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When it comes to article marketing, we are not looking to “sell a product”, but rather to provide helpful, compelling, and informative information ? most of the time you won’t even mention your product. The direct intent of article marketing is not to sell a product, but rather to gain backlinks and secondarily, drive targeted traffic to your site. Of course the indirect purpose is to sell more products on your money site, but you do that by showing your potential customers that you are expert in the field, that you have helpful knowledge for them ? and by sharing that you can gain their trust as well as gaining backlinks for your site.

One way we get these backlinks from other websites, is by submitting articles to article directories and placing a link within the article resource box (or “about the author” section at the end of the article) that leads back to our homepage or internal page. Now remember when I said that we need to include relevant and helpful information within an article as opposed to sales copy? That’s because Google will determine the Keyword Authority for our site based upon the content on the pages where our backlinks exist.

If Google finds all of our backlinks sitting on pages that advertise the same product through repetitive sales copy or overly promotional hype, we risk being flagged by Google as being spammy. Furthermore, many article directories will reject articles that are advertising a product, or that contain an affiliate link. Remember what our current goal is: it isn’t to drive a sale (not at this stage), it’s to create a relevant backlink. It is critical that you grasp this concept.

Ideally, the articles that you write should contain between 400 – 700 words with our keyword phrase occuring between 2-5% of the time (but don’t stress on these percentages too much). This is a good number to work between as 400 words give you the opportunity to properly optimize your keyword phrase, and setting the limit to 700 words will prevent you from wasting too much time on each article.

Your article should consist of purely informative information, something that the customer is looking to read up on. Your goal here is to increase your Keyword Authority and Page Rank for the page that your articles link to. So for example, lets say that you wish to gain Keyword Authority for the phrase “scuba diving”. You could structure your article as follows -

Title: “Top Ten Best Locations for Scuba Diving “

Body: Provide informative information about scuba diving (research the internet to find information about this subject if you don’t know it yourself). Repeat the keyword phrase “scuba diving” between 2-5% of the time without sounding too spammy. I personally aim for only 2%, as the keyword optimization here isn’t that important, and I find anything higher begins to sound spammy. It is helpful to mix up the keyword variations so you could use phrases like “scuba dive”, “diving instructor”, “learning scuba”, etc.

About the Author / Resource Box: You include this at the end of your article, sometimes it has its own input section on article submission sites so keep an eye out for that so you don’t paste it in twice. This is the most important section of your article, and is where you include your keyword/anchor text backlink to your site. This section is the ONLY section that should include a link (do not link in your body copy, many article directories will not allow). Remember, don’t advertise yourself or any product. Your only goal here is to create a link back to your web page that consists of anchor text containing the keyword phrase you’ve optimised the article under. An example of a good “about the author” section would be as follows -

About the Author: “Melissa Richards is a professional scuba diver and water sports aficionado and manages a website about learning how to scuba dive.”

Notice that this About the Author section contained no sales pitch or any sort of incentive whatsoever for someone to click on the link? The entire purpose of writing and submitting this article is to create relevant backlinks from the sites that post these articles ? it is not to advertise my site or get people to click on my link.

Now the you’ve created an interesting, keyword optimized article containing a backlink to your website, all that is left is to submit your article to directories ? without these directories, you wouldn’t have any backlinks!

Before we discuss suggestions on where to submit your articles, let’s talk about duplicate content which you likely have heard of that may or may not play a factor in different circumstances. You may have heard that you shouldn’t submit the exact same article to more than one directory without changing the wording somewhat in some way. This is because (according to the theory), Google will supposedly penalize sites with duplicate content. This can be true on pages within the same domain, but if you consider the billions of web pages that exist out on the world wide web, if Google were to be able to compare one webpage to all the other billions of pages looking for duplicate content every time it spidered a page ? can you fathom the computing power that would require? Google is good, but considering their primary goal aside from relevant results, is speed. While there may be filters that attempt to look for duplicate content among related sites, its not a comprehensive scan. If they find 2 sites with the same content they will usually pick whichever one has more authority on the topic and that’s the one that will rank in the organic results.

However as we stated earlier, our primary objective with article marketing is not necessarily to get our article pages listed on Google (although if that happens it’s a great bonus), our objective is to create backlinks to our main web page by placing a link within our articles. For this reason, the so called “duplicate content penalty” isn’t a concern when it comes to article submission.

With that being said, we have only one objective in mind when it comes to article submission – Quantity. Quantity. Quantity. The more backlinks we get – the better.

So where do you start in your article submission expedition? I could list a few sites, such as ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, etc.. however there are literally thousands upon thousands of article directories out there that you can obtain backlinks from. There is no way I could list them all here. So to cut a long story short, submit your article, in its unaltereted state, to as many article directories that you can find. Don’t worry about editing it for each new site.

Now you may think this sounds spammy, however the truth is quite the contrary. Article directories love informative, original articles, even if they’ve been sent to a thousand different sites. Think about news stories released on the Associated Press – in most cases it is not 1 news outlet that gets exclusive right to the story, it is broadcast on thousands of sites. It is no different here. The only thing the article directories ask is that you created the content yourself (or had someone write it for you with the intent that you would hold the copyright to it), and that the author name corresponds to the name you use on the article directory site. We recommend creating a pen name and using that for submissions on all of your sites.

Article Marketer -

If you don’t have the time to manually submit your article to hundreds of individual article directories, I highly recommend that you use a service known as Article Marketer (no affiliate link). Article Marketer will automatically submit your articles to over 1000 article directories. Each article is reviewed by a real person to ensure that it meets submission guidelines of all the article directories before it is submitted. This site is truly worth its weight in gold, and I honestly wouldn’t be marketing with articles right now if it didn’t exist. It can literally save a month’s worth of work in a few minutes.

Normally articles take about a day to be reviewed before they’re submitted, however it’s not uncommon for this process to take a couple of days at times due to staffing shortages. There is also a free submission service at the website, which works similar to the paid submission service, however these articles can take up to a few weeks before they’re reviewed. The thing that I like most about the service is that there is no limit to how many articles you can submit. I recommend Article Marketer to anyone who plans on using the techniques taught within this tutorial in order to create a vast amount of relevant backlinks.

Important: Don’t submit duplicate content to the same article directories -

Important rule of thumb ? while it is ok to submit the same article to multiple article directories in most cases, one thing you do not want to do is submit the same article over and over to the same directory. Doing this can get you banned. We recommend creating a unique, fresh article each time you submit to an article directory. So you create 1 article, then go send it out to as many directories as you can find, then start a new article ? wash rinse repeat.

Article directories will begin to love you if you continue to submit informative and useful articles to them.

Spread your article submissions over time -

Submitting articles containing your web page link to a thousand directories at once isn’t a problem, but don’t spam your web page link endlessly, and we recommend mixing up the links and anchor text within your resource boxes (we have new tool coming out which will help with this). For every one thousand articles submissions, you can expected to get anything between 30 – 60 backlinks fairly quickly. This is quite natural. If however Google starts to see that you’re getting 500 backlinks after you’ve submitted your article 10,000 times, in the space of just a week, then Google will start to think that something’s not quite right as it doesn’t seem “natural”, and you may risk getting your site sandboxed for longer than normal, or perhaps blacklisted in exceptionally bad circumstances.

The longer your site has been around, the more backlinks Google will consider to be normal. So if you can, submit a new article to a thousand article directories once every week, over a period of 6 months. This will provide a natural looking backlink progression.

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