Article Marketing: Boosting your signal to noise ratio

by Aaron Colman

Published on this site: July 14th, 2006 - See more articles from this month

Articles seem like a perfect match for the small professional. Write about what you know, get people to read it, promote yourself in the process. And of course in a perfect world it can be a really effective way of getting recognition. But this isn't a perfect world...

If you had a lobby with 100 people randomly talking, and one man stood up and said in a plain voice "I will give $1 million dollars to the first person in the balcony that shakes my hand!" would anyone even hear him? Probably not.
Engineers call this the "signal to noise ratio."

Possibly the easiest way to boost this is simply to write usable articles. If they're original enough or provide a new insight they can be a good way to establish your name. People will see your name in the list and intentionally
scroll down to it to read your next article.

When doing this, be careful to maintain a good "frequency" for your articles. Writing too often can create a flood, giving people the wrong impression. Writing too infrequently makes it hard to stand out above the other authors.
Different publishing avenues have different rules, but I've found if you're serious then 2 or 3 per week is usually fine.

Choosing a publishing avenue is the next trickiest detail.

Yahoo and Google groups -

There are numerous Yahoo and Google groups oriented for article marketing. These can be effective, but with one caveat... they are almost all used by article distribution services.

Some of these services have an enormous volume of traffic, hundreds sometimes thousands per week. Your article is going to get lost in all that noise, no matter what you do. Interestingly this means that such services can easily make themselves obsolete. Cheap services like Isnare are very difficult to get value from. The more expensive ones like ThePhantomWriters tend to have smaller volumes, so using their service can still get your message read. Unfortunately if you're posting manually to these groups you may find it
hard to reliably get past moderation. Pay attention to the age of posts, if the group doesn't have much recent activity then you should probably move on to another group.

Nevertheless there are ways to make your message stand out on the lower volume traffic groups. If people are reading your message via the website then getting moderated before a gap in moderation (typically on weekends, but it can change) means your message will be shown on the intro page longer. If you want to target digest readers then posting earlier in the day will usually help you get an early moderation and get you posted sooner in the message. Some
groups may even offer paid placement on their group. If $5 or $10 gets your articles sent out as the first 2 articles on a Friday... it's probably worth it.

These are just some examples. Look for patterns. There are hundreds of patterns that an observant person can find to boost the attention their article gets in these groups. And if you're first to find them and willing to pay a little
for extra placement you'll find a lot of new doors opening to you.

Websites -

Some websites allow articles. This is a great way to get a link back to you while controlling some of the layout of your article. Before posting take a look at the site's PageRank. A quick Google can turn up a number of sites that show you a URL's PR. A low or 0 pagerank can indicate a new site, or perhaps problems with the site's linking policy. Higher PR sites are worth more to chase, so a prime placement for your article on a high PR site is worth the effort to get one. When looking for sites to post your material on you can use one of the lists out there, or you can simply look at where your peers are posted. Find some of their names and search for them. Visit those sites and see if you can get posted on those sites as well.

Forums -

Forums are an excellent way to get posted. You can post your article on an articles sub-forum and people can comment and add their own details to your thread. Forums also tend to have good search engine rankings, making it easier to improve your own.

eBooks -

This is one I'm actively persuing... so if you're interested, email me. The way it works is you mix a handful of your own articles on related topics with those of others. You combine them into an ebook, select a mutually-acceptible license and let everyone market the ebook in their efforts. This promotes you, your material and your articles in a unique way that can also lead to a profitable long-term marketing alliance.

Print -

Local small magazines are easier to get posted on than larger ones. Contact the editors and see what their submission policy is. It's suprisingly easy to get posted in related magazines once you've built a track record. Since fewer people will go to this effort it will help you stand out in the crowd.

So...

Hopefully I've given you some ideas on how to improve your article's effectiveness. I'd love to hear back from you, so if you have anything to add... let me know.



Aaron is the owner of an exciting new site that helps find the software you need for your web business. Free classified ads area, link exchange, article submission area and more. http://www.mysoftwaretoys.com.