Article Marketing
Article marketing involves writing articles around the theme of your site and submitting it to article directories, so that other webmasters can pick the article and place them on their sites. At the bottom of your article is a resource box or brief bio ("About the Author"), stating who you are, and a link to your site.
It is a win-win proposition. The webmaster using your article gets a free content for his site, while you get a free one-way link to your site.
People who read the article and like it, would like to visit the website of the author. You now have a potential customer in your hands. Let's say you are into beads. You write an article and post it in an article directory. People interested in beads will read your article and visit your website to check you out.
If done right, article marketing will help you build a great online reputation for yourself. A cheap and effective method of bringing in traffic and links to your website is to syndicate articles in article directories, other websites and in newsletters/ezines. You may not see instant results with article marketing but if you know which places to visit and distribute your articles, you can bring in lots of traffic without really spending any money (and very little time) on this.
The resource box is the key to bringing those links and visitors – craft it like an advert, not a biography. Use
some form of call to action, and don’t just link back to your site, link back to your blog as well. This will get people to come to your site, as well as creating multiple one way links. Some of the top article directories are Ezine Articles, Go Articles.
Other than that, you should also search for newsletters in your niche and contact them to discuss if they will syndicate your articles in their issues. Ezines are always on the lookout for good content, so if your article sounds like something their target market would like to read, you can be sure that they will run it.
Another strategy is to contact websites directly and ask them if they would be willing to run your articles on their site – this is easier to do with blogs where you can ‘guest post’ once in a while, but don’t hesitate to try this with websites as well. There are a lot of things that you can do with article marketing – directories, newsletters, and other websites.
Go the extra mile and work on getting your articles syndicated in newsletters and on other websites as well. Most marketers will give up at article directories and not go for more valuable sources of traffic such as newsletters or other websites. It may look like a lot of work at the start, but the results, when they start showing up is rewarding and long lasting as once your article is posted on a site, it hardly gets taken down, and will send you traffic for years to come.
A good strategy to follow is to release an article for each of your sites about once every week. However, if your time doesn’t accommodate for once every week, then scale it back to once every month, or once every two months. Whatever you plan is, just make sure you have a systematic approach to it. And more importantly, follow it.
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