Article Marketing
Besides the direct traffic results there are some other important benefits from using article marketing. The one thing I’m really noticing is how important the article title is. Those of you who are copywriters or regular bloggers will be well aware that the title of your articles has the most impact on how often your article is read. The same of course applies in article marketing but it also impacts whether your article is republished. Given that most publishers first search article directories for content, your article title has to have the right keywords and has to be interesting enough to be clicked and finally, if you are lucky, republished. That’s a lot of steps to go through and a lot riding on how good your title is.
Thankfully you can go back and change the title of any article (in fact you can change any element of your articles at any time but it has to be re-approved each time), however you should aim to get it right straight out the door. This is because your article is featured in the Ezine Articles main highly-trafficked category page when it is first published and will very quickly drop off as newer
articles are published by other authors. You don’t get this benefit when you go back and alter an existing article.
Short And Sweet
It’s well known in the article marketing industry that the short, 400-600 word articles, generally get the most traffic. People have short attention spans and they want quick, easily absorbed tidbits, not long in depth quality articles. Yes okay, I had trouble adhering to this rule and I still have trouble getting a point across in so few words. The statistics don’t lie though and the short articles will get you more exposure and more traffic, so I spent some time cutting down some of my blog articles to give them a better chance of syndication.
The Vital Few
Every now and then one article will do much better than all the other articles. When you get the right combination of a solid title, a brief word count and a popular topic your article can go viral and be picked up many times. I can’t really say that any of my articles went viral but a few did standout while others really struggled.
Quantity Over Quality
Speaking from my experience, most of the backlinks I generated from article marketing where not from quality sites. I can think back to maybe one or two instances where I was pleased to see my article republished in what appeared to be a reputable website, with high PageRank and a real audience. Most of the time I spotted my article reproduced at spam blogs – websites and blogs that republish content, slap a bunch of AdSense ads around it and hope to get into the search engines and make money from it. These still count as backlinks and help your traffic cause, but it’s really a case of quantity over quality, which is not sound strategy when it comes to search engine marketing.
What About the Duplicate Content Penalty?
The duplicate content penalty is a major concern when republishing content. Remember Google (and other search engines) may penalize websites that produce duplicate content by removing the page from its index or reducing its search ranking. Now my understanding is that the original source of the article, as in the first place that Google finds the content or the version it deems as the oldest, won’t be penalized. This is not a verified claim, I’ve heard counter arguments against it and in some circumstances if your source content is found after it’s republished somewhere else (which can often be the case if your site is not regularly indexed in search engines and the site that republishes your work is), then it’s your site that risks the penalty.
The answer of course it to modify your article before submitting it to Ezine Articles or similar directories so it’s not a direct reproduction of the article on your website. In my case I reduced the size of most of the articles I submitted so they were not exactly the same as the originals, although they certainly would have shared paragraphs so I probably didn’t do enough. I’ve yet to notice any penalization but there are a lot of forces in play here so if you are really worried, take the time to modify your articles or only submit original content.
