For those who might not be aware of the strategy of article marketing let me explain the actual mechanics of it:
An article is written with the aim of promoting your website in some way. It may be to promote your website directly, it may be written about a product (or service) that you sell or promote on your website, or it may be written about general news or trends relating to your industry, or in some cases it may even be written about a subject only mildly related to your industry.
That article is then posted to an Article Directory (a third party website which hosts other peoples articles), with the most widely recognized article directory being http://ezinearticles.com/, or it can be posted to many different article directories.
The Purpose Of Article Marketing…
A common question at this stage is “why am I filling up someone else’s website with valuable content?”
This question is answered when we consider the purpose of these articles…which of course is to promote our website, or some aspect of our website (this is specifically done through an article bio box, which links the article to our website). The aspect of promotion is achieved in two ways (actually to be perfectly accurate, in three ways…this will make more sense as you read the next few paragraphs):
- These article directories can be a direct source of traffic for your website. For example you may be a plumber who submits an article on “DIY tap washer repair”. Somebody searching for this information finds your article, clicks on the link to your site in the bio box, and arrives at your site, hopefully primed to take some action.
- Part of the algorithm that the search engines use to calculate how “important” (or relevant) your website is, is to consider how many outside links are pointing toward your site (commonly called backlinks). The more of these backlinks there are, and how many there are from “authority” sites (which many article directories are), then the more relevant your website will appear. This will result in a higher positioning in the search results. Of course this potentially will translate into more visitors to your site.
- The third reason is closely related to the above point. Many webmasters trawl through these article directories searching for relevant content to populate their own websites. This is in fact one of the fundamental reasons why article directories were first established, and is perfectly acceptable. In fact, it is most desirable for your articles to be placed on another website…Why?…Part of the Terms Of Service of these directories is that article posted on someone’s website, is that your author bio is included. And what exactly does that mean?…Well that article is now on another website and is pointing back to your site, as well as pointing back from the original article directory…More back links, more relevancy, more potential traffic for you!
My Approach To Article Marketing
So as you can see, article marketing serves more than one purpose, and it can be a really powerful way to promote your website, both in terms of direct visitor traffic and also improve your search engine ranking.
My approach to article marketing is to take advantage of all of the different aspects that I have outlined above. How much I focus on any one of these approaches to article marketing depends on the objectives of a particular promotional campaign. Recognizing and being able to respond to these very particular objectives is fundamental to the overall effectiveness of an article marketing campaign and how it relates to your business…