Where does the traffic of article marketing come from ?

There've been a few posts about article syndication in this thread, so I just wanted to chime in from a publisher's perspective.

When I'm putting together a potential authority site, I look for a mixture of content; some self-created, some specially commissioned and some garnered from around the web.

In my view, it benefits an authority site to include expert articles, taken from relevant directories. Take a look at some of the most respected sites in any niche and you'll see they often feature syndicated content.

In such cases, I look for articles where the resource box points to a site owned by the author, rather than to an obvious affiliate link. My reasoning is that these automatically appear more "expert" (i.e. the author is knowledgable enough to have a dedicated site on the topic) and my site can bask in the reflected authority of that expert.

I also like that it makes it easier for me to contact the author, if the article proves popular, and commission further bespoke content.

I just wish it wasn't such a tedious process wading through the purely promotional articles on many directories to get to the good stuff.


Frank

Not so much an 'air of promotion' - publishers expect you to promote something. More like the less 'air of hype' - be brief and to the point.

"Joe Bloggs has spent the last three years going from novice to blue-chip competitor, and details how he did it on his blog at example.com. Pick up your free copy of [book title] at [url] and find out how you can do it, too."

[Example off the top of my head - would be more targeted to the content of the article and the intended destinations.]

I've also experienced article marketing from the publisher's point of view. Frank has said much of what I would say already, so I won't repeat it. I'll just add that, as a publisher, I tended to look for meatier, longer articles that clearly demonstrate subject mastery.

And yes, by "syndication" I mean that the publisher would take the article intact, with resource box, and share it with visitors/subscribers. Yes, that includes the live link(s) to your site.

That's the main reason to use restraint, both in the resource box and in any in-content links. Even if the article is good, if there are too many links or the links are too self-serving, publishers will pass it up.

Pigs get fed, hogs get slaughtered...

Some. There are others, too. They're not all competitors, in any sense of the word.

They have no choice. TOS of article directories. If they take my article without the resource-box, they get a DMCA notice. If they take it with the resource-box, they get a nice email thanking them and offering them additional, new, as-yet-unpublished - apart from on my own site, of course - content (if I like the look of their site and want my links on it, obviously).

I think partly that. But they don't all have their own affiliate links: not all authority-site owners are "affiliates". Apologies for "sounding mysterious" but I can't give examples without disclosing my niches.

I suspect so. I think you do better, overall, with something that looks like a very short resource-box. This varies a little between different article directories. At EZA, the "unsophisticated/inexperienced reader" is unaware where the article ends and the resource-box begins, which one can turn to one's advantage.

This is rather the missing the point, I'm afraid. Those of us taking this seriously are concerned for our sites to rank highly, not for the later directory copies of our articles (originally indexed on our own sites, of course) to rank highly: we don't want article directories outranking us for our own keywords! :rolleyes:

The only one I know that says this is "Buzzle", which (like many article marketers) is the one I'll never use, for exactly that reason. You have to be able to publish your work on your own site first and get it indexed there, otherwise you'll never create an authority site yourself. Buzzle is the only article directory I know of that rules itself out for article marketing by insisting on that, anyway. I never know quite what people mean by "Web 2.0" sites - sorry: I'm not being pedantic for the sake of it - I know that people use this term with a great variety of meanings, and to me it doesn't mean much at all.

I'm using article directories, where this isn't a consideration.

At EZA, for example, there is a nominal maximum number of articles which one person is allowed to re-publish in one year, but nobody takes any notice of it at all (how was that for a "sweeping generalization"?), and it's a clause that's presumably there only to prevent someone from duplicating the entire EZA site and setting up in opposition to them, re-using all their content, and to give EZA a legal remedy if that ever happened.

Yes, perhaps ... at least in theory. I suspect that pretty often the reality is that if they really like your article and have reasons for wanting to share it with their readers, they'll tolerate a little bit of resource-box promotion, even though it may not quite be "ideal" for them.

Indeed.

When I'm submitting articles to directories, I usually vary one word, or one punctuation-mark, so that I can tell "where they took it from" when it gets syndicated. In practice, it's almost always EZA.

I hear you there, Frank. Well, you and I presumably have it in common - albeit from our different perspectives - that we welcome EZA's slightly stricter approach, higher standards, better editorial guidelines, and so on, and we'd both like it even more if they tightened up a lot further and cleared out a lot of the junk?