Article Marketing

Summary:

Article Marketing pattern is all about writing freely redistributable articles with your links inside to provide an eventual flood of traffic and higher SEO rank. It's usually done with the help of article directories.

Name of the pattern:

Article Marketing

When to use the pattern:

When you need a reliable long-term traffic cheap and you can wait for it to build up.

How to use the pattern:

1. First, you should have a destination, a site or a page you want to promote, where you want the traffic to come. This destination apparently should be rich in your target keywords, and you must know those keywords.

2. Now, write articles on the topic with the same keywords. Submit them to the top articles directories.

Once articles go live, other web masters will start to adopt them, including your "resource box", a small piece in the end of your article where you are permitted by article directories to put your links. Even if nobody picks your article, you still get a backlink from the article directory, which usually have a pretty good rank.

Common opinion is that eZineArticles.com is the best, although, it's also toughest to get in. There are different schools about which other article directories are the best. Some marketers say you can limit yourself to eZineArticles.com and GoArticles.com, other would recommend iSnare.com instead of GoArticles, most people would say you should utilize at least several article directories, and if you are using an article submitter, you may use a lot of them. There is also a school of thought that you should only pay attention to the article directories with the top Alexa rank (see the top 20 article directories by Alexa rank here.)

Attribution:

Not sure. Jason Potash is traditionally considered the top authority on the subject.

Related patterns:

Too many, including Bum Marketing, Article Spinning, and more.

Related anti-patterns:

None really, just avoid hiting duplicate content penalty, whch may be likely with very successful articles.

Details and comments:

Article Marketing pattern is so successful and popular that there is a lot of software you can use to optimize many tasks, if you do it.

Article Helpers

First category includes helpers in creating the articles, which is a very tedious task if you approach this method seriously. Basically, most of these programs use some search engine (usually Google API) to get a bunch of results for your keywords, and then consolidate these results to make your work much easier. It may look not so much, but when you enter a new niche, where you have not much experience, such a tool may be extremely valuable. You can try to start with the reasonably basic free version of Article Assistant from Jason Potash. However, if you acquired the taste for such help, something more advanced like Instant Article Wizard by Jonathan Leger to create articles in 15 minutes or less may be more appropriate as it includes features that are only available in much more pricey versions from Jason.

Article Submitters

Second category is usually a combination of an article spinner and article submitter. Article submitter allows you to submit an article to tons of article directories, and that's certainly worth the investment.

As far as I know Brad Callen's Article Submitter is probably the best, although it's a little pricey ($197, $167 with a discount last time I checked) even though it's worth every penny. Well, he really can charge that. Although his main specialty is SEO and keywords. His Keyword Elite product is a legend.

Anyway, for budget priced business there are close followers: Magic Article Rewriter and Magic Article Submitter by Alexandr Krulik for $80 for both article spinner and an article submitter, or Mass Article Creator and Mass Article Submitter for $77 for both article creator helper and an article submitter, again last time I checked. You can easily find several intermediately priced alternatives ($90-$150), but these are the ones I believe to be on the top.

Article Spinners

See more in Article Spinning pattern, but overall I still did not come across any article spinner that's really worth the money. If you have to use any, buy one of the bundled solutions along with a good article submitter.