Article marketing, if done right, is one of the best ways to get your content in front of people if you’re on a budget. It can generate serious organic search results and significantly reduce the bounce rate that you’ve got on your website. Why? Because people are finding the stuff on your site that they’re actually looking for and for that reason are actually sticking around.
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Of course, the key words in the above paragraph are ‘if done right’. If it isn’t done correctly, then article marketing is about as effective as carrying water to the sea. You see, everybody and your nephew Jimmy (You know, the kid with the stamp collection?) is posting content online nowadays. And the only way that you can stick out above the noise is by having a clear and well-formed message that gets in front of the right readers and then resonates with them.
But how do you do that?
Your site first
The first thing you need to build up is your own website. After all, what’s the use of starting to put content up on other websites if after you’ve drawn people to your website they bounce off and never come back?
For that reason, focus on putting up some good content on your site first, so that when you do start pointing people that way they are likely to actually read what you’ve got.
Don’t just stop there, either. Make sure that your content points both ways. With that I mean that on your website you point to articles related to what people are looking at, while people who are looking at your blog get pointed the other way.
This is important for several reasons:
- The better you inter-link your website, the longer people will stick around on your website, which raises the chance you’ll sell something.
- The longer people stick around on your website and the less they bounce away, the better you’ll rate on the search engines, which will give you organic traffic, which is some of the best traffic there is.
So make sure you put in the effort and that your blog and your site are well integrated. Then apply some of the many hacks to start you blog to get it going.
Choose your sites carefully
When you do start marketing your articles, make sure you put them in the right place. It used to be that all links online were featured equally. That is no longer true. Google now uses something called ‘neighborhoods’. The neighborhood you’re in is determined by who links to your website. The better the links, the better your neighborhood.
More importantly, if Google decides you’re in a bad neighborhood, well then you’re probably never going to get out.
What this means is that you don’t just want to post your content anywhere. Instead, find good homes for your articles in sites that are well respected and attract a lot of traffic.
In this way the chances is much greater that your content will get shared, re-featured and reach audiences much further away than originally anticipated.
The only way to get on good websites is to have good content
Yes, that means you’ve got to create good articles. This takes time and effort. For this reason, don’t try to do these things on your own, particularly if you’re not a natural writer. Get help. There are many ways to do this. You can call upon the talents and the abilities of the people in your company. Ask them to submit an occasional article in their own name.
This will give you content and will allow them to position themselves as experts in their field (Something that you can sell to them as helping them build their personal brand).
Alternatively, get some professional writers involved. With the content marketing explosion, there’s been a similar explosion in terms of writers. Now, you’ll have to search the wheat from the chaff and make sure you find somebody that you like and that understands your brand.
It will take time
And then you’ve got to keep going. Article Marketing is not something that will happen overnight. You’ve got to establish yourself, build up a reputation, build a network of sites and locations where your content is features and climb the hierarchy of links.
And all of that will only happen once you’ve found your voice, started talking about topics people actually care about and have demonstrated that you’re not just some mayfly who will fold up and kill their site just when other people have started to link to it (and nobody wants to link to a dead site).
That will all take time and effort and when you first start doing it. You might not actually see a lot of traffic immediately coming your way, so don’t give up on your other forms of marketing.
That said, there is one big advantage and that is that once you’ve established yourself then you’ll stay established. You’ll become the go-to website for your niche. And then you’ll reap the benefits. For then you’ll only have to build the content and the customers will come.
