The post is about how Garry Conn plans to win a competition he has going with John Cow by using article marketing. Readers are invited to down load the article and put it their blogs if they so wish. Since the article talks about some of the same stuff I’m trying here, I decide to go ahead and put the post here. So without farther ado, here is that post.
What Is Article Article Marketing
Greetings People Of Conn!
Mark Mason here from MasonWorld.com with a guest post (thanks Garry).
When Garry Conn announced the competition against John Cow, I was excited to hear that Garry was building a site that would eventually go up for sale on sitepoint. You see, there are two things that create value for a site: traffic and conversions. When Garry picked Credit Card Debt as a niche, I knew he picked a winner.
(Note for the record that I tried to get Garry to put up a hamburger recipe site).
A Winning Strategy
Conversion is all about how to change traffic into dollars. For the credit card debt site that Garry built, there were three main ways to accomplish that: adsense revenue, affiliate lead programs, and the site mailing list. Garry's site design is highly optimized for these three earning modes. I know Garry has covered these in previous posts, but I mention them here because my observation is that having three independent revenue streams is a great idea. Never put all of your hamburger patties on one grille, so to speak. A fourth revenue stream, information product creation, would be great if the contest were longer.
For conversion to matter, you need traffic. And here, Garry is also on the right track. His choice of an SEO optimized theme (which he designed) coupled with fantastic content centered around keyword-optimized tags means that Garry's contest blog has a great foundation for organic traffic for years to come. Garry is an Adsense guru and knows this part of the business well. He also knows well that building traffic takes time and backlinks. That where I come in.
Let's Talk About Article Marketing
Before I get started I want to clear one thing up -- Article Marketing is often confused with "bum marketing," but they are not really the same thing. It all seems obvious to me now, but I remember having a hard time getting a clear description of article marketing. So, I'd like to offer you what I consider the key ideas behind article marketing, and talk about how you can use it to kill a cow. If you want to know more about article marketing, I am going to point you to my five favorite resources at the end (which are great, but not required to become an article marketing guru or a cow slayer).
So, what is Article Marketing?
Article marketing refers to a traffic generation method that depends on submitting informative "articles" to sites called "article directories." These articles generally consist of an article body that has generally useful information, and an article resource box that contains links back to the author's site. This technique is sometimes mistakenly called "Bum Marketing." Actually, as pointed out by Josh Spaulding, Article Marketing is one of the tools that Bum Marketers use (so named since it is so easy even a bum could do it.) (Getting the bum a laptop and a high speed internet connection is a social problem that is beyond the scope of this post.)
Good article directories have great traffic and strong Google page rank, so publishing your information there increases the chance that people will see and read what you have to say. Additionally, article directories allow people to copy and republish their articles, provided the article is unchanged and the resource box is preserved. This means that your article with your links could end up on multiple sites with lots of exposure. That means lots of backlinks and click-throughs to you. If you can convert that traffic, you can make money.
There are literally hundreds of article directories, the most famous of which is eZineArticles. (As an example, you can see one of my articles about Credit Card Debt.) The fact that there are hundreds of article directories opens up the possibility of submitting your article to many directories and multiplying your exposure. (There can be downsides to this, however, as we will discuss below).
Two Sources of Traffic
The beauty of article marketing is the possibility of two complementary sources of traffic. This is a key point that is often not understood. When you initially submit your articles, if they are well written, you should expect that they will be spread and read. If you write an effective resource box, those same readers will want more information and click the links in the box.
This simple idea generates immediate traffic to your site. In the case of the Connpetition, Garry is already seeing some of these click-through (even though out article marketing efforts have been modest due to resources).Eventually, as the article ages, it may fall lower in the article directory as it gets buried by newer articles on the same topic. This usually means that click-through traffic from articles will fall off as a function of time. Sometimes articles go viral and the clicks keep coming, but this is not usually the case.
Not to worry. Now your article has spread around the net with links to your site at the bottom. Google sees these (correctly) as backlinks to your site. Done properly, these backlinks can help you rank for the pages that the links are pointing to. So, while your direct click-through traffic is falling off, your organic search engine traffic will increase. Pretty cool, eh?
A word about content and keywords
There are lots of things to think about when you are writing articles for article marketing. Most importantly, you need to have a keyword strategy for the content on your site and the content in your article. It may not make sense to directly compete with your own website, for example. Rather, you may want to choose keywords for your articles that complement the content on your site. Garry is a keyword guru, but I will give you a simple example of what I mean here.
For example, if you have a site on "butchering cows," you may want to write an article for article marketing on "castrating cows" knowing that people interested in castrating cows will also be interested in butchering cows. You need to think about this carefully.
Earlier, I mentioned that you could submit the same article to multiple directories. You can, and I do. But you need a strategy for that as well to balance the effectiveness of the submission against the impact of duplicate content. Google expects syndicated content to be duplicated, but there are still tradeoffs that need to be considered (beyond the scope of this brief article).
Article Marketing Resources
As promised, here are five resources that I actually use for article marketing. I have purchased these tools myself. Don't misunderstand me: you can be successful in article marketing without any tools. These are the tools that I personally use to improve the quality and productivity of my article marketing efforts.
- Article Marketing Domination. This is an excellent eBook by article marketing guru Josh Spaulding. This eBook covers all of the details that i have glossed over above, and is a complete reference. You can do article marketing without knowing all the details, but you will get lot better results if you have all the facts. Most things in life are like this.
- Article Post Robot. A tool for submitting articles to multiple sites. It is really tedious and boring to submit the same article to 50 article directories. Article Post Robot automated this process. This is not the most elegant tool on the planet, but it works very well for me on over 50 article directories (the software supports many more).
- Instant Article Wizard Pro. IAW Pro is an amazing tool for article research. I just learned about this tool this week, and have used it a few times with incredible results. Basically it searches the web for research on your keywords and mashes the pieces together in reasonable sounding paragraphs. Cuts article writing time down by a factor of ten or more in my experience. Even if you have no intention of buying this thing, you have got to see the video.
- Micro Niche Finder. One of the most important parts of Article Marketing (not really covered well in this article) is keyword selection. Garry and I both use Micro Niche Finder for all my keyword research.
- Josh Spaulding. OK -- he is not a resource, actually. He is a person - a really nice one. Josh is my "go to guy" and mentor for Article Marketing (Garry is my Blogging, Adsense, and WP Theme Guru), and Josh is also the author of Article Marketing Domination.
The Bottom Line on Article Marketing
Article marketing is a great way to promote your website, affiliate products or affiliate program. You can use article marketing to take over almost any keyword in Google (given enough time and effort). Given a longer contest, we could use this to outrank Cow on his own site just for fun if we wanted to. It is powerful vood o stuff. By writing an article that delivers value and offers a subtle mention of your affiliate product or critical keywords, you're well on your way to getting the proper exposure for your promotion (whatever it is). Simply put, Article Marketing is a great way to promote your business online.
Death to the Cow!
Regards,
Mark Mason
P.S. No Actual Cows Were Harmed In The Writing Of This Article.
P.P.S. I actually like and respect the folks at JohnCow.com, but you would never know it from the above article. LOL
photo credit: ScubaBear68
Hope you enjoyed the post and learned something from it.
Get more ideas on how to make money online for free at my SureCashNow.com site. You’ll find articles, videos and links to other sites that will help you in your quest to make money online.
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