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Jul 21st, 2009 | By CJ | Category: Article MarketingArticle marketing is the way. It’s quite easy and, best of all, it free!
Writing The Articles
For the purpose of article marketing, the typical article runs from 350 to 750 words, making this a very east task to accomplish. It only amounts to 6 to 9 paragraphs… short paragraphs, at that! Take into consideration everything you want to tell your future readers. Make an outline of your high points. From this, you will easily begin to construct the paragraphs.
Make the entire article easy to read. Paragraphs should be short, 2-4 sentences. If you were faced with a single paragraph that spanned half a page, would you bother to read it? As it is too easy for people to “click away” from your article, it is in your best interest to make the reading of your article as easy as possible.
Bullet points are very popular these days. The “information super-highway” has become like the Autobahn, and the faster you can get your message across to readers, the more likely they will be to actually read what you have to say. Use bullet points for your readers to scan.
What To Do With Your Article
Now that you’ve written the article, where do you send it to get the most exposure? Well, first things first. Many out there will warn you about the duplicate content issue. It’s really not as bad as some would have you believe. I have covered the issue extensively in other articles, so I will not rehash it here. Suffice to say that the best thing to do is to post the article first to your own website. Google gives more weight to the first instance of an article that it finds.
Next, start sending the article to article directories. Directories, like eZineArticles.com and others, are repositories for articles where webmasters may come and take articles they like for their own websites, with the one requirement being that they leave the article completely intact, including the author’s resource box. The resource box will have links back to your site within it.
Some writer’s use article spinners to create variations to send out to article directories, further avoiding the duplicate content issue. You can do this, if you so desire, but remember this: if Google penalized duplicate content more harshly than they actually do, then all those article directories would have been shut down long ago!
After directories, the next place to go is Squidoo, Hub Pages and other authority sites where you can create a page. Google considers these sites authority sites and will give more weight to the links back to your site from there. Create a page at these sites and include your article, replete with your links.
Other things you can do involve social marketing, like Tweeting about your article, posting about it in forums and commenting in other people’s blog posts of similar subjects.
That’s basically it for article marketing, and best of all, every single one of these methods is free. Now, notice this article. It is 10 paragraphs and 585 words. Because I know my subject matter, it took me all of 10 minutes to write it. You can do this, too!
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Interesting post on articles. I want to write and submit some articles for our company, but should I just submit to ezinearticles or the many others? It seems that if I take the time to write a good article, I would want to obtain the best exposure. But if Google does not like this I do not want to upset them.
Ah, and you have just touched on the subject of my next post! But I’ll be happy to talk about it now…
eZineArticles (EZA) hates duplicate content with a passion and they think rewriting your own work to avoid such issues makes you a worthless writer. I got this info straight from Chris Knight, EZA’s owner. The post where I wrote about that is here:
http://articlewritingnews.com/my-favourite-article-directory-is/
In my personal experience, I have posted articles to GoArticles.com and the article made it to PAGE 1 of Google SERP (search engine results page) for my keyword within hours! I have no problem posting to other top-ranked directories.
As for duplicate content, it really isn’t about Google not liking dup content, it’s about how much gravity they give to your backlinks. Check this post:
http://articlewritingnews.com/duplicate-content-what-is-it/
It says, basically, search result pages are assessed on the basis of their relevance to the keywords entered, and points are deducted only if they are found irrelevant. Hence, there is no such thing as “duplicate content penalty”
Really, it’s more of a “competition filter” When Google looks at your backlinks, the first ones will be kept and the others are discarded. That is the extent of their “penalty.” You just don’t get all the backlinks. But your work is still out there and the more exposure, the better.
So, I recommend posting to several article directories.
Do you publish the same article (that was submitted to Ezinearticles.com) in Squidoo and hubpages?
You can do that, certainly… again, backlink relevance is what Google looks at, so I wouldn’t post the same article. EZA and Squidoo both have good page rank. So, for example, if you post an article to EZA, it gets approved, and then post the same article to Squidoo, Google is going to look at the FIRST instance it found of your article, which, in this case, would be EZA. When it finds your Squidoo page with a duplicated article, Google will tend to ignore it.
This is not good, because it means you’ve lost out on Squidoo’s page rank! Why not write something else for Squidoo?
In fact, I find that long articles on Squidoo tend to be ignored a LOT. If you noticed, most Squidoo lenses have shorter blurbs, broken up in sections. It’s really easier to write a short blurb than a long article. And when your readers look at your Squidoo page, if they see a big block of text, they’re liable to skip it. Shorter sections are much more appealing, so you may as well write a shorter version of your article for your lens.
Thanks for dropping by, Stephen!
~cj
Very Great Review.I deal in travel related products such as sacks, shoes, tents and other articles. I want to do online marketing for them. Considering all the modes of online marketing, in what equation I should spend my money for it?
.-= custom home building´s last blog ..Trendy and spacious custom home =-.
Well, as you know, chb, article marketing is free, unless, of course, you outsource the article writing and the submission services. Honestly, marketing on the Internet can be as cheap or expensive as you want it to be.
As for an equation… I’ve heard told that pouring 50% of your profits back into your business (in the form of advertising, etc.) is pretty standard, especially in the beginning. As for me, I believe that start-up businesses should pour as much back into itself as possible, once overhead costs are met. It’s more important in the beginning of a new business to generate positive income as soon as possible, so devoting as much profit back into the business as possible is a good idea.
Later, as the business is well-established, that percentage can be re-visited.
Thanks for dropping by and commenting!