Web 2.0 Articles Marketing

Articles marketing has always been a mainstay of affiliate marketing and one of the best ways to market your online business and to get your domain and your internal Web pages indexed by Google and the other search engines, and to get traffic to your site. The basic procedure has been in the past to write several articles, usually 350-500 words each, and submit them to the major article directories like ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com, and articledashboard.com to name but a few.

Generally, article directories do not allow context links within the body of the article itself so you have to put the backlink to your domain or webpage in an author’s box at the bottom of the article. You use the anchor text to boost your ranking for a specific keyword phrase related to a product or service you sell on the site.

The automated variation of articles marketing uses custom article software to automatically broadcast your article to hundreds of article directories, or a web marketing service that performs the automation part for you.

If you have a new website or even an old one that seems to be stuck in a rut and you do not know what to do to get your important keyword phrases ranked better on Google or to get more traffic to your site, the conventional method of article marketing is still probably the first thing that you should do. People who have mastered this technique submit hundreds of original articles to the article directories every month and have been rewarded with sometimes hundreds of dollars a day in Adsense earnings or fat email marketing lists.

That was then, and this is 2010. Search engine optimization (SEO) experts who monitor website marketing trends say that Google is devaluing the links from article directories in its page rank algorithm. What that means is that 10 or 100 links from ezinearticles.com, and any other article directory, is not going to push your keyword phrase as high in the rankings as it once did. That does not mean that conventional article marketing will ever be a waste of time for SEO or that you cannot use your links from the article directories to generate traffic and customers to your site. What it does mean is that you have to change your strategy with the times if you ever want to compete successfully for the most valuable keyword phrases. Enter the new media – Web 2.0 articles marketing. Effective content promotion is as necessary as creating good content.

Web 2.0 Articles Marketing

What do we mean by Web 2.0 articles marketing and how is this article marketing strategy different from the conventional method of writing and publishing articles on the directories?

Web 2.0 articles marketing is about leveraging the longtail content of your domain and its individual web pages using social networking, content sharing, video marketing, and the link juice from established high profile sites. The major difference is this. When you submit an article to an article directory your anchor text links back to a specific page on your website. There is a 1:1 relationship between the anchor text in the author’s box of the article and a single keyword phrase on your webpage that you hope to rank for.

For example, if you sell barbecue grills on your website, the anchor text in an article you publish on an article directory might be “Weber Grill 100.” The link in the author’s box would presumably point back to a specific page on your website that features the Weber model 100. If you do this enough times with enough original articles you will likely attain some success from a decent ranking for that keyword phrase in the search engine results pages (SERPS). That is all well and good, and like I said before, some people have made hundreds of dollars a day in Adsense income by targeting high payout phrases with this very same technique and never paying a nickel for advertising.

For the Web 2.0 example your webpage would be an original article of 1,000 words or more about some aspect of gas grills, charcoal grills, or even the Weber model 100 if you could find enough interesting things to say about it. This is the key. Your Web 2.0 web page is 1,000 words or more about a single topic so that it will contain dozens or maybe even hundreds of longtail keyword phrases directly related to the topic and to the major keyword phrase contained in the title of the page, H1 tags, etc. You want your page long, 1,000 words or more, because it will act as a Feeder Page for the related longtail content that you will be placing on other websites. The longer your page is, and the more expert detail it has about a particular topic, the more opportunities you will have to leverage its content across as many other domains as possible. (see How To Write A Longtail Web Page).

For Web 2.0 you will be promoting the topical content of the entire page and not just one or two keyword phrases as you do with conventional article marketing. In many cases you will be promoting the URL of the page itself or even the URLs of pages off your site that you do not own that point back to your webpage.

I am sure this is still confusing so let me put it another way. The objective of Web 2.0 articles marketing is to get as many diverse domains as possible linking back, directly or indirectly, to specific content pages on your website. Keywords are still an important part of this mix but try to think of Web 2.0 articles marketing as content marketing and not just keyword marketing. I think it will become more clear as we go through some examples.

Content Sharing Sites

Content sharing sites allow you to place your own content on the content sharing site’s domain. Two good examples are hubpages.com and squidoo.com. You can post an article about any topic on these sites and have links pointing back to your own domain or to anywhere else that you want. The 1,000 word Feeder Page that you placed on your own site will have dozens of subtopics that you can use as the main subject of the articles that you place on these content sharing sites.

The advantage to using content sharing sites is that their page rank is very high and the number of backlinks pointing to their domain from other domains numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Google pays a lot of attention to them. A well written article on hubpages.com or squidoo.com could rank number one on Google on its own merits, and many do. In fact, you are more likely to get a number one ranking for a particular keyword phrase on a squidoo.com page than you are for a page on your own domain because Google considers squidoo.com a credible, authority site. That works for you.

It is quite possible that the Feeder Page you are pointing to in your squidoo.com article could be number two in Google for the same keyword phrase. You can imagine what having the number one and number two listings in Google for a popular keyword phrase would do for your traffic numbers.

Here is a list of the best content sharing sites. You want to place an original article on each of these content sharing sites, the subject and main keyword of which come from the longtail content of your Feeder Page. You want to place at least one backlink to your Feeder Page in your article. If you are the ambitious type and are willing to work extra hard place three articles on squidoo.com and on hubpages.com which are topically related to each other and link to their brothers within squidoo.com and hubpages.com. The topic of these content sharing site pages are all based on a subtopic of your Feeder Page and may feature any element of the longtail.

squidoo.com
hubpages.com
gather.com
helium.com
zimbio.com
associatedcontent.com
scribd.com
slideshare.net
wetpaint.com

Article Directories

Article directories are also content sharing sites and should be included in your Web 2.0 articles marketing strategy. Again, the topic of the articles you submit to the directories can be taken from the subtopics on your Feeder Page. You have more flexibility here because, for the most part, you are not using context links (links within the body text). In those places where you could use context links a backlink to a barbecue grills site would be totally out of place in a chamber music article. You can link to any page and any topic that you want in your author’s bio box whether or not it is related to the topic of the article.

One reason to stay on-topic when submitting to the article directories, however, is that you can use those articles to build yourself up as an authority on the topic and to presell interest in what you are selling from your own domain. If you do a good job on topic then the reader is more likely to click on the link when you tell them they can learn more about the topic at your domain.

ezinearticles.com
goarticles.com
articlecity.com
articledashboard.com
isnare.com

PDF and PPT Content Sharing Sites

Adobe PDF

You can place PDF, Word and many other nontext documents on scribd.com and freeiq.com. Google indexes these documents so you get credit for the backlinks in your PDF file. Scribd.com seems better suited for multi-page documents like white papers or lengthy reports that you would have had to break up to convert to them to webpages. Since you can mix graphics and text in very creative and pleasing ways in PDF you can feature your most professional looking content in a way that replicates its native format.

Here again, one of your domain Feeder Pages should provide the topic. Google does rank PDF content and place it in its search listings, which enhances the value of the link juice you can get out a PDF document. Also, there is less competition in PDF and PPT format. Corporate marketers use this technique to sell b2b but there is no reason not to use it for consumer marketing.

PowerPoint PPT

slide-rocket.com
slideshare.com
scribd.com

These sites accept Powerpoint presentations in PPT format. You can make an original Powerpoint presentation slide show by summarizing your Feeder Page content into bullet points and short descriptions. Add graphics for pizazz. You can also add sound to turn your content into a webinar. Google indexes these sites.

Video Articles

You do not need a video camera, onscreen talent or a scriptwriter to make a video that you can post on YouTube. You can use one of the PDF or PPT presentations that you prepared and turn it into a video article with Camtasia or CamStudio. Camtasia is the best video software but it runs about $300. Cam Studio is open source. One other good choice is to go to animoto.com and produce a video article with their online tools using your own content. animoto.com productions can be captivating. You may be surprised at how easy it is to produce a video article complete with music and screen transitions. The downside is that you have to do a voice over. For some people that’s easy but many others would sooner stick their head in a bucket of water than record their voice into a microphone. That’s OK because now there is a better, easier way.

The video articles production software I am using is Video Article Robot. This is new and really easy to use – feed it an article, one of your ezinearticles for instance, and the software changes the text to speech (8 different voices) and turns it into a video, with background music. There is a distribution module that can automatically place your new video article on the top 15 video sites, including YouTube. The software is $47 a month and well worth it. Here is a coupon code you can enter for a 50% discount – maverick50. Enter that coupon code at Video Article Robot checkout page and you can have a video article on YouTube within the hour.

YouTube is probably the second most searched site on the Internet so it provides a great opportunity to get your content found in the Google SERPS or on YouTube itself and in front of your potential customers.

Write down your most important keyword phrases that you want to rank for on your Feeder Page. Go to YouTube and search for those terms. If there are lots of videos and if some of those videos are getting a huge number of viewers than you have found an excellent Web 2.0 articles marketing opportunity.

Click on the video with the largest number of viewers. Right under the video controls and the on the right hand side you will see the number of views for that video. On each side of that number there are two arrow like things that you can click on. Do that and you can see right in front of you the category and the exact tags that popular video used to get the YouTube crowd’s attention. Write a search friendly title and use the tags you found on the popular video to tag your own video and you will automatically increase your chance of getting your video article seen. Make your backlink the first part of your description so people can see it right away without expanding the description. Use YouTube’s on-site tools to add callouts to your video and put in a call to action in it like “For more information go to http://yourdomain.com/feederpage.html”.

You can leverage your video for wider distribution from sites like tubemogul.com

There is another HUGE reason why you should be doing video articles, but I am not going to tell you that here. If you want to know sign up for my newsletter.

Review

We covered a lot of ground. Let’s review what we covered.

Web 2.0 articles marketing is about leveraging your content and placing it on many domains across the net. We started with a 1,000+ word single category article on your own domain that we call the Feeder Page. We then used subtopics from the elements in the Feeder Page to write original content that we placed on content sharing sites, article directories, PDF and PPT Content Sharing Sites, and to make video articles.

You can see now why the Feeder Page article is so long. There has to be enough meat on the bones to serve several audiences without making the same dish twice.

If you are starting a new website or want to rejuvenate an old one with a new campaign you will need 10 to 15 Feeder Pages. You will implement the same procedure for each separate Feeder Page. Web 2.0 article marketing means a lot of work, but so does writing the 300-400 articles each month it takes for successful conventional article marketing. With Web 2.0 you will be able to take on higher volume keywords, keywords that generate 30,000 to 50,000 searches a month, instead of picking through the bottom of the barrel with everybody else for an occasional, undiscovered gem.