Article Posting

Promoting your website requires having a strategy.  Online business or offline every business needs a plan. Selling more means promoting more. Catching fish is about the right kind of bait. Bring in customers is about knowing what they want.  Do everything you can to market out your products and services.

One of the most effective ways to increase the traffic and therefore the sales of your internet based business is through article marketing. Marketing your business through article marketing starts with some basic strategies like—writing articles!

Article Marketing Strategy

Start by reviewing your notes and taking more notes. Brainstorm ideas on how to promote your bwebsite. While you may have some grandiose ideas, recognize that you don't need to have grand slam home run project that would drain your budget. Don't throw all your money away on  radio, tv and newspaper ads. Many brilliant ideas are actually very cost effective.

There are certainly lots of choices for low cost advertising. This article is going to focus on my favorite one: article marketing on the internet. I like this one because you can choose to do all of the work yourself and keep the cost to zero or you can parcel out some of it at a very low cost. Other articles on the site will talk about outsourcing some of these tasks so here, let's concentrate on the basics of article marketing.

So what is article marketing? The idea is to create articles. Not articles for your own web pages or you blog, but articles that you will post on high authority article submission sites. (One of the best is Ezine Articles.) By posting an article there, you will get many benefits.

• Well written articles convey expertise and credibility to the author
• Well written articles with appropriate keywords brings traffic to the article
• Well written articles create trust
• A resource box allows one or more links back to your website
• Links to your website can improve your site page rank
• Links to your site brings more traffic to your site

One of the key factors in ranking well on a search engine is backlinks from high authority sites. A lot of articles means a higher ranking. A higher ranking means more traffic. More traffic equals more money. Article marketing, done right, is a very successful strategy.

Write your Article

Just sit and start writing!   By creating great content you set yourself up as an expert in the topic you write about. If the content is worthwhile, the site visitor will often go down to the article resource box and click on links leading to more information about the subject or to more things that you have written.

The first step is to choose the topics you want to write about.  Specifically, you are looking for appropriate key phrases to target with the article. Think to yourself, if I were interested in the topic you are going to write about, what would I type into a search engine to find the page. That short phrase can be part of the title or at least be place into the page title header so that the search engines are more likely to find your article.

Articles need to be focused. Don't write all over the map. Write about a very small focused area. It's really hard to write about a broad subject in just a few hundred words and in general, your audience already knows the general information, they are looking for specifics.

So with the keyword phrase in mind, an appropriate title for the article, start writing. Just write like you talk. That is the most comfortable for you and is probably easier on the reader too. Once I start writing, I find that I can go on for quite a bit. So, as you reach the 400-500 word limit on the page, stop. If you're anything like me, it's quite a mess and it's all over the place. Now comes the hard work, start organizing the paragraphs so they make better and rewrite the sentences that are unclear. Drop the sentences that are just total sidetracks.

By this time you have a 400-500 word article but it's not entirely polished. Go back and re-read it. Read it out loud. Make changes. Don't stuff your page with keywords but if it's reasonable to work them in, do it. Think about the audience that will be reading this. Make sure you are focused on giving them what they want. 

Submit your Article

You need to use the best article submission websites. Don't submit everywhere that promises to provide free article submission. You want your business and your website to be associated with good quality.  In this overview, there's no room to cover specifics of where to submit but this site will provide other pages with that information. One of the important things you can look at is the Google Page rank of the site. Higher page rank means higher authority to the link from your resource box. Take a look at the Alexa rating of a site to see how it fares. This will give you some idea about which sites get sufficiently high traffic to make it worthwhile.

Run away from the spammy submission sites. It's a waste of time. While they will not affect your page rank, they can certainly affect the perceived reputation of your website to your readers. Trust is vitally important in building a long term article business. You must gain their trust. When they trust you, they are much more likely to click on the links that you will provide in your resource box. Gaining trust is a large topic and is covered in other places on the site.

The resource box that most submission sites allow provides you with a space to tell people who you are and why they should read your articles. This is also where you can place one or two links. I usually like to use one link to specifically identify my company name as the text to my home page and a second keyword text field that links to a relevant article on my site. My signature block, after the bio, might look something like

Some submission sites will not allow you to put your own text and you can only display the URL. If so, display the URL. But, if you can change the anchor text, there is more "link juice" flowing back to your site for those keywords.

Article Marketing Concept

So that's it—really! Write the article, submit it and enjoy the benefits. Fact of the matter is, most people are not successful with it because they don't take action. While the results are slow, they are the principles to use when starting to build a huge online business. Write articles, submit them. The more articles, the higher your ranking on you website and the more traffic you bring. The more quality articles, the more you build your reputation as individual to trust  and the more internet fame that you create for yourself.  More traffic equals more money.

So, sit down and start writing!