Article Marketing Automation is a hidden gem that I’ve only just discovered.

It has two sides:

• A system to publish quality articles to your blogs, either automatically or after you’ve approved them.
• A system to publish your articles to other people’s blogs.

Both are really easy to implement and you’re in control, so you don’t get rubbish on your site.

Publishing articles on your blog

Let’s look at publishing articles on your blog first:

This works with self-hosted WordPress blogs, Blogger blogs plus any blog that can be posted to using services like ScribeFire or Windows Live Writer. You can’t use it with free WordPress blogs due to their non-commercial nature.

Once you’ve told the Article Marketing Automation system your blog’s url, you proceed to select the correct category or categories to receive articles for. The list isn’t quite as wide as the one at EzineArticles but it’s pretty close, so you should be able to get a good match.

You then set up another author account – it’s in the Users section if you’re using WordPress – and give this “writer” a name and password. (Don’t use your regular password for this – use a service like Random Password Generator instead).

Then there are two tick boxes – one to auto-approve new articles, which I’ve personally unticked so that I get to check the articles before they are posted; one to open links in a new window.

There’s also a box to enter the maximum quantity of new articles you’d like per day. Set this at something “normal” so that it doesn’t look like an automaton is posting. I’ve set mine at between 1 and 3 per day. Experiment to see what works for you.

If you’ve got lots of different categories in your blog you can set the articles so they’re posted in the correct category.

That’s it, apart from checking and approving the articles if you’ve chosen to do that.

There’s no limit on the number of blogs you can have. There’s no page rank restriction. You could even use it to kick start a new blog to test an area before spending any real cash on it. The choice is yours. Or you can ignore this side of the system altogether.

Publishing articles on other people’s blogs

This is the flip-side. After all, the articles have to come from somewhere.

You can publish articles on as many different topics as you want. The category selection is the same as for the blog side of things.

Ideally, you should be publishing good quality articles. Either ones you’ve written yourself or ones you’ve had written for you. Some publishers (like me!) will check your articles before they’re published, so you stand a better chance of getting your article published if it’s written well.

The other plus on writing good articles is they’re more likely to get read.

Unlike an EzineArticles article, there’s no resource box. So you need to entice your potential reader to click the links in your article.

You’ve got three links to play with. You choose the keywords and where the links go to.

One thing to remember is that in the same way as links in ebook you have absolutely no control over the links once they’re on other people’s sites. So don’t put a regular affiliate link in the article unless you’re 100% positive it’s never ever going to change.

Instead, put a link to a file on one of your sites. A site you intend to keep.

Point the links to a php file on your domain. Just open a file in Notepad, save it as YourFileName.php (making sure that Notepad doesn’t add .txt to the end of it) and upload it to your site,

The contents of the file should look like this:

<?php
header( ‘Location: http://trevsreviews.com’ ) ;
?>

Change http://trevsreviews.com to wherever you want to send the traffic to. Then if the affiliate link changes, it’s a simple matter of changing it on your site.

Your articles will be drip fed to other sites in the network. So you’ll build up backlinks over time and start getting targeted traffic for the keywords you want to rank for.

The other thing you can do is offer up alternatives within your article. A bit like article spinning, except this actually turns out readable articles.

Once you submit your article, you’re given the option of adding up to 10 alternative titles. Take the time to add at least one or two alternatives here.

You then also get the option to add re-worded copies of each and every sentence in your article. Up to 10 alternatives again. So, if you’re dedicated enough, your article can have totally different versions out there.

This bit takes time. You don’t have to add alternatives – if you don’t, the sites that publish your articles may (or may not) get penalized for duplicate content if they don’t edit your article themselves.

It’s your choice.

You can also go really deep in “spinning” your articles – there’s a full tutorial with lots of explanations if you want to go down that route. It’s something you could always outsource anyway.

So, that’s the Article Marketing Automation system for you.

Well worth the low monthly subscription fee in my view.

You can trial it for 30 days with a money back guarantee, so check it out here.