Build up Your Site Traffic With Article Marketing
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By: Chris Ralph
Right off the bat, I want to disclose that I'm not an SEO guru. Yes, I've studied it and I do know something about SEO, but my expertise is actually in generating great content. I work for a magazine and write articles each month, but I also have a website with lots of info and I make some good money off it as well. While I am not quite ready to quit my job and work from home in my pajamas, I have had some great success with my website using article marketing, and I want to share some of the tricks I've learned with you.
It used to be that one could dump off about a zillion articles at these article marketing websites, it would be re-published many times and shortly you would rank for darn near anything you wanted. The search engines have gotten wise to these tricks, and so it's a lot more work to effectively use article marketing to promote your website, but I can testify that it can be done.
The first benefit of article marketing is gaining links and the re-publishing of your article by other sources. Some article marketing sites use a "nofollow" command so that no web juice flows back to your site. Be sure when select the sites where you will submit your work that you get the valid link that is the full credit to your site. Articles are not re-published as much as they once were, so if you want to see the extra links that come from republishing, you'll need a high quality article on a topic people are interested in, one that will generate real interest. We'll talk more about what constitutes a high quality article here shortly.
The second benefit is traffic. These article marketing sites get millions of viewers each month, and you want to take your fair share of that home to your website. Christopher Knight, who runs Ezine Articles (Perhaps the very best article marketing site), recently stated that a typical click through to the authors website runs around 2 to 12%. All my articles together average more than 25% click through to my site, more than twice the upper end of average. How do I do that? Well, I give my readers good reasons to come to my site.
>> A good quality article fires up the interests of the reader and pulls them in quickly. You have a limited amount of their time to convince them that 1) Your topic is an interesting one; 2) That you know your topic well; 3) That you will deliver on the promise of your exciting title; and finally 4) If they really want to know the full details of your topic, your website is well worth checking out and show them how to get there. Many of my articles have the format of a good summary on the topic, but the website has those extra details (which is why folks just want to check it out).
>> Write on topics that you know and care about it will make your writing a whole lot easier and your passion will make the result more compelling. Write about the topics where you have some genuine expertise. Picking a good title is also critical titles can pull people in or push them away. Remember to get to your point quickly rambling on for a long introduction can turn readers away. Don't write long 3,000 word articles – shoot instead for something in the range of 500-1000 words for your articles. You have a limited time to capture their attention – don't loose your readers.
>> Give your readers great information in a well-polished package. Never worry about giving "everything away" in your articles quality and great content in your articles tells your readers you will deliver even more quality information and great content at your website it helps convince them your website would be a good place to check out. Never forget that "Content is King". Keep writing regularly and continue to grow your inventory of content. A few articles or even a couple dozen wont do the trick you need a good number of well written articles to attract significant traffic to your site.
There are also a few things you need to remember NOT to do:
Don't write over-optimized, keyword crammed, low quality articles they are garbage and tell your readers they need to move on to some other source if they want real information. Even if you have a thousand of them they will pull very little traffic.
Don't just rewrite someone else's article you can get tagged for copyright violations, and again this technique just screams of low quality. Be original, new and creative that's the way to attract new readers.
Don't make it excessively promotional. People read articles for content not ads. As a rule, people want to avoid advertisements. Don't write your article as a "teaser" something that takes the form of "Do you want XYZ? Then come to my website!" These have no content and deliver nothing worthwhile to the reader. To catch fish you need good bait or an attractive lure fish rarely bite on a bare hook.
Author Bio:
Chris Ralph is an engineer who works as the Associate Editor of ICMJ's Prospecting and Mining Journal. His website focuses on various hobby topics related to recreational panning for gold and rock hunting, but also sells jewelry items he has made as well. His website can be found at Nevada Outback Gems.
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Hi, besides Ezine, do you have any other website you like to submit articles to?
Great article Chris. I agree that article marketing is a good practice to gain some links. However, since everyone knows about this search engines devalue links from the article marketing websites. Exchanging blogpost articles would be much more interesting.
Articles Base is another site similar to Ezine. In general, I believe article marketing makes sense for people who don't have their own blog hosted on their own domain — because if you do, you're far better off retaining that content as your own. The addition of pages to the search indices, plus residual benefits such as search driven traffic, enhanced crawl rate, etc — will tend to outweigh a few clicks from people who may or may not be qualified. By retaining that content on your own domain, you're improving your domain's profile, and then can use a slew of SEO tactics to shape the kind of visitors you attract.
BUT… if you're new to this, trying your hand at copy writing for the first time, or not quite ready to start blogging — article marketing is a good intermediate step.
Writing articles is definitely another good tactic to use among all of the other SEO methods that are available. Some other article sites include goarticles.com and buzzle.com.
Many SEOs "overwrote" many keywords, but for niches article marketing is still working…
Great article! I agree, the intrinsic value of article marketing from a SEO perspective is amazing.
Thanks for your comments -
Yannis – I have a few others article sites I submit to – but not many. There are lots of small sites that have little traffic and generate little benefit. The big guys are best. Although its a bit different from a standard article site, Squidoo can be used in a similar manner.
My research many article sites have been devalued, but I think Ezine articles still gets good treatment from Google since all articles are hand reviewed and they refuse to publish stuff they think is junk.
Article marketing is one part of my own SEO efforts, but only one part. I do other things as well.
Some SEO experts think article marketing has little value others say it can be pretty useful. For me its given me some link juice and brought me some traffic – my opinion is that properly used, it can be very helpful. Its not going to be much help for a site that is already highly ranked, but I am convinced you can produced really great content that people would be interested in, only to have it go completely unnoticed because no one has ever heard of you before and you have no links or other exposure letting folks see your site.
- Chris
i agree with you, writing article and sell it is another way of earning good money. you can also write article and submit it into article directories for more exposure. however i even found people selling direct articles for less than 5$ paypal money.
I really like article marketing. It is a great way of making money online if you don't have a website or blog. I think quantity is the key. You can't just stop at 5 or 10 articles. The more the better.