One thing that many people pass over because they don’t wish to spend the time is article marketing. In my opinion skipping this tactic is quite ridiculous, especially for bloggers. As a blogger, I typically write in article format as it is, making it quite easy to convert them into an article format for distribution. I am not alone, almost all blog posts can be used as an article to be submitted to article directories so bloggers are missing out on an additional set of eyes and links when they do not submit their content.
If you plan to simply copy and paste articles from your blog into article directories, I would take into consideration the “duplicate content” filter that Google uses to penalize sites for copying content (supposedly), by making sure that a site:http://www.yourdomain.com actually shows the blog posts before you submit them to major directories, because once they go to something like EzineArticles they will quickly get scooped up by Google’s crawler. I would also highly suggest that if you write a lot of link bait like I do, that you spend a few minutes dressing it up so that it looks nice in the article. When I write, I typically write posts such as “23 link building tactics”, which would not look right without the <li> tags.
Why should you integrate article marketing into your overall marketing techniques?
- Highly targeted traffic, equivalent quality to that of a PPC campaign
- Increase name recognition; always a good thing to be recognized as an expert in your field
- Great way to increase the number of incoming links, a properly distributed article should be on 700-800 websites each with a link back to your site.
- It can actually be fun, don’t make it into a chore and it won’t be. If you don’t enjoy what you are doing now though you are in the wrong business anyway.
- Great source of opt-in subscribers to your mailing list so that you can later monetize that traffic.
- Good way to push affiliate sales if you do it right, since affiliate links are typically not allowed.
So now you want to know how you actually get these waves of traffic, backlinks, fame, and fortune all for free!. That is understandable, so I will give it to you straight. I typically follow a multiple step process to get my article to the masses.
Step one should be pretty obvious, pick a topic, research it, and then write the article.
Step two is to submit it to major article directories (EzineArticles, iSnare, GoArticles, Article Dashboard) either manually or with some help from automation. Typically, I will submit them using a program called Instant Article Submitter to about 70 article directories (although it has a capacity near 600), and then I will use iSnare’s distribution service ($2/article) to get the word out to thousands of webmasters. Using this method, I typically get around 800 backlinks from a single article.
Step 3 is the most important aspect in my opinion that people often miss. Obviously the most important part is getting it out to enough directories and writing a high quality article that people want to link to, which is why I didn’t mention that part. The less obvious par,t is that you should also do a little work to increase the traffic to the various article directories that you submit to. I will go through and do some social bookmarking on each of the articles for a few of the directories that I submit to, typically I make sure to at least do it for iSnare and EzineArticles as these give me the best quality traffic/opt-ins.
Step 4 is the most fun, do a google search encompassing a unique sentence from your article, such as “and then the 20083 tigers in Alaska went extinct due to hypothermia”, by putting it all in quotes Google will only search for that exact term. As a result, the number of sites that show as indexed represents the overall reach of your article (in terms of Google anyway). The more sites indexed, the more backlinks to your website and the better off you are.
And that’s really all there is to know, just make sure that you properly distribute your articles and have an overall marketing strategy before embarking on an article writing binge. I typically either try aim for RSS subscribers, opt-in subscribers, or affiliate commissions as the traffic coming from articles is typically very high quality. On that note, feel free to add this blog to your RSS feed 
Enjoyed the post James. Some great info therein.
One comment re Google and duplicate content. No penalty from Google in copying and pasting articles from your blog or website to an article directory and vice versa. However, if the author of the article puts it on his own website and also on an article directory, Google will rank it only once. So, if it is ranked, say on Ezinearticles.com, it won’t rank again on your website. (No two bites of the same cherry, so as to speak)
Google actually encourages relevant articles to taken from directories and be put on websites. Their aim is to provide searches with as much useful content as possible.
What Google refers to as duplicate content is copying the entire content, or a large part of a website. Doing so will get your site de-indexed at the next spidering.
I look forward to read more posts both past and future.
Veronica