A Recent Issue Of Playboy Revealed… If you put the right title on your article, your article will get opened and read by its intended audience…
Article marketers must serve two masters: Publishers who reach your target audience, and the Readers in your target audience.
Since 2005, online marketers have been living under an illusion that the article’s content does not matter, because there are many publishers who will accept anything that meets a minimum word count.
The underlying theory is that if publishers will publish anything, then one should not need to worry about the quality of the content, especially if the goal of the marketer is to gain inbound links for the purpose of impressing Google and its search listings…
Many people poo-poo my opinion on how to write articles, because they think of me as an Old-School Article Marketing Purist…
Alert! I am not the “purist” that many people suggest I am…
And there is nothing wrong with “old school”, because it worked just fine in 1995, 2000, 2005 and even now in 2010. People have profitably used “old school article marketing” since the early days of the Internet to generate substantial sales and profits for their online businesses. We “old school article marketers” also do pretty well in the search engine ranking game, by using “old school article marketing” to influence our rankings in Google and the other search engines.
In this article, I am going to tackle some of the problems inherent in the “article marketing for SEO” techniques that so many online marketers want to trust as gospel…
Content Does Not Matter… Or Does It?
Yes, it is true that there are many online publishers that will accept anything and everything submitted to them, provided the content meets a minimum word count…
But this is what you have never been told about this article marketing strategy… If you think about what I am going to tell you here, you will have no doubt that what I am getting ready to tell you is true…
If you only post content that those who have no editorial policies will publish, then you can comfortably rely on your inbound links disappearing, nearly as quickly as you can create them…
Is Anyone Home?
I have developed a list on one of my websites, of 1200 article directories that are available online, at: http://www.techcentralpublishing.com/more-article-directories.php
On the surface, it would seem like you should be able to acquire thousands of links to your website, by submitting your articles to article directories…
But here is what you don’t know about article directories…
All article directory software has been designed in such a way that the directory owner will need to manually verify all content submitted to the article directory…
And most new article directory owners quit approving articles within just a few weeks, because they never imagined how much work an article directory would actually entail…
As an example, I took one of the directories from the beginning of the above list: abunchofarticles.com
On the front page of the website, they have the Most Recent articles listed on the front page. I clicked through to the first article on the list, and it shows that the article was submitted on 2009-08-26, and today is 2010-01-17!! That means that this website has not approved any new articles in 4-1/2 months.
Another sample from the list is: allbpi.net. The last article approved on this website was submitted on 2009-09-19!!
You can submit your articles to these websites ALL DAY LONG, but when done, there are probably fewer than 40 article directories that approve articles regularly…
It should be clear to you at this point that if you ignore the quality of your content:
Publishers Who Have Editorial Policies Have Specific Expectations
Publishers who have editorial policies do so, because they understand their visitors and work hard to keep the loyalty of their readers…
They work hard to ensure the loyalty of their visitors, because it is cheaper to retain loyal readers than it is to acquire new visitors.
By ensuring visitor loyalty, these webmasters are ensuring that they are able to retain their current income and grow the revenue opportunities for their website.
As a webmaster, you have the free will to choose the content that you place on your own website. And the publishers whose audience we should want to reach with article marketing also have the free will to decide what they will publish on their sites…
Link Popularity In The Search Engine Marketing Game
Those guaranteed links through article directories are not as guaranteed as you once thought, are they? Even if you can get those cherished links in the article directories, will those links ever gain any search engine link popularity to share with your website?
For your articles to be able to share link popularity with your website, they must develop their own link popularity, where ever they sit on the Internet.
If you write and submit junk articles, who in their right mind will link to those articles that you have made available to the world?
Alert: People only link to articles that they believe that their audience will appreciate. If they link to junk, then their audience will lose confidence in their recommendations…
Serving Your Real Masters…
Your real masters in the article marketing game are the publishers who are going to choose to share your articles with their readers, and the people who read your articles…
As should be obvious to you by now, the publishers who have a real audience with whom to share your articles will only publish quality content…
Some publishers have audiences in the hundreds of thousands. When your article gets posted on many of the big publisher websites, it is not uncommon for the readers of that publication to either post a copy of your article also on their website or to link to your article on the publisher’s website.
Winning the approval of large publishers can result in your article being published on additional websites, and more for the benefit of the search engine optimization game, people will link to your articles on the big publishers’ website…
How does this benefit your website? More copies of your article on more websites, and link popularity being funneled into your articles on third-party websites, which in turn will pass link popularity back to your own website…
Publishers, who are committed to earning a profit, want to publish articles that its readers will want to read…
So your first master is always the publisher, and your second master is always the reader who will be thrilled to have had the opportunity to read your article…
If you serve your first and second masters well, then your articles will develop real value that the search engines will recognize and credit you for having…
A Recent Issue Of Playboy Revealed…
As I wrap up this article, we have finally come full circle to the point made in the title of this article…
The title that you select for your article will determine in large degree how successful your article will be….
David Jackson, a fellow writer, recently pointed out that “On average, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest of your copy…” (http://reviews-by-customers.com/showthread.php?t=253)
His point was the same as mine is today in this article: Your article title must stand out among the thousands of other articles on the Internet… Your article title must attract attention to the article and get the article opened and read… Even the best article on the planet is worthless, unless someone is actually reading it…
Just today, someone commented on one of my videos on YouTube. He said, “It’s funny… this (video) is gold but nobody is watching here on YouTube!!”
He was right of course. The video was posted to YouTube on October 18th, 2009, but only 120 people have watched it… http://bit.ly/5WEWqO
The video carries a factual title, but not necessarily a title that will pull people into it by the droves…
But this article here… Be honest with yourself now… Did you start reading this article because the title absolutely caught your attention and appealed to your curiosity?
I am confident in telling you that you would not be reading this article right now if the publisher did not have an overwhelming desire to see what my article was about, based on its title… And because the content delivered more than the publisher expected, the publisher felt that YOU needed to read what I have written here today…
If I have done my job well, then you will be glad you took a few minutes out of your day to read what I have written… And, you will reward me by reading my Author’s Resource Box shown below, to see how I could further help you achieve your goals…
Editor’s Note: This article published here.
…
My name is Bill Platt. I have been doing article marketing since 1999, and I have operated The Phantom Writers Article Distribution Service since 2001. My most recent article marketing ebook is titled, “How To Use Article Marketing To Positively Impact Your SEO Efforts,” and you can buy your own copy at my website: http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/article-marketing-seo.html The information in this article merely touches on information that I teach in my ebook about how to leverage your article marketing for real SEO success…
Read more articles written by Bill Platt
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