While traditional media has long relied on articles as a marketing tool, people doing business online have also had a large degree of success with this method. Creating quality content and posting it in the right places is a popular and successful way to attract more traffic to your site. Read on for some tips on how you can make article marketing work for you.
1. Write your articles in a style that works for an online audience. Studies show that people reading online tend to skim more, and they want concise, targeted content. Use small paragraphs, bullet points, lists and other methods to keep your articles focused and to-the-point. Always end each article with a call to action. This means that you are telling your customer what you want them to do, such as visiting your website, clicking on a link or purchasing a product.
2. Go easy on the hard sell. Not many people will take the time to read an article once they see that its only purpose is to sell something. Respect peoples’ time and give them real, useful information in each article. This genuinely helps readers, helps them trust you and makes them much more open and willing to entertain your offer.
3. Invest money into a submission service for your articles. Like many other things, article marketing is a numbers game. You must keep a steady flow of articles coming, and have them distributed through many sources. Ezinearticles is one of the more popular article databases, but there are many others. Hire a service to take your finished articles and submit them to various outlets as part of your traffic-building strategy.
4. This cannot be said enough — create content that your readers will find interesting, engaging and useful. You do not have to pack every article with tons of information; choose two or three key points and elaborate on them. Come up with titles that grab the interest of readers, then answer the title with the points in your article. Do some quick research to find hot topics related to your product, and check bookmarking sites to see what readers are most interested in learning about as it pertains to your product or service. Yahoo Answers and similar sites are another good source of information because you can see what types of questions people are asking about your niche, and you can then answer them in your articles.
5. Avoid duplicate article content. This is one of the most important rules of article marketing. Search engines penalize you for duplicating content, so make sure that your website, your articles published elsewhere, your blog and any other content you post is original and unique. Use Copyscape to check your content. Many people take one article and rewrite it a few times. This can work, but usually only if you rewrite each and every sentence.
While online marketing has its challenges, using articles to generate traffic is a tried-and-proven technique for driving more traffic to your site. Having a quality site, with additional informative articles, can help you convert your visitors into sales, and ultimately, profits for you.