I’ve been marketing on the net now for the better part of 20 years now and of all the methods I’ve used, articles are still the way to get traffic through back links. And to me, writing articles has become second nature. Why? Because I rely on my past experience and pay attention to what the guru’s are saying. It’s the majority of opinions by these folks that article marketing and comments from outside sources are still two of the free methods that are most effective.
1. Spreading articles around the net.
It used to be that you could write a great article and then spread that same content to as many article directories and blogs you could find. That’s not the case any more. Google and the other search engine giants are now looking specifically for original content. By original content, I mean one of a kind articles. Some use the method of spinning the articles. Spinning is the process of replacing words in the content that have the same meaning. This may be effective to a certain degree but not in most instances.
Now, to have original content, but use the same basic article you need the use the “in other words” approach. In other words, rewrite the article IN OTHER WORDS. And this isn’t really a difficult concept if you really think about it. You already have a format laid out in your original. For instance; An article titled “What Comes In Springs” could be re-titled “What Blooms In April”. There’s your start. The next step would be to re-write each paragraph another way with the same meaning. As I said, it’s a simple process if you think about it.
Now that you have your article re-created as a unique, original piece of content, the next step is to start promoting these where you’ve posted them. If you post one on EzineArticles, tweet it with EzineArticles.com’s URL. Do the same with your Google+ account and Facebook. On Facebook, maybe even boost the post. I’m sure EzineArticles would love the extra traffic and except for the Facebook boost, if you decide to do that, it wouldn’t cost you a dime and your article gets the promotion you’re wanting.
Forums (Message Boards) can also be considered as a place to create a mini article. Ever think about that?. There are a bunch of forums that are hungry for more and more members and posts. Why not take advantage of that bit of information and put some of the ideas from your articles on these boards to spark conversations. There’s something called a signature area on message boards where you can place a billboard of sorts on every post you make. The advantages to this are (a) your content is being read by more and more people, (b) you have links to your website being put in front of everyone who reads and comments to your thread. Talk about a win/win scenario.
Build your own blog. Place original content on it and as often as allowed, submit it to the major search engines for indexing. Socialize the heck out of it in Twitter, Facebook, Google+, StumbleUpon, etc. Whenever you update the content, re-tweet it for good measure.
2. Solicit comments to your articles.
Search engines gobble this up and actually put more credence on content with comments from as many sources as you can get. Ask your friends on Facebook to go and read your article and then place a comment. Most blogs and some article directories allow this. See if there are any groups that will trade comments with you. Fiverr.com is a good source for comments if you can’t get any friends to help you out.
If handled in the proper way, your articles can be a great source of traffic to your site.