Article marketing is just one of the link-building techniques that myself and my colleagues use to garner links to client’s web pages – and it works. We have gathered plenty of evidence that tells us that time spent writing, spinning and distributing articles is not time wasted.
I’m not saying that the style of article marketing that we use is in any way a replacement for acquiring good quality, on topic, one way back links from respected and authoritative sites. But what I am saying is that it is a low cost way to generate backlinks that will influence positions in the SERPs and almost anyone can do it.
The services that we have been using to good effect are Article Marketing Automation and Free Traffic System. Both will ‘spin’ the submitted articles before presenting them to various subscribing blogs.
A recent post over at Hobo-web.co.uk: (Links That Effect Ranking Change In Google SERPS) suggests that the easier it is to get a link the lower its quality. This is a good rule of thumb and the breakdown of link sources in the article matches my own experience. But nevertheless, links from distributed, spun articles can and do bring some useful juice to the party. So here are a few tips on how to make the most of article spinning and distribution systems.
(These tips apply primarily to the Article Marketing Automation system, but they may be applied to others. For example, there is a new article marketing system that has recently been launched at articleranks.com – you might like to check it out.)
- Precede your article marketing efforts by benchmarking the number of backlinks to the specific pages that you will link to from your article. You may also like to benchmark the number of linking domains (try Majestic SEO).
- Research and write a good article to start with. Don’t be lazy and simply copy someone else’s. The better your article is the more chance it has of being accepted by various blogs, of being read, commented upon and possibly linked to.
- Include the allowed number of links making certain that each targets different pages on a single website or various pages on multiple sites.
- Use keywords as anchor text and, where possible, ’spin’ (vary) the anchor text. In the AMA system this is achieved by wrapping the anchor text in curly braces separating each keyterm with a tilde symbol. (E.g. <a href=”url”>{keyterm1~keyterm2~keyterm3}</a>)
- Take your time over the article title and be sure to write 10 good variations in Article Marketing Automation (AMA).
- The AMA system allows you to readily ’spin’ (rewrite) each sentence up to 10 times. We have found that between two and four variations of each sentence is generally adequate, but more may be beneficial.
- When spinning sentences try to do more than simply using synonyms for certain words. I generally rewrite whole sentences.
- The AMA system limits you to selecting just one category for your article. However, if your article is suitable for submission to multiple categories simply copy what you have done and ‘add’ the same article to another relevant category.
- Always use the ‘review’ feature to skim read a few of the spun versions of your article before publishing.
- The AMA system provides some useful statistics telling you how many times your article has been published but, unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you where. I sometimes leave a phrase or sentence unspun and then carry out Google searches using the unspun phrase to find some examples of where my articles have gone.
- Monitor the number of backlinks to each of your targeted pages as your article is distributed and the backlinks are recognized by the search engines.
Gaining links through article distribution like this cannot compete with naturally attracting links by providing content that people will want to link to. But it can often be very difficult to naturally attract links, maybe to a deeper landing page within an ecommerce site for example. Article marketing provides an effective, low cost mechanism for building links using very relevant and targeted keyterms – and it works!
