Article Marketing Do's and Dont's?

Welcome to the forum,

Backlinks from article directories are USELESS. The actual purpose of article directories is to provide content to ezine publishers who scour these directories looking for quality content that they can share with their readers.

But in order to publish your article, They will have to share your "resource box" which will have a link back to your site. Not only will you get a "legitimate" backlink, But you will also get a good amount of laser-targeted traffic to your site.

This is just a small part of this very awesome marketing strategy.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

You can if it floats your boat. The articles aren't helping or hurting you though. What you're trying to do is article directory marketing (using article directories for backlinks). It was a pretty shaky strategy to begin with, and it is very much dead now. Article directories were never meant for that kind of thing anyways.

Write unique articles? Yes. The internet can always use more good, interesting content. We'll assume for arguments sake that this is what you are writing. Really, you'll only want to submit to EzineArticles to start, and you can add others later if you can find enough webmasters in your niche visiting a directory to make it worthwhile. All this advice has to do with article syndication, explained in these threads:

Article Marketing & Syndication Explained?
Is Article Marketing Dead?! Shocking Interview Gives the Final Answer.


You won't be penalized if you do, but I find that my best results come from tailoring a resource box to each specific article. Kind of make it part of the narrative, you know?

You don't have to give up on directories completely, but definitely give up with what you are doing.

I would continue to submit articles, but quality unique articles per article site. Never use the same article on multiple article sites. Also and this is just me, i only use the top 5-10 article sites.

There are a lot of article directories that will accept anything from duplicate content to clearly spun articles, and these kind of directories are useless/.

I have a question for everyone. Lets say I plan to crank out 4 articles a week in addition to my blog articles. Would it be a better strategy to to submit all 4 articles to one article directory such as Ezine Articles, OR should I spread them out and submit one article to the 4 most popular directories? So, in a month I would either have 16 articles with Ezine OR 4 articles on 4 of the top directories? Thanks.

Can we make the distinction between duplicated and syndicated content, please.

Duplicate content is content appearing multiple times on the same domain.

Syndicated content is content appearing multiple times on various domains, credited to the original author.

Now, continue

hey everyone i am always confused with this. Thanks for sharing this.

Write an unique content, it is always good to post an article with interesting content. write unique articles and submit them to different article directories will get you a good back links as well ezine articles is good to start with.

When it was the "in" thing to do, I followed the crowd and wrote i'd say 100 original articles over months, submitted them to a few (not all) article sites, etc. I watched as a number of sites picked them up and reposted them. All it gave me was a short-lived ego boost and an ever shorter-lived PR hike. Too much of my time was spent on writing for the little I got back.

Thanks Guys!

I know I'm coming across slightly ignorant but it seems to get the best responses

Could you guest post the same article to many websites? Isn't this the same affect as if people were to pull your article from an article directory?

I've tried to submit my original content to article directories like ezine and gave up on it. I'd rather spend my time building a client base, writing unique and high level articles, and then build on my own personal sites. If google decides that ezine and other article directories are junk and decides to blacklist them, then most links generated via those sources are dead.

Build quality content, write content that matters, and repeat. I'd love to price content at .01/word and survive but quality content costs money and that content delivers traffic and profits in the long run.

Hi,

Another quick one.

When it comes to guest posting on relevant websites should you post the article on your own website first or not worry about that as you're getting a nice juicy backlink?

Thanks.

OK OK, will you still benefit from guest posting articles on peoples website without posting it on your own first. People/clients don't always want news/blog sections on there website.

I'm thinking from a backlink point of view.

Do you get less seo benefits/link juice when you don't post the article on your site first?

I get your point Alexa. I'm just saying if I guest post on a website and whether I posted it on my own website first or not it is still a backlink from their website, this as got to be beneficial from an SEO perspective.

If you're guest posting you're going to have to do the syndication yourself by posting the same article on lots of niche websites. people aren't going to be nicking articles off websites and if they are I very much doubt they drag your author bio/link with it.

One thing article marketing does help with is building your reputation in your niche.
I do submit to a couple of the top article directories, but only two or three times a week.

The other thing to remember about articles is they can be repurposed into e-books, slideshows, videos, courses etc. So writing articles and submitting them is not a waste of time.

As for publishing same content on my site first - I do, do that, but I change the wording (not through spinning), but manually, so people who do click on the link do not get to read the same content. The article on my site also tends to contain more information, more clickable links, more images than the one I submit to article directories.

Since Penguin and Panda article directories have gone down a lot in search engine estimation as they realised a lot of junk got published there as a means to an ends. I reckon if you submit quality articles and give value to your readers it can't hurt.
That was my two cents...!!

It also depends on what you're driving traffic to.

A service such as a plumber people aren't going to look for a plumber by reading articles they will type plumbers london in Google.

Where as an informative blog is something that would really benefit from article syndication.

picture of an analytics pie chart ain't nothing private, maybe your statistics don't live up to the hype.

You can even edit out the digits in paint.

OK here is an example of syndication in a slightly different way where it wasn't effective and it working is dependent on what you're promoting.

a makeup artist client of mine posted a video on youtube about make up tips, this had a link to her website (I'm guessing this is syndication just a video instead of an article).

The video is relevant like an article and the people are watching the video so obviously interested.

She got 7,500 visitors to her website in 1 day because of this video BUT didn't get one enquiry...

This is because it was people all over the world and someone watching the video from brazil didn't fancy travelling to england for an eyebrow wax.

Article syndicating in this case would have the same unsuccessful results.

This proves a. YOU ARE RIGHT quality content/videos drive traffic to your website but b. whether it is successful or not depends on what you're offering.

Please can we agree on something haha.

Also does it not make it difficult to submit an article to another website after already posting it on your own, People want fresh unique to them content, I doubt they would approve an article you've already submitted somewhere else?

I have only one "don't" for article writing. Don't write crap. Make sure you know your subject well enough to write unique information. If you are just looking at a few other "articles" and then regurgitating the SOS even in your own words - you are writing crap. You should be familiar enough with your own niche, or the niches you write paid material about - and have enough writing skill - to put together something that isn't crap. If you can't - buy your material.

Just a minor clarification, as long as we're talking semantics...

Posting a video on Youtube is just that - posting content on a content site. It becomes syndication when someone sees that video and embeds it on their site, in the same way an article becomes "syndicated content" when someone republishes it.

Posting content on a content-sharing site, whether it's Youtube or EzineArticles, simply makes your content available for syndication.

I'm sure you know that simply ranking well for a given keyword is no guarantee of either wealth or traffic. Over millions of searches, some statistics may say that a given position gets xx% of the available clicks. But for any given search, you aren't dealing with "law of large numbers" statistics. You are dealing with one human being trying to accomplish one thing.

When they land on the serp with your link, it's just the beginning. You have to attract their attention, motivate the click, and keep them from being distracted by 20-30 other actions they could take.

That's one reason for downplaying the SEO benefits of any scheme (scheme in its benign meaning) of link building. Scan through both the main forum and the SEO section, and you find people perplexed because they reached position x for [keyword] with y,yyy searches and they aren't getting any visitors - human ones, anyway.

Another thing to consider, even if you buy the clicks vs. position stats, is that those stats are based on the number of available clicks, not the number of times a given term in searched for. I've read that a better than fair percentage of searches result in a refined search rather than a click-through.

Article marketing is almost dead now. But it still helps in some links although they are of low quality.
If you want you can try them out and see the end results.