Marketing your Business with Articles
Write your own story
Article marketing is one of the most powerful search engine strategies around. This technique provides your website with lots of fresh content, generates inbound links, and makes your website attractive to search engine spiders and affiliate programs. It also helps encourage people to stay on your website longer, get repeat visitors, and convert more visitors to buyers.
What is article marketing? The idea is for you to write (or outsource) several keyword-optimized articles that relate to your business, post them on your website, and allow other webmasters to reprint your articles on their websites or in their newsletters or ezines free of charge.
The basic steps for an article marketing strategy are:
- Write (or outsource) several articles relating to your business—the more the merrier! See http://ArticleWholesaler.com
- Create a resource block with a brief author bio and links to your website to be included at the end of each article.
- Submit your articles to article directories, which allow website owners to freely reprint them with your resource block intact.
- Post your articles on your website for visitors to access
You should generate as many articles as possible that are related to your business. Therefore, it’s a good idea to start by brainstorming article topics so you have plenty of material to work from. Articles can be written in many formats. Some of the most popular are:
- How-to
- Opinion
- Top ten lists
- Personal stories
- Inspirational essays
- Book excerpts or condensations
The subjects you’re writing about can be applied to these formats to increase the number of articles. Let’s take the example of time-saving beauty tips for new moms. Simply by applying the general topic, you can come up with:
- A how-to article on cutting your morning makeup routine down to 15 minutes (or ten, or five)
- An opinion piece on the merits of combination moisturizer and sunscreen
- The top ten quick fixes for smeared cosmetics
- A humorous personal story about one of your beauty disaster days
- An inspirational essay on the benefits of spending time with your kids
And that’s without branching into specific areas of the topic. You can find a lot of great article ideas by visiting message boards related to your business area, keeping track of news items on your subject through television broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, and Internet news websites, and performing Internet searches on your subject.
Once you have several article ideas, it’s time to start writing! The most important thing to keep in mind while writing articles for your website and for distribution is to make them informative, rather than advertisements. You aren’t trying to sell your products or services with your articles. Your intention is to generate traffic for your website, build trust, and establish yourself as an expert in your subject.
Why is this important? Your website visitors will never meet you, so they have to trust that you know what you’re talking about, and that your products or services are worth paying for. When you write informative, helpful articles, it proves that there is knowledge behind your products.
Each of your articles should have a compelling title, well written body text, and a resource block that links to your website.
Titles: Your article title is important. It is often the first thing an Internet user will see on a search engine or your website’s directory, and it must invite them to keep reading. Make sure the title explains what the article is about in a way that demands attention. For example, you could call an article “Time-Saving Beauty Tips” and probably attract the attention of people looking for time-saving beauty tips—or you could call the same article “Conquering the Morning Marathon: How to Get In and Out of the Bathroom in Fifteen Minutes” and interest far more readers.
Try using one of these “formulas” to generate a compelling article title:
(Number) Ways to (Do Something)
How to _________ Your Way to _________
The Top (Number) Ways to __________
How I (Did Something) in (Amount of Time)
Why (Subject) is Like (Unrelated Subject)
Of course, there are many more ways to word a compelling article title. You can pick up more title ideas by scanning the covers of popular magazines and the headlines in newspapers. Take notes on article titles that pique your interest and make you want to read more.
Body text: Remember all those essays you wrote in school? The structure of an article’s body text is similar—only not quite so boring.
In general, web articles run between 200 and 1000 words. Each of your articles should have an introductory paragraph that summarizes the contents, followed by the “meat” of the article, and then a conclusion that emphasizes your main points. The tone of your articles should be conversational. A good approach is to use the word “you” in the text, as though you’re talking directly to the reader.
Internet users are turned off by big blocks of text, which can be difficult to read on a computer screen. You should keep your paragraphs relatively short, usually from one to four sentences each. Use a blank line to separate paragraphs, and don’t indent. Also, be sure to set articles in a reader-friendly font like Times New Roman, Arial or Tahoma. Fancy fonts are another online no-no for articles.
To further break up your text on the screen, make use of bulleted lists to summarize key points of information. Bulleted lists draw the eye and create space, and they can show a visitor at a glance what your article is about.
Remember to make the text of your article informative and entertaining. Don’t use them to advertise your products. Your website should provide plenty of product detail on your ordering pages; the object of your articles is to entice visitors to view those pages.
Resource block: The resource block is a critical component of your article marketing strategy. This is information you should include at the end of every article you post on your website and in article directories. A resource block consists of information about you and your company, a link to your website, and a disclaimer giving other websites permission to freely republish your articles.
Here is a sample of what a resource block might look like:
Ima Businessmom provides the best beauty tips, tricks and shortcuts for new moms on her website at www.prettynewmom.com. Ima is the mother of three small children and the author of the exciting new ebook Fixing Your Face in a Flash: Shortcuts to Beauty for Moms Who Just Don’t Have Time. E-mail Ima at info@prettynewmom.com for further information and a free beauty tip sheet.
Webmasters: This article may be freely distributed or reprinted on any website, newsletter or e-zine as long as the author’s name, bio and links remain intact.
Whenever another website or e-publication reprints your articles, you gain another inbound link (a link that leads to your website when no return, or reciprocal, link appears on your pages). Search engines assign higher ranks to websites with more inbound links, because it’s assumed the website is informative enough for other sites to reference.
A note on outsourcing: If you don’t have any writing experience, or don’t feel you can generate informative articles with well-placed keywords that will add to the quality of your website, you may want to consider hiring a writer or writing service to compose custom articles for you.
There are many professional writers and writing services that specialize in SEO (search engine optimized) article writing. You can have a series of articles written for you by an experienced writer who will create informative, entertaining copy using the keywords you specify.
Again, outsourcing articles is an issue of time versus money. If it would take you weeks or months to write dozens of articles, it may be better to invest in buying custom content—which you can generally have written in a week or less.
Best of all, when you buy custom articles, all the rights to the material belong to you. You can still include your own signature block at the end of the articles and distribute them as though you’d written them yourself.
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