Article Marketing Pattern

Summary:

Article marketing pattern is all about writing articles with quality content and links back to your site and spreading them around using article directories and some social sites.

Name of the pattern:

Article marketing

When to use the pattern:

When you need a long lasting stable free traffic. Article marketing gives you two types of traffic:

1. Traffic from the sites that used your articles.
2. Search engines organic traffic due to the large number of backlinks to your site.

How to use the pattern:

Minimal implementation includes writing articles and submitting them to article directory sites based on their Alexa rank.

Extended version:

Write an article 250-500 words (usually it's permissible up to 5000 words, but short articles work best). Submit to eZizeArticles.com with the proper resource box. Modify the article so that it's not recognized as a duplicate. Submit to a bunch of other article directories targeting by Alexa rank. Modify again. Create a hubpage on HubPages.com. Modify again. Create a "lense" on Squidoo.com.

Apply, rinse, repeat. You'll see first results in 3-4 weeks. Do more to get more.

Additional steps normally considered outside of article marketing pattern:

Reinforce with social sites: Bookmark all of them on Delicious.com. Mix with bookmarks to somebody else's articles. Submit to Digg. StumbleUpon, etc. Tweet about each article as it appears on article directories sites. In other words, not just submit articles, promote them too.

Attribution:

This is a very generic pattern.

Related patterns:

Social bookmarking, Social marketing, Viral marketing

Related anti-patterns:

Search engine spamming

Details and comments:

While it was known before, it hit Internet marketing community hard somewhere around 2003-2005. I've put the extended version myself based on the currently accepted practices.

Modification of articles is very important for two reasons:

1. Smaller reason is that some articles directories require that the articles is not submitted anywhere else.
2. Larger reason is that Google ignores the duplicate content and won't rank your site based on it.