SMOjoe.com

The mark of a good interactive company is not how well they write content, but how well they distribute that content on the internet.

These days anyone can write and create original media; it’s not that hard to be original on any topic, especially if you know a thing or two about the category and take the time to cruise some discussion forums and blogs looking for rare and precious insights on the subject. And if you absolutely can’t put a sentence together, you can always hire help on craigslist.com for about thirty five dollars a page.

But the real question is, how to distribute the article so that it gets the most attention? Ask your marketing firm exactly how they will accomplish that task? What methods will they use to spread their articles across the internet?

Article marketers have three options, and each one corresponds to a different business model (with regards to how the author is rewarded for his work), but all three will earn backlinks and some click through traffic.

1. Exclusive publication on high traffic online magazines, like Lilith Galleries and Prospere Magazine or any such highly trafficked well respected websites where you have made contact with the editor and submitted stories directly to the webmaster. There is no conduit for the public to submit their work. Leveraging exclusive relationships distinguishes veteran social marketers. The advantage to exclusive publication is increased Google search traffic, higher quality backlinks and therefore more claim to keywords found in titles, subtitles, behind pictures, in anchor text of outbound links, and in the tags of your articles.
   
2. General replication in article marketing distribution sites - EzineArticles.com, Idea Marketers, and Amazines are the big three and the only ones to which Smojoe submits branded content. But there is a new player on the scene, slightly more exclusive, called Buzzle that is getting good reports. This type of marketing is all about the backlinks. It works. One good article can create about a dozen original backlinks from low page rank portals.
3. Citizen Journalism that pays a share of the ad revenue: Digital Journal, Now Public, Orato.com and this includes the ad networks and user submitted content banks like MyLot, Helium and especially Triond.com These sites are great in that they pay some money (on average about 75 cents a year on each article), give one good backlink, and enjoy greater than usual traffic and readership. The only downside is that they are more strenuously moderated and some require invitation or assessment prior to registration as an author - but most don’t have any stipulations.
   

Pick One Distribution Solution - DON’Tcombine three different approaches

Although there’s a place for general replication in this world, Smojoe believes that wide base article marketing is inherently flawed and will eventually be made obsolete by an more evolved Google search algorithm. I can compare this message transmission system to the Pony Express in the 1850’s; at that time the mail delivery business needed to have a lot of horses to send a message across the west, but then came the railroad, then the automobile, and finally the airplane. We are at the railroad stage right now in digital media - leave the horses behind and put your message on just one good train.

Contrary to popular belief publishing duplicate content does not hurt the page rank of your link targets, nor does it dilute the value of the publisher, much. It just becomes a big waste of time as Google will eliminate duplicate results from the list.

When people ask me if they will be penalized by Google for publishing duplicat content, I reply that, “if you submit identical articles to multiple directories, duplicate content filters will spot them, and the links pointing to your website from those articles will not be recognized in Google search math.”

However, that doesn’t necessarily mean that submitting the same article to multiple websites won’t do you any good. Many times, the duplicate content filter will not catch every single one of these articles.

And some folks believe that duplicate content links still count in MSN and Yahoo?  And they send traffic too. But when it comes to article marketing most of the benefit comes from the keyword targeted backlinks you acquire on just a few high PR portals.

Take for example,

Is honey good for you? When you type that phrase into Google, you will discover that an article with a headline that uses the same words is the first result on the first page of Google.

http://www.healthmad.com/Nutrition/Is-Honey-Good-for-You.29459

When I first wrote this article, almost two years ago now, I was dismayed to learn that Triond.com insisted on exclusive content. I remember that it was my intention to repost the same content on Helium immediately after it had been approved by Triond - I just never got around to it. And its fortunate that I didn’t, for that one submission has rewarded my account over $70 dollars, which is more money than the combined totals of every other article I’ve posted before or since.

So why has Is Honey Good For You? made so much money? Because its first on Google search for that same keyword clause. I can see in the site stats that it gets read about seventy times a day, as compared to fourteen unique visits for my second highest article, Deodorizing Smelly Shoes.

Why is this article first on Google for that keyword clause? Because it’s good original content, published exclusively almost two years ago, on a page rank three domain.