Brett’s note: Today’s guest post is courtesy of Janette Stoll. I recently just stumbled upon Janette over the past few months on Twitter, and then I started keeping up with her blog, MarketingDirectSales.com. It’s a fabulous read. Among many areas of expertise, Janette has a strong grasp on using article marketing to support your efforts. I’m personally looking forward to trying her tips listed below.

—-

Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to build traffic to your blog. Bloggers have been using this strategy for years because it’s a tried and true strategy. However, the success of your article is in the strength of the title as well as in the content of the article itself.

Benefits of article marketing

1. Brand yourself, build credibility, and expertise.
2. Free advertisement, build backlinks, and boost traffic to your site.
3. Syndication from other people re-using your articles and sharing them on their sites.
4. Attract, inform, market, and sell your products.
5. Article marketing, when done properly, will benefit your business immensely.

Titles

Before you submit an article, you’ve got to know your ideal target readers and the topic you’ll be writing about. When you know what your readers are looking for – their pain and problems – you’ll be able inform and provide solutions in your article. That is the goal with article marketing.

Create a catchy title that is not only searchable but are click worthy. There are thousands of articles so make your title stand out. A great title will tell your readers what to be gained from the title itself and are more likely to be read by others, picked up by webmasters, and bloggers.

Brand yourself

The purpose of article marketing is to brand your expertise and attract readers to your main marketing hub which is your blog. Your goal is to inform, not sell your products or services. The quality of your article determines whether someone will click to your main site or click-away.

The end goal is to market and sell more products but the first step is to provide valuable information to build trust, credibility and readership.

Use one directory

There are thousands of directories to submit the same article to but I’ve limited to mainly Ezine. Instead of submitting the same article to multiple article directories, it’s best to submit articles to one high-ranked and quality directory.

With Ezine, my articles consistently appear on the first page of Google and provide a good amount of traffic to my blog. There’s a built-in title keyword tool suggestion and traffic reports to analyze the performance of my articles as well as an auto-feed to Twitter.

Plus, I like keeping things simple. The more complicated things are, the less likely you’ll do them. Manually submitting to multiple directories is a lot of work not to mention compromising the quality of your content by having duplicate content in multiple places.

Format

Keep length of articles between 350 to 500 words. Use sub-titles within your article to highlight each paragraph for easy reading and keep the paragraphs short. Highlight the benefits to your readers in the top section of your article. Be objective and always put your readers first.

Before you publish the article, check with the directory’s guidelines; otherwise your article could be rejected.

Author’s resource

In your author’s resource box, offer a free gift to bait your readers to your blog. Make the free gift offer stand out with something catchy and emotional. We’re more likely to take action when an offer appeals to our emotions.

Example: “FREE Report: The Painful Truth Why So Many Direct Sellers Fail”. It’s more intriguing than “get my free report.”

Why article marketing works

Article marketing, when done right, is a solid strategy for building SEO and attract potential customers to your business. Be consistent and incorporate article marketing as an overall part of your online marketing strategy.

Use the traffic reports with Ezine to test different titles, keywords, relevancy and compare why one article does better than the other. Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to analyze traffic sources and keywords so you can tweak future articles or revise an existing one, change the titles, and you’ll have a brand new article to re-submit.

The beauty of article marketing is that you write the article once and it’s indexed on search engines and continues to be searched and republished for a long time. You can also bundle your articles and turn into an ebook and give away on your blog.

There are so many benefits to article marketing and it’s a proven strategy to getting more traffic to your site.

**Janette Stoll is a WAHM and teaches direct sales entrepreneurs how to leverage the internet to build a home-based business. Janette just released a new FREE Report: 9 Powerful Strategies for Turning Your Passion into Profit.

—-

Subscribe now to MarketingInProgress.com by email or RSS.

Interested in guest posting? It’s easy – here’s how.

————–

Subscribe now to MarketingInProgress.com by email or RSS feed.

You’ll automatically be notified whenever something new is posted.

———-

This article was originally posted at http://www.marketinginprogress.com.

Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.