All Entries in the "Article Marketing" Category

Article Key Phrase Optimization

I have to review a lot of articles that are submitted to my article directory and those that writers send me as samples of their work. Those applying for a job as a writer want to impress me with their ability to optimize the sample article I give them for the key phrase I assign.

In doing so they send me a sample where every sentence begins with the key phrase. Or one sentence ends with the key phrase and the next sentence begins with the same key phrase.

There are a lot of webmasters buying this type of content on the web. They think that the number of times the key phrase is in the article is way more important than the actual content and the article’s readability.

Because these webmasters BELIEVE they know about seo and article marketing, they request this keyword density as if it is the most important thing.

Then writers that are new to the web and who want to please their customers do as they have been asked to do. After all the customer is paying for it. So give them what they want right?

Wrong. I may be a total pain in the #%$, but my clients know that when they request something and I don’t agree with it because I know it won’t help them, I speak up and let them know how they could benefit more by doing it a different way.

Being a yes-man is not what these clients need. They need someone who spends time to learn what does or does not work and who will advise them on the best approach to seo or article marketing.

Write the article for the reader first and SEO second. you will find that you will naturally include that key phrase where it is appropriate to do so. Read it over after you finish and see if there is a spot or two where you could have added the key phrase without the article being spammy to the reader.

It can be done. Our writers do it all the time for our clients. You can too.

Why Should I Do Article Marketing?

With information technology on the rise and gaining relevance in the world today, article marketing has become a very significant tool to promote businesses on the Internet.

While it is well-known that articles make consumers understand a product better, a well-written article can be one of the main reasons why any product sells. These days, article marketing is so advanced that it has become the foremost advertising strategy for many online businesses.

Central to the effectiveness of article marketing is the implementation of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The primary function of this form of article writing is to achieve prominent rankings on the search engines by utilizing keywords which are popular among Internet users.

When a user enters a search term which is identical to your keyword, the web page of your article will be displayed as a search result. With effective SEO strategies, you can rank among the top search results and benefit from a steady flow of incoming traffic, which will ultimately lead to increased sales.

Due to the fact that SEO article writing involves a great deal of research and expertise, most website owners prefer to employ SEO experts to manage their web content. These specialized professionals will provide you keyword-rich articles that will dramatically improve the visibility of your website and win customers over with their convincing content.

SEO article marketing is such a proven success in the world of online business that many website owners are willing to hire the services of top SEO experts to help them launch their businesses into greater heights of profitability.

Other than its overall contribution to the betterment of sales, article marketing also brings professionalism and prestige to your website. With comprehensive articles that offer expert information about your products, your website will be widely regarded as an authoritative entity.

It will assume a position as the favored destination for consumers seeking specialized knowledge pertaining to your products. As reputation grows, your brand will be established as a trusted name in the business and this will in turn translate to a long-term influx of web traffic.

Compared to other forms of online advertisements which incur quite a substantial amount of financial investment, article marketing is basically free advertising.

Since your articles are included in the information base of search engines, they will automatically show up whenever a search term coincides with one or few of their keywords.

In a way, an article is a living advertising implement on the Internet and it grows in recognition from time to time, without you having to pay extra for each and every appearance.

Web owners who understand the full potential of article marketing will also post their articles to article directories and ezines to boost their chances of drawing more visitors to their websites.

As the Internet continues to extend its influence in our livelihood, article marketing will prevail as the most important means to distribute information, whether for a product or a mere matter of general interest.

There is nary a website that can communicate effectively without web content, and articles are indeed the most significant bridge between webmasters and users. By adopting an elaborate article marketing strategy, you can be sure that your business will achieve new heights of success.

Article Writing Services

Article Marketing has many benefits and can be used in several different ways. Building link popularity, increasing traffic to your website, and image building or branding can all be achieved through article marketing. If you have any questions about article marketing, call us at 786-317-8774.

1)      Articles for mass submission: We write articles for you that target your keywords, then they are submitted to thousands of article directories to build immediate link popularity. Each article is another doorway to your website because your links appear either in the body of the article or in the author bio section or resource box at the end of the article.

Our articles are always;

1. 100% original content. We check them through Copyscape.com before you see them.

2. A minimum of 500 words unless you specify more or less. Between 500-600 words is the normal length for the articles.

3. Interesting and easy to read (Formatted properly) – An Editor reviews the articles after the writer finishes.

4. SEO optimized for any keywords or phrases you choose.

5. Delivered in PDF or html format for just $5 more per article.

6. Written by someone with both SEO and sales experience.

7. Written in American English, unless you specify British.

8. You own all rights to the articles to do as you please with them.

Our articles are never;

1. Copied from other sources.

2. Just stuffed text with a few keywords thrown in.

3. Written by software.

4. Reused by us or rewritten for other clients.

These articles are also useful for fresh content within your own website or for use in newsletters.

Cost per article: $30.  Orders of 20 articles or more qualify for discounts.

You can read more about this on the article writers page or use this form to order your articles. Mention this blog post and get your articles written for just $25 each in April.

2)      Premium Articles: These are magazine-quality articles that may be much longer than 500 words, may contain images, audio, or even video. Great for submitting to high traffic websites as exclusive content in return for a link back to your own website. You can use these articles in your ezine or newsletter or add them as pages to your website. People link to quality content and it can also lead them to social bookmark these pages in Digg, Technorati, Delicious, and other social book marking sites. The cost per premium articles depends on the options you choose.

More info on custom article writing services here.

Average cost for premium articles is $50-$200 per article depending on complexity, length, whether it is for online or offline publication, images, etc.. Premium Articles are priced according to the options you choose.

Article Marketing Myths

By now everyone has heard of article marketing and so many people out define it in so many different ways there that it has become hard for people new to article marketing to understand.

First of all, most of the SEO Gurus caught on to article marketing late in the game, then scrambled to create their own definitions of it at the last minute so it didn’t appear they were ever not aware of the power of article marketing.

In general, article marketing is where you write an article on a topic that is related to your website topic. Not a promotional article for your website, but an article about something that is informative to the reader.

In the article you use keywords and phrases that relate to your topic as well, much like you would optimize a webpage. Your article when reprinted will be the text of a webpage or webpages.

In the author bio section at the bottom is some info about you and links to your website. It is suggested that you put in one link to your main page and one to an interior page that fits the article you are writing.

If your article is submitted to websites that take article submissions and offers free content to webmasters, then webmasters choose to repost your article on their websites, the links in the author bio section become links from their websites to your website.

Now lets go on to the myths and facts about article marketing

MYTH: Article marketing doesn’t really help you all that much.

FACT:: Article Marketing can help you increase your link popularity and be a source of some of the most targeted traffic you can get.

MYTH: Reprinted Articles only get indexed as supplemental pages, therefore it doesn’t help enough to make it worthwhile.

FACT: Depending on where the article gets submitted to, the article itself can get a top 10 listing in major search engines and not as a supplemental page.

MYTH: Submitting your article everywhere creates duplicate content and the search engines will punish or discount those pages as a result.

FACT: If search engines punished duplicate content in the way that myth suggests then all rss feeds that cause a post in a blog to be reproduced to be discounted or published and they are not. The New York Times articles and CNN stuff is blasted all over the web and are not punished or discounted.

Duplicate content is two webpages that are around 90% similar, not two webpages that have similar text on them. If you would like to compare how similar two webpages are Click Here.

MYTH: The only way article marketing works is you write an article then submit it to thousands of article submission websites.

FACT: There is more than one way to make article marketing work for you. The way mentioned above works okay if you are looking to get a lot of links back to your website whether they are related or not and can be effective if you currently have very little or no link popularity at all.

Another way is to hand submit your article to article submission websites that only accept articles related to your topic. This is more difficult but the links help you more just through the submissions and it’s more likely that the websites that pick up and repost your article will be also related to your topic which can help you with better links and targeted traffic.

Yet another way is to write a very high quality article that you really take your time on and research. You then choose a very high traffic website related to your topic. One that has great PR and a lot of visitors.

Email them your article and offer them an exclusive if they will print your article with your links included in the bio. If your article is of good quality and they get an exclusive you have a good chance they will post your article there.

This one posting of your article can be more powerful than the mass submitted article method if you choose the website you submit it to carefully.

Last but not least, posting your article exclusively on your own website is a great way to add fresh content and if the article is good, people will link directly to the article increasing both traffic and PR for your webpage where you posted the article. But for this to work you need to already have some traffic to work with.

MYTH: You should always post your article in your website first, then wait to get crawled by the search engines before submitting the article elsewhere.

FACT: Adding articles to your own website is called adding content. Submitting those articles to other websites is called article marketing. With article marketing you don’t want the article indexed on your website first.

Yes you read that right. You do not want the article indexed on your website first. You are or should already be doing SEO on your website and adding fresh content to your website for the search engines to get traffic from them.

Submitting articles to other websites and having the search engines find it there first gives another gateway that people can find your website through. If the websites that you submitted your articles to get crawled often, then having your article appear there with the links intact will get your website crawled as well.

If the websites you submitted your article to are getting indexed well by the search engines, then your article being found on their website first might get it in the top 10 results. Placing it into your own website with no or low PR might not have gotten the article indexed at all.

I hope this article will clear up some of the myths about article marketing and that it has helped you understand how and why it works.

Article and Website Content Cheapskates

I see this everywhere and still cannot believe that people do not get it. Content is still king on the web.

Website Content

The most important thing you will ever do for your website is to put in good content. Great content will get you links and your position in the search engine results will be because of the content you put into your website.

Hundreds of back links will not get you ranked well with poor content. Great content will get you good keyword positioning with or without back links, therefore, content is still the most important aspect of your website. Great design, flash, graphics, and a cool banner will not get you ranked well for your keywords and phrases. Great content will!

Let’s first look at your website content. Images are great with alt tags. That helps. But it is the text on the pages that, when done correctly, will help your search engine results. This text is also what will convert your customers into sales.

This text is what your customers will read or not read based on it’s quality. This same text is what the search engines will analyze when they decide how relevant your WebPages are to the search phrase you wish them to send you visitors from.

Article Content

Now, let us talk about article marketing.  If you know about article marketing at all, you know you will be submitting articles all over the web. The links in the author bio at the bottom return visitors to your website if they read and like the articles, you write or have written for you.

Just having your articles in thousands of article directories is not the goal of article marketing, although there are article-marketing gurus out there who think it is. The goal is for webmasters to find those articles and place them in their blogs and websites. If they use your article, their website or blog is likely related to the same topic as your website.

You are looking for these quality links. The links for just being in the article directories do not hurt you, but they do not help nearly as much as those from related websites do.

Your other hope is that thousands of people read your articles. Do you really want people to read poorly written articles and associate that poor quality with your website? Well-written articles get people to read them all the way to the bottom where your links are located. Well-written articles reflect well on your website and your reputation.

If the articles are of great quality then likely your products and services must be great as well. The reverse is also true in the reader’s minds. If the articles are written poorly, then likely your products and services are of little or no value as well. It is not only about the number of keywords and phrases placed into the article folks.

With all of that being said, I still find all over the web, especially at freelancer websites, people going in and saying things like; “I need 400 articles written for SEO and I’m willing to pay $1.50 per article.” Or they say something like; “I need someone to write content for my website and I’m only willing to pay $10 per page.”

I really try to refrain from telling people they are, well . . . stupid, but I am finding it harder and harder each day when I read this stuff.

They will spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have their website designed so it looks really pretty, but the text, the stuff that will actually get good search engine results and sales, they go after cheap content.

Writers that know how to write text that not only is appealing to the reader, but that is also written with the keywords and phrases in mind, are worth being paid well. The moment you start hiring better writers and paying for text that converts sales, you will begin to be successful on the web. That cheap content is not going to make you any money.

A website that is beautiful but gets no traffic and sales may as well be an ugly website. An ugly website that ranks well in the search engine and that makes sales gets more beautiful by the dollar.

A Rinse-and-Repeat Formula for Article Marketing Success

Online marketers are always looking for Rinse-and-Repeat Formulas to drive their online promotions. Article Marketers are no different.

But most people who attempt article marketing are unable to Rinse-and-Repeat, primarily because they do not understand article marketing well enough in the first place.

Article marketing is an advertising model that is NOT advertising. Rather, it is a form of advertising – using Information Marketing at its core.

Information marketing in its purest sense is creating information that people want to buy, then marketing the information as a product available for sale to the public.

Article marketing is a slight variation of the Information marketing model… Instead of creating information to sell, writers create information to serve as an anchor for an advertisement that is similar to a classified advertisement.

The Advertisement Is Anchored By The Article Content

Following the article is what is called the Author’s Resource Box, also known as the About The Author information. I prefer the term Author’s Resource Box, because its purpose goes beyond telling the reader About The Author…

I develop my Author’s Resource Boxes (Classified Advertisement) to serve five very clear goals:

1. One short biographical sentence.
2. A strong call-to-action to deliver the reader to my website… (as an advertisement for my website)
3. An opportunity to apply hyperlinks to keywords important to my website… (for example: article marketing services)
4. Brand my website name in the mind of the reader.
5. And protect my advertisement value, from people who “do not know how to” or “choose not to” publish my Resource Box with the anchor text links… (I provide the actual URL of my website in plain text format, to accomplish the last two goals.)

The Author’s Resource Box / Classified Advertisement that follows the article is the author’s payment for creating the content and making it available to online publishers – for free.

The information in the article is the anchor that is provided to get people to read the advertisement that follows the article – in the Author’s Resource Box.

People, Who Write Articles, Charge According To The Value They Create For Customers

To hear a lot of wannabe online marketers talk, the value of article marketing is in creating a volume of articles to deliver a volume of links to one’s website…

I do call many self-professed gurus “wannabe online marketers”, because they have a tendency to advise people on things they have never done for themselves…

I have seen professional gurus tell people that they can get articles written for them for $5, yet those people offering this advice typically pay $40 to $500 an article to have THEIR articles written for them…

Yes, it is possible to find people to write articles for $5 each, but it is not possible to hire skilled or talented writers at that rate…

Real writers know the value of their work, and they do not write for peanuts… People who are willing to write an article for $5 often lack the talent and creativity to write well; they also realize the value of the work they produce and charge accordingly…

The professional online marketing gurus, who tell you that you can hire writers for five dollars an article are stating a truth, but they are not telling you the secret of THEIR success… The professional online marketing gurus did not get rich hiring people willing to write articles for $5 an article… Nope, they hired really talented writers to write their articles, and they paid what they needed to pay to get the articles written by talented writers.

Successful Publishers Choose Content Based On Its Value To Its Audience

There are thousands of online publishers, who struggle to make ten dollars a month… Other online publishers make tens of thousands of dollars a week…

The difference between the people who make $10 a month and those that make tens of thousands of dollars a week is a willingness to give their audience what its audience wants…

Publishers who are willing to publish anything on their websites fall into one of two groups…

1. Those who will be out of business in one or two years; and
2. Those whose websites are underwritten by other profitable ventures.

Publishers who are really successful online understand their audience, and they strive to give their audience the content that their audience wants to read…

Successful publishers are those who define their audience, by carefully selecting the content they publish…

Unsuccessful publishers are those who try to be everything to everyone…

People are creatures of habit… They find websites they enjoy visiting, and they continue to visit those websites, until those websites no longer answer a need for them…

The general public is no different than you… You have certain websites where you like to go on a regular basis, and you will continue going to that website, so long as the website continues to give you the content you want to read… You also have certain newsletters you like to read, and you will continue to read the same newsletters, until which time those newsletters stop giving you the content you want to read…

To understand your website’s audience, you must look into the mirror to understand yourself… You must understand what you do and why you do it, and when you have come to realize the truth of why YOU do things, you will be on the road to understanding why OTHERS do the things that they do…

If you want to understand how to be successful online, study those who are already successful, and gain an understanding of what they do and why they do what they do… Then mirror their actions…

Successful publishers follow one of two business models:

1. They charge readers to get the content they want…
2. They let readers get the content for free, and they get advertisers to pay for access to the publishers’ audience.

Most online publishers follow the second model…

To increase the websites’ or newsletters’ revenue, the publisher understands that he or she must increase the number of eyeballs reading his or her content regularly…

The more successful a publisher becomes, the more important it becomes to be very choosy about what content is published…

Quality Breeds Success…

As explained in the previous section, successful publishers require high-quality content to keep the attention of their readers and to increase the number of people wanting to read the publication…

Granted, there are thousands of websites that will publish anything, and I do mean ANYTHING…

But publishers who have no editorial guidelines tend to be publishers, who will soon be out of business…

If you rely upon crappy content for your article marketing endeavors, then you are relying on using article marketing to build links that will not have any long-term staying power…

Unsuccessful publishers often go out of business when the website owner must pay for another year of web hosting or domain registration…

Crappy links on crappy websites often have a really short lifespan, so the work that you do today will have little value beyond today…

However, if you get high-quality articles published on high-quality websites, you can acquire links that could survive online for many, many years. I have articles that I wrote in 2000 that reside on websites that still send me traffic a decade later…

The moral to this story is that a $5 article will get you some links for SEO on websites that have a limited lifespan, but high-quality content will get you links on websites that will survive the test of time…

If you spend $40 to have an article written and it delivers traffic and link popularity to your website for ten years, then you have already go more value than you got from the $5 article that gave you a few links for a year.

Rinse-and-Repeat Article Marketing

There are five essential elements of a successful article:

1. Title - There are people who suggest that you should put your top keywords at the front of your article title, but I don’t subscribe to that methodology. I do include my target keywords in the title, when I can, but an article that is well-optimized for the search engines is worthless if it does not get published… The #1 goal of your articles’ title is to get the article opened!! You must present a title that is going to get the attention of publishers and readers; you must present a title that is going to compel a person to at least open your article to see if they will want to read it…
2. Opening Paragraph - The title got your article opened, but now you need your reader to read the article… Tell your reader why they should keep reading your article and read it to its conclusion… Any reader who does not reach your website from your article is a “missed opportunity” to sell your stuff… Show people why it will be in their best interest to finish reading your article…
3. The Article Body – The article body must meet the promise of the Article Title and the opening paragraph… The article body must retain the interest of the reader to the last word… The article body must tell a story people want to read, and leave them wanting more… The article body must successfully carry the reader to your Author’s Resource Box… When finished reading, the reader must be happy to have read the article…
4. The Authors’ Resource Box – Jeff Herring wrote a great article about how to construct an effective Resource Box here… The Authors’ Resource Box needs to transition the reader from your article to your website, by offering a compelling call-to-action to get the reader to go to your website… Tell who you are, but don’t go overboard… People do not care who you are – they only care about what else you can do for them…
5. Your Landing Page - You should never try to sell your products or services in your Authors’ Resource Box. Instead, you should try to get the reader to your website, where you have an unlimited number of words, videos, pictures and testimonials to tell the real story of your products or services. Few vendors have the ability to sell a product or service in 500 characters, so you should use your Authors’ Resource Box to get the reader to your website, where you will do the real selling…

Tell A Story People Want To Read

Often, the difference between someone who will try to write an article for $5 and the professional writer who understands the value of his or her work can be defined simply…

The person writing an article for $5 will “beat around the bush” for five hundred words, without ever actually saying anything of any real value to anyone… The person who works for $5 an article is just putting words on a page so that he or she can be paid…

The person who demands $40 to $500 to write an article is a master of story-telling… He or she will tell a story that people will want to read, and therefore a story that publishers will want to publish…

The authors who tell a story that “people are happy to have read” will find their articles on more high-quality websites, and they will find more people visiting their websites, as a result of having read the article…

Words on a page only please search engines, but a story on a page will also attract readers…

Interestingly, most online marketing gurus who advise hiring people to write $5 articles also fail to tell another truth – they fail to point out that articles that pass real link popularity to a website must have link popularity to pass on to your website…

People don’t link to articles that are nothing more than “words on a page”, but people will link to a story that needs telling… Just like with Jeff Herring’s article linked above; his story is worth sharing with you, and as a result, it has gained its own links from people who do not know Jeff personally… (I have never met Jeff Herring or talked to him by phone or email. It was an honest recommendation for a great article written by him.)

Jeff’s article has gained its own link popularity, by merit of it being a good story… As a result, Jeff’s article will pass real link popularity back to his website, because it has real value for readers and real link popularity to share…

Article Marketing Does Not End When An Article Is Distributed

Ty Cobb was the greatest hitter in the history of baseball… His batting average was .367… In other words, he only got one hit for every three at-bats…

If the greatest baseball player in history cannot bat 100, then I would be a fool to believe that every article I write will be a winner…

Fortunately, enough of my articles produce profits that article marketing is a profitable endeavor for me…

I start the article marketing process with great content… (you be the judge of that – have you enjoyed this article so far?)

Then I distribute the article using my article distribution service.

This is where I diverge from most article marketers…

Most article marketers write and distribute an article, then forget about it and move to the next article… I don’t…

For me, article marketing begins after distribution…

I find out who thought my article was good enough to be shared with their audience… Then I start to market my article on those websites…

Once an article is published on a website, I start setting up Social Media links, Social Bookmarking links, and even more back-links to my article on someone else’s website…

Then I start writing my next article…

While working on my next article, I keep an eye to the statistics on previous articles… I want to know which articles produce traffic and sales for my website…

When I find an article that produces sales for me, I step up the promotion of that article…

I step up the marketing for that article, to help that article produce even more sales for me…

I build even more links to that article, by linking to it in forums, blogs and other articles… I advertise the article where it is placed on my website or someone else’s website… I do SEO linking for the article that is generating sales for me…

I continue to produce links to articles that generate sales for me… I send as much traffic as I can to the article that is producing sales for me… I squeeze that article for every penny I can squeeze from it…

The article marketing process starts with writing and article distribution, but it never ends there… I market all articles at a basic level to see if the article will produce sales for me… And when I find an article producing sales for me, I market that article for years…

Article marketing requires for me to create content that I hope will find publication on lots of websites, then providing it to publishers for consideration through one or more article distribution services… Yes, occasionally I use more than one article distribution service, because while I can get an article to tens of thousands of online publishers, the other guys might be able to reach people that I am unable to reach…

But for me, article marketing never ends after distribution… Once the article has found publication on a website with an audience, I consider it vital to market that article to the best of my ability…

.

If you enjoyed this information, you will find that it just scratches the surface of what I have included in my ebook, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts“, available for sale on my website, http://thePhantomWriters.com/

My name is Bill Platt, and I have been involved in Article Marketing since early 2000.

Explore SEO Friendly Software.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Article Writing Services (articlecontentprovider.com)
• Article Marketing vs PPC Marketing (lazerpromotions.com)
• Article Marketing – What Is It? (ronmedlin.com)
• Is It Really Possible To Achieve Number One In Google? (articlecontentprovider.com)
• Article Marketing Blueprint: Here Are The How’s And Why’s (entrepreneurideasclub.com)
• Submit Your Articles: Some Basic Success Guidelines To Follow (marketersdaily.com)

Article Marketing Reseller Program

Article Content Provider is growing! We have room for people to grow with us as Resellers. ACP was created to be a wholesaler for original content for websites, articles, and more. Our price per article is so low that our Resellers are making steady income every week. All you have to do is take the orders from your clients and we write all of the articles for you.

Email me at info@articlecontentprovider.com or fill out this form to get more information about becoming a reseller for ArticleContentProvider.com

Do You Use Article Marketing For Your Real Estate Business?

If you don’t, you should. And the purpose of this post today is to give you another option for marketing your real estate business using articles. The site is Realty and Real Estate Information and there are two ways you can build links and drive traffic to your site from this specialty site in real estate.

1. Submit a real estate article – That’s right, you can submit a real estate article right to the website. If your article is published then you’ll get a one-way back link to your real estate website. And it doesn’t even have to be a real estate site. It can be a mortgage site or anything related to real estate at all. Submit directly to the site and get your article published today.
2. Become a guest blogger – You can also write to the blog and become a real estate guest blogger as well. All you have to do is sign up to be a user of the site and leave a comment on of the posts that you’d like to be a guest blogger. The owner will change your status to Contributor and you can write about any real estate or mortgage related topic you wish. You can even include a bio with links to your website.

There you have it. If you are a real estate or mortgage professional then you can write articles or be a guest blogger and build more inbound links to your website. Just another opportunity.

Can You Submit Articles Directly To The Publisher?

Yes! In fact, I recommend it.

There are two generally accepted methods of marketing through articles: Mass distribution and direct submission. With the mass distribution method you write an article and submit it through multiple article directories, hoping that publishers will find it and use it. With the direct submission method you identify publishers that you hope will publish your article and submit it directly to them for their acceptance or rejection.

The best way to go about finding publishers to submit your articles to directly is to search for blogs and websites within your niche. When you find one that you like, add it to your list. Maintain your list in a text document or Excel spreadsheet. I prefer spreadsheets because you can list the dates you submit your articles and if they are rejected then you can just send the article out to another publisher immediately. Keeping your spreadsheet updated with acceptance and rejection dates per article is essential so that you can track how your articles are received and how effective they are in your marketing.

This method works well when you have a good list of potential websites that might publish your articles. You can theoretically have an article published at each website or blog on any given day. For instance, if you have 20 publishers on your list and you’ve written 20 articles that you’d like placed, you can send a different article to a different publisher on the same day. If they all are accepted then you’ve got 20 inbound links coming from high quality, relevant sites within your niche, not to mention the traffic that can come from those articles.

Direct submissions is a very useful and effective method of article marketing. We highly recommend it.

How Articles Build Links

Let’s break it down. Articles build links in one very simple way. But in exponentially powerful directions.

You develop your authority with article marketing by writing great content. When you write great content that is highly optimized for search engine traffic, you develop your own authority and build credibility. But you drive traffic to your website by including a link at the end of the article where your readers can go to get more information on the topic.

That link is very important. For two reasons:

1. It attracts traffic to your website
2. And it builds quality, relevant links back to your website

Both are important.

Links, with the right anchor text and from the right domain, can help increase your search engine rankings. Traffic, too, can do the same thing. It’s more than just a way to get people to your site so you can sell them something. When you add value to your site visitors’ experience, they stay on your site longer and you get increase search engine rankings due to the increased exposure.

So how does article marketing benefit you? With link building and traffic. Good SEO never comes in one flavor.