Article Marketing Primer

Learn about the benefits of article marketing and discover strategies to derive maximum benefits from your articles.

Article marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways for the small business owner to promote his business. No marketing tactic can match the awesome power of writing and distributing articles. Every website owner wishing to promote his business online should incorporate this technique in his marketing strategy. To start with, lets review some of the benefits of writing and distributing articles.

Benefits of Article Marketing

1. Direct visitors. Getting your article published on authority sites can immediately bring a stream of highly targeted traffic to your site.
2. Build credibility. Writing articles related to your business is a surefire way to build your credibility and portray yourself as an expert in your field. If your article is informative and helpful, readers trust you and your recommendations and it becomes very easy to sell to these hot prospects.
3. Increase in link popularity and better search engine ranking. When your article is published on different sites, you'll see a sudden boost in the link popularity of our website because of the link to your website in the resource box of your article. Increase in link popularity means better search engine ranking as search engines take into consideration the number of links pointing to a website to determine its ranking. Of course, the more your article gets published on authority sites, the more is the weight of the link.
4. Repeat visitors. Once you have established yourself as an expert in your field by regularly writing quality articles, your readers look forward to your articles and keep returning to your website for more information. Repeat visitors, like repeat customers are valuable assets of any business as they trust your knowledge and expertise and are more likely to be consumers of your future products/services and recommendations.

How to Write Articles for Maximum Benefits

Although writing articles offer tremendous benefits, not many authors are fully able to harness its power. Here are some tips to ensure your articles derive maximum benefits:

1. Headlines. The headline of your article should be written not only to capture reader's attention but also to gain better search engine ranking. When articles are published on websites, headlines are largely used as title of the pages and search engine rank web pages based on the keywords it sees in the title of the webpage. So, when writing headlines, use relevant keywords that form the theme of your entire article.
   
   Take this article as an example. The headline, which is also the title of this page, is "Article Marketing Primer". In this headline "Article Marketing" is an important keyword that people are actually using on search engines which I found from popular keyword databases like Wordtracker and Google AdWords Keyword Tool. If I would have used the title "The Benefits of Writing Articles", which is more descriptive and self-explanatory though, this web page wouldn't have been easily found on search engines, because very few would search using the keywords "Benefits of Writing Articles".
2. Self-serving links. Many authors, in an effort to get maximum benefits from their articles, liberally include links to their website and affiliate links in the article body. Please understand that publishers sense the purpose of the author from the articles. If the article appears more of a self-promotional piece of literature, it is more likely to be sent to trash than invite a second look. On the contrary, if you are generous in including links to really helpful resources, you double the chance of getting your article published as it shows you really care about the readers.
3. Resource box. When article writing trend first started, the resource box would hardly contain any self-serving tone and would contain no more than a link to author's website. Now however, the resource boxes looks more like a classified ad with a minimum of 3 links to different sections of the author's website!
   
   It is as if by the time the author finished writing the article, he could no longer contain acting as an honest helpful guy and out of desperation let go of his real intention through the resource box.
   
   The resource box of your article should be more like your bio and should contain no more than a link to your website.
4. Keywords. There is no point in writing a keyword-rich headline that is totally unrelated to the theme of the article. In addition to the headline, your article body must also contain relevant keywords to supplement the headline. The key here is to restrain you from being overly generous in using the keywords. Be as natural as possible.
5. Short and sweet. Shorter articles, in the range of 400-600 words are generally favored over lengthier articles. Internet users are extremely busy people with very short attention span and you must convey your message in as few words as possible to prevent them from hitting the back button before they reach your resource box.

Word of Caution

In the wake of search engines imposing duplicate content penalty, it makes sense not to publish the exact articles on your website that you use to distribute it to publishers. For each article you distribute, have a different version on your website.

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