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Since we have already discussed what article marketing is, let’s now talk about what it is NOT. I feel it is important for you to see how other people are incorrectly using articles to market their websites and why I believe it is incorrect.

What Article Marketing is NOT

I cannot tell you how many times I have seen and heard so-called internet “experts” tell others how to run an effective article marketing campaign. Here’s what they instruct their “followers” to do:

• Collect as many articles as possible
• Submit those articles to as many article directories as possible
• Gain thousands of backlinks to your website
• Make tons of money

Let me explain this a little further...

They will go on to tell you that you don’t even need to write your own articles. You can simply purchase a few hundred articles for a few dollars and throw your own link into the resource boxes.

Then they’ll lead you to mass-submission services which will submit your articles for you to hundreds and sometimes thousands of article directories across the internet.

In no time at all you’ll have thousands of backlinks to your website and you barely lifted a finger! Your website will surely rise in the search engines and you’ll be well on your way to financial freedom, right?

WRONG!

WHY?

Mass-submitting articles is not article marketing, it is what I call S.A.D. (aka: Spamming Article Directories) Marketing. People who perform S.A.D. marketing have fallen deeply into what I call, “The Link Trap.” Their primary concern is the number of backlinks they can get to their website. This goes back to the previous chapter when I mentioned that you should not be thinking about backlinks.

It is critical that you run your article marketing campaign without falling into the Link Trap! You don’t need to concern yourself with the backlinks because they are going to come no matter what, right?

Remember in the previous lesson when I told you that without trust, nobody would buy from you? And do you remember that quality content is what helps build that trust?

Obsessing over backlinks and website rankings will plainly and simply make you greedy. You will then start to seek out the things that will result in you submitting less than average content and eventually your article marketing campaign will come to an abrupt end because “it doesn’t work.”

I’ve seen this happen over and over, year after year. Please trust me when I tell you that in order for you to succeed with article marketing, you have to do the work.

Concentrating on backlinks and trying to find the shortcuts to get them does nothing but take your attention away from the other essential and profitable pieces of a successful article marketing campaign.

When you get past the link trap, you will be well on your way to running a successful article marketing campaign. But if you fall into it and fail to get out quickly, you will frankly be wasting your time.

Remember that humans are lazy and we are always looking for easier ways to do things, especially when it takes less time. So if you are ever approached by someone who tells you that mass-submitting articles for the purpose of getting backlinks to your website is what you should be doing, turn around and run the other way.

Now let me tell you why. Stay with me here, this is very important.

If you don’t know by now, when your website ranks on the first page of Google or Yahoo for a highly searched phrase, you will realize immediate and sometimes unbelievable traffic. As you rise higher and higher on that first page, your traffic increases almost exponentially with each position it climbs toward that coveted number one spot. Achieving and maintaining a #1 position in Google for the right search phrase can without a doubt put you on the road to riches.

So how do you get that #1 ranking?

Backlinks.

Backlinks

Backlinks are extremely powerful and profitable and they benefit your website in a major way. Of the hundreds of factors that a search engine utilizes to determine where to rank your website within the millions of others out there, backlinks are the most significant. Stay with me for a minute to see how this is not a contradiction of what I said above.

Internet Marketers believe that the most influential factor in the search engine ranking algorithms is how many links there are pointing to your website from other websites and how authoritative those other websites are which include the links. The more links pointing to your website, the higher your ranking will be in the search engines…and links from authority websites and related websites are even more influential.

Part of any good website marketing plan should include building backlinks from other websites pointing to yours. Doing so will increase the popularity of your website in the eyes of the search engines and result in a higher ranking. Websites that do not have links pointing to them simply will not rank highly in the search engines.

Now you can start to see why some people would want to obtain as many articles as possible, insert links that point to their own website and mass-submit them to thousands of other websites. They will immediately have thousands of backlinks and will surely rise in the search engine results pages.

In theory this is a great tactic and in the past few years it has worked brilliantly for the people using it. But like I always say, times change!

The search engines use the backlinks as the biggest factor to rank websites because all things being equal, backlinks are the perfect way to determine the authority of websites. But everything is NOT equal. There are always people out there trying to game the system.

As soon as people realized that the backlinks were so important to their search engine rankings, article mass-submission was born and has been running rampant and widespread since that very day.

The search engines always catch on to strategies like this. In their eyes, mass-submitting articles is outright trickery to make them believe that one website should be ranked higher than the rest.

In fact, they have millions of dollars to pay thousands of people to do nothing but locate and figure out the present strategies that people are using to get higher rankings. Let me let you in on a little secret: they send these people all over the internet reading the same forums you read, getting the same guru newsletters you get, using the same software you use and running the same website optimization tactics you run.

This is done because of the simple fact that they want to give their users quality results. When people figure out how to get to the top of the search engines unethically and unnaturally, the search engines find this out and develop a way to eradicate the technique and if applicable, the websites that are using it. This has been observed many times in the past with techniques such as keyword and alt tag stuffing, blogging and pinging, and more recently, two-way link exchanging.

Some people will say that submitting articles to just a few websites is the same thing as mass-submitting them. Well, the fact is that in today’s world, mass-submission is quickly becoming considered a form of internet spam while submission as described later in this tutorial is not. It’s that simple.

So will mass submitting articles lower your rankings or penalize your website in any way? No, I don’t believe so. The big search engines will never penalize you for doing something that a competitor could do to you.

For example, if they began penalizing websites for mass-submitting articles, I could simply mass-submit some articles that link to one of my competitors. Google would think my competitor was mass-submitting and would penalize their website. I believe that since a competitor could do this to any other website, the major search engines would not penalize for it.

BUT! There is a good chance that the backlinks you gain when mass-submitting articles could simply be ignored and/or discredited and not help you in your search rankings whatsoever. In fact, this is probably the only way that the big search engines could thwart this particular type of trickery. And I personally believe that if they haven’t done it already, they will be doing so very soon.

Let me just ask you a quick question. If the search engines know that a person is mass-submitting articles to trick them into thinking they have an authority website, do you think they would sit back and let that person continue to get those high results? Or do you think they would do something about it?

I believe that they do indeed know what is going on and could already be working on a way to identify S.A.D. marketers, “slap” them and give back the true authority statuses and top spots to the websites that are actually providing the valuable authoritative content that the search engines want to provide to their users.

So again, every single day as I surf the internet marketing forums and blogs, I see people telling each other that they need to write as many articles as they can and submit them to as many article directories as they can. In doing so, they will get tons of backlinks to their websites and they will rise in the search engines.

For those of you who are new to article marketing, when you hear this, DON’T LISTEN!

For those of you who have already heard of the mass-submission technique, you should dismiss it as a “has been” article marketing technique that has had it’s time in the limelight and will no longer help your business.

That is my educated take on this subject and now you know.

I am sorry I let that go so long, it is just so important that you realize what you need to do in today’s article marketing community in order to be successful.

Article Spinners

There is another topic we should quickly discuss that is somewhat related to mass-submission. We need to talk a little bit about article spinners. An article spinner is a piece of software that allows you to write a single article and, with the click of a button, create several variations of the article for you in a mere couple of seconds.

In theory, article spinners are a wonderful idea! Imagine writing a single article, using a spinner to create dozens of new, original articles and then being able to submit them in a matter of a few minutes.

Sounds perfect, right?

This is exactly the type of shortcut I said we are not going to take.

Remember that when you start being lazy, which is unfortunately human nature, you will not produce the results needed to sustain an effective article marketing campaign.

You see, I have yet to see an article spinner that will spin an article that appears to be written by a human.

If you type in a sentence like:

"The boy found a bucket"

The article spinner will give you variations based on synonymns, like:

"The young man discoverd a pail"
"The youthful male revealed a container"
"The childish gentleman exposed an urn"

- Search Engine becomes Hunt Locomotive
- Hurricane Season becomes Typhoon Spice
- Dietary Supplement becomes Food Increase

They just cannot create content that appears to be written by a human. But wait, I can still submit these articles to the directories and get the backlinks to my website, right?

Sure you can! If you want to completely destroy your credibility, branding and any other momentum you have gained to this point. Not to mention, you will make yourself look like a complete idiot.

Still some say that they take these spun articles and rewrite them to, “sound good.” If that’s what you’re going to do then why not just rewrite the article from scratch? At least then it will have a better chance of sounding natural and not being eaten up by duplicate content filters.

Instead, you need to gain status, establish credibility and create name branding in order to position yourself in the right place to begin dominating your niche. What is the point of getting better search engine rankings if you are considered an idiot in your field?

Don't fall into the link trap!

Remember that you want to utilize your article marketing campaign for much more than just getting backlinks to your website. You will get so much more out of it if you can just stay focused on what I am going to teach you later in this tutorial.

I know I am beating this up, but this is perhaps the biggest concept that you need to understand if you want to run a successful article marketing campaign: It’s not about the backlinks to your website, it is about establishing your expert status, gaining trust from your prospects and building your brand name.

After all, the definition of the word marketing is, “a process which determines consumers’ wants, focusing on a product or service to fulfill those wants, attempting to move the consumers toward the products or services offered.”

This is exactly what we are doing with article marketing, writing informative and quality articles for a consumer to read and be drawn toward our product or service. The backlinks and search engine rankings are just a by-product…not something to be obsessed with.

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