It’s on the lips of every reputable SE marketer. It is considered to be the “holy grail” of your bonding efforts!
What’s that? Marketing with articles, of course!
You will often hear how you can get to the top of the search engines, on any topic, by writing articles and using them to promote your business.
And it’s true! But, what they usually don’t tell you is that there will be dozens or hundreds of sites and publications that will use your content without giving you credit for it.
And you have no way of knowing! You are completely helpless and at the mercy of any webmaster who decides to literally steal your content! Theft defined as any use of copyrighted content that violates the author’s posting guidelines.
And if you already knew, let’s look at some interesting statistics. These will give you some situational awareness when you start writing articles to promote your business or get more links.
Last time I checked, there were 1,370 sites that had included one of my affiliate marketing articles on their pages. Want to know how many of them bothered to provide a link to my site? Very, very few!
Why? Well, it seems that many site owners think they can take the articles and put them on their sites for visitors to read, but don’t feel they should return the favor by linking directly to the author’s site (as required).
After all, creating and serving fresh content to your visitors and to the search engines is a favor I’m doing them.
By now you’re probably thinking, “too bad, but what does that have to do with me?” Oh, I don’t know, do you have a site? And do you publish your own content on your site?
If you do, how can you be sure that the content you spent so much time developing and tweaking to rank well in search engines doesn’t appear anywhere else except on your site? How can you be sure that no other website has “borrowed” some “stuff” from you?
And if you’re marketing your business with articles, how will you know who posted them and where if they don’t care enough to send you a copy?
Trust me, most of them won’t! Many of the major article banks and directories let you know when they have published one of their articles because there are usually other incentives for them to do so. They may sell you a subscription or simply benefit from the fact that you will visit the site to see your published article. Who knows, while you’re there you might be intrigued by one of their offerings.
But the smaller sites, not all of them, won’t take the time to inform you, let alone link back to you. So how will you know?
No sweatshirt! I’m sure many of you have been using Google to search for things like products, services, even competitors or link exchange partners.
And I’m also sure some of you are already thinking that Google is a good place to search for your article or unique content and see what shows up in the search results. Sure, you can, but I’d rather use a handy little tool from Google that’s automated, won’t take my time, is super easy to use, and most of all, it’s free.
I’m talking about Google Alerts – a great tool from Google that you can set and forget, but it will do all the dirty work for you by finding out all those sneaky sites that “accidentally” forgot to put a live link in the lines of your Article.
As Google says: “Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant results from Google based on your choice of query or topic.” There, I couldn’t have said it better!
How does it work? It’s easy, sign up for a Google account or simply create a Google Alert using the really easy interface (http://www.google.com/alerts). First, you are asked to specify your search term, that is, the type of text you want Google to report on. Then you tell Google where to look for it and how often you want to receive your alerts. Finally, you enter your email address and voila!
By creating a Google account, if you don’t already have one, you can manage all your alerts in one place, which is really helpful.
The potential of this tool is enormous. You can search for anything at any time and have Google send it to your mailbox, saving you the trouble.
More importantly, you can use it to control what’s important to your business. As a business person, I’m sure that’s one of your main concerns.