Some questions about article marketing

I'll do my best to offer what information I have.

1. SEO is very important, and either you must do the keyword research yourself, or have the article writer do it entirely. Generally, more unique, quality content is better.

For example, if you have an outstanding article that contains a couple of links to other people's sites, then that person may (not necessarily) be willing to do the same. This will add to your page rank, jus as having a link to your article from an authentic reader will, on a comments section, for instance.

2. You can submit your articles to whichever site you like, as long as there is a back link to your page. With google the way it is, having 1000 back links to an article that is not unique, does not contain quality information, etc., is worse, than having 10 back links to an article that does have these qualities. The reason for this is that the more back links you have to garbage content is actually a negative toward you page and domain rank.

Any high-authority directories you submit unique, high-quality content to are valuable. At the same time, they are a strategy that you should use in addition to social media and many other strategies, in order to fully utilize your articles' ROI.

3. You may spin articles, although its not nearly as good as having real, unique, valuable content. Also keep in mind that social media is very important. Having an article that many people have shared will increase your page rank and domain authority much more than having many more garbage articles.

4. You get what you pay for. If you're willing to do the research (or have someone do it for you) and come up with high-quality, educational, informative and entertaining content, then you have much higher probability of someone actually seeing it (and even sharing it).

Although I am not professional in any of these areas, they are some things you should consider. From here, you can look into anything from, what the google keyword tool is, what are authority web sites, and how to utilize social media, to how to use social media in conjunction with other strategies to increase page rank.

1. I recommend you use as many words to say what needs to be said in the fewest words possible. I mean, let the topic you're writing about determine the length of the article. If you can say everything in 100 words, use 100.

2. Submitting to article directories is the passive, less useful way of doing article marketing. If you're brand new, it's a good place to start. Watch out for where your articles end up being reposted. If you like the site, contact the site owner, offer him / her first dibs on articles or propose to write articles with their audience in mind. That said, publish everything on your site first...

Google 'top article directories' and go with the top 5 (you'll see the same ones again and again).

3. You don't have to spin. If you publish on your site, wait for the article to be indexed, it makes no difference how many times you republish it.

4. Article marketing is about getting quality writing in front of people who're looking for what you promote by getting your article published by websites whose visitors are looking for what you promote.

Article directory marketing is about publishing one article in many directories and getting backlinks and whatever visitors you can from the directory.

You're more likely to make a sale if you do article marketing than if you do article directory marketing (more targeted audience).

Article marketing is not what it use to be. It does not bring the traffic it use to and the articles don't get ranked in the search engines like they use to. Doubt the back links are much value any more. It was always a time consumer and now it takes even more time.

Honestly your time would be better invested in social media. Guest blogging would also be a much better choice for your articles.

Just the other day I received an email from an article directory that use to be one of the decent ones, now they are pushing their writing services. Maybe their directory is not doing as well as it use to?

You are doing it for SEO right? Don't do it!! See what Matt Cuts (Google engineer) has to say on the topic in this video.

Thank you guys for the helpful answer. Really appreciate it so much.

Thank you.

It would have been good if Alexa Smith could post on this thread. I think we need some things cleared from her in this thread.

I'm not sure if Article marketing is relevant anymore as far as SEO is concerned. Look up Google for what Matt Cutts has to say on the topic and you'd know why I'm saying this.

Not sure how much I can add to what was (I hope!) fairly thoroughly explained by Steven Wagenheim and myself in this recent, little thread: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post9272650

This is completely wrong: you've apparently confused article marketing with article directory marketing. Article marketing has nothing to do with SEO. Article directory marketing doesn't work at all: it was only ever based on a fundamental (albeit very widespread) misunderstanding of what an article directory is.

Anyway, if it helps anyone, I'm happy to offer answers, with more detailed explanatory links, to each of the OP's questions.

Yes; word-count makes an enormous difference, for many different reasons. For "article marketing", it's extremely unlikely that 300-500 words will have any value at all.

A 1,000-word, article, in any of my niches, will always earn me far more money than two 500-word guest-posts.

Here are a few little threads - well worth reading! - which will help you to appreciate this very widely misunderstood point about article length.

What Word Count Do You Use For Your Articles?

Number of Words for Original Content

A 500 word article will always outperform a 1000 word article

Article Marketing, Articles that are 2400 Words Long?

What is "quality content" "awesome content" mean?

Is it worth it to bring my article up to 1000 words?

Yes; EZA only. Once your article is there, there's normally no additional benefit arising at all from also having a copy of the article in another article directory, too. This point's more fully explained in this recent thread: http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post9264454

You can, but I advise against it. Not because of "duplicate content" (it has absolutely nothing to do with that, at all) but because you won't benefit from it, and if you do too much of it in article directories, there are some potential risks involved.

This post explains what article directories are for, and how to use them.

And this post explains why no article marketer who understands how directories work would actually want to attract potential customer traffic to their own site via an article directory.

Not beneficially, no. It's possible that if you do too much of it in article directories, your PR could suffer a lot (that's happened to many Warriors), but it doesn't matter because it can bring no additional benefit, anyway.

No. Don't do that.

No.

Spinning is total nonsense.

It's a "solution to a problem that doesn't actually exist": a solution of benefit only to people selling spinning software and services.

"Spinning" is without value. It can damage your business, but it can't help you. Everyone who actually makes a living from article marketing (rather than from supplying spinning software or services) says the same things about spinning. And there are reasons for that.

The whole thing is based on a fallacy, and a misunderstanding about what "duplicate content" and "syndicated content" mean and signify.

The value of a backlink doesn't depend on whether the content to which it's attached is "unique" or "previously published": it depends on many other things, but that isn't one of them, and Google says so openly.

For people open-minded enough to read them, the following six items explain much more, at greater length and in greater detail.

• this post explains the benefits of spinning
• the first half (or so) of this thread contains a good discussion of what you can gain from spinning articles
• the advice on this subject given by so many people throughout most of this thread has been really helpful to many people here
• on the meaning and significance of "duplicate content", in this context, this little post from expert article marketer Anne Pottinger includes direct quotations from Google's WebMaster Central Blog on the subject (not easy to find a more authoritative source than that!)
• this little article is also a very useful and accurate explanation of the subject
• this post, and its links, explain in detail the closely related subject of how article directories really work and why they exist

No, definitely not. Ezine Articles is the only directory to which I submit my articles (and that only as a minor, last-stage afterthought to the article marketing process), and you don't need any software to do that, other than EZA's own inbuilt software on their site.

If it helps anyone, here's a one-post overview of "how article marketing works": http://www.warriorforum.com/main-int...ml#post5035794