Article Marketing 101

It’s simple article marketing 101, that when you plan your article content, business plan, marketing plan, and paid content strategies etc. for your business – that you should consider the competition. Do you know who the specialists in your niche are?

Take a little bit of time this weekend and catch up on your competitor stalking:) This is how you do it…

1. Sign up for your competitor’s newsletters and whatever other free goodies they may have. Be sure to use an alias — because there is nothing more annoying than when I see that a competitor has signed up for my info with no intentions of ever doing business with me. Blaah! You can do this easily with a free gmail account. I created one specifically for competitor newsletters.

2. Take a look at your competitor’s info in Alexa. While this isn’t necessarily an accurate look at stats (only computers with the alexa browser toolbar installed are tracked), it does give you a gage of your competition’s traffic and importance.

3. Google their name and any variations of it. Or better yet, add their name as one of your “google alerts”, and you will be able to see on a daily basis what blogs, sites, etc. have picked up their content and/or have written something about them. This gives you a great idea of just how “good” and “respected” and popular the site owner’s content is.

Also – by using this technique you can check on how popular your own content is and the best way to distribute it. I personally was able to see through adding an alert on my name which national publications were mentioning me and that ezine articles was the best distribution method for my own articles. More people were picking them up via that site.