Boost Site Traffic via Article Marketing?

[Updated 12/12/08]

After spending lot of effort in producing content for your blogs or designing your web sites, you start wondering how to bring in visitors. There are many marketing mechanisms ranging from search engine advertising like Google AdWords or Yahoo! Search Marketing to off-line medias. One of the popular marketing approaches has been Article Marketing.

What is Article Marketing?
As the term has suggested, article marketing promotes a product, service, or web site via articles. Article marketing is really nothing new. Many companies have written up and give away so-called white papers to the prospects who want to do a bitof research of their own, before they initiate the conversation with any potential vendors about their business problems. The white paper typically starts with a discussion that demonstrates the company's understanding of the business problems, before presenting their product.

Article promotion works the same way. An article typically consists of three parts: the title, the body, and the resource box. The article body is a short-form of a white paper that seeks to establish the author's credentials in the reader's mind. The resource box at the end of the article is the bio about the author, which is perhaps the whole reason why the article is written. The resource box briefly describes the author's expertise followed by a couple of links that help direct the article readers to the author's blogs or web sites.

How and where to distribute your articles?
Once you've written up a nice piece of article, how do you distribute it to people who may be of interest in the products or services you're trying sell? There are many so-called article directories happy to do the distribution job for you. Here is how it works: You register with an article directory as an author and submit your articles. Once accepted, the article directory will start distributing your articles to thousands of publishers through various means; for example, e-newsletters, e-zines, RSS subscriptions, or syndication. Or, your articles may be viewed or picked up by opt-in readers who visit the directory. The basic requirement for the publishers to freely reprint the articles is to retain the entire article and the resource box intact.

For your convenience, I have included a few article directories as follows:

• Ezine Articles (PageRank 6/10) is the industry leader that emphasizes on "quality" by accepting only articles that meets certain criteria.
• Search Warp (PageRank 4/10)
  
• Go Articles (PageRank 6/10)
• Other article directories include Article City, A1 Articles, iSnare, Idea Marketers, Free Article Zone, Article Bin, Article Marketer, Amazines, etc.

Most of these sites offer free services to the authors and the publishers. Some of them impose fees, when you submit more than a certain number of articles. You as an author may pay premiums to place your articles at the home page of the directory or the first page of a particular category to increase the exposure. Some directory sites offer proofreading service at a fee or even produce the article for you. Others sell you software that would "automatically" submit your articles over thousands publisher sites. I have no experience with any of those software. If you do, feel free to let me know how they are useful to you.

Does article marketing really work?
Submitting your articles to the directories should in general improve the ranking of your web sites or pages in the search results thanks to the increased number of back links. That statement is yet to be proven, though. The search engine determines the weight of each link based on various factors including the credibility of the publisher site that reprints your article. Unfortunately, many article publishers pulling content from the directories are those sites whose sole purpose is to make money from the ads all around your article.

On the other hand, read a few submitted articles in the directories and you'll find that most of them rush to direct you to their "single page web sites" that either promise you easy income or sell you secrets to make quick bucks. If you're somehow interested in any of those marketing schemes, I'd urge you to reconsider that decision and save that money for better uses. There are effective ways to start or grow your Internet business, but no shortcuts to success. To see for yourself, simply click on the links from whichever articles you stumble on that were published a while back. You'll find many of those pointed sites no longer exist, barely functional, or very out-dated. The sites that are still fully functional are those that run a serious business via hard work.

Still, article marketing could work for you. If you are able to produce a lot of high quality articles, chances are some of them may show up in reputable web sites. Not only do those articles improve your search result ranking, but will also help direct quality traffic to your web site. You have to be persistent and tenacious in both quality and quantity for article marketing to work. To tract the progress of article syndication, use the "intitle:" operator (case-sensitive) in the Google search box; for example:

• intitle:"The Title of My Syndicated Article" to look for all the articles with the given phrase in the their title. You should replace it with your own article title.
  
• intitle:"The Title of My Syndicated Article" +source +ezinearticles.com to look for the articles with the given phrase in their title and 'source' and 'ezinearticles.com' in the page. This assumes that you submitted your article to ezinearticles.com and its name is included as part of the article. You should replace it with the directory you use.
  

If you are determined to go that far, you should consider publishing your articles to reputable sites like eHow, HubPages, and Squidoo. They are very different from article syndication and are operated under different terms, though. Read my post about how to make money by publishing to eHow, HubPages, and Squidoo.