…like Stan Laurel without Oliver Hardy.
What's Laurel and Hardy got to do with Internet Marketing? (photo courtesy of bdjsb7)
They go together, work together and the results are 10 times more successful.
In a recent posting I discussed the obstacles we have to overcome as Internet Marketers.
Article Marketing can be the one key you need to finally become successful in Internet Marketing. Internet Marketing and Article Marketing go hand in hand because using articles to market yourself, your website or your affiliate products is absolutely crucial in creating a complete Internet marketing solution.
So what is Article Marketing?
In simple terms, you write an article which you post on your website / blog. Then a few days later (because you want the search engines to recognise the article first on your site), you submit the same article to other web sites known as Ezine Article Directories.
You can go one step further by slightly change the article (the opening and summary) before submitting the article to the Ezine Article Directories. This helps overcome the issue of duplicate content.
There are literally hundreds and hundreds of Ezine Article Directories, you can submit your article to.
If you did submit to them all, you would be submitting all day, everyday.
Thankfully, you can also buy software that automatically submits your articles to hundreds of Ezine Article Directories.
You can go down this route…automation and hundreds of Ezine Article Directories or just manually submit the article to half-a-dozen or so Ezine Article Directories.
These are the most popular and are the ones I suggest you manually submit to:
http://ezinearticles.com
http://www.isnare.com
http://www.ideamarketers.com
http://searchwarp.com
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.articlesbase.com
http://www.articledashboard.com
Plus any others that specialize in your niche (do a Google search for “ ‘your niche keyword’ ezine directory”)
One more thing before we get onto the benefits of Article Marketing…
One of the most successful article directories is EzineArticles.com. Christopher Knight, the owner and prolific article writer of EzineArticles.com, advocates that when you write articles you should keep the articles short and to the point. His suggestion is to keep your articles between a minimum of 400 words to a maximum of 1000 words.
Christopher’s reasoning behind this is today’s readers want their information as fast and quick as they can get it. I couldn’t agree more.
The benefits of Article Marketing:
1. It is free!
2. Your article is providing value, so you will be establishing yourself as a trusted authority on the niche / subject that you are writing about. Your reputation will grow and when readers know they can count on you for real, honest information, they will keep coming back for more.
3. You must add a resource box to your Ezine Directory profile which includes your website domain and which entices your article readers to click on and contact you.
Not only will this create powerful links, but it will also help connect additional traffic to your website that you would not normally be able to get.
4. Each time you submit your article to the directories, it creates a powerful link back to your website (assuming you have your website domain in your resource profile for each Ezine Directory (see point 3)). The more links you have coming to your website from other sources, the more powerful your website will be in search engine page listings like Google.
5. By using the most appropriate keywords when creating your articles (watch my video by clicking here that shows you how to get the best Google keywords to use), they will be optimized for search engines, you will be improving your overall traffic and even your overall page rank by submitting to content sites with high page ranks and authority.
Article marketing can create astounding results in a small amount of time.
For these reasons, it is absolutely vital that Article Marketing is a major part of any Internet Marketing plan that you put together.
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Andrew is a website builder and helps small businesses with their on-line presence…so they can grow their customer list and increase sales. That’s it! That’s what we do each and every day.
Article marketing is very useful in so many ways, branding, traffic and credibility. I hear varied reports on duplicate content, how important is it to change the articles up a little? Great reminder about indexing articles on our home site first. Good overview altogether.
.-= Terry Tiessen´s last blog ..New Video- How To Sponsor 10-30 Reps-Mo MLM Leadership Training =-.
Terry
It is better to change the articles a little before you add to the directories.
You don’t have to…but it is better if you do.
Duplicate content is a big debatable subject. But Google is more concerned around duplicate content on your own site rather than other sites.
Andrew
.-= Andrew @ Blogging Guide´s last blog ..A Thank You Goes A Long Way =-.
If you listen to the people selling article spinners they tell you your articles should be different by 30% is this right or can you just change the heading and the body of your article so the word count is different.
Neil
Neil,
The best way is at least 30% but…you can also just change the title and the first and last paragraphs.
The former is better as Google would see the article as more unique.
Andrew
Article Marketing is one of my favorites in exposing my website to the public. It’s totally free and if i may add, you can also submit your articles to associated content by yahoo. It’s a web 2.0 site but it actually gives you a lot of traffic. It’s approval process is quite long but it’s worth the wait.
Robert
Article Marketing is something I am just getting back into.
Andrew