Article Marketing Tools

Your ranking in Google will have a big impact on the traffic to your website. Backlinks (links from other sites to your site) play a major part in determining your ranking. Each backlink counts as a kind of 'vote' for you site. The mistake many new internet marketers make is that, just like the hopeful presidential candidate, they go chasing votes, trying to get as many backlinks as they can.

The reason this is a mistake is that some votes count more than others - and some votes aren't really votes at all. (I'm resisting the urge to make a political comment here).

Look at this from Google's perspective. The more people that use Google as their search engine, the more Google will earn from advertising revenues (because more people will click on the advertisements on the right of the search results).

What makes people use a search engine? Quality results.

So it is in Google's interest to return quality results.

Google's technology, in their own words, uses "the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance." Let me summarize what this means:

* links should be created by human internet users interested in a topic - not by automated tools
* some users or sites have more authority - just as I would accept legal advice from a lawyer and not a random guy walking down the street
* self-promoting links don't count - if I create a link to this lens that shouldn't really count because I am biased

What does that mean for article marketing?

* misuse of automation tools could flag you as a spammer
* you should target important sites
* sites where there is no review of articles probably carry next to no link weight

I am suggesting that you adopt a rifle and shotgun strategy. The rifle element is the part where you manually craft and submit unique articles to the top article sites. This is complemented by a less focused, partly-automated shotgun approach - spun articles (I'll explain in a moment) to second tier article directories.

First, let me talk about the RIFLE approach. There are a number of article sites that Google ranks highly - and so backlinks from these sites are definitely worth having. In addition, you will gain traffic from the many users of these sites.

These sites are extremely concerned about quality; each article is reviewed prior to publication and many articles will be rejected. Of paramount concern to them is "uniqueness" - the article must not be published elsewhere. For more on writing articles for these sites, see the Articles Links below.

Here are 15 of the top article sites that you should consider:

ezinearticles
go articles
article dashboard
articlesbase
article alley
goarticles
article city
isnare
ideamarketers
a1articles
buzzle
searchwarp.com
helium.com
articlecube.com
submityourarticle.com

Check the links below for a periodically updated list, including Alexa Rank and PageRank value.

I would suggest that you pick around 5 of these and focus on them. If you spread yourself too thinly, you won't build credibility at the site. I would also recomend that you consider using Roboform to automate your sign-ups and logins. The YouTube video below explains how.

The second element of the article marketing strategy I suggest you use, is the shotgun approach. This consists of blasting versions of an article to a high number of less important sites. For this to be effective - particularly in terms of your time - you should automate.

There are two areas in which you can automate:

* content creation - once you have a base article you can 'spin' it. What this means is that you change the article sufficiently so that it will not be flagged as duplicate content by the article sites or Google. At the most basic, spinning consists of synonym replacement - replacing one word with a similar one. This won't get you very far - the algorithms used to detect duplicate content are sophisticated.

* submitting to directories - with hundreds of directories, this could be a very time-consuming, repetitive task. Exactly the type of task that computers love.

Read on for my reviews of article marketing software.

There are many software tools that can help to automate your article marketing. I'm going to focus on three, each with a slightly different approach.

Automatic Article Submitter combines a spinner and automatic submission to hundreds of quality directories. The automation level is extremely high. Automatic Article Submitter:

* handles all account creation - including confirmataion email
* creates pen names for you
* performs keyword analysis (no point submitting if you don't rank on your keywords)
* submits the articles, into the right category, and logs the results
* even turns the articles into blog posts for your own blogs!

Follow the Article Marketing Tools link below, for more information.

This is the big sister of Article Post Robot, a solid performer for many years. It doesn't spin, it only submits. But in this area it excels.

It only submits to 120 premium quality sites but it enables you to create multiple accounts at each site, should you wish to separate identities for different businesses, and checks PageRank so that you can optimize your submissions.

Its real strength - and the reason for its curious name - is that it can schedule your article submissions over a period time. This is actually important - too many articles submitted at the same time could suggest spamming. You are visible on the radar.

Article Drip Robot is subscription software. You pay a monthly fee - you can try it out for a week for a few cents.

Follow the Article Marketing Tools link below, for more information.

Unique Article Wizard has a very different approach. As a blogger, you can sign up for a free account and your blog will receive content automatically from Unique Article publishers.

So, let's say you write an article. Your article would then be syndicated by Unique Article Wizard to lots of bloggers. As part of the service Unique Article Wizard will also 'spin' the article so that each blog gets a different version. Within the content are your backlinks. And these backlinks are on sites that have relevant content (otherwise why would they include my content) - and relevance is very important in determining the value of a link (and why directory submission is almost worthless in my opinion - but that's another lens!)

A similar service to Unique Article Wizard is Syndicate Kahuna. Both can be found by clicking on the Article Marketing Tools link below.