One marketing method that doesn’t get a lot of airplay among bloggers is article marketing. You’ll hear about social media, link baiting, and guest posting but article marketing seems like an outdated method that just doesn’t work for today’s sophisticated internet audience. Also, article marketing has gotten a bad rap since sleazy affiliate marketers use it to pitch their scammy products.
However, I’ve still found article marketing to be a great source of traffic. And in this post, I’ll give six reasons why you should try it out.
Now when I’m talking about article marketing, I’m talking about submitting articles to Ezine Articles. Ezine Articles is by far the best article directory to get published. They have a big audience including many visitors from Google because of their top rankings. There are other good article directories and sites that function like article directories but with a couple more features like Squidoo and HubPages. But in my experience, Ezine Articles is the place to go. Also, people have done traffic tests and Ezine Articles sends much more traffic than the other sites. So, you could try the other sites but it’s just better to spend that time submitting more articles to Ezine Articles.
And with that, let’s go to the reasons.
1. Targeted Traffic
If you’re looking for a massive amount of raw page views, you probably won’t find it with article marketing. Sure, you might get lucky with the outlier article that sends a ton of traffic. For example, the following screenshot is from one of my articles.
But that article is very rare. In fact, I’m still not sure why it got so many views. It has ranked in the top five for a popular keyword in the last two years, but I don’t know why it ranks so well. It does demonstrate the big potential Ezine Articles has for ranking on Google.
But back to my point. Article marketing is much more suited to building that medium sized but loyal audience of repeat visitors and customers because of the ability to make a positive impression before readers visit your blog. There’s a reason affiliate marketers love article marketing. The opportunity to “pre-sell” is a great one and one of the best ways to pre-sell is have a reader read a useful article before they come to your site.
2. Quick Traffic
I don’t like to wait too long for traffic 🙂
If you’ve done the proper keyword research and picked a keyword that’s not too competitive, you can submit an article on Ezine Articles and within a couple of days have targeted traffic coming to your website. With other marketing strategies like link building, you often have to spend some effort for a couple weeks or months before you see results.
3. Quality Control
One of the things that has made Ezine Articles a premier destination is their quality control. Every year they’ve raised their standards for the content they will accept. Therefore, it’s a good place to check on your content quality. If you are continually rejected by them, then you know it’s time to evaluate your writing chops.
4. Great for Small Niches
Article marketing is not that effective in competitive saturated niches like tech, celebrity gossip, and sports. But small industries including sub-niches that don’t have too many competitors are great for article marketing.
It’s usually a better strategy anyways to target an audience within a big market. For example, instead of just being a general tech blog, blog about Motorola cell phones. This sub-niche has much less competing sites and articles, which will allow your articles to stand out and receive more traffic.
I’m in the gaming niche but I only cover the most popular trading card game. As such, my articles on Ezine Articles are one of the few on my topic.
5. Anchor Text
Sometimes you just need a link with relevant anchor text to push a page two ranking to the front page. With article marketing you can do this easily. Simply crank out a 400 word article and you’ve got your link.
6. Keyword Testing for New Sites
For new sites, article marketing allows you to test possible keywords. See it’s hard for these sites to rank for medium competitive keywords, since they don’t have the links yet.
You can use article marketing to see how competitive a keyword will be. Basically, target a keyword with an article. If the article ranks well for the keyword, then you know that you won’t have to work too hard to get the same ranking for your blog. But if the article doesn’t rank well, then that tells you that you’ll have to spend a lot of effort to rank for the keyword.
Performancing offer an authority builder service that includes article marketing.
18 thoughts on “6 Reasons to Try Out Article Marketing”
i always submit to article directories to gain backlinks, most of them are free anyway ..
Ezine Articles may be the best place to submit articles for their rules are strict. This helps the high quality content. Of course, I also found some articles in Ezine Articles are not really good enough.
Besides Ezine Articles, I also submit to other article directories. Some accept my articles very quickly. And these articles bring me traffic very soon, such as articlesbase.com. I know it has nofollow tag. But the time of article being accepted is short, most of time, I just wait a few hours(say, 2 or 3 hours, never more than 12 hours or one day), then my article is accepted.
Great post Dee. I will have to say that article marketing takes a lot of work though which I don’t think a lot of people realize. Its not a challenge so much if you are in the habit of being a writer because then you will be able to dish out quality content in an endless fashion. However the thing is, outsourcing is as much of a challenge as it is to write an article. I know myself its definitely hard to get to a point where your in the groove.
Another frustration when your outsourcing is doing business with people who unfortunately don’t have much of a spine. What I mean by that is that they generally send you duplicate content and charge you for it. If you don’t know what your doing you’re going to find yourself in a situation here your constantly wondering why your articles aren’t getting indexed well.
Anyways, thanks for the article. Anyone who is interested click my name as it will redirect you to the site which I’m currently working on. Make sure to take a look around there’s a lot of great information there to make your life on the net easier.
Article Marketing is definately the way to go. Love Ezine Articles!
As you well pointed out Ezine Articles is the place to start in article marketing. As a matter of fact, for quick affiliate promotions is better to post your article on Ezine Articles that it is on your newly launched site. Why?
Because, in niches with up to 5000 competitors in the organic listings, nine times out of ten the article published on EA will rank on the first page of Google’s SERP without any additional link building.
Also you shouldn’t rely solely on the referral traffic an good, competitive article directory provides you with. Instead you should focus on Keyword Optimizing each article you submit so that the authority of that particular directory is taken advantage of in the SEO game, namely ranking well in the organic listings.
Article marketing can also be used as a genuine SEO tool, namely to build backlinks to affiliate offers.
In order for the links to stick overtime and not be trashed by Google in the Supplemental index the articles you plan on submitting should be spinned at least three times so the uniqueness of that original content is kept. Then use an article submission software to submit that article to multiple directories. Some of the AD are good, some, not so good but they Do provide a link once the article is indexed.
My advice is to use top 25 article directories for driving traffic and the rest for acquiring backlinks.
@Dee, it’s been a while since my last comment. And in that time, I learned that my keyword research is flawed that’s why I’m not getting significant traffic. I’m learning and relearning everything, slowly but I hope surely this time.
Now I use article marketing for SEO and backlinks. I didn’t have a good result from social marketing either, but I suspect it’s because of my niche. Gardening doesn’t sound something that will hit with the social traffic. It’s not very 2.0
This is such a great resource that you are providing and you give it away for free. I love seeing websites that understand the value of providing a quality resource for free. It’s the old what goes around comes around routine.
Article Marketing is one of the best ways you can promote your website and the products that you sell. The articles that you publish online or offline also helps to establish the credibility of your website or product.
Article marketing is not as popular and widely used by link builders. Many internet users nowadays prefers an easy way to find sites on the net. Unless though, you make a good humored article.
I myself prefer social media, forum posting and directory posting.
@Nova What keywords are you targeting?
@Ian I think it all depends when considering to publish your content on other sites. If you’ll get a good increase in traffic, why not do it? It doesn’t take too long to write a 400 word article for Ezine Articles and you can still have the content on your blog. I would rewrite the article to avoid the duplicate content issue on Google but the concepts and ideas would still be the same.
I totally believe in this. Article marketing is really a great way of promoting your business online. Ezine is a very good site wherein you can submit Marketing Articles.
I agree with Andrew I think social media particularly Twitter has overtaken article marketing. Also why post your hard work elsewhere, just keep it on your own blog where it is working for you.
Obviously, article marketing request not only to have a thorough idea of seo marketing but also solid writing skills. Nobody would add to his or her site a poorly written article.
Thank you very much for the link. I guess quality writing as regards articles are concerned is crucial for a successful marketing campaign.
I’m currently doing article marketing by submitting articles to Ezine everyday and creating some squidoo lenses and hubpages every week for almost a month now. Although I have yet to see a relevant increase in my traffic. Am I doing it wrong?
Dee,
re: Competition. I think you are exactly right!
Andrew
Thanks for the link. The Ezine Articles crackdown can only be good for quality article writers. Less competition for us, right? 🙂
“One marketing method that doesn’t get a lot of airplay among bloggers is article marketing. ”
I think the social side of marketing has taken over from Article Marketing.
I teach all my blogging clients about Article Marketing and you are right about EzineArticles being the best but they are about to crackdown on spammers and people who just write affiliate type articles.
You can read my article here:
Ezine
Article Crackdown
Andrew
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