Article Marketing & Free Publicity For Your Website
If you want to get more traffic and get ahead of your competition then article marketing is the best way to expose your message, product or service.
A lot of people seem to be getting excited about this opportunity because it’s easy and accessible, they don’t need any special equipment, they don’t need any experts on hand, they just need a little bit of knowledge.
With article marketing what it means is that you write an article that highlights either a process or a product or service and then put out in one place where people will find it when they search for information related to that topic. With article marketing you're basically creating your own backlinks without doing anything else.
So article marketing means writing articles, submitting to article directories, article partner websites, which can either be free or paid for. There are actually a number of free and paid for services out there that allow you to submit your guest articles and then those services will automatically generate inbound links for you.
You will also be able to add your own link at the end of that article so it’s more like an in text link within the body of the text rather than an outbound link. So, it doesn't look as blatant.
These types of websites include article directory sites like Ezine.com, the content mill, and article partner websites which offer a home base for your guest articles and they'll also generate back links for you.
Article directories are different to forum sites. Forum sites are more like chat rooms, whereas article directories are more like online journals where people post articles that they write and then people can submit their guest articles to those journals as well.
There are a number of free ones out there as well and many of the paid for ones only offer a limited number of articles that you can submit to the site but it's worth looking round all of them because some will have a larger range than others.
What you're looking for is a website that actually has links to other sites that are relevant to your own articles and also allows your article to be submitted directly, there should be no need for you to contact the administrator of that site because they should have submission guidelines on their website.
So it's really a matter of finding one and submitting your articles directly.
One thing to remember with article marketing is that the first article and all subsequent articles will not appear in search engines straight away. It can take up to 4 or 5 months before the links start appearing in search engines so this is something else to bear in mind when you're creating these articles.
So, one of the things you want to do is to create at least a couple of these articles and then submit them over a period of 4 or 5 months. You might want to submit to the same set of sites on a monthly basis, if that's what you're going to choose.
If your articles are really good and really informative then people can go back and search for those articles at a later date because they'll be stored in the search engines.
They may find out that you have references in other similar type articles that are related to your niche area as well so it's worth doing it this way rather than just creating one article, submitting it and waiting for it all to happen.
There is a lot of competition for the first few positions in search engines. It can be a bit like playing the lottery, but if you're really focused on getting your message across and creating very strong articles then you might want to create at least 2 or 3 articles and submit them over 2 or 3 months. If each of those go well then it's not going to matter if they're all published in the same month because they will start appearing in search engines at different times.
There are a couple of different things that you can do to get your guest articles seen by more people. One of the things is to create very strong anchor text within the article, which essentially means that you create as much text as possible, instead of just copy and pasting your article into another document, you put as much text in it as possible.
So, if your article talks about a product or service that you're selling then there might be a number of people that are interested in buying it because they’re going to read all about it on the website and then they can put their own message in there. So, you are basically writing an advertisement for your own service or product.
The other way to get this done is what's called article marketing. Article marketing means that you submit your articles to article directory sites, article partner websites and these sites will automatically generate back links for you but they only include the back links that are in the article itself so that means when people go to those back links they will find the relevant information about the product or service.
So it's less obvious than if you had a press release, which would include all of the keywords in it and then people could put their own messages there. So you want to create as much relevant text as possible within your article because that's what search engines are going to look at. To make sure that the article is relevant people are going to read the whole article and if they find it relevant they're going to use your link because they'll think 'oh well, the author obviously knows what they're talking about regarding this product or service so I'm going to go there'.
So, you want to put as much relevant text in there, put in a few of your keywords and include a link somewhere towards the end of the article and then submit that for directory sites and partner websites.
The other thing about back links is that you want these links coming from sites that have authority. So, people will go to the website and see that it's been linked from a directory site or the article partner or whatever. It's going to look more legitimate if it's coming from a directory site or an article partner than if it's coming from another website.
So, you definitely want to put a link in there because people will think 'oh well I'll trust this directory site, this article partner and I'm going to go there'.
While you're putting links in your articles make sure that you don't get too many links in there because if you have 2 or 3 links then that can be taken away by other websites.
Conclusion
It's a good idea to write about a lot of different topics as well because you want to make sure that you're showing people what you've done and that they can see that you're involved in a wide variety of areas. If they only see one or two things on your website they can end up thinking that you don't do anything else. So, really think about the kinds of articles that you're going to write and how you're going to put these into place and how are people are going to find them.