How Article Marketing Works
Article marketing is one of the easiest and fastest ways to get traffic to a brand new website. It’s used both by beginning marketers and by multi-million dollar companies.
What is article marketing? How does it work? Let’s go over a broad overview of the basics.
How It Works
The term “article marketing” actually encompasses a pretty wide range of different techniques.
In the broadest sense, any time you’re distributing articles with a link back to your website for the purposes of SEO, branding, or traffic, you’re using article marketing.
Article marketing, when done well, can consistently drive hundreds if not thousands of visitors to your site.
Because you’re getting more backlinks, you’ll also rank better in the search engines. Finally, because people keep seeing your name on different sites all over the net, you’ll build your brand.
Why Put Articles on Other People’s Sites?
Why put articles on other people’s websites, instead of on your own? There are a few reasons.
First of all, if your site is relatively new, it doesn’t yet have the weight and reputation that some of these other sites have. Other sites already have backlinks, longevity, and reputation.
In other words, the same article that might rank in the top five on someone else’s site may not rank at all when it’s placed on your site, simply because your site doesn’t pull the same weight (yet).
Also, if you get your article on someone else’s website in your industry, you get to tap into their existing reader base and existing base of traffic.
Finally, the one-way backlinks you get by writing articles for others can make a big difference in your rankings.
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The Process from A to Z
The process of article marketing usually looks something like this:
First, you start with a title or keyword that you want to target. The title is attention-catching, designed to get people from search engines or other people’s sites to click on the article.
The keyword should also be carefully chosen to maximize search engine traffic.
You write the article, doing whatever research you need throughout the process. The final article should be at least 400 words long, preferably as long as 1,000 words.
The article is then submitted to other sites. These can be sites of other bloggers, other industry websites, or just article directories.
Once your article gets ranked, you’ll start to see a consistent flow of traffic coming in from the articles and from search engines.
That’s an overview of the overall process. Of course, each segment has its own quirks and challenges. For example, how do you choose a good keyword?
How do you get someone to click on the link to your website? How do you get other bloggers to let you write on their blogs?
In this article series, we’ll explore these questions in-depth and a lot more.
How to Write for Other People’s Sites
One of the most effective ways to get traffic to a blog or website is to guest blog. Guest blogging allows you to bring someone else’s existing audience to your website.
You make use of all the months and years of effort they’ve put into building their audience. In fact, if you could just do one guest blog post a week, you’ll very quickly find your site’s popularity going higher and higher.
How do you land guest blog gigs? How do you make sure your blog posts bring people to your site?
Approaching Other Bloggers
The most important thing to remember when you’re approaching other bloggers is to realize that you’re asking them for an equal value deal.
People who approach blog owners as if they’re asking them for a favor stack the deck against themselves before they’ve even put a proposal on the table.
So how do you ask for the deal?
First, outline exactly how it’ll work. Tell them what you’d like to write about. Give them a few potential topics.
Tell them all they need to do is copy and paste it onto their websites.
Outline what the benefits are for them and why you’d want to give them free content. Emphasize that it’ll be a win/win for everyone. Make it seem as risk-free as possible.
Then ask for the “order.” Give them a link to your site so they can gauge the quality of your content and make sure that you share similar values.
Assuming they like your site and like who you are, they’ll probably respond.
You won’t get every site you ask to write for. If you approach many sites, you’ll get many “no’s” and no-responses. But you’ll also get a lot of people who say “yes.” And that’s what matters.
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How to Write a Great Guest Post
First of all, get to know their audience. Each site has a slightly different vibe, with an audience that cares about slightly different things.
Get to know the specific vibe of each audience before you start writing.
Connect with your readers first before you write your post. People want to know who you are and why you’re qualified to teach before they’ll open their hearts and minds to listening to what you have to say.
Finally, once you get into the heart of the content, give it your 100%. Give them the best quality content you can and don’t worry about selling.
The goal of the article shouldn’t be to sell to someone on a click-through but to write an article that’s so good that they’ll seek out the link in your bio box.
Make people want to know more by giving them a taste of what you have to offer.
That’s how to approach blog and site owners and offer to do a guest blog post. It’s not difficult. All it takes is commitment and persistence.
How to Make the Most of Article Directories
Article directories are the easiest source of backlinks and traffic possible through article marketing.
All you need to do is sign up for an account and submit your article. Assuming your article meets their guidelines, you’ll be up and running within a day to a week.
Here are a few tips for getting the most bang for your buck with article directories.
Find and Use Do-Follow Directories
Many directories put a NoFollow tag on their outbound links. What does that mean?
It means that although Google will see those links coming into your site, they won’t give you “credit” for having a backlink. The link will have no positive SEO properties.
Naturally, you’re much better off with Do-Follow directories than NoFollow. Look for Do-Follows and focus your energy on those directories.
Use a Range of Different Directories
When Google is counting links, your site will get a lot more credit if you had 100 links from 100 different websites than if you had 100 links from one website.
Of course, it’s not quite feasible to submit a different article to a different directory every time. But it does pay to vary it up.
Perhaps every ten articles, switch to a different directory. This will give you a wide base of backlinks, which will increase your rankings.
Use the Big Ones for Traffic
Use well-known, high PR article directories like EzineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticleAlley for raw traffic.
Because these sites have such a high PR and so much relevance in Google’s eyes, your articles are more likely to rank than if you put them on any other website.
Again, get a mix. Don’t put all your articles on just one big directory, as the backlinks won’t get as much credit.
But do put some of your articles on the heavy hitters, as you’ll get more traffic that way.
Try Auto-Submission
There are a lot of article marketing programs out there that can make the submission process much simpler for you.
All you need to do is plug in your login information and hit a button and the software will do the rest.
If you’re just doing an article here and there, you probably don’t need to use the software.
But if you’re submitting dozens of articles every month, then the three minutes you save from having to submit an article can really add up.
These are a few ways to really get the most out of article directories. Make sure you use Do-Follow directories. Mix things up and get a range of different backlinks.
Use well-known directories for raw traffic. And finally, learn to use auto-submission programs if you’re submitting articles on a regular basis.
