Article marketing can be a terrific way to market your business in several ways. Articles can be used to brand you and/or your site, help drive traffic, acquire backlinks and good search engine rankings, as well as provide a steady stream of new and relevant content to your business. Articles can also be used to market your offers in other ways, such as affiliate products. No matter which end use you have for your articles, there are a few things you’ll need to know about article marketing, and how to effectively implement it.
Whether you write them yourself or have it outsourced, it’s very important to have the best quality content you can get. After all, this is either going on your website or is pointing to it, so it is representative of you, whether you like it or not. Moreover, good quality content in the form of articles can drive lots of traffic to your site, simply either by virtue of being found on the article site or the search engines.
Make sure that you have employed all the keywords you wish to focus on in the articles. It’s very important to have them in the title, body of the article, as well as any tags you may be allowed to append. Of course, while you’re at it, make sure you make good use of keywords in any anchor text links you’re allowed to use in the author resource box. This is your chance to help your article get great search rankings, and your site to be found for exactly what you want it to be found for.
Make sure that when you post an article on any directory, the links are live, and are dofollow. This means that the search engines are allowed to count this as a backlink to your site. There are exceptions and times when it would be okay not to worry about this, for instance if you were posting an article somewhere where you were going to realize a huge spike in traffic anyway. It would be worth it in cases like that, and a few others.
Once you got some good content and want to get it out there, make sure you put it in all the right places. There are literally hundreds of article directories out there these days, and about 50 of those that matter. The rest use your content for adsense clicks, and deliver practically zero visitors and search engine juice. Some of the best ones to take advantage of are places like EzineArticles, GoArticles, Buzzle, ArtcilesBase, ArtcileAlley and a few others. There are also numerous Web 2.0 sites that you can place content on as well, and they are definitely worth the effort too. Sites like Squidoo, HubPages, Wetpaint, Blogger and Tripod come to mind.
Make sure if you take up article marketing as a strategy that you stick with it. Many put up seven or eight articles, and then tire of it before it can actually do much for them. Give it a fair shot and you’ll definitely see results!
