As its name suggests, article marketing is a strategy that relies on the power of articles to drive visitors to the website. Technically, the company must hire someone (preferably a copywriter) to write articles and submit them to various article directories. If a single individual runs the website, then that same person can do the writing. What makes it such an easy methodology is that generating articles doesn’t require large investments or in-depth knowledge of the field—only a good command of the English grammar. Another laudable quality of article writing as a business strategy is that it can be applied to all types of websites, thereby making it highly versatile.

Article marketing’s efficacy is truly remarkable in that it offers not one, not two, but three advantages for any online business proprietor. First and foremost, it can noticeably increase the number of site visitors in so little time. But it’s not just any traffic but highly targeted ones, which means that the traffic mostly consists of people who came looking for the very information that the website provides. There is practically no need to explain the importance of having a site that’s bustling with traffic but for the benefit of those who don’t have a clue, an impressive site traffic almost guarantees the success of an online company. It indicates that the information one has provided in his/her site has reached a notably wide audience who may be potential customers. Speaking of customers, highly targeted traffic is usually composed of people who came to the site to avail of specific products or services. This will provide an opportunity for the online seller to demonstrate that he/she can provide what the site visitor is looking for.

Another advantage of article marketing is that it provides an opportunity for the seller to showcase his/her professionalism. Through the articles, the readers will get an idea of what the seller can possibly offer prior to visiting the site. This method has a distinct ability to effortlessly blur the line between potential customers and actual buyers.

Last but not the least, people with online businesses can trust article marketing to save them money and time. This marketing strategy is economical and time-saving in that the site owners won’t have to shell out a huge sum and allow precious time to go to waste for using marketing methods that don’t really deliver as promised.

Given all the advantages it offers, there is really no reason not to use article marketing.

The benefits of article marketing

Submitting articles can go a long way in helping your website get a higher ranking in search engines. The ranking is for the key words that are associated with your site.

The articles usually come in searches and are, therefore sent to subscribers that are interested in your topic. They are also sent to article directories and publishing websites. When people find your article on line or through a directory like e-zine, they are taken to your website simply by clicking on a link. There are basically two ways through which to get visitors to your website through article marketing.

1. Through the articles themselves by using the link to your site.
2. Through Google searches and getting a higher ranking for your website.

It should also be noted that articles help to give you a reputation of being knowledgeable and trustworthy in your niche. They are a good way of helping your clients get comfortable with you before they buy your products.

Benefits of having a blog

- The biggest benefit of having a blog is that it is possible for you to frequently update its content, thus, giving your readers a reason to return.

- Blogs also help to build a community around the site. In case your blog is marketed well and starts drawing in readers on a regular basis, more people will start subscribing to your RSS feed. You could also get frequent visitors coming to your site to see what is new there.

- A blog helps you to interact with yur readers and future clients through interactive comments.

- As a result of continual fresh content, a blog helps with SEO. In most cases, it is easier for a blog to get a higher ranking, as compared to traditional websites, which stay the same.

- In case you have a traditional website that is static, a blog can help to refresh the content of that website and, therefore, boost your search engine ranking. This is done through the links from your blog to the main site.

- A blog can also help to bring more traffic to your site. This is especially true since people keep visiting your site through the links in the blog.

Which is best

It should be noted that blogs and articles can best be described as apples and oranges. They are different and each offers its own benefits at the end of the day. It is equally worth noting that a blog will not automatically get high ranking in Google or get visitors, unless it has been marketed. In most cases, people with blogs submit articles to their blogs, as a way of marketing them. Therefore, even with a blog, you can still benefit from article marketing.

On the other hand, you do not need to have a blog to submit articles. All that you need in this case is a website. Even if you have a traditional website, you can still do article marketing.

Article Marketing

Article marketing has been regarded as the process of writing articles for publications online, and using these articles for the purposes of advertising your website or web page. It is mainly aimed at increasing the flow of traffic to such site or page. There are various steps involved in article marketing and the most basic of these are article writing and article submission. It should be noted that knowledge in either one of these skills is sufficient, but knowledge in both is highly advantageous as far as increasing traffic to your site and making money as a result of it.

The steps below are those that are involved in article marketing. However, these are based on the assumption that you already have a niche that is based on various factors like;

• An online business that sells your own product(s)
• An online MLM or network marketing business
• An online business that sells affiliate products
• An offline business that uses a website for marketing purposes
• A business that offers internet services like web design, SEO

1. Keyword Research

The first thing that you need to do is carry out research about keywords that are best suitable for your article. These should be keywords that are not used by other webpages and they should have as much monthly usage as possible. One of the best tools to use for this purpose is Google’s Keyword Tool External. Once you have chosen your keyword, it should be included in both the title and body or your article. You should make sure that you use different keywords for different articles. It is also vital that the keyword is used in the first 100 characters of the first paragraph, after every 3oo words in the body and in the last paragraph.

2. Choose a tile

Choosing the right title is also essential. The title that you choose should have your keyword and you can also choose to have a secondary keyword in the title as well. The title is extremely essential, since it is what will persuade people to click on the article and read it. It is, therefore, extremely essential that the title explains what the article is about.

3. Write the article

The article should be well written and should not contain any errors in grammar or spelling. This is because; very few directories will accept poorly written articles and these are also less likely to be listed by Google. It is essential that the content of the article reflects the title.

4. The resource

This contains links to your homepage or individual web pages. In most cases, you only need two links in your text. These are intended to send readers to pages on your site , which relate closely to the article.

5. Submitting the articles

It is essential to not only know how but also where to submit articles. This is because; some article directories are better than others and the only way you can tell which is best is through experience. Article submission can be done either on your own or through an article submission service. However, since this is the critical part of website marketing, it is often recommended that it be left to the experts. Article marketing can only benefit you if it is used right.

Below are three reasons as why content marketing is regarded as the most effective sales strategies on the internet.

Informs

Content marketing as a sales strategy on the internet has the basic principal of providing information that focuses on your niche. This information is freely received by people that share your interests and enthusiasm, provided it is relevant to their cause. Therefore, it is more effective if the content is of high quality. It should also be noted that the more content you offer, the more gratitude your readers will have towards you, for offering them that much information. The most essential thing to remember here is that, the content that you offer must be useful to your readers. If it’s not useful, you will be wasting a lot of your precious time and probably build a reputation of not being well informed in the process.

Makes offers as opposed to niches

When you leverage the reputation that you have developed, you will gain much more interest with your readers. Instead of using over the top sales with your readers, you can simply make them offers, thus, leaving it up to them to either accept or decline. In this way, you will be less likely to offend people or drive them away and you will be able to present them with other products in the future. This is based on the principal that once you have earned the trust of your readers, you should not do anything to violate it, with hope that you will be able to have more influence on them at a future date. In addition, with this, your marketing will become more effective and your efforts easier.

Attracts

As your publications start saturating the market, people will start to look out for more things that you have created. In this way, you will be able to tell that you are starting to build a good reputation and you should strive to become an authority in that field. At the point when people start to look at you as an authority in that field, you will realize how effective this marketing strategy is, since your business sales will be boosted up. Research has established that people are more likely to do business with those that they trust and respect. This marketing strategy aims at developing both the trust and respect of your readers, thus, making it extremely effective. Therefore, you should try to earn the trust and respect of your target audience, as opposed to chasing after prospects.

All in all, it should be noted that content marketing has been known as one of the best ways of increasing sales on the internet. This is because; it aims at earning the trust and respect of your readers.

It happens that the articles posted on the blog or sites are not seen by people unless the site or the blog exists for quite long time on the internet and has already achieved high search engine position.

Although the blog or the site has attained the status of authority in itself, the article posted still lacks appearance on the search engine’s first page, with the use of specific keywords alone.

For getting good response the first measure is of posting the article on the directories with free publishing feature like Ezine Articles. If the right keyword is used, not facing much competition and the luck favoring, the article on publication appears on the first page, which could be considered as a rare event occurring.

In case the unique article is posted at minimum two sites one on the authority site another article on the blog, there is quite possible that both the articles are on first page of the search engine.

Therefore when the article gets published there is necessity of its promotion in the process getting good numbers of back links having origin from the social media like Facebook, Twitter and other numerous similar sites, driving traffic from these sources.

There is also possibility of getting the back links originating from other articles and the blog directories, which have human reviewing options. There are some other directories also for getting back links, but ensure that it is a quality article.

The article marketing requires deploying certain tools, which can be free or paid for getting the back links. Same thing is true for the website promotion and the articles in the absence of which the first page ranking is not possible. Even if achieving the first page ranking still there is necessity to promote the site for retaining the first page ranking.

Most of the times it becomes difficult to write so many articles by self efforts, in that case, attempt should be made to outsource unique SEO optimized article writing work from reputed sources, which is easy and economical after a certain level progress of the website on the search engine ranking.

Different people have different thinking, but it is certainly preferred to work one only and get benefits over long time. It is a real possibility with right kind of article marketing. The strategy of article marketing relies on the volume of articles written. It means having higher content present on the internet.

The Better Part of Article Writing:

With the acceptance of the article and its publishing online the status gets raised to Published Author and achieving online exposure. The higher number of articles which are now published, there is higher propagation of the name in the search engine reports. The higher creditability is established and the status becomes of the expert in the field, with higher number of people getting attracted to the business.

The tendency becomes higher of people trying to know more about the expert published authors having established internet presence by their online search activities. The chances increase in getting more numbers of people in the opt-in list associated with website promotion through article writing, who have keen curiosity as well as they are looking for a solution to their problem with the hope of getting it solved through online contact.

Putting up more content online should not be considered as a blind race, it has to be highly focused and valuable content, which is useful to more numbers of people in offering them the desired solution.

The crappy article written for the sake of writing get ignored and are going to be more harmful than helping to be beneficial in any way.

It is recommended that around more than 1000 articles should be written by self to learn the way of writing right articles and beyond it should be outsourced with a careful eye that the outsourced article are properly written with unique content.

1. Understand your audience

It produces more effective results when you target a section of the society for your marketing campaign instead of making it more generalized. In order to ensure your target audience gets the message you first need to understand them. And to do that you need to first ask yourself what it is that is troubling them and how you can help solve their problems. Only when you know the answers to these questions should you start writing.

2. Do some research

It’s not unusual to get bored when you writing about the same topic over and over again. In order to avoid boredom, thus decrease in revenues, you should always keep an eye on what’s currently the trend in your niche. That way, you can keep yourself engaged in an interesting way and that will also help your readers remain in touch with the latest developments; not to say the positive impact it will have on your business.

3. Don’t get distracted

Losing focus from your goal was never easier. With the internet and telephones keeping people engaged, you can easily get distracted by them. So make it a habit to turn off your cell phone when you sit down to write articles. You will yourself be surprised at the increase in productivity.

4. Use a voice recognition software

In many cases writers type between 60 – 70 wpm. But with the help of a voice recognition software you can take it to 150 wpm. Although an article written with the help of a voice recognition software needs minor editing, it’s still a faster way.

5. Use a stopwatch

When you sit down to write an article, use a stop watch and notice the time it took you to write that article. After that try to beat the previous time in writing the next article. It will make your job much more fun.

6. Write immediately after waking up

It makes a marked difference in productivity when you start writing immediately after waking up; of course, after having a cup of coffee and something light to eat. This increase in productivity is a consequence of your fresh mind.

An article is written with only one thing in mind to convince a reader that you are capable of solving his query. When a person goes online to get his query solved most of the time he either uses a search engine – Google, Bing, Yahoo – or comes to an article directory like EZine or HubPages. When he types in his query, he is presented with a list of results and nine out of ten times a person clicks on a result only after reading the title.

After clicking on the article a reader will now start reading it. And it depends on your opening paragraph if the reader continues to read or pushes the BACK button. There could be a lot of distractions here. So the first paragraph must ensure the reader that reading this article would help him/her solve his/her query.

A reader may click on the article, could be impressed by the opening paragraph and even finish off with the article but all this may come to naught if the reader doesn’t find the content useful or doesn’t like your writing style. He/she has to be made to trust in your abilities in order for him/her to click on the link that takes him/her to your website or blog. Once a reader is on your blog or website, there are 30 – 50% chances that he will avail your services. Compare this to the traffic from PPC method which results in only a paltry 1-2% conversion and you realise the difference. But for this to happen everything has to be in place just right.

Also, article marketing is relatively less expensive and works long term. Unlike the PPC method, you don’t have to pay Google or some other website as much as $1 for a single click. All it takes is submitting an article to a couple of article directories. It works in the long run because once an article has been posted it will remain there even after five years or ten years. PPC will work only for as long as you are paying. That’s not to say PPC doesn’t work; it works spectacularly well for some websites but if you are tight on budget and looking for a long term strategy to bring traffic to your online platform, article marketing is perhaps the best way to do that.

While cost may be the most attractive feature of online press releases for most companies, it isn’t the the only reason why many firms are increasingly turning to the internet. There is another very convincing argument for using online press releases: SCOPE.

SCOPE OF ONLINE PRESS RELEASES

Unlike newspapers or magazines, which are reach only a particular audience, the reach of the internet is global. The Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbum is a perfect illustration of the fact. It’s the world’s most popular newspaper but very few people outside Japan read it or even know about its existence. That’s in stark contrast with popular internet websites like Google, Bing and Yahoo! which are truly international. Therefore the scope is immense and you can reach audience you never originally intended for.

SECRET TO AN EFFECTIVE ONLINE PRESS RELEASE

Online press releases are different from traditional press releases in many respects and for an effective communication they have to be optimized for the web users. Here are a few tips to do that:

• Don’t write in long paragraphs. It’s not convenient to read on a monitor screen therefore most people just skim through the content.

• Use bullets and highlight important points.

• Your are free to use you imagination. It’s not a bad idea to insert colorful photographs and short video clips.

Finally, don’t lose the professional touch. You can add anything provided it doesn’t look professionally inappropriate because that may hit the image of your brand.

You don’t have to spend a lot of money to create a blog. In fact, there are several popular blogging platforms – Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, to name a few – where you can have your blog. All you have to do is go through a simple and short registration process, pick up a URL and design for your blog and voilà! You can start writing!

As a blogger you don’t have to stick to a schedule albeit discipline in posting will leave a good impact on your audience. There are bloggers who post everyday, while others prefer to come up with something new on a weekly basis. You can decide how frequent you want to be and then try your best to stick to the original plan.

In order to attract more audience and keep their attention, it is important that you chose a niche. It is not that readers don’t find blogs on random topics attractive, but on average, a blog on a niche or a well-defined topic is more probable to get more consistent readership. Also, you have got to make sure your blog is informative and adds something of value to the topic you are covering. That’s important if you want people to trust your blog as an authentic source of information.

Once your blog is set up and readers are coming, you can monetise it. Currently the most popular (and probably the easiest) method of monetizing a blog is to use Google AdSense. That programme puts advertisements on your blog and pays you on a weekly basis roughly depending on how much exposure the ads get on your blog. Another advantage of opting for AdSense is that it provides relevant links for posts on your blog.

There is another method to monetize your blog and that uses paid links in your recommended websites section. This option is an excellent alternative to AdSense if your blog is regarded authentic by the readers. This isn’t very difficult as you can also automate the whole process. How much you earn this way depends not only on the popularity of your blog but also on your ability to negotiate.

These two aren’t the only ways to earn money from you blog. There are a lot of companies and businesses out there who are actively looking for people to write something about their products and direct readers to their websites. You can work with them either on a commission basis or figure out another way.

To conclude, blogging is an excellent internet marketing technique that helps you directly engage in conversation with your audience and earn money in the process. In order to earn money from a blog you ought to follow some simple tips like picking up and sticking to a niche and writing informative and original content.