Article Marketing Automation Which Actually Works!

Article marketing is writing and distributing articles which include links back to the site or hub pages that you wish to promote .

Traditionally you submit articles to directories which publish your articles for free and other site owners use the directory's RSS feed to get copies of relevant content for their sites.

Many people think that article marketing will bring them more visitors: it will but not directly. Most directories will not send you a lot of traffic. What they do give you is a keyword anchored link back to your site. Its well-known SEO practice that more keyword anchored back links point to your site the better it will rank in search engine results.

So for many people getting back links from article marketing its not about the number of visitors that click the links directly its about the number of links they get on different sites. So the plan is to submit to as many article directories as possible, and there are literally millions to choose from.

The problem is simple: time - it takes several minutes to submit to each directory, even after you have signed up and created an account. And every article should probably be a little bit different otherwise Google will discount the link - so that's some more time.

If you don't believe me this is a problem: you obviously haven't tried doing it yourself: I encourage you to go out and try it - you should never buy software without understanding what it does - and doing is the best way of understanding!

Now you are convinced that hand submitting to bulk directories is the most mind-blowingly boring activity in the universe you probably won't be surprised that you a lot of people are happy to help for a price.

There are a number of the products in the market: but they fall into two camps: a submission service and submission automation software. Both have their issues.

Submission Services:

I looked long and hard at buying a membership t o one of these. Unfortunately their free version is really, really bad so there is no real way to try before you buy and buying involved significant cash: $100's of dollars.These services use real peole to submit your articles for you so I think customer service is very important and it appears sadly lacking in the industry!

Article Directory Submission Software.

There is also software available which will submit articles to directories automatically: you fill in a few fields and push the button. Again there are issues with the customer service: its non-existant and this for a product which again costs $100's of dollars. I also found it was still taking a lot of time - the software was quite difficult to use, and a number of my article niches didn't fit cleanly into the fixed directory categories making automation difficult.

Directories come and go and change their interfaces : submission needs to be regularly updated but this doesn't seem to be the case in the product I short-listed.

So I had issues with the accepted automation solutions and I did: well nothing. Then I saw a new product start being talked about: a service called Article Marketing Automation, released by the same company who developed the PLRPro site.

This product is different:they distribute your keyword-anchored articles to blogs not to article directories.

Some of you will just have had a light bulb moment so check out the details in my Article Marketing Automation review here.

For those of you who still here on top of the issues I had with the existing products and had some reservations about submitting to bulk article directories anyway.

1. Most article directories are not focused on a single topic so the vast majority of directories which accept automated submissions are low quality in terms of content focus and Page Rank;
2. Your links are only allowed in the bio at the bottom of the article - which in my opinion counts less than links near the top of the page in terms of search engines because so many people put all there spammy links at the bottom of the page or the footer to hide them; and
3. The article is duplicated - which means that the search engines will discount the link a lot - also you are getting lots and lots of links using the same keyword anchor which is knon as "Google bombing" and again not good practice.

What Article Marketing Automation does is cunningly simple: they submit articles to blogs. The blogs are in general focused on a topic or niche: say travel or security systems. So your travel article becomes a blog post a on a blog which is all about: travel.

You can put up to three anchored links within the article, anywhere in the article, so this avoids the problem with having links only at the bottom.

Are the articles duplicated? They could be, but Article Marketing Automation includes a "spinner" which allows you to post variations of your article. If you choose this option you get presented with a random sentence from your article and you right from 1 to 10 variations of your sentence. I find if I write 3 variations for 6 or 7 sentences then I get about a 40% unique article - which is good enough for Google on all accounts. I hate spinning articles but this is as about as easy as it gets. You can also spin your keyword anchors: which you should do even if you don't spin the article.

Whose Blogs are the Articles Posted On?

Well some of them are mine! AMA has to levels of membership: free and paid. If you sign up with the free membership you can submit your own blogs - you then become the publisher half of the story - you are given suggested articles for your blogs (based on the search terms you want) and you publish them. I can track back some of the blogs that have published my articles and am universally impressed with their quality.

The free membership doesn't allow you to submit articles - but to entice you in they give you chance to submit 5 articles for free. This is the best way to try out the service. If you submit articles with links back to a blog you will get the trackbacks nad be able to see the type of site which as published your article.

My articles appear to being published 2/3 times a day: your mileage will vary on the topic's popoularity obviously.

If you sign up using my links on the my AMA review blog post I will be paid a commission. I am however a very, very happy user of this service which is why I am promoting it here. I do suggest that you sign up for the free version first and then if works for you upgrade to the paid version. No risk and you may just be impressed: I can assure you it takes an awful lot to impress me in Internet Marketing!