Work From Home

Much like Article Marketing, writing and submitting press releases can be an incredibly effective way to get attention to your website or cause. However, not just any informative article will do for a press release; these are meant to go to the News agencies of the world… So your submission has to be at least a little newsworthy & time-
sensitive.

Many businesses apply this tactic by hyping up their product launches, writing a press release about the release of their upcoming product that is factual but implies that the launch is quite a newsworthy event where they are located.

The more newsworthy your ‘news’ is, obviously, the more news agencies will pick it up. The more of that pick it up and run your story, the more attention and name recognition you’ll get. All news outlets have websites these days, so any published story should deliver a high PageRank link back to your site. Ideally, you want a story that will get picked up by ABC & CNN, so you’ll get millions of backlinks and receive 10,000 visitors every hour for weeks… Of course I’ve never met a marketer who’s pulled off that trick yet, so back in the real world what you’re shooting for is mention in the local papers and at least one big-city newspaper. That’s enough to bring some great exposure to your site.

Instead of submitting your release to Article Directories, you’ll be submitting it to press services like PRweb.com, which is the biggest and best of the bunch. They don’t make you pay for their distribution, but if you’re trying to get your message out overseas or for the most massive distribution pushes, there are fees that they charge. (I’ve honestly never had to investigate that option.) You can also make a “Contribution” at PRWeb that highlights your release in a special section above the other listings, just like an eBay featured item… This just gets your release read more by those who browse manually… The official press looks at everything anyway.

The biggest turn-off that discourages marketers from writing a press release is that it seems too difficult to make your story sound newsworthy… Especially when your news is nothing more than a product launch.

Before you let that thought defeat yo, go to PRWeb.com and read some of the stories there that have been pushed lately. Most of these stories are all just hyped-up everyday happenings. Let me give you a great example out of today’s headlines I just quickly found there:

“Google killed SEO with their filters, now the SEO Industry responds with
undetectable links.
(PRWEB) January 21, 2007 — The search engine optimization industry has been
hit hard by Google’s increasingly complex algorithmic filters, which can often
times determine whether a link is a paid one or not. Now with the launch of V7N
Contextual (http://contextual.v7n.com), the SEO industry is responding with
undetectable paid links.

V7N Contextual is a new service launched by John Scott of the V7 Network,

which aims to give the SEO industry an edge over the Google filters and other
tactics recently employed to devalue and detect paid links, and thwart the efforts
of those trying to increase traffic to their website. V7N Contextual provides you
with the perfect link - one that is highly relevant, well-placed, permanent,
affordable, and completely undetectable as a paid link by both humans and
algorithmic filtering.”

In case you missed it, all that’s really going on here is that a company called V7N has just ‘launched’ a service that provides a link-source cloaking of some kind… Hardly CNN headline news, but they’ve phrased it to sound Earth-shattering, and he end result will be that relevant SEO news websites and newsletters will all consider this story to run in their next edition. It will likely get out nationwide, but the nature of the news business is that it will have to compete with the other news in that industry at the time.
If it’s a slow enough news day, this story could be really effective!

Writing articles about your topic of interest and sending them out to article directories, other websites, and eZines to publish is an almost ideal way to gain free advertising. I really can’t recommend it enough for long-term link building campaigns. All you need is time & writing skills for this self-compounding method to make your website one
of the most respected and authoritative sites on the net.


I realize that this method has been out in the open and even done to death over the last couple of years, however I find that a lot of people who have tried Article Marketing quickly give it up before seeing any success. It seems that everyone sets out writing articles, no matter if they do it themselves or pay someone to do it for them, by submitting one or two articles to the main article directories found in the more popular article submission software suites.

Some sort of article submission software is pretty much necessary because it can take a long time to submit an article to even a handful of websites… The automation that these softwares offer are not just ’set-it and forget it,’ you will most definitely still have to go to each site and make sure it populates all the right fields properly.

The problem with softwares is that most people who first try them (I am certainly guilty of this myself) want to ‘test the waters’ to see if the technique works or not before they commit to it fully. With most purchases you make in your life, this is a fair strategy - but not when it comes to an article submission campaign. The real benefit in sending out your articles is by doing it in bulk, over time.

What proponents of Article Marketing have so far failed to tell me is that one or two articles out there pointing back to my website, no matter how many directories I send it to, is only going to help a tiny bit, and then slowly fizzle away. More than likely it won’t even send a single visitor to my site… It will only help my PageRank a bit, for a while.

This of course assumes that I haven’t gotten it published by an eZine owner who has a really big list… Since there is no way to be sure that you can get it published by an eZine owner with lots of influence, we won’t depend on it for this example. Think of that as a surprise bonus you can sometime get with this system, if it happens at all.

The way to surely succeed with articles is to have an article submitted to all the directories EVERY WEEK, all linking back to the same website. This of course takes time and patience, which is the only reason that so many people fail at this strategy.

I don’t feel it’s worth my time every single week to write and submit an article, I’ve got more important things to do with my life. Worse yet, I’ve so far made a living from informational AdSense publishing (VRE) sites, so running an article campaign for each of these 250+ small websites is simply impossible. However, over the last year I’ve tested 10 different campaigns of article submission for 10 of those sites, and the one result they all had in common was that bulk, regular submissions are the key.

I hired someone on rent-a-coder to submit my articles for me once a week for 3 months, and right now (4 months later) a few of those sites are #1 in Google with no other promotion except for link directory submissions. It’s a prime example of the tortoise and the hair… But in the first and second months of the campaign, I was sure my turtle was asleep!

Technorati : article directories, article marketing, link building, marketing, online advertising