Article marketing is one of the best online marketing strategies to promote your business to a wider range of audience and also to get some good traffic to your website. There are a lot of article directories that helps you to submit and promote articles as a part of your article marketing activities. Article marketing helps you in making your content get a wider exposure along with more traffic and improved search engine rankings.
Article marketing is a vital part of any SEO campaign and these days with the Panda and Penguin updates, article marketing has really changed the way it performs. Few months back, article marketing was considered as a spammny way of creating an article, submitting it to a number of free article directories, placing a link to your website with your major keywords as the anchor text and ultimately waiting for the keyword rankings to soar high.
But with the Panda, Penguin and other Google updates, things have turned upside down and majority of the article directories are on the receiving end. Hence article marketing has become more hard and you cannot expect to get traffic and improved search engine rankings by implementing article marketing the way you did few months back. Some strict guidelines are there in place and you need to have high quality unique content for article marketing and you cannot expect to publish the same article in a number of free junk article directories.
Here I would like to list you some points that might be the reasons why you are not having a successful article marketing experience in 2013.
1) Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is something that is no more afforded by Google and other search engines. The practice of submitting duplicate content to multiple article directories still persists and this is considered to be one of the major reasons for the downfall of any article marketing campaign. The solution for this is to go with unique content for your article marketing purpose.
2) Low Quantity Content
There are certain parameters about the content of an article and most of the time the article content falls below this parameters which results in a bad article marketing experience. An article must atleast consider somewhere between 400-500 words and anything below this is not considered good by the article directories as well as the readers. It doesn’t mean to create a lengthy article as a lengthy article will be hard for the users to read completely. So the content needs to have a minimum word count so that it is counted by the search engines and also enjoyed by the users.
3) Low Quantity Content
The quality of the content is another major matter that plays a negative role in your article submission campaign. To make things easy, people most often do not care about the quality of the article content and ends up with low quality content for their article marketing plan. Low quality content are ingnored by the users as well as the search engines and this is something that we need to take into consideration while going for online marketing activities such as article promotion.
4) Irrelevant Hyper Links
The placing or stuffing irrelevant hyperlinks and anchor text in the article content has become a habit for the common internet marketers. It used to work some time ago, but now things have changed and the search engine algorithms have become smarter. Rather than spamming your content with irrelevant hyperlink, it is better to place hyper link and anchor text that goes in synchronization with your article content. You can also use co-citation in place of anchor text, as this is another new way that is considered as a good practice by Google. It has been seen that irrelevant hyperlinks are one of the major reasons why majority of the articles do not make their way up
5) Too Much Hyper Links
This is another thing that is a major reason for worry as far as article marketing is considered. Most of us still have the habit of placing too much hyper links on an article, hoping to cover all the major keywords. Believe me, this is such an unethical thing and also irritating to the users as well as the search engines. Such articles are degraded by the users and search engines as too much hyperlink really disrupts the flow of the article.
6) Less User Engagement
Do you write articles for the users or search engine spiders? This is a major question that comes into action when speaking about the intention of the article. Take into mind that users are you ultimate customers and a content that generates maximum user engagement and participation automatically will nab the attention of the search engines and rank higher. If your article marketing is a flop, then check out whether your article is in better position in terms of user engagement.
7) Limited Promotion
What is the use of a well written article if it does not reach the right audience? The answer is that the article will go un-noticed and will eventually go into the waste bin. All your hard work will be in vain and ultimately you will end up with a failed article marketing campaign. The solution to this is promote your articles to targeted audience once it is live and you can promote your content by leveraging the advantages of social media marketing through various social midia channels, groups and communities. You can also use other form of online marketing activities to promote your article. Do not limit the promotion activities of your article as it may lead to a bad marketing experience.
8) Less Useful
Is your article useful for any kind of users? If the answer is no, then do not go ahead with any kind of article marketing or promotional activities as you will not get the desired results with your article. Always create content that are useful to the users otherwise no one will dare to go through your content. If anyone finds it useful there are chances of it getting promoted virally and this will indeed generate unbelievable results for your article marketing campaign. On the other hand, if your content is less useful for the visitors, then forget about any positive results form that particular article.
Since article marketing is one of the best part of any online advertising activities, you should not tend to take things for granted and need to pay special attention to it. Always make sure to make the simple things right to make your article marketing more successful.
very informative post !! I have stopped using too much of links :)