking the success of referrals from publishers through to your site? I'm not just thinking about numbers, but quality too, so that individual publishers who send the best quality referrals can be prioritised.
      When I was writing articles for syndication, I always tracked every stage of the marketing process including article conversions by publisher referral sources. This is one of the very few aspects of article syndication of which I disagree with Alexa.

      IMO, there is no better substitute for evaluating article syndication results than bottom line ROI. However, establishing metrics for measuring effectiveness should be applied to every stage of your marketing efforts, not limited to just article response. For example, continually track the sales process such as traffic source, funnel system, filters (lead qualification), follow-up, product mix, repeat sales rate, etc.

      Because of the extensive resources used in producing and distributing each article, accurate tracking for me was essential. This particular method may not be helpful to you except perhaps for illustration, but I tracked articles using a short source code appended to the link in the resource box.

      Every publisher in my syndication network was assigned a four-symbol alphanumeric code, and every article also had a unique identifier such as a modified Julian date. For example: mysite.com/?ABCD4091801 indicates the originating source and which article (first article written on 1/10/2012) resulted in the call to action click.

      While not exact, the revenue from sales extracted from each publisher source was amortized over the number of articles submitted, giving a general average ROI of the articles. The more successful articles were then submitted to other outlets such as relevant websites, ezines, blogs, and offline publications.

      Although there were additional sales made from opt-in subscribers and other integrated marketing channels as a direct result of these articles, this is considered ancillary marketing, which results are all tracked separately. The importance of knowing how much profit (or loss) is in your marketing processes and business activities cannot be over emphasized.
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  • Profile picture of the author jay761
    Have you tried hub pages? you just create an article, find a long tail keyword that gets searched for using Google’s predictive text (they will give you keyword suggestions) get traffic Travis and it will tell you if you can rank (go to SEO, competition)
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  • Profile picture of the author quinng123
    I wouldn't say article marketing is any different than it was previously in a significant. The only difference is that your content has to be of a higher quality and not obviously spammy to get traffic. As long as you have quality content then the same tactics can be used.

    There are some blog web 2.0's that naturally rank high however. Tumblr and pinterests for example have relatively rankings naturally for google for long tail keywords. In addition to traditional articles directories I would suggest using sites like tumblr and pinterests to leverage your article content
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  • Profile picture of the author writeaway
    It's all about branding and outreach.
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