The internet is an incredible marketing resource for business owners and article marketing is an online marketing technique that provides free exposure for both online and offline businesses. But does it work?
Article marketing is an online business marketing strategy where you supply written content about your business to article directories and ezine owners who then publish that content on the internet for free. This generates a link back to your website, which can drive traffic to your website. Article marketing also assists your search engine rankings when people are searching for something that is related to your article's content.
A few years ago, you could very easily produce an article of a few hundred words then send the identical article to a bunch of different article directories. But, as a growing number of second-rate article directories began starting online with no editorial criteria, the results on the search engines started to become very poor. In 2011 Google decided to try and control the poor quality search results coming from these low standard article directories and released the Panda and Penguin updates. These oddly named updates were developed to filter out pages from article directories that had very low on-page reader time, high exit rates, poor quality links and identical versions of the same article. So the question has to be, is article marketing still relevant today?
Is Article Marketing Still Relevant Today?
When used correctly article marketing is still a powerful marketing technique for your online business. Here are six guidelines that will help you make the best use of this online business marketing strategy.
1. Effective article marketing is about creating content that contains valuable and relevant information. Articles should not just be a lot of meaningless waffle. They should satisfy the reader enough that they want to share the content with someone else, or bookmark it because it is good.
2. You will not rank very well in the search engines if you only have 5 or 6 articles that are published on one directory. You need to increase your amount of articles online. Remember that the more content that you place online, the greater amount of traffic will be directed to your website.
3. Consider writing a press releases as well as an article. A press release is an article that's designed like a story for a newspaper. It usually is fact-based, and includes a few quotes from sources (one of which could be you as the expert). Just like internet marketing articles, you can issue a press release on the internet for free or use a paid PR service. Your press release needs to answer who, what, when, where, why and how and you should still include a link to your website.
4. You can post your articles to your own websites. This is basically a form of blogging. Owning your own content certainly helps search engines view your domain as an authority figure.
5. Ezines are a great place to get your articles published. There are plenty of various ezines on the internet and there will be certainly be versions that go well with your target market. Most ezine editors are willing to give you a link to your website in return for the written content you provide for their ezine.
6. When producing material for article marketing, ensure that you adhere to the article directory's policies and rules. Take time to check and improve your article before sending it to the directory for publication. Don't send out the identical article to different directories. Search engines want to deliver unique content to their users and they will not rank your article if they discover that the exact same article is published online somewhere else.
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