Article marketing can be one of the most effective ways to promote your blog or website. After all, the Internet is all about providing people with information, or, in other words, content.
Every webmaster or blogger needs content, whether it be body copy, articles, audio, video, infographics, charts and graphs, photographs, or news feeds. That’s probably the reason for the old Internet marketing adage, “Content is king.”
Google also likes content. It’s something analogous to a schoolteacher asking a question of her class (somebody making a search) with millions of students all raising their hands and crying out “Pick me, pick me!” The “students,” of course, are all of the websites and blogs trying to be first in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
How is our schoolteacher to know which of all of the students have the best answer? Obviously, Google uses certain criteria to judge the value of websites. That criteria is page rank (PR), and one of the factors Google weighs most heavily is the number of other sites pointing or linking to one’s own, each of which is seen as a “vote” for that site.
The question is, how do you get other sites to link to yours? Fortunately, there are a number of options. These include exchanging links, buying links from sites with a high page rank, leaving relevant comments that contain your website address on other blogs, writing product testimonials that include a backlink to your own site, availing yourself of reciprocal link directories, which serve as go-betweens between sites and bloggers, and so on.
However, of all the methods of getting backlinks, article marketing can be one of the most effective.
Reciprocal linking is fine, except that search engines such as Google will compare the inbound and outbound links a site has. One-way links to a site, especially from high PR sites, carry more weight as far as page rank goes.
Google realizes that reciprocal linking is linking by arrangement and that it is not what is considered as “natural” linking. Besides, like all methods of site promotion, reciprocal linking can be time-consuming, so you might as well focus on the things that are the most effective.
Anchor Text Links
This is where article marketing comes in, and it can be a good method to get one-way links to your site. You see, every article you write has something called a resource box, which is a sort of “mini advertisement” for your site, along with a backlink to your site. From your perspective, this is the most important component of the article. The backlink in your resource box should be “live” and “clickable,” meaning that it is a hyperlink to your site.
Ideally, you would make the backlink an anchor text link, or text that describes the theme of your site and contains the URL at the same time. If your site was about the Apple iPod, the backlink might be the word “iPod,” rather than just being the URL of your site. Of course, you want your site to gain credibility for more than just one keyword.
Creating anchor text is relatively simple. In KompoZer, the open-source HTML editor for Mac and PC, all you need do is select the text you wish to be anchor text, click the Link button in the toolbar, and paste the desired URL into the Link Location field of the resulting dialog box. The resulting HTML code takes the form of:
<a href=”http://yoururl.com”>your anchor text</a>
Such anchor text can aid the search engines in associating the URL of your site to the anchor text word or phrase that you are promoting. The search engines would determine not only that your site is important but that it is relevant to the term “iPod.” However, this is not always possible.
The most important thing is that the resource box contains an enticement for readers of the article to actually come to your site. You can mention that you have more content on the same subject and perhaps a free gift that is likely to be of interest to the readers of the article. You want to promise either a huge benefit or the avoidance of pain by visiting your website.
Distributing the Article
Once you have written your article and created a compelling resource box, it is time to submit it to the article directories.
Such directories typically contain thousands of articles in hundreds of different categories. There are a lot of them out there, so you should focus on the ones that have the highest pagerank.
Why should you give your article away for free to an article directory? Because it will provide a single backlink to your site. Some say it will do more than that.
The theory of article directories is that, once your article is placed there, it begins to develop a life of its own. Webmasters will place it on their sites and ezines, publishers will use it in their publications, offline publishers may include it in their print publications, and bloggers will use it on their blogs, resulting in a sort of instant syndication of your article via their RSS feeds across the Internet.
Do not expect it to usually work this way, however. Unfortunately, despite the rules of most article directories, most websites that use your article (even if they include your resource box) will not include a live link to your website. Some won’t include your resource box at all!
It’s wrong and it’s unethical, but that’s the way it it works this world of ours. Consider the article directories themselves as your main source of backlinks.
If webmasters who use your article omit a clickable hyperlink to your site, it is possible that, if your resource box text is compelling enough, interested visitors will go to the extra trouble to copy the hyperlink and paste it into their browser’s address field (that’s assuming that those who use your article will actually use the resource box).
I once checked occurrences of an article on the Web that I had submitted to EzineArticles.com. Of the three sites that reprinted the article, one included the resource box (but without a clickable hyperlink to my site), one removed the resource box, linking back only to the original article on EzineArticles.com (thanks for that), and the third gave me no attribution whatsoever. All three actions are a violation of EzineArticles.com’s terms of service, but they are a common practice anyway.
Article “Spinners”
Another popular idea of article marketers is that running their content through a “spinner” is a quick way to create a large number of unique articles, and thus a large number of backlinks.
A spinner is software that substitutes words and phrases in an article for synonyms, making it appear to be a different article, although it is actually saying the same thing. However, every article run through the spinner has to be set up in advance with the proper synonyms, and, in addition, each “spun” article should be proofread for grammar afterwords. This requires so much work that it is questionable whether such spinning actually saves much time.
Moreover, the better quality article directories will not accept any content that reeks of having been “spun.” EzineArticles.com, which runs all submissions past a human editor, uses the colorful term of “article vomit” to describe such material and rejects it.
Another problem with the “quantity over quality” method is that spun articles must be distributed to those article directories that will accept them. This is a very time-consuming process in itself.
Guest Blogging
If you wish to ensure a live link to your site on a variety of other websites besides article directories, then you will have to submit your articles to sites and blogs personally, and promise them exclusive access to the article. It’s more work, but it’s a truism in life that rewards are usually commensurate with the amount of work you are willing to put in.
The higher the PR of the sites you submit to that use your articles, the more link juice you will get back to your own site, but the higher quality your articles will have to be in the first place. You get out of this method what you put into it.
Such blogs demand unique content because of the “duplicate content penalty.” They know that duplicate content reduces the PR of their own site, or at least fails to increase it. This is why you should submit only unique content as a guest blogger, and once that content is used, you should mark it as off-limits to anyone else, including your own blog.
The process of article submission takes some time to build up momentum, and that’s not entirely a bad thing. The search engines perceive the growth in your traffic as natural and will reward you accordingly. You don’t want to be penalized for apparently engaging in some kind of “black hat” tactics.
Article marketing and guest blogging is one of the best ways to get the search engines to notice your site and to index it. Once a link from your article in the article directory is followed by a search engine, it will be informed of the existence of your site and it will be able to add your site to its list of sites to index.
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