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Article Marketing Questions and Answers

Guest post by: John Alexander

Article Overview: I wanted to stop and address a few questions that I often get asked about the subject of working with articles for organic SEO. There has been quite a bit of misinformation in the marketplace concerning the best way to work with articles for organic SEO. Let's answer a few of the most often asked questions for you.

Article Marketing Questions and Answers

One of the best ways to learn about effective article marketing, is from someone who is already very successfully doing it. That's how I first learned. So for today, let me address some of the questions I get asked most often. Question:

John, can you give me your definition of what it means to create quality content?

Answer:

The term implies exactly what it suggests. Articles should be written in a way that is helpful, engaging and useful to the reader. Articles should ideally be fresh and original and should be written to satisfy the reason that initiated the user to search in the first place.

Question:

When you say that articles should be original, does that imply that if an article is published in more than one place, that it will penalized for duplicate content?

Answer:

When I say articles should be 100% fresh and original, it implies that they usually will do better than than let's say an article published in 500 different places. But to clarify one thing, Articles are not considered duplicate content, but they are similar to news and can be considered syndicated content.

Question:

But what about those who say articles are duplicate content and can end up being penalized by the search engines.

Answer:

The important thing to remember, is that to get to the truth about something, we need to listen or observe what the search engines themselves have to say. So for example, if someone claims that articles are duplicate content or equivalent to Spam, then they are not in line with the fact that both Google and Yahoo actually have Creative Common areas where they encourage the public to republish other people work under Creative Commons license. So if articles were considered Spam, then why would search engines encourage people to publish these articles? Plain and simple they wouldn't do it if articles were considered Spam.

There is one area that you may want to pay attention to if you begin publishing articles. You would not probably want to publish the same articles across a huge network of Web sites that you personally own.

Question:

Do you recommend that writers use article spinning tools to create dozens of variations of an article. Is there any danger to doing this or is it okay?

Answer:

Personally, I'm a big believer in writing fresh, original content as opposed to trying to use these article spinning tools that create variations of the same article. My advice is to beware of any automated that have a button to push that will instantly and automatically put words or phrases into your content in a general or random manner. Do not use this type of tool when article marketing.

Remember that Google and other search engines are using things like NLP or "Natural Language Processing" to reward well written content. You really want to focus on the aspect of content that is well written. Auto synonym replacement and spinners create unreadable garbage at best. It's like the early days in SEO when some folks would create doorway pages with very little value and all they did is clutter up the search engine's index unnecessarily. Back in the day, most people who were doing doorway pages often were embarrassed to have them even show up in the search results. Best rule is, don't use automatic content spinners that only generate random phrases.

Question:

Are there any other options for helping you to create valuable content on a random basis?

Answer:

I have never seen any tool that let's you create quality content on a random basis. The keyword here is random. The easiest way to determine whether or not to use a tool is to ask yourself if the end result is something that you would be proud to have your name associated with or not. If it looks or reads very poorly to you, it will certainly not be useful to your customers or perform well in organic search either.

I should also make a distinction that if you have a tool that does allow YOU to identify and input word structure, synonyms and phrase replacements on a word-by-word or phrase by phrase replacement based on logic (not randomly), then that this is quite different, because the content is being re-written or paraphrased by you. The result would be content that makes sense, reads well and flows well because you did write it.

Question:

But is this type of tool available and I don't understand the difference between this and any other article spinning tools?

Answer:

The primary difference is that words and sentence structure are not generated at random by a machine. This is the type of tool that does require some actual work on the writers part, but the end product is a number of articles that are all well written, quality content that reads well and you would not be ashamed to sign your name too it, because unlike article spinners, it generates extremely well written content.

Question:

I wanted to ask about article submission tools and how effective they are?

Answer:

They are okay, but not really as effective as they were back in the early days. My best advice is to work with high quality publications and just as you might do in the real world, watch for opportunities to build relationships with editors and publishers.

You can also, in time build your own distribution channel or list of Directories and/or professional publications that are focused on the type of content you write about.

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Article Tags: article marketing, marketplace, misinformation, questions and answers, seo



Related Forum Posts
Re: Let’s talk about the ways of marketing your products, servic - I agree with some of the others who responded it depends on what your selling... but to answer your questions here are some of the methods I use. Forum Marketing Yahoo Answers (I need to use more of) SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Bum Marketing or Article marketing P-P-C (Pay Per Click) Marketing Online Directories Hope this helps.
Re: Contact Information - Another idea would be to have an email form in place to accept "ticketed" inquires (if people are afraid of spammers seeing their email address). However, I hate how some sites try to persuade you out of sending an email by bombarding you with lists of "Frequently Asked Questions & Answers" as I find they're rarely helpful.
Re: Should Evan add a "Social Media Marketing" category to the f - Hi, Online Marketing would be a great title, and having sub categories would make it even better, there would plenty of categories to choose from, Social Media, SEO, Article Marketing and yes even Affiliate Marketing to name just a few, great looking site btw Jeff, take care, Carol
Re: Traffic! How do you get it? - Traffic is the lifeblood of your internet business and it is one of the most popular questions asked all the time how do I get more traffic. The following are some good strategies that are proven to work to help ou gain traffic to your website A) Forum Marketing b) Article Marketing - (Where you distribute your content is the key to success with Article marketing) c) Video Marketing d) Blogging e) Social Media ( sharing content amoungst a targeted network of friends or creating Fan Pages and updating) f) Ezine advertising ( send solo mailings to email lists of people within your niche) Go to google and type in your niche name followed by ezine or newsletter g) Pay per Click H) Joint ventures and ad swaps ( generally will need a list of email subscribers of your own) I) Classified adverts online J) Banner and Image ads - go to google and type in google image ads - full tutorial their I would reccomend you pick one strategy and learn it until you can generate some great traffic and then you should look to move on and implement other strategies.
Re: How to Promote Your Business Online - Thanks for the list ZekeLL , I use many of these ways to promote my online business and am looking into using more of them. I also use Article Marketing, Social Networking and Blogging which I find a very good way to get traffic to my site and also gain valuable backlinks. Take care, Carol


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