21. Article Distribution

Article distribution is a technique that a few people have used for many years to build traffic to their websites. In the last year or so, that technique has been sold in eBooks and software to the masses, turning what used to be a secret guru strategy, into an over-used and abused traffic generation system.

In the past, a lot of traffic-generation systems that became popular with the webmasters, soon became a target of the search engine. Its not that search engines have anything against you and your desire to make a living online, it is just that they want their search results to show quality content, that is visitor friendly and genuinely informative and unique.

There are a few notable traffic generating systems that have dies horrible deaths at the search engines, probably most well-known is Traffic Equalizer (and clones).

Did you know that link exchanges are also being targeted? From looking at my own websites, I don’t think reciprocal links from highly related sites are suffering the same fate as unrelated site links, but that may just be a matter of time. I anticipate that the future is bleak for all reciprocal links. For that reason, you really should be turning your attention to one-way (or non-reciprocal links).

Earlier in this course I told you that I don’t bother working on reciprocal links any more. I do have some on my sites, but they all come from other webmasters asking me for a link, not the other way around. If that webmaster’s site passes my criteria I will accept the reciprocal link. The LinkMachine script keeps an eye on them for me, so I can tell if they remove the link, or indeed if there site is penalised with a PR 0. I can quickly disable those links before they cause me any problems.

So, can article distribution help, and for how long will this technique work if it is being abused?

At the moment, article distribution works, and works well. If done properly, it can drive targeted traffic to your site when visitors click on your resource box link at the end of your article. That visitor comes from another website, not the search engine.

Notice one thing about what I said in the last paragraph, as this is very important:

"..click on your resource box link at the end of your article"

That’s right. The link back to your site (which can bring you traffic), is at the end of your article.

So, who will click that link? Well, the people who will potentially click that link are:

* Those that read your entire article *

Now, of those that read your full article, which will click the link to visit your site?

Well, that is a difficult question to answer, so let’s put it another way.

How can we get people to read our article and click the link to our site?

1. Make the article interesting to the visitor. Tell them something new.
2. Make the visitor want more of your information.
3. Make it clear what you can offer them.

OK, now we are getting somewhere. The first point means we have to write stimulating, unique content. This is something I have been talking about in this newsletter for a very long time, so should not come as a shock.

If you are getting ghost writers to create your articles, try to force that writer down a specific path. Telling an author to write an article on "blue widgets" will usually end up as some sort of keyword focused search engine spider food, not a genuinely informative article on blue widgets.

e.g. I like to send my ghost writers a list of questions about the topic, and ask them to write the article in answer to those question. I go to Wordtracker to do my research, but make sure I use words like "how", "which", "what" etc, in combination with my main phrase. Once I have collected my phrases for a niche, I often have 3 – 4000 phrases.

I then import these phrases into my favourite keyword tool, Keyword Results Analyzer where I can quickly filter out the phrases that will work best for these articles, plus find secondaries for each phrase that will work to theme the page.

My authors are then sent the questions, plus a handful of secondaries to work into the article where appropriate. My brief to the author is simple. Write an article that answers the question, using as many of the secondary words as you can, while making the article read naturally. Put the questions as the title of the article, and work that question into the body of the article near the beginning. That’s it. No mention of keyword densities, not complicated keyword usage formulas that some other marketers teach. When you find the right authors, you know that your content will be useful, unique and informative.

The real key here is knowing that the question your article answers, is a question that people do ask when searching for information. You give your visitor the information they need, which in turn is likely to lead them to wanting more of your information.

OK, back to our three points. We have kind of answered the second point already, but we can do more. The resource box at the end of your article can make or break a potential visitor into clicking. Offer them something in the resource box. This can include:

a link to your "active" forum where people are discussing this and other related information.

a link to your newsletter where you provide them with further information on the topic.

a link to a free mini-series.

a link to a free report on the subject. I like to force the visitor to sign up for a newsletter before they can download the report, so that I get their email address. I only use double opt-in here, as it safe-guards me against people reporting me for spam. As long as your newsletter is the same quality as your initial article, you should keep hold of that visitor on your list for a very long time.

a link to another "must-read" article on the subject (and your article can lead the visitor into this by making it only part of the story).

Whatever else you can think of to get the click.

OK. so you have your articles. Where do you submit them?

Well, there are a few options here. Let’s look at a couple.

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