Link Building – Article Marketing

Article marketing is an age old link building method and is one of the best. The basic premise is simple: you write an article on your niche, include a link to somewhere on your site and submit it across a range of article directories. As time goes on and more people get hold of your article the number of links grow. There are a few problems with this in that there is nothing stopping people from simply removing your link before reposting your article on their site. Additionally Google gives less value to links which are sourced from duplicate content. However, this is still a valuable and important way to generate incoming links and with a few simple tricks and tips you can maximize your impact and minimalize the time you spend writing articles.

Writing isn’t for everyone, but if you’re trying out article marketing then you’re probably already a good, at least reasonably good, writer. With that said, everyone could use a refresher course every now and then and there are always new techniques you can learn and apply to your article writing. Check out this article on better writing and see the difference between professional and amateur writing.

Get the most out of the Bio Box

Your bio box, aka the resource or author box, is in some ways the most important part of your article. It is the reason for the article to exist: a link back to your site. You should mix your bio box up regularly and link to different sections of your site dependent on what the article is about. This can be effectively used for deeplinking and giving PR to pages you want to be ranked a bit higher. To get the most out of your bio box you must understand the reason a person is reading your article in the first place: to get information and to find out about the topic you’ve written about. Therefor if you’re article is good and you offer them more information on the same topic then they will be more likely to click your link. Be specific, offer a link to an article very closely related to the one they just read. Another method which is pretty successful is to offer something for free, an ebook, audio course, set of videos or anything interesting you have that’s related to your niche. Be creative and original and you greatly increase your exposure and traffic.

Article Spinning – Clone Your Article

Article spinning is where you use a piece of software to rewrite your article, changing common phrases and words for others using a thesaurus. This is a very important step because you can turn 1 article into 5 and submit to 5 different article directories without being penalized by Google for duplicate content. Article spinning isn’t perfect and you will need to spend a few minutes after processing an article to clear out any obvious faults (grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, etc). The catch 22 though, is that if you spend any more than 5 or 10 minutes tidying up the article then you’d be as well spending that time on writing a completely new article. However, you can still get good results and if you’re submitting to large numbers of directories then you can get good results.

Here are a couple of free article spinning packages. As always I have chosen not to include paid options.

Jet Spinner – http://www.jetsubmitter.com – Requires you to sign up and supply an email address.
WordFlood 2.0 – http://www.wordflood.com – The 14 day free trial should cover most of your needs.

Maximum Exposure – Submit to a Number of Sites

The final step is to submit your articles and another piece of software can help you vastly increase your effectiveness here. Directory submitters allow you to input the elements of your article, the title, resource box, article itself, etc, and supply your login information. It then submits en masse to as many sites as you select. This cuts down the time and effort you need to put in and increases your exposure several times over.

Some people worry about being hammered into Googles supplemental index for duplicate content and avoid this practice, but you should understand how the supplemental index works and that while having duplicate content isn’t as good as having original content, it’s still worth something. Since you aren’t paying for these articles then there’s no harm.

Here are three of the free software packages for doing this. I’ve chosen not to include the paid packages because I don’t feel paying for something like this is worth the expense.

Magic Article Submitter – http://www.jasonoickle.com/article-submitter
Article Sender – http://www.articlesender.com
Article Submitter – http://articlesubmitter.imwishlist.com

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