Greetings Friends,
I hope you’ve had a great week and that your grand schemes for online money making greatness are gradually blossoming to fruition 
I’m fresh of the plane from LAX this week and ready to share with you some of the wisdom I’ve picked up from the trip!
Firstly, I was reading a post in a popular forum this week about [tag]article marketing[/tag] which contained some information that I thought I should both respond to and share with you in regards to Article marketing..
If you have niche sites and you’re not using articles to promote your sites, there had better be a good reason for it – but at the same time, there are ways to market with your articles, and ways to REALLY market with your articles!
The guy who made this post brought up the relevant point that alot of people use the majority of their article content (that they either write or have written, ie it takes time!) in submitting it to directories all for the sake of a few measly backlinks…
He went on to say that article directories are popular only because shmucks like us submit all our great unique content to THEM and that if we published the same hundreds of articles on our own sites, WE’D have a great PR and become an authority domain too!
It’s an interesting point and while it’s a matter of contention, it’s a point we should on a certain level remember.
Firstly I want to clarify HOW you should be marketing with your articles.
Let me state clearly that there are a TONNE of ways that articles can be used to get you more traffic (and the above theory is relevant only based on WHICH of those ways you utilize) but here’s one of them that will give you a reason to keep posting to directories in spite of the above thoughts:
1. One of the ways I’ve been able to generate a TONNE of traffic to my niche sites is by isolating lowly competitive keywords related to my niche and writing articles on them to submit to the directories – call it bum marketing if you want – it’s just smart article marketing..
If you write an article on a particular keyword, you’re trying to have that page (the page at the article directory that contains your article) rank in the search engines for that term so that the author bio can be followed to your site.
Now why is it better to submit this article to a directory rather than your site?
If you have a new site and you post up your article on “new celebrity diet secret” the truth is, it has LESS chance of getting a high ranking in the search engines when it’s on your brand NEW, low content domain, than it does if it were at a high authority domain like ezinearticles.com
Simple as that..
In fact ANY article, on ANY keyword, is (generally) likely to bring you more site traffic if you submit it to the big authoratative directory than it is when submitted to your site…
HOWEVER.. (and here comes the big secret)
There has to be some balance!
At the same time as leveraging the authority of the article directory you have to be gradually building towards a point where YOUR site could have the authority!
I mean, if you’re domain was a PR7 and had thousands of pages of content – would you submit to IT, or to ezinearticles.com…
No brainer right?
And the only way to get your site near a PR7 is to make more content on your site too…
More content = more backlinks = more authority = higher rankings.
SO…
Ultimately you need two sets of content – but who wants to DOUBLE their article production?! Writing ONE set of articles continually is enough!
So what do we do…
I was going to make a reply to the thread stating the following but some smart chap beat me to it!
What I’ve been doing to overcome the problem is this:
The article gets completed and I ship it off to ezinearticles.com..
After its done (and this is super tricky) I change the article a bit – keep the same title because I AM still targetting that keyword – swap a few paras – rewrite it slightly (after all it’s MY article) and then BOOM, I post it to my site!
Genius right… Hardly!
But what I have done, is taken advantage of the exposure I’ll get from the article directory, while at the same time growing my site toward becoming an authority too – maybe one day I wont even need ezinearticles.com anymore and to be honest I can’t WAIT until then but … until then, this way gives me the best of both worlds.
Phew that was longwinded.
nyhow, I got plenty more cool stuff to share over the next few weeks so get ready…
Andrew
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That a good idea but I suck at article writing. Any Ideas?
Have you ever used the WP Articles Plugin?
Andrew great idea. I have been using the same strategy for the last 8 months or so. So far so good.
What if I just want to bring the rankings of my website to the first page? I mean for example, i have a blog in the second page.. a few nudges and it will be in the first page…
do i submit articles to three directories for the boost or should i submit the article via a service like Article Marketer?
Thanks for your tips man… really loving them..
Hi Andrew.. very interesting post…
Wouldn’t it help if the you linked from the article on ezine to article version number 2 on your site?
I mean, granting that you were able to rewrite version 2 to look original, and you got version 1 published on ezine linking to version 2 through the resource box, using as anchor text, the phrase you want to rank for, and URL is for the specific page.
Hi,
A wee bit late in seeing & replying to this….
But wanted to agree you’ve got a good idea there. Write the one article but change the text up a bit to avoid a ‘duplicate content’ problem.
I’d also suggest perhaps only submitting the first part of your article to the article directory(ies), and conclude with a call to action to click on the link in your author’s box to view the entire article.
i.e. an article entitled ’10 tips to improve your Google ranking’ would feature 6 or 7 tips, and conclude with ‘…for the remaining 4 very TOP SECRET tips, click on the link below.’ or whatever.
Or a variation thereof.
Additionally, I have a free article directories page that lists over 200 sites ranked by on Google PR which also has a ‘niche article directory’ category.
Those niche sites are especially good for submitting articles with topics having the same theme (Google likes inbound links from websites of the same genre) along with submitting to a few general directories with particularly high PR, such as ezinearticles.com that you mentioned.
I’ve linked my name in this comment to that page.
My 2 cents and hope it helps!
- Steve
can u help me with my question i asked before pls?
To Abi (above):
I’m not Andrew Hansen, nor do I play him on TV, but might be able to throw in my 2 cents about your question.
Re: submitting articles to boost your blog from page 2 to page 1 in the SE results…
You can actually do either or both of the options you mentioned. Perhaps write two articles – or rewrite one article to make a second, textually different article.
Then submit one to the top 3 article sites and use article marketer to submit the second.
As I indicated previously, check out the website linked to my name here and see if any of the listed article directories have the same theme as your article. They would definitely be worth submitting to regardless of their current Google PR.
However to boost your blog into page one can be done a variety of ways aside from or in addition to submitting articles. The competitive level of the keyword(s) you’re trying to rank for will determine how much effort and time that will take – ie. easier if your site is competing with 5000 other websites vs trying to rise in the ranks against a field of 20,000,000 sites.
Just ensure your keywords are used to link to your site mentioned in the articles’ “author’s resource box”.
Also find some blogs and/or forums online that talk about whatever your blog theme is, and post comments there with a .sig or website link to your site. But use slightly different – but still related to your topic – keywords in the link than the primary KWs you used in the articles – because you don’t want to risk ‘google bowling’ your own site.
Hope that helps and best of luck!
- Steve
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