As you may have guessed from the title, the focus today is on creating and submitting articles. You may think it’s pretty cut and dry but there are as many theories about article marketing as there are internet marketers. Here are a few:
- the article directory vs. blog debate. Some people swear you should publish first on one, then on the other to get the best results. Others believe the opposite.
- the duplicate content debate. There are people who would swear on their grannies that duplicate content will get you the google smack down. On the flip side there are those who submit the exact same articles to hundreds of directories with no problems.
- the manual vs. automatic debate. Some people believe you have to do manual submissions in order to really get attention. Others believe that you should save your time and put it on autopilot.
- the relevant vs. irrelevant debate. Some people insist that the links in your signature must be relevant to the article to get the best juice others say a link is a link is a link and quantity counts.
There are tons more that I could list but those seem to be the top four. If you’re thinking about doing article marketing seriously I’d strongly suggest heading to the Warrior Forum and spending a couple days reading. Read the different theories, the debates, the results and make your own mind up.
In general, I think that your opinions on the four points above depends on your goal. If your goal is traffic then you want the best, most unique articles that are very relevent to your site/product. If your goal is backlinks, you just want as many articles out there as you can get. My goal is backlinks.
My process:
I said yesterday that I’m cheating and it’s true. In the course John does manual submissions to just GoArticles and EzineArticles and has great results. To be frank, I don’t have the patience for manual submission so I’m going (mostly) automated.
I recently purchased ArticleBot based on the reviews at the WF. With a 50% discount (code: AWESOME) it only cost me about $13. I then purchased an $8 WSO to have my account profiles set up at lots of directories. The WSO guaranteed I’d get at least 150 accounts and I received almost 600 accounts so I’d say it was well worth $8 because even if ArticleBot helps to automate the process it’ll still take a while just to fill in the information and confirm the accounts.
In addition to my ArticleBot submissions I’ll still submit manually to EzineArticles. the reason for this is that they’re much more picky than anyone else so even though it takes longer, having an article on the most powerful directory is a good thing.
I submitted 3 articles today to both EZA and through ArrticleBot. The EZA ones were fine, just had to get the info in there and now wait a few weeks to get them approved.
Submitting through ArticleBot was ok. I got a lot of errors on my first submission. They all had to do with a specific directory script and nothing to do with ArticleBot so there’s not much I can do.
One thing I like about ArticleBot is that you can submit multiple resource boxes for each article and it will rotate through them as the article submits. I created a two-link resource box containing a combo for every link pair so I had @ 20 resource boxes to alternate. The only thing I really don’t like is that you can’t save your resource box(es) so you have to re-do them each time which can be a pain. I created a text file with the link pairs to copy and paste from.
The process of submitting with AB is easy. Just fill out the form and press submit. It takes a while and if you used any sites with Captcha you want to make sure you’re near your computer to enter it when asked.
There’s a report at the end that tells you which sites were ok and which had errors and you can go in and see the error message for each one so you can fix the problem.
Each article was submitted to about 200 directories so even if only half of them approve the article that’s still pretty good. Doing that manually would have been a nightmare.
All-in-all I strongly recommend AB to automate your submissions and I’m happy with how the article submissions went. I just have to work on my process a bit more until I get it perfected.
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7 Comments
I am an article writer and your post has given me a lot of information. Thanks.
I am new to article writing, i found some usefull tips in your post
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Sounds like some interesting tools, how do you ensure that your links are active when you post them. I mean I wouldn’t want to write a long post and then have the link not be active but just a text within the article itself.
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I always put my links with my keywords within html tags. They may be converted to text on some sites but I haven’t seen any like that in the ones that have gotten approved. And, if you use the html at least if they do get turned to text your link will still be there for readers to see.
Articles are always a good way to go. Have to be careful with automation, as people can really get bent out of shape by such things. The backlinks from the articles, combined with the time saving aspect, are a truly powerful draw for this approach.
Article are a great way to reach people, but while it should clear in mind that we not copy any other data. Article sites are very particular so try to write new or a new style..
Hi there! I believe that article are a great way to reach people, but while it should clear in mind that we not copy any other data. Article sites are very particular so try to write new or a new style. By the way, thanks for the post. Keep on posting such a great article in the future.