Article Marketing

January 4th, 2008 | by Chris |

A very good way to get exposure and drive traffic to your website, is that of writing articles and distribute them through article directories. A lot of marketers use this kind of promotion as it can bring both immediate seen short-term as well as long term benefits and results.

On the immediate aspect of it, since your article is live can start sending you visitors that found what you wrote interesting and followed the link in it pointing to your site. This kind of traffic is very targeted since the visitor had to “pre-qualify” himself by going through what you have written and then followed your link. That makes him an excellent prospect whether you are trying to sell a product to him or you are interested in acquiring new distributors for your MLM business.

In the long run, all those links, from your articles on the directories and many other sites that would pick them, can help your website rank high in the search engine results thus driving more traffic to your pages which means more sales, more customers, more distributors and of course more money. Furthermore, as your content spreads around the Internet with your name as the author it helps your self branding and gives you more credibility in the eyes of the prospects. They tend to consider you as more important since your name is all over the web.

But how do you start?

Well, easy. By writing an article. This also happens to be and the most difficult part, especially if you are new to this with no experience.

The first thing you should do is to decide the subject you want to write for. A good help for this is the Google Keyword Tool. Once you go there you can put the keywords related to Network Marketing and work from home industry or related to the product you are trying to sell. This tool would give you related searches from users on Google and their search volume but not an exact number. For exact numbers, although such a tool from a third party can never give you 100% accurate results, you can try the keyword tool at technobloggie

Now, why you want to do this?

Because if you want to write about something, it makes sense to write about something that people are already searching for. What’s the point in writing an article for something that no one or very few are interested? It makes no sense and that’s why you should stick with what is already in demand.

After you do this you move to the next step which is called research. You make a search for the keyword and visit as much pages as you can to get ideas. What you should avoid is to copy and paste them which is called stealing, or rewrite them which is called plagiarism. Research is for giving you ideas, data and of course knowledge on the subject, but your article should be unique and original.

Then you make a draft and you start writing. Your first one would be the most difficult exhausting and time consuming, but as you write more of them the more easier it would seem to you. After a while your writing skills may also improve and people may even start reading them

Of course, if you don’t like the whole procedure you can always pay someone else to right them for you and all the hard work you have to do is put your name as an author and submit them. Naturally, you can outsource even that.

Now, the important thing during the submission is the resource box. In it you put whatever you want about yourself your site and of course don’t forget to put your site’s link there. It is also important that it is compelling enough to entice the reader to follow the link and that you use the right anchor text if you are working on seo (search engine optimization).

One of the best article directories out there is ezinearticles and although some say that submitting only to it is sufficient, it wouldn’t hurt to use a few other, too. Do a search for article directories and you will find plenty. Also don’t forget to read their rules and submission guidelines.

As your articles sit there besides regular readers who would find them more easily than your own site and then come to you, many webmasters who are searching for content for their websites may also like them and use them on their sites thus getting much more links pointing back to your site. That of course leads to even more traffic coming to your site.

Unfortunately as easy and simple as it may sound it requires some skills in order to do it right and give you the best results. Even if you plan to fully outsource it, you still need to have some knowledge on it, so you can oversee the whole thing. There are fortunately a lot of products out there from how to write articles to the advanced stages of getting good search engine rankings for them. But the most important thing is to start using that knowledge and not stay in theory.

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