Article marketing, A.K.A article distribution, A.K.A. article directory submission is a popular website marketing strategy. While thousands of website owners perform this SEM tactic themselves on a daily basis, seemingly as many online business owners hire a company or freelancer to submit articles to popular web directories for them. This search engine marketing (SEM) strategy is highly-regarded in many circles as an effective website promotion tactic, and it can be, provided the article submissions are performed properly and the person who is submitting the articles has a solid understanding of how to get the most out of article directory distribution.
As a long-time proponent of article marketing, a several-times-weekly article directory submitter, and as one who offers article marketing services professionally, I’ve developed a very good understanding of how to get the most out of article directory submission, and I’m going to share some valuable tips with you here today. Here is how to get the best overall results from your article marketing campaign — from start to finish.
If your articles are being rejected when you submit them to article directories, there’s likely a very simple reason for it. By and large, article rejections are due to a few very specific areas:
Now, if you read the article submission guidelines before submitting, and subsequently format your article to meet those guidelines, you’ll enjoy an exceptionally high approval rate as long as the article directory is not dead (or online, but not approving articles). However, as there are a lot of article directories that don’t technically list their guidelines in easy-to-see areas, or at all, here is how to get the best overall article acceptance rate:
Many article directories will accept HTML author bios, or will allow you to use keyword-targeted anchor text (or descriptive text) for your website’s links, even though they don’t mention it anywhere on their website. Links with keyword-targeted anchor text are infinity better than plain-jane, http://www.example.com links, so it’s worth the minute of effort to figure out if a particular directory allows HTML in the ‘about the author’ area.
To do this, just look at a few articles in the article directory that you are going to submit to. If you see any links that have anchor text like keywords go here as opposed to http://www.example.com, then this directory allows HTML in the author bio area. Again, this is well-worth the minute or so that it’ll take you to figure it out as you can use this information to improve your website’s keyword relevancy (through keyword-focused anchor text) for all future submissions to this directory.
Here are some general tips that will help you get better results with your article marketing campaigns.
Realize that mass distribution is not always better than limited article submission – just because you submit to 300 article directories does not mean that you will get any better results than you would get by submitting to 20 article directories. If it’s cheap enough, it may be worth a shot, but you certainly do not want to submit to 300 untested article directories yourself, and you shouldn’t spend a lot of money on it, either.
Making articles ‘unique’ for each directory is not worth it most of the time – unless you’re submitting to a very popular, high-ranking article directory like Ezine Articles or Article Base, or another article directory that you know can deliver targeted traffic itself, it’s not worth the effort to create unique articles for each directory. If you’re using article marketing to grab traffic from the directories themselves, this is another story, but if your goals are to improve your website’s keyword relevancy for specific keywords, and to get more search engine traffic, don’t waste your time on making articles unique or semi-unique.
Take advantage of article directories that allow in-article links – a small percentage of article directories allow you to place promotional links within the article’s body itself. When you stumble upon this — fully take advantage of it. There are a variety of reasons to do this, but two of the most important:
Don’t waste time submitting to dead directories – This is more common with large-scale article directory submission, especially when you get into the 200+ article directory submission packages, but it’s a real time and money waster. If you submit yourself, there’s a good chance that you only submit to a small handful of directories, but if you buy article submission services, especially if you purchase ridiculously-large packages like submission to 800, 1,000, or 2,000 article directories — there’s a very good chance that many of those directories are dead. Regardless of whether you submit on your own, or you hire somebody to submit to article directories for you, be sure that the article directories approve your articles, and that your articles eventually find their way into one of the major search engines through that directory.
Don’t forget to link internally – Unless you have a one-page website, you should absolutely link to relevant internal pages in the ‘about the author’ area alongside your website’s home page. This will help to increase the trust and visibility of your website’s internal pages, and can boost the rankings and visibility of your website as a whole.
Rotate author bios during the submission process – Here at My Site Rankings, our Top 15 Article Marketing package offers this, and we do this for our own personal article marketing campaigns as well. Create a few different author bios, and either link to different pages within those bios or use different anchor text for the same links. When your article is submitted, then, just switch the bios from time to time so that you’re building links to more pages, and working on targeting multiple keywords, even during the same article distribution campaign. Unfortunately, we do not know of any services besides ours that alternates author bios during article submission, so unless you purchase our services, you’ll probably have to do this on your own.
Hopefully this lengthy, yet informative, post will give you some ideas on how to improve your article marketing strategies. Article marketing can be a very cost-effective website promotion tactic, and by using these tips, you should be able to improve your results, and maybe even your revenue, without wasting another day using ineffective article submission methods.
We offer article submission services here at My Site Rankings, and though we are a bit biased, we feel that our article distribution services are among the best available today. If you want to test out our Top 15 Article Marketing service, use the link below to save $5 on our 1 article package to see what our services can do for your website.
View our services: Article Submission Services
Discount purchase link: Top 15 Article Distribution for $25
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