Are You Writing and Submitting Articles to Promote Your Web Site or Blog?

If you are striving to herd large amounts of online traffic to your blog or website, then you certainly want to think about article marketing as being one of your principal ways to achieve that. There are many article marketing web sites just waiting for your article and, in most cases, it's free to submit articles to them. Whether you pen the articles yourself or pay another person else to compose them for you, there are some things that you should realize before you begin:

1. Benefits of Article Marketing - On the plus side, the most important advantage to your traffic-generating campaign will be the backlinks you will obtain in the process of submitting articles. Google and the other major search engines count how many backlinks you have pointing back at your blog or web site. The concept is that if you have a lot of, one-way, inbound links (backlinks) then your web site must have a lot to offer in terms of content and will be ranked higher.

Not all backlinks are of equal SEO value and article marketing is not the only way to obtain them. However, article marketing is a great way to acquire them. Links coming from so-called "authority” sites are credited much more by the search engines than backlinks you might achieve by, say, posting a comment on a small or unknown blog. That's not to say to say that you shouldn’t also be posting comments on related blogs and forums: It’s merely that links generated through major article marketing sites have more SEO clout in terms of backlink credits.

2. Submitting Original Material - The articles you submit to these article marketing sited MUST be your own, original work. If are found to be otherwise, you may have them declined, be asked to remove them or, worse, you could end up battling plagiarism charges. From a SEO point of view alone, you should appreciate that these articles will be listed (as articles) in the search engine listings independently of any website or blog.

The search engines want to see original writing because they feel it to be more useful to their readers than material that has been copied and kicked around the Internet for a while. Therefore, if your article content is not original, it is much less likely to be seen and its links won’t be clicked on if they aren’t visible to the public because the articles appear far down in the listings.

3. Keywords and Staying on Subject - Your articles should be closely aligned to the theme of your site or blog and this applies to the links you locate at the end of those articles, also. If your website is about bird cages and you compose an article concerning plumbing services that has a link back to your bird cage site, you are wasting your time. Instead, your article ought to be strictly about bird cages and any links at the bottom should point to your bird cage site or another site on the same theme.
And, before you even start writing, you should know what the best keyword or keywords are for your site and use them in everything you write including the article title, the article summary, the article body and the keywords listing. The keyword saturation (frequency) inside the article body should be somewhere between one and four percent of the total number of words, no higher and no lower. Be cautious not to use your keyword to the degree that it makes your article read badly. You don't want a sentence that says: "Find the best bird cages at our bird cage site which is a favorite bird cage site of interest to bird cage lovers that is on the subject of bird cages.”

4. Submission Requirements - When you submit a piece to an article marketing site, you will be asked for at least some, if not all. Of the following information: The article title, a brief synopsis of the article, the body of the article itself plus a listing of keywords that are separated by commas with no spaces after the commas and no comma after the last keyword. Ordinarily, you will be given a "Resource Box” where you are able to put in a short biography of the author in addition to the allowable number of self-serving links, usually 2 or 3. If not, put your resource content immediately after your article in the article body box.

The synopsis should be no more than 2 or 3 sentences. The article body should be at least 400 words long and less than the maximum number of words allowed by that particular article marketing website. The keywords will be subject to a maximum number of characters. The resource box will usually be the only place where you can enter self-serving links and the allowable number of links will be stated.

5. Author Guidelines and Approval - To prevent having your articles refused, you should examine the author guidelines of each directory and observe them. Your articles, in most cases, will be read and then approved or refused by a real, live staff member who is aware of all the rules of that website.

6. Keeping Records - Maintain a record that has an account of all your articles, the dates they were submitted and to what directories they were submitted. There should also be a column where you will be able to indicate that the article was approved or refused and a column for any comments you might want to record. That will save you from submitting the identical article more than once to each website which is a "no-no.”

7. Article "Spinning" Software - Most article marketing websites will ask that you author original articles specifically for them and state that you won't submit those identical articles to other article marketing sites. Adhering to this precisely, of course, would greatly intensify your workload and drastically reduce the effectiveness of your labor.

There are numerous article "spinning” programs out there that promise to produce numerous unique versions of your original article. These article spinners are made to use as many synonyms for as many words as possible. The final result is always unreadable gibberish unless you, the author, can assume control over which synonyms will be employed and where. You will notice that a synonym that makes sense in one context, make no sense in another. The software isn't smart enough to know the difference.

8. Manual vs. Automatic Submission - I recommend that you take the time to submit your articles manually, rather than counting on widely-available article submission computer programs. Such software can only submit the identical version of your article to every site, which is contrary to the idea of submitting only original material. Further, each article submission site has different rules and ways of entering data and a few even maintain a "Captcha” entry box to check to see that the article is being submitted by a human being and not a machine.

If you want to shell out for them, there are professional article submission firms on the web that will do all your submissions on your behalf for a price. If you choose to go this way, for the reasons discussed above, check to see that they will be submitting by hand somewhat unique versions of your articles to each website in the correct format for that site.

As you can see, article marketing is a lot of work when completed the proper way. It is also one of the most effective opportunities to promote your blog or web site. If you write well and pick fascinating subject angles to explore, you will, in the years to come, position yourself as an "authority” in your marketing niche, who knows his or her subject area and whom can be trusted enough to buy from.

Your articles will stay on those sites and in the search engine listings for years and, through that time, the backlinks they create will multiply like rabbits. A single article won't do the job. You must be composing and submitting articles on your topic all the time to as many directories as possible.

About the Author:

Bob Gillespie writes on many subjects including article marketing. He is a full-time Internet marketer and author who lives on the island of Maui in Hawaii. Learn more about article marketing at Bob's blog at:

http://article-marketing.inetwyoming.com

Other blogs of possible interest:

http://blogs.inetwyoming.com

and

http://marketing-plans.inetwyoming.com