What Is Article Marketing?

Article Marketing was one of the most exciting Internet marketing components to hit the scene between 2000 and 2004. The “idea” was to write an article offering the definition of a problem and 3 or 5 steps of a solution in 400-600 words with a signature line that included a link to your Web site. The “objective” was to create that article once and have it published on hundreds of other peoples’ Web sites.

In a matter of weeks, virtually anyone could gain a significant amount of links to a Web site thereby increasing Google’s favor of popularity and receiving higher positioning in organic search engine results.

In 2004, the attraction slowed down a bit because of a somewhat ominous phrase called “duplicate content.” Not everyone knew exactly what duplicate content meant. But, it sure didn’t sound very good. There are two types of duplicate content. The first has to do with creating, say, 50 pages on your Web site that are almost identical to each other; maybe the difference between just a few words.

Google certainly does not like duplicate pages, with almost identical content, on the same Web site. If you have any of those, please make some changes pronto as Google’s manual review team will soon discover your attempts to get higher organic search positioning by manipulating the basic pages of your site solely for the purpose of faking out Google.

The other kind of duplicate content deals with producing one article and attempting to get it published and displayed on, say, 1,000 Web sites. Now, we don’t know everything about Google, but we do know that Google doesn’t like to feature much repetition in their search results. They love the idea of featuring important news or information described in different angles. But, Google really does not like to display the same exact content more than a few times.

Why is Article Marketing STILL Important?

Because:

• Every Web site your article is displayed on counts as a link to your Web site and we all know how Google favors sites with lots of inbound links.
• You can get positioning for multiple keyword phrases unlike the olden days of the Web where you had to write a single article geared toward a single keyword phrase.
• Modern tools are now available to get a single article listed on literally thousands of blogs and Web sites…without duplicate content worries.

Here, let’s use an example. A few weeks ago, I wrote an article suggesting the idea that a primary goal of a Twitter user should be to get 2000 followers. So, I wrote an article about it, which has so far appeared on about 100 Web sites, blogs and article directories. If you go to Google and search for these 3 specific headlines, you will find them listed at the top of Google:

“Why You Must Strive for 2000 Followers on Twitter as a Primary Goal”
Click on the article page and notice the formatting and the links at the bottom.

“Getting 2000 Tweeters to Follow You On Twitter is Essential Because…”
This one is a bit different because the Web site manager first added the article to his blog and then made a Tweet on Twitter directing his followers to go look at the new posting on his blog. The amazing thing is that only a day later Google picked up the “TWITTER” posting and displayed it in the search results.

This is a powerful example of how article marketing can be enhanced by social media.

“5 Reasons to Get 2000 Followers on Twitter Fast

I showed this example so you could see the difference in content between the three. This is how article content needs to be differentiated to assure you get as many listings on Google as possible.

Potential Article Marketing Problems to Watch Out For

Now that you know the possibilities, let’s talk about the potential problems. There is a lot of talk in my circuit about article marketing again, which is good and sometimes not so good. Here are the main topics of discussion that I’ve been hearing about and I thought I’d introduce them in a sort of true and false quiz format:

True or False?: You can pay someone in the Philippines as little as $2 per hour to write articles for you.

Answer: True! There’s a big push out there for outsourcing your article writing and article promotion to the Philippines where I’ve heard of paying people as little as $2 per hour to write articles for you. And the people pushing those resources are recruiters who have found workers in the Philippines for you. The 7 main red flags to watch out for if you choose to outsource your article writing and promotion are:

• Poor, boring or insufficient writing content
• Writer doesn’t understand your business
• Articles get produced on “their” time not yours
• Tough to get ahold of by phone, skype, or email when you need them
• You get little or no assistance or feedback during the writing process
• Article does not follow best practices and therefore does not get used by article outlets
• The writer just doesn’t understand the main purpose of article marketing, which is gaining inbound links to your Web site

We believe that you the business owner know more about your industry than anyone else. So, why would any service provider even offer to write articles for you from scratch?

We require our article marketing clients to submit to us what we call “spewed content.” That means, you spew your knowledge onto a Word document or email and don’t even think about sentence structure or grammar or even a headline. We will handle all of that for you. But, your involvement allows you to show your expertise to the readers by sending us preliminary content. Then our in-house writers (Yes, American, English speaking writers) create an authentic article that is truly yours. And then of course, we use that article for the next step, the promotion piece.

True or False?: If someone writes an article for you and uses someone else’s work, the writer is the one that will be liable for plagiarism charges.

FALSE! It’s your document and YOU are expected to verify that the articles written for you are authentic. I’ve been hearing of a lot of “scraping” going on in the article marketing world. Scraping is when you find an article on the web and copy and paste it to your own computer. The practice is then to change a few words (or none at all) and redistribute the article as your own. This is downright plagiarism! When you contract out for writers, you need to have total trust that they are creating original content for you.

True or False?: Quantity of articles is the most important. The more the better.

Answer: Both! This one is both true and false. Here’s why.

Article marketing relies on the building of momentum; a domino effect of sorts. Sending out just a single article won’t do to much for you. Well, sometimes it will. As a test, I launched a squeeze page to promote a training program and wrote one single article to promote it through our channels. In two weeks, I had 99 visitors, 6 opt-ins and 1 sale…for a $10,000 training program. Not bad numbers for the first round. My next step of course is to increase that opt-in rate right? The important part is that I now have quantified numbers that I can apply toward future promotions.

My point is that quantity of articles only helps if the quality of your content brings results…and you have to be monitoring those results.

How Does the HereNextYear Advanced Article Marketing Program Work?

To implement an article marketing campaign with impact, we’ve discovered these pieces all have to be in place:

• A hot or at least interesting topic
• Broad range of readers
• Keyword-rich content
• Engaging content without huge paragraphs or big words
• A description of a problem or the announcement of something new
• 3 or 5 steps for a reader to follow to battle the problem or take advantage of the new thing
• A summary
• A signature line also with keyword rich content and a live link to your Web site
• Variations of the completed article rather than just trying to promote a single writing
• A substantial outlet to get the articles posted
• A reporting system to know when and how many of a particular article was posted
• Monitoring of traffic from the posted articles to the Web site
• Leads or sales that originated from the article posting
• Planning for the next article

Our article marketing program goes far and above the simple service you might get from others who will offer to simply “write articles” for you because we handle all of these pieces for every article.

This is a new program we’ve only been testing with for the past month. But, here is one testimonial we can offer you that’s not just “us” promoting our own products or Web sites.

I didn’t even know what article marketing was until I started seeing the results. Now I get it and as I see momentum of traffic building, I’m pretty sure article marketing is the only promotion effort I need to get all the traffic I need.”
Alan Gay, StockTradingMyths.com

The Advanced Article Marketing Process

1. Consult with our HereNextYear article staff as to topic choice and format
2. Supply us with content (Remember to “spew” and not worry about sentence structure or grammar)
3. We will conduct keyword research related to that topic
4. We will edit what you’ve sent to us to arrive at a final, usable article
5. We will add keyword phrases to the content that were found during our keyword research
6. We will create two additional versions of the article based on the first
7. We will create 10 or more related headlines for the article
8. We will create 10 or more related signature lines targeting keywords related to your Web site for SEO
9. We will syndicate each article to a mixture of 50 blogs, Web sites and article directories every day until our entire network has been alerted to your article. This number is somewhere between 2,000 and 25,000 depending on the business category you wish to target and it’s growing all the time!
10. We will report how many of those locations actually posted your article

Advanced Article Marketing Pricing

$150 per article

$500 per month for 4 articles (one distribution per week)

$1,000 per month for 10 articles per month

From the point where we start working with you to the time a single article is reported as “promoted,” we have spent a good solid 10 hours per article on your behalf. And, that kind of time commitment is what is required to do article marketing properly. And, none of this gets farmed out to the Philippines!

Why would we offer such crazy low rates when our hourly rates have been a standard $160 for the past 13 years?

Because we want YOUR success story! Plain and simple.

The more successful of an article campaign we can make for you, the more others will be attracted to our program. And, that’s just good business.

Our standard pricing is $500 per month for four articles a month or $1,000 for 10. So, if you’ve been thinking you’d like to see what article marketing can do for you, this is your chance at getting huge savings and having the job done right.

Your Next Step:

The next step is to just talk about your project with us. Get us introduced to your Web site and what you sell. We are rather choosy as to the kind of projects we get involved with, so we would like to offer a free consult to see if we’re a good fit for each other.

Simply call HereNextYear at 303-743-0832 Monday through Friday during normal business hours and ask to talk to Marty Dickinson for details. Or, you can also use our online help to talk to Paul or complete the contact us form.

Article marketing is BACK in a big way and we hope this package program inspires you to take advantage of it now before prices go up. And, even at those prices, the value you will receive and peace of mind you will have working with English speaking Americans that understand your business will have you wondering why you even thought of outsourcing your article marketing in the first place.