5 Value-Packed Article Marketing Tips for Blog Traffic Building

[Wayne Liew]

Article marketing, also known as bum marketing after having affiliate marketing incorporated into it is becoming popular in today's Internet as more and more traffic building methods are getting saturated. Being seen as a "tedious or spend money" method of marketing, this method will be the best choice for hardworking marketers and bloggers with some intelligence to promote their blogs, sales pages and sites.

Also, article marketing is extremely useful for a blogger who would like to build extremenly targeted traffic. Yes, they might not bring in the amount of traffic like what social media sites do but these people coming in from your articles are those interested in your topic and will normally participate or subscribe to your blog.

Before moving into my first short value tips on Bloggeries, I would recommend this tips to be read only for those who are already in bum marketing or article marketing or those who have a thorough understanding about what this method of traffic building is all about. If you are eager to learn more about this technique, I will be having a series of blog post on article marketing at Wayne Liew Dot Com, which you can now subscribed to in order to get the tips sent right to you once released.

1. Stumble and bookmark your articles
Yes, I mean articles on the article directories, Squidoo and Hubpages. Most will ask why should you do this for them.

First, you need to get your links on these articles some exposure. Just like a blog, no one will know an article is there if you don't market it.

Secondly, you build backlinks to these sites which will in turn pass the link juice onto your sites. Thinking about nofollow and stuffs? Fine, you can skip this but not all social media sites are nofollowed.

Thirdly, top article directories, Squidoo and Hubpages have a ranking system. The higher the traffic you get, the more times your page or articles will be featured. See what I mean by the screenshot below.

2. No promotion in resource box
Most make use of the resource box when submitting articles as a advertisement spot. It will be like "XXX.com offers the best article marketing tips which will help you boost your traffic by 120%!!". Seriously, this will not work.

Change it to something descriptive, not boastful and try to show the expertise which you have. It can be something like "Wayne Liew has been blogging since the age of 16. Despite of his young age, he owns a blog over at Wayne Liew Dot Com which he shares his knowledge gethered over the years in high quality blog posts. The good news for you is that Wayne Liew is going to release a blog post series on article marketing which will certainly help you in traffic building for blogs".

As you can see from the second resource box example, all the reasons one should click through to a blog is there. High quality contents, subject matter that interests the reader and of course, the expertise of the blogger.

3. Don't be dependent on article marketing
Yes, for some, this type of marketing method can bring great results and it might show the lure that other marketing methods are not needed anymore. Well, what if an article directory goes down or the search engines tweak their algorithm?

Always use article marketing to build an extra source of traffic, not to be totally dependent on it. In fact, you should not depend on only just one source of traffic.

4. Make article marketing easier with money
Article marketing is tedious but if you have a clear vision and hardworking enough, article marketing will actually reward you in a way which you want to do more. The reason why this method is not saturated is because many new article marketers testing the waters gave up because of the time needed to experiment the right resource box, writing articles, submitting and promoting these articles.

You can only become a lazy bum if you have a lot of money to spend. With money, you can certainly hire ghostwriters to write for you and hire someone to do manual submission for you.

5. Spelling and grammar are very darn important
Yeah, in the resource box, you can say that you have tonnes of expertise and trillion years of experience in the field but one significant spelling error or grammatical error will cost you the whole article.

Why can't I just amend it after the article got published? An article gets the most exposure on article directories when it is first published and by the time you edit it, many might have seen your lousy article. Also, updating the article after publication will also mean you need to get back into the queue of approval, which is very time consuming.

This will be my first contribution to Bloggeries and I hope it will be able to help some of the forumers here who are still not very sure on how to use article marketing correctly.

If you are interested in this form of targeted traffic building, hop over to Wayne Liew Dot Com and subscribe to Wayne Liew Dot Com RSS Feed as I will be publishing a weekly series on article marketing which I will be giving the essential tips out in every stage of this method.

Hope to have your views on this. Good luck and all the best in blogging.

[wilhb81]

Totally agreed with your guide here, wayne.

As we always said "Content is King", If we have a good content, we might also have a good rank at SEO...

Wilson.

[Katalina]

Nice article! I especially liked the "resource box" section. You make a very good point. I would be much more likely to click over on the "information" resource box as opposed to the "sales" resource box.
Thanks!

[thegypsy]

hmmmm Article marketing for traffic? Not bloody likely. I really don't see traditional article marketing to offer much beyond SEO benefits really.... Here's how we roll

1. Get articles from professional writers

2. Distribution;

2a. reasonable quality articles; paid manual submission with varied link texts/page titles

2b. quality pieces we track down authority sites in the niche and pitch them on exlusive publishing rights

I also wouldn't screw up my social media marketing accounts by spamming them with my article directory crap. The idea behind social media marketing is too become involved (and trusted) in the community. Our social profiles are built up over time on places such as Stumble and by spamming your followers you not only will lose some of them (and get bad reviews which curtails your stumble-power) but also likely damage your (or clients) reputation in the process.

Furthermore, if you have an article worthy of showing your community. put it on our Blog/site because once again, its about visibility and getting in front of the influencers in the market. This is where the links really roll in. Regardless if the site is nofollow or not, this isn't the point. If you get your content out there infront of the industry influencers, you ultimately build far more links that otherwise. One top story n digg has a link affect that is considerable. I remember one mention on TechCrunch that netted us a hundred or more quality links... How'd TechCrunch find us? Social media baby.... so it isn't always the site you submit to that is the link target... secondary links are the goal with social media marketing

So for me you can do 2 things;

1. standard article marketing for average work
2. targeted article marketing for exceptional work (on niche authority sites)
3. post on site for exeptional work (and then promote via SMM or other channels - industry media)

Article marketing is as much about building brand and reach as it is about mere backlinks.

2c

[Wayne Liew]

Originally Posted by thegypsy

hmmmm Article marketing for traffic? Not bloody likely. I really don't see traditional article marketing to offer much beyond SEO benefits really.... Here's how we roll

1. Get articles from professional writers

2. Distribution;

2a. reasonable quality articles; paid manual submission with varied link texts/page titles

2b. quality pieces we track down authority sites in the niche and pitch them on exlusive publishing rights

I also wouldn't screw up my social media marketing accounts by spamming them with my article directory crap. The idea behind social media marketing is too become involved (and trusted) in the community. Our social profiles are built up over time on places such as Stumble and by spamming your followers you not only will lose some of them (and get bad reviews which curtails your stumble-power) but also likely damage your (or clients) reputation in the process.

Furthermore, if you have an article worthy of showing your community. put it on our Blog/site because once again, its about visibility and getting in front of the influencers in the market. This is where the links really roll in. Regardless if the site is nofollow or not, this isn't the point. If you get your content out there infront of the industry influencers, you ultimately build far more links that otherwise. One top story n digg has a link affect that is considerable. I remember one mention on TechCrunch that netted us a hundred or more quality links... How'd TechCrunch find us? Social media baby.... so it isn't always the site you submit to that is the link target... secondary links are the goal with social media marketing

So for me you can do 2 things;

1. standard article marketing for average work
2. targeted article marketing for exceptional work (on niche authority sites)
3. post on site for exeptional work (and then promote via SMM or other channels - industry media)

Article marketing is as much about building brand and reach as it is about mere backlinks.

2c

Well, first of all, I did not get your message clearly and sorry if I have some misunderstanding.

Article marketing can bring in traffic and I will stand by this point. Again, article directories is not all about crappy articles and bring spammy, which bring me to the idea that submitting these articles onto social media sites is not a bad idea.

Article directories tend to rank well in search engines because of the trust that search engines have with such sites. Let's say a blog is still in Google Sandbox, SEO will mean nothing to this blog and that will mean no search engine traffic. However, with article marketing, which the articles tend to ranked well for keywords, will get the search engine traffic for this blog.

Also, I did not say that all the best things should go to the article directories. General but useful tips can go there in order to pitch some indirect search engine traffic.

Getting exposure on other blogs through social media is in fact a great thing to happen and the best is that the linking tends to go viral. However, you should not only be thinking of the niche whereby you have great blogs such as the webmaster niche and the technology niche. What about niches on gardening, study tips, car repairs tips and some other common niches? Such niches needed the search engine traffic to survive and going through the 6-12 months period in the Google Sandbox is a pain in the butt.

Phew, it has been long since I got a great discussion like this. thegypsy, you have a good point made here and I hope you can have your views on this reply of mine.

[FELEX84]

Content is more important for driving a quality traffics to your site.

[thegypsy]

NP wayne... just throwing my perspective out ...between us we got it covered he he....

As a professional marketer, each avenue has a related cost and thus a potential ROI - so traffic generation isn't generally a top consideration for us with article marketing. The brand/authority building aspects are what give article marketing more dimensions than normal... IMHO

[Wayne Liew]

Originally Posted by thegypsy

NP wayne... just throwing my perspective out ...between us we got it covered he he....

As a professional marketer, each avenue has a related cost and thus a potential ROI - so traffic generation isn't generally a top consideration for us with article marketing. The brand/authority building aspects are what give article marketing more dimensions than normal... IMHO

Article marketing is just more than just traffic building alone. Even if an article appears to be on the first on Google for a lowly searched term like "How to make my PC free from XXXBOOMBOOM virus?" (Just an illistration ), the searcher will likely to convert a sales if you are marketing a particular software to curb the virus.

This is what I mean as quality traffic. In blogging terms, quality traffic means visitors that will return, participate in comments and submit your contents to social media sites. I can say that they are the foundation of a blog's traffic.

P/S: The Article Marketing for Blog Traffic Series is up with an introductory post on what is article marketing. Hope you guys will enjoy it.

[thegypsy]

Originally Posted by Wayne Liew

Article marketing is just more than just traffic building alone. Even if an article appears to be on the first on Google for a lowly searched term like "How to make my PC free from XXXBOOMBOOM virus?" (Just an illistration ), the searcher will likely to convert a sales if you are marketing a particular software to curb the virus.

This is what I mean as quality traffic. In blogging terms, quality traffic means visitors that will return, participate in comments and submit your contents to social media sites. I can say that they are the foundation of a blog's traffic.

P/S: The Article Marketing for Blog Traffic Series is up with an introductory post on what is article marketing. Hope you guys will enjoy it.

erm... can't say I have seen an article repository listing at the top of any meaningful search. Why wouldn't you simply post it on yer site if it was about ranking and surf-through traffic? Makes no sense....

Article marketing is NOT the foundation of a Blog's traffic...at least not any successfull blogs I know.

Let's be realistic here... article marketing is old school and most folks do it as a half assed attempt to build links... It is merely a foundation of a link profile (with directory subs) and might bring in some traffic here and there...

Now, if you get a kick ass article, then target it to industry media outlets and get them to publish it. This can bring traffic as well as build brand/authority for the company/person you are promoting. But submitting the same article to 20+ article repositories is not the foundation of a traffic building, promotion or SEO program...

I have been around since 1998 and I can say without any doubt that the usefulness of article marketing gets smaller all the time...

You mentioned social media, certainly no one is going to submit something from an article repository... not a viable approach. While we're on the topic tho, social media marketing most certainly IS a much better way to go about things.

Instead of putting your article out on the repositories, post the bad boy on the site and prmote through social media profiles and industry cohorts. While we're not after the links from the posting, we do want to get out infront of industry leaders/influencers which then brings a secondart avalanche of editorial links... this is much better use of a kick ass article. You get the links and build brand/authority as well.

Social media is the NEW article marketing IMO - and article marketing for us generally involves getting the articles posted on market authority sites.

[Wayne Liew]

Article marketing should not be a blog's main traffic. However, the traffic from articles can endure for a long period and

Look at the following few search results:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=article+marketing&btnG=Google+Searc h
download free psp games - Google Search
download heroes free - Google Search

The reason why we need these articles to rank well is because of the high PR and the trust Google has for these sites, especially for competitive search terms.

Social media sites do deliver tonnes of traffic but after the spike, how many social media users will return if you don't submit your materials again?

Let's be realistic here... article marketing is old school and most folks do it as a half assed attempt to build links... It is merely a foundation of a link profile (with directory subs) and might bring in some traffic here and there...

Yes, here and there will add up to more. Let's just say you just got the "article marketing" search term saturated on article directories, which something you cannot do with your blog, you will be getting long tail traffic plus the broad search click-through traffic.

Also, article marketing is more than just using article directories, the articles can be used in guest blogging activities, Squidoo or even pack them up as e-books and give it away free.

Geez, I am rushing. Sorry if I did not get things clear.