A killer article is nothing more than a long and structured piece that has the goal of delivering a huge amount of value to potential visitors, thus attracting backlinks and increase the traffic of your blog/website.
If you have a web design blog, for example, you could write an article with “100 Free Resources for Designers”, or one with the “Top 50 Design Blogs for 2011.” Some people call these linkbaits, other pillar articles, but the concept is the same (if you want to read more on this topic check out my article 4 Steps to Increase Your Blog Traffic).
Researching, writing and publishing the article is only half the battle, though. The other half is to actually get it in front of people. The standard practice is to email other bloggers and website owners inside your niche, hoping they will like your article and either link to it or share it on social networks.
The problem with this approach is that it’s pretty passive. If you want to increase your chances of success you should combine it with more active methods, and below I’ll explain three that I use, with real examples included.
1. Find Who Linked to Similar Articles in The Past
Let’s say that you have a design blog, and you just published a killer article titled “Top 200 Free Icons on the Web.” As mentioned above you could start promoting it by emailing bloggers and owners of design related websites, recommending your article to them.
But what if you could find the bloggers and site owners who linked to articles talking about free icons in the past? They certainly would have a much higher chance of linking and liking to your article, right?
You can do this by using Google and Yahoo! Site Explorer.
First of all go to Google, and search for keywords related to the title of your article. In our example we would search for “free icons on the web” or “top free icons”. The result of this search would be a bunch of articles featuring free icons.
After that you just need to go to Yahoo! Site Explorer, copy the URL of each article there, and click on “Explore URL”. Click on “Inlinks”, and then “Show Links Except from This Domain”. You’ll end up with a list of all the blogs and websites that link to that article, and then it will be just a matter of contacting them suggesting your own link.
Real Example: When a published the article “100 Ways to Increase Your Website Traffic” I knew that mine was not the only article talking about this topic, so I went to Google and found others. After using Yahoo! Site Explorer I came up with a list of almost 100 sites that had linked to similar articles in the past, and I contacted most of them suggesting my article. Around 15 of those ended up linking to it.
2. Comment on Blogs Using the KeywordLuv Plugin
KeywordLuv is a WordPress plugin that will add a link to the latest post of the blog of the person leaving a comment. That is, if you leave a comment on a blog using that plugin right below your comment there will be a link to the latest post on your own blog.
The cool thing about this plugin is that it will link using the title of your article, so it will be a relevant link with a good anchor text.
If you want to promote your latest article, therefore, you can find a bunch of blogs inside your niche using this plugin and leave a comment there.
In order to find those blogs, as usual, we’ll resort to Google. Simple go there and search for: “This site uses KeywordLuv” + keyword. The first part will find blogs using the plugin, and then you add a related keyword to filter blogs inside your niche or related to the topic of your article.
Real Example: On one of my tech sites we recently published an article titled “7 Places to Find Cheap iPads for Sale”. In order to promote it I went to Google and searched for: “This site uses KeywordLuv” + ipad. The result was a list of blogs using the plugin and with posts talking about the iPad. After that it was just a matter of leaving some comments. You can also use different keywords and repeat the process.
3. Leverage Social Marketing Gigs on Fiverr
If you haven’t been using Fiverr to promote your sites and articles, well, you are missing some good stuff. It’s basically a site where people offer services for $5. There’s a category called “Social Marketing” where you’ll find all sorts of stuff related to Internet marketing, from social bookmarking submissions to Twitter followers and video testimonials.
To find the best services click on “Social Marketing” on the right menu, then filter the gigs by “Popularity.” After that you’ll just need to pick the ones you think will benefit your article the most.
Real Example: As some of you guys know I also own an iPhone site, and last week I published a monster article there titled “Top 100 Free iPhone Games”. Given the topic, I knew that promoting the article on social networks, especially on Facebook, could be a good idea. I went to Fiverr and purchased a gig where the guy offered to get 100 of his friends to “Like” any page on Facebook. The results were pretty good, and in the end the article received almost 250 “Likes”, meaning that many people discovered the article via the promotion and shared it spontaneously.
Over to the Readers
What about you, what methods do you use to promote your killer articles? What worked for you in the past, and what didn’t?
About Mark
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
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