Article Marketing…A Powerful Long-Term Marketing Strategy
There are many ways to market your business online, both paid and free strategies that you can read about here on my blog, and all can be be successful if implemented correctly. Article Marketing, if done correctly, is a very effective long-term strategy that network marketers (or anyone promoting an online business for that matter) should use to generate FREE search engine traffic to their sites. This strategy should be used along with other marketing strategies that will produce more immediate results. Article Marketing will help you to brand yourself and as “expert”, generate traffic from the search engines to your blog, generate leads and sales. This article will outlay the basics of what you need to get started. Taking action, as always, is up to you!
Create Your Blog: If you do not already have a blog, get one. Make sure that you self-host your blog and don’t use on of the free blogging sites like Blogger or WordPress (free). You want to have complete control of your site for promotion and advertising purposes and you do not want to risk being shut down. To self-host your blog, you will need hosting and you will need to purchase a domain. The easiest blog platform to use is WordPress, and there are tons of free and premium themes that you can choose from.
Social Bookmarks Submitter: This is a tool or plug-in that automatically submits your articles to numerous social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Digg, etc. with a push of a button. I use OnlyWire on my site but there are others that I have read are effective as well. You want to get one of these for sure.
Automatic Article Submitter: An important tool to get your article submitted to hundreds of online article directories at once. These article submitters also allow you to “spin” your article to create different variations to make it look to the search engines like you are submitting different articles. There are differing opinions on this topic of whether or not spinning really is necessary. I spin my articles sometimes and sometimes, due to time constraints, I do not. If you do not already have an Automatic Article Submitter, here’s one that works very well: Automatic Article Submitter.
Manually Submit Articles: Personally, I also manually submit my articles to Ezine @rticles because it is considered to be the top online article directly and it generates great search engine results. I also, but not every time, submit articles to Press Release sites if it something that is press release worthy. I will use press releases for business promotion articles but not “how to” articles. Some of the press release sites really generate some terrific search engine traffic.
Writing Articles: For best results, you want to “keyword optimize” your articles. Also, it is important when implementing an article marketing strategy to be consistent. Write a minimum of 3 articles per week and submit it to as many directories and social networks as possible. Write content that provides value and will bring visitors to your blog or click links in your resource profile to learn more about you.
Back Links: Back-links are extremely important to generating organic traffic to your site (which is the goal of article marketing!). I am not an expert in this area and have joined EZArticleLinks to help me generate back-links to my blog. You need to manually submit your articles to them and they organically generate 200-300 back-links per article for you. Back-links will help Google and other search engines view your site as one that provides value and will help you with your rankings.
It may take you 2-4 months to start generating any significant traffic to your blog, but keep at this strategy. Remember, the traffic generated by an article marketing campaign is FREE and TARGETED! Good luck in your marketing efforts!
Your Partner in Success,
Steve
