Article Marketing

"The art of article marketing. 800-1000 magic words to online business success."

Laura Childs, Mar 03 2007

Adding Articles to Your Online Marketing Mix

Over the next few weeks I'll be including a full online course devoted to article marketing. For now, I'm just going to give you the synopsis of this marketing course - the basics. You can journey onto other resources if you need more information fast, or add this page to your favorites and visit again soon.

In a nutshell:

Article Marketing Brings You Website Traffic

This one's pretty easy to understand, but far too many webmasters miss the mark on making the most of this technique.

Write a 800-1000 informative article pertaining to your niche or market interest.
Submit it to the article directories for other webmasters to use.

How does this benefit you, your company and your website?

At the end of every article used for online marketing is a byline or bio of the article writer. Generally this bio is 2-4 sentences and includes important keywords, your name or company name, and a link to your website.

As your article is picked up from the article directories by tens, hundreds or even thousands of webmasters requiring some fresh content for their sites, your name and links to your website are popping up everywhere!

And, as people happen upon those articles, if the content is good, they will click through to your website. Not to mention the fact that search engines will definitely find other sites linking to yours which in turn increases your site's value in the search engine's eyes.

Article Marketing Increases Your Website's Ranking in the Search Engines

As stated above, just by having other websites linking to yours will increase the value of your site to the search engines. If you could think like a search engine spider or robot, your thought would be: "Hmm, all these other sites are linking to this one about XYZ - this must be the top site on XYZ then..."

Article Marketing Increases Your Online Brand

Whether you're a one-man show or a corporation, this type of marketing online works. Thinking like spiders aside, human minds are much the same. "I've seen that person's name before...", "I've been to that website...", etc.

Caveats to Be Aware of When Marketing Online with Articles

You may think that was all very simple - hardly worthy of an online course. But there is still more to learn about using this marketing technique - do it wrong and it won't bring you any traffic, or worse, risk losing ground in the search engines instead of gaining.

We need to talk about the "duplicate content penalty', 'deep linking', and keyword selection.

We also need to talk about writing headlines and certainly bios that 'get the click'.

We will also need to discuss timing, automated submission, and frequency.

Finally, if you hate to write, or can't write a quality article (this is very important), we'll discuss the how and where to alternatives.

Article Marketing and the Software that Saves You Time

As always, there is software that writes articles, software that submits articles and software that builds websites out of other people's articles...those too, will be covered in depth.