For several years one of the best types of free website marketing has been article marketing, especially when promoting work at home opportunities. This concentrated mainly on writing and submitting articles to article directories. The objective was to produce search engine traffic by means of backlinks and website traffic from readers of the articles.
This still performs, but article marketing has gone through several important changes in the past year. As is the situation with a lot of things on the internet Google is driving most of these changes.
In 2011 Google changed their search engine ranking algorithm to remove websites of low quality. Their primary focus was to lower the ranking of websites that focused mostly on advertising revenue and were built primarily with duplicate content. Duplicate content is content that is already online somewhere else before you add it to your website.
Affiliate marketing websites really struggled. Many of these were mini sites that contained mostly duplicate content and had been full of affiliate banners and links to affiliate sites which were all the same for every affiliate.
Affiliate marketers, along with other Internet marketers who had developed websites with fresh new content, were rewarded with increased rankings. This too set the model for all websites going forward. You must develop a site that contains unique content and benefits your website visitor with a quality experience.
This is where article marketing can be quite a big benefit to you if you do it correctly. There are a few things you need to bear in mind.
1. Add it to your site first. If you are planning to make use of articles to develop website content publish it on your own site before you publish it elsewhere.
Carry one additional action and bookmark your new webpage so the search engines will find it. I suggest you use Only Wire which is actually a program that book marks web pages to social directories.
2. Unique content. A better approach once you add the content to your website is to spin it to make it 100% unique prior to adding it anywhere else.
People who work online from home and do article marketing focus mainly on submitting articles to directories like Ezine Articles, Idea Marketers, and many others. These article directory sites are starting to crack down on article submissions which contain articles posted someplace else on the Internet.
This has impacted people who depended primarily on private-label right articles, or using an article writing company. Because of this you should submit articles that contain only unique content which has not been submitted somewhere else.
Submit Your Article offers a excellent program called Article Leverage. This lets you develop unique variations of your articles before they’re submitted.
SYA takes article variations and submits them to the article directories for you. This is good since you will have a distinctive version going to article directories which boosts the chances of it getting published.
3. Blogging. Publishing content to your own blog is a superb way to develop a large website of unique content.
Expert Affiliate marketers take articles they’ve submitted to article directories and re-create them into reduced versions for blog posts. Most article directories are looking for articles of 400 to 500 words.
It is possible to re-create those into shorter articles of 150 to 200 words and publish them on your blog. Again the secret is to make the shorter article unique so you’re not penalized by Google.
One way to do this would be to take a shorter article and post it to your blog and then bookmark it with Only Wire. Then submit the longer 400 to 500 word version to the article directories. By doing this your site is always spidered first and you are credited with unique content if there’s any question.
4. Article videos. Use an article converter such as Article Video Robot and develop article videos. Something you could do is take the short version of your article and create a video of it in and then post the embed code on your blog.
Article Video Robot enables you to submit your video to shared video sites including You Tube. This is a good method to develop backlinks from your articles and do video marketing.
In summary article marketing is not dead if it’s done correctly. It can still be a great form of marketing online, but you must focus on producing unique content in multiple ways when doing it.