If you’re read the ultimate money making guide and my post about how to make cash online, then you’re familiar with some of the best strategies for producing full-time income with the internet.
However, as I’ve said before, in order to make money anywhere you’re going to be selling something to somebody else, in one form or another. In order to do this (and to do it it with any measure of success) you’re going to need people to actually look at the products you’re offering. In terms of internet marketing, this means you need a consistent, steady, flow of relevant traffic, generally in the form of search engine users.
In this article, I’m going to cover my preferred method for achieving Page Rank-boosting backlinks and exposing your preferred platform for making money (be it a free HowHub or a full blown hosted website) to not just as many people as possible, but as many of the RIGHT people as possible.
Make the Most of Your Efforts
Building backlinks is the most tedious part of SEO-driven marketing efforts, so it’s doubly important to make the most of everything you do; article marketing in particular is one of my favorite options, because you can easily triple or quadruple the benefit of a single article with little additional effort.
Article Marketing
If you’re not already familiar with it, article marketing consists of writing an article of approximately 450 — 750 words on a specific subject, and submitting it to free online article directories. An article directory is simply a website that is made up of nothing but user-submitted articles (as well as advertisements.)
Anyone can take the articles and reuse them on their own website or blog, provided they don’t alter the article and credit the original author. The benefit for you as a marketer is that most directories allow 2 – 3 dofollow backlinks at the bottom of the article.
Some of the best known article directories are:
This is just the beginning — there are litterally thousands of directories on the Internet, and nothing to say you can’t submit the same article multiple times. And at two backlinks a pop, you’re starting to look at some very significant numbers.
The problem? It’d take about the rest of your life to submit ONE article to all those directories. You have to register an account for each one (including email confirmation,) format the article according to the site’s guidelines and submission standards, add or subtract based on minimum/maximum word requirements, figure out which category best suits your article (and trust me, their all organized differently,) plus deal with whatever additional errors and flukes happen to come up. It’s tedious, it’s a headache, and the benefits in no way justify the amount of time spent.
This Is Where Submission Tools Come In Handy
Don’t discount all those potential backlinks just yet, though — after all, this article is about the perks of article marketing, not the evils.
Of course, where there are article markteres, there are article marketing services. If you’re a cheapskate marketer who uses every free tool in the (SEO) book to get things done, this is the one thing you don’t want to skimp on. There are free tools, yes, and I’m even going to describe a few of them to you, but they don’t even come close to matching the results the paid services will bring you.
Dollar for dollar, an article marketing service is going to be your greatest internet marketing investment.
A Few Words on Paid Services
My goal here isn’t to sell you on these services.
Beyond that, though, if you’re really serious about going into business for yourself, either online or offline, you’re going to have to realize at some point that you can’t do everything yourself. There’s just no way. Shedding the grunt mentality and hiring others to do the repetitive labor or other specific functions is fundamental part of running a successful business. But we’ll save that topic for another day.
I also understand if you’re just getting started and don’t have a lot of capital to invest right now. Still, I recommend reading my summary of some of the available services to familiarize yourself with them, for when the time comes. Afterwards, I’ll tell you about some of the free techniques you can get started with right now.
My Favorite Article Marketing Services
- Article Marketer — This is number one on the list for good reason: it’s absolutely hands down the best bang for your buck. They offer quarterly, annual and lifetime subscriptions starting at $99 ($34/mo) and unlimited article submissions to their database of over 3000 article directories. This is huge, because everyone else either limits the number or charges per article, and no one offers that main directories. HIGHLY recommended.
- iSnare — A good choice if you’re on a tigher budget, because iSnare requires no monthly fees. You purchase submission credits from $10 — $100; the more you spend, the cheaper each submission is. They submit to over 1000 directories, so it’s an effective alternative.
- JetSubmitter — I like JetSubmitter because it incorporates the concept of spinning (automated rewriting of your original article so each submission is actually completely unique. Spinning == better quality backlinks.) into the service. It also submits to 1000+ plus websites at an affordable monthly rate; the spinning tool is completely free.
- Free Traffic System — This the best tool for those on a serious budget because, as the name implies, it’s free! (I’ll go into that later.) There’s also a paid version that gets you 500+ guaranteed backlinks per article you submit, and they’re all in-content links which impart a greater value. It’s cheap and effective, and it also does article spinning, so overall you get some seriously high quality backlinks.
There are a number of other services not listed here (Unique Article Wizards and Submit Your Articles come to mind,) which I may or may not include in this list after I’ve had a chance to review them. Overall, though, these four cover all the basic needs you’ll have as an article marketer and provide excellent value for services rendered.
Economical Article Marketing (Read: Free)
As previously stated, there’s no way you’re going to be able to manually submit your article to thousands of directories, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to benefit from article marketing. You’re just have to go about things a bit different.
A couple things to keep in mind:
- Choose only quality article directories. Sites like Ezine and GoArticles have around a PR6, which A) provides a stronger backlink, and B) gets your article ranked higher in Google with less effort. The Directory of Ezines can help you build a good list.
- Write shorter articles. Since you’re going to be writing a lot of them. With Article Marketer, a single article will get you potentially six thousand backlinks, and definitely no less than 400. If you hand submit one article to twenty directories (and it’ll take you about an hour) you’ll get forty. Wow. Forty. Better stop reading this and start writing.
- Write kickass articles. The original basis for article marketing was that publishers would reuse your articles on their own websites, including the links to your site located in the resource box. The better your article, the more widely it will be reproduced, thus adding a viral twist to an otherwise paltry backlinking practice.
- Spin your articles. This is easy to do and (in theory) increases the value of your backlinks (although, some people dismiss the Google Duplicate Content Penalty as myth, and I’m somewhat inclined to agree with them.)
That said, there are a couple of additional pointers anyone starting an article marketing campaign should, whether free or paid, should be aware of.
Basic Article Marketing Tips
As I mentioned before, articles submitted to prominent directories like Ezine will rank easily on #1 SERPs without any additional help from you. This is another angle of article marketing:
Instead of ranking your website for your chosen keywords, rank your ARTICLES for them. This is beneficial in several ways:
- In a lot of cases, it’s easier to rank an Ezine article than it is a brand new website. You can backlink them the same as you would a regular website.
- If you write your article correctly, it can be used to actually presell your visitors on whatever it is you’re offering. If you know anything about affiliate marketing, you know that there’s more to it than just throwing hoplinks around. Presell is crucial.
If you’re going this road, you need to research and choose your keywords the same way you would for a niche website or anything else. You’ll also need to optimize the article for the keyword, by including it in various key places.
Keywords For Article Marketing: What to Look For
As I’ve said before, the two most important pieces of information keywords give us are traffic and CPC. Finding keywords that have both, then optimizing a website for them is the whole point of making money with a blog or niche website.
However, with article marketing, the only one making money from the article is the article directory! Therefore, it is beneficial to target high traffic, low CPC keywords that likely have little competition. This gives article marketing tons of potential. If you can get the thousands of people searching each month on unprofitable keywords to your site, where you’ve already got your adsense and affiliate reviews in place, you are good to go.
There are other sites you can use in your article marketing, such as HowHub, Hubpages, and a handful of actual directories, which will allow you to place Adsense and Amazon or eBay widgets on them; a savvy marketer would take advantage of these as well. In this case, you might target lower traffic, higher CPC keywords that might not otherwise be of any use to you. Backlink these the way you do your main website and articles, and they’ll serve the same purpose while creating an additional stream of revenue.
**Hubs should always be well-constructed and provide useful information, to capitalize on the aspect of networking and interlinking that goes on within the mother site.
A Step by Step Formula
All right, all the scattered technique aside, how about a step by step formula to doing some article marketing, and doing it well? When you’re writing all these articles, you’re sure as shit going to want to take advantage of every conceivable outlet to wring the very last drop of usefulness from each one. This is simply one approach of many, which you’ll probably further modify to suit your own needs and ambitions.
Step 1
Write an article targeting a high traffic low CPC keyword within your niche.
- Consider your title. It must be compelling. Try to imagine what will most interest people searching for that particular keyword. Check out the “Most Viewed Articles” on Ezine and other directories to get an idea of what works.
- Keep it around 450 words and no more than 750. Shorter articles are appealing to readers because they require less commitment.
- Follow a format. Just like fifth grade English class: Introduction, paragraph, paragraph, conclusion. Introduction should describe the question/problem and how you intend to answer/resolve it. Paragraph 1 should contain an example, a useful tip, etc. Paragraph 2 should offer a case study of why your solution works and is the best. If possible, use yourself and empathize with the reader. Conclusion should summarize the article contents.
- Blend your resource box into the end of the article. Include a teaser/call to action. Ie. “For more foolproof ways to get tons of traffic, check out my blog at [link]!” If it were you reading the article, what would make you click on the link?
Step 2
Do a search for your keyword in Google. Is there an Ezine article in the top 10? Submit your article to GoArticles, or vice versa. Put together a list of 10 – 15 top article directories that rank well, and mix things up. Google likes variety.
Step 3
Rewrite your original article. This sounds harder than it is. Just start at the beginning, and change up the wording a bit. Replace words, rearrange sentences, or rewrite them entirely. Going through a moderate sized article line by line should only take about fifteen minutes.
** This step is important if you’re going to use an article submitting service or software, because it easily allows you to whip up a brand new article to submit to directories without compromising the value of the original article. If you’re sticking to the free methods, it’s not really necessary, though it might prove useful for adding content to your own site.
You also want to rethink your links at this time. If you’re mass-submitting, this is the time to use your anchor text, because this is where you’ll be gaining the vast majority of your backlinks. Depending on your goal, you can either link to website using your main keywords, or to your Ezine article using it’s keyword. If you (wisely) plan on doing both, focus your efforts intially on one or the other. This is a rinse && repeat formula.
Step 4
Spin your original article. This is where things start getting interesting. Spinning an article consists of inserting synonyms and variations of some of the words into the text of the article, defined by special “spin tags.” Your synonyms for each word will be inside { } brackets, separated by | vertical line. For example:
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.
Spun, this would look like:
The {quick|fast|swift|speedy|fleet a’ foot} {brown|dark brown|coffee colored|chocolate|mocha} fox {jumped|leaped|catapulted|somersaulted|launched itself} {over|above|clear of} the {lazy|lackadaisical|slothful|lethargic} {dogs|mutts|hounds|beasts}.
In most cases, there’s no need to spin this heavily, though the more variables you use the more unique the final output will be. When you run the spun article through an article spinner, it will output unique articles that use each of the variables in as many combinations as possible. A couple alternatives for this sentence are:
The fast dark brown fox leaped above the lackadaisical mutts.
The swift mocha fox catapulted clear of the slothful beasts.
And so on.
** This step is primarily directed towards the cheapies who will be hand submitting their articles. It allows you to easily create multiple unique versions of an article to submit to the best quality article directories, and also readies them for distribution with FTS. You can also use the spun copies as the basis for a more in-depth hub or page on your own website.
Step 5
Run your spontent (read: spun content) through the spinner. I use JetSpinner, which is free and does the job well. (Simply create a free account to gain full access; you’re in no way obligated to use their submitting service, which is what they charge for.)
Note that the above syntax for spinning the articles (ie. {variable|variable|variable}) is unique to the JetSpinner spinning engine, and as far as I know is not valid for any other spinners.
Double check your article for correct spelling and grammar (there’s nothing more annoying than correcting the same error twenty times) and also insert any necessary formatting such as <b></b> and <i></i> If you write your articles in MS Word, make sure the curly quotes and apostrophes are disabled. And again, you’ll also need to insert the hypertext for your new links, either pointing towards your website or your Ezine article. The spinning tool comes in handy here, because it allows you to easily vary your keyword anchor text. For example:
<a href=”http://lotsofmoney.com”>{Quick money|Easy money|Fast money}</a>
Once everything’s set, copy and paste the article into JetSpinner, and set to output about 20 copies (more or less depending on how many directories you plan on submitting to.)
Step 6
Submit your article(s) to directories. If you’re using a paid service like Article Marketer, submit your article once to 3000 directories, then go take a nap while the other guy spends the next hour and a half submitting his articles to about twenty. We’ll all meet back here after lunch. 
Step 7
Ready your article for submission with Free Traffic System. If you’re a penny-pinching masochist, then FTS is your best friend when it comes to backlinking. If you’re paying for the premium FTS membership, then each submission gains you approximately 500 high quality backlinks, which is nothing to shake a stick at. With as little additional effort as it requires to use, I see no reason for anyone not to capitalize on it.
Modifying your spontent for FTS is simple. Copy/paste the spun article (the one with the { | } spin tags, not the variations JetSpinner spits out) into a fresh Notepad document. Presh Ctrl+H to open the Replace window. In the Find What field enter “{” (sans quotes) and in the Replace With field enter “[spin]“. Click “Replace All” and let it find and replace all the { tags with the [spin] tag. Then, change the Find What field to “}” and the Replace With field to “[/spin]” and click Replace All again. This updates your spin tags so they are FTS compliant.
Next, delete your resource box. FTS allows you to incorporate your links directly into the body of the article. You do so by inserting the %LINK1% and %LINK2% tags where you want each link to appear. Once you’re logged in to the FTS interface, you’ll see where you enter your corresponding URLs and anchor text for both links. (If you’re unfamiliar with FTS, it’s advisable to watch their video tutorials before you submit your first article, to avoid making avoidable mistakes.)
Once again, depending on what you wish to accomplish, you can link back to your original article or to your main website. Submitting your article, including setting up your links, checking the title and body for spintax errors and checking which sites to submit to, should take you around fifteen to twenty minutes.
Step 8
Repeat as desired. If you’re using Article Marketer and FTS as described above, in theory as few as five unique articles can bring you several thousand keyword-rich anchored backlinks. This number can easily be accomplished with a day or two of work. If your sites new, you can direct all these backlinks to your original Ezine articles and get those ranking ASAP.
If you’re working on a budget, you can still manage to gain close to a hundred backlinks from that single article, depending on how many directories you submit it to by hand. I haven’t personally scoured around for them, but if you were to find websites similiar to FTS you’d be able to stretch the value of your articles even further.
You might also look into a one-time investment of an article submitting tool like Mass Article Control or Article Submitter; these are simply pieces of software that will allow you to automate much of the submitting process. It’s still not as streamlined as using a paid service, but it’s a bit more affordable and heckuva lot more efficient than doing it the old-fasioned way.
Something like Instant Article Wizard and a handful of others simplifiy the article rewriting process while maximizing the results. In the past I used a program called WordFlood and found it to operate reasonably well, but recently I discovered the Magic Article Suite which is absolutely fantastic! It combines all three aspects of writing, spinning and submitting into one convenient package. Highly recommended investment.
In Summary
Yet another excessively long article submitted for your approval. (I need to take some of my own advice and write shorter posts.) As always, though, this is probably the most comprehensive guide you’ll find on the subject, with a lot of good practical tips and strategies you can start using right now. If you found it useful in any way, feel free to share with friends and spread the love. Good luck with your article writing!
Related posts:
- Free Traffic Review – If You Want Free Traffic To Your Website Read How To Get Free Traffic Fast
- Mlm Success Training – 3 Reasons Why You Should Seriously Consider Article Marketing
- Article Submitting For The Greatest Search Engine Optimization Improvements
- Making Cash Through Writing Articles And Adding Them To Article Directories
- 3 Quick Suggestions for Promoting Your Blog
voila une info utile merci !
To produce an efficient and smart article marketing campaign it’s a good idea to purchase automation tools. Article spinning and submitter softwares are the best ones you can acquire that are going to massively help you leverage your article marketing campaigns.
Article’s are a great way to build backlinks and drive traffic to your site. I have a site about article marketing, and I was wondering what you guys beleive is the proper technique to market your articles?