Commonly known in the Internet Marketing world as “article marketing”, or, “bum marketing” - it’s simply the act of submitting articles to popular article directories on any given subject, and then putting your URL in the “resource box” (the author credits) at the end of the article. The goal is to hopefully get a decent ranking in Google for your article, and when people read it, they are persuaded to click on the URL for the author that wrote the article, which leads them to your target URL (your website or whatever website you’re promoting).
Whew, that was hard to sum up in one little paragraph, and there’s still so much more to talk about, but I’m just going to cover the basics today, on the subject of using article marketing to drive traffic to your blog.
Article marketing is a wicked tool, which, if used right, can drive long term traffic to any blog. I’m serious when I say that all bloggers, even some of the “big dogs”, should actively participate in this method of traffic generation, because it works. And it works even better in numbers.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with this concept, bare with me, I’ll give you a quick tutorial below:
1. Write an article that deals with the subject of your blog. For instance, if you write about fitness, then get an article written that relates somewhat to fitness. Easy enough.
2. Pick a phenomenal title for your article. This is where you would want to do a little keyword research, but since this is meant for beginners, I won’t go into that at the moment. If you stick with titles like, “Top 10 Ways To Lose Weight Fast”, or, “21 Foods That Melt Belly Fat”, you should be just fine for now.
Note: If you are familiar with keyword research (using a tool such as the free Wordtracker keyword tool, then make sure you do a little check up to see what people are searching for in your niche, and make sure to include your chosen keyword in your title - make sense?)
3. Sign up and set up your free account over at a popular article directory such as EzineArticles.Com (the best, by far).
4. Proof read your article until you’re sure it’s perfect, and proper spelling and grammar is used.
5. Write a quick resource box (the resource box is what appears underneath your article when it goes live). I find that a quick and to the point one works best, with a call to action in it. Instead of saying something like, “Bob Jones is an expert at fitness, read his daily fitness tips here”, instead, I would say something along the lines of, “Learn 7 explosive ways to lose weight fast in our free newsletter”. I would make the word newsletter the actual link back to the site. By putting a “call to action” in the wording, your CTR (click through ratio) will be much higher. This is the whole goal of this, so a good resource box should be one of your number one priorities.
6. When all of the above is done, submit your article for approval.
7. Wait a few days until it gets approved.
8. Use an existing article in your blog, or some other website, to link to the live Ezine Article you just wrote, that way it gives it a little extra “link juice”.
9. Rinse and repeat as many times as you can stand it. Seriously, this is the way to make it happen. Writing 4 articles and expecting heaps of traffic isn’t going to happen. This is a numbers game, meaning, the more articles you get submitted, the more traffic you’re going to receive. Heck, I have articles from over a year ago still generating good traffic for an old blog of mine.
Numbers Are Your Friend
I can’t emphasize the fact enough that article marketing is purely a numbers game. The more articles you have submitted, the more traffic you’re going to receive in the long run.
You see, whenever you submit an article with a popular article directory such as EzineArticles, you stand a chance at getting a good ranking in the search engines because EA carries a lot of weight in the search engines (especially Google).
I want to present an truly awesome example of how article marketing can not only drive tons of traffic, but also put a lot of money in your pocket. There is a guy over at the WarriorForums that goes by the name, “TimG“, and he’s well known around there for his article marketing savvy. Long story short, he just posted some statistics yesterday - because he just hit the 1500 articles submitted milestone. That’s HUGE.
He obviously uses these articles to drive traffic to his websites, and here are his stats from having 1500 live articles (be ready to get jealous and cry):
Page Views: 2,231,423
URL Clicks: 141,030
Now, URL clicks were only recently started to be tracked by Ezinearticles, so one could assume that number is probably double, triple, or more. Folks, that’s a lot of traffic and clicks.
You may think that’s a lot of articles to write, but he freely admits that he outsourced a lot of it, due to the fact that even by outsourcing the articles, he still made plenty of profit from the traffic coming in to cover the costs. When you get to the point where you have 100+ articles submitted and they’re doing well, then outsourcing your article writing is probably the smartest thing you can do. Instead of using your time to write articles, you can be out there promoting and marketing your site.
Imagine, just imagine, how much money he’s pulled down from this. He’s a marketer at heart, so no doubt he used this traffic to direct it at affiliate offers, CPA offers, or whatever floats his boat. And this is just from the article submissions alone! With that many backlinks from the articles, and from people who have used his articles on their own websites (another huge factor in this), he probably has more traffic than he could ever dream of. Even if 1% of those converted to a sale, that’s a lot of dough.
One more thing, like I just mentioned a bit above - the whole point of an article directory is to provide a place for other webmasters to freely copy and paste the articles for use on their own websites, so long as they keep the author resource box in tact. Out of the 1500 articles that Tim submitted, it’s safe to say that there are quite a few webmasters out there using his articles, which of course leads to more incoming links, which in turn can help boost your search engine rankings. I’m quite sure he ranks well for a variety of keywords. Also, big E-Zines that have hundreds of thousands of readers often look at article directories for good articles to publish, so getting picked up by one of those types of sites is an article marketers dream, because if you get picked up by one of the big boys, you can expect a flood of traffic to your site, and fast.
Conclusion
So, as you can see, article marketing can be quite the worthwhile activity, especially if you get serious with it. I find it’s a great activity for when I have downtime, and I’ve recently started a quest called Bum 1000 - which is my attempt at submitting 1000 articles to EzineArticles to see how much traffic I can drive to various websites of mine.
