Article Marketing Strategy – Refine Your Method

There are many different methods of which allow us to boost our rankings in the search engines, and one that has been proven over time to be the most effective of them all is in having the right article marketing strategy. Now, I wont beat around the bush too much here, but there is a lot of talk about how ineffective this method can be, and in order to address this point I will say that article marketing is not a two dimensional strategy. It is a whole plethora of methods that work great when linked together. It is as simple as that, and to be honest, if you fail to get things right from the start, it is either going to end up messy, or ineffective. Shall I start?

Ezine Articles

The most popular directory for online article submission, but why exactly is this the case? Simple. It is a high page rank website that allows members to submit articles for publishing, and has some of the most strict requirements for publishing of all the directories. This practice has made Ezine Articles the most popular source for content for webmasters, which is great news for all, as the only requirement for republishing works is that all articles must include the author credit text. Naturally, this will include an anchor text backlink to your site.

The benefits of submitting to Ezine Articles are huge. As much as we would like to believe that all articles that are republished will include the author credit text, this is not going to be the case always. In fact, I would be lucky to see 10% of my republished articles include my link, but that is ok. In fact, in most cases, these sites link straight back to the article, which works wonders in boosting the PageRank of that individual page, which in turn passes on valuable link juice to my site.

Is Article Spinning Right Or Wrong?

There is a lot of heated debate in the SEO and internet marketing circles about the topic of including article spinning in your article marketing strategy. Some say that it is just lazy, and doesn’t add anything valuable to the internet, and others say that it is simply a method that works. Look… I’m not going to talk my way out of it, I spin articles like there is no tomorrow. I am a business owner, and in running and promoting that business, I need to use methods that work that are good time value. As it happens, creating a unique variation of an article for submission elsewhere works wonders for me in many ways, and often allows me to spread links further.

Generally, this is done after Ezine Articles have accepted the article, with the unique variation submitted to services such as Content Crooner, as to cover the second tier article directories.

Blog Network Submission

This is the part of the whole article marketing strategy that really dominates, in particular, for those very tough keywords. First things first, you are going to need a membership with a blog network. Finding these can at times be a hard task, however, I know of a few that are extremely good value for money.

Article Marketing Automation is a great service from Daniel Turner and Marc Lindsay, and is the most affordable blog network submission service that I use. At 47$ USD per month, you are free to submit an article using the spin syntax, that will be automatically spun and drip fed to their network of blogs of varying PageRank. I have found this service to be massively effective, and some of the best bang for buck that is available on the internet today.

The Article Marketing Strategy Order

Yes! There is an order in which things should be done, keeping in mind that certain services do not allow duplicate content. In general, you will allow Ezine Articles time to approve your article before spinning and submitting elsewhere, as this will trigger their duplicate content alarm. The ramifications of this can be quite bad, including deletion of your account.

Another thing to remember that is of great importance is that there is simply no such thing as a hard and fast rule. All results are achieved over time. In almost all cases where a ton of backlinks suddenly appear for a website or a page, Google will notice that this looks unnatural, and this will almost always result in a loss in rankings. Having said that, it is imperative to remember to drip feed all submissions. Take one article, and drip feed it to your chosen networks (depending on quantity) over the course of a week or two. Its as simple as that.

This all sounds pretty effective doesn’t it? Well, I don’t mean to blow my own trumpet here, but it is damn effective, and it has helped me dominate many very competitive keywords within a matter of weeks, and it will help you do just the same. However, an article marketing strategy really doesn’t mean anything unless you pick the right keywords. Consider the potential of your traffic, and the best way that I can go through this is to make the following (and slightly unusual) statement:

Define a desired action that you want your visitors to take, step into the mindset of that user, define the keywords that they will be searching in Google, then define what it takes to get the to take that desired action.

One Last Thing…

I am currently in development of a short course that covers the most extensive article marketing strategy that is currently available online. I’m not even going to charge that much for it, so for the moment, if you want to keep up to date with what is going on (and to get on the early bird list), take a moment to sign up below this post by entering your e-mail. You can also follow me on Twitter for updates.