James Lee left a comment yesterday with a question about article marketing that deserves to be answered in a post. James didn’t leave a URL or I would have linked to his site. Here’s the question:

Hi Robert,

I have a question for you about Article Marketing through Artemis Pro.

How often do you submit articles pointing to your blog or sales pages? What have you found has been most effective: Every day? Every other day? Every week?

Just curious about your frequency since your blog seems to be doing very well.

Great content!

Thanks,

James Lee

Good question James. When I first started this blog about a year ago I used Artemis Pro to submit articles about once per week. I would rewrite the article twice so I had three unique versions and I have a resource.txt file with links to my blog and all my product sites. At the time I had an external list of about 500 ezines which is quite a small list but infinitely better than only submitting to the internal list. I kept this up for several months and the number of links to my sites grew so it seemed to be effective.

I stopped using Artemis Pro several months ago mostly because of hassles with ISPs. I grew my ezine list to over 5,000 and it got to be such a hassle to submit articles that I stopped doing it. There are ways around ISP issues. PostCast Server is one solution. It is an SMTP freeware that converts your PC into a mailserver so you don’t have to deal with the ISP.

I also tried SSH tunneling but couldn’t get it to work. I’ll probably give SSH tunneling another shot now that I’m back in America. I tried it in Europe and I wasn’t about to call the German ISP and try to figure it out over two language barriers. I don’t speak German or techese. I would like to get back to submitting articles once per week but I don’t have a system in place to do that yet. I didn’t build a list of 5,000 ezine publishers to let it collect cyberdust.

So why do the links to my blog continue to grow when I haven’t submitted an article in months? Lots of reasons. I still do many other things to build links. I have an intern program for starters and many of the intern tasks involve link-building activitities. I also read other blogs and leave comments myself. Several blogs just naturally link to one of my posts every week. And I submit a post to 20+ blog carnivals every week too. Actually someone else does that for me and several others as part of my blog carnival submission service.

Collectively those activities comprise an effective link-building strategy as evidenced by the growth in just the past month alone. When I wrote the sales letter for the blog carnival submission service about a month ago, there were 4,600 links to this blog. Now there are 5,460 links…almost 1,000 more links in roughly one month.

It has been almost a year now that I’ve been building links to this blog and it seems to have worked much like a snowball. In the beginning I remember when I had less than 100 links but I continued to submit articles week after week and slowly gained momentum. Now it’s gotten to the point where the number of links seems to grow even if I don’t do anything. If I remember correctly it took several months and a lot of effort to get my first 1,000 links. Now I get nearly 1,000 links in a month with very little effort.

The only activity I perform myself is occasionally leaving a comment on another blog. The rest of it is all done by other people. That is what I recommend you work towards. If you try to do everything yourself, you’ll eventually get burned out as I did. But when you put systems in place so things get done with little or no involvement from you, then you’ll see the power of leverage in action. These days the links are growing at an increasing rate despite that fact that I personally do less & less. It’s fantastic. It just takes some time & effort to get to that point.

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