Article marketing has long been considered an easy way to build some back links to your site. Of course, the value passed to your site through these links is known to be virtually negligible. Smart bloggers have also learned that the quality of the traffic sent from these sources is low quality.
After all of the Panda and Penguin updates the old web scrapers that would pass massive amounts of back links to your site disappeared. Article marketing, they said, is dead.
The problem with that sentiment, though, is that successful article marketing never relied on those things, anyway. Sure, getting a few back links from an article directory for a low competition keyword could help push your content higher up the SERPs. And, yes, occasionally it was possible to add a subscriber or make a sale from the traffic that came from Ezinearticles.com and other popular, quality directories.
But the most effective use of article marketing has always been just a bit more involved than that, while simultaneously delivering infinitely more horsepower to your SEO campaigns.
How do Article Directories Really Generate Revenue for Your Blog?
The easiest way to explain this is with a quick story.
A blogger, let’s call him Randy, runs a soup recipe blog. It is relatively niche-based, but still covers a broad range of reader interests. He uses article marketing not to generate traffic or back links to his site, but to build a private group of publishers for his own content.
He still follows article marketing best practices, like publishing his content on his blog and making sure it has been indexed before sending it to the directories. But his number one goal is writing content that will be picked up and used on various blogs and newsletters.
He writes an article on a “top secret” potato soup recipe smuggled out of a five star restaurant. He titles the article “An Inexpensive Potato Soup Recipe Your Kids will Love.”
Over the last six months he has already built up a list of blogs and mailing list owners that are willing to publish his content. He creates this one to meet the criteria of just about every blog in his publisher group. They include blogs about potatoes, blogs about soup, blogs about frugal living, and blogs about getting your kids to eat healthier.
Before he submits it to the article directory he sends an email out to his private list of publishers. Within just a few minutes his article goes live on dozens of sites, generating dozens of valuable, one-way back links.
He still puts the article on the directory with the intention of finding and adding new private publishers.
Finding Your List of Private Publishers and Getting Article Marketing Right
So, how did Randy find all of these private publishers to begin with? He regularly checks the search engines to see where his submitted articles have been republished. He copies and pastes one line from his article into a search engine and sees what pops up.
He contacts the webmasters of these sites and asks them if they are interested in having additional articles relevant to their niche sent to them via email on a regular basis. Keep in mind that these are bloggers that are always looking for new content for their readers, and just like most other bloggers, they don’t have a lot of time to come up with fresh content.
So, of course they say yes. They are put on the list and any time Randy wants to get a couple dozen backlinks to a new page or site he writes some content relevant to several of the niches represented on publisher list.
Within ten minutes he has a piece that he knows will provide solid and measurable results.
His blogs consistently rank well for highly competitive terms. And he does it all with just a few minutes a day.
If you follow Randy’s example and start using article marketing the right way, you’re guaranteed to find the kind of traffic you desire.
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