A Unique Twist on Article Marketing
A couple weeks ago I received an email from a woman named Mary representing a web site called 1st 4 Articles. She had found one of my niche affiliate sites and was offering to write an article for my site.
My first thought was, “what’s the catch?”
Of course there was a catch, three links must stay in the article. These days I don’t put a ton of effort into that niche site, so I thought that an article in exchange for a couple links would be well worth it.
To my surprise, the article I received was very professionally written about a tough subject to write about [if it wasn't well written I wouldn't be writing about her service here on Art of Money 
].
I’m embarrassed to admit it but I have purchased my fair share of private label rights [PLR] articles and I was expecting this article to be along that line. You know, someone rambling on trying to fill up space about a subject and stuff it with just the right number of keywords.
But no, this article was highly readable, lively and informative, better than most of the rest of the content on my site that I had written myself. Since the links went to a high quality site that was directly related to the content of the article, they were value added as well.
Since then Mary has written 4 more articles for me, for sites that I am much more picky about and I’ve been equally impressed, so I wanted to give her service a plug on here and I thought it is a great chance for my readers to get a high quality article written for their sites…did I mention that Mary provides the articles for free?
Also, I was able to set the topic for the articles and they are exclusively for use on my site, she doesn’t re-use them. Unique, one-off content for free.
Free is good. Unique is good.
Another reason I wanted to mention 1st 4 Articles is because of the unique approach to marketing her sites that Mary is employing. If you think of the value of a link, on one of my sites I sell them for about $100 a year, then you begin to see the value of this proposition from Mary’s point of view.
If she can get a professionally written 500 word article for say $35, and she gets 3 lifetime links in return, then you begin to see that it really is a win-win business model.
All she needs is a set of sites that with a wide enough range of topics that allows her to write for a lot of different sites. I suppose an alternative would be to sell the links inside the articles, I’m sure there would be money in that approach as well, as lifetime, in context links are highly valued and will increase in value as the search engines refine their algorithms.
Check out Mary’s site and see if you can use her service for your mutual benefit.
I’ve never done it but it also may be worth a try to see if a site that you’d love to have a link from will allow you to write an article for them, in exchange for a link or two embedded in the article.
Jon Symons
Finding interesting win-win situations…so you don’t have to.