One question those unsure about promoting businesses often ask is, “Does article marketing have any drawbacks?” and the answer is yes. There are always cons for pros and negatives for positives. There are never any perfect systems to use. However, you can make it nearly perfect for you if you know how to maximize the potential you have for article marketing.
Some of the drawbacks are that it’s not instantaneous like Pay Per Click marketing. You won’t see results that fast. Sometimes, you might get articles put up and wonder if anyone’s paying attention.
It takes more patience to get the content right. Giving customers pertinent information takes time and if you’re already in a time crunch, you’re going to feel the pressure in that area. If you’re unsure if you’re capable of writing decent articles, then you’ll have to hire a ghostwriter, which will cost you.
Then when the articles are done, if you’re submitting to article directories, it’s up to the editors to decide if the article passes their line of acceptability. Plus, you don’t want to submit one article and be done.
You have to submit regular entries – not only to the directories, but on other sites like Squidoo, Hub Pages and Google Knol. All of that takes effort. While it will pay off in the long run, sometimes it can try your patience to have to wait for results.
To be effective using this method, you have to be consistent. You also need to practice the art of giving in order to get. Give the potential customers who read your article something worth reading.
Give them a reason to want to know more. But do it carefully. Readers know when they’re being pressured and they can smell a ‘buy now’ set up. So make it worth their time.
When you get to the end of your article, tell them you’d like to give them more information (and maybe a free email tip, some advice, a report, or whatever) but because the articles have a word limit, they can click on your page link to learn more. If the article is written in a way that leaves them interested, hungry to learn or you’ve offered a potential solution to a problem, they will click through to your website.
Does article marketing work for everyone? Yes, it does – but it’s just a tool like anything else in business. It’s how you pick it up, how you hammer it, how you nail it in, and how you use the saw that gets the results.