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
Guest post is another steam from this also if your looking to get more content out there and build more links..hard work pays off.
“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”
Agree with you, things have changed a lot from a few years when people used to link back to you after publishing your article on their site. But after Google’s Panda update most of the quality websites have stopped using scrapped content.
Its better do guest blogging these days for getting strong links. It is a lot of hard work. But it pays-off eventually.
Changing Google’s new algorithm give impact on almost blogs. I am one of person who feel the painful impact. My great blog has been banned by Google, and my another blog traffic is dropped. But, I agree with you that a blog or site has loyal readers. It happens to my great blog that’s banned by Google still have unique visitors around 100 – 300 visitors/day.
I will try your tips to increase my traffic blog, and get traffic for my new blog.
I’m using article submission still and I can see that it still gives benefits to my sites. It’s really cool to get some free tools online and reap the benefits afterwards. Thanks for the useful information. More power!
I’ll definitely be trying it here soon. I’ve already received invitations to write guest posts for certain blogs. How much more different is it to write an article for established newsletters?
Hard work always pay good result.We always try to write for our readers not for google.Killer contents always bring good traffic.
Of course not dead.. Because, when someone is pressing the link (your link) and getting to your website, G thinks, that link have some value.
The newsletter idea is even better today after the notorious Panda / Farmer update has struck down on many article sites with sub par quality on the content. Submitting articles to well established blogs as a guest blogger also still works great.
In Sweden we have very few article directories and submitting swedish content to the international ones doesn’t work or isn’t allowed.
Hello, John! Your article is very, very helpful. A few newbie bloggers have come to me, asking for advice on how they could attract traffic to their blog, and I have always exhorted them to produce well-crafted and superb articles — but frankly, that’s getting to be old advice.
While good stories connect people, they can only connect people who actually get to read them, and this is where exposure through other blogs helps.
One idea that can help us find blogs worthy of our time is by installing an add-on in Firefox where the pagerank of Web sites appear on an installed toolbar. This could help us identify which blogs are the best ones for sending our articles to.
I have submitted my articles to blogs before and this method does produce some good results.
After Google just implemented the Farmer update, how do you think this will affect article marketing? I read that many of the article farms lost 90% of their traffic.