Here are my 5 secrets to increase back links from your next article marketing campaign:

1. Keyword Rich Headlines: Back links to your website, blog, micro-sites, or landing pages are entirely contingent on the effective distribution and syndication of your article. That means your article has to attract attention and communicate value.

Publishers must believe in a fraction of a second, while scanning an article directory or article search, that your article will deliver value to their readers, traffic to their site, and revenue through their advertisers. This belief has to be communicated in your article’s headline.

Write your headline with a specific keyword in mind, a call to action, and long tail value. Every article headline should not only be emotionally compelling, but engineered for search optimization.

2. Keyword Rich Copy: Now that you have made it past the initial cut and a publisher is reading your article you need to pop with inherent value.

To a serious publisher that means high-value, high-returning keywords. Most publishers are syndicating your articles for search engine optimization, text link revenue, or affiliate ad revenue. That means your article need to be packed with keywords that sell.

The easiest way to fill your head and writing with valuable keywords is to spend a little time in a keyword analysis tool like WordTracker or Google’s Keyword Analysis Tool. Search your niche and find suggested terms that are paying the highest eCPM. These are the glasses that your publisher (article client) is looking through when reviewing your articles.

3. Call to Action Resource Box: Most resource boxes look like journalistic bylines. These “golden” little boxes are not designed to when you Pulitzer Prizes or even attribution. They are to pitch and sell your product or service.

No publisher or even reader cares who wrote the article. They want to know where to get more advice or (hopefully) buy the secret potion.

4. High Quality Anchor Text: Getting the most out of your anchor text is your prime objective in article marketing. Think about what you are trying to achieve, your perfect customer, and what they are looking for–then capture it.

Your anchor text is like a flashing, neon arrow pointing you site. Make it compelling and accurate.

Do not squander your precious link text on: your name, your website URL, company name or other non-descriptive text. Every anchor text should be a keyword or action you are going to deliver with every customer’s click. This approach will guide search results and consumers into your product or service for the buy.

5. Deep Links Too: Neglecting the development of deep link backs is the number one mistake I see in site development and article marketing. Don’t forget to develop the whole site–not just the home page.

In your resource box, on every article be sure to include not only the home URL, but also a relevant deep link to your site. This can be a landing page, resources page, or the original article.

Most article directories have a quality reputation and credibility with Google, Yahoo!, and MSN leverage this to expand the indexing of your entire site. The more you index the more likely you are to return in organic search and the more credible your site becomes.

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Bill Rice is an expert at Internet marketing and copywriting. His interactive marketing agency, RICEinteractive helps businesses increase their online sales lead generation.

Turning Blogs into Longtail Honeypots

If you already have a blog you probably have noticed the attractive keywords searches that naturally stream in. This is the wonder of mildly focused, frequently posted, haphazard content and Google’s love affair with blogs.

The breadth and frequency of blog posts often open the filters and let us see search results obscured from our increasingly traffic engineered websites. This precisely the trickiness of creating an efficient process to draw in longtail keywords and not ruin the effectiveness of the technique.

Use Categories to Funnel Organic Traffic

The best way to get the right blend is to create a broad funnel. Start with a conscious topic area–a broad keyword. Then, much like you would with a domain, develop a good solid base of categories. However, maintain your normal non-SEO, informal blog-style content generation.

Some attempt to automate this process and get a little “blackhat” using a scrapper to seed keyword content into a splog.

Why I Don’t Advocate Scrapping

I tend to argue against this approach for a couple of practical reasons. Here are my reasons for maintaining my manual posting to these blogs:

• Monetize your affiliate program content research with Adsense by blogging what you learn
• Blogs can be great knowledge bases just waiting to be searched for future ideas
• Buy a domain for each blog and make them domain aging outposts for future projects

Collecting the Longtail Keywords

Don’t forget to actually capture all this data. Blog stats packages are great for quick temperature checks on blogs, but put Google Analytics in place so you can do some serious keyword databasing.

Don’t leave the data idle–flip new longtails into your keyword research queue. The good ones should be flushed out into a PPC or Article Marketing campaign.

Expanding the Keyword Capture

Always be looking new keyword opportunities. As new search phrases come in see if there are opportunities to expand your categories or your posts to bring in more keywords.

Also, don’t forget to check your link backs and trackbacks. Yes, they will happen even on a keyword honeypot. These are great opportunities to find other concepts and categories you should be capturing.

Turning it Into Profit

Well, that is simple. Kick it into you normal keyword analysis or marketing program. Here are a few ideas:

• Adsense on the blog itself
• eBooks built on longtail clusters of interest
• PPC campaigns
• Article marketing topics

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Bill Rice is the Principle at RICE interactive, a leader in lead generating copywriting and social media. He is a frequent writer, speaker, and consultant on marketing and sales. He is passionate about helping organizations execute more profitable marketing and lead generation strategies.

If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice

• Gmail
• LinkedIN
• Twitter
• MyBlogLog
• StumbleUpon
• eZineArticles

I will tell you how to use each in a moment. All you need to do now is sign-up and have your Web URL in each pointed at your home base.

Day 3: Brainstorm Your Brand

This is a critical step and where most stumble. I am going to break it into small concepts.

You are building a personal brand for a reason. Let’s write them down:

• Defining who you are and what you are good at
• Defining who you want to meet
• Defining who you want to meet you
• Make connecting as frictionless as possible

Turn each of these headings into 4-5 core brand concepts. Here are some examples:

• Writer: copywriting, ghostwriting, speech writing, web content
• Affiliate Marketer: ppc, seo, article marketing, affiliate programs
• Mortgage Broker: mortgage rates, mortgage refinance, reverse mortgage, loan modification

From each of these personal brand concepts craft 10 long tail topics. More examples:

• Writer: Copywriting-10 Secrets to Make Your Copy Sell
• Affiliate Marketer: Article Marketing-Driving Niche Traffic to Your eBay Affiliate Store
• Mortgage Broker: Reverse Mortgages-Helping Your Retired Parents Get the Right Mortgage

Day 4: Write–A Lot

A good personal brand only works if it has depth.

This 5 day process is going to immediately drive people to you. Make sure you look like you are open for business and it is clear who you are and why you are valuable.

So now it is time to open up the word processor. Write each of your list of articles. The list should have between 40-50 article topics. Yes, this is going to be a long day. Here are a few tips:

• Each article should only be 300-450 words
• Each should be informative or how-to oriented
• Create a standard format that is easy to read: italicized introduction, sub-headings, and lists
• Use keyword(s) in sub-headings and body of article, but no more than 2-3 times
• Include a consistent “resource box” at the end of each–brief who you are, what you do, and website link

Look at this post as an example.

Day 5: Start Promoting

Okay. I know you are tired, but we are to the fun part–self-promotion!

Expect another long day. Do the following steps. Since we are compressing this into 5 days it is important to do this in order:

1. Post 10 articles to your blog (website): This should simply be a cut and paste exercise. One important trick to add a little apparent depth. Post date each but the final article when posting. I recommend spacing the post dating to reflect 3 posts per week, or whatever frequency you intend to post in the future. This isn’t intended to be a deceptive trick, but rather helps set expectations for your readers for the frequency of future posts.
2. Post 10 more articles to your blog (website): These are going to be posted with future dates. This will help make you ongoing personal brand maintenance less intimidating. You now have a good queue–keep it full.
3. Post 10 articles to eZineArticles: There are others, but this is the best. They have good rules, reputation, and traffic.
4. Hold on to remaining 10-20 articles: Chances are you didn’t write 40-50 anyway–I know you got lazy, didn’t you? I am your coach– I am going to push you harder than you think you can go. If you met my goal you have some extra juice in the tank to deploy or reserve your call. If you didn’t make it you need to work harder–this is important. It is your personal brand. It will make you more money!
5. Gmail: Add a signature block. Make it much like your article resource box, but add telephone number, LinkedIN profile and Twitter URLs. Announce your new website and expertise to 10 friends. Ask them to promote and link to you.
6. Twitter: Go to http://search.twitter.com. Search for your keywords. Reply–intelligently–to 10 tweets on things of interest and relevant to you brand. Follow 10 other people in your brand area that you did not reply to tweets from.
7. LinkedIN: Connect with 10 people you already know (load in address book). Ask them to endorse you.
8. MyBlogLog: Add widget to blog (website). Search for your keywords. Join 10 communities of people in your brand area.
9. Stumbleupon: Search for your keywords. Connect with 10 people in your brand area. Stumble each of the websites of the people you connected with on Twitter, LinkedIN, MyBlogLog. Stumble your most recent blog (website) post.
10. eZineArticles: Add widget to blog (website).

Take the weekend off. Rest. Then…

Repeat Weekly.

Good luck! Happy personal brand building.

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If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice

• Try to find the most appropriate category for your SEO article test
• Consistently post all of your test articles into that category
• Ideally you have already published yourself into a top 10 author for that category
• Write three unique articles for each keyword you are testing
• Vary keyword density, key phrase word order, alternate keywords
• Try multiple headline techniques (try a number in at least one)
• Try various summary techniques (try a famous quote in one)

Marketing the Article

Once written and submitted this is where you can get a bit more scientific. You can attempt a variety of different article marketing techniques. Here are a few that I recommend:

• Blog reference/link
• Twitter comment
  
• Social bookmarking
• Email

I like to use bit.ly (a tiny URL technology) because it gives you detailed click-through source and tracking metrics.

Measuring the Results

If you are not measuring then you are simply hoping for miracles and most people don’t pay for that. Before you start submitting and marketing your test articles make sure you are certain of your objective and key tracking metrics. Here are some possible metrics:

• Views
• Click-through
• Syndication/Publication
• Traffic sources

Quality article directories, like eZineArticles, are making it easier to track and capture these metrics.

The nice thing about using article marketing as an SEO content and keyword test environment is, once complete, you have a great repository of validated and ready to deploy SEO Web copy.

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If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice

Target Venture Capital

Finely written Web copy and experienced keyword research famously attracts search engines, motivates customers, and compels action. If you are an entrepreneur with a hot idea, but not quite enough capital to take it to its full potential angels and venture capitalist should be part of your target market in your marketing plan.

Keyword Research

Start with good keyword research and analysis an zero in on what venture capitalist are looking for–markets, benefits, ideas, and trends. Then create an SEO plan to bring vector in interest to your project or company.

Highlight Synergies

No one will know companies and technologies that are natural components of your value chain. These become powerful synergies when two or more of these opportunities are in one investor’s portfolio. Make sure your Web copy and marketing materials clearly demonstrate these connections and potentials.

Focus on Benefits

Like customers they are looking for benefits and need to be emotionally inspired to action. A professional copywriter can help you achieve this result on your website, in your emails, on your business card, and even in your pitch.

Get Emotional

Remember what drives venture capitalist to action: large markets, smart teams, and a passionate inferno. These are all qualities that a good copywriter can bring to vivid life your marketing.

Target Bright Entrepreneurs

This difficulty in connecting is not limited to entrepreneurs trying to raise capital. In fact, the problem of investors trying to locate the right ideas, quality teams, and attractive deals to meet their goals may be more acute.

Venture capital websites typically highlight past successes, current portfolios, and partner profiles, yet do little to attract targeted new opportunity.

A top copywriter can design a search engine strategy and experience that will efficiently attract, segment, and engage the types of entrepreneurs and ideas you want to fund.

Write for the Sale

Like any marketing or copywriting project, don’t forget to write for the sale. Hope and opportunity will still pass in the wind if you don’t ask for a conversation.

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If you have any questions–contact me: http://twitter.com/billrice