Article marketing is dead?

[Lb1878]

Better time can be spent on developing quality content, putting it on your own site and generating buzz and links to it so you get the benefits and value from it, not someone else.

::cough, Uh hmmm, cough:: .... lol

Glad you see the light.

[i24designs]

::cough, Uh hmmm, cough:: .... lol

Glad you see the light.

Yeah Yeah Yeah... I know you told me so. .. I'm just hard headed and slow to change my mind, once I'm convinced of something.... I just have to make sure I listen to the right people in the future... Thanks!

[Lb1878]

Only breaking chops...haha good luck and keep us posted. Im always eager to hear how people do with articles and building a presence with them.

[i24designs]

Only breaking chops...haha good luck and keep us posted. Im always eager to hear how people do with articles and building a presence with them.

Definitely.... Seems like I have way to many projects going on at the moment... But I am eager to add one more to the list! Thanks again, I will keep you updated!

Oh by the way, I have been looking into starting a guest blogging deal with a buddy of mine in a related niche, but I am not exactly sure of some of the best practices...

Do you know how often we can get away with guest blogging on each others sites, before setting off any red flags? Do you think we should limit it to once a month, or more or less often

I am also wondering weather we should only include 1 backlink in a post, whether it should be in a signature or within the blog post and if it should link to the homepage or to a different page each post.

Neither one of us has done guest blogging before, so he and I are both in the dark about best practices...

Any suggestions you may have would be very much appreciated.

Thanks Again!

[Lb1878]

Do you know how often we can get away with guest blogging on each others sites, before setting off any red flags? Do you think we should limit it to once a month, or more or less often

This, I cannot answer. The obvious answer (hopefully its obvious) is not to abuse it. Maybe someone else has been down this road and can comment.

I am also wondering weather we should only include 1 backlink in a post, whether it should be in a signature or within the blog post and if it should link to the homepage or to a different page each post.
Neither one of us has done guest blogging before, so he and I are both in the dark about best practices...

Since there is a mutual agreement between the both of you, I am sure you can get away with more than one link from time to time. You want to make it look natural though, not like you are deliberately trying to achieve something. Could you get away with it for a while? Probably before a red flag goes up but I don't think you want to risk getting jammed up for constantly linking back and forth or raising any suspicion.

As for where to place the link back to your site, it is more natural if it is within the content and within context. You don't want to write a sentence followed by your link just for the sake of it. Deliver that link in a way that calls for it. Make sense?

If it were me exchanging, I would try to vary where to point the links. Make sure the link correlates to the context of your article and points to a related page on your own site. I would want the benefits of deep links if I was given a choice. Many places (primarily directories) only allow top level links so I can get my home page back links from there. Not that I am trying to limit myself, but just my way of looking at it. Perhaps I am wrong for approaching it that way. Although, the directory links don't pack the punch they once used to.

I think you have the right idea. Just be natural about it. I am curious myself about how much you can push the envelop with linking back and forth.

[i24designs]

Thanks... I think your right, I am going to try to link within the content of the posts and link it to related pages within my site, instead having a signature pointed to my homepage. For now, I will start off with once per month, until I can get a better idea of how things are going to unfold.

[EGOL]

I just read many of the posts in this thread and it is one of the best about this topic that you will find. Commendations to all who contributed.

I would like to toss one more item onto the fire which has not been hit strongly yet in the discussion.....

A few people give me articles and I place them on my site. These same articles are already on their site and have been indexed by Google. They are already on other sites and are indexed. When I place them on my site, almost 100% of the time, my copy of their article will outrank theirs for most of the targeted terms. The reason for this is my site is more powerful than theirs. So, if you give your articles away and others place them on their site you just might be inviting strong competitors into your SERPs, who will rank above you and cut off your SERP traffic.

These people have a different strategy for distributing their content. They don't care about traffic to their own site and they don't care about backlinks. What they care about is exposing THEIR MESSAGE to a maximum number of people. They are glad to have their content on my site because my site has a very high traffic volume in their target audience.

[i24designs]

I just read many of the posts in this thread and it is one of the best about this topic that you will find. Commendations to all who contributed.

I would like to toss one more item onto the fire which has not been hit strongly yet in the discussion.....

A few people give me articles and I place them on my site. These same articles are already on their site and have been indexed by Google. They are already on other sites and are indexed. When I place them on my site, almost 100% of the time, my copy of their article will outrank theirs for most of the targeted terms. The reason for this is my site is more powerful than theirs. So, if you give your articles away and others place them on their site you just might be inviting strong competitors into your SERPs, who will rank above you and cut off your SERP traffic.

These people have a different strategy for distributing their content. They don't care about traffic to their own site and they don't care about backlinks. What they care about is exposing THEIR MESSAGE to a maximum number of people. They are glad to have their content on my site because my site has a very high traffic volume in their target audience.

EGOL...

Those are great points... in the end we always has to keep in mind the true goals and objectives of the person writing the article.... as you stated... they may simply want to get their message to as many people as they can the possible motives are endless.

Your post is a great reminder that we should all carefully consider our goals and objective anytime we begin a new venture or project!

[clickthroughseo]

Excellent thread. It deserves to be summarised into a How To guide really.

[nigelkent1973]

from my experience you ideally want to submit one article to 3 or 4 of the top article directories, i have found this works the best ( with Ezines articles beings the top directory - it has an alexa rank of 200)

If you change the article from directory to directory then this increases the chances of Google givining you an additional link for that article.

You also do not want to bother with the lower page rank article directories, it is not worth your time submitting an article to them if you are after backlinks. It is much better to write one article and get a bank link from a page rank 6 site than 100 page rank 0 sites.

There is lots of discussion about dupicate content from articles and if you submit an article an it is seen as duplicate content then from my experience google does not punish you. The reason why you may want to submit the same article to 4 or 5 directories is to ensure that you get at least one link back from one of those websites. If you just submitted one article to one directory it can take a long time to get indexed and may even get lost wihin the 000's of subpages.

However, i would not recommend taking an article of an article directory and using this on your own website. I tried this with one of my websites and got penalised. It was on the first page of Google for a 2 word keyword and it was removed from the rankings. 6 months later it is only starting to appear again.

There is a suggestion that taking an article and adding it to your site can build content but from what i have learnt (been punished for) is that it is not worth it. It only benefits the person who has written the article by driving traffic to their website.

[autumnsmith]

Not so much dead but evolved... Having your article included on another site can be an excellent way to get backlinks and direct traffic.

Article marketing is not dead it is just harder to get benefit from it. Submitting average articles to article sites IMO is not worth the effort.

Best of luck

I have to agree on these posts of gazzahk. You made a nice job of explaining everything here.