Article Marketing (A Subset of Link Building)

Writing articles about your topic of interest and sending them out to article directories, other websites, and eZines to publish is an almost ideal way to gain free advertising. I really can’t recommend it enough for long-term link building campaigns. All you need is time & writing skills for this self-compounding method to make your website one of the most respected and authoritative sites on the net.

I realize that this method has been out in the open and even done to death over the last couple of years, however I find that a lot of people who have tried Article Marketing quickly give it up before seeing any success.

It seems that everyone sets out writing articles, no matter if they do it themselves or pay someone to do it for them, by submitting one or two articles to the main article directories found in the more popular article submission software suites, such as Jason Potash’s Article Announcer. (Not free, really top-of-the line stuff)

Some sort of article submission software is pretty much necessary because it can take a long time to submit an article to even a handful of websites… The automation that these softwares offer are not just ‘set-it and forget it,’ you will most definitely still have to go to each site and make sure it populates all the right fields properly.

The best Free one I’ve found is a Master Resale Rights product called “My Article Submitter.” There is no support for it, and it annoyingly stays resident in your windows system tray even after you’ve closed it. Still, it gets the job done without too much hassle, and you can download it from my website for free from this link:

http://www.homebizfactory.com/My_Article_Submitter.html

While I use Article Announcer myself, the problem with both softwares is that most people who first try them (I am certainly guilty of this myself) want to ‘test the waters’ to see if the technique works or not before they commit to it fully.

With most purchases you make in your life, this is a fair strategy - but not when it comes to an article submission campaign. The real benefit in sending out your articles is by doing it in bulk, over time.

What proponents of Article Marketing have so far failed to tell me is that one or two articles out there pointing back to my website, no matter how many directories I send it to, is only going to help a tiny bit, and then slowly fizzle away.

More than likely it won’t even send a single visitor to my site… It will only help my PageRank a bit, for a while.

This of course assumes that I haven’t gotten it published by an eZine owner who has a really big list… Since there is no way to be sure that you can get it published by an eZine owner with lots of influence, we won’t depend on it for this example. Think of that as a surprise bonus you can sometime get with this system, if it happens at all.

The way to surely succeed with articles is to have an article submitted to all the directories EVERY WEEK, all linking back to the same website. This of course takes time and patience, which is the only reason that so many people fail at this strategy.

I don’t feel it’s worth my time every single week to write and submit an article, I’ve got more important things to do with my life. Worse yet, I’ve so far made a living from informational AdSense publishing (VRE) sites, so running an article campaign for each of these 250+ small websites is simply impossible.

However, over the last year I’ve tested 10 different campaigns of article submission for 10 of those sites, and the one result they all had in common was that bulk, regular submissions are the key.

I hired someone on rent-a-coder to submit my articles for me once a week for 3 months, and right now (4 months later) a few of those sites are #1 in Google with no other promotion except for link directory submissions.

It’s a prime example of the tortoise and the hair… But in the first and second months of the campaign, I was sure my turtle was asleep!