At this point in the article marketing series, we’ve pretty much done it all.
If you’ve followed the steps in the previous articles, you’ve generated over a dozen articles promoting your landing page or mini-site and posted them to an article directory. Over time, those articles will get picked up by search engines and you’ll begin to have multiple positions in search engine results that lead to your site. You’ll also have increased the search engine results positioning of your site through the anchor text linking to it in the articles.
What else can you do to maximize your results?
The last step is to write more articles, but this time use a pen name. EzineArticles.com allows you to setup multiple author names in one account. This can be used for pen names, or for authors you are managing. Creating a couple of pen names can help to lend credibility to your articles.
Look at it from the point of view of a typical web searcher. They type a search phrase into Google, and see an article or two come up in the results. All those articles are written by the same person. This does a lot for branding you as an expert, but they may also wonder why nobody else is linking to the same site if it’s any good.
If you’ve created a couple of pen names and written similar articles linking to your site, now a web searcher will see that multiple people are recommending the same site. This can create the perception of authority for the site itself, as opposed to branding you as an expert.
It’s a trade-off, and you’ll have to decide which is the right way for you to go.
When using a pen name, try to not write the same article you wrote under your own name. Write a different sort of article, give it a different style of writing, a different voice. The intent here isn’t to deceive the reader, but to provide the same information in multiple styles, so that you can maximize your chances of building a rapport with whoever your reader happens to be.
Above, all, the key to successful article marketing is the quantity of articles you write, and how widely distributed they are. While EzineArticles.com is the premiere article directory, you shouldn’t submit all of your articles to them. Spread the articles around to different article directories, including ones that regularly get picked up by various ezines and newsletters.
Think of article marketing less like writing a well-crafted love letter, and more like dropping ten thousand leaflets from a plane.
Thank you for this excellent series, Jay. You’ve answered many questions I had about using articles. I appreciate your thorough and forthright approach.
I hadn’t seem much traffic on the articles other popular bloggers have submitted. Now I realize thos articles may have other values, and there may be pseudonyms used.
If you had to choose, would you think it more valuable to write additional content for your blog, or write an article for one of the article clearinghouses?
That’s a tough call. Blogs always need new content, so I wouldn’t skimp there. Article marketing can help expose people to your blog through new avenues, which can get new readers who are interested in what you have to say. If I had to choose between the two, 9 times out of 10 I’d choose to add new content to my blog, and the last time I’d write an article or series of related articles to submit.