May
6

Article Marketing To Increase Website Traffic

Filed Under article marketing, website traffic 

Table of contents for Article Marketing Success

  1. Article Marketing Success
  2. Top Article Marketing Resources
  3. Article Marketing SEO | What is Thy Purpose?
  4. The 7 Bad Habits of Highly Defective Article Marketers
  5. Article Marketing To Increase Website Traffic
  6. The Article Resource Box | The 3 Biggest Mistakes

Here is my article marketing process and how I use it to increase website traffic.

Here I will outline my process. We’ll start with a view from 30,000 feet so you can see what the main points are, and then we’ll get more detailed.

I want you to be able to take away from this the exact steps that you need to succeed. But I also want you to understand why we’re doing it this way so that you can tailor it to your individual needs without losing the effectiveness.

 


Basic Article Marketing Concepts

Let’s start with the basic idea.

There are 3 major components of your article submission:

1. The title
2. The body of the article
3. The resource box

What most people seem to forget is that all of the above components are content. Therefore, the more you vary each and every component, the more unique your submission is, and the more chances you have for indexing. The more articles that are indexed, the more backlinks you’ll generate.

The simplest version of my article marketing method breaks down like this:

1. Determine which of your keywords pay the most in terms of Adsense and choose to target those keywords. Rewrite your highest paying keyword pages as articles (as many as you can) and submit them to as many article directories as you can. When you do, submit a different resource box and title with each article.

2. When you format your resource box, use two live links. One link for your home page with your main keyword as the anchor text, and one other deep link, either to a tier 2 or 3 page, whichever is the most on-topic, with the keyword for that page as the anchor text.

3. You can also do some of your resource boxes where you switch your anchor text. In other words, the home page gets a tier 2 keyword as anchor, and the deep link gets your home page’s keyword as anchor.

Note: submitting a different resource box and title with each article submission is very important, as is your keyword selection and the proper use of anchor text. But, this technique works far better when you make the entire article submission unique. I will cover the details of all of this below.

 

The Unique Article Marketing Technique

There are many variations of this technique. As you get better at it, you can enhance it and take advantage of some of the nuances. While there are no exact rules, there are some guidelines that will make or break your success. No matter how you implement this, you have several concepts you need to keep in mind throughout each step of the process:

1. Target your keywords
2. Create and submit unique content
3. Create a unique resource box for each submission
4. Deep link
5. Tease and get the click
6. Reuse/Recycle
7. Rinse/Repeat

Let’s say you have a site about green widgets. Your keywords are:

1. green widgets <- site concept keyword (listed first in the keyword meta tag field on home page)
2. big green widgets
3. green widgets for kids

Before you start submitting articles, you write content for your site around these keywords. Then you use the SEO benefits of article marketing to increase your search engine ranking for these words. Obviously, your home page will be the target for green widgets, and you’ll write at least one keyword focused content page (KFCP) for each of the other two.

What’s a KFCP? If you’re an SBI! owner you already understand what that means, but in case you don’t, it’s very simple. A keyword focused content page is simply a page that primarily focuses on one keyword. It’s the best way to create a Web page so that it ranks for a given keyword. As you get more advanced with your article marketing, you can set up your links so that a page ranks for several keywords, but the page itself should be focused on one word, and use related words in the text of the page.

Let’s say you have a page on "10 Ways to Use Big Green Widgets to Clean Your House Spotless…"

Ok, so now you:

 

1. Target your keywords

Green widgets is your site concept keyword, and if you can rank for that, you’ll rank better for your other words, and vice versa, right? So in the beginning, you’ll include that in almost every resource box. I like to have at least 50 percent of my links go to my home page, until I have at least 500 inpointing links to my home page showing up in Yahoo! for a given site. Once you get enough links to the home page, however, you can get more creative and do more deep linking.

When I do this, I like to check the Adwords keyword tool to see which of my keywords pay the most in Adsense. So, in addition to the site concept keyword, I’ll target the highest paying words the most.

Let’s say that big green widgets pays more in Adsense, so we’ll target that one the most. That makes green widgets for kids our 3rd player here.

Now, don’t get too caught up in high paying words that nobody is performing searches on. If you’re writing pages around keywords, then we’re assuming you already know people are searching for these words. You do have a keyword list you’re building your site around, right? Now we just want to know which ones pay more. Or, you can choose strictly based on high demand and make up for it in volume. That part is really up to you.

 

2. Create and submit unique content

Write 3 articles. One on each keyword. Include all 3 keywords somehow in each article if possible, but focus on one main keyword for each.

Next, re-write each article so you have a unique version of each, for each article directory to which you want to submit.

So, let’s say you’re going to submit to Ezinearticles.com, GoArticles.com, and Articlecity.com. You would write 3 versions of each article so that you have a unique version for each one. For example, you create your first article to focus on the keyword "big green widgets."

Soooo… You write article 1 as…

Article 1a - 7 Ways Big Green Widgets Help You Clean Your House - For submission to Ezinearticles.com
Article 1b - Big Green Widgets: 7 Unique Ways to Clean Your House - For submission to GoArticles.com
Article 1c - 7 Ways to Clean Your House with Big Green Widgets - For submission to Articlecity.com

Yes, you rewrite the articles, changing the title for each one, the description for each one, the body text for each one, and you’ll change the resource box for each one too. If you’re submitting to a ton of directories, this may be too labor intensive, so just make as many combinations as you can do without spending a million years on it.

Start with one article version, and then change sentence, word, or paragraph order if it makes sense. Do the same for the other two articles.

 

3. Create a unique resource box for each submission

OK, so now, you want as many resource boxes as you have article versions, if possible. You want to format your resource box with three major components.

1. Your name

2. Two links with anchor text

3. A call to action.

Here are some examples…

Kurt Schmitt shows people how <a href="mygreenwidgetsite.com">green widgets</a> can change their lives. For at least 3 more ways to clean your house with <a href="mygreenwidgetsite.com/big-green-widgets.html">big green widgets</a> subscribe to the Green Widget Newsletter.

Kurt Schmitt teaches others how <a href="mygreenwidgetsite.com">green widgets</a> clean houses spotless. Visit his <a href="mygreenwidgetsite.com/big-green-widgets.html">big green widgets</a> page and learn 3 more things you didn’t know.

Kurt Schmitt teaches others how <a href="mygreenwidgetsite.com">green widgets</a> clean houses spotless. For a longer version of this article and 3 more ways to clean your house, visit his <a href="mygreenwidgetsite.com/big-green-widgets.html">big green widgets</a> page.

Remember to include your site concept keyword in every resource box. Remember to make more resource boxes with the secondary keyword than the tertiary. This is not a requirement, but you control what Google will do here.

Mix it up! You can also reverse the hrefs so that the home page gets tagged for big green widgets too. So, sometimes, on the green widgets for kids page, use big green widgets for the home page link, and green widgets for kids for the deep link. Just keep making combinations.

Also, try not to include punctuation too close to your links as some article directories will mess up your links if you do. It’s bad to have your link end with "</a>." so put a space if you have to just to be sure.

 

4. Deep link

That is what we just did with the resource box and just mix it up! One link to one page, one link to another. Some article directories will let you put 3 links, so you can do that as well if you like.

I see so many articles out there with only one link to the home page, or no call to action, or worse, no anchor text. A resource box like "Visit http://mygreenwidgetsite.com" is a waste of web real estate! Don’t make that mistake.

 

5. Tease and get the click

Notice that on our site we have 10 items listed on the web page, but we only tell the world about 7 of them in the articles. At the bottom of the article we then tell them that they can get the other 3 at our site. Your article should add value, but it should also be a lead-in to your site.

Although direct traffic is not our main objective, we want to encourage it whenever we can. Remember that your article may be picked up by ezines, some of which are not online but delivered through email. There is no SEO benefit to your site from an article delivered via email. Instead, when this happens you’ll have an opportunity to speak to an audience that consists of someone else’s mailing list. A good resource box will lead some of that audience to your site. They may just stick around and/or return again and again.

 

6. Reuse/Recycle

OK, now you’ve got "7 Ways Big Green Widgets Help You Clean Your House" done. But, can we break those 7 into 7 more articles and get 49 total articles? Can we say that these 7 are part of a larger 7 as well? Maybe…

Sooooo… we ask this question… What else do green widgets do for us and how does it relate to our keyword list?

1. Clean the bathroom
2. Clean the stove
3. Clean the rest of the kitchen
4. Clean your dog
5. Clean your car…

…and so on. So now we have x more articles to write and do the same process, yes? Now, do big green widgets only clean? NO! They also cook…

1. 7 ways big green widgets cook vegetables
2. 7 ways big green widgets cook steak…

yada yada yada…

Then, you can repurpose those articles for newsletters, link bait, article swaps, blog entries, Squidoo lenses, Hubpages and more. That is really a whole topic in and of itself, and I’ll cover repurposing content and using social media in combination with article marketing in another post. If you read my post on article marketing success, you’ll see that I used repurposing there to help get a front page Google listing within a few days.

 

7. Rinse/Repeat

Do it all over again with as many topics as you can. Create site content, create articles, submit the articles, and so on. You can attack each section of your site treating it like a mini-site and then move to the next so that you dominate your keyword groups.

After you do this a few times, you can get more creative with it. I’ve used this on several different sites with great success.

If you can submit 20 articles to 200 sites, that’s 4,000 submissions x 2 links each = 8,000 links with anchor text. Even if only 1,000 of them stick, you win. Your linking structure will be so focused that you can’t help but win. Article marketing is like going on Larry King or Oprah. It sells you and your product before people even come to your site, and the SEO benefits are enormous.

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One Response to “Article Marketing To Increase Website Traffic”

  1. The Article Resource Box | The 3 Biggest Mistakes | Free Website Traffic Tips on May 20th, 2008 8:30 pm

    [...] Article Marketing to Increase Website Traffic [...]

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