Recently a lot of people have been asking me questions about article marketing: what is it and how does it work?
Article marketing is the act of writing short articles, generally 1,000 words or less, and getting them published on the Web or in ezines. Generally you don’t get paid for these articles, but the ROI is that you get links from the article to your Web site. Since incoming links from relevant Web pages helps your search engine visibility, this is a good thing.
First step is to write good quality articles, targeted at your best customers, with keyword rich titles that should do well on relevant searches at Google and the other search engines. You should also craft a good "resource box" which is sort of like an extended byline. You can include links to your site and calls-to-action. It’s best to use a call-to-action that’s relevant to the article you just wrote.
Next step is to get them published throughout the Web.
You can look for sites that publish articles that target your audience. This can be time consuming, but rewarding if you do it right. One good article in the right Web site can bring you loads of new traffic.
You can also use an article distribution company like iSnare or eZine Articles that will distribute your article (for a small fee) to hundreds or thousands of Web site editors. That can greatly expand your reach, although many of these sites don’t have much PageRank, and thus won’t give you a lot of link juice.
I wrote an article a while back on article marketing called Search Engine Success Through Article Marketing that still holds up. Check it out, then get writing!
