Article Marketing Success And Sheep Do not Mix

I like article marketing and find it an enjoyable and profitable way of promoting my websites. I never plan articles, the ideas just come out of the blue from something I have seen or heard. Once I start writing the words just flow, but before I write an article there are two things that I consider.

1. Why am I writing the article?
2. Would it be of any use to webmasters for their sites or for newsletter publishers?

It does not take rocket science to figure that I and every other article marketer am using articles to benefit our own promotions, but they will be of little benefit to us if we do not produce quality articles that others will actually want to read and use.

Owning my own article directory I have read thousands of articles, many of which I would never use on my other sites or in newsletters and many I have declined for various reasons. Let us consider the rights and wrongs of articles starting at the beginning.

Attention Grabbing

Your title is your headline, there to grab attention and many people never look past the first 2 or 3 words. I could have called this Sheep Do Not Mix With Article Marketing Success but I want people who are interested in article marketing and not sheep to read it. Another type of title that will not grab me is The Top 20 Tips For Passionate Sex. It would be more likely to create interest if it was Passionate Sex My Top 20 Tips.

Writing Standards

Spelling and grammar are important. You are promoting yourself and your business and you need to present yourself as professional to be taken seriously. I write my articles in Word first and use the spell checker. I sometimes fall out with it because I am English and prefer not to use Americanised spelling.

If you have problems with writing but good information the answer is to use a ghostwriter or copywriter. There are plenty of good writers advertising on the Internet and personally I think that one good quality article will do more for your business than 10 poor articles.

Know Your Subject

Good advice for writers is that they should always know and understand what they are writing about or their articles have no credibility. I was gobsmacked last week to read an article about my own country that I knew to be very ill informed and by somebody I suspected had never set foot on our shores. The guy could not even spell Britain right and as his misspelling was in the title he sunk without trace before he even started!

Original Copy

The best and most memorable articles are purely original, thought provoking and offer different viewpoints to a subject. Some writers submit zillions of slightly changed articles about the same subject over and over; yawn. They are boring and eminently unreadable after the first one or two. There are exceptions where writers are providing updates and news about their chosen subjects. I would use those articles for my sites.

Lists of quotes from the bible for instance are not original articles. At least 90% should be your own work and quotes only used as a point of interest not as the whole article. Submitting articles on behalf of others is suspect, how do readers know whether you have filched them or not? Plagiarism, not worth going there, eagle eyes and google will find you out!

Advertorial Blues

An advertorial is an advert written in article form. They carry no unbiased information or advice that would be of any help to anybody interested in that subject. There are plenty of places to advertise for free on the Internet, so trying to fob adverts off as articles is unfair on directory site owners or visitors who want to read articles not adverts.

Link Usage

The reason most of us use Article Marketing for promoting our businesses is to place links to our websites in the author resource boxes usually placed at the foot of articles.

I like to maximise the potential and use the up to 3 links usually allowed. Many article directories allow active links, but some do not. A problem can arise when articles are automatically submitted if the script the site uses strips the html. I prefer to submit manually mostly and then I can activate the links myself or just put my website address if the site doesn't accept html links.

Links within the articles are unacceptable on most directory sites, but as you get 3 chances in the resource boxes there is no point trying to cheat.

All Keyed Up

You will be asked to provide some keywords for your articles so choose wisely. Study your content and consider what somebody who might be interested in your article is most likely to enter into the search engines. A poor example is if you are writing about search engine optimisation and your title is SEO, Internet Business Bread And Jam, you would not use jam and bread as keywords unless you wanted to attract hungry people. Apart from that your articles credibility takes a nosedive if you do not know what a good keyword is.

Readability

Finally, your article should not be repetitive and should be interesting. Short paragraphs make it easier to read, text talk makes it more difficult. All capitals in the article body or title are a no no, they only stand out in the sense that the reader feels shouted at and nobody wants to feel like that.

I hope that you have found this interesting and useful and that we get lots more quality articles to read.

Article Source: bb-articles.com

Captcha & Increased Traffic

I haven't had much spare time lately but I've started to make small changes to BB Articles. I added a Captcha to the sign in page because the site was getting spammed. Submitters will need to visit the site now because automatic submission software won't work.

What I could really do with is a script that will decline plagiarised articles. My heart sinks when I log on and see a long list of articles waiting for approval. About 3 out of 20 are approved, the rest are plagiarised, advertorials, have links in the body of the article which most directory sites don't accept, or are too short. I have a minimum wordage to 500, although if a 450+ word article is full of good information I let them through. I now have a script that I can run to automatically delete articles of less than 450 words.

Some directories have a much lower wordage allowed but the best usually want 500+. Some of the more experienced directory owners say that less than 500 is an advert. I'm not sure if I agree with that but I wonder how small articles fare with google. When I use my web design software XSitePro it warns me to increase wordage on a page to 500 because it helps with google rankings. If that's so it makes sense to ask for 500 word articles, better for the writer and the site.

When I searched for BB-Articles in the google rankings it said that the site couldn't be ranked because of nofollow links which must have been set with the software, though a lot of the pages are indexed. I'm not sure what to do about that because they will have been set because there are so many outbound links which the robots would follow off the site. Maybe a google sitemap will solve that problem.

The Alexa rankings are doing great. Around 1,011,000 when I looked a couple of days ago. That might sound high but BB Articles has risen over 500,000 in around 3 weeks since the last time that I checked. I was curious and checked out some of the competition at random and out of 15 sites BB Articles was fifth in the rankings. The lowest was over 5,000,000 and the highest around 40,000. As all of those sites are older and more established the result was very pleasing.

I read somewhere that the Alexa rankings were something to do with traffic, which figures because traffic has steadily increased since the site was launched just over 2 months ago. The biggest increase becan when I started to use Traffic Explosion which was launched on August 22nd. I was sceptical about it working but the site stats tell me it is bringing traffic in and that will grow as more join.

I joined a web ring of article directories yesterday so hopefully that will help to increase traffic.

The Sun Came Out And So Did My Spare Domains

Lots of sunshine this week and everything seems brighter. More new writers for my article directory and the plagiarism has declined but not completely stopped. I stopped smoking but I must admit that I got stressed one day and caved in and bought a pack of 10 cigs. The next day my mouth tasted foul so I guess that taught me a lesson.

Instead of smoking I started to build a new site around an unused domain that I had at www.cashwrite.info It's not brilliant but I was experimenting with designing ads with adobe photoshop and using several smaller ads instead of an header. I had only used photoshop once before so for a beginner I'm quite pleased with the results.

I've decided to give the article directory a new look next month and I might use the same type of ads on the site to make everything look more coordinated. I didn't alter the design much when I installed the directory because I had never worked with anything like that before, but now I feel more comfortable with making alterations.

BB Articles has seen a steady increase in traffic. Quite gratifying considering that I've not had a great deal of time to promote it. Realising that you can't sit still I've been looking into ways of increasing traffic and came across a new traffic exchange programme that I actually totally understood and because it involves advertising the traffic that you get is targeted rather than random. It's early days for seeing how well it works.

One of the things that put me off the traffic exchanges that I've seen before is the feeling that untargeted traffic is worth squat and that I'd rather have visitors who are interested in my sites and are more likely to spend time on them and of course spend.

Another good thing to happen today was that I found a use for another spare domain www.dumpthatad.co.uk I got it a few months ago when I was trying to figure out how to get an advertising media that I used to run offline on to the internet. The idea is fun but a bit complicated for the internet, so I used the site for playing around with ads. I've been a bit stubborn and haven't been cloaking my affiliate links, but today among the masses of products that I own I found a link cloaker with a website and decided that the dump that ad URL would be perfect for the link cloaker site.

I've decided to give the link cloaker away free as an incentive to opt in to my mailing list. Lots of work to do there because I have a few ideas to add to it.

I've got some more spare domains lying around, I just hope that I can get everything else done before I happen upon a use for them!

Banging My Head Against A Brick Wall

Today was the pits. I got home from a hard days work, logged on and saw more new writers and more new articles than any day since I stopped automatic submission. I should have been pleased, I was pleased until reality snuck in.

Despite adding a paragraph in red above the article submission page about not accepting anything that is plagiarised etc. 27 out of 36 articles submitted I suspected were plagiarised. Some of the same writers that I had deleted their accounts for that reason signed up again and submitted more plagiarised articles. 6 of the articles were not written in English and as the site is all English I had to decline them. 3 decent articles left and a heck of a lot of my time wasted.

I have come across article directories that have suspended submissions because of spamming or plagiarism and I don't blame them.

Because so much of my time is being wasted I have less time to promote the site and write my own articles. That will have an effect on the genuine writers and of course my business. One little ray of sunshine is that I found a very low cost article writing service which I am now recommending to the cheats. I've no doubt that most will ignore me, but maybe some will get the message.

Newsletter and Forum

I have been so busy moaning that I haven't added the highlights to my month. I started a newsletter at the beginning of the month and it was quite well received, no complaints anyway!

I'm only going to send the newsletter out monthly, that's enough. I get newsletters from some companies almost daily and have stopped bothering to read them, but I still look at the less regular ones. Apart from the newsletter being about article marketing I want to encourage new ideas and will give anything new developed by subscribers a mention in the newsletter.

I have plans to publish an online magazine in the future, but I need to free up some serious time to develop the idea properly.

I will also be adding a forum to the site in the near future. I wasn't really into forums until I joined a really good forum last month. You get free advertising for posting and I've learned quite a lot and made some good contacts there too.

I'm looking around for a good script, may even get one made if I can't find exactly what I want in the meantime I'll continue getting free ads on my favourite forum.