Yep, I wrote it right. I went from three visitors a day to twelve. Just kidding. It has increased substantially. Looking at my Alexa ranking, the site went from 1.9 million-ish down to 14,000 and change. This week the average is in the 57,000 range, which I think is just fantastic.

Consider this: Since we are in the midst of a redesign of this website, I was hesitant to advertise or promote until that redesign was completed (I’m guessing another week or so, and it looks terrific). Yet I quadrupled the number of daily unique visitors, my AdSense earnings went through the roof, and I actually started making money from a couple of affiliate programs.

Is the suspense killing you? How did I do it? Simple — I used article marketing combined with having good content on the site and good complimentary affiliate programs for visitors to click.

There’s a lot of debate over whether writing and submitting articles is a waste of time. Since I didn’t want to spend money until the new design was up, I decided to resolve that debate for myself.

Here’s how article marketing works — you write a short article that covers a hot topic in your area of expertise. Included in the article is your brief bio and a link to your site. Anyone who wants to pick up the article and use it on their site, include it in their newsletter or ezine or send it out over their discussion group mailing list (a special autoresponder that sends stuff out to a large group) is welcome to use the article, but they have to include your bio box and in some cases notify you of publication.

Y’know, I never get tired of saying this: Article distribution is a great example of Viral Marketing — people get to use your article for free and encourage others to use it for free, and if you do it right it is one giant advertisement for how good you are at what you do.

Before I give you the nuts and bolts, there’s one thing I’d like to throw in. I was talking over at SitePoint about this, and someone was kind enough to write this about AffiliateBlog:

You have a good blog and and excellent site to go with it from the quick view I took. However, because of the very nature of a blog, I can see where submitting blog articles is advantageous. People will go to your site to read back-blogs and bookmark it to see future blogs.

Thank you. That was a very nice thing to say. But you’re missing the point. If your site doesn’t have content that will keep visitors coming back, why are you bothering to promote it? I will concede that submitting articles is much, much easier for someone who has a blog — bloggers are bascially article machines. We churn out at least one article a day. In fact, article marketing is the AdSense of blogging — we are taking our content and distributing it out to other websites in the hopes that someone will read it and click on our site link. Wow…in a way AdSense employs viral marketing. Sometimes I frighten myself.

So here’s how I did it:

First I downloaded the trial version of Article Submitter Pro. I’d like to find the person who designed the user interface for this software and give them a good slap. It was just horrendous — those techs in the group know the word ‘kludgey’ and baby, this was it. I gave up after one round with this software, but I did get some articles submitted. More importantly I had a huge list of article sites to visit. And I visited about 100 of them. Which brings me to my first observation:

If you’re going to do this manually, pick sites with good traffic and/or article propagation. Article Dashboard is a great site, and offers a script that other sites can use to grab articles from their site. So submitting an article to Article Dashboard filters down to those other sites. That is a textbook example of the concept of propagation, which we borrowed from the plant world. All of the the sites running the Article Dashboard Script get your article from Article Dashboard when you submit it.

I then joined some article group mailing lists and started reading what was coming over them. I submitted to a few of them. I submitted the post Does Pay-Per-Click Have a Future? My first posts were a disaster. Some article sites and especially the group mailing lists are very picky about formatting, which I am not.

I asked specific questions of the two mailing lists I submitted articles on, and got no response from either one. My friends out there know how much this annoys me, so I did not submit to either list again.

The next day I saw no noticeable spike in traffic. This is because most article sites manually review each article, so it takes anywhere from three days to three weeks before you get some feedback. This is actually a great feature, because it gets different articles out there at different times, and keeps your name in front of people. This is one of the major reasons I decided to do an article a day, slowly releasing AffiliateBlog articles so people would keep seeing my name in their RSS feed or on a website.

More importantly, this promotional plan, like any other promotional plan online or offline, it takes time to build traffic in a crowded market. So I decided that I would systematically submit a blog entry as an article every day in succession. I didn’t think some of them would be suitable as articles, so I skipped them. The point is that I wanted to get an article out there every day.

My next step was looking into submisison services. I started with article-marketer.com, because they promised a yearly fee for unlimited submissions. Don’t waste your money. They have a script that ‘reviews’ your article and makes suggestions. It takes three days to review each change you make after a suggestion. Some of the suggestions contradict earlier suggestions. So I wasted more than a week on this nonsense and gave up.

Then I came across Isnare.com. They offer an article distribution service that gets your article out to about 200 different article sites and mailing lists, including the two that I stopped submitting my articles to (ironic, isn’t it?).

The cost is minimal, like $2 each or something like that. So I took a chance and bought some article distribution credits. It was about that time that I also started submitting to Ezinearticles.com. Ezinearticles really annoyed me up front because they have a limit on the number of links they allow in an article. As you know, some of my posts are full of links that help the reader get to the resource I’m talking about. So I took out ALL the links and added a little blurb at the end that said Links to all of the sites on this page can be found at AffiliateBlog.com. So now I have another link on the page that goes to my site. Not bad.

So now I have Isnare and Ezinearticles.com. I then picked three more article sites that looked like they had good volume. Then every morning I submitted a new article to Isnare and Ezinearticles, then to my other three. Each morning I looked at the traffic on each site. If my articles weren’t doing well, I stopped submitting to the site and picked another one.

In about a week something very cool happened. I started getting emails from sites I had never heard of informing me that they had published my article. My traffic numbers started to climb and I was seeing referring URLs from article sites. I kept up the article submissions, and then I hit the motherlode.

On Wednesday one of my articles, Domain Name Insanity was reproduced in its entirety in SiteProNews / Exactseek, a widely read webmaster newsletter. My first clue was an email from Shawn Snarski, a good guy that is working on a project for me:

SitePro News newsletter… you’re a rockstar now
I tried to forward it to you but it looks jumbled…

This newsletter has a HUGE readership amongst the tech community

That is one of the thrills of Article Marketing — you never know where your article will appear. I had to up my bandwith quota for AffiliateBlog that day, and the traffic has stayed at an elevated level since then. Two people who saw the article in SitePro News emailed me for permission to reproduce it for their newsletter. I gladly gave it.

There IS content on your website that you can submit as articles, and there are supporting articles you can write. It takes time, but I can tell you from experience that that time is worth it. Go take a look at what others in your area are writing, and see how many people have downloaded each article. Look for heavily downloaded articles and see what you can write about that subject. I found early on that the title is very important. So make sure it it is descriptive and provocative. You clicked on the title for this article, right? Why?

If you don’t have the content or ideas to write a continuous stream of articles, you may have bigger problems. I will post the sites I submit to in the next entry, along with some writing tips.

Eplilogue
While I was writing this I received an email from Christopher Knight of Ezinearticles.com, informing me that I have been named a Platinum member, a status that can not be bought and can only be earned by sending in quality articles. Only a small fraction of our thousands of authors ever obtain this level.

This gets me approved quicker and gives me other benefits, including a star next to my name, which sometimes doubles the number of downloads of your articles. For the record, EzineArticles is the most popular article site on the Internet and gets some massive traffic. Here’s my button:

I’m proud of that button. Now go get writing.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, April 1st, 2006 at 3:19 am.
Filed under Traffic Tips, Viral Marketing, Internet Marketing, Your Site.
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