SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING VIA ARTICLE DISTRIBUTION Most of us realize that one way to improve our chances for increased website traffic is to place online ads using Google Adwords or something like it. A less costly, more rewarding albeit more time consuming practice is article marketing. For short term results, use Adwords. For longer term results, combine ads with article marketing. Why? Because Google and the Internet never sleeps, and hardly ever destroys content. Hi-content information has a way of lasting perpetually. I know. Some of my stuff has been around more than a decade on the same websites. I had to contact the site owners to change my tagline becuase I had moved. The Business Know How forum, formerly of AOL fame, comes to mind. What I didn't know back then was how to leverage my content so it would be syndicated everywhere. I submitted to just a few sites and while that helped, pebble in the ocean folks. How could I make a splash? BEST ARTICLE MARKETING SUBMISSION SERVICES Well, now that I got back into the article distribution and syndication game, or chose it to market the Smart Company Growth business brand, I started by finding the sites that wanted my content. There are a ton of them out there and a few major ones: Articles Base, Go Articles, Ezine Articles to name a few. What I found was, to be on all of these, it took an extraordinary amount of my time, not leaving any time for the business of my business you see. I searched for an aggregator who would take my articles and submit them to as many places as I could. Then a friend and associate suggested Submit Your Article. I was leery, but I investigated it. However, my friend was an avid Submit Your Article enthusiast whose webiste was getting thousands of unique visitors per day. Let's just say that is hundreds of times what my site, began in January 2011, was getting. I had a boatload of articles I wrote for American City Business Journal columns in the 1990s and early 2000s. My strategy: update for modernization purposes, discard the ones that were hopelessly out of date, and submit to as many places as possible. Now let me tell you, I was warned by my business buddy that article marketing takes time, even using the top article distribution websites in the business. Search engines take a while to index backlinks, etc. I wanted something fast! I did a link: mywebsite.com test on Google to check backlinks from my first few submissions (about 7 articles) through one of the major article directories. I almost threw up! I had fewer than 20 links to my website. Boo website. Yes, it was a brand new site and yes, Google takes a while on the backlinks, I was told. But 20?! I HAD WORK TO DO. People, the early results are in. A month in I repeated the same linkback check on Google and saw a stunning 10,700 links to my site. Now it may not be all from article marketing, but submitting articles has been the main SEM activity I've been engaged in for that time, so I know most of it is. Rather than talk about it, I'll just show you can see a screen shot of the backlinks to my site as of 2-25-11 on the blog post at http://smartcompanygrowth.com/?p=945, prompting me to write this review. Folks, I have submitted a total of about 12 articles in the last month. That backlink number is not a hallucination--ABOUT 10,700! My daily traffic to the site is lagging the curve, of course, but has quadrupled since I started using the Submit Your Article service. You can see in the image the first few results are my blog posts on my page, and then the article links from elsewhere kick in. What else can I say? I am now a believer. Now frankly, I'm not an expert at what to do with the increased traffic and not necessarily an emarketer, but I'll figure that out later. I like to write, I have a lot of archive articles, so for my money, use of the top article marketing service is the way I will go. I can complement with Adwords campaigns, etc. later. HOW DOES SUBMIT YOUR ARTICLE WORK? I haven't previewed and tried other top article marketing services. No need to. Submit Your Article works, so to me, it's the top article distribution website out there. Here's a few more reasons why. I thought you could just go out and send the same article to hundreds of sites, no harm, no foul. Well, not exactly. Google, Yahoo and other search engine players tend to punish that. And it's a funny thing, article sites and blog owners love to have something unique. How to do? How to do? I didn't want to have to rewrite all of my articles each time. I'd sooner jump from a bridge. Submit Your Article has a tool they call Article Leverage. After you input your first article to the site, along with both html and non-html author's boxes (SYA provides direction and suggestion here), keywords, and summary statements, you move through successive screens where you get to put a spin on things like your title (make sure your main keywords stay pristine), your opening paragraph, various sentences within the article, and your author's boxes. Is it clunky? You bet. A pain in the rear end? Uh-huh. 1000 times easier than customizing your article a hundred times? Try 100,000 times easier. What Submit Your Article does is use an algoritm to then mix and match your substitute phrases, titles and author's boxes to make each version they submit to directories unique, all without losing the central theme of the article. You determine your level of uniqueness by how many different "spins" you put on your title, sentences, author's boxes, etc. SYA's default recommendations work fine. So what else can this do for you? Well, when all these different versions of your article get into cyberspace, besides providing all the backlinks to improve your site SEO (I showed you that already), it provides alternative content returns when someone searches on your keywords, so that you can not only show up in the top 10 search return on Google, you can own it! I call this category killing. People, I don't want to bore you but if you think I'm lying, visit the blogpost and take a gander at the second screen shot at http://smartcompanygrowth.com/?p=945. The first 5 articles listed are my one article. I had 6 in the top 10 out of 22,600 returns. My orignal article was title "The Weak Manager Litmus Test". I searched on the term weak leader, not weak manager. Still came up. If you take out my magic word Litmus which many people might not think to search on, and just put in Weak Leader Test (the search does NOT use quotes, as most people won't), I have 3 in the top 1o returns. Still not bad, huh? Go check it out yourself. Here's the best part. One of the other things Submit Your Article does to justify being the best article marketing submission site going is to dose your articles to the marketplace. You control the rate, but I usually adhere to their suggestion of one month being the best. This provides a more natural appearance of your stuff in cyberpace on the syndication directories and blogs (by the way, they submit to contect relevant blogs too). The article in the above image-submitted 3 weeks ago and has not complete its run of submissions yet! Look, how I leverage the traffic and exposure from Submit Your Article is undetermined. They can't control that nor do I expect them to. I'm getting my money's worth. The basic service is about $47/month and that's what most people use. If you're not going to submit at least 4 articles a month, you might either want to step it up or consider ads. They key is propogating your small business expertise on the web, so you need to have fresh content. Submit Your Article has a premium service that runs about $60 and it allows other stuff, such as text links in the article body back to your site, blog or marketing link. That's what I am using for additional value and submissions. Both are gobs better than what you're doing now. So get to stepping. Start writing and start submitting!
Please Rate this Article 5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5
Not yet Rated
