The Dos and Donts of Article Marketing

Creating unique content is a must-do in terms of driving traffic to your website. Once you have done this, then you need to promote that content to ensure that the target audience is aware of it. Many SEOs claim that Google's duplicate content filters have made article marketing ineffective, while others suggest article marketers simply need to adapt their tactics to remain relevant....

There are ways to market your articles effectively, which will garner you increased traffic to your website, and hence capture potential customers and their information. There are also ways to market your articles that could have a detrimental effect on your search engine rankings, page rank, and your visitor numbers.

Do....

host the original article on your own website. You can then focus on delivering links to that article.

Use Web 2.0 sites eg create a lens on squidoo for article marketing, add your articles to social bookmark sites, use twitter to promote your article

offer your content to blogs as unique/exclusive content. These joint ventures/partnerships with other sites can prove valuable.

write a regular 'column' for a community portal

make sure any links in the resource box point to relevant pages within your site, not a generic page or homepage

spin articles to keep original content on site and put the spins out there to develop your linking strategy

remember that links to articles can stay up for years and bring traffic for a very long time. But this also means that an article you may have forgotten about can be plagiarised so keep an archive of your own work on your site to ensure no-one steals your position on the SERPs.

Share your articles with other websites but look to seek deals where you get a page for your article with no other links on it rather than being lost in a morass of other content.
Don't....

bulk submit your article to too many article marketing websites. If an article appears on too many sites, the greater the risk of getting hit with a duplicate content penalty

submit your article to a more 'powerful' site than your own. The likelihood is that you will lose search engine ranking to that site, plus you gain little or no link juice from this technique.

submit your article to a popular category. The frequency of submissions to such categories will drive your article down the listing very quickly, unless the site has reviews and rankings and your article proves popular.

spin articles if your time and budget could be better spent writing new unique content and creating a buzz for that

Phil Robinson is an experienced online marketing consultant and Founder of ClickThrough Marketing - an international Search Engine Marketing & Internet Marketing agency