Article marketing is a popular way to advertise your product or website on the Internet. It involves using articles for marketing yourself as an expert in your niche, and increasing traffic to your website. It is an important component of your over all marketing strategy on the web. Well written articles that can sustain readers’ attention make this technique highly effective.
The basic idea behind article marketing is post your articles to a number of article directories with a link pointing to your business website. Most directories allow you free posing. Once published, your article becomes available to all – and also for potential reuse. If readers of your articles feel interested, they will click the link to your website. It serves two purposes: one, it adds to the traffic to your website; second, you get more back-links to your site which means higher search engine ranking. Submitting more articles means improved ranking through increased back links. But wait, article quality is an important factor.
Your marketing efforts will be greatly rewarded if your articles are of high quality. So, what goes into making a quality article? Stating in simple terms the ingredients of an effective article are: an attractive title; it is short, simple and to the point; and first 2-3 sentences motivate the reader to read on the full article. When written this way, each article can potentially send hundreds of visitors to your site in no time.
Normally people submit 2-3 articles to a few article directories and wait for some miracle to drive traffic to their website. For sure, it does not happen that way. Soon they give up in frustration and their marketing efforts end, probably for ever. Article marketing is not an easy or quick process – it requires persistence and takes time. Further, check you article writing speed. Quite likely, you take too much time, and that may be the real reason of your frustration.
Submitting an article to more than one article directory is not a healthy idea because you get penalized for plagiarism by search engines, particularly Google, when they find duplicate word for word content. Many article directories reject articles that already exist elsewhere. If you need more articles for your article marketing campaign but have no time to write, you can hire a professional ghost writer.
There are other ways to use your article for marketing purposes: convert your best articles into an ebook and distribute it through emails or a downloadable link. You can also contact some related blogs to submit your articles. Discussion forums are another platform where you can submit 2-3 line summarized versions of your articles ending with a back link. You can social bookmark your articles at the social networking sites – this helps your articles get higher rating by the search engines.
If you have not used article marketing to promote your business website, you sure have missed something in your over all marketing strategy. Quality of articles is the prime parameter that makes this technique effective. If tried patiently it is a sure shot method to generate high quality traffic essential for success of your business.