Article marketing is a specific advertising technique used by online and offline entrepreneurs to help them gain exposure for their products and services as well as brand themselves as experts in their industry.
Offline article marketing is much more difficult to break into, because each magazine has an editor who has to approve the submission and publication is often many months away. However, it can deliver some great results if you target the right publications. Use a Writer’s Market annual edition to find out what publications are seeking articles from freelancers.
The online world of article marketing is very attractive to Internet entrepreneurs because it’s fast, free, and effective. You can publish as many articles as you can write. You can submit them to multiple directories. And you can see results in minutes, depending on the directory.
With article marketing, your goal is to write enough content that your reader feels you’ve provided value, but not so much that they feel there’s no reason to continue their search for information. You have to leave them hungry for more.
You’ll be leading them from the title to the resource box, hoping they click through on the hyperlink in your resource box and ultimately buy the product or service that you’re promoting or opt into the email list you’re pushing.
An article marketer knows that volume and quality count. They write as many good articles as they can and submit them to various directories all over the World Wide Web. While the tactic itself is a form of advertising, the best article marketing efforts are never accused of being overly promotional in nature.
Article directories receive a high volume of visitors and often have many categories to choose from. So it’s to your advantage to place an article on a directory and ride the coattails of their PageRank and standing in Google to get a portion of their traffic funneled to your site through your article submissions.
When you start article marketing, you’ll want to focus your content around a specific keyword or phrase. Make sure that keyword phrase is used in the title, in the first sentence, and a couple more times throughout the article.
But don’t engage in keyword stuffing, which is using the same keyword over and over again in the article. That makes your article unreadable and it could get rejected from the directory. Most allow approximately 2% of the article to use your specific keyword phrase.