One of my favorite, and easily executable skills as a Virtual Assistant is article marketing. It is one of the easiest and fastest ways to get traffic to my clients’ websites. It’s used both by beginning marketers and by multi-million dollar companies.
Here is a broad overview of the basics of article marketing. What is it? How does it work?
How It Works
The term “article marketing” actually encompasses a pretty wide range of different techniques. In the broadest sense, any time you are distributing articles with a link back to your website for the purposes of SEO (search engine optimization), branding your business or attracting traffic to your website or blog, you are using article marketing.
Article marketing, when done well, can consistently drive hundreds of visitors to your site. Because you are getting more backlinks, you will also rank better in the search engines. Finally, because people keep seeing your name on different sites all over the net, you can build your brand, by seeing seen as an expert in your “field”.
Why Put Articles on Other People’s Sites?
Why put articles on other people’s websites, instead of on your own? There are a few reasons.
First of all, if your site is relatively new, it doesn’t yet have the weight and reputation that some other sites have. Other sites already have backlinks, longevity and reputation. In other words, your article that might rank in the top five on someone else’s site may not rank at all when it’s placed on your site, simply because your site doesn’t pull the same weight (yet).
Also, if you get your article on someone else’s website in your industry, you get to tap into their existing reader base and existing base of traffic.
Finally, the one-way backlinks you get by writing articles for others can make a big difference in your rankings.
The Process of Article Marketing
The process of article marketing usually looks something like this:
- You start with a title or keyword that you want to target. The title is attention catching, designed to get people from search engines or other people’s sites to click on the article. The keyword should also be carefully chosen to maximize search engine traffic.
- You write the article, doing whatever research you need throughout the process. The final article should be at least 400 words long, preferably as long as 1,000 words.
- The article is then submitted to other site(s). These can be sites of other bloggers, other industry websites or just article directories.
- Once your article gets ranked, you’ll start to see a consistent flow of traffic coming in from the articles and from search engines.
That’s a general overview of the overall process. Of course, each segment has its own quirks and challenges. For example, how do you choose a good keyword? How do you get someone to click on the link to your website? How do you get other bloggers to let you write on their blogs?
I’ll try to answer some of those questions in upcoming posts.