Increase Link Popularity With Article Marketing: A Real Test

In these days I am testing article marketing techniques in order to increase the link popularity of my English website and boost its authority. I'm very surprised from the results obtained briefly. I've decided to share strategies and experiences.

How article marketing works

It consists in articles submission in proper directories with republishing right for whomever. These articles must contain links to content or services which you want to promote.

Photo Credit: Lathspell

Every time an article is republished the inbound links number increase, and the link popularity increases as well (viral marketing).
The line that separates the marketing article from the advertising is very thin:

• You must provide useful information for the users
• Links only constitute widening of article, that has to be useful for the users also without of them
  

Choice of the best article directories

There's literally tons of article marketing websites. The first strategy is the search criteria of the most popular directories. I've decided to search the best directories using a new meta search engine, Aftervote.

It searches simultaneously in Google, Yahoo and MSN (have looked for free articles). Then I've ordered serp for Page Rank and choosed the best sites between the first 20;

• Ezine Articles: PR6
• ISnare: PR6
• Articles Factory: PR7
• GoArticles: PR6
• IdeaMarketers: PR5
  

Article submission and link popularity check

I've subscribed in every site and have submitted:

1. a first article on April 15: Modem or ADSL router, how to make the choice
2. a second article on April  21: How to make free phone calls via the Internet using VoIP
   

I’ve bookmarked in del.icio.us the Google serp using titles delimited by double quotes as key the in order to monitor the results. After only 2 days, Article Factory had published the first article, placing a great link in the page home. With a minimum effort, I got a link from a Page Rank 7 web page!

Then, day after day,i have verified the serp matches which were increasing slowly but constantly. This is the situation now:

1. Article: Modem or ADSL router, how to make the choice
   • Inserted on 04/15/2007
   • Google matches after 11 days: 86
2. Article: How to make free phone calls via the internet using VoIP
   1. Inserted the: 04/21/07
   2. Matches after 6 days: 65
      

Web Traffic comparison between article marketing directories

Ezine Articles needed more time to verify and to validate the first article. This delay made me curious and brings me to compare the traffic of the five article marketing sites, also because Page Rank is not a valid factor regarding the real traffic volume of a website.

I draw a web traffic comparison chart using Alexa in order to find out the most popular article directory. Take a look:

Ezine Articles is the most visited website and this explained the reason why it needed so much time to validate submissions. However, as the most expert users know well, Alexa values are unreliable. Better, the absolute values aren't reliable, while the comparison between the traffic trends can be considered more affordable.

In this way, I realized that Ezine Article is more popular than the others are, but wanted to have an idea about its real traffic amount. Therefore, I made a comparison between it and another website that I know pretty well: repubblica.it. It has more than one million of visits per day.

Look here:

Considerations

This is what I got working a little bit for a couple of weeks;

• 151 new inbound links
• 5 quick links after a couple of day: 
  • 3 links from a PR6 page
  • 1 link from a PR5 page
  • 1 link from a PR7 page
    

Moreover, one of these links comes from a site that has millions of visitors per day. In addition, articles has not been validated all yet.

I think that this test is enough to realize that article marketing works, and it works better than SEO strategies.

In this video Lisa Sparks show how article marketing can increase your link popularity.