Article marketing is quite an ambiguous concept. When you’re just starting out, the general advice seems to be to write an article and submit it to as many directories as possible. In other words, focus on quantity, not quality. Add article spinning to the mix and article marketing seems to be only good for low quality links for SEO.
Others who have honed their article marketing skills will say you should only submit high quality articles to a few high quality directories. But you can only get so much traffic from a couple of directories. Unfortunately most advice on article marketing I’ve read in most sources ends here.
Guest blogging is not considered part of article marketing in general, maybe because the requirements for articles are much higher than those of article directories. What are the differences?
A typical article directory is not niche targeted and accepts articles on almost any topic there is. They publish thousands of articles and any particular article is most likely to be buried deep under piles of other articles. On the bright side, your articles don’t have to be unique or top quality to be accepted to most directories and it’s easy to get published on most directories.
Meanwhile, blogs are niche targeted and publish few posts, which means your article gets a lot of exposure as well as “link juice”. However, your articles must be unique and top quality to be accepted.
The result is that your article submitted to an article directory barely sees the light, while it will almost always get readers’ attention on a blog. The requirements for your article are higher, but the benefits you get are much greater as well. Additionally, you get high quality backlinks which are worth hundreds (if not thousands) of links from article directories.
That is why to get a real effect from article marketing you have to crank out several articles per day, while to get the same effect from guest blogging all you may need is a couple of articles per week. The trick is, of course, to write good enough articles to be published on good enough blogs.
To find these blogs simply do a search in Google for “write for us” or “guest post” and add your niche keywords. Blogs that already accept guest posts are more likely to accept yours too as long as you follow their guidelines.
If you’re just starting out and don’t feel like you can write a top notch article, don’t worry and keep improving your writing skills. Start by submitting to smaller blogs first before going for the big ones. In the long run it will be worth your while.
Just wanted to post that I have learned an awful lot from you. Yes article marketing can be stupidly boring so definitely I would recommend leveraging your efforts as best as possible for each article because the results will be worth it.
Good post. There is always the dream that your article on the article directories will get picked up by other websites but I have found that they are just as often picked up by skimmers and Plagiarists who don’t give you a proper backlink. Not that that can’t happen to a guest blog post too, but it seems like many think the article directories are made for this purpose.