Part 4 - Publishing Articles Online
Article marketing is the act of publishing articles online for marketing purposes. It can do wonders for your company's web presence, traffic levels, and general success online.
By publishing articles over the web, you can extend your communication reach and increase your search engine ranking. You also give your key audience more ways to find you online. In other words, article marketing supports the notion of thinking like a publisher, which is a key component of your future web presence.
With a little online research, you can find dozens of websites that seek articles from expert authors. You're an expert on your products, services and industry, right? Well, I'm going to show you how to put that expertise to good use, from an online marketing standpoint.
When done right, article marketing combines the benefits of public relations, positioning, search engine visibility and branding. Best of all, it costs you nothing but time and effort. Try to get that from traditional advertising!
Now combine the value of article marketing with the website and blog strategies we discussed earlier, and you have three of the key elements needed for a strong web presence.
Do you see how these individual elements add up to provide major benefits (in addition to their individual benefits)? That's the whole point of the web presence over the website alone. It's just one more way to outperform your larger competitors online, which is the entire premise of the Online Equalizer book.
So how can article marketing help you, and why should you invest your time and energy? Here are six advantages articles have over traditional advertising:
Article Marketing Advantage #1 - Reach
Articles have much greater reach than advertisements. The reasons why are obvious. Most web publishers and editors are happy to republish quality articles. But who would republish an advertisement? The answer is nobody — unless, of course, you pay them to do so!
Articles have a viral quality. When you publish articles online through a distribution website designed for that purpose, you offer that article to hundreds of potential publishers. If your article matches a publisher's needs and is well written, it will likely be published time and time again. This can happen any number times, for every article you publish. The length of this reach is limited only by the quality and quantity of the articles you submit.
An advertisement, on the other hand, will be published where you pay to have it published, and nowhere else.
Advantage #2 - Credibility
Articles help you build credibility among your target audience, position yourself as an expert, and inspire trust in your company as a whole. When your articles appear on other websites, you gain credibility you cannot get from traditional advertising (especially if those sites are prestigious or well known).
Advantage #3 - Cost
Writing articles is free! You don't have to buy any special software or pay any fees. You don't have to hire a designer or sign any contracts. You can write articles in a word processing program like Microsoft Word, or in a text program like Notepad or TextEdit.
And all you need to publish them is a computer, Internet connection, and an article distribution site (free). Popular article distribution sites include EzineArticles.com and ArticleDashboard.com.
Advertising, on the other hand, will cost you a lot — too much, in this humble marketer's opinion. Despite their decreasing effectiveness, banner ads cost in the hundreds. Magazine ads are even worse. A half-page ad in a full-size glossy magazine could easily cost you thousands.
Advantage #4 - Effect
Articles do not interrupt people the way ads do. Good articles are helpful. Good ads are still only ads. People are also learning how to ignore ads, evidenced by the declining effectiveness of the advertising industry (many of whom are scrambling to write "white papers" with titles such as "Advertising: Alive and Kicking!!!").
This is especially the case with new or smaller companies. Traditional advertising can break the bank before anybody knows or trusts you. Articles, on the other hand, have the power to educate your audience, build your credibility and your brand, while costing you nothing but time.
Advantage #5 - Versatility
The no-cost nature of article marketing lets you experiment freely with different tactics. You could write articles around key search phrases to increase your website traffic. You could introduce a topic and then promote a book or online tutorial that delivers the topic in full (and generates leads). You can do a number of things you couldn't do with traditional advertising.
Advantage #6 - Website Traffic
Article marketing can increase your website traffic in two ways. First, when you publish articles online (and those articles get published on other websites and blogs), you increase your audience. And if you've included a link to your website within each article, readers can easily find you.
Articles marketing can also increase the number of inbound links to your website, as other websites republish your work and link to you as the author. As we have discussed previously, such growth in "link popularity" will increase your search engine rankings over time.
So articles can deliver direct traffic as well as search engine benefits!
What Do I Need to Launch an Article Marketing Campaign?
The best part of article marketing is that it requires very little to get started. If you can write an article, and you're reasonably Internet savvy, you could begin an article marketing campaign today.
Here's a list of things you'll need for your article marketing program:
- An article (ideally several articles)
- Internet access
- An article distribution site
Sure, there are the less-tangible assets like knowledge, creativity and persistence. But from a material standpoint, you only need the three items listed above in order to get started. And as for knowledge, you'll gain plenty of that by reading this chapter of the book.
Let's start off with a few "rules" of article marketing that I've devised, after more than five years of publishing articles online.
Articles Continued >> 7 Rules of Article Marketing