Below are the top 15 ways to make sure that anyone that would normally be interested in what you have to say flee from your site and go elsewhere for their information.  If you don’t believe me, simply try it yourself for a few weeks and see what it does to your site

1. Start your post with a hoplink for a ClickBank affiliate product, this is always promising.
2. Spend more than half your content asking your visitors to do things for you (email friends, social bookmarking submissions, comments, subscribe via email). *cough* You don’t mind, right?
3. Don’t spell check your posts, tehre is no raeson y u need gud grammor to mak money on internet!!
4. Don’t use paragraphs, people love to read solid chunks of text.
5. Don’t include any links, images, bold/italics, or anything that might make people look at your website for longer than 7 seconds.
6. Allow any comment to go unmoderated, everyone loves reading about various ED pills while they try to get their information.
7. Include completely off topic posts, I love hearing about your love for beluga whales in your “internet marketing blog”.
8. Don’t utilize social media, they are unlikely to click on your PPC ads so listen to the people on DigitalPoint that say that this traffic is therefore useless.  No need to have actually interested readers.
9. Decline all trackbacks, whenever somebody is interested in your blog and talks about it you should hide this fact from others while pissing off the other blogger.
10. Make sure to divulge your hate for everything, everyone loves a blog that is simply a long rant.
11. Go on internet marketing forums and say “Hey look, I found this awesome site: [insert site]!!!” while also having it in your signature, nobody will guess it is yours and make fun of it.
12. Use pop-unders, pop-ups, and pop-overs as well as exit ads to get people to sign up for you affiliate products, because clearly people will appreciate this.
13. Always hotlink images from other sites, especially ones that clearly visit your site as well, nobody would ever change the image to something incredibly offensive.  While you are at it, make sure you have lots of dead pages (404) on your site.
14. Lies!  Make sure you lie to your readers as much as possible… I made $17 million today just by writing this blog post!
15. Don’t offer any useful content, ever.  All content should be written to make money or to help with Google.  Useful content would never develop any links naturally, it must all be artificial.

There you go, it is just that simple.  Follow these easy steps and you will be well on your way towards losing all of your RSS subscribers and daily visitors.  Simply rinse and repeat, inserting a copy & pasted ad copy as your posts every once in a while and you won’t have to worry about people chewing up your bandwidth.

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