Article Marketing – is it the best marketing strategy? - By: Claire Morawski

Once your website or blog is ready, there are various forms of marketing strategies.By ready, I mean that you blog is ready to receive visitors - you must have valuable content (I recommend 5 - 10 good posts), good pages and a call to action. This ensures that once your visitors arrive, they would spent time going over your blog, reading posts and pages, and would bookmark your blog to revisit. Maybe they will even subscribe to your feed. One of my best strategies to generate traffic to your blog is Article Marketing – especially if you are new.

In his e-book, Blog Profits Blueprint, Yaro Starak lists Article Marketing as a traffic stream – meaning that it takes a while to generate traffic with article marketing, and usually it only comes in ‘streams’. On the other hand, the other strategies that he mentions under the Traffic Rivers, although it’s true they would bring in traffic by the hoards, you need to be somewhat already successful with a list of subscribers or readers or followers. In addition, Yaro doesn’t mention the software which I personally use which allows me to submit different versions of my articles to multiple directories in a legitimate way. Hence, if you are in the beginning of your internet marketing career, have some time on your hands, are willing to be consistent, plus the help of a stellar piece of software which will relieve some of the load of uploading articles manually and will hence save you time and money, then Article Marketing is my best choice by far, especially if you are looking for long-term success.

Why is Article Marketing a Good Marketing Strategy?
Before going into the list of positives about article writing as an effective marketing strategy, I wish to emphasize that I am discussing article marketing the way I make use of it.
* It’s free for the most part of it – if you would like to benefit more from this strategy, then there might be some software, such as the Automatic Article Submitter, which would make your life easier, saving you time and money, since it will ‘automatically’ upload your article to multiple directories.
* It’s long-term. Once you write an article, the search engines will ‘find’ it for years to come.
* It’s interactive. Your readers are able to leave comments, which encourages communication among your readers and you.
* can build a relationship with your readers – they get to know more about you through your articles, and hence trust you more.

What to write about?
There are no rules on the type of articles or topics to write about – first of all you just have to experiment and start writing articles, then you would be able to gauge what your readers like most. You also have to find your style of writing – just be yourself. Articles can be humoristic, information, controversial, personal reflections, ...

Think why you are writing the articles – if you are doing it for a hobby it’s usually because you love writing and the articles tend to be either your opinion on something or your personal musings. However, if on the other hand you intend to make money out of your articles, you must first focus on building a relationship with your readers. The article has to be enjoyable to read and offers value to the reader – remember, ‘what’s in it for the reader?’! Only then, will readers keep coming for more, and they start viewing you as an expert in your niche. Nobody likes reading articles, where the author is trying to persistently and obviously sell you something.

My advice to you is:
* read other articles and study them… what you like, what you don’t like, what is it in the title that attracted you to read the article, how is the flow, what is the call to action, what would you improve, …
* another tip is to keep a file with a list of titles that attracted you, and this will help you get ideas when you are stuck with what to write.
* a good starting point is to ask Why? Who? How? What? maybe even going as far as Where? and When? of the topic you intend writing about.

In the meantime, here are some key characteristics which can get you started:
* How – To Article e.g. How to Write a Traffic-Pulling Article in 1 Hour
* Present an Argument e.g. Article Marketing Doesn’t Work
* Lists e.g. 5 Tips to Improve Your Article Marketing Strategy

Step-by-Step on how Article Marketing Works
* Think of a topic / title which would interest your blog’s readers
* Do your research – as in what others have written about it and maybe comments of other readers.
* Write your article (a good article should be between at least 300 words to a good maximum of 700 words)
* Now for your article to be an effective marketing strategy you need:
o Your keyword, that you want to rank for, in your title
o A content-rich article
o A Call to Action. This is very important. In the signature box, you would need to write who you are (with a link to the original article) and a link to a call to action for your readers to click on – all this in 2 sentences.
* Upload the original to your blog – tag it appropriately.
* Upload the same article to the Automatic Article Submitter Software – here you would spend a good amount of time ‘spinning’ an article. You would be actually taking each sentence and rephrasing it once or twice, so you would end up with different variations of the article. It’s important to note that you have to actually do the spinning, as there are some other software which does the spinning for you, but then you end up with a load of nonsense. In a future article I will be writing in further detail about this software in my Review for the Automatic Article Submitter.
* Then submit your article to different directories through the software. It’s important to note that now the original article has different variations, but all with the same message that you want to send out. The only thing is that instead of submitting the same article to multiple directories, you actually took the time to rewrite each sentence at least once, which will in turn increase your search engine optimization.

The bad about Article Marketing?!
* You have to write good posts, and enjoy the writing part.
* It takes a bit of time, especially when it is compared with other marketing strategies such as PPC (pay-per-click) But then it’s free and it’s more long lasting, in the sense that once you take the time to write an article and submit it to different directories, then it will be found on the search engines for years to come. With PPC, once you stop paying and placing ads, the results will cease too.
* You have to be consistent for it to work – readers like coming to your blog and see constant changes, as otherwise they stop visiting.

What is Your Next Step?!
Now before getting excited about article marketing, it’s imperative that you have a blog and a call to action. When people visit your blog, they will find lots of ‘rock’ posts and information, which in turn will lead them to subscribe or fill out their e-mail addresses, so that you can then build a relationship with them. If you have a blog in place (preferably a self-hosted blog), then fine – focus on writing ‘rock’ posts and submitting them to different directories on a constant basis – you might want to look into the Automatic Article Submitter Software that I personally use - you'll find a link under Your Resources Page in my blog. This software will enhance your search engine optimization and will increase your blog's traffic. If you are still new and would like to have your own self-hosted blog, then visit my blog (link below) and sign up for the free online training, where I will personally send you a recorded training and in a matter of days and a few dollars, you can create your own professional, self-hosted blog.

About the Author

Claire Morawski wrote this Blog Post on Article Marketing Strategies to help people like you to succeed in branding You and marketing your business online. Visit Claire Morawski's Internet Marketing Training, and I'll personally train you how to build your business successfully using internet marketing.

Article Directory Source: http://www.articlerich.com/profile/Claire-Morawski/74793

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