Posts Tagged ‘article marketing’

In an upcoming telecall on Tuesday, September 15, 2009, you can learn 5 free and easy ways to promote your expertise online — specifically by using the tools already available to you in your IdeaMarketers Writer account.  IdeaMarketers.com founder, Marnie Pehrson, will be covering:

• Article marketing
• Book and ebook promotion
• Getting search engine traffic
• Understanding & Using RSS Feeds to Save Time & Maximize Your Presence
• Become a Syndicated Columnist

This call is also a kick-off for our 10-year anniversary giveaway of a FREE Netbook! In the call you’ll find out how you can qualify to win. To register go here.

Michiel Van Kets of manual-submissions.com brought up some critical points regarding my last post. While I don’t agree with everything he said, he did make a good point about WHY submission services link back to the original article. They’re trying to tell Google that they had it first. They’re trying to protect against duplicate content penalization and claim first use of the article. Since ideamarketers.com is the longest running article directory on the Web (Dec 1998) and it does receive several million page views per month, it is considered a high authority site and usually brings up higher search results. So, I can understand their concern.

Yet it still doesn’t give the end user a good experience to be led away to a duplicate copy of an article for more information, nor does it best serve the writer who isn’t able to “strike while the iron is hot.”

SO… I came up with a solution.  (Criticism is the mother of invention.) I’ve programmed our site to recognize if the “more information” url is a link to a major submission service. If it is, it will link to the default URL on the writer profile for more information and then at the bottom of the article, it will say, “This article was submitted by a submission service.” That phrase will then link to the duplicate copy on the submission service’s site.

This should satisfy the submission service, the author, the end user, and Google. If you use a submission service that links back to a copy of the article on their site, you’re welcome to comment below with the name of that service and I’ll add it to the programming so it will be handled appropriately.

I might add, that many times the default URL on your writer profile will NOT be the URL you want to link an article to. In this case, ideally you’d put a specific URL within your site in the blank we provide in the article-level custom resource box.

If you own or work for a submission service, you’d be better off letting the writer have their specific URL in the custom resource box and hard-code a link (using html) to your original copy at the bottom of the body of the article. This way you’d be covering your own interests and those of your customers.

Many people use article submission services to save time when submitting articles to article directories. And that’s ok. But there is one thing you’ll want to be aware of. It’s nothing malicious, but it is incredibly ineffective for you as the writer who’s working hard to churn out quality articles and then paying someone to submit them for you.

We’ve noticed a pattern among articles submitted by article submission sites to IdeaMarketers.com . Every article in our system is allowed to have a URL associated with it. We link your primary keyword phrase to this URL. We tell people to go there for more information when they read your article. This URL SHOULD link to your site for more information about the article subject. This is your chance to get people to your site to sign up for your list and perhaps one day purchase from you.

The problem with some of the article submission services is that they don’t fill in this blank with your site’s URL. They fill it in with a URL on THEIR site which contains an exact duplicate of the article being submitted.  This means someone who has just read your article is going to be linked off to read it again on another site! They don’t want this. They want MORE information about you.

If you use an article submission service, I’d recommend logging into IdeaMarketers, go to the Article/PR Admin menu, click on Edit/View and edit your articles. Make sure the custom resource box links to a URL on your site for more information about the article’s subject. Better yet, ask your article submission service if they will fill in this blank with a URL on your site.

I’ve posted a 2nd part to this post here.