Article Marketing – Be Found, Drive Traffic.

Article marketing is a good way to promote your business, establishing you or your company’s expertise in a specific area and pulling traffic back to your website. Search Engines also appreciate the additional content added to the website via article writing and the additional links that can be created can be valuable for Search Engine Optimisation purposes.

Article writing is about the creation of new content that can then be made available for use on other relevant sites free of charge. This new content is of value to sites that operate in that particular subject area. In addition the articles should provide value to those sharing similar interests or who are searching for information, advice and assistance with that subject.

Article writing, when done properly, can establish you or your company as experts in a particular space. Writing a number of articles on a niche subject can attract interest in you and your business from readers keen to know more, or wanting your advice or assistance.

Once written you can post your articles online to any number of submission directories. Below are a list of what could be considered as the top 20 submission sites based on Google Page Rank and Alexa Ratings (at the time this article was written): 

To help you be successful in your article writing here are a couple of tips that should be followed:

Select the right topic.

This sounds pretty obvious – but just what constitutes the right topic?

Here you need to remember what the purpose of article marketing is;

• to establish you or your company’s expertise in a specific area
• to increase the number of inbound links to your website which help get your website found via the search engines
• to pull traffic back to your website – think of links as tunnels through which new visitors will travel to your site.

With this in mind you need to be writing on a subject that you know well or that your business excels in. The article should be relevant, informative and appealing to your target audience.

Once you have a topic in mind you should conduct some ‘keyword research’ in that area. Doing this will help you identify what your target audience is most interested in. At the same time it will provide you with the words and phrases that people are putting into search engines in order to find this information.  You can then incorporate these keywords into your article and especially into the title and sub-headings. Using appropriate SEO techniques when writing articles will help your articles to be found by your target audience.

How many words?

There is no magic number here but generally you should be looking at between 500 – 1,000 words. (This article has 880 by the way!)

Don’t forget that writing for online readers requires a specific technique;

• use headings and sub-headings
• use bullet points
• write in shorter sentences where possible
• avoid long unbroken paragraphs

If you feel that your topic needs much more than 800 words consider breaking the article into parts; 1, 2, 3 etc. you can then release these as a short series.

Don’t sell!

You must resist any temptation to overtly “sell” in the article. This won’t endear you to your readers. Remember you are trying to demonstrate your own – or your company’s – expertise and knowledge in the subject. If you can do that effectively then people will recognise your value and will automatically come to you for advice and assistance.

One thing that often comes up with article marketing is the question of duplicate content.

The search engines have an issue with duplicate content as it can devalue their search returns. There are ways of managing the duplicate content issue and this is the subject of an another article in fact! To avoid problems here, we would first of all post the article on our own website and let the search engines index it there. We would then produce a slightly modified version of the article and submit that version to the selected article directories and publishing sites, making sure that there was a clear link pointing back to the original document.

It is also advisable to avoid over submitting the document. Instead look for appropriate and quality placements and submit manually.

Finally, treat article marketing as one aspect of a wider Link building and Search Engine Marketing strategy. It can be a useful tool that backs up and reinforces other search marketing techniques.

If you would like to know more about this subject or Link Building and Search Engine Optimisation to drive customers to your website please visit us at http://www.digitaltradingcreative.co.uk or call us on 01793 680866. We would be delighted to hear from you.