I know some of you are still doing article marketing to build back links and I found a blog post that will be of interest to you.

In his post on creating Link Trios, Glen explains how to get the articles you’ve written to rank higher in the search engines with minimal effort:
http://www.viperchill.com/link-trio/

One reader asked:

I’ve begun to do some article marketing with EzineArticles, GoArticles and ArticlesBase. I’ve found that my articles are often picked up by scrapers who don’t include the links and/or spin the article. I even saw one site where they included the first paragraph or so and that was it — no link back to the full article or anything.

Should I spend time tracking these down and asking them to comply with the terms of use? I’ve had some success with that in the instances where I was able to contact the blog owner, and in one case I had to contact the hosting provider who ended up taking the site down. But I wonder if this is a waste of time?

Here’s my video response

Welcome to Day 18 of 30 Days to More Traffic!

Introduction

This is perhaps the most popular way of driving traffic to a site for Internet Marketers, but you can use the same traffic tricks for a general website. Write a 500-word article with SEO in mind and submit it to ezinearticles.com. Be sure to place a link to your URL in your bio along with a tasty line or two about why the reader should visit your site.

You can also take a single article and “spin” the words in the content around then submit each original article to other ezine directories such as goarticles.com, articlecity.com, associatedcontent.com, articledashboard.com, articlesbase.com, and searchwarp.com.

Spinning

Spinning an article simply means taking the information from an article and rewording each line. Spinning content can be done manually or you may enjoy using a free content spinner like the one at jetspinner.com.

You might also want to consider using different main keywords in each article, so you’ll have a better chance of your article coming up in different searches (remember, compete for highly searched keywords as well as those terms searched for only 100 times per month, as well as seasonal keywords!).

Besides the direct traffic you’ll be getting from your articles, you’ll also acquire new one-way incoming links. With all that I’ve said in mind, let’s sum up how effective article marketing can be for sending traffic your way.

Benefits:

• Direct traffic from articles
• Direct traffic from websites who digitally reprint your articles.
• Traffic from search engine traffic your articles receive.
• One-way incoming links from both the article directories and the sites that republish your articles. Remember that incoming links (especially one-way) are essential for generating search engine traffic.

If you’re having trouble getting incoming links, article marketing should be a good focus for you easily acquiring them. More incoming links equals more weight in the search engines.

Consider these techniques when applying article marketing:

Write three articles on the same topic. Submit one to article directories. Put the other two on your website. In your bio box, tell readers they can read parts 2 and 3 at your website.

This may sound like a dumb statement, but only write about things you know others want to read about. Otherwise, you’ll get no traffic to that article to begin with. So write interesting articles or hire someone to write them for you.

Be sure to write in a fashion that your readers will 1) grow trust for you, 2) gain knowledge because of you. In internet marketing, articles can be powerful tools even in the sales process.

Private Label Rights

To make things easier you can buy Private Label Rights to articles for dirt cheap. For slang, we call this content “PLR.” When you own Private Label Rights to content, you can reword the information and submit the spun articles to ezines. However, it all depends on what specified rights you retain when you purchase Private Label Rights.

I highly recommend using PLR. You can get 500-word articles often for under a buck. This saves countless hours of work, especially if you’re working in a niche you’re not an expert in.

Use a PLR membership site such as plrpro.com or search for groups of PLR articles to purchase online. Search for buy PLR into your search engine and you’ll find what you’re looking for. You might also want to try Warrior Forum and ask if anyone has any good PLR on your niche.

Article Marketing by Steve Wagenheim

This is probably the cheapest of all the methods because it’s virtually free. Your only cost is web hosting and the cost of your domain name. Submitting to article directories is free so take advantage of it.

Okay, how do you get the most out of this?

Well, that’s where a lot of people disagree, unfortunately. So this is the tactic I choose. Others are welcome to add their 2 cents.

I choose not to fight the masses. So I go after the keywords that don’t have as many competing sites but still have a decent number of daily searches according to Wordtracker. I make my cutoff 50 daily searches and no less. Competing sites I cut off at no more than 50,000. Yeah, I’m picky, but the keywords I target that meet this criteria bring me decent traffic.

I do not plaster my articles all over the Internet because I am building for the long time. I don’t want duplicate content to ultimately turn my search engine rankings to dust. Yeah, I know, there are those who argue that duplicate content penalties are a myth. I’m not going to get into that here. I’m just letting you know what I do, and that’s to submit to just a few places and different articles for each. Ezine Articles is still the king in my book.

When you submit articles, make sure your articles are informative and the resource box has a strong call to action. Resource boxes that read like “John Doe is an author and has a degree in…” won’t cut it. You need to write something like…

“Sick and tired of <whatever the problem is>? Want to finally <what the solution is their looking for>? Then go to my site at <URL> and get your free report on <whatever your solution is>. Start <whatever they are trying to do> TODAY!”

This is what I do and my opt ins come regularly everyday.

Try to write at least 3 or 4 articles a day. Why?

Well, that’s where the rating of this method comes in.

Quality Of Traffic – 10. These are people who are specifically looking for this information. You can’t get much more targeted than this. If the site in your resource box is a solid match for the content of the article, you should get quite a few opt ins.

Speed Of Traffic – 10. You’re going to start getting this traffic right away, as soon as those articles are posted. With Ezine Articles, it’s 6 to 24 hours once you’ve reached Platinum status, which only takes 10 articles submitted.

Quantity Of Traffic – 3. This is the big problem with article marketing. You’re not going to get a lot of traffic in the beginning because you don’t have many articles in circulation. However, once you have built up a nice article base, you will start to see the quantity of traffic increasing over time.

Article marketing is what I call the long haul process. It’s not a quick fix like Adwords, which you can pay for dearly if you don’t do it properly, but it’s a cheap way to get highly qualified traffic fast. Over time, the amount of traffic you get WILL increase, but you have to write everyday.

This section written by Steve Wagenheim. If you want a fool proof step by step formula for writing articles in under 30 minutes…check out the link below. It’s a book written by Steven Wagenheim who has the number 1 rank at Ezine Articles for the category of Internet Marketing…beating out over 4000 other contributors.
http://www.honestincomeprogram.com/tcawamg.html

I know some of you may disagree with this but when you’re writing an article I believe that worrying about the keyword density is a waste of time.

If you’re writing a good and informative article about a particular subject then you will naturally have your keywords show up in the article as well as some of its synonyms.

3% to 5%

Now I’ve heard people say that you should have the keyword density of between 3% and 5%. To me this seems ridiculous!

Has anyone done the math on this?

%5 would be very high. That’s 1 in 20 words. A 400 word article would have the keyword 20 times!

%3 also seems very high to me. That’s 1 in 33 words. A 400 word article would have the keyword 12 times!

Focus on good Writing

Instead of worrying about keyword density just focus on writing good informative articles about your particular topic.

I would make sure that your keyword did appear a couple times but beyond that I don’t think it really matters.

Search Google for your keyword

If you’re still really paranoid about keyword density then do a Google search for your keyword and analyze the keyword density of the top 10 search results and use that as a baseline for what you should do.

I know some of you will strongly disagree with me and that’s okay.

Introduction

Below are 3 articles I wrote on advanced article marketing totaling 2,100 words and I have combined them into 1 post.

• 2 Secrets to get Massive Traffic from Article Marketing
• This Ezine Article Has Been Viewed 546,866 Times
• How to Write the Perfect Resource Box

I have also included some other tips for article marketing.

2 Secrets to get Massive Traffic from Article Marketing

Become popular

To begin I would like you to head over to ezine articles and find an article in your niche. You can do this simply by searching for the keywords that you are targeting.

The article that you find is not really important as long as it’s in the correct category. It’s the category that we really care about.

Once you’ve located the article in your target category, I want you to scroll down to the bottom of the page.

At the bottom of the page you’ll see something like the following:
“This article has been viewed xxx time(s).”

This is the statistic that says how many times the article has been viewed. This number will be important later.

Now I want you to scroll up and look for the text that says:
Most Viewed EzineArticles in the xxxx Category (90 Days)

These are the most viewed articles in your category in the last 90 days.

The funny thing is that once an article makes it onto this list the number of views it receives goes up dramatically.

This is because as people finish an article they are looking for something else to read in that same category. And they come across this list of the most viewed articles and click on one of them giving that article another view.

So if you can only get on this list you’ll get more views. More views means your article is put on more websites which results in more traffic for you.

How to get on the popular list

I want to show you a quick and easy way to get on the popular list. It’s a secret that the experts use all the time.

What they do to get on the popular list is buy traffic. And they do it for super cheap.

There are a number of places that offer traffic for super cheap.

One place I recently used was:
http://www.donkeymails.com

In just a matter of a few days you can get hundreds of views to your article and get it on the popular list. Doing this will dramatically increase your exposure and increase the number of views to your article.

It’s important to know that Ezine Articles does not like this and is cracking down on this. DonkeyEmails.com works right now (April 5, 2009) for sending traffic but at some point it may not work anymore as Ezine Articles cracks down on this even further.

Use RSS to increase traffic to your articles

At the end of any article on ezine articles there is a link to the author’s page. This page shows a list of the author’s articles.

Here’s an example:
http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Jacky_Chen

And near the top of this page you’ll see the text:
“Jacky Chen – EzineArticles.com Expert Author”

Next to this text you will see a little RSS icon which has a link to this author’s RSS feed.

Now what you want to do is take this RSS feed and submit it to many RSS feed directories. This will help build back links to your article, getting more traffic to it.

On my traffic tricks blog I have a list of RSS feed directories that you can submit your feed to:
http://nickstraffictricks.com/981_submit-your-rss-feeds-to-rss-directories/

Pretty easy, right?

Take action

I have just shown you two easy ways to dramatically increase the amount of traffic from ezine articles.

Now it’s time for you to take action and implement what you’ve learned.

This Ezine Article Has Been Viewed 546,866 Times

Getting down to business

So we all know that article marketing is a good way to get traffic.

Well that is of course as long as our articles get viewed.

Today I want to tell you about an ezine article that has been viewed 546,866 times.

That’s right, over half a million times!

The article

The article is titled: “How To Lose Belly Fat With A 10 Minute Workout”

You can get to the article by going to this URL:
http://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Lose-Belly-Fat-With-A-10-Minute-Workout&id=95932

So the question is: How did they do this?

And how can I do the same for one of my articles?

The power of the title

I believe the secret to getting so many page views lies in a fantastically written title.

When someone sees a search result they quickly scan the titles of each article and decide whether they want to click on that title link and view the article.

Once they’ve clicked on the link the article is shown to them the view count is incremented.

So this could be a crappy article and it wouldn’t affect the view count because by the time you read the article the view count has already been increased.

So the secret to getting lots and lots of views is in having a powerful title.

So let’s take a little time and dissect this title. Let’s find out what makes it so effective.

The power of how to

People are on the Internet because they want information. They want to know how to do something, or how to lose weight, or how to stop snoring. The common thread among all of these is the phrase “How to”.

How to is a great way to start an article. Anyone with a problem or need is looking for a how-to article.

Write about what people care about

This should go without saying that you should write about things that people are interested in.

Weight loss is something that millions upon millions of people are interested and losing fat around the belly is something that many people are also interested in.

When thinking about what you want to write about make sure it’s something that millions of people care about. If millions of people don’t care about your topic then you’re not going to get a lot of views.

Time scarcity

If the purpose of your article is to show how the reader can accomplish something in a minimal amount of time then make sure you mention it in your title.

People don’t have a lot of time to spend on things and are always looking for ways to get the most out of a short timeframe.

The article with half a million views does this perfectly. It says you can lose belly fat end it only requires a 10 minute workout. 10 minutes is a short amount of time.

Think of ways that you can use this in the articles that you write.

Popular because you’re popular

If you go to the article with half a million views and scroll down past the bottom you will see something that says:

“Most Viewed EzineArticles in the Health-and-Fitness:Exercise Category (90 Days)”

This is a list of the most viewed articles. If you can get your article onto this list then your views will go up dramatically.

Many people searching for articles will find an article, and after reading it will scroll down to this list and click on another.

Lots of people view the articles in this list. If you can get your article on this list your home free.

Keywords are critical

If you view the source of this article you’ll find the following keywords in the meta tags:
“lose belly fat,yoga mats,exercise,fitness,health”

The keywords you choose are important.

Find the most popular articles in your niche and look carefully at their keywords.  You may consider using some of them.

How to Write the Perfect Resource Box

The purpose of a resource box

The purpose of the resource box is to get people to click on the link you provide.

And nothing else.

If people are reading your article then they are hungry for information and looking for more. They’re not looking for some long biography about yourself and how great you think you are. They don’t care.

What they want is more information and that’s exactly what you’re going to give them and nothing else.

Do not mislead your potential website visitors

In our quest to get people to click on the link provided in our resource box it is crucially important that we do not mislead people. It will damage your credibility.

Every day on different forums like the warrior forum for example, I see people complaining about marketers who use misleading tactics. They gain a bad reputation. So don’t do this.

Use A Single Link

In trying to get traffic to your sites from your resource box it may be tempting to plaster it with links to your sites. Don’t do this.

Pick the link that works the best and focus your efforts on getting the reader to click on this one link.

The link should be super relevant to the article

It should answer the reader’s question, “Where can I go to learn more about this?”

Make your resource box a continuation of the article

When people finish reading the article they frequently skim over the resource box. Sometimes they skip over it completely.

So the trick is to make it look like it’s a continuation of the article.

People won’t skip over your resource box if they don’t know it’s there!

Mention the link in your resource box in your article

Some article marketers have found that it’s very effective to mention the link to more information in the middle of the article.

So the reader is halfway through the article and they come across a statement mentioning that there is more information in the link provided at the end of the article. When the reader finishes the article they will be far more likely to click on the link and get more information.

Keep your resource box short

People have very short attention spans and it’s important to keep things short and concise.

Where to put your best tips

If you have an article on 10 tips on how to lose weight fast I recommend putting your second best tip first and your very best tip last.

The first tip the reader sees should be your second best tip and this will entice them to keep reading. After you send your second tip you should mention that you saved the best tip for last and hopefully the reader will continue to the end of the article.

If a reader finishes the entire article they are far more likely to read the resource box, see your link, and click it.

Another thing you can do is actually put one of your tips in the resource box. This makes it so people are more likely to read it.

Numbers entice people to click

When people finish reading the article they are usually looking for more information and one effective way to get them to click on your link is to say something like “Watch 3 videos on how I…” or “Get 17 more tips on how to….”

People are far more likely to click on your link if they believe in advance that they will be getting something of value. Using a number helps convince people that they will be getting valuable information by clicking a link.

Use the word free

I recommend that your resource box link to more information that is free whenever possible.

This enables you to use the word free to help entice the reader to click your link i.e. “Watch 3 FREE videos on how I…”

Things to include in your resource box

The list of things to include in your resource box is really pretty short. While there is some flexibility I recommend the following things:

A brief explanation of additional information using a number of some sort i.e. “Watch 3 FREE videos on how I…”

You of course also need your link

Things NOT to include in your resource box

Here is a list of things that I think should not be included in your resource box. Remember the purpose of your resource box is to get people to click on your link. That’s it. You have one shot at enticing them, so don’t blow your chance by boring your reader with unnecessary details.

• Your name
  People don’t really care about your name and I think it’s a waste of precious space.
• Your biography
  Again, people just don’t care and this doesn’t help convince them to click on the link.
• Your Ezine Subscription Address
  Your reader doesn’t care about this. It doesn’t help them solve their specific problem and it doesn’t help them decide to click your link.
• Your contact information
  Readers are lazy and very few of them when to take the time to compose an e-mail with their questions and actually send it to you. And if you think they’re going to call you with a question then you are mistaken. Leave this out.

Testing and experimentation

It’s important to test different strategies and see what works best for your niche. Some of the strategies I have outlined will work better than others for your niche. And you won’t know which ones work best until you test.

Ezine Articles & Twitter

Every time ezine articles approves an article you can have it tweet about it.

Learn More:
http://twitter.ezinearticles.com

Take Article Marketing to the Next Level

Learn Highly Potent Article Marketing Strategies Here

Finding the best topics your articles can be a challenging task.

Today I want to show you a quick way to generate ideas for good topics.

Oh, and this works for just about any niche.

What you want to do is head over to ezinearticles.com and find a random article in the category that best describes your niche.

Since a category that describes my niche is SEO, I went to the category and chose an article at random:
Keyword Optimization Will Increase Your Traffic

The article I picked was not important.

The category is important.

Scrolling down past the end of the article you’ll see a section that says:
Most Viewed EzineArticles in the Internet-and-Businesses-Online:SEO Category (90 Days)

In the SEO Category, these are the most looked at articles.  These are the articles that are getting peoples’ eyeballs and getting their attention.

Write an article like one of these and you’ll get people looking at your article.

And if you want to know how many times an article has been viewed, you have to scroll most of the way down the page and you’ll see something like this:

This article has been viewed 26 time(s).

Good luck and good night!
Nick

Article Marketing Introduction

This is probably the cheapest of all the methods because it’s virtually free. Your only cost is web hosting and the cost of your domain name. Submitting to article directories is free so take advantage of it.

Okay, how do you get the most out of this?

Well, that’s where a lot of people disagree, unfortunately. So this is the tactic I choose. Others are welcome to add their 2 cents.

I choose not to fight the masses. So I go after the keywords that don’t have as many competing sites but still have a decent number of daily searches according to Wordtracker. I make my cutoff 50 daily searches and no less. Competing sites I cut off at no more than 50,000. Yeah, I’m picky, but the keywords I target that meet this criteria bring me decent traffic.

I do not plaster my articles all over the Internet because I am building for the long time. I don’t want duplicate content to ultimately turn my search engine rankings to dust. Yeah, I know, there are those who argue that duplicate content penalties are a myth. I’m not going to get into that here. I’m just letting you know what I do, and that’s to submit to just a few places and different articles for each. Ezine Articles is still the king in my book.

When you submit articles, make sure your articles are informative and the resource box has a strong call to action. Resource boxes that read like “John Doe is an author and has a degree in…” won’t cut it. You need to write something like…

“Sick and tired of ? Want to finally ? Then go to my site at and get your free report on . Start TODAY!”

This is what I do and my opt ins come regularly everyday.

Try to write at least 3 or 4 articles a day. Why?

Well, that’s where the rating of this method comes in.

Quality Of Traffic – 10. These are people who are specifically looking for this information. You can’t get much more targeted than this. If the site in your resource box is a solid match for the content of the article, you should get quite a few opt ins.

Speed Of Traffic – 10. You’re going to start getting this traffic right away, as soon as those articles are posted. With Ezine Articles, it’s 6 to 24 hours once you’ve reached Platinum status, which only takes 10 articles submitted.

Quantity Of Traffic – 3. This is the big problem with article marketing. You’re not going to get a lot of traffic in the beginning because you don’t have many articles in circulation. However, once you have built up a nice article base, you will start to see the quantity of traffic increasing over time.

Article marketing is what I call the long haul process. It’s not a quick fix like Adwords, which you can pay for dearly if you don’t do it properly, but it’s a cheap way to get highly qualified traffic fast. Over time, the amount of traffic you get WILL increase, but you have to write everyday.

This post was written by Steve Wagenheim. If you want a fool proof step by step formula for writing articles in under 30 minutes…check out the link below. It’s a book written by Steven Wagenheim who has the number 1 rank at Ezine Articles for the category of Internet Marketing…beating out over 4000 other contributors.
http://www.honestincomeprogram.com/tcawamg.html