How to approach B2B social media marketing.

Part three - building the distribution network continued: article marketing.

The least salubrious of content distribution services, article marketing
has, over the years, been a great way to get backlinks and good SEO
but it has recently been badly hit by Google’s clamp down (via its algorithm
update, codenamed Panda) on what it perceives as duplicate content providers
(content farms). Many of the leading article directories have suffered badly.
Ezinearticles.com, for example, reportedly lost over 35% of its traffic in just
a few days (following Google’s algorithm shift); its all important Page Rank
(PR) dropped too.

This algorithm update has cast an even bigger shadow over the worth of article marketing as a simple way of gathering large numbers of SEO friendly backlinks.

Many article marketing sites have seen this Google change coming and have been insisting on original content for a while – creating a major headache for businesses expecting to push the same story to as many article sites as possible and then sitting back while reaping the backlinks.

Undoubtedly the value of article marketing has been reduced but it might still retain some SEO worth if you stick with the major directories – the ones that insist on fresh content and that don’t litter their pages with ads. But you must be prepared to devote the time and effort to produce unique content for each one if you want to be successful.

As a word of caution many businesses, including large numbers of independent affiliate marketers and multi-level marketers (MLMs), use specialist software called ‘article spinners’ to automatically rephrase content to make it ‘unique’. This allows them to target swathes of directories with ‘all new’ content quickly and easily. The downside of these pieces of software is that they usually produce rubbish results - and content that’s been ‘spun’ a lot ends up as complete gibberish. Avoid! There’s still only one way of producing quality content.

If you want to proceed with article marketing here are five of the more popular directories. There are loads more, many are a bit dubious.

Ezinearticles.com is the biggest in terms of daily page views, receiving over a massive 10 million with 27% of the visits coming from the USA (8% from the UK). Ezinearticles offers an extensive selection of categories which is unsurprising as it has over 23million pages. According to Alexa the site has a global traffic rank of 103 it also as a Google Page Rank of 6.

Hubpages.com receives nearly 6 million daily page views with approximately 25% of its traffic coming from both the USA and India (7% from the UK). Hubpages offers wide selection of article categories supporting over 7 million pages. Its Alexa global traffic rank is 185 and its Google Page Rank is 6.

Squidoo.com is just below Hubpages on daily page views at a little over 5.9 million with 35% of its visitors coming from the USA (6.5% from the UK). It has a good selection of categories and over 7.5 million pages. Its Alexa global traffic rank is 186 and its Goggle Page Rank is 7.

Articlebase.com gets over 3.6 million daily page views with the majority of its traffic coming from Asia. Again, it has a good selection of categories supporting nearly 19 million pages. It has an Alexa global traffic rank of 296 and a Google Page Rank of 6.

Articlealley.com receives daily page views of around 450,000 with over 40% of traffic coming from India, 15% from the USA and nearly 6% from the UK. It has a limited number of categories and has around 2.2 million pages. It has an Alexa global traffic rank of 2472 and a Google Page Rank of 5.

In part four we’ll be looking at using Twitter and Facebook for business.

Part two building the distribution network.