Use Article Marketing to Obtain Quality Back links and Organic Visitors!

I was reading one of the forums I subscribe to when one of the participants reported that he had hired an outfit to submit his site to a bunch of directories. He further stated that overnight he could not keep up with the orders. He said it increased his business by more than ten times!

I contacted the individual and got the name of the submission service that he had used.

I have a number of websites languishing on the internet with small steady streams of income. I have a site dealing with cruise ship vacations, and it was bringing me in about $4 to $5 dollars a day from advertising on the site. I decided that I would use that site for my article marketing test. I wanted to find out first hand if it would work for one of my sites.

Learning about article marketing the hard way

I can’t remember the name of the service, but it was pretty cheap. His services included actually writing articles, and they were cheap too.

I had the cruises site submitted to something like 1,000 directories. I also had him write an article and submit it to something like 500 article directories. I was able to proofread his article, and it wasn’t anything I would be proud of, so I re-wrote it and had the service submit it.

Then I waited to see what would happen. Nothing happened. Months went by and no sign of increased traffic.

If you want it done right, do it yourself.

However, I had never heard of article directories or article marketing. I investigated it, and it sounded plausible. I noticed that the articles did indeed show up in Google SERP’s. I also noticed a lot of articles that sounded as though they were written by the service I had hired to write my article. They are easy to spot...it’s obvious that English is not their first language.

I decided to try it myself. I wrote an article about cruise ship vacations, and then began searching for article directories to submit to. I Googled article directories, and then used an online traffic estimator site to see how much traffic each one got. I selected the top 35 directories traffic wise, and submitted the article.

Writing and submitting articles to the directories

I then began submitting articles for a number of my sites. It didn’t take long for me to realize that 35 directories is too many for me to handle. I decided to whittle the list down to 10. I did Google searches and picked the 10 directories that showed up the most often and dropped the rest.

Natural looking links are what the engines like

Articles on a couple of the directories are indexed and show up in search results within hours of being submitted, others take a couple of weeks, and some take months. I like that it takes weeks to approve the articles, because that way it looks more natural to Google if you pick up links slowly.

If you get 500 links in a day or so Google assumes they are less valuable. I also change the anchor text of the links in the author’s box for each directory I submit to. Again, it looks more natural, and you get to work in more keyword phrases in your anchor text.

Deep linking is another nice thing about article marketing. You can link to individual pages other than the home page of your stie, increasing the page’s importance in the eyes of the engines.

First a web page, then an article

I generally write an article and make it a webpage for one of my sites. Then I wait until they are indexed by Google. Once they’ve been indexed I submit them to the article directories. Usually within a few weeks the articles are showing up on search results pages, often with a higher ranking than the same article on my site.

This reinforces my belief that at least some of the article directories are respected by the major search engines. My stats also show a continuing stream of traffic to the site which should continue indefinitely.

How much traffic you get depends upon the quality and topic of your article, and the number of articles you’ve published and submitted. Over the last year I’ve done about 100 articles. A half dozen one way links don’t have the impact that a couple of hundred articles have.

Original content for your site

As a side benefit, your site gets a page of good original content every time you finish another article and once you get over a hundred pages on your site the search engines begin to notice you.

I’ve found that the same article can do well on one directory and terrible on another. There are niche directories that focus on narrow niches like green articles, or cooking, etc. where some of your articles will simply never be approved if they aren’t exactly what the editors are looking for.

Make use of the anchor text on the links back to your site

I’ve managed to dramatically increase my ranking for keyword phrases using the author’s links “anchor text”. It takes quite a while, up to a year in my case, but the search engines are keeping track of those one way links and eventually they add up and can make a huge difference.

The benefits of article marketing are definitely worth pursuing if you are capable and willing to write lots of high quality articles, and you need patience. Make your articles about 500-900 words long, read the directory guidelines carefully and follow them.

When I go to my Google Webmaster Tools account and view the links to my pages, the links from the article directories show up. When I search for things these articles show up with high rankings in the search results pages. Next time you are surfing the web take note of how many article directories are mixed in with the search results.

Some of the article directories are amazingly fast. When I submit an article to the directories it’s usually indexed in Google and on the results pages of searches within and hour or two! I find that amazing. So Google must trust and value these directories.

When I view my server logs I find I am getting traffic daily from the directories. So I now have proof that article marketing brings me free organic search engine traffic, gets me additional valuable back links, and increases my rankings in the search results.

Changeup your anchor text frequently and do some deep linking to your web pages. Write your articles for humans. The better the article the more visitors you will receive as a result.

The best way to learn is to jump in and do it. Choose your article directories carefully and start marketing!

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