I’ve been doing article marketing for my firm for some time. It’s not a major focus of my marketing campaign, but it certainly complements it nicely. I first wrote about the advantages of article marketing on Ezine Articles here. In this article I’ll discuss how you can take your law firm article marketing one step further.
Sure, when you publish articles on EZA, if you target relatively low competitive keywords you can rank your EZA article well in the search engines. You’ll even likely get some traffic to your law firm website. These are great benefits.
But, you can ramp up your article marketing by taking it one step further and that is syndication.
Syndication is when other websites (or print materials) take your articles from an article directory and publish it “as-is” on their website.
When you publish on EZA and other article directories you’re giving permission for your article to be syndicated. This is a good thing and something to aim for.
“As-is” means the links to your law firm website you place in the article resource box at the bottom of your article will also be published on the websites that syndicate your articles. Voila, you’ve built backlinks to your website with no additional effort.
What about duplicate content?
It’s a myth when concerning the same content on different websites. Yes, it’s true … it is a myth. Your originally published article whether on your firm website or elsewhere will not get punished in the search engines. The entire duplicate content issue pertains to the same content on different URLs on your website. Not the same content on different websites.
Think about it. Syndication is something that’s been happening for years in the print world. The major publications continue syndication online including Google with Google News.
Sure, a syndicated article may not rank as well as the originally published web page of the same content. But it will likely get indexed (which means the backlinks count to your website) and you need not fear about your website being punished by the search engines.
It’s true that Google’s recent Panda algorithm update is ranking websites with only syndicated content lower, but it does not mean those sites are not indexed. Moreover, syndication is still happening since Panda. Since the Google announcement of Panda, my syndication numbers from EZA increased from 146 to 171 (see below). This tells me websites are still syndicating content.
Capitalizing on Syndication
Once you notice that your articles are being syndicated, it’s time to ramp up your syndication efforts.
How can you tell if your articles are being syndicated?
Take a look at your EZA stats screen on your EZA home page. It looks like the following (taken from my EZA account on March 20, 2011):
The syndication number is indicated by the “Ezine Publisher” figure which is 171 for me.
171 instances of syndication means I effortlessly built 342 backlinks to my websites. It also means more readers and traffic to my websites.
Syndication = traffic & backlinks which are two cornerstone objectives in online marketing.
Likely more websites syndicated my articles without clicking the “Publish” button on the EZA page where my article is published and instead they simply copied and pasted the article. But I can’t prove that with any certainty unless I do a search for each of my articles in Google (which I explain below).
A note about my other stats. The 8.6% click rate is the rate of readers who clicked to my websites. 8.6% is NOT good, in fact it borders on terrible.
The reason I have a low click rate is my first 80 or so articles do not have very good resource boxes (I should go back and edit them but I haven’t had the opportunity). When I started with article marketing, I made some mistakes. My click rate has more than doubled with my latest 80 or 90 articles once I learned how to improve click rate in EZA (see my 1 simple tip to improve article click rate section below).
Next, find out who is syndicating your articles
In the Google search field, type the title of your published EZA article surrounded by “”. If your article is syndicated and it’s indexed you’ll get a list of web pages where your article is published.
Go to each website and if you can contact the webmaster, do so offering that you’re willing to offer them your articles before you publish them on EZA (and elsewhere).
Not every webmaster will take you up on it, but some will and that’s an easy way to ensure you build more backlinks to your website. Continue delivering quality content and you’ll have another easy source of completely white hat backlinks.
1 simple tip to improve your article click rate
I started getting much better click rates when I integrated the resource box as part of my article.
A very simple way to do this is by starting your resource box with the word “Next”.
For example, if you wrote an article about breathalysers (as a DUI attorney), you could write the following resource box.
Next, discover 5 types of breathalysers used by the police. Not all breathalysers are the same and not all breathalysers require the same type of maintenance by law enforcement. Learn about the different breathalysers used by the police so you know something about the breathalyser you blew into when charged with a DUI.
I don’t know if there’s 5 types of breathalysers. I’m not a DUI lawyer. I use it as an example.
The bolded portions are th links to your law firm website – be sure to link to the relevant articles.
I’ve stopped the “Atticus is a DUI lawyer practicing law in Fargo North Dakota with the law firm of Atticus & Co. since 1990″ type of resource box. That’s what your EZA profile is for.
The “bio” style resource boxes receive lower click rates almost every time. Instead, integrate your resource box into your article and then write a great profile bio in the event readers want to learn more about you.
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