How to make your articles work harder for you

If you spend a lot of time writing articles it's probably because you have discovered that it's a great way of promoting yourself, your business and/or your website.  This hub is not about the benefits of article writing or even how to do it well, it's more concerned with doubling or trebling the benefits you get for every piece you write.

You could just publish the article in one place, say your website or on Ezine or eHow, and if it is good content then you will see the benefits.  But if you are spending several hours a week writing articles you want to be sure you get the most “bang for your buck”.   Here’s how.

1.      Really think about the title

Great content is a given essential but without a great title an article loses most of its effectiveness right away.  Titles should be crafted according to your goals:

-         If you want people to click on your article and read it, then the title needs to promise something useful, interesting or perhaps controversial. 

-         If you want your article to be picked up and redistributed by aggregating websites or community sites in your niche, then look at the kind of titles they are looking for

-         If you want your article to rank well in search engines, the title has to consist (mostly) of a search term that you can realistically promote onto first page results.

One title that have worked for me was “US economic decline is looking terminal” which now ranks no 1 for “US economic decline” and is a controversial enough statement for people to take a look.   

Another was a pretty routine piece about the effectiveness of PPC advertising which got syndicated on loads of sites not because it was that great a read but because the title referred to PPC.  Same with one I wrote about dieting.

2.      Don't forget the tags!

People can be a bit lazy about thinking through the tags they put at the bottom of articles, or even putting any on.  But if you want people, search engines and re-publishers to find your material then it is vital you do so. 

Also if your goal is ultimately SEO for your website then you want to tailor your tags accordingly; if you want to rank well as a dental hygiene website then having links from articles tagged “dental” and “hygiene” presumably helps. 

I’m no tag guru but I am starting to take care over what I put in the tag box to help achieve several of my goals but particularly getting articles republished.  If you look at aggregator sites you are aiming for then they often give a big clue as to particular tags they are fishing for.  I write a lot about finance and noticed for example that tagging my articles “economy” (among other things) got them republished in appropriate places.

3.      Get into an effective promotion routine

If you are publishing articles to promote a particular website then don’t forget that the more you promote the articles the better it will be for your target site.  In fact you should treat each article like an SEO project in its own right and this is best done by developing a  routine. 

I have a spreadsheet on which I list my articles and I try and give all of them the same treatment, in my case involving things like:

• Blogging about them
• Submitting them to google
• Tweeting about them
• Republishing to Facebook
• Social bookmarks
• Going back to old articles and adding links to the new ones
• Making the article my forum signature or posting about it on a forum

4.      Make some articles your “flagships”

If you publish a lot of articles you might want to designate some flagship articles that you think are really good or significant in some other way (they promote a service of yours) and promote these more than the rest. 

 Some ways to give extra attention to flagship articles is to issue press releases, advertising them or write a few quickie articles (not duplicate content) that link to the key one.

An example of how to use this strategy is if your niche or industry is, how shall we say, a bit boring.  If you are forced to put out dull technical content because that’s what people are searching for or need in your area, you are not going to pull in much casual traffic and build momentum. 

The trick is to occasionally put out an article with wider appeal and give it a big promotional push and this should help your other material.  If your niche is office products for example and you normally write about the qualities of staplers and post-its, you could put out an article about “Top 10 things people steal from the office”.

5.      Join the RSS revolution

RSS, formatting technology that puts content into feeds for easy distribution around the web, is a boon for article marketers if they take advantage.  Websites that re-publish articles often do so by subscribing to RSS feeds which deliver articles, posts, images etc from selected sources and regularly updates them automatically. 

The good thing from an article marketers point of view is that the feed data, besides the title and text (or a summary) of the article, also includes metadata and authorship information.

In terms of how you go about this, you can either create an RSS feed yourself if you are HTML proficient or, more likely, take a shortcut like I do.  I publish all articles of a certain type in one account on an article publication site and create feeds using their facility (Hub pages is a great example).