What is article marketing used for? I have often been asked this question, especially by people confused as why it should be necessary to market articles when you can have them submitted free of charge to such a wide range of article directories.
In fact article marketing is a misnomer. Your objective is to market your website, or product, not to market your articles. Article marketing is internet marketing by the use of articles to advertise and bring traffic to your website. An article provides you with traffic in a number of different ways.
The first step is to write the article. The topic should be carefully chosen to match the content of one or more web pages on your website. The reason for this is that your article can be used to advertise not only your website, but also one specific page on that website. This will become clear when we discuss how articles work to bring traffic to your site.
The article should be based on a specific keyword, or even two. This article is based on two keywords. You should keep in mind that the term ‘keyword’ is frequently not fully appreciated by those who have not been long involved in internet marketing. A keyword is more than a just a word, or phrase, that you feel is relevant to your website. It is a search term used by search engine users. It is the term that a visitor types into their search engine browser, Google say, in order to find information on the topic they are interested in.
The two keywords I have chosen to write this article around are ‘what is article marketing’ and ‘article marketing’. Note that I write the article around the keywords, not write the article then look for keywords that apply to it. Anyone searching under the term ‘what is article marketing’ or even just ‘article marketing’ is liable to find my website.
Once you have written the article you design the most important part, which essential for a good article marketing campaign: the Author’s Resource Box. Some directories call this the ‘bio’, some the ‘signature’ and in some it is simply added at the end of the article. Wherever it is, it is here that you add the link back to your website. If you can do so by means of anchor text linked by html to your website all the better, though not all directories allow html. Even better, link it back to a specific web page since this is better than just the home page of your website.
Having done all this, you can get traffic in the following ways.
Readers of your article will find it by means of the keyword. Therefore, if you have chosen your keyword well, your article should attract visitors. If you have written well enough for them to want to know more, then they will click on the link you have provided to your website. The link should lead them to a page relevant to the article. If you have a website on jewellery, and you have written an article on opals, your link should take the visitor to your web page on opals, not the home page on jewellery.
You only have a few seconds to grab the attention of the visitor and if they don’t see what they are interested right away the will likely click away. If you have no web page specifically devoted to opals, don’t write about them! Hence the importance of carefully choosing the keyword and the topic of the article.
When your article is submitted to article directories you a link back to your website, or individual web page, from the directory. Search engines, particularly Google, set great store by one way links. They indicate to the search engine that your website is well thought off, and hence provides a good service to the search engine customers. The more back-links you have, the higher you are likely to be listed in the search engine index for the keyword used for the search. Back-links to a page deep within your site are even more valuable than those to your home page, which is why your article should be written about a topic specific to one of your web pages.
Your article marketing strategy though, is at its strongest when other people find your article so good that they copy it to use as content on their own website or ezine. Anybody doing this must keep the author’s resource box, or bio, intact. This means that for every person who does this, you not only get the chance of a direct click to your website by visitors to the other website, but also another back-link. Some articles can provide hundreds of back-links, and I have web pages at number one position in Google due largely to my article marketing campaigns.
However, in order to have your article copied to lots of websites it has to be well written. If you cannot write well enough yourself, then have your article ghost-written professionally. You can still put your name to it, and your own resource box, since to all intents and purposes you are the author. It is your name under the title. Compared the amount of business, either get through direct clicks or from your high search engine listings, the relatively small cost of ghost-writing is irrelevant.
My answer to the question ‘what is article marketing’ then, is that it is a means of generating traffic to your website through direct links to a page on your site, and the promotion of your site to search engines through the generation of back-links from article directories and other websites.
Peter is a professional freelance writer who is currently ghostwriting from his website http://www.article-services.com His articles are written specifically for the customer who is given the copyright, and he offers three copies of each article on request. Peter is a busy man but can be contacted by email or telephone from his website.
Disclaimer: The information presented and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of ArticlePros.com and/or its partners.
