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Posts Tagged ‘article distribution’

You can effectively maximize your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) by having your article marketing outsourced when you are trying to sell a service or product through the Internet.  SEO is the process for getting the highest ranking possible in the list of URLs presented by the search engine as the results of a particular keyword search.  The possibility that an Internet surfer will visit your site is substantially increased if your URL is placed on the first page of the results.

More traffic to your site means that you have a better chance of selling your product or service and unique articles offer an inexpensive way to increase that traffic.  The first purpose of the articles is to allow you to place the keywords and phrases that you believe would be searched when a potential buyer of your product or service uses the Internet to look for your kind of product or service.  In this way, the search engine spiders will know that your website is focused on those keywords and phrases and will include your site on the results pages when someone searches for them.

Submitting your unique articles to those websites that collect them is a key step that should not be neglected.  These sites that collect articles already have high rankings in the search engines so that the ranking of your own site will be pulled up because of the links to your site that are included in your articles that result in more and more backlinks to your website as the number of articles that you have submitted increases.

A second role for the articles is the addition of backlinks to your website through a natural process.  Search engines, particularly Google, consider backlinks as an indicator of the popularity of your site.  The more backlinks you have from quality sites, the better your search engine results pages ranking will be.  Also, you may gradually become an expert in your specific field as you get more and more articles published on those websites.  Many people would then like to provide a link to your website so that the number of backlinks to your website will grow even faster.

As you can see, marketing with articles on tap plays a key role in maximizing your SEO efforts.  And if you feel that you do not have enough time to write those articles, you can always buy articles from an article writing services.  The prices offered for the quality articles are quite affordable.

There are plenty of places where we can learn about an affiliate marketing business, but there aren’t many places where you can find someone to do some of the hardest work for you.  Well, I haven’t quite fixed that problem for you, but I know that I have unearthed what is probably nearly as good.

I do affiliate marketing, although I also sell my own information products and physical products.  I use websites and blogs for all of my online business activities.  I rely quite heavily on search engine optimization (SEO) to secure traffic, but that is a long term strategy.  In some cases, I have used PPC for affiliate products with success, but more often I am lucky to break even. 

So, for me, as for all Internet marketers, traffic is a very challenging part of my business.  Especially difficult are those times when I have to pass on a new affiliate opportunity because none of my websites are optimized to bring in targeted traffic for the product, so I face the age old question:  How do I send my traffic to the vendor’s site?

My approach to directing traffic to the vendor’s site is just like many other affiliate marketers, I bring the visitors to my own site initially for an introduction to the product or, perhaps a comparison of competing products.  Then I just hope that I have been sufficiently convincing to get them to click the link that directs them to the vendor’s site so that I have some small chance of earning my commission.  I would like to make that process a bit less involved and take the prospects to the vendors a little more efficiently.

I use content syndication for all of my sites.  While I get some traffic directly from the articles, my primary reason for article marketing is its SEO value, which is considerable.  There are two major problems with the traditional approach to article marketing, especially for the affiliate marketer.  The first of those problems is that the top tier directories that publish and distribute articles do not allow links within the body of the article, contextual linking.  Typically, the links are isolated below the article itself in a sort of no man’s land called the author’s box or the resource box.  Second, the major article directories do not allow affiliate links or even links to redirected pages or domains.

Finally, there is an article distribution service that solves those two problems and allows direct linking using our affiliate links which can be placed contextually within the article.  Yes, you will be able to join the affiliate program of the amazing My Article Network once you become a member of the service.

My Article Network is something of a cooperative that brings site owners (publishers) together with article marketers.  (That link will let you know what I have to say about it on one of my sites.) 

Since I am writing for affiliate marketers, I’ll cut short the presell message and let sales page of My Article Network speak for itself.  I’ve been using it for less than two months, and I am a complete convert to the system.  I joined it for the article distribution, but I became so enthused that I set up four new blogs to take advantage of the free content in some of my niches.  {(Go ahead.  Click the link, you know you want to.)(Do it!  You know you want to click the link.  Come on…don’t you think I deserve it?}

I make a lot of judgements in my online business, judging the output of others.  We all do that, I guess, although perhaps in different ways.  Even in our roles as consumers of business products, we judge the copy of a sales letter or a video before we buy a course or a new piece of software.  We assess what is good or ineffective when we do our competition analysis of the website design of others in our niche.  We also critique the writing of our writing team or those to whom we outsource article marketing.

I write all of my content about Internet marketing (including article marketing) myself.  However, I hire free-lance writers for most of the other niches in which we compete.  In addition, I average about two dozen unsolicited articles per day from other marketers who want me to publish them on my sites in some of those other niches.

I have learned from having wasted money.  I now use a select stable of writers who make up my writing team and whom I have trained to do my paid writing.  However, of the unsolicited articles…I reject a substantial majority even though they come to me as free content.

I thought that it might benefit other marketing writers to know why I am more likely than not to refuse to publish the articles that they send me.  Here are the most frequent reasons for my rejections:

*  The articles don’t make sense in English.  Any language, of course, is composed of its vocabulary and its grammar, and it is difficult to master both by taking a few years of apparently inadequate instruction.  It is certainly posssible that a writer may write brilliantly in her or his native language, but, without complete fluency in a second language, the writer will never be able to write effective marketing copy.  The writer (or the writer’s employer) needs to hire a native speaker of the language to edit (or even rewrite) the article.  After writing a first draft, have a writer who is truly fluent in your targeted language rewrite the copy. 

*  The articles are submitted in the wrong category.  I receive articles about subjects that simply make no sense for publication in a blog that has a theme such as the one to which the writer has submitted.  I have a business blog to which people submit suggested articles dealing with plasma televisions or planning your daughter’s wedding.  All the writers have to do is to put a business spin on their idea, somethat that could often be done with a little rewriting and an extra paragraph.  One could author an article about how to build a wedding planning business and cover many of the same topics as the article about planning a daughter’s wedding.  A web author could switch the things to look for in a plasma TV to the best features in a plasma monitor to be used in business video presentations.  Either of those, I might be happy to publish.

*  Many articles are the victims of poor spinning.  I have spun articles for many years, so I can usually recognize within a paragraph or two if an article has not been well prepared for spinning.  No website can get any benefit from a poorly spun article or from publishing duplicate content. 

Implicit in all of these reasons for rejection are the solutions to the problems.  Either follow proper writing, submission and spinning standards yourself, or hire a web article author who thoroughly understands the needs of Internet marketers.

I have some actual data to share, but first let me provide a little context with you.  Seven weeks ago I joined an content distribution service.  While I don’t actually know the guy that designed this remarkable tool for online marketers, it seems to me as if I do, because I have bought so many of his products and joined enough of his membership services to have paid for a good part of his car.  [He should at least offer me a ride in it

Due to my many prior experiences with this boy genius (well, he’s not really that young), I was confident that the service would accomplish for me what it promised: An innovative way of distributing my articles.  Like any Internet marketer, I could always use more traffic, and is there anyone who isn’t on the look-out for a way to add external links pointed toward our virtual real estate?  My primary approach for achieving both of these goals is distributing content to article directories.

This service has some advantages over traditional submission to article directories, though.  For example, I can now put my links directly into the body of the article rather than assigning them to a resource box.  That’s something that most article directories don’t allow, but I know that it is more effective for both traffic generation and for search engine optimization.  Second, the articles go directly to websites for publication, sites that are in my niche or a closely related niche.  Once again, great for traffic and SEO.  Third, since some of my business involves affiliate marketing, with this service I can put an affiliate link directly in the article, if I want–another thing that the article directories don’t allow.  Fourth, the distribution system has a built in article spinner, so that the version of the article that each website publishes can be unique.

After almost fifty days, I thought that I would check to see what I had accomplished so far.  Here are just a few of the highlights of my experience with My Article Network.

Now the articles trickle out to the sites, so those I’ve put into the system so far are all at different points in their publication schedule.  I have submitted 58 well spun article.  Unique versions of those articles now appear on over 1900 pages on the web.  I am allowed to insert up to three links in each article, but I vary the number of links, so my conservative best guess is that my sites singled out for promotion through this system have received somewhere in excess of four thousand links.  Of course many of those are so new that they haven’t been picked up by the search engines, yet.  In other words, a lot of the work that I’ve put into this distribution already will reach the maximum benefit months down the road.

I started a new site in a very competitive niche about three months ago, and I have directed the links from more than half of my articles toward that site’s promotion.  Alexa couldn’t even find that site when I first joined this system, and now it has climbed in the Alexa rankings more than two million positions.  In fact, it gets more traffic than some of my sites that have been around for quite a while.  Indeed on the oldest site that I ever built (that I still own), has received no attention from me in months, but I entered nine articles into this system and that site’s Alexa ranking has improved by more than 120,000 positions.  I can’t attribute that traffic growth to anything other than those nine articles–and the system that distributed them.

Okay, if you like those numbers, take a look at this.  I didn’t even think of tracking the results of this program until six days ago–yeah, I know, I’m a slouch).  During that six day period, the eight sites that I have promoted using this distribution network have risen in Alexa a cumulative total of over five million positions.  I realize that Alexa is not the finest measure of progress, but I still think that’s a very strong indication of getting my money’s worth and then some.

I actually became so excited by the whole process that I have subsequently created four new blogs to join the over 10,000 websites that are eager publishers for the content that we writer-marketers provide.

I strongly suggest that you become a member of My Article Network.  Yes, you affiliate marketers out there, you can become an affiliate–after you join the article distribution service.