Internet Marketing and Publishing

Are you a ‘purist’ article marketer, working to syndicate every piece of content you produce? I am, and I try to follow the path that many fellow content writers have proved for themselves to be successful.

Article marketing, with the end goal to get your material syndicated and republished on popular, relevant websites and blogs, or in newsletters, has no association with spamming the internet with hundreds, often thousands of spun, unreadable excuses masquerading as articles.

Over the past two years, Google has been implementing algorithm updates to weed out, and de-index these ‘trash’ articles, and often the spuriously named article directories hosting them as well. Consequently, the backlinks they had been providing disappeared, and so too did the websites they had been pointing to. Hence the hue and cry on forums such as the Warrior Forum, Digital Point, Wicked Fire, etc., proclaiming ‘article marketing’ to be “dead”.

Cue The Article Marketer

For the true article marketer, producing high-level, in-depth content for syndication, nothing could be further from the truth. Our websites and blogs have flourished amidst Google’s onslaughts; this, in spite of the fact that we never actually produce our content to please Big G. Google loves us because associated highly-ranked, authority websites respect our writing sufficiently to republish it for the benefit of their readers. This provides us with backlinks that are pure gold.

But this is actually secondary to the main benefit: hoards of focused visitors who have read our articles, clicked our links and arrived at our own websites to read more. This immediately presents us with the opportunity to establish ourselves as true experts in our niches; our websites as the places to go for the information they require. It’s the one reason why every article we offer for syndication should first be published and indexed on our own blogs and websites. We, quite rightly, should be recognized as the authority, but equally as important, each article should a building block cementing our status as the expert to be sought out and read. Read the rest of this entry

Copyright infringement is an unfortunate issue many internet marketers are encountering, often on a daily basis. Unscrupulous thieves seem to view someone else’s published content as fair game to copy; heck, I went through a long, unpleasant correspondence with one guy who flat out insisted, once I published my writing on the internet, it became public property for anyone to copy at will, without permission or attribution. There are also a lot of software programs out there to scrape content from article directories, websites etc., and automatically republish it on “autoblogs.”

I publish a lot of content in my blogs and at Ezine Articles, and, of course, my purpose is to get these articles picked up by niche-relevant webmasters and re-published in their blogs, newsletters, etc. But, they are required to leave my resource box with its backlinks to my own internet real estate intact. The vast majority of them do, but there are always one or two jerks who think the rules just don’t apply to them.

Implementing Google Alerts is one method I employ to alert me about people stealing my content, and I use it to good effect.

• Every time I publish anything, I always head straight to Google Alerts which provides me with customized, saved searches executed automatically and delivered to my inbox or RSS reader. To set up an alert, I pick one sentence or short paragraph from my article and enter it as a search term (exactly as you would for a regular Google search, with the same optional parameters). Then, I click the ‘Type’ field to define what source(s) Google should use: Everything, News, Blogs, Videos, Discussions, or Books.

• Next, I choose how often I need to receive alerts: ‘as it happens,’ ‘once a day’, or ‘once a week’. I usually select ‘as it happens.’ I also set the Volume to ‘only the best results.’
• Finally, I decide how I need the alerts to arrive: via email or feed; I normally opt for email.

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When I wrote the article “10 Proven Benefits of Converting Your Articles into Videos” the first comment I received from one of my followers was “How do you turn your articles into videos?” This prompted me to come up with this simple explanation on how to go about it.

There are several options of converting your articles into videos. For instance you can use PowerPoint to create animated slides and convert them into a video format. You can use a flash program to create your videos. But these options really require technical know-how and most people may find it a little bit difficult.

The easiest way to convert your articles into videos is by using an article-to-video-converter software that turns them into videos in the shortest time possible. It is user friendly and it doesn’t require much technical know-how. But you need to select a good program that allows you to edit your article in any way you want. Secondly, you need to spend some money to use the service.

Normally a good program will have a variety of free images you can choose from to use as a background for your videos, with an option to upload your own images. A good program should also have a variety of free background music and a provision to distribute your videos to major video sharing websites like YouTube, MySpace, Yahoo Video, Daily Motion, Metacafe, Revver, Sclipo and many others at no extra cost to save you time and money.

Converting your articles into videos, using an article-to-video converter program, is a three-step process that involves copying and pasting your article into the program, converting it to video and uploading it for distribution to video sharing websites. It’s as simple as that.

Copying and pasting your article into the program takes just a second. After pasting it into the program, the software automatically separates the paragraphs, which then become your video screen descriptions. Each screen description corresponds to a specific paragraph.

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Everywhere you look these days, especially since Google’s ongoing succession of algorithm updates, naysayers are proclaiming, “article marketing is dead” or, “article marketing doesn’t work any more”. Fortunately, my experience tells a completely different story: instead of losing its effectiveness, article marketing in its original, purest sense has now acquired a whole new authority, helped, rather than hindered by Google’s clampdown to eliminate trash content.

Complementary to article marketing is Guest Blogging, and when approached correctly, it can very easily produce superior results. Why should this be? Well, a blog post is an article, the only difference being, it’s published in a blog, not an article directory. However, that one difference can be amazing in the focused, quality traffic it attracts.

So, How Does Guest Blogging Provide Superior Traffic?
Simple. As respected as many article directories may be, they are not authoritative websites. When people are searching for information on a subject, or solutions to their problems, they will only read your article posted in a directory if they happen to stumble upon a link to it during their search. There is no way they are going to head directly to Ezine Articles or Article Base to find answers.

Article directories were created to be depositories for articles; a place where webmasters can go when they need fresh content for their websites, blogs or newsletters. Only when these webmasters publish your content, can it begin to attract focused readers back to you. Their ready made, niche relevant audience will read your content, and if your information is good enough, they will follow the links to your website in the resource box for additional reading.

When you publish an article in an article directory, it’s with the intention it will get picked up by niche relevant webmasters, but there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t stack the odds significantly in your favor and pro-actively seek out and approach these webmasters directly and offer to guest blog for them.

In fact, you really should make Guest Blogging a major part of your article marketing strategy. It will involve quite a bit of additional work on your part, but I promise you, the results will be well worth the efforts. Read the rest of this entry

Whenever you create material for your blog or website, don’t make the common mistake of assuming you need to sacrifice the quality of your content in the name of SEO. You may be surprised to learn how the two can actually coexist in complete harmony. Look at it this way, your intended readers will be searching the internet using the keywords which are pivotal to your SEO, so, if you create your content based on topics constructed around those same keywords, there is a strong likelihood this is also the content they are seeking.

Use the right keywords so that your content is found easily, but always write coherently, for your readers to enjoy. The worse mistake you can make is stuffing your content with keywords, just for the benefit of Google. Actually, Google’s algorithms are getting progressively smarter; throughout the year they have been de-indexing what I describe as SEO fodder, or material short-sightedly produced to please the search engines, rather than live, human readers.

When people enter a keyword and perform a search, they are presented with a list of links. If they click to visit your website because they are intrigued by your title in the search results, they do so because they expect your content to live up to their expectations.

Your opening paragraph will either entice them to read further, or drive them to click their back button. Your content needs to be fresh, helpful, and sympathetic to whatever caused them to search online in the first place. It should anchor them to your website, eager to consume more of your writing. Your content may be easy to find, but without its perceived, crucial empathy with your readers, little of it will be read to completion, and none of it will be shared.

Presenting them with re-hashed, keyword heavy “fodder” they may have already read, which is neither helpful nor relevant will do absolutely nothing for your reputation. Furthermore, Google now uses your site’s perceived “stickiness” in its ranking algorithms. This translates into good or bad news for your SEO; offer content which causes your visitors to disappear fast and your rankings will suffer; offer optimized editorial excellence, keep them on your site reading and Google will rank you accordingly.

Anne Pottinger +