Great post. I must admit article marketing is still a great way today to get traffic. Once I have had my articles written I submit them to ezinearticle and once they have been accepted by ezinearticle, I submit them to seolink vine and it slowly builds backlinks to my site and it works great for me.

Good old bum marketing after all these years it’s still going strong!

Blake

Which of the two products would you recommend?
Article Post Robot or AutomaticArticleSubmitter (recommended by Josh Spaulding)

Thanks in advance!
Karim

I am trying this now as part of the AAS tutorial series (as you know) — and I will publish all of the results.

What is needed to prove this is testing….which I have not done.

Thanks,
Mark

Anyway, about to buy AAS from ya.

Should be fun. Oh also, do you generally have good success using article marketing with CPA offers? email me if easier. Thanks

Jan

Jan

With the web 2.0, article marketing is becoming even more effective.

Franck

@Joe — I have thought about it — stay tuned. Hopefully there will be a whole new version this summer.

More recently I’ve been experimenting by submitting articles I feel are stronger more well written, to fewer yet stronger article directories(i.e. ezine) and then submitting weaker content to a larger number of directories to help create a larger number of backlinks… then back and forth depending on the content. I maybe just maybe just making things more complicated than it needs to be?

(This is essentially Josh’s method and maybe giving too much away from josh’s ebook – you would’nt hurt my feelings if you didnt publish this comment)

There are some articles you really want to call your own and want that content to ONLY be on your site.. but then at the same time you want to get the word out about those articles… its a catch 22 I suppose.

Also thanks to both you and Josh on clearing up the difference between bum marketing and article marketing. I was one who used both terms interchangeably.

How many months revenue were you able to get from selling your article directories? Did you put extra links to the websites you wanted while you ran them?

Thanks

Thanks for stopping by.

Mark

I just found your blog and you have some excellent content here, congratulations. We have friends in common – Jay & Sterling from IBM.

I use Micro Niche Finder and Article Wizard Pro, two very useful tools.

Regards

Andrew

I, too, like IAWP. I’ve only tested a handful of keywords to see how well it performs and the way it puts together its findings is quite impressive. I’m excited to see how much time it can cut down on article writing.

Mark

I really appreciate the clarification on Bum marketing, and I have updated the article accordingly.

Also, regarding time for an article directory — is it the article approval part? If so, what about that takes time, and why can’t that be completely automated?

Thanks!
Mark

@ Christine – I’m not sure what article directories you’re talking about, but all of those which are worth submitting to are absolutely free and you ALWAYS retain all rights to your work! The only site that MAY be worth submitting to that pays for content is AssociatedContent.com and I don’t recommend submitting there. They don’t allow a realy resource box and although articles there normally get a decent amount of traffic they don’t convert, as they don’t allow you to place your resource box at the bottom.

As far as an article directory shutting it’s doors…it’s not going to hurt you. You have full rights to your articles, so just submit elsewhere. The only way that would be an issue would be if you only submitted to that one article directory and didn’t save your copy, which wouldn’t be smart 🙂

@ Garry – You’d be surprised. I’ve created several article directories in my time. You’d be surprised how many people out there will submit to a new article directory. I normally just start a small, cheap adwords campaign and they take off. I’ve started and later sold articlesalley.com everyonesarticles.com and a few others. I’ve had several up to $100+/day before selling.

The downside to running article directories is that they’re EXTREMELY time consuming. The real secret to running a successful article directory is loads of deep linking. The content piles up so fast and so deep that you need to get to spiders deep into it not only to get the content indexed, but to get some authority down into those deep pages.

@Garry — I have always wondered about that myself. Not sure if Matt would be willing to reveal the secret sauce. Josh Spaulding knows something about Article Directories. I will ask him.

I can see how things work very well on your end as your site is monetized. I’d like to see if you’d provide some input on how you shaped and molded your site into being a site to where people feel compelled to invest the time into submitting their articles into you directory. How did you get the ball rolling? No one is going to invest time into submitted into a ghost town, so how did you go about marketing your site and getting say the first 100 articles added?

One thing that works really well in my opinion is to avoid competing directly with your website when doing article marketing. This is what I was referring to above when I talked about keyword selection strategies. Obviously it’s hard to explain all this in a short blog post.

Like Garry I’d really love to hear what you say about this. Your opinion is welcome here always.

I am glad to see that you are following Mark Mason’s publishing… What are some fine print items that people should be aware of?

I had submitted a couple articles to an article directory some years back, and it was doing very well. Then the site closed down for some unknown reason and took my work with it. There was no warning, no explaination, nothing. It was just gone.

That’s why I say you’ve got to do your homework on these sites before submitting anything. Mark mentioned a site called EzineArticles.com. That is probably one of the top sites online. However, there are a lot of them out there, and like anything else, there are a lot of scams. Read the fine print in the TOS before you commit to anything.

For the writer, you have the potential to have your articles seen by hundreds of people. The down side is that you’ve got very few rights to your own work. Of course it depends on which directory you work with.

For someone who runs a newsletter or website, it’s a great way of finding articles to fill in blank spots. Most of these articles are free to use, as long as you keep the author’s information with it.

They are a very valuable tool, but you’ve got to read the fine print before you jump in.