Article Marketing Part I – Getting Started
Thousands of articles and hundreds of e-books have already been written that extol the value of using articles as an integral part of your Internet marketing strategy.
We have used them since 1999, well before the term ‘article marketing’ was coined.
We used them because it was a way to communicate our opinions and insights based on our experiences over time. We became serious in 2001 and by 2003 we had written articles that are now highly ranked in the search engines to this day.
In fact last month we had ten of them that were read, on the average, 550 times.
In other words 6,000 plus impressions per month and that figure has remained consistent since we began using Google Analytics to track our traffic stats.
Thank goodness we chose to write ‘evergreen’ material – content that is subject specific and written to last!
This article, Part I of III will cover the first things someone wanting to generate more traffic to their web site and enhance their online reputation should consider. This is for those of you who are just getting the process started as well as folks who want to rethink their existing strategies for better results going forward.
Before You Start To Write:
Who are you writing for? Remember back on day one of this series when I told you about Market Samurai? Then it was to encourage you, right from the start, to do marketing research – keyword research – so that your web site would rank well in the search engines for the words and phrases your potential customers are using to find the products and services you have on offer.
This process is also crucial when writing articles, publishing them on your web site or in your newsletter, and syndicating them across the Internet. If you are going to do the work, doesn’t it make sense for the right people to be able to find them easily and read them?
Perhaps, before you get started writing articles, you should go back and get a free copy of Market Samurai and watch the excellent educational videos that are there for you.
Write The Article:
First you need to know who you want to read what you’re writing (see above) and then you have to write it so they’ll want to. When we got started we found some article templates we could use to help us organize our thoughts. We bought and discarded several sets of them in fact. Only one stood the test of time and we still refer to them all the time.
Assuming you already know a great deal about the subject area you intend to focus on these templates ping your brain in such a way that you get lots of a ha moments – never at a loss for how to say what you want to say. The creator of the templates we use will give you two of his most popular templates if you wish, just click here!
In addition to the templates we have taken the art and science of article marketing to an entirely new level. Over the years the process has bee so productive for us, the only Internet marketing we’re doing really, that we went looking for a process that would help us with article research and automation.
We found it a couple of years ago and now that the 3.0 version is available I thought you’d want to know about it. We are on a mission to write 3 new evergreen articles a week in our spare time about subjects we know very little about but subjects or web site visitors are telling us they are interested in.
This is a research tool that collects research on any keywords you give it and helps you quickly (VERY quickly) gather that research together into an article of your own and there is a fully functioning version available for a trial offer of less than ten dollars.
Publish The Article:
In parts II & III I will cover this in detail based on our experiences over the last decade or so. Here is what you should now, as soon as you’ve written that first article.
Before you do anything else, like putting it on your web site for example, you should submit the article to www.ezinearticles.com Here’s why. They get over a million hits a month, their web site is one of the top 10 on the entire Internet, and they are picky about what they publish.
So, go their web site and read, watch, listen to the registration and article submission information. Create an account, there is no charge for anything you’ll ever need from them, and go for it.
In the beginning several days for your article to be approved. There will be some back and forth until it’s live on their site. Then submit the next article and the next. In fact when we write a new article we submit it there first and do not submit it anywhere else until they have approved it.
Article Marketing Part II – Article Syndication
In Part II we’ll cover the strategies we’re using that results in each and every article we write being published on at least 150 web sites and online newsletters read by our target audience.
Plus how we leverage the articles when they are published on our web site and how we get them picked up by the social networking sites.
Stay tuned to the email series!
