Article Marketing is a good way of gaining both backlinks and traffic, and more powerful than many first realize. In fact, some people use it solely for the backlink value, and by doing so, are ignoring a potentially incredible source of extremely targeted traffic.
One argument regarding article marketing is that it is a 'short term' solution, which basically requires you to submit content to a third party website as opposed to building up your own. While this is very true, at the same time, it is a way that you can tap into the already-high page rank and reputation of article directories, hence the good backlink potential.
What you end up with is aHigh Page Ranked site, which gets found in search result that basically advertises your website, which is fantastic.
Now how can you use the articles you have already written and create an abundance of content. Let me quickly run through a traffic driving strategy which has worked on many occasions, In fact I will be using this series in the same way.
Re-purposing Strategy
Let's go from an article you have written already, or one you will prepare especially for this exercise. Get an article which points toward a product or service you provide, let's not forget we are trying to make money with these strategies, so target the article to build a need for a sale.
Make sure the article is keyword rich and uses language which surrounds the product or service. In essence what we are going to do is turn your article into other types of media. This is again ensuring that we come from a position of abundance not scarcity. Abundance in this instance is quite simply to dominate multiple media platforms with the same information. All this information is tied by the same keywords and phrases right across the board.
Multiple Media Platforms - Same Information
For this strategy, you need to understand that Optimisation is all about links, linking from sites of authority, internal linking in fact any link that enables both the search engines to understand what niche your site's targeted at, and for your human audience to get to the information they are looking for quickly. Both of these need you to decide on your keyword or keywords.
1 - Post To Your Blog (Or Website) - Create A Landing Page
Part 1 - Firstly get your article on your Blog or your primary website, this will do a few things. Firstly create more living content for your site which is looked upon favourably by the search engines, but it also beds your article in. When you put writing into a forum where you know people WILL read it, you tend to put more care into it. You do you best with the spelling and the way the sentences are constructed. It's also a goo place to make sure you have enough keywords in the article.Part 2 - Create a "Landing Page" with a chosen "Call To Action" - This could be a sales page specifically there to sell a product or service. It could be a "Squeeze Page" focused on just getting people on to your list. Keyword focus should be on the url, titles, headings and body text.
2 - Submit your article to "Article Directories"
Go to Article Directories and submit your article there. These are great places to get back-links to your chosen site, your"Landing Page". The Articles Directories should all have a "High Page Rank" such as ezinearticles.com which has a Google Page Rank of 6 and anAlexa Traffic Rank of 105. You could also look atArticleBase Where people can pick up your aticles for their blogs with the caveat that all pst must carry your link to your site. So in other words, not only do you have article on a popular site, you may have a number of blogs running your article as well.
3 - Create A PDF
Creating a.pdf document is not only a great way to distribute your information in a format which can not be changed, you can also upload your pdf to sites such aswww.scribd.com
The great thing is that.pdf documents are fully searchable which means the search engines or spiders can read what's on them. You can put hyper-links in the document so a really great format.
4 - Create A Slide Show
From the information in your article and the pdf you can extract or distil a bullet pointed and descriptive presentation which expresses the core essence of your message with site addresses and keywords. You can upload these presentations to sites such as:
www.slideshare.net -www.slideboom.com -www.scribd.com -www.authorstream.com -www.sliderocket.com in fact Sliderocket is one site I think you should take a look at closer. I think it has some great video making potential... but I'm going to cover this in another post.
5 - Create A Video (Create Channel)
If you don't have a YouTube Channel then it's about time you did. If you have a gmail account then sign up through that but get on board with YouTube. Just so you understand the importance, YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world.. You notice I said Search engine!!! - People are searching for solution to their problems. If your article solves peoples problems then you can easily create some short videos even if they are power point based. In fact you could read from your article and use the slides you prepared for your presentation. All you have to do now is to use screen capture software like Camtasia for PC orScreenFlow for the Mac. A great alternative isscreenr.com which isFREE and a fantastic. Really quick to use and gets screen captured videos on to facebook, twitter and YouTube in only a few minutes.
6 - Strip Out The Audio And Create A MP3
Stripping out the audio from your video provides the opportunity to do a few really cool things. The first is to create audio bloggs or audio files in your website. The second is to create some free audio downloads which can be used as a valuable free gift in exchange for their email.. Ethical Bribe!! Third, you could create CD's to give away or sell and finally if you go over towww.podcast411.com you can find out how to create podcats of your MP3's
7 - Upload To iTunes As A PodCast (Create Station)
This is a bit more advanced but well worth exploring. If you are usingWordPress then you can create podcasts foriTunes using a plugin calledPodPress. or usepodcast411 (above) Creating a subscribable podcast again increases your internet presence and consequently increases the chance of targeted client finding you.
In fact that's what this is all about...driving traffic to your site or Landing Page by dominating as many on-line media types as possible. The reason we put it together in a strategy is simply so you get as much of this done as possible.. But even if you only did half what I have suggested you see a dramatic rise in the number of visitors to your site..
All you have to do now is make sure your site converts and you're on to a winner
Andy Phillips is an internet marketer and Director of Business For Life http://www.businessforlife.co.uk writes a Marketing bloghttp://www.andyphillipsblog.com/blog/ and producer of the "Squeeze Page Theme Packhttp://www.squeeze-page-wordpress.com/
