Go Keyword Crazy: How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing #10

Horse and buggy under autumn tree, near Salem
Originally uploaded by jerryhobbs

This is the thrilling conclusion of the 10 part series How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing…And What To Do About It!

We're all in the same boat here–all of us are at various stages of learning how to market and drive traffic to our websites.

If you're like most folks, when you first start marketing your website you probably didn't have any idea about any of the SEO stuff, such as keywords. 

Then after a while, you learned what keywords are and what their purpose is, and you got the general impression that you're supposed to be using keywords in your website and in your article marketing campaign.

Perhaps you've overheard bits and pieces of information, such as "use your keywords in your articles to attract Google's attention" and "putting your keywords in your titles is extra effective."

And then you take that information and try to do the best you can with it.

No one can blame you for that–even the most experienced SEO junkie is constantly learning, constantly trying to figure out how things work. 

But I have to tell you, I see more articles than I'd like to admit that look like they've been peppered with a keyword machine gun, with keywords just sprayed throughout the title, the article body and the resource box with no attention to the writing quality and educational content.

This is not what you're going for!  

When it comes to keywords, balance it the key. 

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Phone In Your Content: How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing #6

(294) Phoning it in
Originally uploaded by Sarajea

This is Part 6 in the 10 part series How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing…And What To Do About It!

Article marketing is where art, craft and technology meet.

When we think of SEO and technology, we sometimes think that things are super-complicated, that you need to think like a machine, but actually that couldn't be further from the truth! 

Your ability to write a thoughtful article is much more crucial to your success than understanding the technical stuff surrounding article marketing.

Surprisingly though, sometimes the area where people slip up the most has nothing to do with technology, but involves more the "art" and "craft" part of the equation. Instead of producing well-written educational articles, folks can fall into the habit of phoning in content. 

To determine if you've fallen into this trap, let's look at the 2 areas where "phoning in" of content occurs:

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Give Up Just As You’re Getting Started: How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing #5

This is Part 5 in the 10 part series How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing…And What To Do About It!

We all LOVE immediate gratification, don't we?

This is why we start workout programs, hit the gym hard for a few days in a row, and then look in the mirror expecting to suddenly look like:

a) Arnold Schwarzenegger back in his "Terminator" days OR

b) Linda Hamilton back in her "Terminator 2" days (remember her arms?)

And then when we see that we still look very much the same way we did at the beginning of the week, we get frustrated, think "Ugh, this is taking too long!", and then promptly eat 3 slices of pizza and a hot fudge sundae.  

Yes, most of us (myself included!) do have a tendency to want to see immediate results with anything we do, and this includes article marketing.  

One of the most common reasons why folks don't see the results they were hoping for with article marketing is giving up too soon after expecting results immediately.

I just want to be up front with you about what you can expect with Article Marketing as far as the time frame goes:
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The Last Minute Resource Box: How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing #4

This is Part 4 in the 10 part series How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing…And What To Do About It!

I think it's safe to say that we've all been there–

You've just finished writing your article.

You're excited to get it submitted and out to the publishers.

You login to your account at SubmitYOURArticle.com and start entering your article into the article submission page (or you go to an article directory to manually submit your article there), and lo and behold you're asked to fill in the Resource Box field.  At this point many folks think:

"Doh! I forgot about that part. It's just a little author bio–no biggie. I can just come up with a Resource Box on the spot and get that part out of the way so I can finally submit my article."

Then, as I have done in the past, and as many others have done and are still doing, you throw together a Last Minute Resource Box and proceed on your merry way toward the "submit" button.

HALT!!!!

STOP!

Wait a sec!

Little do you know that you've just sashayed over perhaps THE most important part of your article submission–and it's not even part of your article!
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Bombard Publishers With Your Articles: How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing #3

paperwork
Originally uploaded by tlong

This is Part 3 in the 10 part series How To Sabotage Your Article Marketing…And What To Do About It!

Remember how we said that when you're article marketing the first person you need to please is the publisher?

That's right–lots of times when we're trying to accomplish goals for our business, our focus is on ourselves and what we can get out of a situation. We try to get what we want first, thinking that if we don't then we may be left out in the cold.

Well, article marketing doesn't work like that.

In order to accomplish your ultimate goals with article marketing, you need to first please 2 other groups of folks–

1) The publishers and

2) Your target readers 

Now, let's embark on a very educational daydream. Let's take a journey into the mind of a publisher…

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SubmitYOURArticle.com Update: Resource Box Manager now integrated with ArticleLeverage™

Following the recent Resource Box Manager feature that we introduced to SubmitYOURArticle.com, we have now integrated it into ArticleLeverage™ so that our users can easily select from previous resource boxes and increase the efficiency and ease-of-use of using ArticleLeverage™.

This update is actually the result of a contest we rean with members, and this winning idea came from James R Kobzeff, of ProAPOD Real Estate Investment Software.

His company produces real estate investment software for rental property analysis, allowing you to create cash flow, rates of return, and marketing presentations for investment properties at your fingertips in minutes.

As the winner of the contest, we also sent him a complimentary bottle of champagne.

Thanks to everyone else who entered, we had some great suggestions coming in that will also feed into future development of the site.

10 Ways to Sabotage Your Article Marketing…and What to Do About It!

Have you ever in your adult years thought that you had a chance at someday competing in the Olympics? 

Well, I have for a while now.

Every time the Olympics comes around I just get a surge of "I could do that!" enthusiasm, and all the sudden my brain jumps from the thought "maybe I should workout more often" to "maybe if I trained really hard I could be a world class athlete!"  

I know I have a wild imagination , but does anyone else all of the sudden feel like starting an intensive workout program when the Olympics comes around?

It's the thought, "Maybe I could really do this!" that gets us all excited and gives us the energy and drive to start something new. 

At the beginning we're all excited, with visions of being totally buff, or perhaps winning a gold medal some day Then we follow a program for a week, maybe 2 weeks, and one day we wake up and realize we're disenchanted with what we're doing, because…

• The results are not coming fast enough.

• We're not even sure if we're doing this "getting in shape" thing right.

• We see other folks getting major results with (what appears to be) minimal effort, and we think there may be something genetically wrong with us that we can't spontaneously morph into a superb specimen of the human form.

Little by little, lots of times without even realizing it, a bit of self-sabotage keeps us from fulfilling our true potential.

We get off the program, we skip doing things that we know we're supposed to do, we have unreal expectations for results, then we shake our fist in the air and think, "Ugh! This isn't working for me!"

I've said it before and I'll say it again, undertaking an article marketing campaign is a lot like starting a workout program…

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5 Things To Do Before You Start Article Marketing…

Lucky number 5
Originally uploaded by Darwin Bell

From time to time I'll get an email from a person saying, "I've submitted several articles and I'm still not seeing results."

My first questions to them are always–

• What type of results are you looking for?

• What is your means of measuring your results?

• How long have you been article marketing and how many articles a month have you been submitting?

Sometimes the person's answer is,

"I don't think I'm getting any results because I haven't had very much of an increase in sales on my website, which is why I'm doing article marketing. I submitted 5 articles the first month, then I got busy the second month and didn't submit any, and this month (my third month) I've submitted a couple."

At this point I'm wishing that I had the ability to turn back the hands of time so that I could tell this person some very helpful tips before she started that would have eased her mind, helped her measure her results more accurately, and increased her success rate.

For anyone who has just stared doing article marketing, or is on the verge of starting, or who is considering starting, I've got 5 tips for you that will make your life easier.

Oh, and even if you've been submitting articles for a while now and didn't have these tips when you started–it is never to late to do these!

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5 Ways To Stop Singing The Resource Box Blues

You Got Me Singing the Blues
Originally uploaded by Spheres57

Oh, the resource box!

That little box at the end of your article has such potential to skyrocket your results, but for many folks it's also the stumbling block that keeps them from achieving their goals. 

The resource box is the article marketer's potential pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the one spot in your submission where you can try to convince the reader to sashay on over to your website.

I look at a gazillion articles a day (well maybe not that many –but A LOT!), so I know that many folks are slamming the door in Opportunity's face, either totally neglecting that resource box area and just popping in a lonely link with no bio info, or pointlessly cramming link after link after link in the box with no effort made to get folks to click.  

Do yourself a favor and stop singing the Resource Box Blues and start paying attention to the Resource Box Do's!

Here's a list of 5 definite 'Do's' to keep in mind when crafting your resource box…

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Reader Question: Why Do Article Directories Ask Me for My Keywords?

Words …
Originally uploaded by Ieneke

When you're submitting your articles, either manually through the directories themselves or automatically through SubmitYOURArticle.com, you may have noticed a field in the "enter article" page that asks you to insert your keywords.

What exactly is done with the keywords that you type into the keywords box when you're entering your article?

Great question!

The keywords you type in are used on many sites where some keywords are wanted for the meta keywords tags for the page where the article is published. In plain English, meta keyword tags are a technical thing to help Google and the other search engines determine what your article is about. Additionally, these keywords also help search functions on some article directories.

And here's another thing–If you've been submitting articles through SubmitYOURArticle.com, you can look at our own article directory and look up some of your articles.

Find one of your articles and click through to the full article page–look at the URL (the web page address) for the page that your article is on.

Notice anything interesting?

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