Article Marketing

Using articles to advertise and promote your business should be a part of your marketing plan for many reasons. It’s a good way to drive traffic to your website with no cost to you. Following are some suggestions for writing articles that will work for you.

When you designed your website, foremost in your mind was grabbing your visitors’ attention. The same thing should be true with your articles. Use catchy headlines. You want the headline to entice your reader to keep reading. You also want to repeat important keywords frequently because these are what the search engines glom onto. It’s of the utmost importance that your article is picked up by the search engines, and the way to do that is to feed them plenty of keywords.

Write lots of articles. The more you post, the more links the search engines will pick up on. Remember that it’s the number of links that moves your web page up the hierarchy, and the higher you are, the more traffic that will be directed to your page. Don’t post your articles just anywhere, however. You want to submit them to those sites that are ranked high by Google. Google uses PageRank (PR) for ranking sites with a range from 1 to 10. One is less important, 10 is more important. Post your articles to a high PR site to get high quality links. A site with a higher PR indicates that the site is trusted and is searched more often. By the way, PRs are posted on the Google tool bar.

Be particular about your links. Read the site’s instructions for how to post the link. For example, some sites require http://. Once your article is posted, check it out to make sure your link is working. Posting an article will not do you any good if the link is not active, so check it out.

It’s easy to get so caught up in using key words that your articles don’t say anything useful. Don’t let that happen to you. Have something worthwhile to say and say it in such a way that there will be a genuine interest in reading it. Make certain your article will make a contribution to your reader, such as sharing valuable information about using articles as marketing tools. If you contribute valuable articles with useful information repeatedly, you will become known as an expert on your topic, and that may be the most beneficial thing that could happen from using article marketing as a tool in your marketing plan.