What Is Article Marketing?
Article marketing is a specific advertising technique used by online and offline entrepreneurs to help them gain exposure for their products and services as well as brand themselves as experts in their industry.
Offline article marketing is much more difficult to break into, because each magazine has an editor who has to approve the submission and publication is often many months away. However, it can deliver some great results if you target the right publications. Use a Writer’s Market annual edition to find out what publications are seeking articles from freelancers. Article Marketing 365
The online world of article marketing is very attractive to Internet entrepreneurs because it’s fast, free, and effective. You can publish as many articles as you can write. You can submit them to multiple directories. And you can see results in minutes, depending on the directory.
With article marketing, your goal is to write enough content that your reader feels you’ve provided value, but not so much that they feel there’s no reason to continue their search for information. You have to leave them hungry for more.
You’ll be leading them from the title to the resource box, hoping they click through on the hyperlink in your resource box and ultimately buy the product or service that you’re promoting or opt into the email list you’re pushing.
An article marketer knows that volume and quality count. They write as many good articles as they can and submit them to various directories all over the World Wide Web. While the tactic itself is a form of advertising, the best article marketing efforts are never accused of being overly promotional in nature.
Article directories receive a high volume of visitors and often have many categories to choose from. So it’s to your advantage to place an article on a directory and ride the coattails of their PageRank and standing in Google to get a portion of their traffic funneled to your site through your article submissions.
When you start article marketing, you’ll want to focus your content around a specific keyword or phrase. Make sure that keyword phrase is used in the title, in the first sentence, and a couple more times throughout the article. Action Enforcer
But don’t engage in keyword stuffing, which is using the same keyword over and over again in the article. That makes your article unreadable and it could get rejected from the directory. Most allow approximately 2% of the article to use your specific keyword phrase.
7 Article Marketing Tips to Help Increase Views and Conversions
Everyone can use a little help with his or her article conversions. Even the best marketers tweak their style to try to achieve the very best rates possible. Here are seven article marketing tips that can help you have even greater success with your campaigns:
Tip #1: Treat Your Title Like the Star Attraction
If they don’t like your title, they’re not going to read the body of your article, much less make it to the resource box where you’ve placed your hyperlinks. Take more time to create a traffic pulling title than you do with any other part of your article.
Tip #2: Maintain a Perfect Keyword Density
Most article directories don’t set limits, but the good ones do. That’s because they know what search engine spiders consider keyword stuffing. Keep it to a healthy 2%, which means for every 400 word article, you could use your keyword phrase 8 times total.
Tip #3: Break It Up With Bullet Points
Make your article easy to read by creating lists in bullet point form. People love to quickly skim an article first and then click on to the next chunk. Or, if they like what they see in the bullet points, they’ll go back to the beginning and read your article more thoroughly.
Tip #4: Check Your Spelling Before You Submit Your Article
Don’t simply use spellcheck to check the quality of your work. It doesn’t always catch the mistakes. Go through your article word by word and make sure it’s correct. Some readers will click out if they encounter a spelling error.
Tip #5: Watch for Trends You Can Use in Your Article Marketing
Magazines and news shows will touch on a wide variety of niche topics, and you can watch for trends or topics and then use them to rank high quickly with your articles.
Tip #6: Share Your Articles in a Viral Nature Once They’re Published
Your article marketing campaign doesn’t end the moment the directory accepts and publishes your article. Give it a boost by pinging your article link, bookmarking it on sites like StumbleUpon, and publishing it on your own blogs and websites!
Tip #7: Run a Few Different Versions of Your Resource Box
Don’t make the common mistake of writing a short bio or “about me” in your author’s resource area. With article marketing, this is the prime spot where you’re supposed to guide your reader from the body of the article to your call to action. Go out with a bang and invite them to download a freebie or follow up for some deeper information. And test a few variations to see what works best.
Employ all or some of these seven article marketing tips and you’ll be well on your way to designing a content campaign that produces great results every time and lasts for years to come.
What’s the Best Article Marketing Strategy?
Everything in Internet marketing has a strategy attached to it. Whether you’re talking about graphics or joint ventures or an article marketing strategy, you want to have a plan of attack in place before you embark on a campaign that could cost you time, money or both.
With article marketing, two primary factors are involved – quality and quantity. You can’t neglect either one if you want to have success as an article marketer. If yo churn out a high volume of crappy articles, then they won’t convert and your time will have been wasted.
Likewise, if you take too long working on individual articles, you won’t see the kind of traffic you’d hoped for that will help you generate a nice steady flow of profits. So how do you come up with an article marketing strategy that works for you?
When you’re just starting out, you can take the do it yourself route to keep costs low. But there are so many tasks you have to deal with each day, it may seem hard to get article marketing tasks finished.
Start out slow. Plan to write 1 article per week that’s 400 words total. At the most, this should take you about an hour. If you find that it takes you three or four hours to write an article, then you may need to shelve your article marketing efforts until you’ve completed a course on writing for an online audience.
Once you have the time, increase your quantity to three articles per week, until you’re finally working on one article each day. That’s 365 articles a year out there working for you to pull in targeted prospects.
Rotate the type of article that you use. For instance, on day 1 write a question and answer article. On day 2, write a story article. On day 3 write a list article, and so on. Each week, check the stats on your articles and see which ones are converting better for you.
Each month rotate the directories that you’re using for your article marketing campaigns. On month 1, try EzineArticles.com. Then in month 2, use Xomba.com, and so on. Your niche may convert better in one directory over another, so again, track the results.
At the end of year one, analyze all of your articles to see which directory and type of article you’re ranking high in Google for – and which resource box is converting into click throughs for you, too.
The best article marketing strategy is one that provides the right balance between writing enough content and writing the right kind of content for your target audience. What works best for you may not be an exact duplicate of what works for another marketer.