Why Article Marketing is Important

by John Eberhard

Article marketing means to write an article and then distribute that article around to various web sites called article directories. Article marketing is an important part of link building, which is often lumped in with the subject of search engine optimization.

My company does a lot of link building for clients. The purpose is to build up a lot of links to the client web site from other sites. The reason for this is that for Google, the number of links to a web site from other sites is their top criteria for determining the ranking of that web site. So the higher your Google ranking, the more traffic you will get from them.

I use several methods to build up links to web sites. But the most effective method I have found for building high volume links is article marketing. I use other methods to build quality links, but for quantity, it’s article marketing, hands down.

The first step is to write an article. This should be a minimum of 500 words, and should be about some topic of interest related to your product or your industry. It should not be a pitch directly about buying your products or services, but should be informational.

Aside from building links, writing and distributing articles is a way of establishing you as a reliable information source. For many companies, this is an important strategy today in making you and your company a trusted place to do business. By writing an article with relevant, correct information, you are demonstrating that you know what you’re talking about.

Once the article is written, I usually distribute it to between 50 and 100 article directories. Some of the top directories are:
http://www.goarticles.com
http://www.isnare.com/
http://www.articlecity.com/
http://ezinearticles.com/

There are several of what I consider premium article directories, including:
http://www.squidoo.com
http://knol.google.com/k
http://business.blinkweb.com/

We used to consider HubPages.com a premium article directory, but they have demonstrated that they are really anti-marketing, so we don’t bother with them anymore. Not sure why a site like that would even exist if it was anti-marketing, but there you go.

The best frequency is to write and send out an article to at least 50 article directories, at least once a month. Sending out to 100 directories is better, and sending more than one article per month is better too. We have some clients where we distribute one article per week.

By following a program of at least 100 article submissions per month, it is possible to build up links from practically none to over 2,000 links within several months.

You can check your number of links on Google by entering this in the search line:

“yourwebsite.com” -site:yourwebsite.com

I hesitate to give that because every time I do someone complains that it doesn’t work. But it does. It’s your web site address, in quotes, then a space, a dash, the word “site,” a colon, and your web address again without quotes. You enter that in the Google search field. It will then say at the top “About 27,700 results” (as it did for my web site just now). That’s the number of links.

If you do that for some of your competitor sites, that will give you an idea of how many links you will need to be able to rank well for your industry.

Good luck with link building and search engine rankings.

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