Article Marketing, Blogging or Both?
Sep 12, 2006 Michael BritoAs I mentioned in a previous post, article marketing is NOT writing an effortless article (or buying one), submitting it to thousands of article directories and driving traffic to a generic page infested with Google Ad Sense. When creating an article marketing strategy, time should be spent writing an article that has value and/or satisfies a particular need. The title, probably the most important aspect of the article itself, should be written as bait to draw the attention of potential readers.
The biggest no-no in executing an article marketing strategy is to post the same article on your blog that you do in a directory. Not only is this considered duplicate content but its proven to be a horrible customer experience. As a user, the last thing I want to do after reading an article somewhere is click through to the blog and see the same exact article.
What I normally do when I write an article is submit it only to a few select directories like (Associated Content, Buzzle, Ezine Articles, Go Articles, Web Pro News, Site Pro News, etc.). Then, I will write a paragraph or two about the article in my blog (perhaps why I wrote it) and then link to it on Associated Content (AC). The reason I choose AC is that they allow readers on their site to easily add content (articles) to social bookmarking sites like Digg, Newsvine, Netscape, De.licio.us, etc.
Lastly, and keeping in mind Social Media Optimization, I would also add the ability for the readers of your blog to easily link to it, subscribe to it, tag it, post a comment; and then add it their favorite social bookmarking site(s).
Technorati Tags: article marketing, article syndication, article distribution, article submission, blogging, blog marketing, social media optimization, socialmediaoptimization
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September 26th, 2006 at 4:54 am
writing articles take up considerable time..thanks for this post. Now at least I know what is effective if I ever did article marketing
October 7th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
regarding duplicate content: the modern SE algos are sophisticated enough to determine the real source of your article. simply make sure that spiders have already crawled your content, then share your articles. SE's use date of indexing as the major factor in duplicate content issue resolution. Also shared articles usually have a link (one-way of course) to the original publication - another way to tell the SEs where the content comes from.
October 24th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
Oleg...thanks for the tip. I appreciate it.
November 1st, 2006 at 6:26 pm
By the way, does anyone know how to get your articles into the Site Pro News newsletter? Any way to submit an article to Site Pro news at all?
November 1st, 2006 at 6:33 pm
Oleg. I took a long shot and emailed their editors directly. You might also try http://www.sitepoint.com/. The only issue with them is that they have exclusive rights to your article for 6 months. They do receive a ton of traffic though.
Michael
November 1st, 2006 at 8:03 pm
Thanks, Michael
December 27th, 2006 at 10:01 pm
[...] Marketers have been using article syndication (sometimes referred to as article marketing) to promote their product and/or service for years. Just recently, however, article marketing has began to grow in popularity because marketers now understand that consumers are tired of being marketed to and that building relationships with them is much more effective. Additionally, article syndication will result in higher search rankings with keyword optimized content; natural incoming links, and drive targeted, relevant traffic to their website. [...]
September 16th, 2007 at 11:59 am
Article marketing does work and as far as the duplicate content issue is concerned, it is there, but just version your blog post if you intend to post the same to article directories. But a far better way is to use a different article for marketing, and be sure that it is of supreme quality, coz that's what derives more traffic to you.
March 13th, 2008 at 7:05 pm
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