Article Submission
Pillar #8 – Article Submission
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Pillar #8 covers article submission – an excellent way of increasing the links
that are pointing to your site, and guaranteeing that there are keyword-rich links
which point to your site.

Article submission is one of the most consistently popular and effective ways of
improving your industry respectability and predictably increasing the number of
your back links.

The great thing about allowing your article to be reprinted is that there are an
unlimited number of websites that may then be willing to republish your article.
Effective article marketing can be extremely viral in nature.

Article marketing background
Article marketing used to be one of the most consistently successful forms of
internet marketing for many years.

Between the years 2000 and 2004, before search engines like Google started to
develop more complex algorithms, link building was largely a numbers game.
Because of this, publishing your articles on other sites which included links back
to your site was one of the easiest ways to build up back-links that mattered to
search engines.

Article marketing is still is an extremely effective way of internet marketing, and
still one of the best ways to control the links that point to your website. The only
issue is that nowadays you can’t get away with getting credit from search
engines for the same article that appears on hundreds of different directories. So
in summary there’s not quite as much search engine optimization benefit as there
used to be from article marketing – but some SEO benefits still exist. Moreover,
article marketing can also drive relevant readers directly to your site.

Article marketing overview
When submitting articles to free reprint directories it’s essential that you just
focus on subject areas that are particularly pertinent to your own website
visitors. There’s no point in trying to drive visitors to your site who have just
read an article which has nothing to do with the subject matter that they will be
finding out more about on your own website.

First-things-first is to decide on your subject matter – there are plenty of tips to
help you with choosing that later on in this pillar.

After you complete your article, ensuring that you optimize it with relevant
keywords, the next thing that you need to think of is your author bio – this
should include a brief summary about you, your website and two links back to
your site.

Author bio format
It’s important to careful consider your author bios – and the exact nature of the
links that point to your website from within your author bios. I always
recommend including a keyword rich HTML link back to your site and a full
http:// version of your URL within your author bio. The HTML for an author bio
in this format would look something like:

Matt Lloyd is the founder of the href=”http://www.HomeBusinessBuilders.com.au”>Internet Marketing
Training Company.

If the article directory that you are submitting your articles to accepts HTML
within their author bios, then the code above will produce the phrase ‘Internet
Marketing Training’ that links to http://www.PurpleInternetMarketing.com.

The reason that you also want to include a full http:// version of your URL within
your author bio is that if article directories ignore your HTML, then they still
might decide to create live links from mentions of your domain name – and
they’re more likely to do this if you include the full URL (with http:// at the front
of it).

This is especially applicable if you are submitting your article to an article reprint
directory which is especially popular with ezine publishers.
Below is what the example author bio would look like if both the HTML and the
full mention of the URL became live links.

The ideal author bio format
Ideally, you want your author bios to be in a format which includes:
- A keyword-rich link to your home page.

- A keyword-rich link to an internal page on your site – this is in addition to
the keyword rich link to your home page. Having links to internal pages
on your website is a great way of getting one-way, search engine friendly
links to internal pages within your website.

- A non-HTML full URL (including http://) mention of your website
address.

Bearing this strategy in mind, you should be ensuring that you submit at least
one article to an article directory for every single category on your website – with
a keyword rich link back to each of your website categories

Article Format
The optimum length for the kind of article that you would submit to an article
directory should be around 500 to 800 words in length. Any less than 500 words
may not be deemed to be of sufficient quality by some article directories. More
than 800 words and readers may get bored with your article – and may not even
reach your author bio at the bottom!

Your article should have an informative introductory paragraph which will
appeal to your own website target market as well as acting as a synopsis for the
whole article.

The quality of your article title is imperative – a well-though-out article title
should appeal to both readers and search engines. ‘How to’ or ‘Top 10 ways of
doing something’ works really well. Try to include a relevant, targeted keyword
phrase.

All paragraphs within the article should be short, punchy and to the point. You
should try to include the same keyword phrase that you are using in your title
within your article body – once near the beginning, once somewhere in the
middle. When reading articles online, people do not like to scroll through
paragraphs. Readers prefer to be personal, straight-to-the-point articles, so be
careful if your natural language style is quite formal – you might want to tone
things down a bit.

Figure 8.1 – Ezine Articles
Ezine Articles, by far the most popular of the article directories
Ezine Articles – the best starting point

There are several hundred different ‘free article reprint’ directories. At the time
of writing, Ezine Articles (figure 8.1) is by far the biggest and probably offers the
best value for your time investment. For the vast majority of novice article
marketers, Ezine Articles is the best starting point.

You will need to create an account before you get started. After you’ve registered
you’ll be able to choose from hundreds of different categories in which to include
each article, so there should be a category that is able to house most niche topics.

Figure 8.2 – Ezine Articles
Submitting your article to Ezine Articles

Researching keyword phrases for your articles
Just like you do when you’re trying to improve the search engine optimization of
the pages on your own website, you can use the Wordtracker service to research
a keyword phrase to include within your article title and content.

For articles published elsewhere you’re generally better off aiming for an
extremely relevant long-tail keyword phrase. In other words, a keyword phrase
that’s particularly relevant for your article, yet not that difficult to hit the top of
search engine results with.

Remember to include your chosen keyword phrase in your title and in the
content of your article so that when the article is republished it is more likely to
be found by search engines.

Formatting your articles
Ezine Articles allow you to use some HTML tags within your article. This means
that you are able to emphasize different areas within your articles such as
subheadings with styles such as bold and italics. This is an extremely important
tool when you submit your articles to Ezine Articles as most article publishers
will be too lazy to make use of them – meaning that your article will stand out by
looking a lot more professional than the vast majority of the other articles.

Other major article submission sites
The next of the major article submission sites which I also recommend using is
called iSnare (figure 8.3). But iSnare isn’t just an articles directory – it’s also an
article distribution service.

This means that when you submit your article to iSnare, as well as getting your
article published in their directory, if you pay for their article distribution service
– which costs a maximum of $2 per article – you’ll also get your article
distributed to up to 40,000 other publishers.

That’s not to say that your article will appear on 40,000 other websites – it just
means that 40,000 other publishers will be made aware of the fact that you have
just published a free-to-reprint article.

Technically, iSnare works in a similar manner to Ezine Articles. In other words,
you need to create a free account, sign in to your account and submit your article.
Although you are able to submit the same articles to iSnare as you do to Ezine
Articles, in an ideal world, to provide unique content for search engines it may
be worthwhile considering submitting different articles to each service.

However, if you do want to try submitting the same article to both Ezine Articles
and iSnare, it’s a good idea to try to track which service is encouraging the most
other websites to reprint your article. An effective free way of doing this is by
using Google Alerts to track the amount of times that your article title is used on
the web. If you use a different article title for each submission service, this will let
you track which service works best for you.

Figure 8.3 – iSnare
iSnare.com
There are about 30 different categories on iSnare. The reason that they can’t offer
as many categories as Ezine Articles is that they have to tie up their categories
with their distribution partner’s categories.

Another thing that iSnare offers you is the facility to choose a pen name instead
of using your real name – and they let you associate multiple pen names with the
same account.

Editing tips for iSnare
However, iSnare don’t allow any HTML to be included within your article body
– that’s because many of their publishers may wish to republish your article as
an email to their list, and your HTML therefore might not display as intended.
But that’s not to say that you’re not able to have some kind of design control over
your article. If you just think a little bit creatively then you’ll discover that by
adding a couple of dashes either side of your subheadings, or by including
numbered lists, your article will stand out as being head and shoulders better
than the competition. This means that it’s got a better chance of being republished.
Something else to bear in mind with iSnare is that you get asked to complete 2
author bios – and it’s important that you complete both author bios. One author
bio allows HTML – this is generally for publishers who wish to re-publish your
article online. The option that doesn’t allow HTML is generally for publishers
who choose to reprint your article as an email. Just remember for the no-HTML
version to include your full URL which might be re-published as a live link.

Niche article sites
Although less general, and more ‘niche’ article sites won’t have as much total
traffic to their sites, they may well have just as much relevant traffic as other,
much larger sites like Ezine Articles.

For example if you wish to submit an article about ‘Sales management advice’,
you may be better off searching Google for relevant sales management article
sites. Not only could this drive more relevant traffic to your site, it could end up
being more beneficial to you from a search engine optimization perspective due
to the close overall relevance of the site on which your inbound link sits.

The importance of tracking traffic from article sites
It’s important not to spend a great deal of effort submitting your articles to the
same article site without analyzing the quantity and quality of the resultant
visitors from that site. For instance, some sites will drive a lot of visitors, but they
may not stay on your site for very long. Other sites may send a great deal less
visitors – but a large percentage of them may turn out to be loyal customers. You
can analyze this by setting up ‘goals’ with Google Analytics.

Consistency is the key with article marketing. To gain a good return from article
marketing you need to be prepared to submit articles to reprint sites on an
ongoing basis – at least one per week. And you have to submit original articles.
Submitting articles that have already been published elsewhere, or re-hashed
articles will simply not work as well.

The benefit of submitting unique articles to individual article directories
It’s a good idea to use the free Google Alerts service to track the republishing of
your release. As previously mentioned, if you enter the titles of your articles as
your Google Alerts, this will let you keep track on when and where your articles
have been republished. This will help you decide which article directories may
be worthwhile building a one-one one relationship with, and submitting unique
articles to for their sole-use in the future.

Remember that unique content is more likely to get ranked more highly by
search engines. By offering unique content to specifically targeted niche article
directories you are working on building up much better quality links to your site.
It may take time to build these unique articles and links up, but in the long-run,
it’s certainly worthwhile.

Pillar #8 – Article Submission Summary

•Start your article marketing by submitting a minimum of one article per week
to Ezine Articles. Aim to make your articles between 500 and 800 words long.
Include an author bio at the bottom of all your articles which contains a
keyword link to your home page, a keyword link to a category page on your
site and a non-HTML link to your home page.

•Effective articles are often formatted in the ‘How to…’ and ‘Top 10 ways of…’
doing something. Use subheadings, keep your paragraphs short and
remember not to be too formal in your tone of language.

•Think quality and quantity. Quality will help your article to stand out from
the competition, and give you a much bigger chance of getting your article republished
on other sites. Quantity is important too – this will keep your
articles featured on the home pages of the various article directories and start
to get you featured as a top author on various sites.

•After you submit articles to top general article directories, offer to submit
additional unique articles to other highly respected industry specific websites.
This unique content and unique links will drive good quality, relevant traffic
from the sites and have an extremely positive effect on your search engine
optimization.

•Remember to use Google Alerts to track the republishing of your articles. This
will help you to identify sites to which it would be worthwhile to offer unique
content to in the future.