Article Marketing

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Changing Roles of the Article Directory - How To Do Article Marketing The Right Way?

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Article marketing is the art and craft of using articles for marketing, which typically translates into attracting more eye-balls to one's offer or brand. But there are some areas of confusion and uncertainty - even controversy and disagreement among experts - about article marketing.

So, what is the right (or effective) way to go about article marketing? How to get quality traffic in reasonably good volume to justify the effort? It begins by clearly defining why you are trying article marketing.

Is it to get higher search engine rankings for your website, blog, or individual articles? Or is it to reach your target audience in other ways? There may be some overlap, but broadly these are two rather exclusive approaches to using article marketing. We'll address both in this article. But let's start with something less controversial and generally accepted.

How many articles? How often to write and submit them?

Many first-time article marketers are worried about this. The simple answer is: As many as you can, as often as you can, without sacrificing quality or compromising on your strategy. Yes, strategy. It's important. So here's where we'll dive right into it.

Your strategy will depend upon your goal for article marketing - higher search engine ranking, broader readership, or both.

If you want to get ranked high on search engines, you need to research keywords that are most valuable to your business, assess competitiveness, hunt out related terms and phrases, and plan your content creation to press all those hot buttons that matter for search engine optimization.

When your goal is to get your content syndicated through other channels that reach your intended audience, your focus will be on solving problems many are seeking solutions for, and presenting them in a manner most appealing to the publishers who can reach that market.

Which brings us to the first controversial area...

Is Article Spinning Necessary - Or Advisable?

Should your distributed articles be 'spun' (edited or modified lightly to appear 'unique' to search algorithms, while retaining similar meaning)?

The consensus view of experts following a content syndication model would be against spinning. But if getting ranked on search engines is your only aim, you cannot help spinning articles - because otherwise, duplicate instances of your content on other websites would be ignored by search engines for back-link purposes. Maybe even for ranking on SERPs (search engine results pages).

It boils down to the stated intention of Google and other search services, which is to deliver a good 'user experience'. Imagine the front page of Google search results littered with multiple copies of the exact same article on multiple different sites. It ain't gonna happen... not unless Google enters self-destruct mode!

So if you want each discrete submission of your content to count as a 'unique' article, or regarded as a valid back-link to your site, then it has to be modified sufficiently enough for a search engine's algorithm to regard it as different from other versions. That's called 'article spinning' and it gives you a shot at owning multiple slots on the SERPs for your content. You can do it with software, or manually. You can do it well, or poorly. You can be intelligent about how you do it, or stupid. The choice is yours! :)

(More discussion: Should you spin articles?)

Where To Publish Your Articles? How To Get It Indexed?

Going into nuances would make this article a little book. So I'm going to be dogmatic in my recommendations, with the advice to test variations for your model and see which works best for you.

There's a strong case for publishing your articles on Web properties you control or own, because it clearly positions you as the original author. Over time, this can help position you as an authority or expert on the subject. It also makes it more likely that search engines will rank the version of your article on your own site higher on SERPs than a distributed or syndicated version, though this isn't always guaranteed.

Once your article is indexed in search engines, you can then submit it to article directories or other content distribution sources for syndication, with or without further modifications and tweaking (as your content strategy dictates).

There are many ways to get your article indexed. Here is a simple approach. Publish your article to your own website or blog. Install another blog on which you will publish a short summary of each article, with a link to the full content on your site. Then submit the links of your article page and your blog post to various social bookmarking sites. Submit RSS feeds from your blog to RSS directories. Ping the blog posts. While the first few articles may take a while to get spidered by search engine robots and indexed, you'll find that this soon becomes fast, almost instant.

Should You Publish The Same Article In Many Places?

Now that your content is published and indexed by search engines, the next step in article marketing is to get it read by many people. You could do it on your own, by announcing your article to your in-house mailing list, your social network followers, your RSS subscribers, your family and friends... but there's still a vast crowd out there who may want to read it. How can you reach them?

Enter: the Article Directory.

The role of article directories in article marketing has changed recently. Gone are the days when your typical customers or prospects found you through articles published on a directory. Thanks to changes in Google's algorithm, data dumps of poor quality content are now classified as 'article farms' and downgraded on SERPs, making them harder to find on search results.

But article directories are still relevant. In a sense, they are even more relevant than before to article marketers who focus on providing quality content. And that is because article directories have retained their core audience... content publishers.

Publishers of digital content (bloggers, webmasters, ezine editors and more) are still flocking to quality article directories in search of content that they can re-publish and syndicate to their audience.

Read that last bit again - carefully. It is the 'hidden gold' waiting to be mined in article directories. Strategically. By writing and submitting articles that are intended for syndication, you can tap into this relatively less competitive channel. You can leverage ready-made audiences and reach them with your article content. There's no better way to get your work in front of large audiences of laser targeted prospects. The value of this is incredible.

What Are The Best Places to Submit Articles?

You'll find many huge lists of places where you can submit articles like this one, and different people have their own favorites. But as an article marketer seeking the widest exposure for your content, knowing what you do about article directories, your goal should be to get the greatest possible distribution - for the least possible time and expense.

If you can afford it, there are services and software tools that let you submit content to dozens, hundreds or even thousands of resources. If you can't, then focus on fewer places which give you the highest return for your investment of time and effort. It will always be an area for testing and improving, so get started right away and test continuously.

And don't stop with just article directories. There are many other places to share your articles. You could submit them as guest blog posts or forum discussion starters. You can even convert them into other formats and distribute them on PDF sharing sites, Web 2.0 resources (Squidoo, HubPages, StumbleUpon etc.), PowerPoint presentations, screen-savers, or even shared software!

So Is This Kind of Mass Submission The Same As Syndication?

No. Article syndication is when other publishers use or distribute your articles to their audience, either digitally or otherwise. This is an audience that you will not have access to directly by yourself. You are piggy-backing on the effort invested by other publishers into assembling this audience, and presenting your content to them through article syndication.

This can happen passively, when you submit your content to article directories from which publishers can pick them up. Or you can get more active and take steps to syndicate your content by approaching publishers directly.

In that respect, mass submission can be the first step along an article syndication path. You distribute your articles widely across multiple resources frequented by publishers, and watch to see how many of them use your content. You can track this using a variety of tools like Google Alerts. Then, you can approach each publisher who used your content, offering them your other articles for syndication.

It may take time to establish a working relationship, but the effort pays off richly by way of getting your articles read by a vast new audience of your ideal prospects.

How To Maximize Your Chance of Syndication?

Do all articles get syndicated widely? Certainly not. But a popular myth is that only very high quality content even stands a chance of being syndicated. That's not true either. The determinant of how widely articles are syndicated is the value you provide to readers. High value content spreads widely. Poor content stays limited in reach.

With that said, there are specific things you can do to improve your chance of getting content syndicated. But always keep this in mind:

Syndication is NOT for search engines.

That sentence summarizes a rather complex and involved philosophy. Those who use article syndication go straight for the jugular - the targeted audience that their syndication partners can reach. The primary goal of article syndication is not higher ranking on search engines. That's why your articles written for syndication can ignore elements of on-page SEO, 'duplicate content' worries and more.

Here are some guidelines for getting articles syndicated:

1. Write longer articles of 1,000 to 1,500 words. They are more often syndicated than shorter ones.

2. Entertain or provoke controversy. Grab your reader by the eyeballs. Make it hard for them to ignore what you're saying.

3. Do not market or promote anything. Not in the content. And maybe not even in the resource box at the end. Your goal is to attract them to wanting to know you better, not coerce them into clicking a link!

4. Polish your content. Avoid spelling and grammar mistakes. Punctuate correctly.

Maybe this flies in the face of all article marketing advice you've ever received before. But don't ignore it just for that reason. After all, if your current style of article marketing works fabulously well, you wouldn't even be reading this, right?!

Now let's take this to an even higher plane... and talk about how to find more syndication partners than article directories will deliver you.

How To Find Syndication Partners?

It's a good start to publish your articles on article directories and wait for some publishers to use them. But then, you can scale it to greater heights and find hundreds, or even thousands of syndication partners who can get your article in front of millions of readers.

Ezine publishers, bloggers, owners of authority websites, digital publishers, folks with a large social network following, influencers and sneezers - all can amplify the signal of your high-quality content remarkably.

Some nice and detailed ways to approach prospective syndication partners are on this discussion which is well worth a read. And this comment from a very experienced article syndication expert, Paul Uhl, is brilliant.

Article Marketing - In a Nutshell

1. Decide what you expect from article marketing, and why you're doing it

2. Devise your content strategy to fit those objectives

3. Create top quality content as often as you are able to

4. Publish it on Web properties you control or own

5. Ensure that your content is indexed on search engines

6. Distribute it through the best channels to reach your intended audience

7. Consider article syndication as a high-impact form of article marketing

Simple, yes?

Go on and start doing it!