Article Marketing Mistakes -- 3 Deadly Sins
Kurt Schmitt
May 01, 2008
When it comes to article marketing, there are a number of deadly sins. I see them over and over again. I see people making these mistakes, and before you know it, the word gets out. Articles don't work. They don't bring traffic.
Have you experienced this? Do you feel the same way? I'm here to tell you that I used to believe the same thing. I couldn't understand why my traffic didn't increase after submitting over 200 articles.
Even though many people were expressing disappointment, some marketers were still claiming that they were having great success using article directories.
Were they telling the truth? Were they just trying to sell an otherwise unsellable ebook? Even after buying the ebooks that promised to tell me the supposed secrets, I just wasn't getting the results I wanted from articles. Sound familiar? The problem was that I was doing it all wrong.
Once I figured it out, everything turned around. I started to see increased traffic to my sites. In fact, the increase was on the order of hundreds of visitors per day. By avoiding these 3 sins that I outline here, you can dramatically improve your article marketing results.
The 3 sins that I see most people committing are:
1. Wrong expectations -- having the wrong expectations about what your articles are meant to accomplish translates to certain failure. This comes from not understanding how to properly use article marketing.
The result of this is that the focus is all wrong. The net effect? Minimal, if any, increase in traffic.
So, let's clearly state that the main purpose of article marketing is to create keyword focused backlinks to your site. These keyword focused backlinks then increase your site's search engine positioning for those keywords. All of your article marketing efforts then, should be directed towards this objective.
2. Keyword selection -- since our main objective here is to generate higher search positioning for particular keywords, proper keyword selection is vital. Most people, however, do not do this properly, if at all.
For traffic purposes, there are two ways to choose your keywords for your articles. The first way is to choose your highest demand keywords and base your articles on those. The second way is to choose a keyword that is easy to rank for and has low supply, but reasonable demand. Although you can determine this manually, this is where having the right keyword tools comes in.
If you don't want to purchase tools for this, there are two free tools that you can use for this purpose. One, is the free Wordtracker tool which you can use to find demand. A score of 100 or better is best here, but I have gone as low as 4.
The second tool is Google itself. Simply Google your keyword and check the search results. A keyword with fewer than 1 million is good, the lower the better. You can have success with this with words up to 5 million results, but I would not go any higher. Each keyword is different, so you'll have to experiment in your niche.
3. Linking without anchor text -- perhaps the biggest article marketing mistake I see is not using anchor text. If you just link to your website with your url, you are wasting Web real estate. Why? Because the whole point of this exercise is to increase your search engine positioning for particular keywords. The way you do that is by creating backlinks to your site using those keywords as anchor text.
For a more detailed discussion on article marketing success techniques, visit Free Website Traffic Tips.
Have you experienced this? Do you feel the same way? I'm here to tell you that I used to believe the same thing. I couldn't understand why my traffic didn't increase after submitting over 200 articles.
Even though many people were expressing disappointment, some marketers were still claiming that they were having great success using article directories.
Were they telling the truth? Were they just trying to sell an otherwise unsellable ebook? Even after buying the ebooks that promised to tell me the supposed secrets, I just wasn't getting the results I wanted from articles. Sound familiar? The problem was that I was doing it all wrong.
Once I figured it out, everything turned around. I started to see increased traffic to my sites. In fact, the increase was on the order of hundreds of visitors per day. By avoiding these 3 sins that I outline here, you can dramatically improve your article marketing results.
The 3 sins that I see most people committing are:
1. Wrong expectations -- having the wrong expectations about what your articles are meant to accomplish translates to certain failure. This comes from not understanding how to properly use article marketing.
The result of this is that the focus is all wrong. The net effect? Minimal, if any, increase in traffic.
So, let's clearly state that the main purpose of article marketing is to create keyword focused backlinks to your site. These keyword focused backlinks then increase your site's search engine positioning for those keywords. All of your article marketing efforts then, should be directed towards this objective.
2. Keyword selection -- since our main objective here is to generate higher search positioning for particular keywords, proper keyword selection is vital. Most people, however, do not do this properly, if at all.
For traffic purposes, there are two ways to choose your keywords for your articles. The first way is to choose your highest demand keywords and base your articles on those. The second way is to choose a keyword that is easy to rank for and has low supply, but reasonable demand. Although you can determine this manually, this is where having the right keyword tools comes in.
If you don't want to purchase tools for this, there are two free tools that you can use for this purpose. One, is the free Wordtracker tool which you can use to find demand. A score of 100 or better is best here, but I have gone as low as 4.
The second tool is Google itself. Simply Google your keyword and check the search results. A keyword with fewer than 1 million is good, the lower the better. You can have success with this with words up to 5 million results, but I would not go any higher. Each keyword is different, so you'll have to experiment in your niche.
3. Linking without anchor text -- perhaps the biggest article marketing mistake I see is not using anchor text. If you just link to your website with your url, you are wasting Web real estate. Why? Because the whole point of this exercise is to increase your search engine positioning for particular keywords. The way you do that is by creating backlinks to your site using those keywords as anchor text.
For a more detailed discussion on article marketing success techniques, visit Free Website Traffic Tips.