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Archive for the ‘Article Marketing’ Category
Wednesday, July 18th, 2012
Are you afraid of that old pill called duplicate content? Should you be?
I want you to feel free to pursue a dynamic content marketing strategy, so I’m going to share something with you that few online marketers are willing to let you know about. Most of your competition want you to be afraid of duplicate content penalties. And that’s why they won’t tell you about syndication.
Duplicate content is when you have the same article published on multiple websites with no interlinking between them. It looks as if the publishers all want you to believe that they were the first to publish that article. This is bad.
The only penalty you get for duplicate content is that only one of those web pages will be indexed in the search engines. The rest just simply don’t exist. That’s not really a penalty, but there’s no benefit to you. That’s why article syndication is so important.
You can publish the same article on multiple websites if you do it through syndication. By this I mean you publish the article first on your own website, then you submit it for publication to other websites. Websites that publish your article will provide you with a bio and a link back to your original article. All of these articles will be indexed in the search engines, but your original article will most likely rank the highest. And what’s the benefit?
With article syndication you get back links to your website and new unique traffic. Everyone wins – you, the publisher, and your readers. And you don’t have to worry about duplicate content penalties.
Tags: article syndication, content marketing, duplicate content
Posted in Article Marketing | 4 Comments »
Sunday, November 13th, 2011
Article marketing has changed over the years. In the old days of article marketing, you could do a mass submit of your articles and see it appear all over the web. In a period of time you’d see a load of incoming links show up for your website and those inbound links helped you to rank better in the search engines.
Mass submit article marketing still works to a limited degree, but it doesn’t work anything like it used to. You’re much better off today spending your time submitting fewer articles to websites with higher authority. And the three websites I recommend all have a Google PageRank of 8 or better.
- Squidoo – The brainchild of permission marketing guru Seth Godin. Build information portals called Lenses and use it to build links to your most cherished web properties. You can also monetize your Lenses.
- HubPages – HubPages is somewhat like Squidoo, though not as sophisticated graphically. You can monetize your hubs and the idea is to build hubs around a particular topic. Focus each article on a small part of your niche and make hubs rich in the macro-sense.
- Knol – Knol is owned by Google so it’s got to be good, right? In fact, it is good. The great think about Knol pages is that you can put links right in your articles. And you can make them long authoritative encyclopedias of knowledge.
Article marketing may not be what it used to be, but the benefits are still just as good as they’ve ever been – if you do it right.
Tags: article marketing, HubPages, inbound links, knol pages, Squidoo
Posted in Article Marketing | 6 Comments »
Saturday, October 8th, 2011
Amazon recently announced its own version of the tablet PC – a competitor to Apple’s iPad. It’s called Kindle Fire.
The astonishing thing about the Kindle Fire is its price. For less than $200, anyone can hold a PC in the palm of their hand. You can watch videos, listen to music, download your favorite apps, read e-books and store all of your entertainment on Amazon’s cloud. It’s clearly the best value for the money in the tablet PC market.
Why is that important? I think it’s extremely important for small business owners because it unleashes a new opportunity in e-books.
Pre-orders for the Kindle Fire are off the charts. Its official release date is November 15 and it’s selling in the millions. Of course, that’s good for Amazon, but it’s also good for small business owners.
The ease of publishing a book in Kindle format is phenomenal. You can write an article in one hour and publish it to the Kindle in ten minutes without needing an ISBN. You don’t even have to know any code. That means you can effectively have a string of white papers that you sell through Amazon on the Kindle and if you price them right they not only can serve as an additional source of income, but they will also boost your reputation – just like quality articles always have.
E-book marketing has always been good, but it just got better – thanks to the Amazon Kindle Fire.
Tags: Amazon Kindle, article marketing, e-books
Posted in Article Marketing | 4 Comments »
Monday, August 1st, 2011
Article marketing is generally thought of as something that takes place off of your website whereas blogging is generally something thought of as something that takes place on your website. However, you can publish articles on your website and you can blog apart from your website.
However you look at it, both forms of marketing can fit nicely into what we call “content marketing.” Here are 5 things blogging and article marketing have in commong:
- High quality content is very important. If you are going to publish articles that promote your website and drive traffic back to your website, then you want that content to be the highest quality possible. The same is true of onsite content designed to gain search engine rankings.
- Speaking of traffic, they both have the potential to deliver high quality targeted traffic to your website.
- Consistency is key, both with article marketing and with blogging.
- Both article marketing and blogging have the potential to affect your reputation online in both the short term and the long term and for better or for worse.
- As with any type of content marketing, articles and blogs both have huge SEO and social media benefits. Be diligent in your efforts and it could pay off big time.
Forget the hype and just focus on the benefits – both for article marketing and blogs.
Tags: article marketing, blogging, content marketing, Reputation Management, SEO, website traffic
Posted in Article Marketing | 9 Comments »
Saturday, July 30th, 2011
Remember when Facebook first opened up personal domain names? You could get your own name and it was on a first-come, first-serve basis. Well, recently, HubPages has decided to give you your own subdomain and you better hurry if you want it to be your name. Otherwise, you might have to settle for your name plus a few numbers, or a variation that you’ll be forced to live with.
Let me say that I think this is a good move – for HubPages and for you. Subdomains will likely be considered a higher authority since you’ll have control over all the content in your domain name.
Another benefit to you is reputation management. If you’ve noticed that your profile pages on your most active social networks rank highly for your name, then I expect that your HubPages subdomain will rank well for your name as well. That is, if you keep your subdomain active, and that means writing articles on a regular basis.
Article marketing has long been a very good way to get new traffic to your website and build links. HubPages is one avenue for your articles to get you traffic, links, and an increase in your authority and reputation. Now you can do it with a branded subdomain.
Tags: article marketing, HubPages, Reputation Management
Posted in Article Marketing | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011
Article marketing is still alive and well on the Internet. Do you ever wonder where you can publish your articles and build links back to your website or get the attention you deserve as an expert in your field? Here are 5 non-article directories that are great places for marketing your article content.
- Squidoo – Squidoo is the brainchild of popular author and marketing genius Seth Godin. You start a “Lens,” which is a single-page resource on a given topic. You’re allowed to link to other places on the Web, and that includes your own websites.
- HubPages – HubPages is a place for authors to publish articles on a variety of topics. You can monetize your articles on HubPages with your Amazon affiliate links, Google AdSense, eBay, and other monetization strategies. Another thing you can do is link out to other pages on the Web.
- Knol – Google Knol pages have become very popular as well. These articles tend to be more technical in nature and you can add as many links to your Knol pages as you want. Written well, they can be a great source of information and establish you as an expert in your field.
- Helium – Helium is another site similar to HubPages where you can write articles on specific topics, monetize them, and build links to other pages on the Web.
- Triond – Triond is unique. You publish your articles on topics at Triond and they are syndicated to niche websites so that you can reach a larger audience.
For greater leverage and flexibility, try using these 5 websites for publishing your articles. Note, however, that you’ll be more effective at each site if you publish only original articles.
Tags: article marketing, self publishing, website promotion
Posted in Article Marketing | 9 Comments »
Saturday, April 30th, 2011
Anyone who has read my blog for very long knows that I am a strong advocate of article marketing. That is, I believe that writing articles and publishing off of your website with links back to your website is a good way to promote yourself online. The benefits are simple:
- Free one-way links
- Enhanced reputation for the author
- New targeted traffic to your website
- And that’s just a start
HubPages has done well to provide these benefits. But due to a recent Google algorithm change, which everyone has started calling Panda, HubPages has had to undergo some policy changes.
Some of these changes makes me wonder why HubPages ever accepted some articles in the first place. For instance:
Duplicated Content: While we used to allow some duplicated content (e.g. if it also existed on your blog and so long as you did not link back to the source), it is now required that all content published on HubPages be unique to the site
I’d have thought that would be a no-brainer. But I guess not.
There are other policies HubPages are incorporating that I give them credit for. Some authors may not like them, but I think they are great changes. The result will be more credibility for HubPages and for its authors. Everyone wins. How can that be bad?
Tags: article marketing, content, HubPages
Posted in Article Marketing | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011
Article marketing is a mainstay of Internet marketing. It’s been around since the earliest days of the Internet and Web-savvy marketers have been very effective in using article marketing to drive traffic to their websites and in closing the sale. But recently, article marketing has taken a huge turn – for better and for the worse.
Google slapped the article directories hard, so hard that you might not want to keep putting your articles there. They may work and they may not. But there is actually a better way to go about marketing your business and your website these days.
The 2011 way to market yourself through articles is to distribute them through other channels. Try HubPages, Google Knol, and Squidoo Lenses. Or find websites within your niche that publish articles. Even niche-related blogs.
Articles are still good marketing tools. But distribution channels change, and the methods that article marketers use should change right along with them. If you want to be successful at article marketing, study your niche. Whose doing what? Where are they publishing? What are they publishing?
Don’t ask those questions to follow the trends. Rather, ask those questions so that you can move ahead of the trends. Then, write your articles and send them to the right places.
Tags: article marketing, articles
Posted in Article Marketing | 3 Comments »
Thursday, April 7th, 2011
If you’ve been paying attention to the Google Panda update, you’ve noticed that EzineArticles – the largest article directory online – was hit and suffered a huge traffic loss. That’s a doggone shame. But what is even more of a shame is the article directory’s response to the update.
Chris Knight says he agrees with Google’s update. So do I. But he boasts about EzineArticle’s quality guidelines post Panda. Here are the changes the article directory has made to its quality guidelines and what you’ll have to do to get your articles approved there.
- Match the author name in your resource box with the byline
- Limit your links to 4
- Deliver on the article title
- Limit reference material within the article
- Properly format your articles
- Keep the resource box short (15% of total article length)
- Maximum keyword density of 2%
In an age when most serious SEOs have given up on keyword density, that last point seems rather strange and out of place. I understand all the other guidelines and agree with them. Perhaps EzineArticles is saying it won’t publish articles that exceed a certain percentage of keyword density because it wants to control spam in its directory. But this guideline sends a signal that keyword density is important. I would not walk away with that impression. Google has more than 200 criteria for making ranking selections. No one, not even EzineArticles, knows all of them, but I’m reasonably sure that keyword density isn’t one of them.
Tags: article directory, article marketing, articles, EzineArticles, keyword density
Posted in Article Marketing | 2 Comments »
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