Article Marketing: A Great Way to Leverage Your Time

When you’re looking at ways to break into a niche market or you’re starting a new business online you need to create visibility. One of the best ways to get your site on the radar is to write informative articles relevant to your products or industry. These articles, when used effectively will drive traffic to your site from consumers looking for more. Following are some good guidelines and effective techniques for using article writing to successfully market your website to others.

Become a Contributor

Article marketing, for those of you new to the term, is the distribution of your content (articles) through article distribution sites and repository services, such as Ezine Articles. At the bottom of your article is a resource box that you’re allowed to put a link to your site and a small bio about yourself.

Through the distribution of your article to these sites, you can effectively increase the exposure of your expertise, as well as, drive traffic to your site seeking more information. By having your content reproduced around the Internet you can leverage the popularity of other sites to your advantage. People who are interested in learning more about your subject will use the link you provided in the resource box. These one-way incoming links reward you with better search engine rankings.

The Flipside — Become a Consumer

From a publisher’s viewpoint — like yours — when you put an articles online for distribution it’s free content. So, if you’re struggling to stay up with a regular email newsletter and are coming up dry on content, reprinting articles from the distribution sites can be a great way to lessen your workload. You can also use the articles to populate a webpage, blog or other publication as long as you follow the rules for reproduction usually posted at the site.

Article Writing

It’s a well known fact that when writing articles for online consumption its best to keep them short, generally about 400-600 words long… these get the most traffic. People usually have short attention spans and are looking for the quick, easy to absorb snippets. Save the wordy stuff for your more in-depth studies you post only to your site for specific training — or better yet, put it in an eBook!. You can’t argue with statistics… the short articles get you more exposure and ultimately more traffic. So, if you have some long articles that you’re considering to put into distribution, try cutting down some of the fluff and content to give them a better chance of getting syndicated.

Article Titles

This is the neon sign that you need to put on your article. Any copywriter or regular blogger knows that the titles of your articles need to be good enough to lure the reader inside. Titles have the most impact of anything in your article… without a good title people will just pass it by. This, of course, also impacts whether your article will be picked up and republished. Most people who are searching article directories looking for content, are looking for something specific. Make sure your article title has the right keywords in it and that it’s interesting enough to be clicked. To sum it up, you’ve got a lot riding on how good your title is… take the time you need to noodle out a good one.

The Nuggets

Every now and then you’ll write an article that gets a lot of hits. Take a look at it and see what may be there that you can duplicate into other articles. It may be the title, the subject, you’re tone, or some element that sticks out.  Sometimes you’ll get the right combination… a solid title, a good word count and a subject that people are interested in. In those cases, your article can go viral… getting syndicated many times. Pay close attention to those because whatever lit the fire there, you want to kindle in other articles you write.

Quality over Quantity

While it’s important to be as prolific a article writer as you can to maximize on the exposure you’ll receive from the article distribution sites, you have to maintain a high level of quality in your writing. Banging out a 500-600 page article is a mistake. If you start pushing articles out to the web that are light in substance, then you risk either not getting noticed anymore, or worse, remembered for the crap you dumped out there.

So be thoughtful in your writing. Give the people what they want. Do it as often as you can, but while keeping the value there for them to read.

Is Article Marketing Worth The Time?

Yes!

One good benefit of article writing is that you can parse your content and use it elsewhere… either somewhere on your site, or in an eProduct, or newsletter, or email. Leverage the content you’ve spent time all that time to develop and you’ll reduce the amount of time you need somewhere else.

The best part of article writing though is the exposure you’re getting online. If you write consistently good stuff that gets picked up and distributed, you have the potential to gain the moniker of a “guru”. This step can lend powerful credibility to you online. Once you’ve achieved this status, you’ve entered the realm of a life-changing experience. You’ll be in demand!

Yours for Bigger Profits