Over the past few years, online article marketing has become one of the quickest and most affordable ways to build one way backlinks to your website.
The concept of article marketing is simple; you write an original article and then submit it to free article directories. You include a “resource box” in the article that briefly touches on your services and that includes a link back to your website.
These articles don’t have to be long at all, in fact, the recommended length is 450-700 words per article. You will want to make sure that the article is genuinely informative and that it is not a self promotion piece. Your chance to promote your services or website is at the end of the article in the resource box.
I wrote my first mortgage article back in December of 2004. As a result of that article, I have received more than 450 requests for more information and I continue to receive between 2-5 new contacts per week. Additionally, the linking power of that article has helped me maintain a top 10 ranking in Google for a keyword related to a very popular mortgage program. At the time, I hand submitted my site to about 50 directory websites which ranks up with the most boring things I’ve ever done (the good news is there are services that can do that for you now. I’ll list a couple in a second.)
Additionally, completely separate from the real estate / mortgage industry, I wrote four articles for a friend of mine who has a company that provides a specific type of legal service. As a result of those articles, we moved him from deep in the search results (and in the case of Google, not ranked at all for his top keyword) to the top page of the three big search engines for not one, not two but three of his targeted keyword phrases.
While the submissions for the mortgage related website example I used were done just over two years ago, the non mortgage related example was done August and September of last year. I only mention that to demonstrate that article marketing can begin to produce noticeable results in a relatively short period of time as well as provide your website with long term exposure.
If you’ve read anything about online marketing and search engine optimization (SEO), you will have no doubt come across the term “duplicate content”. What this refers to is the existence of the same piece of content in two separate places. Google in particular is known for picking only version of an article to return in its results. This really makes sense as otherwise you’d be seeing the same article hundreds of times. While each and every website that your article is published at may not rank for your article’s keywords, you will still be receiving benefit from the backlinks associated with those articles.
I won’t get into the raging debate over duplicate content here, but if you want to be sure that your site steers completely clear of any duplicate content issues, you can take two simple steps to bullet proof your article submission strategy along with your web site when it comes to duplicate content.
- Write two versions of the article, one for your own website and one for distribution. Just rearrange the paragraphs, change the phrasing and give the introduction and conclusion a good once-over.
- Try to avoid posting the same content in more than one place on your own websites. This really won’t hurt your rankings, but in all likelihood, the search engines will only return one of the pages that the article is featured on thus hiding the other content on the “duplicate” page.
While not necessary, try and accomplish two things when it comes to keyword selection and your resource box.
First, try to vary your keywords from article to article. Over time, it would seem funny if every single link that pointed to your website said the same thing.
Second, give the reader a reason to click on your links and move past the article and to your websites. You need a call to action to entice them to point that arrow and push that mouse button where you want them to. Many writers use free reports or newsletters to draw visitors. If you can’t think of anything creative at the moment to use as a call to action, don’t let that stop you from writing and submitting your articles.
Ok, now that you have an article all written and ready to put out there to start building your links and, as bonus, hopefully drive some very qualified traffic to your website, the next step is submission.
(Check out this list of free article directories.)
Submitting articles by hand is really out of the questions as it would take hours and hours if not days to submit your article to even a fraction of the directories out there. This being the case, there are a number of services that have popped up and that will distribute your articles for you to hundreds of free directories for a fee.
Two of the more popular ones that I use are:
- Article Marketer (Starting at $ $79.99/quarter)
- iSnare (Starting at $2 per article)
There are also a number of software programs out there that you can use to submit your articles. It’s been a while since I have used any of these so I won’t go into any detail or make any recommendations. If I do have the time to try some of these out, I’ll be sure to post the results.
For the purpose of estimation, lets say you watn to write and distribute four mortgage articles. On the time side, it will probaly take you about an hour to write each artilce and about 5 minute to submit each artilce once you have accoutns set up with the two article distribution services I mentioned above. So, total time, four and half hours. On the cost side, your only expense is the distribution services. You can just try it out by uisng iSnare for about $2 an artilce. I think the minum distrubuiton packacke they sell is $10, so we’ll use that figure. If you want to get even more bang for your article and you decide to sign up for Article Marketer as well, the lowest you can get in the door with them is $80 for a quarterly (unlimited submissions for 3 months) subscription. So, cost side, low end $10 high end $80.
Once you get a couple of distribution accounts set up and get in the groove of article writing, the time and cost per article drops dramatically.
I just jumped over to both Article Marketer and iSnare and noticed that they both offer a free trial distribution. So, in reality, all you need to do is write one original article and you can test this out for absolutely no cost!
If anyone is considering tyring this out, don’t let the fact that you are not doing it “perfectly” stop you. If you write an article and submit it, the worst that that can happen is that it doesn’t help your website or drive any prospects. On the other side, you just might hit a home run with your first article and land a prospect that turns into a funded loan!
I’m working on a big project relating to article distribution. The space in this project will be limited, especially on the mortgage side, and I’m going to give my subscribers a first shot at joining up. So, if you haven’t done so already, sign up for my free Mortgage Marketing Newsletter. Sign up today and receive a free link in our Find A Mortgage match directory to help promote your website along with weekly (or so) mortgage marketing tips and blog recaps delivered directly to your email.
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