Try outsourcing articles if you are short on time

Using Articles to promote your website is not a new idea.  But the evolution of Article Marketing has now taken the practice full-circle.  In the early days articles were about building a presence in the online community, and this use of articles, to establish your brand and provide you with high quality backlinks for very little effort is what makes Article marketing so compelling.

What is Article Marketing

Your site will fail if it doesn’t have inbound links.  It will sink into ignominy, down into the hidden depths of the Internet.  But with a few well placed links from other sites it will rise to the top, where it gets read, gets linked to, and gets indexed, in a virtuous circle of success.

This is where articles can help.  Article Marketing involves you writing a short article (300-500 words in best) and then including a link back to your site in the footers.  You then submit the article to the main article directories (see below) and they publish your article, including the links back to your site.

That in itself is pretty good. These article sites, like Ezine Articles, are very high page rank, and the search engines index them almost constantly, so you will get links back to your site in no time at all.  But it gets much better!    As well as your article getting published at the directory it will also get picked up by tens, or hundreds, of blogs, news sites and publishers.

These publishers come to Ezine Articles and take your article for publishing on their website.  The crucial detail is that they must leave all the links intact.  By doing that you still receive the credit, and now, instead of having links from a few article directories you also have it from potentially hundreds of blog and magazine publishing sites.  Backlink heaven!

Killer Article Marketing Strategy

Follow this simple plan to get awesome results, massive traffic, and high quality “link juice” back to your site.

1. Create your article.  Make it 500 words max, with a simple clear title that explains the contents
2. Carefully check your article for spelling and grammar.
3. Make sure text is well spaced out.  No huge paragraphs.  Bullets and lists work well.  Think of your reader, who is probably scanning very quickly
4. Now publish the article to your own website.  Many people will suggest you first publish to Ezine Articles (EZA) but they are wrong.  I have tested both ways and believe me that publishing to your own site first will help.  In any case, who do you want to be seen as the “original owner” in the eyes of the search engines.  These things matter.
5. Wait a few days until Google has come along and indexed it.  You can submit to some social bookmark sites to help speed it up if you wish
6. Now for part B:  Take the same article, and add two links.  One should be to the exact same article on your website, and one to another place (on that site or a different site you own).  These links are what gets you all that lovely link-juice.
7. Publish the article on EZA.
8. Wait until the article is indexed.
9. And finally part C:  This is where the huge traffic boost comes in.  Take the article, and rewrite the title slightly.  For example you could change “Dog Training: How to teach a dog to sit” to “Teaching a puppy to sit in 7 days”.
10. Change the links.  The first link, which pointed back to your website, is fine. However, make the second one point to your article on EZA.  This will keep the EZA article, which is by far the most important in terms of your visibility, high up in the article rankings so it will keep on getting referenced.  You now have two permanent links to the same original article on your site
11. Sit back and watch the traffic build up.  Rinse and Repeat!

If any of that isn’t clear please leave a comment below and I will explain further.

Which Article Directories?

There are literally thousands of Article directories out there.  However, the following directories will provide you with 80% of the coverage, for around 10% of the effort.

• Ezine Articles (EZA):  The largest and most visited of all the Article Directories.  Always start here.  Beware:  Content must be owned by you.  Despite what many will tell you there is no problem submitting articles that you have already published on your website, so long as you own the copyright to those articles.  That means you write them yourself, or you paid someone to write them for you.
• Articlesbase.com:  Second in size to EZA, and contains a large store of articles.  Slightly less strict with the URLs, so you are allowed to include a link in the main body as well as in your author signature (called the author bio) section.
• Goarticles.com: Another of the biggest article directories.  High Google Page Rank (PR5) and daily indexing so your article, and the links to your site will appear in Google very quickly
• Articledashboard.com: The last of the big article directories.  Just copy and paste your articles into here for an extra boost of link juice and traffic
• Suite101.com:  A great site to use if you are looking to use the Article to make money, rather than just drive traffic.  Suite 101 pays you for your articles.  They must be original and in your name.  No pen-names or pseudonyms allowed

I’d recommend submitting to these and then stopping, but if you really want more then there are good online resources where you can find more.  Does anyone have a list?

Get started now and you will see a steady increase in traffic and inbound links.