To begin with, aim for quantity. Most people who begin article marketing try the "bum marketing" method. This is all well and good, but it can lead to disappointment early on in the game. If you put a lot of effort into keyword research, building backlinks to the articles and so forth, it's still going to take a fair amount of time before you begin to see results. It takes a while for the articles to rank, and you never know whether it will drive any traffic at all for that given keyword. The big players in the game who rely on article marketing for traffic will almost always aim to submit 100 to 200 articles to begin with in one niche, *before* they concentrate on trying to rank them in the search engines for keyword phrases. Note: Articles don't have to be lengthy. In fact, due to the small attention span that people have when browsing, the shorter the article the better. The quicker the visitor reads through your article, the better. The sooner they reach the end, the sooner they'll see your resource box and (hopefully) click through to your site to learn more. The best article directories allow articles as small as 250 words. Your article title can be the most important thing. Many people overlook this with article marketing. A big portion of traffic to your articles come from the article directory itself - the actual people browsing the site. To prove this, lets take the traffic for ezinearticles.com for example. Looking it up on compete.com shows that the site had over 12.5 million visitors in September 2010. That's in one month! This is why your article title is so important. Create the title to force people to want to click through and read your article. Think of it as a headline. Make it compelling, curious, promise benefits and secrets that can only be obtained by reading your article. Leave unanswered questions. Back to what was mentioned earlier about short articles. It's also an idea to leave your content slightly unfinished. Then include in your resource box that the reader should click the link to continue. This urges the reader to want to investigate your site, and can increase click-through rates significantly. Treat the resource box as an advert. This is a mistake that many article writers make. The resource box will simply say "John Smith is an expert at ______, his website is _____.com". It's good to remember that your resource box is an ad. The article directories let you write anything here - make your content as promotional as you want. No point in spending all that time on the article title and body, when the reader gets to the end and does nothing. The resource box also has to be compelling. Put as much effort into it as the title. Make the reader *want* to click through to your site. Remember that the article directory has hundreds of links on the same page competing to get the readers attention, links to different articles, AdSense ads, categories etc. You want to persuade the reader to click on your link in the resource box. Make it compelling. In summary, those who have the will power to commit to writing and submitting 100 articles in one niche or category are the people that get the most success out of article marketing. Most others will give up after their 4th or 5th article submission, surprised that there isn't masses of traffic flooding to their website. Article marketing is more about consistency than anything else. Don't be disappointed when your first submission only gets 25 views. In fact, don't even look at statistics until you've submitted your first 100. Concentrating on individual statistics will only slow you down and disappoint you. The whole goal should be consistent submission of quality articles. And be sure to remember to make the titles and resource boxes compelling. Treat it as a mini sales letter rather than an article. Get those clicks! Do this, stay committed and consistent each day, and you'll be on the road to success, big traffic, and high conversions with article marketing.
Thanks for that but I think article marketing is over saturated. Rather write unique content for your own site and concentrate on getting your own site to rank well.
I think article marketing still works however you've just got to make sure that you're techniques are up to scratch and that your targeting the right type of niches.
Personally, I think article marketing is a waste of time. Articles themselves will provide very little traffic or income (unless you're lucky). Not to say it doesn't provide some value for SEO and should be considered as a part of any good SEO strategy. But even it's SEO value is limited, especially since the latest Google update, which de-valued many "article submission" sites...
Good tips, we use a lot of these techniques for increased SEO performance on our web hosting knowledgebase. I especially liked your comment about titles.
Tips are really very useful. Many many thanks Article marketing works like a wonder if done with proper planning...
You have discussed very mature points regarding articles marketing. But normally website owners write content for their business not for their users so they loose the actual concentration.
with panda update everyone is scrambling to get a good spinner. I agree with writing an ad for the resources box, but with character limitations, and site like ezine articles not allowing you to suggest anything commercial about your site (or that your site may have the full article - heaven forbid!, it can be difficult at times to accomplish a compelling ad. I find that since most sites dont allow tables and graphs (or are hard to format) that I will provide a snippet of a table, talk about it in the text and leave that as an open ended thing that the more curious will want to pursue.
Thanks for sharing, great tips! The following are my point of views : I think article writing is not for everyone, as it require a lot of time and effort, good in wriitng, good english, etc. I don't denied it is a good way to drive traffic to your sites, but to compare the returns and effort, i think is not worth while spending too much effort or money to hire people to write for you. However if you are a born writers, then it will benefits you a lot. So it is very subjective, one must know his or her strength and weakness, to get the most out of it.
Yes i am agree with terrencewan that article writing is not for all but it is works in special conditions.
Nice guidelines...thanks for sharing. Though article marketing may not be for everyone, its always good to read imformative posts like these.
Article writing and publishing is just one of the white hat SEO strategies, that you can still use. As long as these are quality articles, you can distribute them online. The purposes of article marketing is not just for traffic, but also to inform readers and build a good reputation/exposure online.
Article writing can work really well if you do it properly. Article submissions to the top directories especially can help you in backlinks from top PR sites.
This is the best instructional article on the resource box I have read. Thank you and good job! I like writing articles and spinning them to the degree I do is labor intensive. However, with the new changes, I am questioning how effective it really is now? I don't know. Does anyone know of any IM's who have done some testing? I am confident it still provides good SEO, and we should not stop using them, but also should use ALL the backlinking tools the net offers us. Not just stick to one.
Thanks very much for sharing this valuable article. I am bookmarking this website to read it thoroughly.
Some great points about article marketing there, you don't need to write and submit essays to get results and the title is the most important thing behind article marketing.
Nice tips, trying to keep the mind of the reader is what article marketing is all about, and good copy too
Article promotion has been devalued since the Goolge Panda update, especially since it's now rolled out all over the world. Good articles will always be helpful, in catching the occasional visitor here and there and to rank better. But to spend countless hours on article marekting today, without a clear idea of why and how, would be a waste of time. I do agree with the approach to don't look at stats in the beginning. It's far too easy to get blinded, disappionted and then you lose interest. Keep building!