I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: bombarding article directories with your hard-written content in the hope of getting traffic and backlinks, lost its value several years ago, and a sound set of Internet Marketing Strategies in today’s competitive web climate needs a little more thought.
Article Directories are no longer “the” main source of traffic for anyone, and though posting articles frequently enough to them does yield “some” results, you’re probably looking at posting in excess of a 1,000 to 10,000 high-quality articles on several high PageRank directories before seeing tangible results like a small but steady stream of daily traffic to your websites via your backlinks.
That’s a LOT of work, and there’s no way of automating it unless you have an army of highly competent, quality writers who write an article a day for you, charging you $10-15 per article in the process.. Not my idea of a sound, cost-effective component of any set of Internet Marketing Strategies.
And if you don’t hire super writers to scale your article marketing efforts, there’s the other popular option of outsourcing your writing to a team of keyword-stuffing, spinner-writers to get the job done, who post a million links in articles for you but they’re work is next to unreadable.
People don’t read crap, and believe it or not, Search Engines don’t either.
As a Search Engine programmer myself, I can tell you that all the top search engines out there have special algorithms in place to detect and eliminate poor content from their index databases.
So if you’ve fallen prey to the well-known fallacy of spinning your content a gazillion times and posting it with a backlink to a gazillion directories, feeling like you’re AB amazing business manager to have come up with such a neat, zero cost strategy, then you need to re-evaluate your Internet marketing strategies right away, because frankly speaking, you’re going nowhere, especially not UP the internet marketing ladder if you keep this up.
Make way for Slide Sharing.. Heard of it?
Slide sharing websites (just Google “slide sharing sites”) post your written content in PDF, PowerPoint or some other visually appealing format, have mostly do-follow links (for those of you who believe that actually means anything of value to your internet marketing strategies, for SEO atleast ;)), have very high PageRank and are indexed by search engines more frequently than article directories anyday.
Why do search engines favour Slide Sharing sites?
Why should you add yet another “thing” to your list of “free things to do to succeed online”, that bucket already overflowing with more Internet marketing strategies than you can handle?
Because the content on slide sharing sites is top-quality, well presented and never contains crap content because the site owners review your posts more stringently than any article directory in existence. The backlinks in your resource boxes on Slide Shares are 100 times more likely to get clicked because slides are presented in a page-wise layout and not all your content on ONE long page, exposing your links to the reader many times over as compared to just once in article directory pages.
Slide Sharing sites don’t have the attention in the Internet Marketing world that Article Directories do, and that’s because everyone looking for a cheap or free solution to organic search engine rankings is almost always lead by cheeky Internet marketers to buying Mass Article Spinning and Submission software, which these poor souls then go on to buy and start polluting the web with more kink than it already has today.. 😉
If you’re someone who puts in hours of effort into writing top quality articles, please do yourself the justice of posting them to sites that will actually respect them and which search engines will more than happily index and provide great organic rankings for.
A well-written, SEO Optimized article submitted to a Slide Sharing site is 100 times more likely to hit page #1 of Google for it’s optimized keywords than an article any day.. I don’t have the slightest clue as to why this hasn’t become as big a trend in Internet Marketing Strategies as article directories have over the years..
I mean, it’s an absolute no-brainer yet almost everyone I know who’s into Article Marketing keeps posting to these directories over and over again, content with their crappy click rates and zero optins..
Slide Sharing is one of the most powerful additions you can ever make to your arsenal of Internet Marketing Strategies, and if you aren’t convinced by now that you NEED to be using them, then may the god of success help you in your ways 😉
Ali K. is an Affiliate Marketer, Product Creation & Launch Consultant, Copywriter, and one of the most Highly Recognized Programmers in the Home Based Internet Marketing world, the Lead Technologist behind the Blockbuster Launch of The Internet Time Machine, and Search Engine NowRelevant.com, and mentioned in several International News Publications such as Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, NY Times, LA Times, and Reuters, to name a few, for his work.
Ali K. also spearheads The SEPCON Project, a 100% Free Email Advisory with a mission to educate anyone and everyone interested in home based internet marketing in the art of Explosive Internet Marketing for Profit and Success. The SEPCON Project provides Cutting-Edge Software, Courses, Videos, Audios, PLR Re-Brandable Products, eBooks and tons more. Sign up for FREE (no gimmicks) at The SEPCON Project
While bombarding article directories with lots of articles for the purpose of building backlinks is not the only way to go about getting more inbound links, it should still be an arrow in the quiver of one’s overall strategy. With that being said, I have never heard of these slide sharing websites before. I am always open to new backlinking strategies. What are slide sharing sites you would recommend the most?
– Andrew
Thanks Ali,
I visited the sites you listed here and I did a few searches for documents, but I did not find any resource boxes. On Scridb there is only the author’s name as a link back to their profile where an author can list a website. I found some documents with links embedded in the documents but when I looked at the page source there were no href tags around the links. Am I missing something here? Thanks.
– Andrew
I have to admit that I hadn’t heard of slide sharing until this article, and its certainly something I’ll be looking into. Nice to hear some straight talking for once too!
This is the new strategy I’ve learn this year and I’ll be glad to learn more to earn inbound links for my site.
I have been thinking alot about adding Slide Sharing sites to my backlinking strategy recently. An I think you are right in saying these platforms are under utilized.
But I still believe article marketing has its place. I know Internet Marketers who use articles as a sole marketing strategy, and they are earning 4 and 5 figure monthly incomes. Whats is important is the article needs to be high quality to ensure it gets syndicated to other sites, and there is where the true value comes in.
Hey Ali, great information on this post. I was never into the habit of relying on article marketing for links especially now with the recent Google algorithm change. I’m looking forward to trying out this method for a boost in traffic.
Article Marketing now looks more clutter free with Google’s algorithm and though I’ve never tried this technique before but if article marketing really boosts traffic I think I should try out this technique. Thanks for sharing such an informative post which caters even to the interests of people from other profession, other than then blogging community.
So glad I found this post, I’ve been doing some article marketing with Ezinearticles, so far traffic is okay at best. It’s great to find out about other ways to effectively get traffic to my website besides the usual route.
The most effective method that gets me the most traffic and conversions into sales is the good ‘ol search engine traffic !
That is an interesting point on page-wise showing of slides to give more exposure to links. I am presently submitting to article directories as well as PDF directories and I have my links at the bottom of each PDF page. I hope the PDF files do attract more clicks. My Google Analytics metrics will tell.