Article Marketing Strategy - Do You Have One?

If you've had any experience with article marketing then you probably have come across many of the "tricks" the so-called experts use to get their articles to rank and bring in traffic.

What typically follows is the unfortunate marketer begins to get caught up in all of these silly "tricks" and leaves out the most important element... CONTENT!

If you have no content, then you will not sustain the reader's interest and they will click away within a few seconds. This is why so many article marketers get frustrated when they see hundreds of clicks on their articles but NO SALES!

Useful and interesting content is truly the first crucial step when it comes to article marketing strategy. Good, useful content is what gets the reader "hyped" and in a frame of mind to click on your links or read down to the resource box.

So What Makes Good Content?

An example of good content is any information that is immediately useful to the reader. Long paragraphs of "salesy" content or boring and dull statistics do nothing to bring the reader closer to your product. Remember, people search for information, not products. Your product should simply represent a better, faster, or more efficient way to get at what the reader desires.

For example, let's say you are promoting a body building ebook. Now very few people go on Google and type in "body building ebook". On the other hand there are thousands of searches for "body building tips". If you don't believe me, just type in the above phrases into any keyword tool.

But effective article marketing doesn't end with good content...

Nothing is more frustrating than writing your "gold-mine" article, keyword optimized, with perfect keyword density, getting it ranked on the first page, the POOF! gone in a couple of weeks! In the past I've had this happened to many of my articles and it frustrates me to no end!

You see, web pages go in and out of the Google index all the time. So you might write an article for EzineArticles, optimized for your chosen keyword phrase just as you were told to do by Gary Guru, and it gets ranked quickly on the first page or two. This is because Google holds high value for a site like EzineArticles, or in other words EA has "Authority" and "Trust" in the eyes of Google. Google sees your content as relevant because you followed the "rules" of optimization, and since you published your article on a site Google trusts, it might temporarily give your article some of the same trust by indexing on the first page or two.

I say "temporarily" because as time goes by Google requires your article to prove it's value or trust, or that it can "stand alone" in value for your given keyword phrase. As weeks pass the site your article is on begins to matter less and the value of your article begins to matter more. You can build value and authority for your article by building or obtaining links to your article that have the keyword phrase you wish to rank for as the anchor text of that link. Each link built or obtained counts as a gold star in value for your article in the eyes of Google. Now there's more to this process, but for the sake of simplicity, if your article has more gold stars than another article or web page using your keyword phrase, then it will rank higher.

Now if you're thinking that you've already built backlinks to your article but it still is not ranking well, you must understand that it can mean that Google may not have found these backlinks, or Google may not count these backlinks (spammy or inferior sites), or you simply don't have enough backlinks to rank higher than the next fellow. But you MUST build backlinks to rank higher or your content will be left in the dust! It's scary to think you could be building backlinks through other articles or blogs knowing that the next person trying to rank for your keywords may have hundreds of quality backlinks already!

What Information Do I Need To Stay Ahead Of The Pack?

This can be a daunting process, but you need to be able to see exactly what the other guy is doing and then DO MORE to outrank him or her. You need look at the top ten results for your keyword phrase and then determine what anchor text they are using, where their links are coming from, and what sites or directories their article or page is coming from. In other words, find out WHY these top ten are ranking so well. With this information you can then decide if your attempts at ranking for a particular keyword phrase are worth the effort. You think getting this information is work? You bet it is...

I now own a tool that that does it for me automatically. I can enter a keyword phrase and instantly see the number of backlinks to the top 10, 20,30 or more web pages. I can also see the number of links to the web site it is coming from as well as the page rank of each result.

Here's an example:



Click Here To See This Tool In Action!

By typing "pretty pink bows" in the search field I immediately see that the top site has 5 backlinks and the next two have only one. I also see that the top two sites have in excess of 84 million site links. The third position has 1 backlink and just in excess of 7 thousand site links. Knowing this and the fact that EzineArticles has many more sitelinks than the third position, I can easily rank for the number 3 spot with my article by having only a few backlinks. How powerful is that? Page rank can come into play, but the authority of EA would make ranking for these keywords simple.

From this same example I can click on any result and it will show me exactly what anchor text is used for each result and how many times it is used.

Although I can't fully control how or where Google chooses to rank a web page or article, I now have a tool that instantly let's me know my true competition in detail and if it is worth the effort to try to rank for certain keywords. Now I can stop wasting time wondering how much work it will take to get to the top of the SERPS and instead start doing what it takes to get there!

Click HERE to learn more about this tool

While daily consistent action is probably the most important step in article marketing, having a repeatable system is a close second.

I originally started article marketing by finding a product on Clickbank, then trying to write about it on EzineArticles, optimizing for certain keywords, then publishing this same article to multiple article directories.

Most of the time I got lots of clicks, but zero sales. So I would write another article, and another, still with the same results, aside from an occasional sale or two each month. I then began to try various "guru" practices such as article submitters, pinging, blogging, etc... but what this lead to was a mass of confusion rather than what I was after...SALES!

The Strategy To Profits With Article Marketing Is In The System!

The system I use saves tons of time (what most article or affiliate marketers do not have enough of!) and allows me to:

Get my content indexed most of the time within hours to at most 1-2 days

Get "eyeballs" looking at my content almost immediately

Save time by using the best research methods for determining profitable keywords

Build traffic organically using all search engines

Use my time to create more content rather than waste time by doing all the "wrong" things

Most importantly I've gotten results using this system over and over! You can re-invent the affiliate marketing wheel over and over again unless you have a step-by-step plan that you can work from...