THE SUCCESSFUL USE OF FREE ARTICLES

C David

One of the best ways to increase your site’s visibility and traffic is by authoring articles and then offering them for free at a variety of locations. Each article contains your URL, thus creating a link back to you every time it appears on the internet.

The power of links with respect to search engine placement is tremendous, and having your name spread across cyberspace increases your credibility and reputation. A successful article creation and distribution campaign can pay huge dividends.

However, it is easy to turn this potential bonanza into a disaster! An unsuccessfully operated campaign can lead to negative publicity and poor performance. It also risks wasting the considerable time and energy required to conduct an article campaign. Those considering using content as a promotional tool need to make sure both the production and distribution components of the strategy are enacted flawlessly.

Poor content is a very common error. Excited at the prospect of building an extensive backlink library, the site owner quickly authors a series of haphazard articles and submits them to various locations.

Although acting quickly does help increase your exposure quickly, poor content leads to very poor results.

Many sites that welcome submissions may refuse to use the article. The power of articles is well-known and many sites are flooded with free submissions. As a result, they are becoming more selective and may decide not to accept a less-than-stellar piece.

A poorly worded or uninformative article, even if accepted at an article clearinghouse, is unlikely to be picked up by other webmasters. One of the chief advantages of an article campaign is its potential for exponential growth. An article appears in one location, leading three others to use it. Those three sites lead to use by others, ad infinitum.

If the actual content is of low-quality, that growth potential is nipped in the bud even if the article is accepted by an initial target.

Inferior copy also reflects poorly on the author and his or her site. Although a primary goal of an article campaign may be increasing backlinks, one must also realize that people may actually read the article—and that it has the author’s name and URL attached!

Instead of promoting the business, a poorly-written article can actually advertise inadequacy—potentially driving business away and reducing the supplying site’s credibility.

Using free articles as a promotional tool requires well-written and well-edited content that provides readers with valuable information.

It is not only important to write good articles, it is important to distribute them correctly. Shooting your article off to a half-organized list of potential targets can seriously undermine your campaign’s effectiveness.

A successfully article-based advertising campaign requires a well-researched and comprehensive list of submission targets. When one considers the effort required to produce effective content, it makes no sense to follow through with a less-than-optimal distribution plan.

Distribution should be targeted to sites that are likely to accept the submission and are visited by others similarly interested in your content and using it. Additionally, article authors should make sure the sites to which they submit allow clickable URLs in resource boxes and must be sure to take advantage of those locations providing an opportunity to use anchor text in their links.

Appropriately distributing an article can be tedious work. The sites that accept submissions often require completing a membership process prior to presenting the article. They may require an eventual confirmation after an email is sent to the author before publishing. They use different submission forms, making automation extremely difficult.

However, great distribution is at the heart of a successful article campaign.

Using free articles to increase your exposure and link-base is effective. That effectiveness, however, is contingent upon great execution in both production and distribution.
----

Article Staff offers custom-produced content and content-related services including editing and article distribution. http://www.articlestaff.netfirms.com/ Article Staff blogs at http://articlestaff.blogspot.com/