Article Marketing Conundrum

I was writing articles for a couple of years before I got decent results from them. I used to get a lot of traffic but it took me a while to realise there's different types of traffic and that my articles needed a purpose above just being interesting.

Make sure that your articles are good but that they also effectively achieve pre-selling or whatever their purpose is. Don't waste your time just writing content for the sake of it.

Kim-

Sounds like you are on the right track and utilizing free sites like EZA and Hub pages to market your articles. One quick suggestion is to become active on blogs within your niche. I have had opportunities to guest blog on sites because I was an active participant in the community. More eyes will then be reading your material and increase traffic. Guest blogging also gives you another link and up the SEO ladder you go.

Hi Kim

I would also suggest that when you are writing your articles make the last paragraph lead naturally into clicking the link for your site. So for example you could be writing a "how-to" article and then include something like "to read more about how to do XYZ click here" type thing. You can use your bio box to do things like that as well, so that the reader will automatically click on your link if they are interested in what you have to say, and want to keep reading.

Best of luck
Ellen

Take a look at the competitive market you're in and what type of information you're presenting to the public. If you are promoting content that is general in nature, you'll have to write more articles in order to be competitive with established sites.

If you focus on sub-niches of your main niche, then you'll have a better chance of attracting traffic from smaller groups of people.

The whole "backlinking" nonsense has really gotten out of control again since Allen allowed it back on the forum.

I understand the value, but I wonder how many lurkers are just like poor Kim here, trying to attack an impenetrable niche where the money keywords have pros with over 50k decent PR backlinks already established...

The best advice, ever, is what Alexa and myob are telling you: Quality content submitted to Quality destinations.

That's it.

And you can forget about "SEO, backlinks, indexing, linkwheels" and all of the other nonsense that's being parrotted by those looking to take money out of your wallet (or purse).

Bruce Lee once said that "There's always someone out there who's better than you are. Always".

I apply that to backlinking and SEO, and say "There's always someone out there who will be better than you are at it for the keywords that matter. Always."

Syndication really does seem to seperate the winners from the losers in most article marketing efforts beyond very drilled-down niches that can be dominated.

A lot of the questions asked by people are answered by Google themselves if you take a chance to look around.

Take this for example:

Ranking
Sites' positions in our search results are determined based on a number of factors designed to provide end-users with helpful, accurate search results. These factors are explained in more detail at Technology overview · Corporate Information · About.

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. For more information about improving your site's visibility in the Google search results, we recommend reviewing our Webmaster Guidelines. They outline core concepts for maintaining a Google-friendly website.

Also:

Search
Co-founder Larry Page once described the “perfect search engine” as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” We can’t claim that Google delivers on that vision 100 percent today, but we’re always working on new technologies aimed at bringing all of Google closer to that ideal.

Before you even enter your query in the search box, Google is continuously traversing the web in real time with software programs called crawlers, or “Googlebots”. A crawler visits a page, copies the content and follows the links from that page to the pages linked to it, repeating this process over and over until it has crawled billions of pages on the web.

Next Google processes these pages and creates an index, much like the index in the back of a book. If you think of the web as a massive book, then Google‘s index is a list of all the words on those pages and where they‘re located, as well as information about the links from those pages, and so on. The index is parceled into manageable sections and stored across a large network of computers around the world.

When you type a query into the Google search box, your query is sent to Google machines and compared with all the documents stored in our index to identify the most relevant matches. In a split second, our system prepares a list of the most relevant pages and also determines the relevant sections and bits of text, images, videos and more. What you get is a list of search results with relevant information excerpted in “snippets” (short text summary) beneath each result.

As Larry said long ago, we want to give you back “exactly what you want.”
Describing the basic crawling, indexing and serving processes of a search engine is just part of the story. The other key ingredients of Google search are:

Relevance. As Larry said long ago, we want to give you back “exactly what you want.” When Google was founded, one key innovation was PageRank, a technology that determined the “importance” of a webpage by looking at what other pages link to it, as well as other data. Today we use more than 200 signals, including PageRank, to order websites, and we update these algorithms on a weekly basis. For example, we offer personalized search results based on your web history and location.

And:

Design and content guidelines

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map has an extremely large number of links, you may want to break the site map into multiple pages.

Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number.

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn't recognize text contained in images. If you must use images for textual content, consider using the "ALT" attribute to include a few words of descriptive text.

Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.

Check for broken links and correct HTML.

If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

Review our image guidelines for best practices on publishing images.

Technical guidelines

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site.

Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.

Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.

Make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. This file tells crawlers which directories can or cannot be crawled. Make sure it's current for your site so that you don't accidentally block the Googlebot crawler. Visit The Web Robots Pages to learn how to instruct robots when they visit your site. You can test your robots.txt file to make sure you're using it correctly with the robots.txt analysis tool available in Google Webmaster Tools.

Make reasonable efforts to ensure that advertisements do not affect search engine rankings. For example, Google's AdSense ads and DoubleClick links are blocked from being crawled by a robots.txt file.

If your company buys a content management system, make sure that the system creates pages and links that search engines can crawl.

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines.

Test your site to make sure that it appears correctly in different browsers.

Monitor your site's performance and optimize load times. Google's goal is to provide users with the most relevant results and a great user experience. Fast sites increase user satisfaction and improve the overall quality of the web (especially for those users with slow Internet connections), and we hope that as webmasters improve their sites, the overall speed of the web will improve.
Google strongly recommends that all webmasters regularly monitor site performance using Page Speed, YSlow, WebPagetest, or other tools. For more information, tools, and resources, see Let's Make The Web Faster. In addition, the Site Performance tool in Webmaster Tools shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world.

Quality guidelines

These quality guidelines cover the most common forms of deceptive or manipulative behavior, but Google may respond negatively to other misleading practices not listed here (e.g. tricking users by registering misspellings of well-known websites). It's not safe to assume that just because a specific deceptive technique isn't included on this page, Google approves of it. Webmasters who spend their energies upholding the spirit of the basic principles will provide a much better user experience and subsequently enjoy better ranking than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit.

If you believe that another site is abusing Google's quality guidelines, please report that site at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport. Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts.

Quality guidelines - basic principles

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website that competes with you. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"

Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.

Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate our Terms of Service. Google does not recommend the use of products such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries to Google.

Quality guidelines - specific guidelines

Avoid hidden text or hidden links.

Don't use cloaking or sneaky redirects.

Don't send automated queries to Google.

Don't load pages with irrelevant keywords.

Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.

Don't create pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other badware.

Avoid "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other "cookie cutter" approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content.

If your site participates in an affiliate program, make sure that your site adds value. Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first.

Over 200 ways to determine the rank of a page and/or website... Don't get too hung up on all the details will drive you crazy, just write your articles and see what happens for yourself and then adapt

Bolded some good points :> Atleast in my opinion.

If importance was measured by visible pagerank, Google could close much of their search operation and just leave a couple of robots to do the maths. From the FAQs

Q: My site's PageRank has gone up / gone down / not changed in months!
A: Don't worry. In fact, don't bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked. PageRank is an easy metric to focus on, but just because it's easy doesn't mean it's useful for you as a site owner. If you're looking for metrics, we'd encourage you to check outAnalytics, think about conversion rates, ROI (return on investment), relevancy, or other metrics that actually correlate to meaningful gains for your website or business.

First of all, submit your articles to ezinearticles.com, which is a top article directory. However, don’t waste your time submitting your articles to many article directories. It’s better to submit your articles to websites related to your topic that accept contributions from readers. Your site will get a better ranking, and many visitors.

Submit them also to the Free traffic system. They distribute each article to various auto-blogs. This tactic is very good for getting backlinks. Your site may also receive a few visitors from this practice.

Another excellent way to send traffic to your site is by answering questions at Yahoo Answers and Quora. You can post your articles inside a question if they fit with what you are writing about, in order to complement your answer.

However, have in mind that everything takes time. There is a fierce competition online, in all fields.

You need volume. Write many articles; and their quality is also very, very important. If your articles are well-written, they will send traffic to your website for years to come.

Boy o' boy, have I nejoyed reading this thread.
Nice to see everyone in class listen to our top notch teacher, Alexa.
Private lessons available?

If I can chime in. Kim I know how you feel about being frustrated and tackling a competitive niche for your first foray. I went after an equally competitive niche early on, except I took a link building approach to the extreme, all by hand. Monotonous, tiresome, and time consuming. However, after a few months of day after day...it paid off. Then, I realized content was MORE important than links, so I started producing content months later. Not only did my position rise, but held a page one ranking for almost a year now.

You, are starting off the right way, by developing the content first. Every piece of content you create, you are actually creating links when you are publishing it off site. For me, I found it flattering when I saw obscure domains in my webmaster tools, from other sites who 'stole' my article, and published it on their sites and left my links.

Lastly, I noticed you mentioned you were writing 800 word articles. Shorten it down to 500. Then, with just a bit more effort, you are actually getting two articles for just a bit more effort than the one you are producing now. And remember to use your keywords in anchor text over and over. Sure enough, if you are doing what you say, one day, you'll wake up, and see your self starting to rank. Once that happens, you know it will be worth it.

Hi,

I enjoy reading this thread as like I'm listening to some experts in article marketing involve in discussion and chat.

Good thread, good read.

Hi Kim,

When you start talking about 'article marketing' around here, you need to be careful because that term refers to two very different strategies.

The goal of the first type of 'article marketing' is to get direct visitors from the article itself to your site. You write a high quality article about your topic, usually focusing on a long-tail keyword, and you use the ranking power of the article directories (EzineArticles, GoArticles, etc.) to get direct article views and click-throughs.

The goal of the second type of 'article marketing' is backlinks. Here you use article distribution networks (Unique Article Wizard, Article Ranks, etc.) to distribute as many articles as possible and you get a high quantity of high quality backlinks. The articles themselves will rarely be read, but the backlinks will help your website rankings increase and you get traffic directly from the search engines.

The payday loan niche is very competitive. But within any niche, there are always opportunities. Keyword research is key. For every keyword you need a good balance of traffic and competition. You might be talking about 3 word, 4 word or longer keyword phrases.

In determining your chances against the competition, it's easiest to take a holistic approach. Looking at some basic data - the site, the URL, the backlinks to the page, backlinks to the site, maybe age of the site (you can get most of this data with free plug-ins for Firefox) - I look to see if there is any website or article like mine already ranking.

In other words, if I want to follow strategy #1, then I'm going to look for other articles, web 2.0 sites, etc in the results. If I want to follow strategy #2, then I'm going to look for websites similar to mine in the results - maybe fairly new with no pagerank and relatively few backlinks (as opposed to mega sites with tens of thousands of backlinks).

thanks,

Valerie