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
benefits of article marketing are still huge… infact as an alternate to article marketing you can use auto post feature on posterous to post to your many different blogs… and get links from all of them at once
Hi john, today mostly they are using the article marketing like e zine and so on because its one of the best paths to increase the traffic for long years.
Guest posting is one of the strongest way to get quality back links and market your site with a known audience of a website related to your niche .
Sourish
Hi,
Good tips! In fact the idea of submitting articles to sites in your niche seems similar to the idea of guest blogging. That’s no bad thing though – I’ve had some real success from guesting blogging. It’s much more effective than article marketing (for me at least.)
Thanks!
Pete
Posting articles to directories and guest posting for blogs never really occurred to me. However, now that you have mentioned them, it all just makes sense. Writing for both along can be a win-win situation. Nice post.
As far as I know article directories like Ezine and articlebase is extremely useful in promoting a blog…I haven’t done any guest posting yet..may be its the time for me to give it a try.. 🙂
I have also experienced that article directories are great ways for promoting tools, I try to at least write 3 versions of my daily article one for my site and two for article directories.
Always use a unique article for each web site. Do not send the same article to each. writing a new article each time then Unique Article Wizard is definitely for promoting your sites.
Nowadays we are using various tactics in online marketing and extra study is the best way to get success in online business. I trust that guest post such as posting on do follow blogs can help a lot to have a higher Google ranking and newsletter also help to promote our blog. Thanks for awesome post!
Hey John,
I try to use both strategies…Guest post and submit articles to directories…
Cheers!
Jorge
The newsletter submission is a very cool idea. Never came across it before. Will definitely try it. It’s much more difficult to get our foot in the door for bigger sites or blogs.