Take heart, beginners–you will grow into those shoes.

When you are first starting to do article marketing, you are like a toddler who is trying to walk in his father’s shoes.

You want very badly to know everything there is to know, to do things the way they should be done, but sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

I have noticed that there are some recurring themes in the questions I receive from folks who are new to article marketing.

This is completely understandable–if you see yourself in the items below, just make the correction and move on. Mistakes can be our best teachers!

Here are 3 of the most common beginner mistakes:

1 – “I should be able to see some type of results after having submitted my first article, right?”

It would actually be unlikely to see any significant change to your website traffic or search engine ranking after submitting your first articles. You will usually have to do article marketing consistently for several months before seeing a change in the search engines.

2 – “Should I be trying to get my website to rank highly for my own name?”

It is not a big deal for your website to rank highly for your own name–that is not what you are shooting for.

Think about it–if someone knows your name, they already know about you. They will most likely find your website with little trouble.

The people who you want to go out of your way to attract with article marketing are the people who do not know your name or your business.

People go to Google and type in search terms when they have a problem that they need solved. Let’s say they need a business coach. They have no idea who they need, they only know what they need–a business coach.

So, they type the search term “business coach” into Google, and then a list of websites comes up. If you are a business coach, that is the list that you want to be at the top of.

How do you know what your potential customers are typing into Google when they are searching for businesses such as yours?

You need to do keyword research.

3 – Placing too much emphasis on one statistical measurement (PageRank, backlinks, etc).

Sometimes people will have the impression that they can estimate the success of their website or another person’s website by looking at one statistical factor, such as PageRank.

They might say, “That site has a PR4 or a PR3 (or lower). That is not a powerful site. If that site gives me a backlink, it will not help me.”

The truth is that PR is only one factor amid many that Google takes into consideration when formulating its rankings. There are many PR4 and PR3 sites that are ranking above PR6 sites for very competitive keyword terms.

If given the choice, would you rather have a super high PageRank assigned to your website, or would you like your website to be in the #1 spot in Google for your keyword terms? Obviously, your goal is the latter.

Beginner–avoid this danger. Do not take any one statistic and try to determine your own or anyone else’s success by it.

Really, the only definitive measure is website ranking for particular keywords. Is your website improving in the rankings for your targeted keyword terms? If so, then that is a sign of success.

Is your website sitting in the #1 spot for your keyword terms? Is so, then bravo–you are dominating for that keyphrase, no matter what your PageRank is.

(Here’s more on the topic of Google PageRank.)

I hope this info has helped some beginners out there! If you have any questions, just let me know.

Photo credit:

In Dad’s shoes by Micah Taylor

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Here’s a question I received recently that we’ve been covering in detail these last few posts:

I keep hearing contradictory evidence about article marketing. Some say it works, some say it doesn’t. Some say there’s only three directories worth submitting to. Still others say it’s a waste because they don’t generate any traffic. Confused? You bet!

We’ve already talked about the “some say it works, some say it doesn’t” part of the question. In this post we will cover the part about how many article submission sites you should submit to and why.

“Some say there are only 3 directories worth submitting to…”

People who say that there are only 3 directories worth submitting to are missing the whole purpose of article marketing (not to mention only getting a fraction of the results they could otherwise achieve).

You can see where their logic is coming from though–they are assuming that the reason to submit an article to a particular directory is for the sole purpose of getting traffic from that article on that directory.

I can see where that line of thought is coming from, but it is based on a misunderstanding. Let’s get this sorted out.

The purpose of article marketing is to drive traffic to a website. Article marketing accomplishes this in two ways–directly and indirectly.

Directly–You submit your article to a directory and someone sees your article and clicks the link in your resource box, which leads the reader back to your website. That is direct traffic. It is a perk, but not the main benefit you get from article marketing.

Indirectly–You submit your article to some article submission sites. Publishers see your articles on those directories and decide to republish them on their own sites. Every time a publisher reprints your article on his site he also republishes your resource box, which includes a backlink to your website. The more times your article is republished, the more backlinks are created for your website (this is maximized when you use our ArticleLeverage™ technology, either the standard or advanced version … more info here). The increase in backlinks over time positively affects your search engine ranking for your keywords. As your website rises higher and higher in Google and the other search engines, you receive more and more traffic to your website from the search engines.

This is indirect traffic, and this is where the big traffic payday is. Traffic from search engines is the main advantage for people doing article marketing, although many people misunderstand this, and only focus on direct traffic from the articles themselves.

Are there only 3 directories worth submitting to?

Absolutely not–there are tons of directories worth submitting to. The more directories you can submit to the better.

The whole purpose of creating free reprint articles is to have them reprinted, and the more directories you have them on, the greater your reach and the more likely publishers and readers are going to find your articles! That is the power behind article marketing.

As a powerful illustration of this, if you had written a book, would you only want it in 3 bookshops?

You have two options:

You can publish your articles on 3 sites and wait around twiddling your thumbs hoping publishers will find your articles and republish them, or you can take matters into your own hands and submit your articles directly to tons of publishers from the get go.

One of these options produces frustration and the tendency to say “this isn’t working!”. The other option produces results.

Using SubmitYOURArticle.com, as well as getting your articles published on reams of article directories, we also help you cut out the middleman … so you also not only get your articles sent direct to content-hungry publishers on our email list, but Gold Level members also get their articles published directly on niche-relevant blogs (and with our Naked Articles feature, more powerful links too).

What if you’re submitting by hand?

Now, if you are submitting manually, I know that this news about submitting to tons of sites does not sit well with you. You are only human, and there is a limit to how many directories you can submit to.

You would probably rather that there were only 3 directories that were worth submitting to, but honestly, after a while even submitting articles to those 3 directories starts to feel like a chore that you don’t want to keep up. And then you get tired and frustrated. And then you quit. And then you say, “article marketing doesn’t work”.

Then you aren’t sure what to do to market your website, but you keep on hearing your colleagues and your competitors talking about how article marketing is working for them. And then you wonder “why does it work for them and not for me”?

Does this sound familiar to anyone?

In all honesty, the days of hoping to get results through manually submitting articles are over … you minimize your results and it’s an ineffective and inefficient use of your time. You can’t hope to get the kind of results you would otherwise get through automatically submitting your articles.

The good news…

The reason why article marketing is the marketing tool of choice for regular everyday small business owners is that:

1 – It’s easy if you use an automatic article submitter. Your articles are automatically distributed to a large network of targeted publishers, and because your articles are getting widespread publication, you only need to submit a few articles a month (8 per website).

2 – It’s effective. People who do article marketing correctly see results.

If you have any questions about how to do article marketing, just let me know.

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Article Marketing Strategies

Look for golden nugget niches…

Here’s an interesting question that I received from a reader recently:

 

 

 

 

 

I have a question relating to my site and the article marketing strategies that I’m using. I started off targeting natural alternative medicines and therapies and had no idea what I was doing in terms of keyword search.

Now, I have changed focus to more natural and herbal remedies, rather than the therapies etc. (Hoping to find buying terms, rather than just information.) My dilemma is there are thousands of remedies for thousands of problems.  I have started writing in the last couple of months on articles so diverse I feel like I am not targeting anything in particular.

My question is, if you have a site that has too broad a theme, like mine, what do you suggest? I have almost given up on it at times, because I really don’t know what sort of plan to follow.

So, you have a website that has a broad topic–natural and herbal remedies. You’re right–a change in strategy may be a good idea.

When it comes to websites and article marketing, it is better to be a big fish in a small pond. Right now, your pond is just too big, so you need to scale it down.

My suggestion would be not to target so broad a theme but to look for the golden nuggets that exist within it. Keyword research will be paramount to narrowing your topic and finding some niches with high payoff potential.

If you do keyword research carefully, you’ll find niches within this area where the competition isn’t so great but where there is good traffic potential.

Focus on a small number of these “golden nugget niches” until you start getting traffic and start seeing earnings of some kind, depending on how you intend to monetize the niche.

As you start doing well on these and mastering the process, you can then add further niches to the mix and just scale it up basically.

You can see why the “big fish in the small pond” approach is more effective. It can be overwhelming to be immediately dumped into a niche that is as expansive as “herbal and natural remedies”. You could work a long time and not see much of an impact with a niche that large.

By scaling down your niche based on your keyword research, you can get a foothold much more quickly. Once you have your first foothold in the search engine rankings, you just expand your topic bit by bit.

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Gold Nugget by Razzmataz

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Are you a specialist?

When beginners are looking for article marketing tips, probably the first question they ask is, “What should I write about?”

My answer is always the same: You should write about your general niche–the general topic of your website.

Let’s say that you are a dentist and your website is for your business. If that is the case, then all of your articles would be about oral health care.

If your website is about scrapbooking, then all of your articles would be on various aspects of that topic.

The general topic of your website is your article writing niche.

What if you are still deciding on the topic of your website?

Obviously, if your website is for your established business, then your website must be on the same topic as your business.

But what if you are starting from scratch and are trying to decide on a website topic?

How broad or specific should your topic be?

Wikipedia defines a niche as being “a focused, targetable portion (subset) of a market sector.”

Let’s think of it in terms of medical doctors–the very largest “market sector” would be the doctor who covers the whole body. This would be an Internist or a General Practitioner. Because this doctor is focusing on such a large area, it is hard for him to have really in depth knowledge of any particular area of the body.

If a patient has a problem with his shoulder, the general doctor might refer the patient to an orthopedist. If he has a patient who is pregnant, he would refer her to someone who specializes in pregnancy and baby delivery. If he has a patient who needs surgery, he would refer to a surgeon, or even a surgeon who concentrates on a very specific area, such as a brain surgeon.

The general doctor has a very wide area of interest, and the specialists have smaller areas of concentration (niches).

Some doctors may get extremely focused in their area of specialty, such as a pediatric cardiologist.

This is sort of how websites work.

Are You A Specialist?

When you have a website, it’s a good idea to specialize in a niche (a smaller targetable portion of a larger market sector). The more specialized your website is, the less competition you will have, and the easier it will be to get a foothold in the search engines for that topic.

If your website niche is ultra specific–let’s say it is a site devoted to selling a particular toy that you invented–you will have to be more creative in your choice of article topics.

As always, you will want to do keyword research for terms that are related to your product or service, and then use that information to create article titles and topics.

I’ll use myself as an example–I invented SubmitYOURArticle.com. My website is for my specific product.

I have a very targeted niche–my product is an article submission service. This article submission service niche exists within the larger niche of article marketing. And then article marketing exists within the still larger niche of SEO (search engine optimisation).

When I look for keywords, I look at the super specialized niche having to do with article submission services and also within the larger topics of article marketing, SEO, writing, and other more general topics. I look for keywords related to my niche that my potential customers might be searching for in Google.

When you get a good list of long tail keywords (longer phrases that are very specific, usually 3-8 words long), then you have a ready resource for generating article topics around your specific article writing niche.

What is your article writing niche?

I ask this to get you thinking–do you know what your niche is?

If so, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Related Resources:

How Long Should My List Of Keywords Be?

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Anatomy: Figure Drawing by Philip Bitnar

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