Ever since the Google Panda update, SEO’s have been talking a lot about how article marketing is dead. Nonsense!  I have found some great relatively new ways to promote articles, be seen as an authority in your niche and generate a healthy social media following using the sites below.

1. Squidoo– This is by far my new favorite place to write articles or “lens” as they are called at squidoo.com. You can write on whatever your niche happens to be, or even something related to your niche and get great link backs to your main site. You can also build a community around your topic here very quickly. I found it much easier to get comments, +1’s, Likes and Tweets for my articles here than many of the other social sites that are more popular. Squidoo has a healthy Page Rank of 7 and growing according to the SEOBook toolbar .  A link back from here will give you some “authority” from the search engines.
2. Gather– Gather.com is quickly becoming one of my favorite places to do some “article marketing.” If you’re a traditionalist you may not see this as article marketing, and probably by certain definitions it’s not, but it’s a great place to share current events in your industry, introduce your company by way of making connections with people in complimentary industries and help each other out via the social network. You don’t have to overtly “sell” anything here, just engage in the community, everything you do on gather will show up in a feed that others can subscribe to thus keeping people up to the minute in the know about what’s going on with your company/industry.  Gather also has a good PR 6, so the link backs you create from your Gather page back to your main page should help you with your rankings.
   
3. Quizilla– This may definitely look at first glance like novelty to some seasoned SEO’s and/or article marketers but give it a second look, there is a lot of opportunity to grab here for your business, if you get creative about it and it’s right for your type of product.  You can create some fun and interest around your niche by creating stories for people to discover, polls to gain some insights or even quizzes if you’re feeling frisky. It’s easy to find something you’re into at Quizilla – just use the search box or browse the tags. You can create whichever of the above works for your company, tag it with your keywords, and get creative about marketing around your brand. SEOBook gives them a PR 6 so its definitely a growing community that pays to get in on while it’s still young and create some “fun” around your brand. The community is definitely on the younger side, so if your product is aimed at that demographic, go for it!

Kimberly Clark is a Content Strategist who enjoys helping clients navigate through web design in Louisville and beyond.  From planning to ongoing content strategies, she has a deep understanding of the tools of the trade like social media and SEO.  Kimberly is also a data fiend and uses it to develop unique, original and interesting web content that keeps visitors engaged and interacting. She works at: www.VIAStudio.com