Kick Ass Article Marketing Strategy
Article Marketing is one of my favorite marketing methods because the methodology allows you to:
Attract your target market to your blog or Web Site
Brands yourself as an expert that can solve your target market's problems
Create hundreds, thousands, or even millions of back links (think of them as popularity votes) to your blog or Web Site
Even if article marketing only did one of the above three benefits, it would be well worth it. The fact that it does all three is a testament to how effective article marketing is.
After getting well versed with article marketing, I created my own article marketing strategy that brands myself via my blog through articles. If that sounds a little confusing, hang on and it'll crystallize in a second. Just know this: it works!
Of course to make all this work requires a little work. How much depends on you and your budget, but there is no free ride...no silver bullet. You'll have to weigh your ego with your bank account and see which one weighs more. Like all things in marketing and business, you leverage either time or money.
That said, here are the main 4 components of my kick ass article marketing strategy:
Choosing Key Phrases and Topics For My Articles
Getting The Article Written
Posting The Article On My Blog
Distributing The Article To Hundreds Of Directories
So let's talk about each one of these and put the pieces of this not-so-complex puzzle together.
Choosing Topics And Keywords For Your Articles
The first thing you need to do when you write an article is determine the key phrase (aka keyword) you want people people to search for. You can write a masterpiece article or blog post, however, if no one finds it because it's something no one is searching for, well, you get the picture ...
In Internet Marketing, there are few things as important as keyword science. You must understand it and the great news is it's not very difficult. The best way to learn is to get your feet wet, so head on over to this Free Keyword Suggestion Tool and type in a key phrase related to your product or service.
TIP: If you are in a network marketing company, I suggest you not only use the name of your company but also type in key phrases related to the problems your products or service solves. For example, if you're in a health company, you might consider testing the key phrase back pain or vitamin benefits.
After you type in a phrase and press the ‘Hit Me' button, you should get a list of key phrases related to the one you typed in. This will immediately give you insight into what people are searching for that is related to your market. The number of searches is on a per day basis. For example if you type in gardening tools, you will see that it gets around 126 searches a day (at least at the time of this writing).
Once you get a key phrase that is being for, all you need to do is embed that into your title and make a good title.
Other great resources to get key phrases and to give you insight into what people are searching for is SEO Book and of course Google's Keyword Tool.
Now of course keyword science and selecting great key terms can be much deeper this, and you will master keyword science as soon as your investment in Traffic Secrets 2.0 is delivered to your doorstep.
Get The Article Written!
With your key phrase and title in place, the next step in my article marketing strategy is to get the article written. You either write it yourself or you pay a writer to write articles for you. Again, it's the leverage time or leverage money decision. I personally prefer to leverage the money as you probably do too.
Should you decide to write your article, however, the main thing is to write something valuable that asserts you as someone who brings value to other people by solving problems.
As many of you have already told me, you really admire and appreciate my work because I solve marketing problems for you by not holding anything back.
When you hire your writers, I recommend you contact me for for my source and as a second recommendation, search for writers at on elance.com.
Posting The Article On My Blog
Once the article is written, I take the content of the article and the same title, same key phrases, etc. and I make it into a blog post. Because the article directories do not allow pictures, videos, formatting, etc., I do that in my blog. And I also inject my own personality and change the content just a little.
Most article marketers do not do this, however, so this might have come as a surprise to you if you are an article marketer. Most marketers using article distribution write an article, distribute them to directories and have the resources box (aka "About the Author" box) (I'll explain this later) point back to their primary Web Site. Let's tie the picture together in the next part.
Distributing The Article
Well, the article is written and I've pasted it on my blog and customized it.
Now all I need to do is distribute it to as many directories as possible. You can do this manually or if you will use Article Marketer to distribute your article to thousands of directories for you. They also have proof readers before your articles are sent to the directories, ensuring a grammatically clean article. This is really kick ass!
I cannot say enough good things about how easy this service makes my article marketing. Distributing articles manually takes more than time than you probably have and you will see how simple and cost effective it is when you visit this site and read about it.
Briefly, it's as simple as copying your article, picking a category and filling out the About the Author box and that's where the magic of my article marketing strategy works.
*IMPORTANT: Most article marketers use the same "About the Author" text for every article they distribute, which is basically put out a basic information about who they are and a link back to their main Web Site. What I do here is I put a link back to the blog page and with the anchor text being the key phrase of the article.
Tying It All Together
That was a lot of information to digest, so I'm going to give a fictitious example and tell you my business work flow.
Step 1: Keyword research. After playing around with the keyword tools, I decide to write an article based around the key phrase "viral marketing"
Step 2: Determine a title. Let's call the article "13 Reasons Viral Marketing Works" That's a title that would grab my attention.
Step 3: Get the article written. I pay my writer to write this article for me. Again, you can write it yourself although you will rather outsource it.
Step 4: After I get the article back, I take the contents of the article and publish it on my blog using the same title as my article. I change up the content a little and make it more search engine friendly by applying the concepts that you will master.Let's assume this piece is accessible on my blog at:
http://www.forestmarie.com/13-reasons-viral-marketing-works/
Step 5: Using Article Marketer, I paste the article title, content, and keywords I'm optimizing for. I select the category of the article.
Step 6: The "Magic" Step ... I fill out the "About the Author Box" and I put a link back to the blog page itself that the article is about. For example, I typically use something along these lines:
This article was originally published at: <a href="http://www.forestmarie.com/13-reasons-viral-marketing-works/">viral marketing</a>
Ah, ha...
We now have some advantages!
The word viral marketing is known as the anchor text. Now when Google crawls the hundreds or thousands of article directories that I distribute my article to, it will find that many Web Site are linking back to my page using the key phrase I want them to find me under, which helps out tremendous for off-page search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.
In this make believe scenario, we're talking 1000 pages pointing back to my page for the key phrase "viral marketing." That's a lot of votes for my page!
After you consider this with 1000 blog posts and 1000 articles each distributed to 1000 directories, you understand we are talking a lot of traffic and a lot of self promotion. Indeed, content is king.
So now you know my kick ass article marketing strategy. After you do it once, you'll see how simple and automated it is.
Remember, the writing is outsource-able and so is the article distribution itself
*This was presented by Forest Marie and forwarded by Angela Giles, Leads expert.
http://www.getmegaleads.com/insidescoopreview/htm
Here is one of my articles that I manually submitted to dozens of Article Directories last year and it is STILL #1 in Google for the anchor text, Independent GRN Affiliate!
http://www.squidoo.com/AN-INDEPENDENT-GRN-AFFILIATE
