Article marketing has emerged as a significantly important marketing tool in Internet marketplace. The whopping success of hundreds of online article directories bears witness to this phenomenon. Either written by themselves or bought from ghost writers, business owners submit large number of articles to hundreds of the article directories available out there.
How to Be a Gold Digger and Take Advantage of this Rush to Get their Articles Published
There is enourmous wealth and business hidden in the thousands of articles that appear in article directories. You can directly and legally use these articles to increase traffic to your site and increase your sales.
The Rules of Article Marketing
By submitting an article to an article directory, the author gives permission to other website owners, ezine publishers, newsletter publishers to use their article. The publisher who takes the article is in turn obliged to respect the copyright of the author. The publisher is not allowed to edit the article in any form or remove the author resource box, which usually has a link to author website.
Giving Search Engines More Reasons to Visit Your Site
The only catch of using a free article is to leave the link in tact, which can be to your direct competitor. An article is a credible piece of writing. Publishing an article ensures your website has keyword rich fresh content that search engine are in love with.
There is however minimal risk of duplicate content. Publishing a few articles from article directories, however doesn't really get labelled as duplicate content. If you publish same content under two domains, it will account towards content duplication. The problem occurs only when a website copies more than 10% of the content from the second one. Taking articles from article directories doesn't work towards that proportion and you can safely use the article.
Closing More Sales with Articles
The visitors you get via search engines because of these articles is a bonus. Putting two highly visible text or image link to product sales page and product information pages at the top and bottom of the article is enough to keep the visitor at your site and give them the reasons to buy from your site.
Think about a sale you close solely because of that specific article. A sale that would go to your competitor. A sale a day because of that article is enough reason to leave an article at your website.
Strategies for Using Competitor Articles
Don't link to the article from your home page. After all, the article has a link to your competitor site. Instead use it to attract traffic via search engines only. However you need to provide a link to the article from a sitemap. Search engines attribute more value to sitemaps than human visitors do.
Design the page in such a way that the reader is not motivated to click over to your competitor site. Providing easily visible links at the top and bottom of the article is enough to keep the visitor in your site.
Make the links highly relevant to the topic of the article. If the article is review of a product, say a just-released digital camera, include text with exact model name of the camera next to "Buy Now", "Check Prizes" or "More Product Info" buttons.
Test the Effectiveness of the Article
If you find the article helps only with sending your traffic away to your competitor, stop using the article. You are not running charity fund. If you find more visitors entering your website through the article page, get more articles of similar type.
Competitor Articles as a Keyword Research Tool
If you find more visitors entering your site through the article page, check the keywords they used to reach the article page. You will be amazed at the simple variants of search phrases customers use. You can in turn use the phrases in other parts of your website - in product description pages or testimonial pages. You can also choose to remove the article from your website after 15 or 30 days.
Always Respect Copyrights
Take articles only from article directories from which you can freely take the article. Don't take any article from other websites, unless they explicitly state you are free to use their articles.
Authors submit articles to article directories for good reasons. The only thing they expect in return is a link to their website from publisher websites. This give them more exposure and higher importance in search engine algorithms.
Don't use articles from article directories if you don't like to give an outbound link from your website.
Don't try to reword the article to make it look like a new one. Better option is to write your own article or hiring a ghost writer to write high quality article for your website.
Play by the rules of article publishing to boost credibility and sales, at the expense of your competitor.
