Does Article Marketing Still Work for SEO?

Using articles to coincide with an SEO campaign is old hat, its been around for years and over the last year or so I have seen a number of commentators write off its effectiveness. Much more emphasis is put on producing the content live on your own site, via a blog or media distribution page i.e. pdf files for download. But I’m still a believer in article marketing and going by the results of the techniques I use the search engines agree with me.

So, how do you run an effective article marketing campaign? We’ll I’m going to run through a few samples that will hopefully give a greater insight in how to harvest better results from your written work.

An Articles Starting Point and Redistribution Rules

If you have a blog or some form of media centre within your site then this is your articles birthplace. You first publish on your own domain for a number of marketing reasons: unique content, internal links, page incrementation, readership and authoritative status (if your content is of a certain standard) etc …

You can then harness the power of the community via social media channels. Please be aware that I am not talking about self-promotion! If your content is good enough it’ll be picked up. Sometimes, however, a nudge may be required, but in most cases there are devoted social media blood hounds out there forever sniffing out decent published information worthwhile to submit to there favourite site.

During this time I am already rehashing the original post getting ready for stage 2. This is where I’ll pick apart the post and do a nip, tuck and beefing-up job. Remember, a blog post has many personal touches woven throughout, articles on the other-hand should be informative without being too personal. The information relayed is the important factor, the main focus, and if you do it correctly the driving force of a lot of traffic and back links to your site.

Once you have dissected and turned your post into a quality, informative, well written and grammatically correct piece - your ready for distribution. There are only 10 – 15 article sites that would receive my article submission - seriously!.

The reason why the number is so small?

Because I have tested who brings me traffic, where my article is best picked-up from, published on other sites with anchor text still in place and also which article sites don’t trigger Google’s duplicate content filters. Its not hard to find out who Google deems as trusted resources for article submissions – just do a search on a recently submitted articles title and see which escape the duplicate content filters.

Within the article distribution period I also run a Google Alert either on the article title or a part of a paragraph or both to trace where my article is being found. I don’t, nor have I ever, used automatic software for releasing my articles. I like to keep it manual thus always having control plus I’m not spamming my article to over 300 article sites so don’t really see the need.

Stage 3, Yes there really is another Way!

The third way to ring some juice from your inspirational content is by again re-trimming and sending it to press-release and syndication sites. There are a few good ones out there that are free and will also have your work featured in Google News – another traffic driver.

You can pay for distribution but to be honest you could use your time better utilizing your skills in content creation and getting your pr release picked up by an on-line journalistic presence via a few emails - if its good enough it’ll be published without hurting your pocket.

Always make sure your blog post, article or press release reads well, has no spelling mistakes and also follows simple grammatical rules. I have seen posts that I wanted to submit or give a vote-up within certain social media sites that had information within worth spreading but were hampered with poor spelling or grammar that I refrained from doing so. I am not the only one who is put-off by badly written or hurried posts.

So, in summary, combining the old with the new, articles and press releases with blogging and social bookmarking can bring very effective results in both traffic and quality back links to your site that will help promote you or your company to a wider population seeking advice from the information you disclose.