Article Marketing: 3 Tips to Save Time

Article Marketing is a key component of the 90-Day Content Marketing Challenge because it is a great way to reach new audiences while developing quality back links to your site. When done correctly, Article Marketing can increase your brand image and help establish you as an expert in your field.

Even though Article Marketing is a cost-effective way to promote your business – it does require a significant investment of your time. A little advance planning can limit the amount of time you need to invest, however.

Here are some ideas to save some time on your Article Marketing efforts:

• Create a Master List of Article Directories.  This will keep all of your pertinent account information (i.e. username, passwords, and account ID numbers) in one place so you don’t have to go searching for it every time.  (I also include details about the directory itself, such as its Page Rank and affiliate link policy).  I use a very simple Excel spreadsheet that looks like this:

An added benefit to using this spreadsheet is that the links are live – so all I have to do is click on my spreadsheet when I am ready to submit an article.

Every minute counts, right?

• Write Your Articles in Batches.  This way, you can do all of your keyword research at once and use one body of research to generate 5 or 10 articles instead of just one or two. I find that multiple article topics naturally come to mind while I am conducting keyword research.  (Yet another reason I like Micro Niche Finder’s Strength of Competition (SOC) feature – as I go through and find keywords and phrases with green or orange SOC results, I can develop a list of article topics (that I can rank well for in the search engines) without any extra effort).

• Rework Content You’ve Already Created. No sense re-inventing the wheel.  Have you written a great blog post, email article or special report that can be reworked into one or more new and unique articles? Can you slant the angle to reach a whole new audience?  Reworking your content into something fresh and new will help you get the best mileage in terms of search engine optimization – and keep your readers happy. Here is a great article about how to re-purpose your content the right way.

• Don’t feel You Have to Submit to 100 Different Directories. If you are submitting the same article you won’t get any extra boost in the search engines by having your work appear on a ton of different directories. There are article submission tools out there that promise to distribute your work to literally thousands of different directories, but I prefer to have work with a few high-quality directories. For the purposes of this challenge, I will be submitting articles to 25 directories/week because submitting to 5 directories per day is something I can easily do in a limited amount of time.  For me, this number represents a good balance between reaching a wide enough audience and the time I need to invest each day to accomplish that. Your number may be different.

Tomorrow, I will talk a bit more about the selection criteria I used to create my article directory list and share the full list with you.

Til Next Time,

P.S Is it Thursday already? I better pick up my pace on article writing and distribution to reach my weekly goals.  I’m game, though.  How are you doing with your weekly and monthly plan??  Leave a comment below to let us know!