Article marketing can help you get the steady stream of traffic-luring links you desire, if you leverage it to your best advantage. And that's easy to do once you understand the four keys to article marketing success.



In order to hit your marketing target, it is important to choose an article distribution service that offers deep and wide distribution. Once you submit an article, it should be sent out to as many publishers as possible who publish everything from relevant websites to newsletters to e-zines. The service should also offer a long list of categories so you can submit to the ones that fit your content best, assuring deeper, wider distribution.

The more places your article is published, the more links you get. Reaching the deep and wide distribution goal will be a major challenge if you attempt to do it through manual submissions or article marketing software. Go with a good distribution service instead and save yourself a lot of precious time and painful headaches.

In order to take advantage of deep and wide distribution practices, you need to meet each individual publisher's guidelines. Things like article length, hard line breaks, including HTML coding in the body of your article or writing an article that is really just a long-winded advertisement will limit your publication possibilities.

Each publisher has its own submission guidelines. Review them carefully before you send your article off to never-to-be-published land. A good article submission service will do a lot if this legwork for you.

Even if you submit to plenty of publishers and follow all the guidelines, you still may not reach your publishing potential. Unlike traditional publishing outlets, the Web is constantly changing. Old sites disappear and new sites show up each and every day. Staying up to date will keep your name and website address circulating all over the Web.

For this reason, be wary of article marketing software. Their distribution lists are out of date practically before you buy the program. Mmm, there's nothing like the smell of fresh back links. You'll get fresh links all the time if you stay on top of what's hot and what's not on the Web.

Once you've covered the first three bases, it's important to track your progress. After all, how will you know if you're reaching your marketing goal without some measurable results?

The best way to do this is to plug your link into the top search engines and see what comes back. Keep digging until you get a good feel for how many places your article is appearing. If you're happy with the results, carry on. If not, go back and examine your submission tactics. Are you submitting deep and wide? Are you following publishers? guidelines? Are you staying on top of the ever-changing online publishing landscape? If not, you're selling yourself short.

Yahoo!, Google, et al use links to determine their search rankings. Getting your articles published regularly on new, relevant, active sites is a great way to move up in the rankings and realize the site traffic volume you need to succeed.