Article Marketing
The use of articles is an excellent way to get exposure for your site and create content to post to your own site. Articles generally take the form of “How to”, although you can write about pretty much anything that relates to your site topic.
Articles should be in the 400 to 500 word range. You are not writing War and Peace so keep things focused. Try to pick about five topics of interest to your readers about your subject matter (your niche). You can write the articles yourself or contract them out. You should be able to get an article written for about $5. You can easily find an author on eLance, or check out Textbroker. Textbroker charges by the word and level of quality.
For a one star quality article the cost is a dime a word, $4.00 for a four hundred word article! I personally would use the two star quality level at 14 cents a word. Frankly, at those rates it’s not worth your time to do it yourself. Keep in mind your article is not to sell or promote. It is to inform. The process of selling will take place after a person gets to your site. You want to position yourself as a knowledgeable person regarding your field.
Once you have your articles you will post them on your website (remember search engines love content) and then on article directories. There are hundreds of article directories and they are just what the name implies. There are directories of thousands (or much more) articles. They are categorized by subject for easy searching. Once you select an article directory, select a category and post your article. When you post an article you will have the opportunity to list your personal or company details. Enter your name, company name (if appropriate), email address and most importantly your web site URL. Once your article is posted you now have another link to your site!
A Nice Example of an Author Signature Line and Very Effective Use of Anchor Text Links
Most importantly, ensure the title of your article is keyword rich. When your article is listed the title you use will be part of the URL for the article. This example: http://ezinearticles.com/?Five-Natural-Ways-to-Eliminate-Panic-Attacks&id=1969113 show how your title will appear. Guess what, this is a very specific keyword phrase that will appear high up in Goggle when someone searches on it. Ensure you put the effort in to maximize your article title.
As I mentioned there are hundreds of article directory sites. As with everything on the web only a handful are worth posting too. Be careful when doing a lot of posting, there is a point where too much is bad for you. The search engine robots don’t like a lot of duplication. So if you plan on doing a lot of posting consider having two or three versions of each article prepared and mix them up (do not put variations of the same article on a single article site).
Once your article is posted to an article directory members of the directory are able to take your articles and post them on their own site (you can do this for your own site as well to get started with other articles). You must list all of the author’s information and maintain any links. The great thing is you now have another link pointing to your site! To maintain freshness you may want to consider slowly posting your articles. If you have five to ten done when you start post them over a few months. Then over time add a new article every month or so. Search robots love fresh content!
Be sure your articles support the keywords you are focused on. Over time as you collect more and more articles you can make a set of them and offer them to websites complementary to yours. Once they are on the site they will provide more inbound links to your site. For the best response to your article post be sure to read this article on creating effective titles. An effective title will also help in ranking high in keyword searches in the search engines.
