8 Little Known Ways to Get Your Articles Read and Published
Marketing with articles, for as long as it’s been around, may have seemed to have lost it’s punch over the years. Or at least that’s what lots of people believe. But actually, it’s quite the opposite.
Many prosperous website owners will tell you that writing articles and submitting them to online directories is how they got their start on the internet, and they’ll further tell you that they continue to do so. This is typically due to the fact that it works. Plain and simple.
That said, one of the keys to successful article promotion is to stick to a few easy rules to make sure that first, your article gets read and second, that once someone does finish reading your content, they click through to your site.
Here are some great tips you can follow when using article marketing as part of your overall strategy online.
- Take a look at what’s popular. Many article directories like EzineArticles.com for example, let you view the most published and the most viewed articles within a certain subject area. To see which articles are the most popular in the market you’re writing for, do a search for your topic, click on any article and then scroll down to the bottom portion of that article’s page. Here you will see the articles that have been published and viewed the most often.
- Make your title intriguing. It must be a topic that people have an interest in and that will have the ability to get plenty of views online. Using article titles such as “5 Ways to…”, “10 Reasons Why…”, “Top 12 Reasons Why ___________”, are some frequently used and incredibly effective titles.
- No self promotion. One of the reasons other sites turn to article directories for immediate and free content is because the subject which has been written about is a good choice for their own website readers. It will be quite challenging to get other sites to publish your articles if all you do is promote your own personal product or service.
- Use great spelling. If your content is a hot topic that is getting lots of views yet there are numerous misspellings within the content, it most likely won’t be published by other webmasters. Most article directories these days run your submission through a spell-checker first before you can publish the article so it will catch many of these mistakes but just to make sure, run it through your own spell-check first.
- Make it easy to read. Use bullet points or numbered lists to make for easier reading.
- Be clear and succinct. Avoid long drawn-out paragraphs and break up your content into manageable parts. Your content shouldn’t leave the reader wondering what your content was about in the first place.
- Grab attention within your authors resource box. Keep in mind, your authors resource box is your “take”. This is where you’ll encourage the reader to visit your site. Tell them why it would be advantageous for them to download an e-book you have written or to sign up for your newsletter.
- Don’t stick to just one directory. When distributing your content don’t just stick to one service. There are several well-known directories online that you can submit your articles to. Just be certain that when you do, you are submitting unique content and not re-using the same article over and over again.
Once you begin the whole process of writing and submitting articles and submitting them, you will start to notice an increase in visitors to your website.
This traffic will not only come from the directories themselves but you’ll often note that other sites who have chosen to publish your article will also be sending you visitors.
This is the biggest advantage of marketing with articles since that one piece of content that you submitted may be used by numerous locations online thus increasing not only the visitors you get, but it can help you get those valuable and much-needed back links to your website too.
Lost PageRank? Can You Get it Back?
Filed under: Google, Internet Marketing, Marketing Strategies, Online Marketing, seo, Traffic, Web Sites
A question that’s often asked (nearly everywhere SEO is talked about it seems) is about PageRank and what to do if all of a sudden the awesome PageRank you just had yesterday – has tanked or worse yet, disappeared all-together.
If your PageRank has Dropped
First, determine what has really happened. If you had a PageRank of 5 yesterday and you all of a sudden have a PageRank of 1, all is not lost. This could actually mean a variety of things. One of them is that one of the sites linking to you has seen a significant drop in PageRank itself. Remember, when other sites link to you (and especially if they’re one way links), you get a portion of their PageRank passed on to you.
So if you had a site that had a PageRank of 7 linking to you, thus helping your own PageRank status, and they all of a sudden dropped to a 3 (as an example) then your PageRank will likely be affected.
Now consider this PageRank drop with not one site but with multiple sites. This would definiately have an adverse effect on your overall PageRank.
The first thing to do would be to check and see if there have been any changes to the PageRank of the sites linking to you. But first, you have to know who is linking to you.
One way to do this is with Yahoo’s site explorer tool. Enter in your domain name, click “inlinks” and then choose “except from this domain” from the drop-down list. This will show you all of the links pointing to your own site.
Visit these sites and be sure that none of them have been removed from Google’s index. (You can find this out by typing in the Google search box the following – site:thenameofthesite.com.) If nothing comes up, they’ve been removed from the index and this could be one of the causes of your drop in PageRank.
You can also use Google Analytics to see who is sending you traffic via the “Traffic Sources -> Referring Sites” link.
If Your PageRank is Gone
Ok, this is probably one of the worst-case scenarios. If you previously had a PageRank on your site, even if it was as little as a 1, and all of a sudden you look up at your trusty Google toolbar and notice that the PageRank of your web page is now gray, this can be a very significant issue.
The first thing to do is to first check that URL in Google and see if it’s still indexed. Just type in the Google search box site:yoursiteurl.com and see if something comes up. If it doesn’t, it means that you’ve probably been removed from Google’s index.
So what should you do?
Well, if this were to happen to you that means that Google felt that you were doing something illegal; or at least something against their webmaster guidelines.
So you first need to ask yourself a few questions.
- Did you use any kind of black-hat techniques on your site? Things such as cloaking, invisible text, redirection, etc. If so, this could likely be the reason.
- Were you selling links from your site? Likely that this could be the issue.
- Did you offer any downloads off of your site that could have contained malicious code?
There are many possible questions that you could ask yourself – and far too long of a list to post here; but the bottom line is that if you were doing something “illegal” in the search engines eyes, they probably found out about it and you are now feeling the reprucussions.
You can also check out Google’s business listing quality guidelines andGoogle’s webmaster guidelines to double-check to be sure you were following the rules.
If you have a Google webmaster account, log in and see if you have any messages from Google. If you’re lucky, they’ll have sent you a message telling you why your site was removed.
Whatever it is that they tell you, FIX THE ISSUE. Once you have the issue fixed, you’ll next need to submit a reinclusion request. Which could take a bit of time so be prepared to wait and ready to explain yourself.
This post is an excerpt from Bonehead Bits – The SEO Newsletter. To get your copy before the public does (for free), click here now and get signed up.
Are You An Expert?
I just heard about this free service today from Joel Comm (you can follow Joel on Twitter here).
It’s called PitchRate.com and it’s a free service that let’s you enter in your expert details so that journalists, newspaper editors, radio show hosts and more can find you and contact you to talk about your area of expertise.
All you do is fill in information about yourself and what you do and then keep an eye on your email for anyone that might contact you regarding that area of expertise.
As you can imagine, this is a fantastic service for both those in the journalism industry and yourself. Journalists are always looking for experts to interview but it’s oftentimes hard to find them. And you may be relatively unknown in your field. This is a great way to get your name known.
I highly recommend that you take the time to fill out a profile at PitchRate.com (I already have) and see what happens.
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