Why Article Marketing Should Be Part Of Your Online Strategy

What is Article Marketing?

Internet article marketing is used to promote the business or author’s expertise, products or services online via article directories.  In short, you write an interesting and read-worthy article on your chosen subject and include in that article several links back to your own website.  You should include a compelling ‘Call to Action’ with one of your links enticing your prospective customers to buy your product or service.  When you submit the article to an article directory you make it available for other businesses and site owners to use.  They do this because they consider you to be an expert in your field, an ‘authority site’.

They go to the article directory and look for an article on their chosen topic, which could be the one you have written.  They can re-publish your article on their site but they are required to leave any links already there completely intact.  If the sites using your article have good page rankings with the search engines, such as Google, then the search engines give more credit to your site.  The more credit the search engines give depends upon the quality of the link back to your site.  For example, if a site with no page ranking uses your article, the search engines will not consider this to be a quality link to your site.  However, if a site with a page ranking of three or more links back to you, the search engines will consider this to be a quality link. 

As many site owners use article directories to gather relevant, interesting and topical content, it is perfectly possible that your content is eventually published on hundreds of websites.  Bearing in mind that each of these websites have their own market and visitors, your content, including the links back to your website, could be read and digested by many thousands of readers.

Business owners attempt to maximise the results of an article advertising campaign by submitting their articles to a number of article directories.  However, search engines filter duplicate content to stop identical content from being returned multiple times in a search engine results page.  Professional article marketers circumvent this by creating a number of unique variations of an article on behalf of their client.  This is known as article spinning and it does require some expertise. However, by doing this one article can, in theory, acquire site visitors from a number of article directories.

The primary goal behind article marketing is to get search engine traffic to the article so that the author or business can strengthen their authority and influence within their field, whilst also maximising that traffic for their own site.  The key to successful article marketing is providing value with their articles i.e. interesting, unique and read-worthy content, not just promoting services or products.

Article marketing is one of the most subtle forms of advertising. A well-constructed article will provide useful information to the reader rather than simply promoting your website. When an internet user reads a high quality article on a relevant topic that mentions your website, they will associate the quality of the article with you and your business. However, if you are not a confident writer, it can be difficult to create articles that will show your website in a positive way and help increase your website's visibility and popularity. In that instance, you might consider using the services of an online marketing agency to ensure that the articles will be of the highest quality and to further ensure a professional service from an article submission and spinning point of view.

One of the most important and elusive parts of SEO is creating a web of incoming links to your site and article marketing is a powerful and proven link building strategy.