Hello guys and gals. Not long ago, one of my mentors told me that his favorite MLM lead generation strategy was by far, article marketing. Personally, I found that a little strange considering I found him—not once, not twice, but thrice—through his pay-per-click ads before I eventually became his customer.
But hey, who am I to argue with someone who never once sold or marketed anything online, didn’t know the first thing about social media and still created a significant six-figure income in about 10 months. As far as I was concerned, when he told me that, article marketing instantly crash-landed on my radar.
So naturally, I spent oodles of time and a bit of moola researching, asking questions and putting together a plan of attack for my content marketing strategy. And I have to tell you, this has quickly become my favorite lead generation strategy. One that I hope to complement with video marketing in the not so distant future for a powerful one-two punch.
Today, I’d like to share the basic process and the tools I use to make article marketing simple, productive and more importantly, profitable.
Article Marketing, Step 1:
The first thing I do is open up Market Samurai and perform my keyword research. Once I have my general niche keyword list, I head over to the tool’s SEO competition module so I can whittle down my list to only those I actually have a half-way decent shot at competing for and dominating.
Now, that’s not to say you don’t want to target short-tail keywords. One of the nice things about article marketing is that you can leverage high page rank websites like popular article directories, to show up for competitive terms. I mean let’s face it, it’s unlikely, especially when getting started, to outrank some of the more established websites on competitive keywords with your own brand spanking new site. So instead, you can use article directories as a conduit to funnel traffic to your own website.
Starting out, your SEO efforts are better suited towards outfitting your website to match the lower volume key terms you do have a chance at dominating.
Article Marketing, Step 2:
Now obviously, once you do this initially, you’ll end up with enough keywords to create a nice long list of potential article topics. So, naturally your next step is to start writing. Personally, I launch Google Docs and start hacking away.
The key is to keep your content relevant, compelling and engaging enough to build your following. Remember, this isn’t about spamming your article with your niche keywords so you can rank. This is about providing real value and information to your readers. And I’m warning you now, as consumers we get smarter by the minute thanks to the same marketers that try to game the system. So no spamming. Because even if you get by the search engine’s own filtering measures, you’ll turn your readers off and then you’ll come crying home saying “this stuff doesn’t work.”
Besides, there’s a lot of debate on whether keyword relevancy has that big of an SEO role anymore. Regardless, my general rule of thumb is never to let keyword density get in the way of quality and flow. Make sure you keyword lives on the title, url, and as anchor texts on the resource box. Other than that, if my keyword doesn’t fit my thought, it goes out the window or I rewrite all-together. If you need some kind of metric to go by, stay within the 2%-5% density range of your total word count, although I tend to hover on the lower end so as not to tick off the Google gods.
Article Marketing, Step 3:
So here’s where I whip out another one of my secret little tools. Once you have a final draft of your article, re-write it two more times using different wording, of course. Here’s why.
I use a special article spinner called Unique Article Wizard to produce many unique variations of my articles. Of all the spinners out there, and there are several good ones, I went with Unique Article Wizard for one primary reason. Every one of my articles will be readable, coherent and will appear as if it was written by human hand. So content duplication is virtually impossible.
I can’t disclose the specifics of how it’s done to honor the confidentiality agreement, but suffice to say that it uses three versions of the same article—re-written slightly differently of course—to create a huge number of wonderful unique variations. Then it automatically sends a unique article version to hundreds of directories based on the topic categories you select for your article. My last article was going out to an estimated pool of 1200-1300 directories and opt-in niche sites.
You can also create up to 500 resource box signatures which is super powerful. This alone allows you to have unique resources boxes that you can use to target any number of niche keywords using anchor text optimization. Typically, I’ll use one of two links to direct readers to a specific page within my blog and I’ll reserve the other link for a more general or short-tail keyword related to my niche. Either way, you can tailor all 500 resource boxes to one set of specific keywords or your can spread it around. In fact, you can do this process individually for every article you write.
Finally, I also like the fact that all content is reviewed and approved by a human before submission. This really ensures the integrity and quality of both the product itself, but also the content being distributed.
Article Marketing, Step 4:
Unfortunately, I discovered early on that Unique Article Wizard cannot submit to certain directories and websites like EzineArticles.com, for instance. And then it hit me that you could actually generate a unique version of your article to copy and paste to any number of manual submissions. So here’s what I do.
I go back to the wizard and I generate a random version of my article for any website or directory I want to submit to manually, including my own blog of course. In fact, you can really explode your blog content by simply leveraging unique versions of your article. I also like publishing unique versions of my article to places like Hubpages.com or Squidoo.com.
When you think about it, this is a great way to create unique content on the fly and expand your footprint on high page rank websites. I mean, just think about it. You do the work once and then let the power of leverage take over the rest. Pretty cool indeed.
Article Marketing, Step 5:
Finally, the last thing I do is open up my OnlyWire account and post my new article to the social networks and bookmarking sites. I ensure I always have links going from Facebook to my blog and my manual submissions. Then, I make sure my blog posts also show some link love to articles that I post manually on HubPages and EzineArticles.com. This creates a nice loop of content that will (hopefully) get picked up and syndicated while building a strong back link structure.
That’s pretty much it, folks. Once the submissions start getting indexed, you’ll notice your content show up and you’ll rank very well. Initially, you’ll see this with sites or directories that have a high page rank. If you do your job right and your articles provide value, you’ll funnel that traffic to your website. And eventually as you continue to optimize your website for specific niche terms and you start to build on back links and syndication, your website’s page rank will rise as well and you’ll benefit from some Google SERP love.
I hope you have found this post useful, even though it went a little long. Keep an eye out for a video demo of this process I’ll be posting on the blog to show you how simple it really is.
And by the way, if you’re wondering how I figured out all this stuff out, check out my free training by opting in through the form on the top right hand corner of this page. If you’ve had a little skin in the game and you think you’ve seen it all before or you’ve tried it and it didn’t work for you, then try again. Chances are you didn’t let it run it’s course, or you did something wrong.
If you’re new to internet marketing or just want to get better results in your network marketing business by leveraging the internet, this is how I was taught by my mentor and how I learned everything I know.
Here’s to your continued success…
