Internet User Asks:

I hear a lot of Warriors discuss how they are reaching out to thousands of readers through article syndication. The technique seems pretty legit but i still had some doubts.

1) Sites like Ezine Articles have thousands of articles posted everyday. How does one get publishers to post our article on their site/blog?

2) Wouldn’t you rather let search engine visitors come to your site instead of being directed to EZA?

First of all your content does matter a great deal! 2nd do not mass submit to thousands of directories, bad idea!

All your content you want posted on your own site first and foremost. Do not give away your unique and fresh content to anybody. It is yours why not use it, post it on your own site / blog first.

After it is on your site / blog then you want to do some bookmarks, social posting, and pings to get that content seen by people and search engines. Do not syndicate just yet, wait a few days and make sure your content is indexed.

Then you want to go to social media sites such as livejournal and multiply (there are hundreds of these sites) and you want to post what I call half articles. The half article should include at least 1 link in the body and and a read more link leading back to the original on your site.

DO NOT CREATE HUNDREDS OF ACCOUNTS FOR THIS! Only create as many accounts as you can “manually” handle. Which means you should only create 5 – 10 social media accounts on multiply type sites. You want to handle these sites manually and participate in the sites. Every time you post on your site / blog this is the first place you post your half articles.

Once that is done run a few (not many) bookmarks on the social media accounts you created. You do not want to go over-board on bookmarking these sites as you want to build your site and not theirs.

Next on your list you want to make sure you create hubpages and/or squidoo lenses. Create an entire page based around 3 – 4 of your articles. DO NOT ADD ANY SALES PITCHES! Add informative content and engages users and attracts them to your blog / site. squidoo you can feed your rss feed into your lenses that you create. Again a few few bookmarks will not hurt here.

Now you want to locate some top bloggers that are “related” and you want to build a relationship with them. Many will disagree here and think you should just email people, which does work but I personally think it is more beneficial to build a relationship first.

Once you build a relationship with these top bloggers they will have no problem publishing your content any time you want. I know people that I can post on their blogs any time, all I need to do is send a email and say “hey let me post on your blog” and they allow me no questions asked.

This is because I built a relationship with them and they know I am not going to post junk garbage. Building a relationship with 5 or more people in your niche that have related products and services will go way further than any content junk filled article directory that has ads all over your articles!

This is just for starters as there is more to syndication but this should get you up and running. I personally syndicate on 300+ ad free websites.

In the marketing arena you will hear many times marketers talking about
the title of your articles and content. While we all know the content of
that article (including pictures) makes a huge difference in search
engines rankings and retained readership; we must not forget about the
title which is designed to attract the reader.

High quality content and pictures that are related can be worth 1,000′s
of visitors but how much is that title actually worth ? If the
following story about Forbes stealing a New York Times article is any
indication, the title is worth 100,000′s of visitors.

Just this past Friday New York Times published a new article entitled : How Companies Learn Your Secrets.
This lengthy article discussed in detail how large companies such as
Wal-Mart and Target collect data on individual consumer patterns to
figure out how to most efficiently keep their customers happy. This was a
great article but did it have the actual title that it deserved to have
?

When Kashmir Hill, a writer at Forbes, read this article and realized
the potential he created a more compact article with a more powerful
headline (title). Kashmir Hill got rid of most of the fluff and got
right to the meat of the story and written his article entitled : How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did.

When I checked the story on the New York Times website, it had 60+ links
and shares on Facebook which was far less than the 17,000+ that Forbes
article has. The Forbes article currently has a mind staggering
1,063,916 views on it’s article.

The truth is that in the age of technology and popularity of newsfeeds
and streams, article/stories titles matter more now than they ever have
before. The highest quality content online can fail to drive traffic
without the proper title. The story of Forbes stealing a New York Times
article illustrates this very clearly with their recent Target article.

A internet user ask:

what should be the minimum number of word for a article?

Is it 100, 200, 300,400?

Anything under 500 is considered a blog post and not an article. You should focus on writing articles that are very informative and reach at least 700 words. One reason why you would want longer articles is because you can re-purpose those articles easier for other uses.

For example an 900 word article gives me the ability to post that article on my site and then split the article into 3 mini articles. I can take these 3 mini articles and post 1 on multiply, 1 on livejournal, and 1 on jamespot. This way these social media sites have similar content but not the same.

I do this for readers and not some duplicate content myth.

A internet user ask:

I’m thinking of initially writing 10 good quality articles of a word count of about 700-750 words and submit them to 100 article directories allowing me to put 2 backlinks to my website. So if I calculate it mathematically, I get 2 * 100 * 10 = 2000 backlinks with these 10 articles.

The panda update was about more than just quality content, it was about quality websites also. Many of those article directories you are thinking of submitting to got hit hard because they are nothing more than content farms (Matt Cutts on article marketing).

Those article directories that are loaded down with ads, adsense, and massive links all suffered in the SERPS. Ezine articles lost over 1 million keywords in Google because the site does not offer the quality Google is looking for.

Article Marketing is very much alive but you need to rethink your article strategy and make sure your articles are high quality. Your articles must posses proper spelling and grammar, semantically related words, have a proper reading grade level according the Flesch-Kincaid readability test.

Once you have high quality articles then you need to submit to your own site / blog first and then syndicate your articles to websites that are built according to what Google wants. These sites must have proper seo and must have very little ads to 0 ads.

If you follow the above then you will see results but just slapping those content farms with articles hoping for backlinks, you are going to be hugely disappointed. Recently Google has implemented what is called the Google page layout algorithm which will start to devalue and even de-index sites that are built with too many ads and very little content.

A internet user ask:

I have a blog that posts two 500 word articles everyday and currently has 300 articles after 3 months. But now I find I am running out of ideas for articles. Is it ok to bring the scheduled post to something like 1 per week? Is it bad to completely stop in terms of SEO?

I prefer to set my blogs to 1 post per day and I normally set them up about 2 weeks in advance. You could slow down and go to 1 post per day or even 1 post every few days.

Just making blog post though is not exactly going to get you what you want. You need to make sure that you are syndicating your blog post. You must bookmark them and share them with social media websites.

As for SEO – Do not always focus on trying to sell something to your readers. Try to engage with your readers and supply informative post that have no hidden agenda.

There are many things to take into consideration here. If you decide to slow down with the blog post then maybe on the days a post is not made you could post comments on the currently posted blog post.

You can always get new ideas by reading news rss feeds. A great place to do this is by creating an account at NetVibes and selecting a keyword based on your niche. The next screen will show you many feeds from around the web.

Every single business online does content marketing even if they do not realize it. When you make those simple facebook post you are doing content marketing; when you bookmark your site you are doing content marketing; when you start a thread on a forum you are doing content marketing.

Content is simple put – Written Words

This does not mean every single business online focuses on search engines though but their content must be of high quality to engage with their possible customer. Imagine trying to sell an article writing service and the sales page (which is content) has a grade level of 3 according to the Flesch-Kincaid test for readability. How many people are seriously going to buy the service ?

You see your content matters regardless if you are focused on search engines or not. If you are focused on search engines then that content is a “TOP RANKING FACTOR” and this is especially true for Google. While Google does use over 200 factors in determining the rank of a page / site, the fresh high quality content is on the top of that list of factors.

By high quality I mean, semantics, reading level, grammar, spelling and etc. (ever wonder why Google has these options on advanced search ? well that is why because they use it as part of their 200+ factors for rankings). Don’t take my word for this though because this is posted right on Google’s own blog.

A internet user ask:

I’ve written an article on my niche that I offered to an ezine publisher. The owner placed it on his article publishing blog, but did not say anything about including the article in the ezine.

The problem here is I posted the article on my blog 2 days ago, it didn’t get indexed by Google, and it’s now indexed by this blog.

So can I still take the article and offer it for syndication to other websites ?

Build a few backlinks to the post on your blog from social media sites. Take the article’s first half (first few paragraphs) and post it on places such as multiply, livejournal, and a few other social sites.

When posting the half article you want to add at the bottom “Read More” and link to the blog post. This will help you in getting your blog post indexed.

You are free to article syndication, after all it is your article. You could rewrite a few sentences if you choose to do so before syndicating it to other places.

If you are looking for proper articles that are high quality content then you are not going to get them for $5. This is where many (and I do mean many) make mistakes in article marketing, they think they can slap out any old trash just for the glorified backlinks.

In the real world this does not happen because your content matters a great deal as does the website you are posting it on. Your content must be of high quality and by that I mean it must have a proper Flesch-Kincaid readability score, it must have proper formatting, it must have proper grammar and spelling. Most importantly it must have proper keywords and semantically related words.

There is no real article writer that is going to give you that for $5. Instead of focusing on buying a ton of articles at $5 a pop, why not buy 10 proper written articles at $15 or $20 each ? Article marketing is not about quantity as many say it is, it is more about quality.

If you are wanting high quality content written for article marketing strategy then you should look into hiring real content writers. Professional freelance ghostwriting service can supply you with amazing articles.

How to Use Unique Articles and Backlinks to Maximize SEO Results.

The reason article writing is effective for boosting SEO results is you can use so many key words that target your niche. Once you know all the key words, it is a simple task to get them into unique articles again and again. When the unique articles you’ve distributed are picked up by search engines, it will move you higher in the search results when people use your keywords. A good article marketing campaign can easily springboard your website to the top of any web search.

Unique articles work so well for two reasons. The first is back links. By including a link to your web site in every article you post, you create another website that search engines index that now refers to your website. The more places you find to publish your unique articles, be it forums, e-zines, or directories, the better. Each and every back link to your site from one of these sources will further boost your ranking on search engines.

The second is a proliferation of keywords. Not only do your unique articles contain them, but so do those of other people publishing to that site in your niche. With your included link in every publication, you’re just further associating your website with those keywords. This not only helps you with the SEO on your own website, but allows you to direct traffic to your website by piggy backing on the SEO rankings of the sites you submit to.

One of the best thing about unique articles as an SEO tool is their cost. They are dirt cheap. They cost as much effort as you’re willing to spend writing them. If you’re too lazy, or handling too much volume to do it all yourself, you can commission unique articles from writers. Then you just submit your articles to as many publication outfits as you possibly can. There is no shortage of places that accept free unique articles. Anyone can do this, and the only real investment required is time.

Here are some suggestions on ways to really make backlinks work for you.

* Put out press releases. The advantage to using press release sites is they distribute the release to all the major search engines for you. What’s more, if you’re lucky, your unique article might be picked up and published on other blogs, websites, or even the media. All of this is good for your SEO. Just remember, you have to put your URL in your press releases.

* Get to know the people. Regardless of the niche you’re targeting, there’s a forum, chat room, or website that is all about it. Find it, be a participant. Write unique articles, make comments, submit unique content, and always include a link to your website.

* Review things. There’s a place to review anything and everything, and multiple places to review most things. If you’re putting your URL on your unique article, and then submitting to multiple outlets, it is easy to see how your results can snowball.

* Target bigger websites. Let’s be honest, some e-zines, forums, and websites are getting more traffic already. I know I mentioned this one before, but it’s a huge help. If the backlinks you’re creating with your unique content are on websites that already have high search engine rankings, it will further boost your own.

These tips will give a real shot in the arm to the SEO of your website, boosting your search engine rankings faster than you might think. But, they all need one thing; unique content.

It never ends to amaze me about the author recourse box and people complaining about they do not see the clicks that they want. There are several factors involved here why you do not have those higher clicks on your resource box.

First I will cover the fact as I have many times, you must remember those article directories that many submit to have ads all over the place, this distracts your possible visitor/customer that could be going to your website. Some seem to think that the percentage of distracted people is not that high but they are dead wrong.

An article placed on an adsense farm vs being posted on an ad free article directory — The percentages could range from a low 20% to a high 60% that do not click on your link because they see something else shiny and want to know what it is.

This is “normal” human behavior because as humans we do have low attention span, this is not something made up but it is a fact. Some have longer attention spans than others but fact is we all have a limit on that attention. When we see something new and shiny we run towards it and forget about what we was doing.

This is one major reason why your clicks will be less, think about where you are sharing your content. An ad free article directory / web 2.0 site will always out perform a site that is nothing more than an adsense farm.

But — there is another major reason why your clicks are low and this may even be more important than the ads vs no ads reason above. I have seen many articles fall under the below 2 categories because people just are not trained properly enough to know how to effectively create a resource box.

#1 Some will post an article on internet marketing techniques but yet when it comes to their resource box they will try to push some email marketing or list building junk.

#2 Some will post an article about website traffic generation and then in the resource section they will post something like “I have been an affiliate marketer for X years, visit my site”. Honestly nobody cares how long you been online or how long you have been a marketer.

Read more on Formatting Articles.