Many small business owners are confounded by the following questions: "Why should I write marketing articles about my product? Why should I waste my time if no one is going to read them? Why should I pay money to submit articles to online directories?" Since the internet is so vast, it's tempting to view each individual piece as a "waste," as nothing more than a needle in a haystack. However, writing articles is the most important aspect of an online sales marketing campaign. As a small business professional, you simply cannot survive the competition without them.
"Content is King." This has become the maxim for website marketing in the new millennium. So far as we can tell, the best way to a search engine's heart is through writing articles that have been optimized with keywords. There are many facets to pulling off a successful article advertising campaign, of course. You'll need to track down writers, key phrases, article directories and some affiliates to team up with. It's no surprise, then, that many business professionals choose an established web marketing company to help them connect the dots.
First, we'll talk about how the writing of articles can help your business. Ultimately, you want published articles to bring potential buyers to your site. The only way visitors can find your site (unless they're specifically searching your name) is by typing a term into the search engine and checking the links on the first page of results. Statistics show if you're not in the top results, you can forget about people ever finding you. A group of people called Search Engine Optimization experts spend their days analyzing what sort of terms people are typing into the search engines. They can even run diagnostic tests on your page that tell them where people are coming from to reach your site, what search terms delivered traffic, what search terms delivered sales, how long people stayed on your site, what pages sent people fleeing and where people went next. This research can greatly help your overall internet marketing campaigns.
Before you hire a professional copywriter who specializes in writing articles, you'll need to meet with an SEO expert and determine what keywords are most valuable for your industry. In the past, just one or two general words related to your business or service would suffice. Today, longer phrases are preferable, as are location-sensitive terms. In the olden days, you might have run a search and landed on a page that was fraught with spelling errors, full of nonsensical keyword repetitions or a page that just contained link after link. Today, the search algorithms are much more complex and an article marketing expert will tell you that it takes well-written copy with a certain keyword density to really attract search engine attention.
Your website can be the best in the world, but what good is it if no one can see it? By writing articles to publish on your homepage, you will show search engines that you mean business. You're not just another useless site out there; you have much to offer consumers. As the search engines crawl your page, they'll look for numerous internal pages, freshly updated content, blocks of 500 words or more, keywords that are in high demand and the appropriate density of keywords. Well-written promotional articles can accomplish all of these things. If your rankings improve, then you will undeniably see more traffic coming to your site. Ideally, this increased awareness will bring more buyers and sales.
As you know, "word-of-mouth" advertising is the most trusted and coveted form of marketing today. A person may not buy from a salesperson at her door, but if her aunt rants and raves about a product, then she might just run out and buy. Writing articles often works to the "word-of-mouth" advantage. Once you attract a reader, you can bring that reader back again by publishing a continuous stream of relevant content -- be it videos, blogs or articles. That reader may like your articles so much that she'll forward them to friends or post some on social networking sites, which will bring even more people to your site, already prepared to buy. And just think, this free traffic only cost you the price of the initial promotional article!
Andrew Wilson runs Marketers College, a large and growing site offering training in article marketing and many other areas of internet marketing.
Maximise your article marketing work by using Web2Mayhem to distribute your articles on article directories, blogs and many other sites.
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