Darren Chow Article Marketing Specialist Blog

After sending the blog post on the death of article marketing, I’ve received several emails with questions about article marketing. I’ve decided to post them here for the benefit of everyone. My responses are polished so as to make the reading easier and to add-on information.

Q: How much would someone need to spend in order to have enough articles to be a player?

If it really does take thousands of articles nowadays, it seems like a game that only the big boys can afford to play.

So I can see what the guy was getting at when he said article marketing was dead. It’s not “dead” per se, but prohibitive in terms of time and cost for many.

That is a very good question. Spending will depend on the niche that you are in. For most niches, a budget of around $500 per month will be enough. That works out to 3 to 4 articles per week, or 20 articles a month. If you hire your own writer, that amount may be even lesser (perhaps $200 a month?). Or if $200 is too much, you can save even more by writing your own articles and then reinvest the profits when you make sales. You don’t really need to wait till you get thousands of articles before you become successful. I’m just saying that the players are getting bigger because they have spent a lot of time and effort generating content consistently. My point is, anyone can get there as long as you put in consistent effort and write quality articles, as mentioned in my post. But if you consistently put out 20 articles a month, over the course of 1 year, you would have 240 quality articles. Over 3 years, you would have 720 articles…see, now you are becoming one of the big players and other people have to catch up. If you put out 50 articles, and then stop, what kind of results can you expect? But now, after 3 years, you are sitting on 720 articles and I bet your site has attained pretty high rankings in the search engines now (assuming you did your SEO right). That’s not a bad position to be in. At $500 a month, that’s not a lot to spend on advertising for a business, and it’s certainly not prohibitive. Consider the alternatives – how much are you going to spend on other forms of advertising to build up your business? Businesses can EASILY spend way over $500 a month on PPC or other forms of advertising every month. And when the spending stops, the traffic stops too. Not so for article marketing. Don’t forget, once your own site becomes an authority site, you get a LOT MORE traffic from the search engines and you get the traffic every single month. And it all starts with building links consistently. But I’m not going to kid you. The article marketing game will continue to evolve and it will become harder and harder to get a foothold in any niche due to competition. The same cycle happens to all niches, and to all marketing channels. It’s $500 a month now, and in a few years time, maybe it’ll need $1000 a month. Similarly, Adwords used to cost just 10 cents a click. Now you may have to pay $1.00 for the same keywords. Lesson here is that the early bird catches the worm. If you can get things done today, DON’T WAIT. When opportunities present themselves, take advantage of them. Hope that helps

Q: Speaking of SEO and article marketing, here’s a question for you:

Do you advise optimizing your articles for the same keywords as your site? Or does that mean your articles will end up competing with your site?

Here is a more recent question I just received in my inbox.

Q: You are great about responding so quickly and I really appreciate it. I am not as familiar with the video procedure as I would like to be. If I have an article and that is all, but I would like to have it made into a video and distributed, what is the charge? Also, I have not had much luck lately with articles getting distributed. When I first started with fastsubmitarticles, I seemed to constantly see them coming up in different publications online. In the last six months or so, I don’t see them at all. Any explanation? Thanks.

Here, I want to remind you about how article marketing works. When you distribute articles, you can expect traffic to come from 2 sources.

1) Directly from article directories. – This usually happens only to well established sites like Ezinearticles or Articlesbase. Just four to five years ago, many article marketers are teaching others that the more you have your articles published on different sites, the more traffic you are going to receive. For example, if you receive 10 clicks a month from one site, you can easily publish the same article on a hundred other sites and get 100 x 10 = 1000 clicks.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. We all know that search engines filter their search results to remove duplicate content. If you do a “site:” command search, you still see these articles in the search index, but they just don’t show up for keyword searches. What does that mean?

It just means that the search engines are policing the search indexes pretty heavily to ensure a positive search experience. For this reason, it’s common that some of your articles may not show up. But if you create a Google Webmaster account, you will see those links showing up in your account.

2) Traffic comes from search engines. – For the longest time, I’ve always emphasized on the SEO aspect of article marketing because the bulk of the traffic will come directly from search engines. That is, if you manage to get your rankings up in the search results. New sites will experience the Google dance (rankings dropping in and out of search index) more often as the search engine learns about the sites. But you should still see an average of 30 to 50 unique visits daily. As you build up content and more links, the site will slowly work it’s way up to 50 to 100 unique visitors daily. This will take 3 to 4 months and by then, you should be able to see some revenue.

The exciting part is when the site becomes an authority site and achieves top 3 rankings in the search results. That is when your income REALLY takes off. Traffic level from 100 visitors a day can jump to 1000 visitors a day.

Are you already in the top 3 for your primary keywords? If not, there is more work to be done.

Of course, to get to that level, it takes time, commitment and effort. That’s why I say, “NEVER GIVE UP!” It takes some webmasters years before they get to the authority site level.

If you are persistent enough, success will eventually be yours.

Sincerely,

Darren Chow

P.S. If you need more information about SEO, check out the SEO definitive guide.  Coupon: seocoupon6547

A couple of days ago, after I sent out an email celebrating our half a million page views milestone, I received a really weird email message the next day.

The message said, “Everyone knows that article marketing is dead.”

I say this is a weird comment because obviously, everything is pointing in the opposite direction – the page views are increasing, and the clicks are rocketing.

So how come this individual claims that article marketing is dead?

From my own experiences, article marketing traffic and search traffic traffic ranks right at the top in terms of quality. In other words, these two traffic sources hold the highest conversion rates.

After reading the comment, I remembered that I once read a similar comment in Digitalpoint (a webmaster forum), claiming that Adsense is dead.

As we all know, Adsense is NOT dead, and still very much kicking and alive. Whathappened was that the game has changed and those who were able to adapt continued to make big money. And those who didn’t bother to cope with the changes went the way of the dinosaur – they simply gave up.

Now here is a trap that I want to warn you about.

On the Internet, things DO change, and they sometimes change pretty fast. The important thing is to recognize these changes and then adapt as quickly as you can.

Since we are talking about article marketing, let’s use article marketing as an example for further discussion.

Article marketing, obviously, is not dead. But for sure, the game has changed. Article marketing now is quite different from article marketing five years back. So what has changed?

1) Huge influx of articles. - Due to the effectiveness of article marketing, more and more people are jumping on the band wagon. A handful of articles used to work quite well five years ago (a handful is about 50 articles). But today, you barely get enough impressions with just 50 articles. The article marketing game has evolved. The search engine results are becoming more and more saturated. Instead of just 50 articles, marketers need hundreds or even thousands of articles to succeed. Today, it seems that only the giants (those with thousands of articles in their accounts) are making big profits. Everyone is playing the numbers game, and this has contributed to…

2) Decline in quality. – As every marketer tries to increase their traffic with more articles, the quality of these articles starts to decline. Many marketers started hiring ghost writers who are non-native English speakers but who charge low rates for their services to churn out hundreds and thousands of articles. It’s only a matter of time that…

3) The search engines step in. – The search engines realized that the search experience can be adversely affected by the large number of low quality articles that are being published all over the Internet. So they quickly tweaked their algorithm to detect duplicate content. Today, search engines still continue to reward original content that is of high quality. Even article directories like Ezinearticles started to pull their socks up and tightened their quality guidelines.

With these changes happening to article marketing, how can you continue to make article marketing work for you?

You will require two important qualities:

1) Consistency and persistence. - The majority of article marketers simply give up as they simply cannot keep up with the game. So they switch to some other traffic sources. That leaves more money on the table for you and me. You can take advantage of the situation by being even more consistent and persistent in your article marketing efforts. Continue playing the numbers game and get your article count up. At the same time, pay attention to…

2) Quality. - Quality has always been an important factor. But as article marketing continues to evolve, only those who can continue to deliver high quality content will continue to profit. Do not underestimate the importance and power of this factor. It’s one thing to talk about quality, but it’s another to be able to DELIVER quality. Most people just talk about quality but they can’t deliver. Somehow, they find it too hard to create quality content on a consistent basis. So let this be your secret weapon. If you can create high quality content CONSISTENTLY, you are head and shoulders above your competitors.

Moving forward, we understood the vital role that quality has to play in our clients’ success. So like everyone else, we are also tightening our quality guidelines. During the past few months, we had to let some of our old writers go (due to quality issues) and had to work hard to hire new writers – writers who can deliver high quality work. It’s much harder to find and hire such people but I think at the end of the day, our efforts will pay off. When clients make money, they are happy, and we are happy. Everyone wins.

So what to do with those naysayers who claim that everything is dead?

“Adsense is dead.”

“Article marketing is dead.”

“CPA is dead.”

“Clickbank is dead.”

“PPC is dead.”

Everything dead.

And for every item that is dead, there is a success story at the other end. Someone else is able to adapt and make an absolute killing on the Internet.

Someone is making huge money with Adsense right now.

Someone is making big money with CPA now.

PPC is still working very well for those who know the rules of the game.

Clickbank is still generating millions in sales and the money must be going into some lucky chap’s pockets.

And of course, I personally know of marketers who are making five figures monthly from their article marketing efforts.

So my suggestion is to leave the naysayers alone and disassociate yourself with them. They bring with them negative energies that may not do you good.

Be a smart and discerning marketer. If you come across similar comments like “this-and-this is dead”, just shake your head and then go back to work.

You know better.

Sincerely,

Darren Chow

P.S. By the way, if you have worked with your own freelance writers, you know that managing them is not easy. All sorts of problems arise. The most common excuse is that their Internet connection is affected due to some storm or lightning. It appears that lightning has a weird sense of humor – choosing to strike at the writer’s router just before an assignment is due.

Here is an email I wrote to one of my writers. It’s an interesting read and perhaps, some lessons can be gleaned from it.

As an online marketer, I’m bombarded by advertisements left right center all the time. Many of these advertisements are about making money on the Internet. I don’t have a problem with advertisements. But I do have a problem with making money by hook or by crook. Let me tell you what happened…

A couple of weeks ago, I started doing joint promotions (internet marketers call this an Ad Swap) with other marketers – i.e. you give away something free to my list of subscribers or customers, and I’ll do likewise for you. The end result is that we end up with something that everyone wants – a larger list of prospects and/or customers. It’s supposed to be a win win situation for both parties.

But before I agree to do a swap, I always go through the following process:

1) Join the list of the other marketer to see what is being offered.

I think it’s every marketer’s responsibility to always act in the best interest of the subscribers. There are two goals I want to achieve here. The first goal is to make sure that the materials are a good fit for the people on my list. It doesn’t make sense to send something that my customers are not interested in, even if it’s free.

The second goal is to get to know the other marketer – his or her background, achievements, future goals, etc. Here, I want to make sure that this marketer knows how to serve my customers (which is you) well. I don’t want to send you to a marketer who doesn’t know how to respect and treat people with decency.

2) Work on the ads.

Usually, when an agreement is reached, both parties will exchange ads – I’ll send out yours, and you’ll send out mine. The problem I’ve encountered is that many marketers are looking to build huge lists, so they join every promotion that comes along. Most of them use cookie cutter ads.

Unfortunately, I’m quite stubborn on this issue, and I sometimes refuse to budge. That’s because I understand the customers on my list. Different lists have got different profiles, so I’m confident to say that the cookie cutter approach just doesn’t work. Which is to say, there is no one-size-fits-all.

People are different. The fact that these marketers continue to use cookie cutter ads says that they know very little about the background of the people, and they do not show a strong enough interest in people to go find out. To me, this is unacceptable.

Let me give you an example.

The ads that I come across are usually along these lines.

A) Give away something valuable for free (as a sample or for self introduction).
B) Give away something that is on sale (e.g. a $47 ebook) for free (as a gift to build goodwill).

That’s fine, provided the gifts offer a genuine solution to the problem that the customer is facing. And you can’t really do that if you have zero understanding of the customer. For this reason, I always download and read the materials before agreeing to a joint promotion.

This marketer I was working with has already agreed to go ahead with a joint promotion. He has 5,000 leads on his list, so that sounds like a fairly lucrative deal. All I had to do was to take his ad, write one for him to send, and then send out the ad on a date that we both agreed upon.

However, I didn’t agree to the ad that he wanted to send out because I know my customers wouldn’t respond well. It was unfortunate that this particular marketer thinks that he knows my list better than I do and wanted to send out a cookie cutter ad that was full of hype.

The ad contained words like “pleading, begging, awesome, snagged”. In my opinion, that was overselling.

And do you know why marketers tend to try too hard sometimes to sell?

The main reason is that the people on the list are not buying enough from them. It could be that the list has stopped responding. So the marketer tries even harder to sell them something.

Or maybe they are buying, but from the marketer’s perspective, it’s always not enough. Everyone wants more sales, more money, more dough…so they hype up everything in an attempt to sell more.

If you have read any of my previous materials, you know that I’m a big fan of this “C” word known as “Conscience”.

People buy from me because they trust me. I do not believe that they buy from me because of how I hype up my marketing. I don’t. If I do so, maybe people will stop buying from me because I have become one of them – chasing after money without really caring about the customer.

The marketer that I was working with was adamant about a little thing like the subject header of the email. He said that he had tested his headline and he has gotten the highest click through rate because of that headline.

I could see how he behaved in this manner. And I don’t blame him for being adamant. You see, he was taught to market in this manner. That’s why he believed so strongly that the subject headline matters so much, to the point that he shuts out everything else.

In the end, I had to reject the deal.

Do I earn less? Maybe. But I earn enough. And I’m happy to announce that I earn enough to have a good night’s sleep without having to worry about my conscience coming back to haunt me.

I never try too hard to track open rates, click through rates and stuff. Sometimes, I don’t even track at all. But the funny thing is, I always get sales.

Let me ask you this question.

Before you open an email, do you open emails from

A) Someone who is genuinely interested in you and your goals OR
B) Someone who is just interested in selling you stuff?

Don’t tell me the answer. I think you already know the answer. It’s quite obvious actually.

Sure, dangling a bone in front of a dog may work – for a while. But when the dog realizes that it is never going to get the bone, the trick will stop working. In other words, sooner or later, people are just going to stop responding to those emails, especially if they are sent by people who are just after their pockets.

But if you know that the email is coming from a good friend, a sincere associate, you are more likely to open the email, no matter what the subject header is.

When was the last time you open an email from an unknown source?
I bet you delete them without opening.

When was the last time you open an email from a good friend of yours?
I bet you open every single email.

There you go.

I don’t see pro marketers like Sean Mize and Janet Cole putting lots of hype into their sales letter.

And you know what? They are making a really good living without all that hype.

Sure, a little bit of hype wouldn’t hurt, but it’s there just to get your attention. These marketers never sway far from being honest and truthful. Just take a look at the people around you – your friends your family members. Chances are, you learn the most from those who are honest and truthful with you. You know, deep in your heart, who you really wanted to work with.

At the end of the day, the best marketers know that you cannot run away from honesty.

If you ever go into marketing, make honesty the center of all your marketing efforts. Your reputation will improve greatly, and you will have more successful marketing campaigns down the road. That’s a guarantee.

What you don’t want to do, is to manipulate or resort to tricks. I remember one marketer I approached. I think she was trying to protect her subscribers, but she was doing it wrong. (Another true story by the way)

She wanted to have good content for her customers, but her definition of good content is some “trick” that will help her customers. A trick, by its very nature, is gimmicky. Sometimes, a trick may even be classified as black hat. That’s where you need to be a little careful here.

This marketer thinks that her customers are already very knowledgeable, so they won’t respond to the usual materials. So she thinks that if she can send them some “tricks”, they are more likely to respond.

Unfortunately, if she is not careful, her good intentions may back fire and affect her reputation adversely. First, I want to say that the assumption of customers knowing everything may well be false.

Even the same “boring” materials can be useful. How? For example, you can send good marketing fundamentals to remind your customers that they exist for good reason. People tend to forget after a while, so it’s useful to send reminders. You see, same knowledge, same materials, sent at a different time, can be useful.

Another alternative would be to send materials with more depth. In fact, I think that there is no such thing as knowing everything. For instance, I specialize in article marketing. So I sent out a report on article approval to show my customers how they can improve their article approval rates with just a little more effort.

(Download here: http://www.fastsubmitarticles.com/download/article_approval.pdf)
(Right click save as to download)

More depth means you include information and details that the average person would not have paid attention to. By giving out information with more depth, you show that you really know what you are talking about, and that you are in a better position to provide solutions.

See? There is no need to resort to tricks. Really.

Ok, I think I’ve rambled on long enough. Time for some official business.

The Games and Entertainment Blog Network has just been released.

The 2 for 1 promotion is now on. Here are the details:

* Min. 3 distribution credits must be purchased in a single order.
* For every 1 purchased credit, you get 2 free.
* Offer will expire on 11 Sept. 2009 (one week from now).
* To claim your free credits, make a purchase at http://www.blogcontentsyndication.com/register.asp
Then email me from the website. Remember to include your login email.

That’s all I have to say for now.

Remember to look out for more free stuff as I send them along to you from my partners.

Hope they’ll help you achieve your goals more quickly.

Enjoy the content!

To your success,
Darren Chow

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.

I wrote a letter to my customers during new year’s eve. Perhaps you can pick up some tips from the letter.

Here’s a brief passage:

Another year has come and gone. Now is the time to reflect and to learn the lessons from 2008, and plan for the year ahead. In this letter, I hope to provide you with some real value by suggesting various ways you can grow your online business.

Everyday, I work with clients to promote their websites using article marketing. Most are already quite experienced in this arena, but there are some who are still new to article marketing.

Let’s be clear. There are 2 primary goals you want to achieve when you embark on an article marketing campaign.

1) Direct traffic from the links in your articles and

2) Getting your sites to rank better in the search engines.

Article marketing is a very effective method to get your site to rank well in the search engines. Ultimately, everything boils down to keywords. Your online fortune will depend on how well you rank for targeted keywords. In other words, you want to target keywords with traffic, and keywords that will convert.

So how do you know which keywords will bring you traffic, and which keywords will convert?

Read the rest of the article here: Plan to Grow Your Business With Article Marketing in 2009