A Strategic Look At Article Marketing
Articles at article directories are basically good for three main things: getting a backlink, getting traffic to your website, and establishing a brand/following for yourself. If you are focusing on each one of these things in isolation, then you are not maximizing your article marketing efforts. They are all interrelated, and you should consider all three of these things for every article you write.
Let’s take a look at all three in detail:
Backlink
Articles provide backlinks. When you submit an article to Street Articles, you get to include at least two links in your article that link back to a page on your website. In the words of PotPieGirl, these are like “votes†for your website. In a simplistic sense, the higher quality the backlinks are to your website, the better your website will rank for a given search term.
The great thing about submitting to SA, is that you can receive highly-relevant, contextual backlinks in the body of your article. In-content backlinks are some of the best ones you can get.
Getting Traffic To Your Website
Since articles you submit to SA contain links back to your website, you can harness the power of SA to drive traffic to your website. If someone finds your article helpful, they are more likely to follow links that you include in your article.
However, there is a certain strategy you should employ to increase the likelihood they will click on your links. I will go into this in more detail later.
Establishing a Brand
Establishing a brand/following is probably the most neglected aspect of article marketing. Yet it is probably the most important element of article marketing these days.
If people read one of your articles and they find it helpful, they might be inclined to take note of the author for future reference. They might be interested in reading your other articles or even visit your website. They might tweet the article to your friends or “like†it on Facebook.
The social element of article marketing is highly emphasized by Street Articles and one which can be used to your advantage. Establishing yourself as an expert in a particular niche will provide you with a social following and improve your personal brand.
Since WA already contains lots of information on branding and establishing an identity; I’m not going to get into it here.
@urn357: I understand where you're coming and you do raise some legitimate concerns. I'm not claiming these techniques will work for everyone, but I have certainly noticed a higher CTR on most of the articles I submit using these strategies. I'll upload some screenshots when I have a chance, but it's not uncommon for me to get CTR around 20 - 30% on my SA articles.
Part of a high CTR also has to do with the article topic and the quality of the article. Some topics are just not going to give you a high CTR for various reasons (e.g. not something people are passionate/emotional about).
In response to SA not coming up in webmaster tools, I have noticed a similar thing as you sometimes. However, webmaster also doesn't show ALL of the links going to your website. Just because it doesn't come up in webmaster doesn't mean Google doesn't recognize it. And no, SA has not changed their links to NF.
Reply
And I've said this before in the forum. Google webmaster tools no longer recognizes my links from SA. They used to about 6-10 months ago, but nope not anymore. So if you are looking for Google to recognize your links from SA, then good luck on that. Yeah, your article may rank high in their search engine, but I think SA changed their links to NF or something. I will think this way until they clarify and show me I'm wrong anyway.
And I've said this before in the forum. Google webmaster tools no longer recognizes my links from SA. They used to about 6-10 months ago, but nope not anymore. So if you are looking for Google to recognize your links from SA, then good luck on that. Yeah, your article may rank high in their search engine, but I think SA changed their links to NF or something. I will think this way until they clarify and show me I'm wrong anyway.
