How Article Marketing can Help Your Blog
Article marketing is a great way to promote your blog. Many people might think, article marketing is dead or “old”, but the fact it, it’s not. It works, and it works very well.
Basically, you submit an article to the article directories. Once approved, your article will be published in the directory, giving you a backlink and sending you plenty of visitors. Here’s a more thorough explanation of article marketing.
1. Backlinks
The first benefit of article marketing is backlinks. Search engines love the article directories. Most of them have a high PR. Ezinearticles.com has a PR of 6.
Links from these high quality directories can help push your websites to the top of the search engines.
In addition to the links from your articles in the directory, you will also be getting backlinks from reprints of your articles. Other webmasters might stumble upon (what a pun) your articles and they might republish it on their own blog/website/E-zine. Which can get you even more backlinks, and help your website rise above the competition in the search engines.
2. Creditability
Article marketing is also a great way to establish your creditability and your status as an expert in your niche. Show the readers you know what you are talking about through your articles. People are more likely to buy from whom they trust, and article marketing is definitely a great way to build up this trust.
If you have a blog that teaches someone how to do something (like StayOnSearch teaches people how to SEO) then you definitely want to establish your authority over your niche through article marketing.
3. Free Traffic
Perhaps the most important benefit of article marketing is traffic. You can receive a lot of traffic from article marketing alone, free of charge.
Other forms of traffic like PayPerClick, SEO, Banner advertisements all cost money. But article marketing is probably the only way to generate a lot of targeted traffic, completely free of charge.
EzineArticles alone has millions of visitors a month and your blog would be tapping into it for unlimited amounts of free traffic.
Who doesn’t need traffic?
4. Targeted Traffic
The traffic sent from your articles is also highly targeted. The readers have already shown interest in your topic by reading your article and clicking on your link. Which means they will be more willing to buy, or opt-in to your newsletter, as long as it is related to the article.
This means, article marketing will give you a much higher conversion rate than other sources of traffic.
5. Autopilot
Did I mention that all this is done completely on autopilot?
Once your article gets published, and you have done a little bit of promotion (like social bookmarking), you are done! There is no more work for you to do. Visitors will be constantly flowing in to your website, through your articles, 24/7.
Article marketing is the only form of online advertising where it’s completely hands off. Publish an article once, and reap the benefits for a lifetime.
So these are only some of the benefits you get from article marketing. As you can see, article marketing is truly a powerful way of free online advertisement online, which you can use for your own blog. If you are not already using article marketing for your blog, then I highly recommend for you to give it a shot.
What do you think? Do you use article marketing? Have you found article marketing to be effective? What difficulties do you have when doing article marketing?
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13 comments
Do you mean "credibility?"
Hey Daniel,
I liked your article. I have been article marketing for a short time and have success with getting my website and pages indexed and ranked in the serps. I am basically doing as you suggested but the end result I have no sales.
How many articles are to be written? (I know you can't answer this precisely but a ballpark guesstimate).
Is social bookmarkeing worth its trouble?
Thank you Gene for reading my article. Article marketing is really a numbers game, and it varies by niche. In some niches you only need to submit ten to make a bunch of sales, but in others you might need 100. So to answer you question, you should consider your schedule, and how much time you are willing to put in, and then think about how much articles to write everyday. Then stick to this schedule!
As for social bookmarking, I think it is an okay way to get traffic. It's not as big as it used to be, I would recommend submitting it anyways, because it doesn't take much time anyways.
I would like to add one more thing into the backlinks section of article marketing, that is if you don't ping your article sites, your backlinks will just get lost. If you submit your articles to authority article sites like EZA, then that's fine. But if you use a software and submit massive number of articles, you'll need to make sure that you ping those article sites when they accept your article so that SEs can crawl and index your backlinks.
I agree with you Mike. Pinging your articles can help Google index your content faster, and help you get higher rankings.
I have started doing some article marketing (and social bookmarking) for my blog. I’ve also started article marketing for some of my clients at my agency. My main question is this: should I be posting completely original content on those article sites? I create all of my own content, but can I post my current blog post to those sites or should I be creating new separate articles specifically for my article marketing? Would love some direction as I am just getting my blog off the ground.
Thanks,
Leslie
Hey Leslie,
Yes, unique content is always the way to go. I know this may seem tedious for some people, but unique content will always show better results than trying to publish the same article to multiple sites. You can also outsource article writing to someone overseas which is very affordable. Usually you can find offshore writing for about $3-$5 per article.
Check out Odesk.com if you are interested in outsourcing content development.
Good luck
Thanks for the input. I will have to find time for the extra content, but it will be worth it.
Hey Leslie!
Great to hear that you are using article marketing. It is a great way to promote your, and your clients websites.
To answer your question, you must first consider that blog posts should be written differently from articles. Here’s what I would recommend, write a blog post, and then rewrite (if needed) the same post to an article, and publish it EzineArticles + Other directories.
But if you write an article (there’s a fine line between a blog post and an article), and post it to your blog, you can just send it straight to the article directories.
Hope that helps
Daniel
Daniel,
You are right. There is a difference between the two. Perhaps those small differences will be enough to make the content original for each location. For instance, my blog posts lack very strong introductions and conclusions while my articles should probably be very strong in that area. I definitely have time to re-purpose posts.
Thanks!
Hi Daniel, Great to see you talking about article marketing as blogging always seems to be the popular target. I will say a couple of points from experience.
1 – Regularly use a tool such as Dupepro to find out where your articles have been published. From experience, most people will take the article, remove the link and then pass it off as their own.
2 – Check the internal pages of article sites if you are doing it purely for backlinks. ( Not everyone does it for traffic because of their niche). The internal pages of some article sites actually turn into no follow.
3 – I think the amount of traffic is dependent on your niche. I have done article marketing for many clients of different niches, and some have great success while others like estate agents in the uk, have very poor results. Welcome to be dis-proved on this.
Thank you Natalie,
1. I didn’t know about Dupepro, but I’ll take a look at that.
2. I only submit to the popular directories, EzineArticles, GoArticles, and ArticleBase. These directories all are do-follow.
3. I cannot agree with you enough about the traffic. The article marketing niche (if you submit to directories) is only around 1/10th of the traffic if you write about health niche.
Thanks
Been submitting articles to EZA and I can say that it really works well with my article marketing needs. And I agree that it generates lots of free traffic. When you type a keyword in Google, EZA is always one of the sites that you'll see generating results on top.