Link Building #3 – Article Marketing
The third link building strategy that I have employed for my niche sites (and now I’m going to start doing it for this blog) is article marketing.
What is Article Marketing?
Article marketing is the process of writing an article that relates to your website and submitting it to a selection of the many article directories on the Internet. The article directories are provided as repositories of information for content publishers that need content but cannot create it themselves. For example, somebody may want to build an email list of tips in his niche but not have enough tips to use so he could go to an article directory and use the articles found to publish to his list.
How Does Article Marketing Help With Link Building?
The authors don’t publish articles out of pure generosity. Part of the terms that the publishers agree to is that the entire article must be used as-is with all links intact. The article author is invited to publish a short bio along with one or more links (this will vary according to the article directory) with each article.
This facilitates link building in two ways. Firstly, when you submit an article to the article directory, a copy of the article is published at the directory itself so your links appear there. Some of the directories like EzineArticles have very high PR and the article pages themselves can build good PR over time and these can count as very strong backlinks to your site.
Secondly, if a publisher uses your article then assuming he follows the rules and takes the article in its original form with links intact, if he publishes it to the web somewhere (as opposed to say an email list), that will result in further backlinks to your site though these are often of a lower quality than the original backlink from the article directory.
Article Marketing Can Also Drive Traffic
When I first experimented with article marketing which was over a year ago now I bought Josh Spaulding’s book Article Marketing Domination (now on it’s 5th update). He uses article marketing primarily to drive traffic and sees the link building aspect of it as secondary. A few weeks ago we exchanged a few emails and I asked him if his position has changed and it hadn’t.
How does article marketing drive traffic? Due to the power of the article directories themselves. There are a handful of really big directories such as Ezine Articles and Go Articles and these get thousands of visitors every day. They showcase popular articles in each category and a top article can gain thousands and thousands of views over time. Also, Ezine Articles in particular has fantastic ranking ability in Google and if you craft your article with SEO in mind, it will rank highly for your chosen keyword which drives traffic to the article which in turn drives traffic to your links.
How to Craft Your Articles
This is the tricky part. What Josh does is write 2 articles. He takes one of them and submits it to just 5 of the very best directories in order to gain the maximum amount of traffic. To do this the article is going to need a catchy headline that actually entices people to read it. In addition, in order for that article traffic to convert into real traffic to your site the reader would actually have to be compelled to read your whole article and then click through to the links at the bottom. In other words, you have to create really high quality, compelling content!
For his second article, he simply submits this to about 30-50 of the best directories that don’t fall into his top 5 – these ones are mainly for the backlinks.
I used a variation on his strategy for the article marketing I did with my AdSense sites. I checked the article directories for other articles in the niches that I was in and they were all very crowded with hundreds of articles on those topics already. The top articles in those categories already had thousands of views so I didn’t think it would be possible to write a really popular article that would drive any significant amounts of traffic. Therefore, I wrote all of my articles with SEO in mind.
Recall that I created these sites using the keyword sniping strategy which aims to build the whole site around a single keyword. Every piece of content on the sites was targetting the same keyword and likewise, every article that I wrote for directories was also targetting that same keyword. It is not easy coming up with that much content for a single keyword!
So for each article, the primary consideration was the keywords – each article was as highly optimised to my chosen keywords as my site content and in the bio for the articles I included links back to my sites with that keyword as my anchor text. I then used a 3-article strategy. The first article was submitted to all PR6+ sites, the second to PR4 & PR5 sites and a third article to all PR3 sites.
The Duplicate Content Issue
Duplicate content is simply having multiple copies of the same piece of text on either multiple pages within one website or on multiple sites. Some people get quite worried about duplicate content and feel that it must be wrong but all that happens is that Google tries to filter it out so that a searcher is not presented with multiple copies of the same content in his search results. If one of your pages or your articles gets filtered, nothing bad has happened, you’re not being penalised, it’s just not showing in the serps. Do the backlinks still count? I don’t know. Somebody with more SEO knowledge will have to answer that one.
However, there is another issue. Most article directories are aware that your articles are unlikely to be exclusive and they only ask that they are original (ie not an article you have scraped from Wikipedia for instance!) and yours to publish. But there are some directories that do want exclusive articles that haven’t been published elsewhere. Is it worth the bother? This depends on your goals.
For my niche sites, I am just building a few links and considering the time it takes to write a unique article, I want to try and get more than one link from that unless it is very strong. Certainly at this stage in the AdSense project I would not want to invest wads of time when the income is so low. So far I haven’t had an article rejected for being a duplicate but if I did I’d just ignore it and move on. However, I am going to start article marketing for this blog and in that case I do feel it is worth the time to develop exclusive articles for specific directories such as EA.
Article Submission
Submitting your article to 30+ directories can take longer than writing the original article! I did try various article submission programs but I’m not going to tell you about them because quite frankly, they were all crap! I decided to simply do it manually and yes it is tedious but you know you’re getting it right that way.
You might be expecting me to publish a list of directories that I submit to but I’m not going to simply because it’s one of those things that gets out of date really quickly and I don’t want an out of date list on this blog and I don’t want the timesink of keeping it updated. Instead here is my suggestion – use whatever resources you can to find article directories. For example, a good place to start is obviously Google and another thing I do when looking for stuff like this is use the Firefox plugin SearchStatus which allows you to right click and see related links.
Next, put these on a spreadsheet and note down the PR of each one – easily done with the above plugin which shows the PR and Alexa Rank of every site your visit in the status bar. Order your directories according to PR and when you submit, just keep going from the highest to the lowest until you get bored! As you visit the directories, keep an eye on the PR and update your spreadsheet as they do change. I saw a PR6 directory drop to a PR3 recently.
Don’t bother submitting to anything less than a PR3 but do keep them on your list and then perhaps every month or two just visit them to see if the PR has raised to PR3 or above.
A Note About PageRank
Something I’d like to point out here – just because a directory has a certain PR does not mean that any article you submit to it will automatically have the same PR to pass to your site. New pages will always start out unranked and it takes time for the PR to pass around but usually, it will happen quicker on a directory with high PR. In some cases though it is even possible for an internal page to have a higher PR than the home page – I have a couple of posts on this blog with a higher PR than the home page.
One thing you can do to help it along is to plow a few backlinks into your article pages. Note that I only do this on the big ones – PR6 or above and no I don’t write articles to the articles as that could just go on forever! I simply do a round of social bookmarking to the article pages of the articles at the biggest directories such as Ezine articles to give it a little boost.
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SEO Diva
November 26, 2008
Caroline, this is a great article! The way you explain article marketing makes more sense to me than many other posts I’ve read.
I’ve been discounting it to some degree but you’ve inspired me to give it a try again.
Thanks!
Kay
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