Writing Articles as a Free Ad Strategy

[Erich]

Writing articles is not as difficult as one might think... First go to Yahoo or google and enter the search term "work at home articles" you will find literally hundreds of articles related to helping people work at home with their online home business. This is where you can locate many different topics to write about.

The easiest way to do this is to copy and paste an article onto a notepad document and read it several times over to get the authors thoughts on the subject. You can then add and delete a few paragraphs here and there and change the authors writing style to your own... Sometimes you can change a couple of sentences with your own ideas in each paragraph and get similar results...

The main thing is to use the subject of the article you are writing and change the core content... to your own unique ideas and thoughts. You do not want to copy the article and use it as your own.

Anyone can easily complete an article in 20-30 minutes. Set aside one or two days a week and write at least 2-3 on those days. Do at least 5 a week over the course of the next year and you will have over 250 articles on your website.

After you complete an article and get it on your website you will want to email WAH webmasters [preferably in the top 25 listings at yahoo, MSN and Google] and ask them to post your article on their website. You will be surprised how many will respond positively. This is because it is also good for their own website...

If you do this then next year at this time you will have literally hundreds [perhaps thousands] of your articles with a link pointing to your website all over the internet.

If you don't own a website look at page 3 last post...

The following will not only teach you how to write and post articles, but also provides many of the latest and best online marketing strategies. You don't need to be a member of TripleClicks to get in...

International Association of Home Business Entrepreneurs- for great marketing tools [/color].

[stirls]

Writing articles is a very powerful strategy and one that everyone should do. The above strategy that Erich mentions is a good way to get started and a feel for how to write articles but I want to caution people that copying is not the way to success.

Google and other search engines are increasingly putting more importance on 100% original content. That meas if you copy an article already on the internet and just change a few sentences then Google or the other search engines are able to see that as not an original article and don't add it to their index.

Now not being in the Google index is not the end of the world - getting an article posted in an article directory or on someone else's site with a link to your site will get you traffic - but if it is not in the Search Engine Index then the article will not help you in the search engine results or with increasing your PR rating.

Here is a good tool to help you make your articles original - follow Erich's advice and find articles that you can work with. Change them and then paste the original and your article into this tool www.dupecop.com/duplicate-content-checker.php

Your goal should be to have an article 70% or higher original. If you hit that mark then you are good to go. But here is the catch - once you post the article on more than one site - Google will only index the first version of it (the other Search Engines are less strict) so make sure to post the first version of the article on your site, wait a week and then distribute it to as many places as you can.

This is a bit more work than it used to be but doing this correctly is still very powerful and should be done by everyone. - Plus it is free so why not give it a go

Chris

[stirls]

Mike - Google does this by using thier very complex algorithim that they use to rank pages and present search results.

How often do they crawl your site? That all depends on how many links are pointing to your site and how often you make changes to your site. the more links the more often the Google "bots" will follow links to your pages and the more freqently they will come to your site - this is another reason to get articles out there with links to your site.

[Roy]

Here is some information directly from Google on duplicate content::

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html

And on Copy Right and Duplicate Content:
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicate-content.html

Now what is confusing is if Google only index one page that contain Your Article:
Case 1: you page is index, that mean all other content site containing your Article would not be index, thus no added page rank for your site:
Case 2: The copy is index, then you page would not be index that contain the Article.

Roy

[mcomo]

I have a couple of question regarding article writing. I notice some folks have article pages and other do not. I also notice that some people have a small portion of text at the bottom of their main page. Here goes:

1. Is it better to have an www.mypage.com/articles.php, which has titles that click through to individual articles? It would seem this way you could have many articles topics on one page and it would allow many ads to be seen if folks had to go through several pages to get to the article.

2. Is it also good to have a link on your main page or just let them back into the site via clicking on ads on the article(s) pages?

3. Is their any importance to having some of the text at the bottom of the main page?

Thank you for your help on this topic.
Mike C

[Nancy]

;DHi Mike

I really think how you set up your articles is more a personal preference.

I set mine up with only a link on my main page to an article page, from there I am setting up links to my articles which are set up on other pages. All connecting to my website.

It was a lot of work to set up...but now that I have it, it is only a matter of going to my article template and inserting my newest article, go to the main artilce page and putting in the title for my new article with a link to the new article. Then uploading both to IPower.

I think I have about 30 pages attached to my website now.

I hope this helps. and is not to confusing.

Take Care
Nancy

[mkglenney]

I'm just now getting around to writing articles. (Why did I wait so long??? ) I have several articles in a couple of niches and I'm going to start in the work-at-home field.

There's an easy way to make original articles. I LOVE this neat tool. It pops out articles on the fly and it's all ORIGINAL. PM me if you want to know more about the tool.

[tjmarshall]

Hey Melissa!

Yes please let me know more about this neat tool you are using for your article writing. Thank you.

Tammy M.

[Erich]

I have been advised the following is a good place to submit your articles for good traffic... You must first get approved but It appears that is an automatic process. I have been told they are going to start a "Home Based Business" category as soon as they get enough quality articles...

www.evancarmichael.com/

Erich

[bosko40]

Thanks Erich,
It looks like a top quality site. I have submitted my request via email. I guess that's how we do it. I had a hard time finding which link to use. I was told by one who knows that Mr. Levinson writes some great books on marketing. I am looking to getting "Guerilla Marketing" soon (it's one of his books).

There are some great articles on that site by Mr. Levinson. Definately worth the read.
Adam

[tjmarshall]

Thank you Erich,

I will look into that right away.

Tammy M.

[Gitte]

Hi to all,
I think most critical is to make the right choice where to submit your articles. Not only should you look if there is an appropriate category for your content with good quality articles already posted there - I agree with this of course. You definitely should look on the Page Rank and only choose directories with a PR 5+ to get a significant amount of traffic AND a boost in your PR.
Brigitte

[Elaine Currie]

gitte said:

Hi to all,
I think most critical is to make the right choice where to submit your articles. Not only should you look if there is an appropriate category for your content with good quality articles already posted there - I agree with this of course. You definitely should look on the Page Rank and only choose directories with a PR 5+ to get a significant amount of traffic AND a boost in your PR.
Brigitte

Hi Brigitte,

As you say, posting your articles in the right category is important if you are writing good quality articles and want them to be found by human visitors.

On the point of submitting only to high ranking directories, I beg to differ. Of course you want to submit to the top directories but for improving your PR, any one-way link is valuable. You really want to get your articles published in as many places as possible. Google does not impose penalties if you have links back from "bad neighbourhoods", only if you link to them. As posting to article directories does not require a reciprocal link, there is no need to worry.

Logically it would not make sense if it was otherwise because, once you have submitted your article to a directory, it is available for anyone to publish anywhere they choose. For Google to impose penalties for something like this, when it is beyond your control, would mean Google's system could be manipulated by unscrupulous business owners to damage their rivals and, as we all know, Google is pretty hard to manipulate!

[Sandi Moses]

Something hit me over the head (not literally!) the other day with what should be obvious but may not be, especially to those just starting out.

==> The title to your article and the keywords featured in your article need to be - or at lease use - the keywords on the website to which you are trying to drive the free traffic. <==

Think about it. When people put terms into a search engine if your article contains those terms there is a much better chance your article will come up in the search. People click on your article from the search finding and from there to your website!

Sandi

[Elaine Currie]

b123home said:

Something hit me over the head (not literally!) the other day with what should be obvious but may not be, especially to those just starting out.

==> The title to your article and the keywords featured in your article need to be - or at lease use - the keywords on the website to which you are trying to drive the free traffic. <==

Think about it. When people put terms into a search engine if your article contains those terms there is a much better chance your article will come up in the search. People click on your article from the search finding and from there to your website!

Sandi

Hi Sandi,

Another piece of advice I saw recently is to use your keyword twice in your article title in order to get maximum attention from Google. eg "Work At Home: Does Work At Home Give You A Headache?". Sometimes this can look quite natural but you will see really horrible titles where authors have tried to use this technique with a long keyword phrase. It requires a balance between what will attract Google and what will be a turn-off for human readers.

Also, using the keywords for each particular article in your author resource box is supposed to be beneficial.

[cindi]

I finally started my article marketing this month. I have to say I am thrilled with the results I am having. Not only am I showing clicks from the articles themselves, the search engines are indexing them quickly. I checked my links this morning and they skyrocketed. Other websites are picking them up, including blogs.

I am just amazed, so I just wanted others to know that if you haven't started your article campaigns yet, you should. It does make a difference.

Cindi

[Erich]

cindioverfield said:

I finally started my article marketing this month. I have to say I am thrilled with the results I am having. Not only am I showing clicks from the articles themselves, the search engines are indexing them quickly. I checked my links this morning and they skyrocketed. Other websites are picking them up, including blogs.

I am just amazed, so I just wanted others to know that if you haven't started your article campaigns yet, you should. It does make a difference.

Cindi

Hi Cindy

I'm not surprised at the positive results you are seeing.

Many of the top income earners in our business make their money writing articles and publishing them online. There are many successful webmasters who like to publish articles on their websites which is where the majority of your traffic will come from... There are just two steps to getting this free traffic... write the article and submit them to as many webmasters and search engines as possible.

Keep writing and you will continue to see good results.

Erich

[Sandi Moses]

I'm still learning the ropes with the Google indexing thing.

Google last visited my home page on August 23, 4 days after their previous visit which is more or less normal for that site. I checked just to make sure and the teaser paragraph for my most recent article shows. However, even though there are 2 links to the page containing the entire article, the page containing the entire article has not been indexed. Google has no record of that page.

Do I wait a week or so before submitting the article "all over the internet" or do I wait until the page containing the entire article has been indexed? (That could be a long time and I don't want to die of old age waiting . . . . )

Inquiring minds want to know! ;D

Sandi

[talfighel]

Hi everyone,

For those who don't know how to write an article and don't really want to, I am willing to write it for you for a fee, as per Erich's permission.

I will be writing the article and it will be original. The article will be about the work at home and home based business area. It will be about 400-600 words.

Once the payment is submitted to me, I will start to write the article. It will me take up to 4 days to write, edit, and email it to you.

Once I submit it to you, you will have full rights to the article and I will no longer be able to use it in the future.

I will also provide you with links as to where it would be best to submit your article for best exposure.

if you are interested then let me know.

Tal

[Elaine Currie]

b123home said:

I'm still learning the ropes with the Google indexing thing.

Google last visited my home page on August 23, 4 days after their previous visit which is more or less normal for that site. I checked just to make sure and the teaser paragraph for my most recent article shows. However, even though there are 2 links to the page containing the entire article, the page containing the entire article has not been indexed. Google has no record of that page.

Do I wait a week or so before submitting the article "all over the internet" or do I wait until the page containing the entire article has been indexed? (That could be a long time and I don't want to die of old age waiting . . . . )

Inquiring minds want to know! ;D

Sandi

Hi Sandi,

Google is funny (why am I not laughing!).

I just had the opposite experience while waiting for an article to be indexed. I checked the Google Webmaster tools and found that Google has not accessed my index page for over a week (it usually happens every few days). Then I did a search for a phrase in the article and found the new page on my website containing the article has been indexed. So, in this case, Google crept in the back door without me noticing. I'm guessing this is because of a link from a blog post.

I would not worry unduly about having Google index your page before you publish your article everywhere else. The way things are working at the moment (you never know, it might change) is that Google decides who has the best claim to an article on the grounds of website "importance", ie number of links back to the page containing the article. The outcome is that, even though you wrote the article and got it on your website before anybody else, you will not get top ranking if your article appears on more "important" websites. This is why you will see so many instances of the top position going to articles posted at Ezine Articles.com or on Squidoo.

Google appears to have made changes to its pesky algorithms recently which have thoroughly shaken up the search results. I have seen sites that previously ranked within the first few pages for a key phrase, disappear altogether to be replaced by sites I have never seen before. (BTW - this is also having an impact on the value of classified ads on some websites.)

Sometimes you will find your webpage will quickly show high up in Google for a search term contained in an original article but, don't get excited, because this is normally only temporary. After a few days or weeks, your page will sink down and disappear. If you are lucky, a version of your article at an article directory or someone else's blog will rise to the top so you will still get some visitors from it.

As far as I know, Yahoo and MSN still take notice of the original date of publishing when deciding who has the best claim to an article but they usually end up following Google's lead, so we can't count on that lasting for ever.

Writing and publishing articles is still worth doing for publicity because, even if your website does not appear high up in searches, you will get visits as a result of someone reading your article on another website, each new article you post on your website adds weight to it and distributing articles widely is still the best source of free one way links.

[cindi]

Elaine,

I noticed this with Yahoo also. I keep a close eye on my keywords and who is in what position for them. Pages that had been up in the top 10 for the past three months have come and gone to be replaced by what I call worthless web pages. Some of the stuff that is on page one now for my keywords is blog posts, everything "scam" related and some stuff I am not even sure what it is!

I think the search engines are looking more for that kind of stuff. My site will never break into the top five pages of any website. I am in the top 10 for my key words in MSN and have been holding steady for a few months, but MSN hasn't indexed one article where Yahoo and Google have.

It is truly a game where the rules change daily, but I am with you, articles are still a person's best bet, maybe not for getting indexed as one thinks they should, but for free traffic and making a name for oneself.

Cindi

[Sandi Moses]

Well. This is certsinly discouraging.

I went to add my latest article to EzineArticles and found this report.

Messages: 0 Unread Messages
Articles: Live (17) | Pending | Modified | Problem | Draft
Page Views: Your articles have resulted in 7,163 page views.
Published: 425 times the EzinePublisher link has been followed for your articles.
URL Clicks: Your articles resource links have been clicked 3 times.
Emailed: Your articles have been referred to others 1 times.
Comments: 0 have been posted on your articles.
Votes: 1 have been cast on your articles.

Sandi

[Elaine Currie]

b123home said:

Well. This is certsinly discouraging.

I went to add my latest article to EzineArticles and found this report.

Messages: 0 Unread Messages
Articles: Live (17) | Pending | Modified | Problem | Draft
Page Views: Your articles have resulted in 7,163 page views.
Published: 425 times the EzinePublisher link has been followed for your articles.
URL Clicks: Your articles resource links have been clicked 3 times.
Emailed: Your articles have been referred to others 1 times.
Comments: 0 have been posted on your articles.
Votes: 1 have been cast on your articles.

Sandi

Sandi,

Please don't feel discouraged.

Your stats from Ezine Articles look fine to me. Don't focus on the fact that your resource box has only been clicked 3 times: that is 3 times just at the Ezine Articles website. It is more important to note that other webmasters have used the publish link 425 times. That means your articles could be on 425 other websites where your link could have been clicked many more times.

Also, Ezine Articles is big but it is not the only article directory online and, presumably, you submit to many other directories as well. I submit articles to scores of directories and hundreds of groups.

Don't forget, having your resource box bring visitors to your website is only part of the plan. Having your articles posted on other websites will give you free one way links even if they are never seen by human eyes.

If Google's unfair system is discouraging you, don't forget it is liable to change - maybe one day soon, Google will give us the recognition we deserve! In the meantime, we still have Yahoo and MSN.

Writing and submitting articles is a long term strategy. If you write and submit good quality articles, they will spread virally and will go on spreading for years. You can set up Google Alerts to track this and you will soon see that articles you published two years ago are still working for you.

The fact that your articles are being picked up by publishers indicates that they are good quality, so keep on with what you are doing but do it more! I won't remind you who told us we need to take "massive action" but he was so right. You need to think in terms of hundreds of articles published at hundreds of directories. Writing can take a lot of time at first but the more you do, the easier it gets. It took me nearly two years to get up to 100 articles on Ezine Articles but the next 100 is going to take 6-12 months at my current rate - and I am getting faster. I decided that one day my website will be so big that Google won't dare to ignore it and that idea helped me to speed up.

Keep on keeping on.

Regards,
Elaine

[cindi]

Over the weekend I have had two people email me and tell me they liked one of my articles and one asked to trade links. One was a marketing web page blog who added my blog to their feed and another a PR4 B2B page who asked to exchange links. Both are quality pages and I have article writing to thank ;D

Cindi

[troyzone]

Congrats Cindi! I guess that just goes to show how well article writing works as a free advertising strategy Keep up the great work!

Troy

[tjmarshall]

Melissa,

What is this article tool you referred to earlier in this post? Thanks.

Tammy M.

[stack]

I've taken alot from the forum, thought it be about time to give back a little:

As all the posts above indicate, writing articles is a great promotion tool, it helps build fresh content, and up our google rankings for article keywords with backlinks.

Article marketing can be very slow, and the results hard to see. With a couple extra steps, specifically using social bookmarking you can see results almost immediately! Here is how I would go about getting immediate traffic.

1) Keyword research - Figure out "long-tail" search terms that would likely convert in a sale. Long-tail is a term for search phrases that are very specific, usually 4-6 words. For example "work at home" would be very broad, and hard to rank for (since it's such a popular search phrase, and therefore has alot of competition). Instead something along the lines of "work at home jobs for moms" would be long tail. (In this case, even that long-tail search result may have heavy competition, you may have to be even more exact).

You can do this research with expensive software, or you can just type different long-tail phrases into google and see what comes up. If you find that the top results are not "exact" matches to your search term (ie. extremely relevant) you have a good opportunity for some traffic! Move to step 2

2) Write your article - Write your article using the key phrase that you have identified. If you need ideas, use the suggestion above of taking a previously written article (just search ezinearticles.com) and modify it so that it is rich with your new key phrase. Make sure that the title of the article contains your key phrase, you have your key phrase bolded in the article, and that your resource box points to your site (or landing page that you think would convert a reader interested in this topic)

3) Submit your article to ezinearticles.com This site has a strong reputation, and your articles are much more likely to come up in google result then when hosted on your own WAH website.

4) Social Bookmarking - Once approved, submit the link to your article at ezinearticles.com to as many social bookmarking sites as possible. There are over 100 quality social bookmarking sites (del.ico.us, digg, furl, etc.) Submit your article link to every single one. This has provided me immediate search traffic. These social bookmarking sites are crawled by google multiple time each day. Within days you will have over 100 links with anchor text of your exact keyphrase pointing to your article. You may find that within a week, your article will be coming up as the top search result on google for your exact key phrase. Because of the preciseness of the search phrase, the readers of your article are extremely valuable traffic! You will find you get extremely high conversions from people clicking through from your article to your site. The back-link from this article will be very powerful. Over time it may even have a PR2 or PR3 ranking, which you have created simply by add back links to IT from the social bookmarking sites.

5) Long term linking strategy - Now submit your article to hundreds of other article directories. Try to change it slightly for every 50 directories you submit it too, so that google gives it more weighting as "fresh" content. This will be your long term linking strategy as these submissions are not likely to provide results for weeks or even months (submissions can be very slow on some sites, google crawls these sites less frequently etc.).

5) Repeat for new key phrase.

[shing]

Hi Stack,

This is great information, especially for those working with free marketing methods. Perhaps this can be moved into a permanent thread to help with free marketing. It was great of you to share!!

Shawna

[bosko40]

Stack,
This is excellent info you have provided here. I had never heard of these social bookmarking sites. It's a great idea. I am an avid article writer and this really should help with the traffic from them.

Is there a list that you know of for all the social bookmarking sites? I googled it, and have signed up for a few, but was wondering if there was an easier way to find them.

Thanks again--it's good to see someone so new at this business offering up this kind of great info.
Adam

[bosko40]

I just found a pretty good site that lists several social bookmarking sites. Here is the link:

www.blogmarketingtactics.com/social-bookmarking/social-bookmarking-top-links.html

hope this helps,
Adam