Where is the best place to publish your article?
I bet you are thinking I will say EzineArticles now aren’t you?
Well guess what? You are wrong!
I love EzineArticles and the article directories have their uses. But, they are not the best way of publishing your carefully crafted content online.
The answer is quite simply – publish your articles on YOUR blog first. If you don’t have one yet, rush off to Expert WordPress; download their free super cool hacker safe set up tool and install a blog complete with SEO plugins today.
No, I haven’t gone crazy (I already was a bit mad but that is a different story…)
By publishing your article on EzineArticles first, you are helping to make the directory an authority site. Why not put the effort into making YOUR site an authority in your niche?
The main reason is sales conversions, particularly if you are an affiliate marketer.
Think about it.
Each step you place in front of your potential customer, your conversion is diluted. Let’s take a look at some easy numbers.
For example, your article gets 1000 views and 10% click through to your site (I think EZA average is around 5% but it’s early and we will assume you are above average!).
100 visitors land on your site; they are already interested in what you have to say so 20% click through to your affiliate product.
Now there are 20 visitors landing on the sales page. Let’s be generous and say 5% buy (that is VERY generous, most Clickbank products convert at around 1% or less).
That is 1 sale if I have done my basic math right.
The article directory is the winner. They are the authority site; they have the full 1000 visitors to monetise.
What if…
YOUR site was the authority site. You can do it, just publish to your blog first. It will take some time, but you are writing the articles anyway.
I can hear your questions now so let’s debunk a few article marketing myths while we are here.
1. Article directories require unique content
Most article directories, including EzineArticles, require you to submit your own original content. What this means is you publish content owned by you that does not appear elsewhere on their directory.
You can publish articles that you have submitted to other directories and that appear on your blog.
You CANNOT publish PLR articles since they are very likely already in their database and EZA would be hit by duplicate content penalties (more about that in a mo!).
Now, be a bit careful. SOME directories require unique content that has not been published anywhere else on the internet. These tend to be the revenue sharing article sites. Check the publisher guidelines first.
2. What about duplicate content?
The duplicate content penalty only applies when the same content is published on the same domain – which is why you should not submit PLR articles to the article directories.
However, if you publish your article several times without any changes, some of those articles will end up in the supplemental index. This is because the search engines want to please their searchers. Showing several results that are all exactly the same is not the best way to serve their customers.
This is NOT the duplicate content penalty. Your articles are still indexed and the backlinks are still valid. And, if you published on your blog first then the chances are it will be YOUR site that is chosen to appear in the rankings.
However, it is good practice to tweak each article before you submit it to the article directories. Change the title slightly and rewrite the first paragraph at least.
What is your article marketing plan now?
- Write your article
- Publish your article on your blog
- Ping it so it is found and indexed
- If you’re not being lazy, re-write the title and make some changes to your article so it is not exactly the same.
- Publish your article online using the article directories
- Sit back and watch your site become the authority site and the money start coming in.
Want to know more about article marketing? Download my free report
.gif "Free Traffic System - Increase Targeted Website Traffic with Free
Unlimited One Way Links")
What do you mean by
“Ping it so it is found and indexed”
Pinging is basically using a tool to notify other services that your blog (or website, feed, podcast etc) has new information.
If you use WordPress, look in settings > writing > update services and you will likely see http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ as it comes as standard.
Now, the problem with this is WP will notify pingomatic with EVERY change you do on your blog. Eventually it becomes ineffective.
Some people will advise to add additional services, so you have a whole list of ping services going on. Theres 2 problems with this method
1. It slows down your blog after every change
2. You are spamming pings and they will eventually become ineffective.
I personally prefer to manually ping, using a service like feed shark, pingoat or ping-o-matic There are lots of services out there, see which one matches your site type best.
Additionally I have the Google XML Sitemaps plugin which notifies Google, Bing and Ask (and Yahoo if you have an ap key) each time you post.
Hope that helps