If you scour the web looking for low-cost or no-cost ways to promote any product or service online, you surely will see the suggestion of article marketing. Well-written original articles have proven to be one of the most powerful forms of advertising on the internet for the small business owner.
Article marketing can take several forms. One of the most obvious is writing articles to post on your own website or blog. This is a great idea. Search engines love unique content and are always trolling for something new. Adding keyword-rich unique articles to your website or blog on a regular and consistent basis will keep the search engine bots coming back frequently to update their indexing of your website.
The next most commonly used article marketing strategy is for a marketer, like you, to write an article and submit it to an article directory. Since the idea is to have original, fresh content, you should not submit the same article to different directories. Each article should be unique. You can use the same theme, but the words and ideas need to be different.
Article directories are where webmasters or ezine editors go to find new content to publish on their sites, blogs, or distribute to their readership in the form of ezines. They are also visited by people researching online for information. When you submit an article to an article directory, attached to it is what is known as an author’s “resource box” or “bio”. This is a piece of text that you write to promote your personal website or a particular product. This is where you include a link to your website, your blog, or other articles you have written so that interested parties can click through to learn more about your products.
Once you get the hang of writing articles, you may want to consider submitting some of your articles to sites that actually pay you for well-written articles, like Associated Content, or Constant Content. These sites have high editorial standards, and many writers find they can earn additional money by submitting articles to these sites. It may not be much, just $2.00 to $8.00 per article, but you can also earn lifetime residual income from the amount of views a particular article receives, so it can add up over time. Obviously, you will want to promote your articles on the pay-per-view sites as much as you can.
Having your articles posted at article directories has a twofold benefit. The first benefit is that it gives you a one-way link from your author’s resource box back to your website. This improves your website’s ranking in the search engine placement. This is what Google calls “PR” (short for Page Rank). A link back is like a “vote” for your website. The more votes you get, the more important your website will appear to the search engines. The more backlinks you build linking to your website or blog, the higher position your website or blog will appear in search results.
The second benefit is that real people read these articles. If people choose to read your article, it is logical those people may be interested in your subject matter and, therefore, are potentially customers for the items you are offering on your website. This makes them “qualified traffic”, i.e. people who are more likely to be converted into actual customers.
Free advertising, in every form, is worth the effort. Getting links and real live visitors from article directories is just the start of the benefits of article marketing, though. The real power of article marketing is in its viral effects. Have you heard the phrase, “Do the work once, get paid forever?” That’s the idea behind viral marketing.
To benefit the most from the viral effect, articles need to appeal to human readers and have:o Interesting content
o Good grammar, spelling and punctuation
o Material that will not get dated too quickly
o Desirable keywords
An article with all of the above will potentially spread throughout the Internet for literally years to come, at no additional cost. It is for that reason that spending time on article marketing is one of the best uses of your time for any online marketer.
Here at Success Point Consulting, we love to help small business owners get started with Article Marketing. We will write a package of 10 articles on topics and keywords you select for only $85. You are then free to do whatever you wish with the articles. You can use them as blog posts, submit to article directories or ezine publishers, or use them however you see fit. For more information, contact Trina@SuccessPointConsulting.com.
Here’s to your success,
Trina
P.S. Remember to check out our new ebook: Money in the Bank: A Step by Step Guide to Establishing Business Credit.
Once you are satisfied that you’ve gotten more keyword ideas than you could possibly use hit the “get more related keyword ideas” one last time. This time, though, go through the list in the top box and delete any obviously non-relevant words or phrases. 
