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What is Article Marketing?
Good question. In its most basic form – and the one we are going to be discussing in this post – Article Marketing consists in writing an article related to your business or specific niche market and then submitting it to – one of the many – article directories available for this purpose.
That’s a very simplified version but, to tell you the truth, it’s all you need to know at this point.
How can Article Marketing help you gain more traffic?
- Article Directories get a lot of traffic from people searching for specific information; this information is archived under specific categories, for example: Sports, Business, Health & Fitness.
- Article directories like Ezinearticles.com tend to rank well in Google (They used to rank better before Google’s Panda update, but that’s the topic of another blog post) and other search engines. If you choose your keywords well, your article could get some good visibility and generate traffic due to its high ranking.
- Other website publishers and bloggers use articles from these directories as content for their sites. This is perfectly legit and also free! This results in possible increased exposure to your article which always includes a link back to your site.
- These links on your articles means more back links to your website, and as we all know, Google likes sites with relevant back links so this should help your SEO efforts and improve your site’s ranking.
Any article you submit to an Article Directory will contain a special resource box – usually at the end of the article – which contains links to your website. Most directories allow you to include two links in your article marketing efforts; if other publishers use your article on their site, they have to include your resource box and links. See how this can lead to more traffic?
If you write a really interesting and useful article, it has the potential to be published on many sites; depending on their popularity, you could see a nice increase in traffic to your site!
3 Things to Keep in Mind
1) Make sure you choose the right keywords for your article. This is vital; if you choose keywords that have a lot of competition, your article marketing efforts are destined to fail as it’ll be very difficult to rank well in the search engines for these highly competitive words. Do some careful research and see if you can find some less competitive keywords, that way you’ll have a chance of getting your article ranked, found and ultimately read! For ideas of good keywords to target, you might like to try Market Samurai (This is the tool I use and highly recommend) or you can go with a perfectly acceptable free tool, Google’s Keyword Research Tool .
2) There are literally thousands of article directories many of poor quality with little traffic; you want to make sure you submit your articles to one of the “better” article directories. The following is a list of some of the larger and more recognised ones which should help you get started:
- Ezinearticles.com
- Goarticles.com
- Buzzle.com
- Articlesbase.com
- Articledashboard.com
- Amazines.com
- Isnare.com
Open accounts in each of the above directories and start submitting articles on a regular basis; try to aim for, at least, one a week. If you’ve done your homework and chosen good keywords, you’ll soon start to see and increase in traffic to your site – and if traffic is a little slow in coming, at least you’ve got all those great back links to your site helping with your SEO 😉
3) Make sure you prepare a resource box that will entice readers to click on your links; the success of your article marketing campaign depends on this!
You need to ensure you offer a compelling reason for readers to click on the links in your resource box and head over to your site. I would recommend you take a look at how other authors have worded their resource boxes and see what works best for you; you’ll have to do a bit of testing here until you find the right formula. Just remember that there has to be something in it for them; what are they going to gain from clicking on your links? May be a special report or other relevant articles.
It’s not rocket science… article marketing is relatively simple but it does require some work and dedication. Give it a try and apply the above tips; with a little work – and patience – your efforts will soon reap their rewards.