How to Recycle and Monitor Your ArticlesHow to Article Marketing © 2009-2010 Ugur Akinci Article marketing should be one of the main tools in your marketing tool kit. In the long run it works very well. But there is a major issue with article marketing that no one admits: sometimes your articles get forgotten in one blind corner of the Internet. No one reads those articles (for one reason or another) and all that effort that went into creating them yields no traffic and no profits. Here is the Article Recycling methodology I've developed over the years which works the best for me. STEP 1 I start with posting my articles (must be over 150 words) to the high-traffic and revenue-sharing SITE 1 (e.g., Xomba). If my articles get a high read count, that's fine. I leave them there. This is usually a site that splits its Google AdSense revenues on a 50-50 basis. I also post the same article to SITE 2 (e.g., American Chronicles, or Web-Site Articles) which is usually not an ad-revenue-sharing site but neverthless draws a lot of visitors. I monitor the Google News to make sure this is a site that feeds the Google News RSS for the keywords that I use in the article. That's important for high visibility. STEP 2 If there is no SITE 1 or SITE 2 traffic, or if the traffic climbs and then stabilizes, I delete the article from these two directories and either add it to my Aweber Autoresponder Message queue or (if it's over 250 words) post it on SITE 3 (e.g., Ezine Articles), another no-revenue but high-traffic site that encourages reprinting of the articles. Each method has its own advantage. Articles posted on sites like Ezine Articles circulate for a long while. The build up starts slow but over a year or two you may end up with dozens and hundreds of reprints. Since each reprint also duplicates your footer web site information, you certainly get a lot of indirect traffic in the long run. Importance of Autoresponder I pay great attention to my autoresponder list as well since my own opt-in mailing list is very precious to me. It is the best way to carry out a qualified conversation with my regular readers while marketing my books and other information products that they might also be interested in. For example, currently anyone who signs up for my technical writing autoresponder list receives 2 years worth of weekly e-mail tips and essays on technical writing and other related technical communication topics. To me it's important to keep this direct line to my readers' mailboxes supplied with fresh ideas and materials. Almost every day I receive messages from readers all around the world, telling me the positive contribution these tips and tutorials are making in their careers. I recommend you also start your own autoresponder system if you'd like the get the most out of your article campaign.
Okay. You have posted your articles to the Ezine Articles web site. People who visit, read and like your articles have started to reprint them on their own web sites, blogs and ezines. QUESTION: How are you going to know who is doing what with your articles, or if they are doing it properly by, let's say, including your hot-linked information at the footer of the article? Ezine Articles, for example, provide detailed reports showing all kinds of activity on your articles, including the number of times they are reprinted on other sites. But what those reports cannot tell you is the exact manner in which your articles are reprinted. There are for example many software-generated spam-blogs out there that grab your articles and reprint them on fake blogs without giving any credit or hot-links back to your web site. So how are you going to monitor that? First off, if your article is used as fodder for one of those horrible spam-blogs there is very little you can do. Forget about it. Hundreds of thousands are created each day. Blogger, to its credit, keeps deleting them but the "black-hat artists" keep creating them by the millions through push-button automated software. They fake blogs do not even have any contact information since they are not created for human consumption. These pseudo-sites with weird and random domain names are created only to attract indexing robots which are expected to follow the links embedded in the article to the special sites that the black hat has created. It's a way to steal traffic from thin air. However, you can monitor other legitimate uses of your articles by creating a Google News Alert by using your name and last name as the search keywords. If you select the "Comprehensive" setting, Google sends you a full report of every new blog-posting out there that includes your name, including all the Ezine Articles reprints. If the reprint has published your hot-link in the footer of the article, that's great. There's nothing to do but send your thanks to the publisher. But more often than not such reprints would include everything in your footer but NOT in a hot-linked format. That is, your web site address and other information would be included in there but not as a clickable live HTML link. When I find such blogs, I leave a comment, thanking the owner for the reprint. And I do something else: I leave behind my own clickable hot link by typing in something like "Please visit http://www.learntechnicalwriting.com for free newsletter and writing tips." That way any reader who would like to click and visit my web site can do so. It's a simple and effective way to get credit for your good honest work. 2. SEO – Optimize your articles properly for the search engines. 5. Recycling – Recycle your articles through this "Dynamic Recycling" method. 6. Integration – Integrate your article marketing with social networking sites. Have a Great Tip, Photo or Comment About This Topic?Do you have a great tip or photo about this? Something that you believe we should read or see? Contribute and share it today! |