Article Marketing is one of the most effect and successful methods in driving traffic to your website.
Article Marketing:Increases your visibility
Improves your link popularity
Builds your reputation as being an authority or expert in your field
Enables you to touch markets that you could not touch before
It's free advertising
So let's say you are writing an article about Pet Insurance. The first thing that you would do is to identify the consumer's main problems or frustrations in buying Pet Insurance. Then in your article you need to solve their problem. Should the customer want more information they can click on a link that you have provided and they will be directed to your website.
In your article you are generally allowed two links, and usually below the fold. One link should go to your main or home page, and the other link should go to a page in your website which has information about the keyword that you provided or used in your article. 'Above the fold' is what you see when you initially go to someone's website. If you use your mouse to scroll down to see the rest of the page, this is what they call 'below the fold'.
When you write an article and put it up on your website, search engines like Google will see it (it's called crawling) Google will crawl it and make it available to searches.
Articles can be promoted in several different ways. Your article can be placed on your website, you can submit it to several article based directories, or other website owners may place your article on their site to increase their content.
So if your article is about Pet Insurance . . . someone entering 'Pet Insurance' in the 'Google Search Bar' . . . articles about 'Pet Insurance' will come up. If your article is at or near the top of the searches more people will click on it and be directed to your website, thereby increasing traffic.
Here are the steps to writing and promoting articles in order to get traffic to your site to make sales.
1. You can write your own article, or outsource it to be written.
1a. Your article should be 300 words or over and have original copy. Copying it to another site will result in duplicate copy and will not receive any 'credibility' from Google. In other words; if you submit an article to one of the article directories, such as http://www.Ezines.com/ Google will credit you with 1 article and 1 link to your website. If you submit the same article to another company, Google will see it as a duplicate and instead of receiving credit for 2 articles and 2 links, you will receive credit for only one of them, and there is a chance that Google will not give you credit for either article and actually penalize you by moving you further down in their search engine rankings.
Your article; should address an interest or concern of your 'target' group. It should not be about you or how great your company is. No one cares about that . . . but you.
It should be written in a way that directs the reader to your website to get more information or to buy your product or service. Think of it as telling a story and the reader needs to go to your website to find out the ending.
You can also go to; http://www.ArticlesHaven.com/, or http://www.CreativeCommons.org, which is a website where you can receive 'free' articles on a variety of topics. Just take that article - rewrite it to make it your own and this will save you a great deal of time and thought.
1b. Write a compelling title for your article. Make it interesting, catchy, and newsworthy, etc. If you want to know what a catchy title looks like, just go to any magazine stand and look at what headlines catch your eye and make you want to read the article. An even faster way is to just go to http://Magazines.com.
Adding keywords in your title and copy are beneficial. This is because people search by using keywords, and if the keywords in your title and the body of your article ‘match’ what people are ‘searching for’ your article has a better chance of coming up.
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