Why I Don’t Do Article Marketing
April 2nd, 2012
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Author: Hi everyone! Article marketing is one of those things that a lazy, greedy person like me just abhors. I’m selfish – I want my own content on my own website. Article marketing has long been touted as one of THE primary ways to enhance SEO – and like all of you, I read the courses and did the time myself when I was just learning the ropes – for all my little niche topic sites. I did it whenever a “course” would instruct me to do it.
I even drink out of my favorite Ezine Articles coffee cup each morning that I earned for some reason or another. I forget.
But I no longer DO article marketing for the sake of SEO and backlinks. I just don’t DO backlinking at all now, really. Not with SEO in mind. I’m going to show you a very short and interesting video (like 2 minutes) by Matt Cutts (of Google) in just a sec – but let me expand on the whole article marketing issue myself real quick from a Tiffany Freaking Dow perspective. LOL!
People always email me about article marketing and I generally tell them I prefer to keep my own content on my site. I’m sure they go on to find another marketer who is in line with their craving for article marketing tips.
I do build pages on other sites – take Squidoo.com for instance – but it’s NOT for SEO purposes. It’s mainly so that I will have more opportunities to convert into a sale. For instance – if my site has a page about a deep fryer, I will create a deep fryer lens on Squidoo that has ONE of the links to my own site.
This benefits me because the customer might go to my domain and bookmark it and see other items they want to buy. If the lens wasn’t enough, then maybe my page on my domain can clench the sale.
Also, my own domain might take up 1-2 spots in the SERPs, but I’d love to have a few other pages with a chance to rank well, too – so I can make more sales – and Squidoo is a nice place to convert.
When I implemented the original Bring the Fresh product, for example, I did the linking they instructed for testing purposes to show you how the course worked, but I didn’t continue it – and it wasn’t for this site. It was for other niche sites I later sold.
I get asked all the time: “How do you get backlinks to your blog?” (This blog). Well, I write blog posts that people get inspired by, get angry about, or want to share for good reasons.
Apparently, and I’m no SEO pro, search engines used to consider the number of inbound links to help them determine PageRank and all that jazz. Well now it looks like they’re considering the actual site content and its social appeal. Hooray!
When I go to someone else’s marketing blog, and I’m wondering how much of an impact they have, I don’t look for ads or keyword titles – what I look for is the number of comments they person has and the number of social shares.
This tells me at a glance if this person has a following or not. It tells me whether or not this person’s blog is engaging. That’s what matters. That’s what Google wants. Good content. An original voice. Sharing something people want.
Listen to Matt Cutts tell what he thinks of article marketing in this 2 minute video and then I’ll continue:
Now he talks about duplicate content – they go into that on Google blog posts, so all that means is if there’s 100 sites with the same article, they’re going to choose only the best – maybe 1-2 to show up front. So if you’re thinking about PLR – tweak it, or even use it as curated content where you add YOUR commentary on what’s been written.
Use PLR as a springboard for ideas, not for some cut and paste measure. Every website needs a voice – and you HAVE to develop one for your site. PLR can’t do that. It can give you a nice structure of information and facts, but it won’t reach through the computer and grab the collar of the reader and say, “You’re not going ANYWHERE, Bub!”
Not like an original post with an attitude can!
Be inspiring, be creative, be funny, be honey badger – whatever you truly are – to get your audience to engage with your content.
Matt has it right on when he says to create content that makes people want to link to it organically. Let other people link to you – forget about linking to yourself, unless it’s some sort of original content and you want to point to your site so that your readers can get more information on your site or blog.
As he says, don’t write article marketing content with the hope that someone needs content for their own site with a link back to you just because they have to. Those aren’t quality sites. Quality sites have an audience that comes back for more because they relate to the blogger (even if relating means they get so annoyed they just have to read what’s next).
Tiff 
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Posted in Career
You don’t worry about SEO because you get all your traffic from the WF.
Yea, you write those posts that get reactions from your stable of readers. But those readers almost all originally came from the WF.
What if the WF disappeared into thin air one day. Then you would start to wonder where all your new supply of readers would come from. You can’t last forever without new blood.
Then you would say to yourself “I’d better learn a thing or two about SEO”.
LOL Jim is that where you came from?
I don’t post enough to sustain me from just WF, Jim. There have been so many people who found me by word of mouth of others.
Now I started respecting your right to have a $0.02 (even if it was wrong) – but when you say stupid stuff like the above, then I think you’re just a random troll.
Ha! Heck I don’t post comments much, (some help huh?), but I just about read many of your posts. I find them quite interesting. Not sure at times if I am reading all for knowledge or being nosy:-)
But word of mouth is how I found out about you Tiffany. Yeah baby!
LOL Thanks Zoe!
I also found Tiffany through a search I did. I didn’t link with her on WF until after SHE talked about WSOs etc. As a matter of fact, the first thing I do when I go to someone’s website is look at their Alexa ranking. If it is low enough, I scroll down to see their shares, their comments etc. Tiffany ALWAYS has a slew of comments and lots of shares.
I’d say she’s doing just fine with her strategy.
Hey Tiffany,
To be fair, most of the people that I know that know you, know you from Warrior Forum. I have tried to share some of your stuff on Facebook and get other people in the loop, but don’t know if they were interested or not since we are all content writers, editors, and SEO VAs. Our company does have a stockpile of your PLR in our vaults for random niche websites though.
The guy that wrote the comment sounds a little bitter, but I do think that your fans come from WF, which isn’t a bad thing.
Erin
About 18% of my referral traffic is from Warrior Forum. Google sends about 35% and a wide variety of other domains send the other. According to Alexa. Also, sometimes someone will hear about me from someone else, I will instruct them to join WF and then we get to know each other better there. But either way, I don’t mind!
Tiff,
The vast majority of article marketing has become so “evergreen”, that you rarely see content of any real usable value any more.
Don’t get me wrong, I still submit articles to the top 3 article sites. However, I never post the same article to those three at the same time.
Instead, I write three high-quality, well researched and unique articles; each covering only one (1) specific issue (i.e traffic, list building, etc.) and submit them by hand to each of the top 3 sites. I do this twice a week.
However, the bulk of my traffic still comes from the quality of the content that I post at my blog. Why is this?
Because, as you say, people are lazy by nature (including me). With this in mind, you can become the “goo-roo” simply by compiling relevant, timely and useful information at your blog for all of us lazy people out here!
OMG… building traffic and backlinks by compiling and posting timely, relevant and useful information at your blog? What a novel idea!
Be good to yourself,
James
James you have it right
I think we sometimes actually make MORE work for ourselves when we employ shortcuts than if we took the slow road to success with less work.
Hey Tiff,
I’m not sure I agree with you on the end of article marketing yet, although it is trending that way.
I can agree with you on the Ezine Articles coffee cup – it’s my favorite too! lol They used to send it when you reach Platinum author status. If I could find a set of them I would grab them.
I’m sure it has its place – I just don’t.
Isn’t it the perfect size coffee cup Not too big but not too small. LOL!
LOL, now that I think about it, I did find you from the WF long ago. That and your Squidoo book.
I don’t thing you know how lucky you are to be able to have “word of mouth” referrals. Do you have any idea what percent of people try for that and fail?
I still think that the WF and you are connected at the hip. That’s why you mention it in so many posts.
I’ll try not to bother you again this week so please don’t post anything I disagree with
LOL You devil! I do appreciate the word of mouth referrals, Jim.
So many times each day someone emails me saying, “I heard about you from ____” and it’s some other marketers steering them my way.
I do appreciate the WF, though – I don’t hide that fact
But it’s not my bread and butter. I had that scare man years ago and it scared me straight.
You can comment – you just got me all riled up earlier.
“Word of mouth” referrals don’t come from luck. They happen because of hard work and dedication to providing value to your reader.
Hi Tiff,
I’m glad not everyone does article marketing. I have been trying to do it, but ezinearticles won’t publish anything about plr articles. They won’t even publish an articles that is not about plr if the website link in the bio box has plr in it, which mine does.
Other places such as articlebase does, but they get no traffic to speak of, not for the plr niche anyway.
Goarticles is so hard to join I’ve been trying for years and still not succeeded. (lol)
So all in all I’m happy to give up on it.
LOL me too Bev!
Like you I am a lazy Internet marketer so did very little in the way of article marketing for myself.
I did however make a few hundred dollars a month by writing freelance for a popular content provider. Since all this hooplah with Google de-indexing blog networks, there has been very little (i.e nothing in the last week) for me to write.
I can only surmise that the majority of customers were paying for content to post on blog networks. The unfortunate side effect is than now I have to put more effort into my Internet marketing efforts (not by article marketing obviously) to hopefully make up the difference.
I’m also assuming that this may have a detrimental effect on the demand for PLR content and was wondering if you had noticed much difference to your sales volume?
No – PLR isn’t about backlinking. You can use PLR right on your site to build content. Google hasn’t changed their view of duplicate content – and PLR isn’t a penalty. Still, best to add to, tweak, etc. Always best to do that – but always has been! And sales aren’t down.
I used to do article marketing a few years ago. I was getting a lot of hits to my site. But I stopped doing it as it was too time-consuming. Now, I rely solely on social media, word-of-mouth, and other methods of promotion to get traffic to my site.
Good idea Harry
I’m happy to agree with you Tiff … I used to kick myself for not writing more for article marketing because it was pushed everywhere I looked for advice, but I quit for good at last Panda!
Now what do you think of promoting articles by having them show up on other sites like Scribd, Posterous, BizSugar, and so on?
Fran
I don’t do it – and I don’t know anything about it. I think building your own content is best. Squidoo looks great and converts, so I consider it part “mine.” lol
I don’t do article marketing. I think I have 2 articles at ezine articles. They won’t let me link to what I want to or have any mention of PLR on a site. That’s what I DO—so screw them and screw article marketing. LOL
Oh, and I didn’t find you at the WF. I don’t remember how I found you, but it wasn’t there—just an FYI. *wink*
I do try to go there and get involved, but not much appeals to me and I’m not one to just randomly comment without something to say.
I know that aggravated me. Patti, they used to allow it and even when I explained that I taught ethical use of PLR, etc, they snubbed their noses at it.
I was just sitting and thinking about article marketing. I did it a lot over the past couple of years and just cant keep up any more. I have started now focusing on placing contents more regularly on my own blog. See how much of a difference that willl make.
I seem to have lost my touch on writig and am trying to get it back.
I dont use PLR as I hate having to rewrite. I wish they could be used as is, but duplicate content issue is another issue.
I didnt learn about you from WF and I too like to use squidoo.
PLR is also good just for research. You can download a pack for $5 and have your research done – read and write from scratch.
I think that article marketing does have it’s place (for newbies who are just starting out and using it as a testing ground), but now that I have my own site, get links naturally and all that jazz, I agree with Tiff.
I don’t do article marketing at all anymore (and haven’t for quite some time). Yet, the quality of backlinks I get now far surpass anything I could have gotten in times past on my own and come from places I didn’t know existed.
Neat isn’t it? Writing for ourselves lol
I simply don’t give a rat’s booty about any of it anymore. It got to a point where I almost just quit building sites (I’ve built and sold a million of them – ok, not a million, but hundreds lol) because I was bored of keeping up with all the “latest seo/backlinking/ “tactics”. It took the fun out of it for me.
I decided to do one without worrying about all of that stuff, and I started a new niche site March 1st. This is outside of IM and I did not use my subscriber list or anything. I had 4300+ visitors in the first 30 days, and sold 17 items via Amazon so far. I did no backlinking at all except for genuinely posting once on one relevant blog and one relevant forum,. lol
Other than that, I’ve just been creating meaty posts and list posts that I know people will want to share in that niche. (One post got 62 Likes – pretty good for brand new site/article)…
Here’s the kicker, near the end of the first 30 days, I started to see a trickle of keyword search visits. It’s been slightly increasing daily, and already broke into the top ten ranking for a decent keyword.
The reason I’m telling you this is because I used to pay more attention to backlinks than I did the content. lol. Now I’ve reversed that I have seen results just as quickly – if not FASTER in some cases….
I have been sharing basic results with some peeps (facebook, etc.), and people were asking me “what my secret is”. They thought I was being “secretive” and “holding back” when I replied with “list posts, social sharing, and genuine/meaty content”. lol
It helps to do keyword research and use basic seo strategies, but I think too many people focus ONLY on getting “Google traffic”. The Internet is really big and there are a lot of traffic sources beyond Google.
Good for you Jay! I believe in that process too.
Tiff, I get your point but you happen to be in a niche where social media actually happens! What if you were selling commercial insurance or engineering tools, for example? No one wants to post on Facebook or Pinterest about that stuff so how does Google decide how to rank it?
Strictly, putting a link to your own site on your Squidoo lens is against Google’s webmaster guidelines as well – it’s not a natural link.
There is a still a lot of crap ranking on Google’s first page, so a lot of sites may have disappeared but that doesn’t mean they’ve been replaced with quality.
I wanted details on some psychological research and the top result was of course Wikipedia; the article was badly written and had almost no useful information, but Google thinks that Wikipedia deserves the top spot anyway.
Living where I do I see very few Adsense ads on Google SERPs, but I’ve got screenshots of the SERPs my friends in the US see – and almost everything above the fold is Google spam (i.e. paid links, they very thing they would de-index us for!)
Let’s get away from the idea that Google is a public service; it’s a business and it does what serves GOOGLE best, not the user.
Not sure how they rank that. Maybe just factors like how long someone stays on the site or something…
Where does Google say it’s against their webmaster guidelines to link to my site from another site? I don’t disbelieve you, just want to learn more.
Personally, I think content is king. If you are providing good quality content that is helpful to your customers and readers then guess what, they will be back.
Tiffany, you are one of the very few people I read regularly and that is because you are REAL. I never feel sold to, I always think you are interesting and I also get a giggle once in a while because of your great personality.
I think about you a lot as an example of someone who doesn’t fit into a mold. You are definitely one of a kind and it works!
Thank you Michelle! I’m honored
If I remember correctly I found you by searching for specific PLR on Google. Found your blog and one thing led to another.
I’ve been quietly following you since 2007. I think I just started making comments the last year or so.
I’ve enjoyed watching you blossom and grow. You inspire people to believe in themselves and the possibilities. Quite a gift.
And you just keep giving, sort of like the energizer bunny… that was meant in a good way, lol.
LOL Thanks Gma
Well done on the traffic numbers Tiff!
I SO hope you are right about Google being better at finding quality nowadays.
The last algo change or two seems to have decreased the quality of Google search pages recently – so much so that I am shifting more to Bing for my research.
I haven’t used Bing but I might pop in and check it out.
Hi Tiffany,
About 2 or so years ago I started writing for Ezine Articles to get a website some recognition but after about the third article when they told me I had duplicate content and wouldn’t listen to what I was trying to tell them I decided to hell with them.
My “duplicate” content was the ingredients in a particular beauty product and as I tried to explain to them you can’t change the formula for ingredients but all they did was send me a link to some website that had every bell and whistle known to man, and probably some that weren’t, and say mine was the same as that one. Get a life.
I guess it depends on who was moderating or whatever your particular story because some of the rubbish that passed for content was ridiculous and I wasn’t going to play that stupid game.
Thanks for all your “stuff” it’s gratefully appreciated.
Thanks Maureen – that is silly – lacks common sense!
Well, finally I can quit feeling guilty for not doing article marketing. I quit doing that long ago. I prefer finding a quality blog in my niche and doing a special guest post for added exposure. You get instant credibility since the blog owner is having you as a guest and you have your content on a highly targeted site for your niche.
Years ago it seems that people were in a frenzy to daily submit their sites to all the search engines. I kept telling people they didn’t need to do all this. I finally set out to prove what I was saying by starting a brand new site…only adding quality content. I didn’t submit to a single search engine…and sure enough I was doing just fine. Some people were paying big money to these companies to submit their sites each month.
Yup! Content certainly is king…no question about it.
Tiffany, I first read some of your info from a non-WF-related web site a couple of years ago. But more recently, I heard about you again via the WF. What can I say? You’re popular!
Love your personality! And your experience and how you to distribute it to your audience keeps me coming back for more.
This post about article marketing is so timely because I have been debating whether I should devote any serious amount of time to it versus spending that same amount of time just placing quality content on my site (fairly new).
Thanks to what I have read in this post and some other research that I have done, I am leaning towards giving article marketing a pass. Please, keep the great content coming!
I totally agree. A site with good quality unique content will rank at the top or near the top of Google everytime.
Tiff,
I found you years ago via a Google search for help with Squidoo. Found you again at the end of 2010 because I wanted to know if you were still around and as ethical as you had originally appeared to be…
After I found you again, I looked for anything and everything I could find outside of JUST your blog (which was helpful in and of itself regardless of whether you might be one of “those” kinds of gurus). One of the places I found you, along with lots of reputation hints and posts, was the Warrior Forum. And I see nothing wrong with you touting the virtues of it’s usage…any more than you tout products that have worked for you and people who have inspired you.
And by the way, on the ethics side…I found out that you were…and you are.
Love ya lady!
Oops…the whole reason I started my rant?
I’ve never done an article or article linking or whatever cause I’d rather invest my time into actually posting on my blogs….so I for one am HAPPY to know it’s ok that I don’t add that to my to do list for my blogs…much more fun actually writing for me than the SERPs!!
Hi, Tiffany I first heard about you in another forum (not the Warrior Forum), as some people on that forum were discussing your Squidoo lenses. I had to check out who this Tiffany gal was!
Thanks Kim!
I did a lot of article marketing when I first started out. It takes so much time, that I decided not to do so much of it. Now, I do backlinking, occasionally write a guest post, and use SEO to bring in traffic. I never put the same article in more than one place.
Best wishes always.
Good idea
I found you thru WF but who cares. It’s social media and if were gone the masses would just go somewhere else. I’ll take any reason whatsoever not to do article marketing.