Some people are fans of article marketing. Others aren’t. This may be due to concerns about their articles being stolen, duplicate content penalties or even just a dislike of article writing.

Could it be? Is article marketing a waste of time?

In my experience, no, it is not. I get traffic and backlinks from articles I’ve written. I get better search engine rankings. It works for me.

Why doesn’t it work for everyone?

The first reason article marketing doesn’t work for everyone is that not everyone goes at it right. They try submitting private label articles or don’t spell and grammar check their work. They submit thinly disguised ads as articles.

In short, they don’t think about what article publishers will want to use or what people will want to read.

What helps make an article stand out?

Article writing doesn’t have to be laborious. If you know your topic well it may take only 10 minutes or so to write a reasonable quality article.

If you want to stand out more, you may need to do some research or be more detailed in what you write about your topic. The articles that really stand out are the ones that provide the best information to readers. This will help you to stand out as well.

Lists are said to work very well. You can do a top 10, 20 or more with some pretty good results. Shorter lists work well if you give details as to why you picked each item for your list.

Humor can also work. Humor is often some of the hardest writing to do, but when it’s working it’s a lot of fun. You may run the risk of offending people and you need to think about what impression a humorous article will give of your business. It may not be the one you mean to make.

Submitting your articles to the right sites helps.

While you can submit your articles to smaller article directories, the bigger ones such as eZine Articles are more important. But that doesn’t mean smaller ones are good for nothing. If they are choosy about the kinds of articles they accept, your work may only be associated with other good articles.

Many article directories accept pretty much every article, and your work is hidden by junk and spam. If you’re submitting by hand, skip this kind of directory.

Niche directories are a good choice as well. This can keep your article with other relevant content. Your odds of being read by people interested in the topic may go up.

And of course submit articles to relevant webmasters who accept article submissions. This can go a long way toward developing a relationship with another webmaster. You don’t want a competitor so much as a complementary site.

It’s making the extra little efforts that will help your work to stand out. People who fail in article marketing most often do so because they aren’t working hard enough on it. Don’t fall into that trap.

Not my income goal, my article marketing goal. It’s been a couple months since I’ve managed that, for a variety of reasons.

My goal is simple. By the 15th of each month, have one article for every day of the month written for publication through Article Marketer. I only had two left to do today, and I finished them.

This is one of the things I love about Article Marketer. I can spread out the publication of my articles over a period of time, so that a blast of writing doesn’t leave me with a single days’ exposure on the article sites. Instead I appear in various categories throughout the month.

I have my sites set up by priority. My highest priority site gets an article published every 3 days. Next priority is weekly. The remainder are approximately monthly, with a couple sites getting extra articles if I have the free time for it.

This month I’m not doing extra articles. I’m going to start researching new BANS niches instead.

I got a package in the mail yesterday from Ezine Articles, and thought I’d share the results with you. Every here and there, they send just some of their “Expert Authors” a little something. Last time I got a coffee mug. This time it was a mouse pad.

But what I really liked was that they included some stats for me. First of all, the stats told me I need to work harder on my article marketing. Fan that I am of it, I only sent them 66 articles last year. My goal is 1/day. But then I wasn’t doing heavy duty article marketing for a lot of last year. Still, I want to do better. Should have done better.

My most viewed article got 1400 page views. That’s not too bad, especially since 642 people clicked on the link to go to my website. That’s not bad, close to half the people reading the article go to visit my site.

I checked in Google and found that the exact article title, in combination with my name, has 141 results. I combined it with my name because the title in this case may not have been unique, and one would expect my name to appear anytime someone included the resource box as they are supposed to.

And the article is one I wrote and submitted in 2006. It’s been there a while.

I checked my other stats, since Ezine Articles gives some really wonderful stats. That article far outperformed my others, with twice the clicks of its nearest competitor. That tells me I was on to something with that one. On the other hand, some articles appear to have been published more often, another facet to consider.

Now, I do my article marketing a semi-lazy way. I do all my own writing rather than use a ghost writer, but I submit using Article Marketer. I have a lifetime membership with them, and it really is easier than doing it by hand or even with article submission software. I’ve been trying to use part of each month to write up an entire month’s submissions, and then I use Article Marketer’s system to send them out one a day. Keeps me from having to think about it the entire month.

I hope I can come closer to my goal of 1 article submission per day this year. I already know I’ve missed some days, but I still keep working at it, to see how far I can come with it. Just think how much more 365 articles can do in comparison with a mere 66!

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas
How I Research a Market for a Niche
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be?
How to Set Up a Wordpress Blog
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes
Can Article Marketing Work for You?
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work - Is It Really That Hard?
Building Your List
Getting Social with Your Blog
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click?
Article Marketing Statistics (current page)
Putting the Pieces Together

I’m a big fan of article marketing myself. I have regular goals for how many articles I write each and every month for publication on other websites. It has really helped me to build traffic.

But it doesn’t work for everyone. Why is that?

A lot of people try to skip steps when they write articles. They dash off a quick piece, possibly full of links to their own site and submit it to tons of article websites. The part they don’t understand is that in order for article marketing to work, someone has to want to post your article.

And the good article directories are picky. They don’t post just any old piece of junk.

A good article should be at least 400 words of relevant information. Some say 750 words is ideal, others don’t really worry about it. But it is much harder to really impress people with fewer than 400 words.

There are tons of article directories out there, but just a few important ones, such as Ezine Articles. Many of the rest will probably never do much more than provide a highly obscure backlink, if the search engines notice it at all. The better article directories give you a chance that webmasters will decide to use your article.

You should also be submitting to selected webmasters who are willing to receive articles from you. If you can develop a relationship with a webmaster you are more likely to get them to publish your article to their site or newsletter. If they have a good readership, that can mean a nice amount of traffic to your website.

A lot of people recommend using automated solutions to article submission. There are some good services out there, as well as software solutions. My own personal favorite is Article Marketer. I’m a Lifetime Member there.

What I love about their service is that I can queue up my articles in advance, telling them when I want an article sent out to their publication list. Article Marketer is also picky. They review my articles and tell me if, in their view, there’s a problem. It’s just a bit of prescreening that helps to make sure you haven’t missed anything.

They absolutely require a minimum of 400 words, they make sure you haven’t overdone your use of keywords (their opinion, of course), they make sure your resource box HTML works, and they make sure your article is correctly categorized. These things can be a help.

Right now Article Marketer has a deal going on, and I don’t know the end date. They’re offering discounts on their quarterly, annual and lifetime memberships. And if you sign up, they’re also offering 1, 2 or 3 articles written for you, free with the purchase.

I love using them because it simplifies my overall article submission process. If I want to target a particular webmaster, I can still do that myself, but I don’t have to take the time to submit to the various websites. I’ve used article submission software, and using Article Marketer is just a better use of my time in my opinion.

What Else Should You Know?

A lot of people worry about duplicate content when they submit articles. The quickest way around that is to not post the identical articles on your site. The other part is to remember that it’s not quite as bad as people say it is, so far as I can tell.

I often have what I post on my site be different from what I submit to directories using Article Marketer. The information on my site generally has the most detailed information. The submitted articles are good, go into some reasonable depth, but there’s just a bit more to them on my sites than elsewhere.

It also takes a LOT of article submissions to really make a difference. Two or three articles won’t do a lot for your site. You have to be persistent in your efforts.

I would also suggest that you read my recent article from the newsletter on what I find keeps an article from being marketable. It’s from my own experiences running one of those really minor article directories.

Starting a Home Business Series:

Get Your Home Business Going in the New Year
Brainstorming Your Home Business Ideas
How I Research a Market for a Product
How Do You Get a Website Going?
How Much Does an Online Business Really Cost?
How Complex Does a Website Need to Be?
How to Set Up a Wordpress Blog
These Are a Few of My Favorite Themes
Can Article Marketing Work for You? (current page)
It Sounds Like a Lot of Work - Is It Really That Hard?
Building Your List
Getting Social with Your Blog
Is Your Site Ready for Pay Per Click?
Article Marketing Statistics
Putting the Pieces Together

More important, what drives your target market nuts?

One of the things you need to remember is that customers love solutions. The more annoying the problem, the more people will want a solution.

Thinking about what drives people nuts is important as you write your marketing copy, blog posts and articles. There is little point in focusing on things people don’t care about.

You don’t have to be perfectly serious as you write, even when you’re focusing on providing solutions to problems. A touch of light humor can work very well, but too much will make the humor more memorable than whatever you’re trying to sell. It’s something to use cautiously.

So how do you know what problems to address? There’s an old saying about how people don’t buy a drill because they want a drill. They buy a drill because they want a hole. That’s the kind of thinking you need to use.

There are a few ways to do this. You can take sides on a controversy, discuss the faults of other solutions, discuss the many ways you could solve a problem, and so forth. Creativity is good; you don’t want to sound like everyone else. You want to stand out.

And yes, thinking of what drives you nuts can drive you nuts some days. All a part of the process.

Technorati Tags: copywriting, taking sides, controversy, marketing, customers, clients, home business, online marketing

Article marketing has been promoted as one of the great ways to build an online business. You write and submit articles, building links to your website and building a reputation for yourself. It’s a pretty nice deal.

But it is not always the right way to go about promoting something, especially on your own website. Your site should always be providing what the visitor wants, and if that’s not information, you don’t want to direct them toward information. They need to be directed toward the product they want.

The goal of article marketing is to build relevant links to selected pages in your site. This helps them to do better in the search engines.

When you do article marketing you need to think about what it is people want from you. If they’re going to buy, a review article may be more appropriate on your website than one on how to use the product. The how to use article may be sufficient, however, for submitting to article websites for the links. Read the rest of this entry »

A post over on GreyWolf’s blog asks how people are doing with their rankings on sites that they use article syndication sites to market. I’m rather fond of article marketing, and use Article Marketer to submit my articles.

So how am I doing?

I would say I get adequate but not spectacular results so far. This may change over time. I have a new site that I’m experimenting with pure article marketing on, and it does rank already at #5 for what I would consider to be a moderately competitive keyword. It’s about two months old, so it could just be the luck of being new and vanish utterly in a few weeks. We’ll just have to see.

I am giving that site content unique from the articles I submit for it. The idea is for the articles to encourage people to come to the site for more information. However, the articles are reasonably complete in and of themselves. I still want to give enough that site owners might possibly feel comfortable publishing the articles. Read the rest of this entry »

In light of my discussion the other day on using other people’s content, I also wanted to cover the topic of duplicate content. Many people worry that any duplicate content on their site will trigger a massive search engine penalty.

Good thing it’s not so, eh? At least not if you have plenty of original content on the site as a whole as well.

If you’re doing something like taking a quote from someone else’s blog to illustrate a point, that is a valid kind of duplicate content. It is also likely to be a small part of the page text, so certainly not likely to trigger a penalty.

Besides, penalties don’t generally happen for duplicate content. It can just be hard to rank over those who are using that same content, unless you somehow use it better.

Even using an entire article, say, from a free article site, won’t trigger a penalty as such. You may have better luck if you add your own touches to the page, but it will not penalize the entire site. Read the rest of this entry »