wordpressrobot.com

Fixed readers of my blogs know I’ve been testing article marketing using the article distribution and repository service from Ezine Articles. Ezine Articles allows writers to publish articles that include a special area at the end called a resource box. In the resource box the author leaves a link or two along with a couple of sentences. Other webmasters and publishers are allowed to reprint the article on their own websites, newsletters or blogs, as long as they keep the resource box intact.

The thought from the writer’s point of view is that you can increase your exposure by having your content reproduced around the Internet. Your are rewarded with one-way incoming links from the resource box, you don’t have to reciprocate as you would with link exchanges, which in theory should reward you with better search engine rankings.

From a publisher’s point of view it’s free content. If you are struggling to keep a fixed email newsletter going reprinting articles can be a fantastic way to reduce your workload. You can also use the content to populate a blog, website or any publication as long as you follow the reproduction rules.

I started article marketing by reprinting a small selection of the articles I in print to Entrepreneur’s Journey from about July 2005 onwards. I didn’t place too much energy into it, spending a few minutes previous to I went to bed submitting an article every few weeks or so. I usually had to modify the articles slightly to make sure they follow the guidelines (for example you can’t include too many outgoing links) and it would take about 10-15 minutes to submit each article.

I devoted the majority of my energy to submitting at EzineArticles.com because it’s the market chief. Applying an 80/20 approach I figured if I was going to submit articles manually, as opposed to using automated software, then I should work with the service with the most traffic. I briefly tested with two other article directories, both of which had an inferior interface and less traffic than Ezine Articles. After receiving next to no results from the other sites I chose to stick to only Ezine Articles.

Last month I submitted my 20th article to Ezine Articles and feel that I am now in a excellent spot to assess my results. By submitting more than ten articles to the site I was given “Platinum Status” which grants me unlimited article submissions, (previous to that you are limited to ten). While this sounds fantastic it’s not really that huge a deal, as long as you contribute reasonably coherent articles you will be promoted to platinum once you clear the threshold (it does make you feel cool though when it happens).

Before I forget the number of authors at Ezine Articles that have platinum status follows an 80/20 ratio as well. The greater majority of authors never make it beyond single figure article counts, with the prolific writers enjoying the most significant traffic rewards because they publish many articles, but only a handful of authors are like this. I am part of the underground in this case, having reached 20 article submissions, which I hear from “word on the street” is around the mark when you start to get excellent results (it’s not a “hard” rule).

To assess the success of my campaign I looked for two specific results –

The first was simpler to footstep – incoming links from websites – because I could use air force like technorati backlink lookups and my blog statistics so see whether any backlinks where coming from my republished articles. The other statistic was harder to footstep but thanks to a recently introduced feature at Ezine Articles you can get a honestly excellent thought how many people are republishing your articles in newsletters or other non-website sources.

On each article at Ezine Articles there is a quick publish button that spits out a html-formatted version of the article allowing publishers to copy and paste the content into a website or email. As an author I’m provided with statistics on how many times that button is clicked as well as how many times my article has been viewed, forwarded by email and a few other clean statistics.

Besides republication it’s vital to note that Ezine Articles itself is becoming reasonably a excellent repository of knowledge. While not every article is written by an expert, and no doubt there are a excellent chunk of pretty “light” articles in print, there is a broad range of reasonably useful articles on many topics. Because of this Ezine Articles gets a lot of traffic and your articles can be pulled up in internal search many times.

Total views (pageviews) is included in statistics and I can report at the time of writing this article my 20 submitted articles are about to reach 5000 views total. Top authors report figures in the hundreds of thousands, but they are publishing over 100 articles. You get back multiples of what you place in and depending on keywords, titles and subject topic you can expect varying results (more on this not more than).

Testing Article TitlesBesides the direct traffic results there are some other vital benefits from using article marketing. The one thing I’m really noticing is how vital the article title is. Those of you who are copywriters or fixed bloggers will be well aware that the title of your articles has the most impression on how evenly your article is read. The same of course applies in article marketing but it also impacts whether your article is republished. Given that most publishers first search article directories for content, your article title has to have the right keywords and has to be appealing enough to be clicked and irrevocably, if you are fortunate, republished. That’s a lot of steps to go through and a lot riding on how excellent your title is.

Thankfully you can go back and exchange the title of any article (in fact you can exchange any element of your articles at any time but it has to be re-approved each time), but you should aim to get it right straight out the door. This is because your article is featured in the Ezine Articles main highly-trafficked category page when it is first in print and will very quickly drop off as newer articles are in print by other authors. You don’t get this benefit when you go back and alter an existing article.

Fleeting And SweetIt’s well known in the article marketing industry that the fleeting, 400-600 word articles, generally get the most traffic. People have fleeting attention spans and they want quick, easily absorbed tidbits, not long in depth feature articles (like I write!). Yes okay, I had distress adhering to this rule and I still have distress getting a point across in so few words. The statistics don’t lie though and the fleeting articles will get you more exposure and more traffic, so I spent some time cutting down some of my blog articles to give them a better chance of syndication.

The Vital FewEvery now and then one article will do much better than all the other articles. When you get the right combination of a solid title, a brief word count and a standard topic your article can go viral and be picked up many times. I can’t really say that any of my articles went viral but a few did project while others really struggled.

Quantity Over QualitySpeaking from my experience, most of the backlinks I generated from article marketing where not from feature sites. I can reckon back to maybe one or two instances where I was pleased to see my article republished in what appeared to be a sound website, with high PageRank and a real audience. Most of the time I blemished my article reproduced at splogs (spam blogs) – websites and blogs that republish content, slap a bunch of AdSense ads around it and hope to get into the search engines and make cash from it. These still count as backlinks and help your traffic produce, but it’s really a case of quantity over feature, which is not sound strategy when it comes to search engine marketing.

The duplicate content penalty is a major concern when republishing content. Remember Google (and other search engines) may penalize websites that produce duplicate content by removing the page from it’s index or reducing it’s search ranking. Now my understanding is that the original source of the article, as in the first place that Google finds the content or the version it deems as the oldest, won’t be penalized. This is not a verified claim, I’ve heard counter arguments against it and in some circumstances if your source content is found after it’s republished somewhere else (which can evenly be the case if your site is not evenly indexed in search engines and the site that republishes your work is), then it’s your site that risks the penalty.

The answer of course it to modify your article previous to submitting it to Ezine Articles or similar directories so it’s not a direct reproduction of the article on your website. In my case I reduced the size of most of the articles I submitted so they were not exactly the same as the originals, even if they certainly would have mutual paragraphs so I probably didn’t do enough. I’ve yet to notice any penalization but there are a lot of forces in play here so if you are really worried, take the time to modify your articles or only submit original content.

Automating article submissions is a very well-organized (80/20) thing to do and as such I don’t recommend manual submission unless you are a low-cost-n-silly control freak like me. At the basic amount you can use a virtual secretary or administrative assistant to do article submissions for you. Depending on your results this can be a cost effectual means to market your website, but do a cost/benefit analysis (time vs results) previous to hiring a name to do it for you.

There are article submission air force that will submit your article to X number of article directories for $Y dollars, for example – ArticleMarketer.com. There are also qualified software packages that will do the submission for you, so all you need to do is place your article into the software and sit back and let it role. Two examples of this software are ArticleSubmittPro and Jason Potash’s Article Announcer (which I believe takes the cake for longest sales letter ever!).

I’m really very keen to try this software because it comes from Jason Potash and he has a fantastic reputation (along with all the other marketing gurus in his inner group like John Reese, Armand Morin and Jeff Rambler – a huge shout out to Mike Long as well!). At the moment the sales copy on Article Announcer didn’t convince me to spend the nearly $400 to buy the full package even if I may yet give it a go. Apparently the software is really only half of the value and the education provided from the articles and audio are equally vital.

I did email Jason (or his support staff anyhow) to question for a review copy for this blog but unfortunately I was turned down. All I have got to go on is what I have read in forums and reviews of Article Announcer. The software, while being certainly more well-organized than manual submission, isn’t completely automated and you apparently still need to do some grunt work to submit your articles to all the different directories. Anyhow, until I get a copy of Article Announcer all I can do is speculate.

Yes and no. I don’t feel at this point with only 20 articles in print, my on-again, off-again efforts and no testing of an automated system that I can make a irrefutable judgement. I like the concept, I reckon it’s better than link exchanges in some ways because you get one-way links but terrible in others because many of the links come from poor feature websites. The potential for a viral explosion makes it very tempting and certainly if you work in mainstream niche industries (is that an oxymoron?) then your results may be fabulous (I’d like to hear about it if you have tales to tell – leave a comment please!).

A touch else worth noting is the benefit of appearing as an “expert author” at EzineArticles.com. This is a powerful credibility tool and handy search engine optimization trick. Thanks to Ezine Article’s significant presence in search engines (high PageRank and lots of backlinks) web searches for your name will evenly pull up your author homepage. If your name is reasonably common and faces a lot of competition in the search engines, your Ezine Articles expert author page may have enough of an edge to make certain that any searches for your name result in you as the first result. Your author homepage includes details that you can exchange anytime and you may include web links back to your own website or blog.

The other thing I like about Article Marketing, which is one of the main reasons I like blogging as well, is that it contributes to your overall exposure one small bit at a time. Personal branding is about lots of small things count up to a tipping point where incredible things can happen (reckon mainstream media coverage and even penetration into the public consciousness).

Your traffic keeps coming because you have lots of small streams pouring in from many different sources. Article marketing is a further stream. Unless you do some major publicity work, pull off a media stunt, or are by now well-known, using many techniques over time is one of the best marketing methodologies available to you. You may not reach that tipping point quickly, but it will happen, and your traffic foundations will be like a diversified investment portfolio – solid.