Article Marketing How To: Getting the most out of it

Article marketing has been known as a viable solution to gaining productive backlinks for quite some time now. . . but all the time I see people doing it wrong; this little piece is to help some of the people who are currently doing it wrong to get more benefit out of the process.

Problem 1: Your content sucks.
Ouch. . . Really, I’m not meaning to offend anybody, but if you want people to pick up your article, it has to:

• Have a point: Skip the shameless self promotion and skip the ‘article over-peppering’ with the same keyword phrase every two sentences; you’re choking the reader.
• Have a unique voice: You’re not likely to find a webmaster or blogger that will provide you with a quality backlink if your content reads like it was created by a monotone radio-host, when the article is supposed to be about Disney world. . .

You don’t have to be a great writer to put out decent quality content: if you can put a couple of sentences together in a logical fashion and know how to use punctuation somewhat properly. . . you can do ok. Maybe not fantastic at first. . . though you’ll likely improve with practice.

Problem 2: You’re writing content for search engines.
If you want to be successful with your article marketing endeavors: write the content for people! There is a point to using a keyword or phrase lightly throughout the course of an article, and also where within the article structure these keywords are placed. However – if you write your articles with the angle that people will enjoy the read and benefit from the article: your article will get picked up by more people naturally. Webmasters and Bloggers love well written content to use in their online publications: but I personally wouldn’t touch one of these spam soaked articles with a ten foot pole.

Problem 3: The keywords used for your article are the keywords you’re trying to rank for.
No! No! No! This is a grave mistake made by many article marketers even yet today – and it’s truly costing you. Why? It’s because you’re creating competition for your own website!

Maybe you don’t know this, but I’ll explain it in simple terms and you will finally realize what you’ve been doing.

If you create an article that is intended for article marketing, i.e. it’s going to be submitted to article directories and then to related websites, the keywords that this article is optimized for will help the article directories and other websites to be optimized for these specific keywords.

This is not good for you at all, especially if you’ve found an underdeveloped niche that you’re looking to exploit. . . the reason being is because these article directories are likely more established than your website. Article directories tend to have more weight with the search engines, and to most search engines these older, established domains will outrank you for your own article. Bad news for you.

How to get better results with article marketing

It’s really pretty simple – just a couple of tweaks and you can find yourself getting much better results in your article marketing campaigns.

#1: Change your mindset & consider the reader instead
The reader is the very reason you are creating this article. You might think that you’re ‘trying to build links to your website’, but no, if you focus on this, you’re losing out on some valuable links.

Instead, think about providing useful content in an easy to read manner. If you provide a useful piece that’s a pleasure to read; the links will come, and you’ll get better quality links out of it.

#2: Use related keywords for content, not competing
It’s pretty simple to understand once it’s explained to you: if you’re using article marketing to promote your website, write about topics of a closely related niche, but don’t create competition for your own.

For example: if you are promoting a website about ‘lemon scented cat litter’, then maybe create an article about litter box training for your cat or kitten for submission. If you’re promoting a website that offers videos on ‘how to make a toga’, than maybe write an article about frat parties or ancient fashion trends. . .Hopefully you can see my point here. Just remember – related, but not competing.

Article marketing is still a very useful resource for webmasters and marketers to build up the popularity of their websites; only there is now a lot more competition than there was even a few months ago.

If you want article marketing to work well for you, you should always try and reach your reader: because bottom line, if there were no readers – there would be no article marketing.