More On Link Building: Article Marketing

Link building is essential for improving your search results. But you can't stop there.

You see, ultimately one must go beyond links. Think about the actual value of the placement as far as potential traffic, branding and reach. You will find that when you do so, that the links are of better quality and the benefits greater.

Quality supersedes quantity. When it comes to article marketing we seek to get as much value as possible. This means that we don’t simply toss off a bunch of copies of the article to repositories far and wide. You need to look at what makes the most sense strategically and plan from there.

Content is content

Now, the first thing we are going to need is a writer. If you have someone in-house that is already creating content, marketing materials or managing the blog, we’re in business. If you find yourself creatively challenged then looking at bringing in a professional writer as a sock puppet staffer is also an option. Much like content for the website, cutting corners will ultimately weaken the program.

You seek to create content that would be of a quality high enough that you would publish it on your own site. Not some knock off garbage piece that is 400 words long and devoid of value. That is not going to get us what we want… and at worst is negative branding.
You are seeking to build authority, become ubiquitous in the market and hopefully get some links that do more than please search engines.. we actually get some traffic ;0)

Finding the targets

Next we want to establish some targets for content placement. Remember, article marketing is more than mere repository overload. We can generally look at a few locales for potential promotion;

Article repositories – the most common form of article marketing.

Industry media outlets – most markets will have media/news portals

Guest blogging – on first and second tier industry blogs

Supplier websites – create how-to articles, FAQ etc…

Vertical markets – websites of related non-competitors.

Basically you need to get inventive and look for those that might appreciate some free content. Some of these relationships may not happen over night; cultivation is often required. But an article is often nothing more than content…with accreditation to you. This is how the path should be travelled.

Article repositories should really only be used for posts that you feel are weaker than others and aren’t suited for higher level branding. But even these should be of at least an average quality as any distribution is still a representation of you and your enterprise.

Crafting the article

Now that we have some varied targets we can set about trying to establish some demographics for the audience. Whenever possible, don’t be shy and simply talk to the editors of your target site and ask about the people and topics that fly well. Most times they can give some great qualitative feedback which helps when crafting the tone and language of the article.

I won’t get into the nuts and bolts of targeting as that is more of the writing element and beyond the scope of this post (look at this later in the week). But what is important is that the article is set up to succeed.

Getting the links

The best links to have are what are known as editorial links; these are links within the actual content themselves. This is something that should be used sparingly and don’t fill up the article with a ton of them from one end to the other. Each post should have 1-2 nicely targeted, but relevant, links to your site.

This is also extra important with distribution via article repositories as it ensure that is someone reprints it without the author bio (no! say it ain’t so?!) that you still get a few back links from it.
If we’re targeting a specific location with our article, we’re sure to get a link in the author bio and latitude for a few editorial links within the post as well (to relevant content on your site).

Targeting Considerations

Just as we did with the directory submissions, we want to vary link text as much as possible. This means a unique author bio for each and every article repository and diversity in link texts for our other distribution channels.

What link texts should you be using? That all depends on the strength of the potential link location (re-print from repositories? Or one-off on an authority site?). Try and use your core target terms for the stronger sites and work your secondary terms with the larger distribution channels.

Also remember to incorporate targeted titles for the post and include words from your lists of semantically related support terms for effective article marketing.

This post adopted from sitereference