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Smart Article Marketing For Fast AND Long Term Blog Traffic

Posted: 21 Feb 2009 06:57 AM PST

I’m regularly asked by readers whether they should use Article Marketing as a way to build their blogs traffic. My answer is always the same - ‘I’ve never done it, but I’ve heard that others have had some success with article marketing.’ So today when Andrew Hansen offered to write this guest post of his experience of article marketing I thought it’d make an interesting read.

Article marketing for traffic is by no means a new concept, but as old as it is there are still great misconceptions about the best way to use it as a tool in creating new targetted visitors to your blog.

I was inspired to make this post after I recently checked the traffic stats for an old niche blog that I hadn’t worked on for a number of months.

It was a blog that we launched almost solely on the back of article submissions and article traffic and now despite server changes, half the site getting lost, total reindexing and other drama, the traffic to this site from the search engines continues to flow, see below diagram:

And primarily from the search engines…

Not an enormous amount, but for a site that hasn’t been touched in months and survived all the mentioned havoc, it’s not bad.

The big benefit of article marketing is that it allows you to generate both quick traffic and traffic that lasts when done properly. Furthermore it allows you to generate traffic in 3 separate ways that I’ll illustrate in this post.

Before we begin, let me clarify that by article marketing, I mean the submission of articles to directories, blogs and websites in order to gain exposure to your website through your author biography links.

Article Marketing Traffic Generation Part 1:

Just by submitting your article to a directory, you give it the potential to be found by other people interested in your topic, who are searching through that directory.

It’s not a lot of traffic but it’s fast and it’s relatively targetted.

When we started this site we went on a steady article marketing campaign, submitting a few articles each day to some of the big article directories like ezinearticles.com.

I couldn’t get a screenshot for you, but in the first month or two of this site, ezinearticles.com was the number one source of traffic to the blog (where Google now is in the second shot above) pushing more than a thousand visitors a month to the blog, just from that single directory.

That’s one of the fast traffic elements. Again it’s not enormous traffic but is is fast and targetted. Just having your articles in the directories can bring you traffic. The point to note though is that this is not the MAIN source of traffic that article submissions can bring…

Article Marketing Traffic Part 2:

This next kind of traffic is the one that a lot of new blog and online marketers got stuck focusing solely on and that’s "bum marketing" - just another word for submitting an article to a popular directory and trying to have it rank for a long tail keyword.

Because article directories like ezinearticles.com are old, strong, authoritative domain names, the content you place on them can outrank content optimized for similar terms that you put up on your own (new) website. So when you submit an article that is keyword optimized for some long tail keyword, that article on the directory can get quickly ranked in the search engines, and the author link can be followed to your website.

But this traffic is also only temporary. For more reasons than there are time to list, these pages tend to rank well quickly but drop off quickly too, meaning you see an increase in traffic from the search engines, but it doesn’t last if that’s your only strategy.

This happened with the site above too. In the next couple of months we started to see our search traffic creep up to the same level of traffic the article directories were bringing in.

Most article marketers will stop there and wonder why their traffic dries up within a month or two. That’s part 2 of getting quick traffic from your article submissions but the 3rd and most important part is yet to come.

Article Marketing Traffic Part 3:

This is what ensured that I locked in traffic from Google, used article marketing to create an authoritative blog and claim traffic that won’t dry up even if I want it to.

From the beginning, with each article we submitted to a directory, we left two links in the author biography. One link was to a post of content on my blog that was related to the article but contained more detail than the article. So I submit an on "exercise balls for fitness" and put a link in the author bio to a post on my site at the URL: http://myblog.com/exercise-ball-workout-tips with the anchor text "exercise ball workout" or some keyword that I want to rank for with that post.

The other link in the author biography always went to my blog home page but with a different keyword as the anchor text with every submission. We followed the same submission frequency and guidelines for about 4 months and you can imagine what happened.

Our search engine traffic didn’t dry up, but continued to increase. The only thing to note is that it didn’t increase from the articles at ezinearticles.com that were getting found in the search engines, it increased from our own blog posts getting found in the search engines, in many cases outranking the ezinearticle.com submission we made on the very same keyword!

From there it took off. The extra search engine exposure caused other bloggers to find us and link to us, all that incoming link value made our domain more authoritative so that all the new content we added was getting indexed and ranked at light speed and pretty soon our traffic had tripled.

Another thing to note is that with enough work, our own site now became the big authoritative, strong domain. We didn’t need to submit as many articles to the article directories anymore because it could rank just as well being up on our site.

It’s these factors that ensured that we still see traffic despite all the drama that happened with this site and that keeps that traffic flowing today.

I hope this gives you an insight into the power of this kind of "triple whammy" article marketing and that it’ll inspire you to start an article marketing campaign of your own.

Andrew Hansen has helped thousands of bloggers and aspiring online business owners to discover profitable niche markets, drive quality traffic to their blogs, and turn their traffic streams into cash through his blog at AndrewHansen.name, and his blogging and traffic generation software Firepow. Subscribe to receive updates and learn more about how Andrew can help you make more money online.