Autopilot Article Marketing Strategy to Increase Blog Traffic

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In my series of posts about How To Increase Blog Traffic and Search Engine Exposure, this is the post I couldn’t wait to share! Article marketing is the number one way to drive traffic to your blog, increase search engine exposure, and improve search engine
rankings… and it is FREE to do. More traffic to your blog, more search engine exposure, and higher search engine rankings mean MORE REVENUE FOR YOU.

Affiliate Article Marketing or Traffic Generation – or BOTH

In my opinion, article marketing is the most UNDER-used free resource we internet marketers have. Why? I imagine there are a lot of factors that keep fellow marketers from effectively using this simple process.

One- Article Marketing IS simple…. and yes, it is also boring. Effective? Yes! Exciting? Uh, not even a little bit…lol Article marketing takes discipline and a big dose of “stick-to-it-ness” in order to really work for the long haul. In the past, I have found myself dreading writing a small article to syndicate all over the internet. I would find myself doing anything to avoid writing that article… even doing laundry – yuck!

Two- Article Marketing is not a get rich quick type thing. It’s just not. You can submit an article and it could take weeks…months…to see the real benefits.

What Are The Benefits of Article Marketing?

Effective article marketing can lead to more traffic to your blog, higher rankings in the search engines, increased affiliate sales, and more back links to your site.. It’s all win-win with article marketing!

Thing is, there is a right way and a not-so-right way to perform effective article marketing. Article marketing means that you write an informational (non-promotional) article and then submit it to many article directories. The beauty of these articles is that at the end of the article you can add your author bio area/resource box. In this bio area you can offer links back to your blog. When readers want more information on your topic, or are interested in your service, they will click these links to get to your blog. Simple, right?

Yes, article marketing IS simple.

But yet, we all put it off.

My Autopilot Article Marketing Strategy

After seeing my own serious case of procrastination when it came to my article marketing efforts, I decided to set up a system for myself that really works. I researched others systems, read many articles that others have submitted, and have analyzed the results of my trial and error for my own system.

I also realized that most of us were making article marketing harder than we have to.

I read the best post on another blog called How to Write Articles That Convert Like Crazy. That post was some serious straight talk about article marketing!

One of the most interesting parts of the article is this:

“This is a trick I’ve tried and tested repeatedly, and in MOST markets….it works like a charm. I almost hate to share it – but here it is anyway. Write VERY short articles. And lots of them. Keep the articles UNDER 320 words. Under 300 for Ezine Articles ( the granddaddy of Article directories) is best. But…here is the trick. Create one LONG resource box that you save in your author account. Break it up into several paragraphs, each paragraph has a link to your offer page as above. ( Ezine will accept two links in the resource box as a matter of policy – I’ve found that more often than not – they’ll take three without complaint if you are a solid contributor to the community) Your resource box in this example should be a STRONG close….and should APPEAR to be part of the article – ie – almost no transition between the preceeding short article and the saved resource box. As you are allowed to “sell” in the resource box area…this simple approach will seemingly extend the article with a strong sales message, live links, and solid close, in EVERY article you submit on this topic, as this is your default signature file for each. This works tremendously well for me, and I attribute a lot of my article marketing success to this, and this alone.”

Wow – write articles UNDER 300-320 words? Really? I went and double-checked the editorial guidelines for EzineArticles, and sure enough, there it is…

“ARTICLE BODY:

1. Must be a minimum of 250 words and no more than 5,000 words. For us, an ideal article size is 400-750 words.”

Fact is, I think most internet marketers think they have to submit a 1,000-word article masterpiece, when in fact, 300 words or so is plenty!

But… I Still Have To Write The Article!

Yes, whether it is a 2,000-word article or only 300 words, you still have to do the writing. I’ll be honest, sometimes my brain just doesn’t feel like writing – especially when it’s a topic I am not overly familiar with. This feeling goes for not only my article marketing efforts, but also my niche blog content creation and Squidoo lens creation.

Even tho I was SO excited to do this post for my blog traffic series, I had to wait until today to do it. You see, I have been very lucky to be able to test a software program while it was in beta and today, it was released to the public. This amazing, wonderful, awesome, super program takes SO much workout of my article writing and content creation. I could go on and on about just how fantastic this tool is, but I know that just one browse through the information page and you will get it – no doubt! Check out the just-released article creation wizard – you will LOVE it! It truly has been a life-preserver for my article marketing efforts.

Ok, time for me to stop rambling and just tell you how I do my article marketing.

My Article Marketing System

Here we go…

1. I use the article creation wizard to write my article. Not a long article, but effective enough to offer information and hopefully cause the reader to want more information from my blog.

2. I submit this one article to EzineArticles. Within a day or two, the article will be live.

3. I then follow the guidelines and submit my article to this service. I love this service, too. This article marketing service will submit UNIQUE versions of my article all over the internet to many, many article directories. Best part is, I can also have UNIQUE author bio boxes attached to each unique article, too! What does that mean? That means that I can a) change up the anchor text I choose to link back to my blog and b) I can change what pages I link to from an article. Kids, this is POWERFUL stuff! This service also allows you to choose how many articles you have submitted each day. You can choose to have 100 unique articles submitted… or 20 articles… totally up to you.

4. Another powerful feature of this article submission service is that I can also get unique versions of my submitted articles for my own use. When I’m ready to make a Squidoo lens to generate traffic to my blog, I go get a unique version for the content on the lens. When I want to promote with Zimbio, I go get a unique version for the content. Perhaps I want to create a niche blog to promote my main blog….and I will need content, right? Right! I just go get more unique versions of my articles. It’s magic.

I have seen a tremendous improvement with traffic generation, higher ranks in Google and other search engines, and affiliate sales since I started routinely using my little autopilot article marketing strategy. It just plain WORKS.

If you are one of the smart marketers who use this proven WordPress system, you will totally get how this all fits together. While article marketing in itself is free, having an very inexpensive virtually autopilot article marketing system is PRICELESS!