How To Keep Your Article Marketing Campaign Going Strong

Article marketing is a long term endeavor–for the most long lasting and dramatic results, you will do it consistently over the lifetime of your website.

Easier said than done, eh?

Very few of us take a straight path from the ground level up to the pinnacle–for most of us it’s a series of ups and downs and periods of going in a horizontal line.

The Life Cycle Of An Article Marketing Campaign

• Stage 1–When first starting out you’re very gung-ho–you sincerely want to put forth your best effort and are committed to seeing things through over the long term.

• Stage 2–After a month or two, you start to get into a groove, and submitting articles is just a natural part of your life and business. You’re over the initial hump of nervousness about your writing abilities, and your confidence is building.

• Stage 3–As you get more comfortable, you start learning some of the tricks of the trade–refining your resource box and offering incentives to click through to your website, writing strategic titles, and experimenting with different types of article formats, such as list articles and how-to’s. You take a stab at using keywords in your article submissions. At this point, you are successfully juggling many balls at once and you’ve come much farther than you ever thought possible. What was once intimidating for you is now all in a day’s work.

• Stage 4–But then something happens: Life gets busy, and the balls you were juggling start to fall from air. Your submissions become much more erratic, and it gets harder and harder to crank out an article. You’ve lost your groove, and you’re not sure how to get it back.

• Stage 5–You either quit or your find a way to re-capture your momentum. That is what this post is about.

Maybe you haven’t experienced all of these stages–maybe you went from Step 1 to Step 5 in a week’s time or maybe you’re still in the beginning stages and haven’t gotten to the “life gets busy” stage yet.

Regardless, I think we all know how it feels to have the best intentions for seeing a project through and for one reason or another losing focus. It happens to the best of us (myself included!), and I know it’s frustrating to start out strong and then lose your momentum.

The trick is to figure out a way to re-capture an upward spiral even after you’ve taken a downturn.

So, how do you make this work over the long term?

How do you keep an article marketing campaign going consistently for years at at time?

Focus on quality.

What’s a quality article?

1. The content is valuable to your target market.
2. The content is enjoyable to read, and leaves the reader with a positive impression.
3. The content has long term appeal: it is useful today, and also next year and the year after that.
4. The content is easy to read, free of grammar and spelling errors.
5. The content represents you and your business well.

If you’re struggling to get back in the saddle, make your article writing as simple as possible–just focus on creating quality articles that serve your readers.

Stick to a schedule.

You’ve heard the saying “Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.”

From my own experience I have found that it’s infinitely easier to write and submit articles consistently when I map things out. I mark my calendar with the days and times I’ll be writing and also the topics that I’ll be writing about.

The thing is, we can have the best intentions in the world, but the trick to getting anything done is just doing it!

Having a schedule helps big time.

When you create a well thought out plan, it’s like you’re working on auto-pilot during the month, getting things done without putting too much thought into it.

Here are some pointers for creating a monthly Article Writing Schedule.

Look at the big picture.

With article marketing it’s the big picture that really counts–if you submit a handful of article for one month, then you probably won’t see drastic results. But if you submit a handful of articles every month for 12 months, you will see what marketing momentum can do for your site!

Here are some tricks for getting a more long term view:

Write a series. Now, before you go off and write a series of articles, please read this: What If You’re Itching To Write An Article Series?

Writing an article series for article submissions is probably not what you’re imagining it to be–you can write an article series (and I do it all the time), but you should make each article a stand alone article, and not put Part 1, Part 2, etc in the title or article body. For more info on how to write an article series when you’re submitting articles, see that link above.

I love to work in series, because it makes the writing process simpler and forces me to look several articles into the future rather than just taking it one article at a time.

Get real. You can get a big picture view just by knowing the facts about how link building works and how it impacts search engines.

When you submit articles, you build backlinks to your website. Google evaluates backlinks every 3-4 months, so logically you know that any articles you submit this month will likely not have an impact for a few months down the road.

Especially as you’re just getting started, there will be a period of time when you don’t see results. Don’t be sidetracked by that, but remember that Google will eventually re-calculate your backlinks and adjust your search engine ranking accordingly. For more info on “getting real” about what you can expect from your article submissions, see this post:

The #1 Reason Why Article Marketing Fails

Get Back In The Saddle

If you’ve fallen off course with your marketing efforts, don’t fret–we’ve all been there!

I encourage to build on your previous efforts and to take up where you left off. The great thing about doing anything over the long term is that brief lapses can be compensated for and you can turn things around pretty easily.

What about you–Do you have any special tricks for getting back in the saddle after falling down on your marketing plan?

Photo by jimmedia