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Some people find great success with article marketing, while others think its proponents are full of bull. The difference between the winners and the losers in article marketing is most frequently defined when the writer sits down and begins to write. That is right. Success and failure is most often determined by the writers’ motivation, and more importantly, by the writers’ commitment to the reader.

Flawed Strategies

In 2005, a few of the Internet Marketing gurus took notice of the success people were having with article marketing, and they passed this news to the Internet Marketing newbies of the world. But, there was something missing from the advice given.

In a lot of cases, the people preaching the power of article marketing had never used the technique themselves. Even today, few of my article distribution competitors utilize reprint articles to promote their own businesses. Most of my competitors rely upon affiliate marketing to promote their websites.

Unfortunately, the Internet Marketing newbies of the world were given a lot of bad advice. It was said that:

The only purpose of article marketing was to build links, and link popularity for search engine rankings;

The writer only needed to write enough words to meet the minimum word count requirements of publishers;

It wasn’t necessary for the content to be well-written, since the publishers do not read the articles they approve for publication;

Anything that can be done to reduce the time/cost of article writing would benefit the marketer.

The only suggestion that bore any resemblance to the truth was the first item about “building links for link popularity”, but the error in this statement was to assume that there was no other purpose for article marketing.

The Bigger Picture

I have been using article marketing to promote my own websites since 1999, and I have offered article-marketing services professionally since 2000 and under my current domain since 2001. I had been using article marketing and providing services for at least five years, before the gurus started leading the uninitiated Internet Marketers astray in 2005.

As one of the pioneers in this industry, I have always attributed three benefits to article marketing, in this order:

1. Publication in a newsletter ensures that thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of readers, can read ones’ article when it is published. (Frequently, publication day for my articles will generate phone calls from many potential customers and multiple sales, sometimes thousands in sales.)

2. Publication on a website increases the likelihood that your article will be found and read on websites that have targeted and loyal visitors.

3. Building links for link popularity and improved search rankings.

I have never denied the ability to use articles to build ones’ link popularity and to increase ones’ ranking in the search engines. In fact, my website ranks in the top 20 results in Google for hundreds of keywords.

But in my experience, using articles to increase search rankings is something that is ranked at #3 in my list, because it is a long-term play. Your ability to rank in Google for specific keywords is influenced significantly by what your competitors have done before you. I have used this example many times before, but if you want to rank for the keyword “travel” against such websites as: Expedia, Yahoo, Orbitz, The Travel Channel, CNN, Travelocity, Lonely Planet, USA Today, the New York Times, and the U.S. Government; then you better bring a huge budget to the contest.

Once the newbie in Internet Marketing is aware of the challenges of the search rankings game, then the newbie is better prepared to target and get realistic results from an article marketing campaign.

What Newsletter Publishers Require From Their Writers

While it may be true that a few article directory managers do not review articles before publication, it is not true of all article directories. Directories such as http://www.EzineArticles.com, http://www.IdeaMarketers.com, http://www.Website-Articles.net, http://www.InvisibleMBA.com, http://www.ArticleStars.com, http://www.ArticleDashboard.com, and http://www.Isnare.com have editors who personally review each and every article posted to their directories, to ensure that the articles meet the directory’s editorial guidelines.

And, newsletter publishers personally read and approve every single article they publish. Why? In order for a publisher to be able to sell high-dollar advertising, the newsletter must attract and retain loyal readers. In order to get and keep readers, the newsletter must “absolutely” publish content that its readers appreciate receiving and want to read.

Herein lies “the secret to success” in article marketing. Not only do newsletter publishers read articles, seeking to find the content that will ensure the loyalty of their readers, the website publishers who have served loyal audiences for several years also strive to provide their readers only the best content available.

Article Spinner Software Stops Short Of Serving The Reader

No matter how well the Content Spinner software sellers may write their sales copy, one would be a fool to trust computers to write the kind of articles that people want to read.

Remember, the newsletter publisher and the successful webmaster are solely focused on finding content that will keep their readers loyal to them. Also remember that the “link building game for link popularity” is a long-term play that could take years to see fruition.

Given this knowledge, why would someone who is truly seeking success online be willing to trust that the article spinners are able to develop articles that would pass the “human eye test” or even the “smell test”?

What The Article Marketing Professionals Have To Say

I know that I have always suggested that one should take into account what someone is selling, before taking his or her word at face value. Since I sell ghostwriting services, it is absolutely in your best interests to take my words with much skepticism. BUT… I am not the only professional Internet Marketer with this viewpoint. Following are quotes by people whose names you may recognize.

Christopher Knight of Ezine Articles was asked, “How much must I change or rewrite my article so that your content filters won’t reject it or suspend my account?” Chris responded, “The answer is all of it. Seriously, don’t rewrite your own articles. Just create new ones. It’s not that hard.” Chris added that derivative content adds no value to his website. (http://blog.ezinearticles.com/2008/07/content-filtering.html)

Chris McElroy from http://www.ArticleContentProvider.com says, “Computer-generated articles can never replace hand-written original content. Just getting articles into article directories does not help your link popularity, so submitting garbage will get you nothing in return. Only when your articles are reprinted in newsletters, ezines, websites, and blogs that are related to your topic do you get any value from article marketing. Those who think otherwise don’t understand the first thing about article marketing or SEO.”

Allen Taylor, who contributes to the article marketing blog at http://articlecontentprovider.com/article-marketing-blog/ was asked to review someone’s article spinner software. I am sure the guy who requested the review is kicking himself in the butt right now; since Allen proceeded to show his readers exactly how worthless the software is in the real world.

Allen concluded his review with the following words: “I would not recommend rewriting your articles. Just write fresh articles that don’t threaten to have problems like the ones noted above. Really, it doesn’t take long to write a 500-word article that can be used for article marketing or other online marketing purposes. If you’re going to do something, why not do it right?” (http://articlecontentprovider.com/article-marketing-blog/?p=177)

Willie Crawford (http://TIMIC.ORG/) is not an article-marketing professional. Instead, he is a professional marketer, who uses article marketing to promote the many websites that make up his online empire. Willie is a seven-figure earner, and yet, he continues writing new articles whenever he has the time to do so.

Willie said: “I’ve looked a numerous ‘article spinners’ and seen that the output from them was generally so incoherent that it would have been an insult to my readers.”

“I respect my readers and realize that writing is communicating one human to another. That’s why all of the articles that I publish are unique and not software generated variations of my work.”

Communicating One Human To Another

Those people who have found the greatest success utilizing article marketing as a promotional tool are those who understand that article marketing is best-used as a tool to communicate “one human to another.”

At the beginning of this article, I suggested, “Success and failure is determined by the writers’ motivation, and more importantly, by the writers’ commitment to the reader.”

Successful newsletter publishers are those who have made a commitment to keep their readers interested and reading every issue. Successful webmasters and bloggers are those who have made a commitment to keeping their readers satisfied and coming back to their websites frequently. All are looking for article content that will attract readers to their publications and ensure reader loyalty.

The successful article marketer is the person who understands his or her audience and gives his or her audience exactly what they want.

The article must convince the newsletter publisher that his or her subscribers will value the message in the article enough to read the next issue. The article must convince the Webmaster and Bloggers that the article will keep a reader on his or her website for a while longer. And finally, the reader must be thankful for having been given the opportunity to read the article.

In the end, the decision is yours. Are you simply happy complaining about what could have, should have been with the articles you have written. Or, do you want to invest what will be required to make sure your article marketing campaigns are successful?

Editor’s Note: Article published here.

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Bill Platt has been helping online marketers with article ghostwriting and article distribution services since 2001, through his website: http://thephantomwriters.com/ Read more of Bill’s thoughts on article marketing at his blog: http://article-blog.thephantomwriters.com/

Read more articles written by Bill Platt

In any business, if you can reduce your effective advertising expenses, you will increase your profits. Many business owners will opt to push the additional savings into more advertising, and if you are utilizing the information described in this article, you could feasibly increase your paid traffic by 40-times, with the exact same advertising budget.

But before I can show you how to reduce your advertising expenses and increase your traffic, it is important for you to learn about proper keyword research.

When playing the search engine rankings game, it is important to know what people are “actually typing into the search engines” in an attempt to find your business…

Food For Thought

Think about this, if you were going to take a vacation to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and you needed to find accommodations in Ft. Lauderdale FL, what would your first search keywords be?

Would your first search be the generic search phrase, “travel”?

If you answered, “Certainly not”, then you and I are not much different…

Why would anyone type in the generic keyword “travel”, when they know specifically what they want, before doing the search?

They wouldn’t, would they?

Some people will abbreviate the “Fort” in Fort Lauderdale; others will not abbreviate. The same applies to the state information – some will abbreviate; others will not. Some web searchers will eliminate the state information, because they assume that Google will know “which” Fort Lauderdale they mean. (In the case of Fort Lauderdale, that is reasonable to believe. But search for something like “Paris”, and you might discover that 23 U.S. states have a town or city named, Paris, along with the country of France.)

People will search for a range of spellings for the locality, and then they would add niche-specific keywords to their search, utilizing words like:

hotels

hotel rooms

hotel suites

accommodations

Expand Your Thinking

Chances are that even if you sat down to generate a list of keyword phrases that people might use to find your business in the search engines, you will get stuck in the “keyword rut” that bogs down so many other webmasters… The “keyword rut” that I speak of is the one where we get a certain set of words and types of words stuck in our heads, and that prevents us from exploring the wider range of what might be available.

Even the best keyword research tools fail to show us the full-range of related keywords – keyword research tools tend to only show us the keyword phrases of a “similar root word”. For example, if you type in the word “hotel”, you can get vastly different results from the Google Keyword Research Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) and the WordTracker Keyword Tool (http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/).

Just to prove my point, I ran the keyword “hotel” through both keyword search tools. Google’s Keyword Research Tool performed better than the WordTracker tool, but WordTracker does provide better estimates of search-volumes outside of the Google universe.

While not all-inclusive, I wanted to show you a list of suggested keywords that I was expecting to find using both tools. Behind each Keyword, I indicate in parenthesis which tools provided those suggestions to me…

motels (Google – YES | WordTracker – YES) BOTH

accommodations (Google – YES | WordTracker – no)

bed and breakfast (Google – YES | WordTracker – no)

b&b (Google – YES | WordTracker – no)

vacation rentals (Google – no | WordTracker – no)

vacation homes (Google – no | WordTracker – no)

condos (Google – no | WordTracker – no)

condominiums (Google – no | WordTracker – no)

beach rentals (Google – no | WordTracker – no)

As you will note from this example, if you let the keyword research tools do all of your thinking for you, then you would have missed over half of the keyword phrases that are actually relevant to your business…

That my friend spells m-i-s-s-e-d o-p-p-o-r-t-u-n-i-t-i-e-s!

How To Do Better Keyword Research

A trip to the library or your favorite bookstore could be the best thing you will ever do for your business research / keyword research…

Use book titles to narrow your search, but check the “back of the book” for the Index, before you make your selection…

Many of the best books in the non-fiction niche have an index at the end of the book, with page-after-page of topic related keywords, with page numbers.

If you have selected the most relevant book from the shelf, and it has a good Index at the end of it, you will have one of the best resources you will ever need to do keyword research in your niche.

Value The Long-Tail Keywords

Many people make the mistake of only chasing the high-volume keyword phrases that signal strong interest in a topic…

However, the high-volume keywords have some inherent shortcomings:

Although 151 million searches are conducted using the word “travel” each month, that search will seldom generate a real click, because the person searching for it will realize that more specificity is to his or her best interest.

If you are able to get a click from the search for “travel”, that click will cost an average of $2.25 in Google.

If you are bidding high enough to be seen for a search for “travel”, you will find your competitors to be many. It is harder to be noticed among the crowd.

If you do generate a click from your placement on the word “travel”, that visitor may hit your website and leave to do more shopping, since there are currently 11 paid listings on the front page of Google for that search phrase. People will spend less time on your site, if they know that they have more varied choices.

The still-generic search for “Fort Lauderdale travel” will require $1.72 per click, with 8,100 searches per month.

A more specific search for “Fort Lauderdale Florida hotels” will actually cost an amazing $3.48 per click, but the hotels that are paying for those leads are more likely to get a larger portion of the 60,500 monthly searches, since this search phrase is far more precise.

“Fort Lauderdale beach resorts” only costs $2.02 per click and has 27,000 monthly searches, which is really inexpensive compared to the still-generic “Fort Lauderdale Florida hotels”.

“Fort Lauderdale resort” is even cheaper at $1.93 click, with 50,000 monthly searches.

“Fort Lauderdale beach place” gets a surprisingly high, 3,600 searches per month. It has two competitors and can be purchased at an average of $1.06 per click.

…Do you see where we are going here?

Here is where I get to drive my point home… “Fort Lauderdale reservations” gets 40,000 searches per month, and it has an average Cost Per Click (CPC) in Google of a measly 5 cents per click!

As individual searchers drill down into the search results, your chances of appealing directly to them when they are likely to make a purchase is greatly increased… And more to the point of this article, you can generate a lot more traffic for a lot less money…

If you have fewer competitors on the long-tail keywords AND you pay less for those clicks, you could very well cobble together a large list of long-tail keywords that will give you access to the same volume of traffic you would get with one high-volume search, for much less money!

Let me make my point with “Fort Lauderdale beach resorts”, which has 27,000 monthly searches at a rate of $2.02 per click, and “Fort Lauderdale resort” with an 50,000 monthly searches and an average CPC of $1.93. These two long-tail keywords co-joined will be exposed to 77,000 people at Google, and those clicks will cost an average of less than $2.02 per click.

If you simply compared the above example with the 60,000 searches for “Fort Lauderdale Florida hotels” at $3.48 per click, you will find that you can reach more people, at more than a 38% discount in PPC pricing…

In Conclusion

There are many niches where you might advertise, where your competitors are paying $2 to $6 per click in a shark-feeding frenzy, and yet you can get 5 cent clicks all day long for other relevant, more specific, long-tail keywords, with less search volume… But, by bidding on more keywords, you could actually get as much exposure as your competitors are getting, at a much lower cost…

There is one niche where I am getting as much exposure as the competition, but I am only paying 5 cents a click in MSN and Google, while my competitors are fighting among each other for the shorter, less specific keywords in the niche, at $2 to $6 per click… In comparison, I am able to get 40 to 120 times more traffic for my websites than my competitors are getting for the exact same amount of money… And the people visiting my site have pre-qualified themselves by drilling down to my extremely relevant keywords for their searches…

As a business owner or manager, it is important to target your PPC and SEO towards the actual keyword phrases that your potential customers are using to find your website… But more importantly, if you leverage the knowledge found in this article and your efforts, you might be able to discover that you can tilt the odds towards you getting the sale, and you can do it at a cost that would make your competitors envious…

Article previously published here.

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Bill Platt has been providing article distribution services since 2001 at http://thePhantomWriters.com/ Utilizing his nearly one decade of article marketing experience, Bill Platt created a free ebook titled, “Article Marketing: Beyond the Basics”, which will teach you why many people fail with article marketing, and how you can turn your articles into profitable and productive advertising tools. Get your copy of this article marketing ebook that has been receiving rave reviews. Download it for free here:
http://thephantomwriters.com/ebooks/advanced-article-marketing.html

Read more articles written by Bill Platt