All Entries Tagged With: "link building"

Article Marketing Isn’t The Only Link Building Tool There Is

Article marketing is pretty well known today as a great link building tool. Indeed it is. But it’s not the only thing you can do to build inbound links. Used in conjunction with other link building methods, however, it can be very powerful. Here are a few other tools you can use in conjunction with articles to help you build inbound links to your website:

• Blog Marketing – Blog Marketing has become a big trend in the last couple of years. You can build great links with your blog depending on whether your blog is on the same domain as your website or on another domain. Either way, you get good quality links.
• Social Bookmarking – Sites like Digg, Reddit, Mixx, and other social bookmarking sites are great ways to promote your content. But they are also great ways to attract links for your content and to build links to your content. Are you using them effectively?
• Social Networking – Social networking has a few things in common with social bookmarking, but they are not the same thing. With social networking you are using sites like Facebook and LinkedIn to build relationships then send people to your Web properties for more information. The link building comes in when you set up your profile. Most networks will give you a dofollow link from your profile on their site back to your own site.
• Link Bait – There is a lot of confusion as to just what link bait is. It is really something that you put on your website that draws inbound links from others. A mortgage calculator, a social application, a well-written blog post, a video … it can be anything as long as it is effective in drawing inbound links from other websites.
• Social Widgets – Widgets that you create with links back to your own site work well. Every time someone uses a widget you create on their own site it will link back to yours. Good links.
• Directory Submissions – Submitting your website to directories is another good way to build inbound links. It’s basic and fundamental, but necessary.
• Blog Comments – Leaving comments on other people’s blogs is a good way to build inbound links.
• Forums – Just like blog comments, forums are good for building inbound links as well. Just jump right in, start communicating with people, and build those links. Usually, the good links come from your signature line.

There are many other ways to build inbound links to your site. The key is to use articles in conjunction with other methods of link building to build a solid linking strategy that helps move you up in the search rankings.

How Many Articles Does It Take To Succeed With Link Building?

Difficult question. The answer is the number is different for every website. If you are in a highly competitive niche then it could take a lot of articles. If you are in a brand new niche that has little competition then it may not take long at all. But understand that virtually every niche online has a constant stream of new competitors trying to knock the No. 1 guy off the pedestal. That’s why link building is so important. In order to stay at the top you need to keep building new links. That takes time and money.

Article marketing is a slow process. But it’s a necessary process. You can’t just throw up a website and not build links to it and expect to stay on top forever. Without a steady flow of inbound links from articles and other types of websites, you are likely not to maintain good search positions over time.

Link building and article marketing go hand in hand like combat boots and automatic rifles. How many articles does it take to succeed? The answer is axiomatic: One more than it takes to fail.

Is Article Marketing A Form Of Advertising?

Many people new to article marketing want to know if it’s like advertising. No, actually, it isn’t. With advertising you spend money to reach a particular market and the advertising tends to be an interruption into their lives. They weren’t looking for it. It just happens to be there. Article marketing isn’t anything like that.

Article marketing is the practice of writing articles to achieve greater publicity, but unlike press releases the articles don’t directly request publicity. With article marketing you are attempting to give away your knowledge. The articles should be heavy on giving and light on taking.

Once you write an article that gives more than it takes you submit it to article directories, or publishers directly, and people who are interested in your niche will seek articles just like yours for publishing. They will publish your article for free.

So what do you get out of it? For starters, you get a short bio at the end of your article. It doesn’t have to be long. In fact, shorter is best. One to two sentences at most. But you do want to include a link back to your website. When publishers publish your article they agree to publish it with your links intact. That link acts as a traffic conduit from the publisher’s website to yours and it also gives you additional search engine mojo due to the inbound link to your website.

Is article marketing like advertising? No, it’s not even close.

Interviewing As Article Marketing

People love interviews. Especially celebrity interviews. If you have any ability at all to carry on a conversation, all you have to do is contact a celebrity in your field and conduct an interview. Then publish that interview on your blog and as an article in your favorite article directories.

Carl Ocab, the most famous child blogger online, recently conducted a Twitterview – that’s an interview on Twitter. Twitter makes access to celebrities so much easier. All you have to do is find the celebs in your industry and follow them. Retweet their tweets. Respond to their tweets. And connect with them online. When the time is right, send a polite DM and ask for an interview. You can conduct the interview over Twitter like Carl Ocab did or do it through e-mail. Whatever works for you.

The next step, after conducting the interview, is to blog about it. Post the interview on your blog. That will get you immediate attention for your exclusive celebrity interview.

Next, take your interview and turn it into a 300-500 word article. In most cases you can run the interview just as it is. But I’d recommend writing a paragraph introduction that is unique to the article along with another paragraph summary at the end – again, the summary should be unique to the article. Then submit that article to about 10 article directories.

The benefit here is other publishers get access to your exclusive interview to use on their web properties. Since people love interviews with celebrities, you should have no problem getting it picked up by several publishers who will send a link back to you. There will be no duplicate content issues since you are distributing the interview through article directories, but you published it first on your blog so if there was any issue then Google knows that you were the first. All you’re looking for is the link value in re-publishing.

Article marketing allows you to give other publishers an opportunity to repurpose your original content according to your rules. It works like a charm.

My recommendation to Carl Ocab: Repurpose the Twitterview as an article and distribute it through article directories.

Why You Should Use HubPages For Article Marketing

HubPages is a great way to market your business through articles. Unlike traditional article directories, when you publish an article at HubPages you are given a ranking based on several criteria that are important to the HubPages team. They look at traffic of your article, the traffic sources for your articles, the length of your article and uniqueness of the content, the number of thumbs up received from other Hubbers, and the overall HubScore of the author. Take a look at my HubPages profile page and you’ll see that I’ve earned the reputation of “Prodigy” with just three articles.

These are important criteria because they determine your reputation and trust factor at HubPages.

There are plenty of reasons to use HubPages for your article marketing. Besides building a reputation for yourself, HubPages articles are viewed by a lot of traffic. Because a lot of other people are using HubPages, you can build a solid reputation by networking with other Hubbers. But you’ll also build link popularity and inbound links to your website from your articles. Unlike traditional article directories, HubPages does provide link juice and every article is a potential inbound link for your website. And another reason to add to these is the ability to earn income through AdSense from your articles as HubPages has a revenue sharing program with its authors. You can also earn affiliate income through Kontera, Amazon.com, and eBay using HubPages articles.

So how many reasons is that to publish your articles at HubPages? Let’s count them:

1. Build author reputation
2. Increase your link popularity through inbound links
3. Drive additional traffic to your website
4. Earn AdSense income
5. Earn eBay affiliate income
6. Make affiliate income with Amazon.com
7. Use Kontera for additional income opportunities
8. Networking opportunities

If you decide to use HubPages for article marketing, be sure to upload original articles. That will increase your author reputation tremendously. In fact, if you upload the same articles that you send out to article directories, HubPages will penalize you so make sure you are publishing original content.

I would recommend uploading your articles to HubPages first then sending them out to article directories if that is your plan. Though I haven’t tested this, I suspect that you may get a penalty after HubPages discovers your articles later. It may not be as big a penalty, but I think it’s possible that it will happen so you are much better off publishing original content always. But HubPages is a great article marketing opportunity.