This is a guest post by John who likes freelance writing and is an internet marketer. You can visit his website OnlineIncomeAchievement.com to know more about his work.
Traditional article marketing consists of writing an article and submitting it to article directories such as Ezine Articles, Article Base, Go Articles to name a few.
While this method of using articles for traffic worked swimmingly for a number of years, it doesn’t quite deliver the same results anymore. The growing competition in the field has made it less effective as a way of generating traffic to a website.
So, IS Article Marketing Dead? Not by a long shot.
Today, there are better ways to get the most out of your article marketing efforts. Instead of submitting your articles to the directories, you’ll be better served by submitting them directly to where your target market is hanging out. There are blogs, for example, that consistently get up to 400k (and more) unique visitors a month. Of course, the more popular the blog the tougher it will be to get your content selected, but you don’t necessarily have to shoot for the highest end of the spectrum to get decent exposure for your article.
There are websites and blogs for pretty much anything under the sun these days. This means that whatever niche you’re in, there will be online properties where people interested in your niche gather. Popular websites/blogs already have a loyal audience that comes in daily to consume content, and some of these sites actually invite content and would gladly publish your article as long as you submit original, quality content; all you ask in return is that they allow you to put a link to your website either somewhere in the article or in your author’s bio.
This means that, upon acceptance, your article is instantly exposed to thousands of targeted visitors every day without any extra work on your part. This will translate into a tremendous increase in traffic to your site, blog, squeeze page, etc. It’s a win-win situation. The website owner gets free, fresh content for his or her readers, you get exposure.
How Is It Done?
So, how do you find blogs that will accept to publish your article? An easy way is to run a Google blog search for a keyword in your niche and browse the results. You’ll find that some blogs, not all, will have a “Submit Article”, or something similar link that you can follow to find out about the guidelines for submitting an article for publication. Just make sure you do some research on the blog in question to determine if it gets enough traffic to make it worth your while.
Alternate Method
Another way to use your articles for massive traffic is to get them published in an online newsletter. Many businesses create their own newsletters as a way to build customer loyalty, some of these companies are always looking for content to populate the newsletter, and as such they will happily accept pre-written articles – it makes their life easier. All you have to do is contact the owner, via email or phone, and you’ll find that more often than not, you’ll get a favorable response.
A simple search on Google for “newsletters + your niche” will produce a slew of newsletters that you could approach by asking them if they’re looking for contributors. Obviously, they’re not all going to be looking for pre-written content, but some undoubtedly will – it is a numbers game. This is a very underused method, and while it does require a bit of extra work, the results can be more than worth it.
Some newsletters have subscribers in the 10’s or even 100’s of thousands. This provides a substantial exposure potential for your article; much more than you would get by submitting that same article to all of the article directories.
You can even sign up and become a subscriber to a few newsletters to get a feel for what they’re about and what they look like. This can help you decide on the ones that are best suited for your style of writing.
Final Words
An additional advantage of giving your articles to high-profile websites and newsletters is the fact that you do not need to worry about keyword research or assuring that you properly sprinkle keywords in your article for SEO purposes; you do not need Google in this instance because the high-profile website already gets its own traffic, or has a large list of subscribers in the case of the newsletter. How liberating is that?
Most article marketers think of search engines as the way to acquire traffic. There’s nothing wrong with this given that that’s where web surfers go to search for information; however, Google, or any other search engine, is not the only place to get traffic. There’s a load of traffic than can be acquired from various websites out there without the competition or having to keep up with Google’s ever changing algorithms.
Now, if submitting to article directories is producing results for you, by all means continue doing so. But, you’ll start to see a lot more traffic by taking it a step further and contributing content to popular sites and newsletters in your niche.
Top 10 Search Terms:
• chucks this site uses keywordluv
I strongly recommend the guest post route over article marketing. If what you’re looking for is page juice, it’s rare to see an article that ranks. But if you write a guest post and promote it with your own links, encouragement of comments etc. that guest post can get it’s own page rank for you. And if the author of the blog knows you’re promoting, they will accelerate their own promotion and you’ll have twice as much power pushing your post.
yes for me also, guest posts are much effective and direct way of promoting yourself and your brand. Unlike article marketing, it is a very direct and targeted method and brings results instantly
So, basically, you’re saying that guest posting brings more result than submitting articles to ezine? I see that it’s getting popular and it’s not a bad idea. What if you use both technique to get maximum result?
Yes using both method is the best approach however because of time constraint we should use the best method that will yield a better result.
Article marketing is defiantly not dead, only it requires approach. First of all, you need to create article, which is really compelling to the audience – something that people want to read and see.
The other thing is syndication – you need to get your article in front of a massive audience in order to see benefits. You need to produce your article in various formats – guest posts, PDF’s, Videos, podcasts, e-books, newsletters and many others.
This will ensure maximum exposure for your content and more targeted results.
Kind regards,
Peter
The best way is to write guest post and get maximum traffic of the other site. It is also good to submit your article at Ezinearticles.com to get fruit of huge traffic and link that article to your site.
I want to say that Distributing your articles to online publishers, article submission sites can instantly bring thousands of visitorsto your web site. For example, if you manage to get your
article accepted by a large ezine with half a million subscribers you will experience a sudden increase in subscribers or sales from your site.
I think the idea to use newsletter to get some traffic is great. I have not tried this, but sounds like a great idea… will check how to approach this!
Great tips on using newsletters to distribute your articles to different audiences. Very smart and something I had not ever heard of!
Article marketing is a tried and tested way of getting your content and brand out there, so while we may get all excited with ‘new’ and ‘innovative’ methods, we’ll keep coming back to the basics.
This is a great idea! I know about guest posting and have already submitted a few articles that have been accepted, but I honestly hadn’t thought of trying to submit for a newsletter.
Thanks for the tip!
Delena
Guest posting and writing online newsletters for businesses have never really occurred to me. However, now that you have mentioned them, it all just makes perfect sense. Writing for both along with article directories can be a win-win situation. Thanks!