Getting More Miles from Your Article Promotions
August 3, 2006 – 5:30 amWe all know that proper article directory submissions is an excellent way to promote your site but are you really taking full advantage of this powerful promotion strategy. Here are three powerful tips that have helped create excellent results for me.
Your Title: The most important first step of any new article you are going to submit is the title. You need to first of all ensure your title contains the exact keyword phrase that you are targeting but also is completely unique. Lets say for example you are writing an article about “blue widgets”. If I go to Google and type in “Blue Widgets” I get back over 51000 results. So I change it to “Fabulous Blue Widgets USA” and now I get “0″ for results. Now why is this so important? Because you want to be able to track your articles. When the directories and websites post your article you will want to be able to find it and by having a unique title that still sounds interesting will allow you to do just that.
Now if you are asking why you need to track the article, I need to ask you if you have made any money online yet? I am serious here, because if you are not bothering to track your results how do you know what is working?
Tracking articles is extremely powerful for 2 reasons.
1. What’s Working: Writing and article and just blindly blasting it out to the world is like taking a shot gun and closing your eyes and just hoping one of the pellets hits something worth while. Instead watch your articles and see what happens with each one of them. What you will start to see is what topics seem to get picked up the fastest and which ones seem to go no where. What do you do with that knowledge? Simple… write more articles on the topic that works and less on the ones that do not!
2. Partners: Currently I have one website that was virtually dead; it is in a very competitive market and never really seemed to go anywhere. This is the way of websites.. some work others do not… but then one day I started seeing some revenue generated from this site. I thought it was a one time fluke but it started happening consistently, so I went in to check my stats and low and behold a very popular site had picked up my article and was sending me about 30 unique visitors a day. This may not sound like much but in that market it is making me about $5 to $7 a day from Adsense. So what have I done since? I emailed the webmaster and have offered to write content for their site that is 100% unique and only for them.
Now from that my eyes were opened to the fact that I probably have a few of my popular sites getting similar traffic from articles but it gets hidden in the stats. You know what.. I was right. So I started researching what sites my articles where showing up on and created a list of potential link partners. These sites already show a need for the content and if the site is getting traffic why would I not want to work at a partnership with them. Not everyone will reply to your request but some do and having a guaranteed one way link back from an established site is very valuable.
Your Topic: I already talked about one way to find out what to write about… by seeing what articles you have submitted are being successfully picked up but another very much over looked strategy is to look at your statistics and find out what keywords are being used to find your site. Then research those words and find out where you rank in the search engines for them. If you are not in the top 10 results then write an article about that topic and create your self keyword anchor text links in the resource box that link back to the exact page that is showing up in the results. This will hopefully achieve two great benefits for you…
1. Increase your incoming links to that page based on the keyword which should lift your page up higher in the rankings.
2. Potentially put your article in the top 10 for that term giving you a second way to get traffic from those results.
Your Resource Box: Almost all articles have only the root domain name as the link in their resource box. This is a huge mistake because it is vitally important to create deep links to your website to help create a natural linking structure. An easy way to do this is by following the strategy mentioned above by looking at what terms and pages are getting results already. The strategy I currently use is..
1. First article links to index
2. Next article links to index and html sitemap
3. Next article links to index and individual content page
4. If I am seeing results then I continue to submit an article monthly for this site to the index and a deep page.
You will notice that I always link back to the index page, which is very important. You want your index page to be about 60% of what is linked to and then 40% of the rest should be deep links to individual pages.
This is what I do and by no means need to be what you do however I encourage you to consider a similar strategy. Remember however that the rate you submit the articles needs to be something you can maintain. Your link growth needs to be consistent to maintain and achieve good rankings. Most of my sites I only submit one article a month, which allows me to show a consistent link growth to the engines (combined with a few other linking methods I use) but not get overwhelmed with article submissions.
Good luck and let us know your comments!
Talk to you soon
Jason Katzenback
