When you’re starting to publish your articles to article directories, you should stop for a minute and consider the strategy that you intend to use. While you could just skip this step entirely, for the best results, you absolutely must have a plan.
Basically, one of the main reasons why a plan is necessary is simple: Depending on where and how you publish your articles, your results are going to be different.
First though, you need to consider what you want to gain out of your article marketing efforts, and in that regard, you have two choices:
1. Traffic
2. Backlinks
If you’re looking to gain traffic, then you need to remember that the idea you’re operating on is to get traffic to your article first, and then channel it from there to your website (via the backlink). Of course, if you’re instead looking to just gain backlinks, then all you want is to make sure that you have that backlink pointing back to your website.
With this in mind, what happens when you want to publish the same article to multiple directories?
For one thing, some directories may not allow it. A perfect example of this is eZineArticles, which insists that the article be published first on their directory, before being published on any others.
However for the most part, if you were article marketing for backlinks, then publishing multiple copies of the same article onto various directories would mean – yes, more backlinks!
In that scenario, it is easy to see why publishing the same article more than once is definitely a good idea, but the question we have to ask ourselves now is: What about article marketing for traffic?
Sure, you could do the same, but if that were the case all that you’d have is a number of articles competing with each other for exactly the same market share. Instead of this, what some marketers do is alter the backlinks slightly so that there’s one ‘original’ article, with the backlink pointing to your website, and then many ‘copy’ articles that have a backlink which points to the original.
By doing this, you’ll be boosting the SEO value of that original each and every time you publish the ‘copy’ articles. Thus, you’ll be able to channel more traffic to it, and at the same time, gain more traffic from it.
Nifty little trick isn’t it? Truth be told, it could be amazingly powerful if used right.
Remember to take into account the rules and regulations of article directories though. If you like, publish first on eZineArticles, just to satisfy their requirement, and then after it is up there, go ahead and publish elsewhere.
Keep to the rules, and use this strategy wisely so that you’re able to get better and better results.