Article Marketing with a Robot – Part One

Anybody who has been struggling to build a website and get it ranked for a year or more realizes at least two things: in order to get your message the masses, writing posts to your blog isn’t nearly enough and article marketing for competitive keywords can be a frustrating prospect. As a case example, let’s take a Type II diabetic who has recently, after a long, life-changing struggle, overcome the illness (through drastic changes in diet, exercise, and whatever else it took); she decides to start a web-blog to help others who are struggling with the debilitating disease. A few weeks later, her site is up and running, and she eyes it fondly and checks her Blogger Dashboard daily to see the expected traffic explosion because, after all, there are plenty of people with diabetes who would gravitate to her website, right? Weeks pass; months pass. She then stumbles upon a webpage about article marketing and snaps her fingers; now she knows what she’s been doing wrong; or, more accurately, not doing. So she gets back to work and begins turning out informative articles centered on her posts and linking back to her site. After the Google-Bot has come back around to crawl her site and sees the links to several prominent article directories, her site goes from page one million to perhaps page ten thousand. She gets a visitor a day from here on out. Suffice it to say, this return isn’t quite what she expected from her article marketing efforts, being that she wrote as many original articles as she could think of, while keeping the content somewhat unique. What, then, should she do? There are only so many ways you can say the same thing, without beginning to go off topic and straying from a tightly-plotted or focused blog-post. Besides her campaign of visiting similar blog posts on the internet and leaving insightful comments on them, article marketing is really the only other search engine optimization aspect she knows. And by checking her Blogger Dashboard, it doesn’t look like many of the sites are “respecting” her hyperlinks back to her own blog (what she notices is in fact true; many, maybe most, blogs these days have so-called “no-follow” tags, which means that the search-engines may very well note that your link is there, but they won’t score it; this score is precisely what you need to have your website moved up in the search engine results pages, where more people can see it). Then, an idea strikes her: what if she could instead write articles for every single website she visited and posted a comment with her hyperlink, and submit that article to a directory? Each article’s resource box would have her hyperlink, and it would be respected by the search engine – furthermore, a good article directory will have a much higher PageRank than most websites that allow commenting anyway. As soon as she has that brilliant though, her spirits fall, as she realizes that she must have visited 30-40 websites and left a comment on each one over about a week’s time. There’s simply no way she can think of 50 articles on that single post…