Article marketing is and can be a means to an end. The end result is to drive increased traffic to a website, either to sell a product or increase advertising revenue. The fact remains that many people that make use of article marketing are not writers themselves, and their time can be better spent on other tasks. Because of this, it can be a good idea to outsource the work.
There are two basic elements to article marketing – writing the articles themselves and then submitting them to article directories. Both or either of these can be outsourced. For the writing you will need to find a professional writer, while the submission can be taken care of manually by someone else, by a service or by article submission software.
Writing Articles
Writing the articles themselves is the most time-consuming and the most difficult part of article marketing. For any article marketing campaign to be a success, the articles must be of reasonable quality so people will want to publish them. Also remember that any articles that are submitted to directories must be unique so there will be a lot of rewriting work involved as well.
If you feel that your talents lie elsewhere, or you simply do not have the time, you will want to hire a freelancer to do the writing for you. Probably the most economical option here is to look on the many freelance websites on the internet. On these, you can post a project and freelance writers will bid on it. There are many writers out there who can do a good job for a good price, you just need to find them.
However, it is important that they can provide good quality even if it costs that little bit more. Paying pittance for poorly written articles will be a waste of your time and money. When posting a project, ask all writers for samples of their work and make sure they agree that copyright on all articles goes to you.
Also remember that these articles will be published in your name, so they need to be of good quality and factually accurate if you wish to build your reputation.
It is best to start off by offering a small amount of work, say 10 articles. From this you will be able to determine if the work is up to quality, and you can choose whether or not to continue using the writer.
Once you have chosen someone, good communication is key. Make sure your instructions are clear in terms of the articles required, the style of writing and article length. Also, bear in mind that the writer may not have an in depth knowledge of the subject or subjects, so help them out by suggesting sources of information if you can, and answer all queries. This will help them achieve quality results and in little time they should become authoritative on the subject themselves.
Unfortunately, the major search engines can now detect duplicate content, so you will need to submit a unique version of each article to each directory. If you send the same version of the article, you will only be awarded for one backlink for SEO purposes, no matter how many times the article appears on the internet. Because of this, you may also need the writer to tweak each article for you into different versions. Alternatively, you could try out some article spinning software that will change your articles for you.
Submitting Articles
There are freelancers available who will submit articles to directories for you. However, if you are submitting to a large number of directories you are probably best off looking for a reputable service online.
In fact, many article submission services will now also make sure that a different version of an article is submitted to each directory, while others will offer you tools to help you make unique versions to avoid issues with duplicate content.