1. Get Backlinks
2. Drive Traffic
3. Establish Reputation

In fact, more webmasters are doing it for the first reason than 2 and 3. And I believe this is causing a problem – poor quality articles.

What You Should NOT Do

Articles that are solely written for the purpose of search engine spidering, indexing, link popularity and PR ranking. Usually, these articles have not been researched or the authors have little experience in that topic. Such articles seldom get read lest being published at reputable or authority sites.

You need to put in some good writing skill and some wealth of experience to make an article interesting. Otherwise, your dense article does not get read and your effort of writing the article goes to waste.

In order for your readers to enjoy reading your article, you must first enjoy writing it.

Do you have that smile in your face when writing the article?

Try this with your next article. Put a small mirror in front of you and make sure you keep smiling. Write about 400 words on a topic that you enjoy. Submit it to article directories such as

• EzineArticles.com
• GoArticles.com
• ArticleDashboard.com and etc.

The Science of Article Marketing

Monitor and track your article, make a record the number of websites that published your article over a 3 to 6 months period on a weekly basis and you will know if your article is well received.

When you have the hard figures from your monitoring and tracking, you then can measure your result and tweak your future articles for better performance. That, I believe, it the science of article marketing.

EzineArticles.com is one of my favourite article directories. It’s free to submit your articles – all you need is to register an account. Here’s an article that I submitted to EzineArticles.com recently, it’s about Optimizing Web Pages for Search Engines.

When submitting article, you’ve to be careful…

1. Choose a topic that is relevant to the target web page that you want to increase link popularity.

2. Your article has to be at least 250 words long. I would recommend between 400 and 600 words.

3. Use the rules of SEO copywriting. Do not keyword stuff, write naturally. Your article will only be published on others’ websites if it’s well written and informative.

4. Use the targeted keywords the Title of the article.Usually it may not be possible to use the exact keywords, so be creative and weave those words(or variant or related words) into the title. For example, the targeted key phrase is “SEO company” and the title is “How Companies Can Optimise Their Web Pages for Search Engines“.

5. In the resource box, make sure you provide a link to the web page which you want to increase link popularity and PR. You can do this: http://www.yourdomain.com and it will be converted to a hyperlink.

A better way is to embed HTML codes – <a>…</a> to include your targeted keywords for that web page.

For example,
Shi Hengcheong is not a sought-after internet marketer but rather a SEO guy trying to make a living. He can be found optimizing <a href=”http://www.yourdomain.com/”>Your Targeted Keywords</a> and building up content websites with useful information.

What makes your content addictive?

• It is Not the useful information you provided.
• It is Not the radical idea that you mentioned.
• It is Not the pretty pictures.

It is about trust and entertainment. You have to gain the trust of your readers and you have to consistently entertain your readers – they have to feel pleased after reading what you’ve said.

You can write using simple words to paint a visual picture in the mind. And, ultimately, you have to be able to touch their hearts with your careful use of words.

Have you ever sliced up lemons? Remember that refreshing scent as you cut them into triangle slices. It’s nice, isn’t it?Now, imagine holding up a slice of that fresh yellow fruit and slowly put it into your mouth, taste it… How do you feel?

Not only you’ve to make them see, hear, smell, taste and touch, you have to appeal to their emotion – they must have a feeling for your writing in order for them to be addicted.

Addictive copywriting works best with blog. And I will learn and sharpen my writing skill and hopefully in the not too distant future able to write to thrill!

The 5 Tips to Addictive Blog Writing

1. Keep it Simple and make it clear. Write short sentences.
2. Keep it Credible. Say things that you actually have the experience doing it. Your readers will can tell if you are truthful.
3. Keep it Clean. Use graphics sparingly, just enough to add some colors, liven it up and make it interesting. Don’t turn your blog into a firework display. Also, make sure your ads are relevant and keep it to the minimum, especially on your homepage.
4. Keep it Original. Your readers do not want to read something that they have read elsewhere before. Develop your own style and write from your own experience with your own opinion and viewpoint.
5. Keep it Entertaining. Don’t be too serious. This is a blog after all. So give your readers something refreshing. Read your own blog aloud, if it sound boring, hit delete. Yes, the entertainment industry can be cruel.

Ultimately, you’ll need to know your readers well in order to give them the feeling that they are looking for to keep them coming back. This is something SEO cannot do – search engines have no feeling!

So how do you track where your articles were published. One nifty idea is to use an unique pen name. Say your pen name is Somevery Uniquename. You can now go search Google for the phrase “Somevery Uniquename”, enter your unique pen name with the quote. And since you are the only person using “Somevery Uniquename”, the results would show where your articles were published.

AND, how do you choose an unique pen name?

I used this pen name generator and came up with quite a few unique names. The next thing I did was to Google for this list of names to make sure there was not result returned for my pen name. To be double sure, I also checked on Yahoo and MSN search.

Shelton Nattle is my unique pen name. I will use this name for all the articles I published for distribution.

Despite all these negative things that were pulling me back to start a web directory over the past one year, I finally decided to embark on this Singapore Web Directory project for 2006.

Niche Articles Directory

The next project I will start in 2006 is an article directory for niche markets. I realised that many webmasters are always search for good quality articles for their websites. However, established article directorys with tens of thousands of articles may not be easy for niche site webmasters to search and gather articles quickly. So I will build one to target at this need.

The article directory will have several hundreds articles to start with. I will engage writers to write these articles. Eventually, I hope people will submit their articles.

Both projects above will require much of my time and money. So I may look for partners and volunteers to help me, especially to have good editors to approve the submission

However, Internet marketers are exploiting the use of such directories to generate Adsense income and promote their affiliate marketing campaigns. One reason that prompted the big jump in number could be attributed to the free article directory script – Article Dashboard. Just do a search using the keyword “powered by article dashboard” and you can find loads of free articles websites. I have yet to try out this free script and I believe it should be easy to implement otherwise it won’t be so popular.

Will the search engines do something to curb ten of thousands of similar articles flooding their database? Well, I think it’s a matter of time before an update on their algorithm to take of the problem. Meanwhile, if you are adamant in following the crowd, just make sure you do have some original articles in your directories – preferable a repository of original niche articles.