The Basics of Article Marketing
Posted by Yvette | Under SEM 101 Tuesday Mar 23, 2010
One of the best ways to optimize your website is article marketing. Article marketing starts with creating articles that relate to your industry and/or your specific products. Then you get those articles out on the web through a variety of channels. The two major benefits are 1) increased inbound links from reliable web sites and 2) letting web searchers know that you’re an authority in your field.
Most article marketing campaigns include writing a good, strong article and then submitting it to multiple article directories like www.goarticles.com, ezinearticles.com, and articledirectory.com. These websites are trusted by Google and tend to get fairly high search results. So, it’s quite possible that someone searching using your top keywords would find your ezine article listed on the first page of search results while your website is still listed several pages back.
To take maximum advantage of this, what most people will do is change their articles slightly by moving paragraphs around, changing the title, and replacing a few words here and there. Then they’ll submit these articles to 50+ article directories. The upside of this plan is that your article has the potential to rank on many article websites. However, the downside to this plan is twofold. First, these changes usually result in lower quality articles. Second, searchers will most likely keep coming across the same article in different forms. This will be frustrating to them and can hurt your brand.
While it takes a little more effort, it’s best to select between 5 – 10 directories and then to write original, unique and interesting articles for each of them. It’s fine to utilize the same topic, even some of the same facts, figures, and research. However, it’s best to take a different angle with each article. Find a way to use the same information to glean different ideas and different meanings.
If you just don’t have the time or the interest in writing articles, you can always hire someone to do the writing for you. Sites like www.elance.com and www.guru.com have listings for thousands of writers who could do the work for you.
No matter how you get started, a strong article marketing campaign should be part of every small business owners advertising plan.
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