Article Marketing – A Case History and Ongoing
Experiment
I stumbled across article marketing about a little
over a year ago. I was reading one of the forums I subscribe to when
one of the participants reported that he had hired an outfit to submit
his site to a bunch of directories. He further stated that overnight he
could not keep up with the orders. It rocketed his business by more than
ten times. Wow!
I have a number of websites languishing on the
internet with small steady streams of income. I have a site called
cruisesrfun.com and it was bringing me in about $4 to $5 dollars a day
from advertising on the site. I decided that I would use that site for
my test.
I’d love to multiply that by 10 times! I
contacted him, and got the name of the submission service that he had
used.
Learning about article marketing the hard way
I can’t remember the name of the service, but it
was pretty cheap. His services included actually writing articles, and
they were cheap too. I decided to try it out. I have a site called
cruisesrfun.com and it was bringing me in about $4 to $5 dollars a day
from ads on the site. I decided that I would use that site for my test.
I had the cruises site submitted to something like
1,000 directories. I also had him write an article and submit it to
something like 500 article directories. I was able to proofread his
article, and it wasn’t anything I would be proud of, so I re-wrote it
and had the service submit it.
Then I waited to see what would happen. Nothing
happened. Months went by and no sign of increased traffic.
If you want it done right, do it yourself.
However, I had never heard of article directories
or article marketing. I investigated it, and it sounded plausible. I
noticed that the articles did indeed show up in Google SERP’s. I also
noticed a lot of articles that sounded as though they were written by
the service I had hired to write my article. They are easy to spot…it’s
obvious that English is not their first language.
I decided to try it myself. I wrote another
article about cruise ship vacations, and then began searching for
article directories to submit to. I Googled article directories, and
then used an online traffic estimator site to see how much traffic each
one got. I selected the top 35 directories traffic wise, and submitted
the article.
Writing and submitting articles to the directories
I then began submitting articles for a number of my
sites. It didn’t take long for me to realize that 35
directories is too many for me to handle. Then there is the issue of
duplicate content. I decided to whittle the list down to 10. I did
Google searches and picked the 10 directories that showed up the most
often and dropped the rest.
Articles on a couple of the directories are indexed
and show up in search results within hours of being submitted, others
take a couple of weeks, and some take months.
Natural looking links are what the engines like
I like it that way because it looks more natural to
Google if you pick up links slowly. If you get 500 links in a day or so
Google assumes they are less valuable. I also change the anchor text of
the links in the author’s box. Again, it looks more natural, and you
get to work in more keyword phrases in your anchor text. Deep linking
is another nice thing about article marketing. You can link to
individual pages other than the home page, increasing it’s importance in
the eyes of the engines.
First a web page, then an article
I generally write an article and make it a webpage
for one of my sites. Then I wait until they are indexed by Google. Once
they’ve been indexed I submit them to the article directories. Usually
within a few weeks the articles are showing up on search results pages,
often with a higher ranking than the same article on my site.
This reinforces my belief that at least some of the
article directories are respected by the major search engines. My stats
also show a continuing stream of traffic to the site which should
continue indefinitely. How much traffic you get depends upon the
quality and topic of your article, and the number of articles you’ve
published and submitted. Over the last year I’ve done about 100
articles. A half dozen one way links don’t have the impact that a couple
of hundred articles have.
Original content for your site
As a side benefit, your site gets a page of good
original content every time you finish another article and once you get
over a hundred pages on your site the search engines begin to notice
you.
I’ve found that the same article can do well on one
directory and terrible on another. There are niche directories that
focus on narrow niches like green articles, or cooking, etc. where some
of your articles will simply never be approved if they aren’t exactly
what the editors are looking for.
Make use of the anchor text on the links back to your site
I’ve managed to dramatically increase my ranking
for keyword phrases using the author’s links “anchor text”. It takes
quite a while, up to a year in my case, but the search engines are
keeping track of those one way links and eventually they add up and can
make a huge difference. It can happen quickly in the right
circumstances.
The benefits of article marketing are definitely
worth pursuing if you are capable and willing to write lots of high
quality articles, and you need patience. Make your articles about
500-900 words long, read the directory guidelines carefully and follow
them.
Changeup your anchor text frequently and do some
deep linking to your web pages. Write your articles for humans. The best
way to learn is to jump in and do it. Choose your article directories
carefully and start marketing.
Oh yeah...My cruisesrfun.com site is up to $50 a day in profits.
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