Article Marketing to Build Your Business

Article Marketing for Promoting Your Own Info Products

Using article marketing for promoting your own info products is a widely underused tool but one that's highly effective at directing traffic. When talking about marketing by the use of articles, there's an assumption that it's basically for affiliate marketers.

While it's true that many successful affiliate marketers do tap into the power of using articles this way, you can use it to accelerate the growth of what you have to offer, too. Every day people access this gold mine to heighten the visibility of their businesses. It's sort of the sign in the window that leads the way to the site you want the traffic to get to.

You can use this savvy idea whether you're promoting a physical or an informational product. When you use article marketing for promoting your products, you build a solid web presence and even if you're a startup online business, you can afford to use this tactic to promote yourself because it won't cost you a dime.

What it will cost you is the time it takes to write the articles or the cost to pay someone else to do it if you're not comfortable with your own writing. Since article directories allow links, make sure you take advantage of a powerful linking strategy.

When you do submit articles, keep them coming. You'll want to keep the content fresh and meaningful for the visitors, eventually establishing yourself as the authority in your niche. Not only that, but relevant content will boost rankings of your site.

Make your article content easy to digest. Unbroken text leads to skim reading. Break up long paragraphs because it's easier for people to read in shorter bursts. That's why bullet lists are so popular.

You also want to prepare articles for your affiliates. The reason you want to do this lies in how you can then use the articles. These articles can be used on websites, on blogs, in email newsletters and as special opt-in information reports. Whatever you do, it has to bring added value to the table.

When you write the titles for your articles (or have someone else do them) avoid being vague or cute with your titles. You don't want to waste time on words that won't go to work for you as SEO rich verbiage.

Article marketing for promoting your products is not a selling tactic. You want to have content that promotes your stuff by way of hinting at a solution - you don't want to solve the problem completely, because then why should the customer go to your other site or buy anything from you? The purpose of the articles isn't to sell. It's to point the traffic to the site that will bring a conversion.

Improve Your Business Article Marketing Efforts in 3 Steps

Are your business article marketing efforts leaving you frustrated? Are you not seeing your goals reached the way you thought they would be? Don't give up. As with any type of marketing, there's a fine line between doing it the right way and getting rewarded for your efforts and doing it the wrong way and drawing a blank. But if you're not seeing results, there's a pretty easy way to fix that problem.

There are three main steps that can improve your marketing strategy. The first step is to ask yourself what the message is that you're getting across. Customers have a need. They have problems.

Are you supplying answers to those needs or are you just causing the consumer to have more questions? Before you can tell anyone else the benefits of your products or services, you have to know it yourself. So sit down and write out the reason why the product or service that you have is what they need. Then present it to them.

The second step is to know how to present that message within a few seconds. There are a lot of products and a lot of services vying for a consumer's attention. Some studies suggest that when visiting a website, the average person will spend anywhere from 30 seconds to 1 minute.

That is, unless you grab their attention. Always start your articles with attention grabbing headlines. This can be tricky when you have to use keywords in the title, but it's still doable.

Just because it's business article marketing, that doesn't mean it has to be dull. Consumers want to know secrets, they want to know how to improve their personal lives, their business lives, they want to know how to get stuff done fast and they want to know how to do it all and still have a life left over. One way to understand how to create headlines that stand out is to study other headlines that get your own attention.

The third step is to be personable. This is one of the steps that so many businesses miss today. Understand that you're not just selling a product or service. What you're trying to do is create a bond.

You do this by putting yourself into the consumers' shoes. For example, say you're selling a product to help with backaches. You could try writing an article and tell how your product helps with backaches and why it's the next best thing since the invention of coffee.

Or you can sympathize. You can put yourself into the middle of their problems. Still using the backaches as an example, you could say, "I know what it's like to work hard every day and go to bed with an aching back hoping that sleep would relieve the pain."

You get the picture. You have to walk alongside them with their needs. People interact and respond with people and not products - don't forget that. Business article marketing is nothing more than the gentle art of persuasion. It's letting the consumer understand why they should trust and buy from you.

Article Marketing Automation with a Free Directory and Blog

Whenever you mention article marketing, most people instantly get an image of sitting down to write a bunch of content. But it's more than the writing process. You can cash in promoting affiliate products or your own products and services by setting up a system that automates your article marketing for you year-round.

There are three ways to add article marketing automation to your task list. The first involves outsourcing your writing and submission process to a qualified freelancer. You simply pay a bill and then let them conduct a full article marketing campaign for you, with hyperlinks pointing back to your domain.

The second one involves an email autoresponder system. Use a free viral report to get subscribers to an online newsletter and then drip feed a daily, weekly or monthly article to them that you grab from your own article directory account or from someone else's, since you're allowed to use articles as a publisher.

Use a system like Aweber and schedule your follow up emails to go out on a regular basis. You can add a bit to the email by writing an introduction about the topic that the article will cover, and ending the email with a conclusion (and possible hyperlink to a product, too).

Thirdly, you can use the same tactic on a blog that you create. Register a domain on a registrar like GoDaddy and use a hosting plan at a site like Hostgator, which has a cpanel where you can install a WordPress blog using the Fantastico button.

Then click Add New blog post and post your first article that you grab as a publisher form an article directory. Keep adding new blog posts, only for subsequent entries, schedule them to post each day for as long as you want them to appear.

Google and other search engine spiders will continually visit to index your content - the more frequently you post, the more often they'll come back to index. Try to post some original articles mixed in with the article directory content or at the very least write an introduction to the article and a conclusion, as you would do with an email autoresponder.

Article marketing automation can help shave time off of your daily task list. By either allowing someone else to handle the workload or setting up a system that continues posting throughout the year, you're able to focus your efforts on other areas where you need a more hands on approach.

Ask This Before You Hire an Article Marketing Service

Thinking of hiring an article marketing service? Before you commit to a payment, you should know that you might not get the results you're hoping to achieve. There are services that will happily take your money and submit articles to various directories. But that doesn't mean anything will grow because of those submissions. You have to ask what their policies and beliefs are regarding keyword density and search engine optimization.

If the articles aren't written so that search engine optimization is used correctly, that article is time and money wasted because it's not going to hit the bulls-eye. In fact, it won't even come close to the dartboard.

Search engine optimization in article marketing is the practice of choosing specific keywords in each article for the purpose of boosting ranking. However, there's a right balance to how many or how few keywords to use.

If you use too many - called keyword stuffing - then the article will be rejected by some article directories or shunned by Google (or so "they" say). When that happens, if you paid for a service, you've wasted both money and an opportunity for your business.

Keyword density is the area where many who are new to any kind of marketing mess up. Even those people working for an article marketing service don't always understand how fine the balance is.

They either pepper the article with too many keywords, leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth, or they flavor it with too few and the search engine spiders can't recognize what the article is about.

And if the spiders can't find your article - you won't get the ranking you want, won't get the traffic you're looking for and your conversion rate will either plummet or become non-existent. So, what is the balance? Within the article, keywords can only make up about 2%. That's not a lot of words to play around with.

Not all sites are indexed. So find out where they plan on submitting your articles. Find out their strategy for article submissions. A sudden flood of articles for the sole purpose of driving up rankings won't make some search engines very happy campers and you could be out of the ballgame before you even get up to bat if that happens.

Article marketing is basically you trying to promote your website. Without the use of this powerful tool, you might not get the right exposure, but by using directories, you reap in an area where they've been sowing. They want your articles, but they don't want to get articles that are sloppily put together and don't play nicely according to the rules of keyword density.

So, before you hire an article marketing service and plunk down money for a submission campaign, make sure the company understands exactly how to work with keywords and if they don't, save your money and do the writing and submitting yourself.

Great Article Marketing Advice from Super Affiliates

If you want great article marketing advice, you want it from those who've already traveled the road you're on. Remember that advice remains only words unless you grab it and use it to take action yourself. Follow these tips to see success in your niche with article marketing:

1.         Before you submit any articles, make sure the affiliate program you've selected is a good one. It won't matter how many articles you write or where you submit them if you have a lousy program.

2.         Don't reuse the same article over and over again. There are search engines that will drop your rankings if you use the same material repeatedly. Churn out original content and it'll work out better.

3.         Besides submitting articles to directories and social media sites, send them out to your email subscribers as well. With a few tweaks, you can shorten the article into bite sized morsels of information and give your readers something they can use - and of course, something that whets their appetite for the products you're offering.

4.         Don't sacrifice quality for quantity. It's better to have five well-written, clean articles than ten that are rambling and difficult to read.

Pay attention to how the super affiliates use great article marketing and follow in their footsteps. In fact, pay attention to how they run their business if you want yours to bring in the income they generate.

One super affiliate, Ewen Chia, has articles at submityourarticle.com and in those articles, he points the way back to his main site. His main site then points to his other areas where he promotes material. One of his links is to his blog and on the blog, you'll find helpful tutorials as well as videos where he's offering all sorts of helpful information.

Super affiliates don't get to be wealthy because they spent a ton of money to make a lot of money. If you'll do your research, you'll see that many of them didn't have a lot of cash they could fork over when they were first beginning to build their business.

All many of them had was a dream and determination, so they took advantage of all of the freebie tools to help them build their success - tools like places that support free article submissions. If they promoted their business into a wildly successful venture, you can too.

It's important to learn from those who've been where you want to go, but the most important aspect of great article marketing is to make sure your reputation is a good one in the marketing community.

You can write thousands of articles, you can have a top-notch website and tons of blogs - but if you don't offer material people can use, or you get aligned with a program that's scammy, you'll get painted with the same brush.

When you endorse a product and you talk about it in your articles, make sure you know what you're talking about. Your audience will trust you until you prove to them otherwise. Your online reputation is worth far more than a few quick bucks. You can always make more money, but you can't always rebuild a reputation that's been torn down.