Darren Chow Article Marketing Specialist Blog

As the owner of a professional article distribution service (I do this everyday), I have the benefit of reviewing and submitting hundreds of articles each month.

As you probably already know, article submission is just one way to build links online. The major problem with article marketing is that it can be rather painful. Consider people who don’t write well, type slowly, or don’t know how to use software to help automate the submission process. Writing and submitting one article can take hours!

On top of that, if you don’t follow the rules, your articles may get rejected, and you’re just wasting time, writing and submitting your articles.

Here are some general guidelines. If you follow these guidelines, you will yield the best results.

WHAT NOT TO DO

• Submit articles with less than 450 words.

Most article directories accept articles with at least 450 words. Some may accept more, some less. But most will accept 450 words.

• Promote a site with nudity of excessive affiliate links.

It’s not common for article directories to reject a site that has been completed. But if you are trying to promote an adult site, or if your site contains nothing but affiliate links, your articles have a chance of being rejected.

• Use super long anchor keyword phrases.

Keep your anchor texts to 3 words max. Don’t link the entire sentence. Keep the links to your author resource box. The author resource box should not be more than 450 characters. 450 characters will allow you to write about 2 to 3 sentences. There is no need to write a short story here. Just a couple of sentences with static text links in them will do.

• Use profanity in your articles.

Don’t use any kind of profanity in your articles. Vulgar words and phrases are automatically detected by some article directories. Your articles will be rejected before they have a chance to be reviewed by a human editor.

• Submit an illegible article.

Articles are seldom disapproved because of grammatical errors, spelling errors, or sentence structure faults. But it has to be of decent quailty. In other words, readers must understand what you are trying to say. If English is not your native language, consider hiring someone to write for you.

• Use software to spin articles.

Some article marketers use software to spin PLR (Private Label Rights) articles, in the hope that the article directories won’t detect the duplicate content. Unfortunately, most software just replace words with synonyms. In the process, the meaning is skewed and the article no longer make sense. For instance, the word “market” may mean several different things depending on context.

Consider:

Original sentence: I go to the stock market to invest.

After replacement: I go to the stock bazaar to invest.

OR: I go to the stock shop to invest.

The word “market” may mean “bazaar” or “shop” – a place for buying stuff. But when you put the words into context, notice that the same sentence now sounds funny.

• Use URL as your links.

You shouldn’t be using URLs as your links. The bulk of your traffic will be coming from the search engines. So make sure you spend a little time working on your keyword research, and pick some phrases to target. Use those keywords in your links.

• Write and submit an entire report.

You are submitting articles, not reports. Every now and then, I see writers submitting articles with over a thousand words. If you have long articles, break them up into separate articles. You are not posting to your blog. You are building links with your articles. More articles equal more links.

In addition, most readers just scan articles instead of read the entire page. If you write super duper long articles, you may lose your reader, and you never get the chance to see them again.

WHAT TO DO

• Write and submit articles regularly.

If you are not building links, your competitor may just be creeping up on you. So make it a habit to distribute articles regularly – even if it’s just one article per week.

• Submit to hundreds of article directories.

Don’t just submit to 1 or 2 article directories. Start with Ezinearticles.com. Once approved, you can use the same articles to distribute to all the article directories.

• Outsource of use software to help you distribute articles.

It doesn’t make sense to sit at the computer for hours just to distribute articles. You have better things to do. Outsource all the article submissions or use some software to automate the process. Your article marketing will become way less painful.

A word of caution if you are hiring writers to write for you. Use a duplicate content check tool like CopyScape to check for plagarism before paying your writers. Some writers are just out to scam others – they scrape content off other websites and submit them as their own. Don’t be fooled!

• Focus on keywords.

Try to dilute your efforts by targeting too many keywords at any one time. Focus on two or three keywords, and write your articles based on those keywords. Once they start to rank in the search engines, move on to other keywords.

Notice that there is a cummulative effect. The more keywords you target, the more traffic you will get. But be patient. SEO does take a little bit of time, especially for competitive keywords.

• Publish 100% original articles.

Using PLR articles is fine. But many directories (like Ezinearticles) will not accept PLR articles. You have to be prepared to accept that if you are using PLR articles. Otherwise, you just have to write 100% orginal and unique articles. Unique means that your articles must not be published on the Internet before. So don’t make the mistake of posting to your blog, and then submit the articles. Once the articles get indexed by the search engines, Ezinearticles may not approve the articles.

• Be clear about your goals.

What are you trying to achieve? If you just want to build links, you can submit general information articles. If you are trying to sell something, focus on the products and talk more about the problems that your products will help to solve. Don’t give away all the answers in your articles. In that 450 words, show that you understand the customers, and that you are sincere in helping them overcome whatever obstacles they are facing. That will encourage them to click your links and visit your site.

Article marketing is simple to understand. But for some, it can be painful to execute. Imagine having to spend hours each day writing articles, just to distribute to hundreds of article directories. The distribution process can be extremely tedious and tiring.

If you’re using some kind of software to distribute your articles, that means having to let the software run on its own (if it’s completely automatic), or sitting at your comp clicking away to complete the submission process. Frankly, I wouldn’t spend time doing such work manually. It has to be automatic for me.

I started out using article submission software to submit my articles, but I find that such software just isn’t good enough. For one, I don’t like the idea of leaving my computer on for hours, just to submit the articles. Secondly, the article directories always seem to get out of date! So time is wasted on a bunch of error web pages.

So why would anyone in the right frame of mind get into something as painful, or as tedious as article marketing?

The answer, is traffic. When you perform article marketing, you have only one goal in mind – to drive targeted traffic to your website. If you can’t automate this process, it just means that either you have to go through a lot of pain, or you simply give up and find something else.

But I like to think that if article marketing is challenging, there has to be more value in it. I’ll see if I can help you understand why later on. Let’s get back to the subject of traffic.

When you distribute articles, you are expecting traffic to come from 2 sources:

1) Directly from your articles

and

2) From the search engines

Direct traffic from the articles.

Each article you submit, you are allowed to include 2 to 3 links back to your website. If an article title catches the eye of a reader, and he goes on to read your article, then clicks on a link to visit your website, you can be sure that the level of interest is very high. One such visitor is a hundred times better than one hundred non-targeted visitor. Why? Simply because a targeted visitor is more likely to seriously check out what you have to offer. If you are selling some product or services, he may end up buying something from you. Or if you offer information, he may end up clicking on an ad, and you earn a commission. Either way, you get some kind of response from him. That is a good sign.

Just yesterday, I received an email from Ezinearticles (the most popular article directory on the Internet) claiming that they received a total of 5.1 million clicks in January. In fact, it’s a new milestone for them.

Bear in mind that’s 5.1 million clicks to member websites in a single month. What do you think they are seeing in their Adsense account? For sure, the numbers are staggering.

From just a small handful of customers, the articles that we submitted managed to rake in 10,000+ views, with over 1,000+ clicks. That’s just from 168 articles, submitted over a period of 2 months. Let me show you.

5.1 million clicks in a month – how much of that goes to you? I really hope that you’re doing something to get a piece of the action. You can write and submit the articles yourself, or if you’re too busy, you can hire us to distribute articles for you (super strong hint).

The greatest benefit of article marketing is that once you submit the articles, the traffic streams in steadily. Even if I do nothing to my Ezinearticles account right now, the clicks will continue to climb. If I want more traffic, I simply submit more articles.

From our tiny account, we did 1k+ clicks in 2 months. If you go to Ezinearticles and check out the top authors, you will quickly learn that some of them have over 10k articles in their account.

Top 10 authors at Ezinearticles

How many clicks do you imagine they are getting?

I hope that is enough to whet your appetite a little bit.

As a marketer, you have to adopt an aggressive approach, like what some of these guys are doing. Check out some of the articles submitted by this guy: Sean Mize

I want to draw your attention to this guy because not only is he getting tons of traffic from his articles, he has also successfully monetized his traffic.

Today, he is proud to claim that he is making over $180k+ on his internet marketing coaching home page. If you ever want to learn all about how to drive traffic using article marketing, and how to convert that traffic, he is the guy you want to listen to.

Why am I promoting him?

For 2 reasons:

One, he is a customer of mine (ta-da!), so I want to shine the torch his way a little. He has also referred some really good clients to me, for which I am most grateful.

But more importantly, Sean is someone who knows what he is doing. I can vouch for him because I have personally downloaded some of his stuff, and they are all down-to-earth materials. Not overly hyped, and definitely not much fluff. You can get a good feel of that the moment you hit his homepage. Don’t take my word for it. Join the list, listen to what he has to say, and judge for yourself.

If you still don’t feel comfortable, you can always unsubscribe. I don’t think Sean will mind the least bit. You see, besides the traffic that he is getting from all the articles, I bet he is getting a fair amount of traffic from the search engines too.

Will the traffic from search engines be more than the direct traffic?

Well, that depends.

Getting traffic from the search engines.

Getting traffic from the search engines depends on the keywords that you are targeting. I talked a little bit about keyword research earlier this year, so you may wish to check out the article for a quick recap.

The essence of the article is that if you want more traffic from the search engines, you will have to target keywords with proven search volume. The more popular the keyword, the more traffic you will get. Of course, most popular keywords are harder to rank because of competition. If you can find a keyword that is easy to rank, and the competition isn’t hard to beat, you may be sitting on a goldmine.

Keyword targeting is easy. When submitting your articles, be sure to use them as your anchor texts.

For example,

[linkcode]Anchor Text[close linkcode]

Use 2 or 3 words in your target keyword phrase. There is no need to use something like “Click here to check out the best article marketing blog.” Just a simple “article marketing blog” will do.

But in the course of my daily work, I still see people linking like this:

[linkcode]Click Here[close linkcode] OR

[linkcode]http://yoursite.com[close linkcode]

When you do this, what do you rank for?

You may eventually rank for “click here” or “yoursite.com”, which won’t bring you much traffic. Even if they do bring you traffic, it’s going to be untargeted traffic.

Article marketing is a time tested method. If you do it right, there is no way you can’t get traffic to your website. It takes some effort and patience in the beginning but is it worth it? More importantly, does it PAY to be patient? Go ask Sean. I’m sure he’ll be able to answer that question for you

Whatever you are doing online this year, be sure to take full advantage of the opportunities online. 5.1 million clicks and six figure incomes – that should be enough to get anyone excited.