Article marketing

Article marketing is a branch of content marketing. It is a type of advertising in which companies write and distribute short articles to a range of outlets such as article banks, forums, and newsletter publishers. Its main purpose is to gain a huge number of online audiences and boost the number of sales opportunities for products or services on websites. Another main purpose of this kind of marketing is to build backlinks. This type of marketing strategy can help marketers acquire new visitors and increase sales on their websites. Article marketing is also one of the least costly ways to market a company.

Advantages and disadvantages of article marketing

There are many advantages of using article marketing such as:

• Increasing brand awareness – a company can use this marketing strategy to establish a good relationship with their readers, which they can convert into consumers if the company’s articles are useful enough for their readers.
• Increase in page rank and SEO – an advantage of article marketing is that if the articles are good enough, their search results will get higher ranks. This results in the company’s whole website to get a higher rank since those articles have backlinks to the website.
• Inexpensive marketing – article marketing is one of the least expensive ways marketers use to market their product or service. Once your article is published, it stays there as long as the website is up and running, it also gets indexed in search engines and thus with nominal time and effort you gain to achieve a free advertising tool.
• Articles may go viral – if a company writes a great article, it may become viral and they would get a lot of readers and their site traffic would increase as well. An article going viral can create a lot of advantages for the company in the long run.

While there are lots of advantages to using article marketing, there are some downsides as well:

• Stolen content – if a company uses article marketing, they publish their article to another website. Some editors may omit the company’s resource box, which makes the whole article marketing useless for the company. The company may not get the credit and site traffic that they deserve.
• Can be expensive – a company might need a ghostwriter to help them write a great article that would lead customers into their website. Hiring a freelancer can cost the company some money especially if they want to hire a really good one.
• Time-consuming – the process of presenting articles to distributors can be time-consuming. The company needs to plan to present new articles regularly and make time to write and submit those articles on time

Traditional article marketing

Article marketing has been used by professionals for nearly as long as mass print has been available. Business provides the content to a newspaper, possibly on a timely topic such as an article on tax audits during tax season, and the newspaper may use the article and include the business’s name and contact information. Newspapers and other traditional media have limited budgets for gathering content and these articles may be used in the business section of the newspaper.

Traditional article marketing is advertising a company’s article through the use of magazines, newspapers and any print media. (Daniels, 2013). This way of marketing has been going on for a really long time but it is still very much useful and still in style to this day. It still produces results in offline establishments.

The method of doing the traditional article marketing is very straightforward. The company will choose a print media business they want to work with and discuss the conditions of the article they want to produce. Once the article has been written, the print media will then print and publish it. Both companies will benefit from this project. The print media company will have content to print and the business will gain exposure for their products and/or services. (Ekanem, 2015).

Internet article marketing

Internet article marketing is used to promote the authors’ expertise of their market, products or services online via article directories. Article directories with good web page ranks receive a lot of site visitors and may be considered authority sites by search engines, leading to high traffic. These directories then give PageRank to the author’s website and in addition send traffic from readers. Articles and article directories attract search engines because of their rich content. This practice may have been effective in the past, however, changes in Google’s algorithms over the years have negated the benefits one would have received from this practice. Both Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and comments by Google’s Head of Webspam, Matt Cutts discouraged, if not outright prohibit, the strategy of using article directory marketing as a means to build backlinks.^[2][3]

Business Owners, Marketers and Entrepreneurs attempt to maximize the results of an article advertising campaign by submitting their articles to a number of article directories. However, most of the major search engines filter duplicate content to stop the identical content material from being returned multiple times in a search engine results page. Some marketers attempt to circumvent this filter by creating a number of variations of an article, known as article spinning. By doing this, one article can theoretically acquire site visitors from a number of article directories.

Most forms of search engine optimization and internet marketing require a domain, internet hosting plan, and promoting budget. However, article marketing makes use of article directories as a free host and receives traffic by way of organic searches due to the listing’s search engine authority.

The primary goal behind article marketing is to get search engine traffic to the article so that the author can strengthen their authority and influence within their field, while also leveraging that traffic for their own site(s). The key to article marketing is that the author should be providing value with their articles, not just promoting their site, products or services.

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A few years ago, article marketing involved writing and posting content for reprint on article directories and syndication site. During this time, having your articles appear on other websites was an advantage not only for the exposure to the audience on other sites but in search engine optimization (SEO) as well.

How to use Article Marketing Explained

Article marketing is an easy way to promote your website, computer products and services and best of all, you can do it yourself for free. Furthermore, article marketing can boost your web site traffic and sales on a daily basis. ​And when focused on a specific niche market, it becomes one of the best ways to draw in targeted traffic to your website.

How to use Article Marketing: Article Marketing Explained

All you have to do is write informative and educational articles relating to your website, products and niche market and then build a web page for each article and submit to article directories as well.

How to write articles: When writing articles, you need to place yourself in the customers’ shoes and ask yourself, what information would you look for to then somehow end up at your website.

For example, if you were selling printers and you took the time to learn the products and the market, then you can right an article titled “How to Choose the Best Printer”, as these are keywords that potential customers might type into Google before making a final buying decision.

​Or, if you where writing about digital cameras, then you can write an article titled “How to Take the Best Pictures with your Digital Camera”. These are keywords that digital camera consumers would type in to learn how to take better pictures with their cameras and eventually be lead to your website by the link provided in your article.

Or, you can write an article called “The Top 10 Best Laptops”. These are keywords that potential buyers would use before buying a Laptop online. And writing such articles will draw in plenty of targeted traffic for free.

When writing these articles you’ll also need to implement keywords and keyword phrases into your articles and then link those keywords to relevant web pages within your website.

The examples mentioned above are just examples.

You can also write reviews on internal or external hard drives and call your article, “Seagate Model XYZ Hard Drive Review”. And article like this can draw in major traffic as consumers are used to searching for product reviews before purchasing their storage solution of choice. And if your product review is on your site then most likely, the reader will buy the product on your site right there and then.

Paragraphs of an article should start off with the major point of that specific paragraph and should be kept short as well. Readers are intimidated by long blocks of text. Therefore 3 to 4 sentences are usually sufficient for each paragraph.

Articles don’t have to be long in order to be effective. You can say everything that needs to be said within 350 words or less. Typical word count for article writing is 350-750 words. Anything longer than that may be disregarded by the reader since most internet users don’t have time to read long articles. And when you write your articles, you don’t have to write using technical jargon. Instead, write your articles for the layman and use common words and descriptions. If technical terms must be used, then restate what you wrote in simple terms so that anyone can understand it, i.e. “in other words…”

Yet the more information you provide then the more people will see you as an authority figure in your niche market. Furthermore, always try to emphasize the benefits of the product to the consumer since benefits are what helps sell products rather than features.

Article marketing can boost traffic and sales: