Outsourcing or in-house writing of articles around your product or market segment can generate traffic and downloads to your site, as well as increase your Google rankings while also establishing good positioning in the marketplace. Moreover, an article writing campaign and syndication of your new content on other websites can increase your link popularity
Summary of the three main benefits of article marketing:
- Article marketing provides relevant text links to your product or service that helps with search engine optimization
- Article marketing sends interested and qualified traffic from the article to your website. Articles with good content, rank well in search engines and can receive a lot of traffic themselves.
- Article marketing allows you to position yourself as an expert in the market or niche your software caters to and thus increases the level of trust in visitors and therefore increased likelihood in a purchase.
Although there are experts out there to whom you can outsource article marketing, consider that it is probably better for you or your team to write the articles. You are the experts in the product or service niche that you have created. If you are interested and passionate about the solution your products and services provide, you may be surprised by how easy and well you can churn out articles. Give it a try!
To initiate article marketing:
- Refer back to your keyword list, and pick the 50 (or as many as possible) most relevant, targeted and highest searched keywords or keyword phrases.
- Write a 500 word article on each keyword, or have one written.
- If the keyword phrase is, say “Outlook to eCRM“, title your article similar to this “Outlook to eCRM – The easiest way to ingrate Outlook with eCRM.
- Use your keyword within your article text as often as seems natural and easy to read.
- Remember, you are writing the articles for pure informational and helpful purposes. Do not promote your product or service in the article! The best way to build trust in your niche is to offer FREE information and content of value to your readers. Only at the end of the article in your “signature”, should you refer to your product or service. EG: “”Lance Winslow” – Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; http://www.WorldThinkTank.net/. Lance is a guest writer for Our Spokane Magazine in Spokane, Washington”
- Sign up for a Unique Article Wizard, a very effective and well know service in the internet marketing niche. There are multiple options that offer a platform for optimizing and distributing your articles effectively.
Important! Many services offer distribution of articles to hundreds if not thousands of websites. This is NOT what you want. Distribution of multiple copies will result in duplication, and will completely dilute the possibility of ranking in the search engines. If you didn’t know already, duplicated content is not popular in search engines. You only need for your articles to appear in the top 50 or so article directories.
This article should help you get good results in the medium term. Be patient. Article marketing is VERY effective, but does take some time to bear fruits. Many people give up on it, so I implore you to keep at it and get some articles out each month, even if you target the same keywords, but write different content. You WILL see the results after some time.
Once you have the articles written, it would be a shame not to show them on your website as well. The problem you face is that it would then be duplicate content. What you should do is have them re-written so that the understanding is the same but the wording is no longer exact and in the same location etc. This will allow you to publish the article in two locations on the web (two article directories or an article directory and your website) without getting flagged as duplicate content, and having the page removed from the search engines index.
Another way to use re-written articles is to have two on each directory. Write 50 and then get them re-written. You can then publish 2 versions on two directories with the end result of 100 unique articles in total. This can be very effective.
Another great “do it yourself tool” that can greatly assist you in your article marketing and distribution, is called SENuke. It has many futures beyond article marketing which we will get into later. Having now looked at the medium to long term actions, let’s look at ways to make immediate sales.