You can download this podcast in audio format at the iTunes Music Store by clicking here.


Hello and welcome to Tactical Execution, an information series exploring innovative marketing and strategic business positioning for entrepreneurs and small businesses in an increasingly competitive world.  My name is Patrick and I’m your host.  You can find written versions of these podcasts at TacticalExecution.com and I encourage your candid feedback at the same location.  Today, we’ll be talking about online article marketing so let’s get started.


There’s pretty broad consensus out there that the two best things you can do to build traffic to your website is (1) regularly contribute to blogs and forums and (2) do article marketing.  And it’s this second point we’ll be talking about in detail today.


Article marketing is the process of writing articles and then publishing them on the internet.  Now, there are two sides of this and I think it’s important you fully understand the dynamic here because BOTH parties are benefiting.  You’re benefiting and the place where you publish the article is benefiting as well.  Let’s start with the RECIPIENTS of your articles.


The places where you’ll be publishing your articles are called article directories.  If you Google the phrase “article directory”, you’ll find places like ArticleDashboard.com, ArticleGold.com, GoArticles.com, iSnare.com, ArticleDirectory.com and ArticleAlley.com, and there are thousands of others.  Most of these directories have an automated submission form and nobody checks to see if your article is actually WORTH publishing.  So does that mean anyone could publish an article online?  Yes, it does.  Absolutely anyone can publish an article online.


So the big question is: why?  Why would they accept articles from anyone?  And why would YOU publish an article if absolutely anyone else could do it too?  Well, let’s take a look.


The article directories work like this.  They accept thousands and thousands of articles and then they position Google Adsense advertisements along each article.  You’ve seen them.  They’re always labeled “Ads by Google”.  And these directories are hoping people will come to their website and look at some of these articles and then, perhaps, CLICK on one of these ads.  If they DO, the article directory makes a small commission.  We talked about this in the chapter on Pay-Per-Click advertising.


And believe it or not, you can make REAL money doing this.  A close friend of mine makes over $700 per month from Google Adsense advertisements on his website.  And that’s just a small parked page.  $700 may not seem like a lot but consider that he doesn’t have to do ANYTHING to make that money and that’s also the revenue from just ONE website.  You could easily create multiple sites to augment that revenue.


There are others who literally make tens of thousands of dollars each and every month from Google Adsense advertisements.  I know of a blog that gets over 700,000 visitors each month and the author of that blog falls into this category.  He makes an absolute fortune on those little “Ads by Google”.


So anyway, that’s why they do it.  They’re looking for Adsense revenue.  And I’m sure some of them make TONS of money doing it.  These article directories don’t really care if your article is good or not.  They just want as many as possible.  And they’ve got automated scripts that look for keywords in the article so they can correctly categorize the article under one heading or another.  Others ask the author to select a category upon submission.  A visitor to the directory can do a search for a keyword and find thousands of articles that include that keyword.


Now, we also talked about CONTENT in an earlier chapter – the more the better.  Well, as you might imagine, you can go to an article directory and collect all the content you want – and it’s free!  You can quickly and easily get hundreds of articles and put them all on your website.  Here’s how it works.  Every time an author publishes an article online, he or she can include a short bio as well as a link back to their own website.


So if you want to use someone else’s article on YOUR website, you’re welcome to do so as long as you include the bio and the link back to the author’s website.  That’s the way it works.  So you can go to a directory and get hundreds of articles about YOUR topic and post them all to your own website as long as you include all the bios and links from the authors.


Now, don’t get too excited.  This isn’t some sort of hidden pot of gold.  I know some of you are listening to this and thinking “oh my God, I can build massive content in a single day without typing a single word!!”  Well, it won’t benefit you that much.  Yes, it may provide some benefits for your own website visitors – particularly if you manage to find some quality articles – but the search engines won’t give you much credit for it.  Google checks for duplicate content when it indexes websites.  If your content is identical to content listed somewhere else, you get absolutely NO credit for having it.  That’s why I stressed the fact that the content you provide on your website needs to be UNIQUE.  Unique relevant content.  That’s what you’re after, at least if you’re trying to cater to the search engines.


Anyway, back to article marketing.  If you can write an article about your topic, you can quickly and easily publish it online and have THAT article show up all over the place within days.  Back in 2006, I published the written versions of my “Beyond the Rate” podcast chapters as articles.  I published 13 in total and they now show up over 80,000 times on the internet.  They’re EVERYWHERE!  I mean; I’ve even found them on Asian website with all Asian characters and there in the middle of the page is MY article in English.  Amazing.  And let me tell you how I did it.


There’s a website called iSnare.com and I’ve added it on the Links tab of the Tactical Execution website.  On iSnare, you can publish your article and then pay $1.50 – yes, that’s $1.50 – and have them electronically distribute it to thousands of article directories.  And it’s all automated.  No human ever gets involved.  The article gets sent out there and automatically accepted on thousands of different article directories and it only costs $1.50 per article.  What an incredible process!  And they’re not the only ones doing this either.  There are hundreds of different article submission platforms and they all do basically the same thing.  That’s the internet for you!


So, getting your articles out there is pretty easy to do.  And keep in mind that all these directories that accept your article MUST include your short bio along with your link.  So that means you can have thousands of inbound one-way links to your website within a couple days and it’ll cost you $1.50 – beats the heck out of spending hours and hours soliciting reciprocal links by email!


Now, again, please don’t expect these links to improve your PageRank with Google.  As I mentioned a second ago, Google looks for duplicate content so all those inbound links don’t change your search engine ranking as much as you might think.  I mean; yes, there are some tricks to the process but the days of meaningless inbound links are over.  But that doesn’t mean there aren’t real benefits.


First and foremost, each one of those links represents a new “front door” to your website.  People who might find that article can click your link and get directly to your website.  That, of course, is the source of traffic.


You can also use your ideal keywords in your bio and use THOSE words to link to your own website.  In other words, you shouldn’t necessarily use your website domain name as the link.  Rather, you should use your ideal keywords and put the link onto THOSE words.  Google DOES look at the WORDS used to link to your site and your page rank can improve for those particular words as a result.  So choose your ideal keywords carefully and then incorporate them into your author bio – and then put your website link onto THOSE keywords.


Also, the position your article holds within the article directory DOES play a role.  If you’re close to the directory’s homepage, the link will count for more than if your article is buried under thousands of other articles.  So how can you get close to the homepage?  Well, you have to publish articles regularly and often.  All these directories have headings like ‘recent articles’ and ‘popular articles’ and ‘active authors’ on their homepage.  So if you publish regularly and often, you’ll end up in those headings, improving the impact of the inbound link to your own website.


And by the way, these article directories DO get real human traffic and those people are ALSO far more likely to read articles that are recent or published by active, highly-rated authors.  In fact, there are tons of people publishing email newsletters and many of THEM go to article directories for content.  Do you think they’ll be choosing an old outdated article?  Probably not.  They’ll be looking for something current.  And if you have something that fits the bill, your article can end up in an email newsletter to a bunch of people you’ve never even met!


So, how many articles are we talking about here??  How many articles do you have to publish for this to be effective?  Well, I recommend publishing two articles per week or more.  WOW.  Did I just take the wind out of your sales, or what?  I’m sorry if I did but that’s the truth.  If you want this strategy to work; if you want to build traffic to your website; if you really want to improve your page rank with the search engines, you need to keep pumping out new content, all the time.  Two articles per week.  Even one per day if possible.  That would be ideal.  But two per week is a good start.  That’s about 100 articles per year.  Not bad.  I know people who did two each DAY!  And they did that for 3 months!!


Well, I’m guessing you’re a little less enthusiastic now than you were a minute ago.  And you’re probably asking yourself, “how long do these articles need to be?”  Well, I have some good news.  Articles you publish online only need to be between 400 and 600 words long – just a few paragraphs detailing one specific topic or another – some particular aspect of your business.


Personally, I think about those numbers and relax a bit.  I mean; each one of these podcasts is between 2500 words and 3000 words, and I can usually crank them out in two or three hours, assuming I’ve already got the content.  Think about it.  500 words is about 1 typed page, on average.  My paragraphs are usually 80 to 100 words long.  So a 500-word article is usually 6 paragraphs.  You can have one introductory paragraph, a second paragraph outlining the article’s structure, three paragraphs making three primary points and one closing paragraph to wrap it all together.  Done.  With some practice, you can pump these out in 45 minutes or less.


Now, believe me; if you do this for an extended period of time, you WILL definitely see some real results.  Don’t expect anything in the first 5 or 6 days because all these sites take a few days to “approve” new authors.  But you’ll see your traffic go up a bunch after that and if you keep publishing regularly, you’ll see your page rank with the search engines go up as well.  This stuff works.  It takes TIME but it works.


Here’s another piece of good news.  If you absolutely HATE writing, you can actually BUY articles for about $10 each.  Yes, it’s true.  You can buy unique relevant content articles for $10 a piece.  It’ll most likely be written by someone in India or Argentina or Bangladesh but it’ll work.  Some of them are actually pretty good.


So let’s think about that for a second.  You could spend $20 per week or $80 per month and have a regular stream of articles being published.  $80 per month.  That’s NOTHING.  Compare that to some of the other forms of advertising people are doing – including pay-per-click, by the way – that’s an absolutely GREAT investment.  I bet you’d get far more real organic HUMAN traffic over a period of time doing article marketing then you would doing almost anything else.


If you did an article each day, it would cost you $300 per month.  That’s STILL nothing if you really think about it.  It would add up to $3600 per year and I guarantee you’d end up with impressive traffic statistics after you’ve posted articles every day for a year.  Seriously.  It’s a viable strategy.


The problem with all of this is the same as the problem with MOST of these strategies.  It takes time and it takes discipline.  Every day.  Every two days.  Whatever.  It takes some real discipline to do this and stick to it.  But does it work?  Absolutely.  It works.  But you have to get some discipline and stick to a schedule.  Can you allocate 45 minutes each day to write an article and publish it?  Actually, let’s call it an hour, giving you 15 minutes to post it to the various directories.  So, can you do it?  I guarantee, if you DO and if you have a little patience, you’ll be amazed at the results.


Now, publishing through iSnare.com is easy and VERY cost & time effective but I don’t necessarily think it’s the best way to go.  Instead, you could focus on the article directories that already have the top page ranks with the search engines.  I’ve done some research on this and included a section on the Links tab of the Tactical Execution website entitled “Top Article Directories” and it includes the article directories I’ve found with the highest page rank.  You’re probably better off submitting your article to these top directories than spamming it out to thousands and thousands of directories that never get seen.  Of course, if you can do both, that’s probably best but if you only have time to do one or the other, I suggest focusing on the top directories.


Now, if you want the maximum benefit from a search engine optimization perspective, I would modify the article slightly every time you submit it somewhere.  As I mentioned, Google looks for duplicate content and if you can send unique content to every single directory, your pagerank will improve as a result.  Is it worth the extra effort?  I’ll leave that for you to decide but it’s definitely worth mentioning.


So sit down and start typing.  Start by listing a series of topics you could address.  Each one should have a topic and three specific points you want to make.  Create this outline first and make sure you have your list of keywords nearby.  Get in the habit of incorporating keywords wherever possible.  And then start typing.  They don’t have to be long.  500 words is fine.  And they don’t have to be brilliant either.  Just make a quick argument for something.  Offer some insight.  Explain a process.  Whatever your content is, they just need to GET DONE.


Article marketing is no secret.  Lots of people know about it.  And now, you do too.  But the reason most people don’t do it is because it’s a pain in the neck.  It takes time and people always end up getting lazy.  I fall victim to that myself and I’m better at generating content than most.  But it really does work.  So if you want to kick-start your online presence and build some real human traffic, start writing articles.


Please visit TacticalExecution.com to get an itemized list of things you can do TODAY to start getting results.  It’s a FREE 1-page PDF file in the members-only section so you have to register and log in, and then you’ll find it under the “Resources” tab.


You can also view upcoming topics by clicking the Marketing tab under Podcast Chapters.  If you have a suggestion for future topics, please use the Contact form to let us know.  And finally, all the websites referenced on this podcast have been included on the Links page.


Okay, thank you very much for listening.  If you like what you hear on these podcasts, please tell a friend about them.  Modern technology like podcasting can help elevate new and innovative thinkers but we all have to play our part to help spread the word for those who deserve our endorsements.  If I am deserving of yours, my thanks.


I DO offer workshops, seminars and keynote speeches as well as consulting services so please email me at Patrick [at] TacticalExecution.com for more information.  I’m also doing an extensive podcast series on stock market investing, real estate finance and the economy.  It’s called Financial Audio and you can find it on iTunes.


Stay tuned.  There is a lot more to come.  In the meantime, think big, take action and market strategically.  Bye for now.