CBIntuition

As a partner in a popular Article Site, I see Article Marketing used, misused and abused. In this post I hope to demonstrate where people are going wrong, and give some hints and tips that will make your Article marketing more effective.
Many of the mistakes made are based on what people have heard or read regarding the search engines and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). That’s all very well, but the search engines continually evolve and SEO rules must evolve with them. Sadly, people get hooked on a concept and don’t adapt what they do to the latest behaviour of the search engines.

Mistake #1 – Article Marketing is only for Creating Backlinks
This is a common misconception promoted by so-called SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) specialists. Somebody discovered that the search engines give higher priorities to sites containing more incoming links (or backlinks) than those with fewer links. As article sites promote the re-publishing of articles on other sites, the number of links from each submitted article can grow considerably.
This led to people frantically churning out hundreds of articles to submit to article sites, just so that they could get a lot of links back to their website. Many people are still stuck in this rut, churning out numerous articles. In fact they are stuck so far into this rut that they make…

Mistake #2 – The Content Isn’t Important; Just Get the Backlinks
People stuck in the “Get as many backlinks as possible” rut tend to write short, repetitive, uninformative articles. They don’t really care that nobody will ever read the article – they just want the backlinks, and they submit their articles to 50 or more article sites. Of course, after people started doing that, the search engines started finding duplicate content, and discounting the backlinks. So the marketers needed some way of doing the same thing without being hit for duplicate content. This led to the invention of Article Spinners or Article Rewriters – software that rewrites your articles automatically, creating hundreds of new articles. In fact, they are all the same article – just written using different words and phrases that mean the same thing. Unfortunately, this led to…

Mistake #3 – Article Spinners Will Reliably Make 300 Different Versions of my Article
Article Spinners/Rewriters WILL take your article and make 300 different versions of it. But the majority of those versions will be complete rubbish. These programs work by replacing words and phrases with others of the same or similar meaning, using a Thesaurus and/or Dictionary. Some work better than others, but most just aren’t up to the mark. The users of these programs don’t bother to read through the generated articles, so they don’t realise what rubbish they contain. They blindly submit the generated articles to different article sites, filling those sites with incomprehensible rubbish.

Mistake #4 – It Doesn’t matter if Nobody Reads the Articles
We get a lot of visitors to our article site. The majority of them are not submitting articles; they are reading them. They have searched for information on a particular subject and found articles relating to it. If your trashy, “spun” article comes up in their search, they’ll read the first few sentences, realise that it’s worthless and move on to the next article.
But imagine if that next article was useful, informative and written in good English (or whatever language is in use on that site). The visitor will read through the article right to the bottom. If they found the article useful and want to know more, they might just click on that link in the Resource Box, and the author of that good article may have got themselves a customer.

Take a tour of the better quality article sites. You will find that the articles are moderated. If you submit trash, it will be rejected and never published on the site. You will have wasted your own time. The better quality article sites will also carry more weight to their backlinks. A single link from one quality site could be worth 20 links from sites containing unmoderated rubbish.

Mistake #5 – The Backlinks Generate Traffic Via the Search Engines
It’s true. The search engines will index the backlinks, and if the quality of those links is high enough, you might get a top spot on the search engine results pages, but it’s not guaranteed.
But go back and read Mistake #4. You can get traffic directly from the article site, via your Resource Box link. And at that point, you have an advantage. When somebody starts searching for information about something, they might not be ready to buy it yet. They want to do their research. If they find a link directly to your site in the search engines, they don’t want to be sold something – they are looking for information. If that person finds the link to your site at the end of an informative, well-written article, a psychological change has happened. That person now…
1) has more information on the subject
2) found the article useful, and has built some trust in the author
3) might be more inclined to buy something
4) might want more information so follows the link to find out more
When that person lands on your website, they are now more targeted than they were before reading the article.

Mistake #6 – Quantity is Not Important
Many ebooks about SEO and Article Marketing suggest that you need write only 200 or so words in your articles. That might work for the “backlink rut” people, but if you’re going to use Article marketing effectively, you need to give more than 200 words.
A well-written article of a decent length is going to hook the reader more than a 200 word article. On our article site, the minimum is 250 words, but we suggest between 500 and 1000 words (or more if you wish).

Mistake #7 – It Doesn’t Matter if my English Isn’t Very Good
The quality article sites which carry out moderation of articles will not rate your article if it is full of spelling and grammatical errors, bad English, and too much slang. Don’t forget that your article is being published worldwide. A slang phrase or colloquialism that you use in your article might not be understood by many of your readers. Even worse, it might have a completely different meaning – maybe even offensive.

Mistake #8 – Everyone on the Internet Lives in the USA
On our site, we often receive articles that are very specific to a country – more often than not, specific to the USA. Don’t forget that what you are writing about may not apply outside your own country. Simply state at the beginning of the article that it applies to your location and may not apply elsewhere. In June/July 2009, our site received visitors from 139 different countries or territories.

Mistake #9 – Make your Resource Box link a hyperlink
We have seen numerous articles submitted containing web addresses in the Resource Box, but they have not been entered as hyperlinks, making them less easy to follow.
An even worse mistake is not even entering a web address in the Resource Box! If you don’t enter a website address, you’re not going to get any traffic, and you won’t get any backlinks.

Summary
Effective Article Marketing:
- Generates backlinks
- Generates traffic
- Builds trust between the visitor and the author.

Steps To Effective Article Marketing:
- Read the Submission Guidelines of the article sites – they are all different
- Write informative, well-structured articles that encourage visitors to read them to the end and then follow your link to your site
- Enter a hyperlink to your website in the Resource Box.

Related Reading:

The Spinner's Companion (Companion)

Real World Search Engine Optimisation: SEO Techniques For Everyday Webmasters! Learn From The Masters! AAA+++

Search Engine Optimisation (Marketers Checklist Guide)

Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies)

Marketing Mistakes and Successes

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