If you thought that a good article marketing strategy was to write short articles, which are full of general statements, and to add a resource box, before you submitted it to an article directory, then you wouldn’t be alone.
You would still be wrong, though.
You might get some traffic, of course, from people who found your article in a search engine and clicked on the link in your resource box. But it is nothing compared to what you could obtain by:
- Writing your articles in a different style.
- Writing longer articles.
- Being active and keeping a list.
I’ll go into more depth with each of the three points in a few moments.
Article Marketing Strategy Tips # 1: Write Your Articles in a Different Style
Don’t be generic.
You might be able to come up with an article in seven minutes, but if people get the same impression from reading your article as they could by sticking their thoungue out of the window on a windy automn day, you might just as well do something else during those seven minutes.
Because your article would be BORING!
And nobody wants to spread boredom around.
Yes, “spread”.
Did you forget that the purpose of an article directory, for you, is to make others able to grab the articles and post them in their eZines or on their websites?
Look at it this way:
- Situation One: You put your article on a directory, and people have a change to read it and click on your link.
- Situation Two: Your article gets syndicated, and it can now be read on five different websites. You now have five times as many changes – at least – of having it read and that people would click on your link.
Therefore, your first goal should be to write an article in an entertainable way.
Alexa Smith, who is the expert to go to, when it comes to article syndication, has this to say about an article that is perfect for syndication:
The article has a witty opening, heaps of controversy and entertainment all the way through, laughs in all the right places, and a real sting in the tail.
In other words: Be entertaining. Arouse feelings and emotions within people.
Article Marketing Strategy Tips # 2: Write Longer Articles
How long should your article be?
Long enough!
I have been a spokeswoman for short and to the point articles. And I still am. I hate reading a long and boring article when the same could have been said with fewer, and better chosen words.
When I write about a narrow topic, like how to wash your hair without water during an emergency situation, I can tell the reader all she has to know with 250 words.
For other short articles, I aim at 400 words, and I normally end up at 500-600.
But if you want to have your article syndicated, Alexa Smith has had the best results with articles that are 1,000 – 1,200 words long.
Article Marketing Strategy Tips # 3: Keep a List of People Who Have Syndicated Your Article
When you notice that somebody have syndicated your article (you should be able to see that in the statistics on the article directory), go out and find the article, and contact the publisher and ask him/her, if he/she wants more.
Then save the person to a list, and keep expanding your list, every time a new person syndicates your articles.
When you write your next article, post it to your blog first, and when it is indexed in the search engines, send it out to your list. As Alexa puts it:
Those people, between the whole lot of them, have access to tens of thousands of subscribers to their ezines/blogs/newsletters/websites/whatever. (It’s only tens of thousands because we’re talking about cauliflower soup – in real niches it can be hundreds of thousands). And they all need content to publish all the time, of course (these are the people for whom article directories exist, so they can go there and find it).
18 (or 28, or 38) of them want to use my content (the article we’re talking about), and they all send it out to their subscribers or put it on their websites for all their regularly returning visitors, and so on and so forth. They got free content and I got a free link.
Can you imagine that? Instead of getting a few hundred views on an article directory, you could easily get thousands of targeted views.
By following this article marketing strategy, you are not working harder, only smarter.