How To Make The Most Of Your Article Marketing

Article marketing is a great way to build backlinks, but simply submitting articles to the article directories and sitting back, waiting for the traffic to start flowing doesn't work like it used to. In this article we're going to look at some strategies for maximizing your results from article marketing.

First, the landscape of article marketing has changed quite a bit over the last few months. Google's Panda update hit most of the article directories pretty hard, and they've really clamped down on their quality requirements as a result.

250-300 word articles that are really just re-worked content from other places just won't cut it any more. You need to write longer articles, 500+ words, and they need to be just as high quality as what you would put on your own websites.

This goes beyond the minimum requirements for most article directories, but look at it this way…

You could get by with the bare minimum but if Google does another big update that spooks the article sites into tightening their requirements even further, those bare minimum articles might suddenly be not good enough, and get removed from the site.

Wouldn't you rather put a little extra effort into writing articles that will stand the test of time?

Another way to get more out of your articles is to build backlinks to your articles once they go live on the article directories. Most people just submit an article and move onto the next one, so if you're building links to those articles you're going to outrank most of your competitors.

And the backlinks you include in those articles will be more powerful, since the article will be getting some "backlink juice" as well. The extra link juice will trickle down to your own website over time.

Finally, treat your articles as a source of direct traffic as well as a source of backlinks. Include a good call to action in your resource box to get people to click through to your website.

You'll still get links to your website, but you'll also get some direct traffic from people who find your articles on the article sites. This direct traffic can come pretty quickly too, so it can help get your site moving while you wait for the links to have an effect on your rankings in Google and the other search engines.