While the phrase, “If you build it, they will come”, may work in baseball, it’s most certainly no guarantee in business.
Case in point, the millions of beautiful, trustworthy, informative websites you’ve never seen, owned by companies of which you’ve never heard. These days, competitive digital marketing requires major league SEO and a game-winning strategy for driving traffic. Fortunately, article marketing is your ace.
What Is Article Marketing?
Article marketing is a type of content creation specifically designed to attract larger audiences and bring in more leads for a company’s goods and services. Article marketing is one of the earliest known forms of marketing and was first used in printed newspapers and magazines.
The most effective form of article marketing casts the writer (and/or company) as an industry expert touting a specific product or service for the good of the reader. With linked assets in place, the article is published and shared to as many (reputable) platforms as possible with the purpose of gaining high-quality backlinks, domain authority, and traffic to your website.
Article Marketing and SEO
Let this statistic sink in for just a minute…SEO drives almost 100% more traffic than paid traffic.
What this means is that a well-executed article marketing campaign has the potential to drive thousands – if not millions – of new visitors to your website in a much more sustainable way.
Of course, to do this, you must write useful, engaging, share-worthy content that’s properly optimized and ranked by search engines. If you succeed, people searching your topic find your article, at the top of the first page of results, and click through to your website.
It works because article marketing benefits SEO by:
- Increasing website authority
- Driving organic traffic to your site
- Ranking in featured snippets, site links, and local, video, and image packs
- Increasing keyword rankings
- Turning leads into sales
- Adding valuable backlinks
- Directing authority to other sites through internal links
Steps for Success
Now that you know what article marketing is, and why it’s valuable to your online efforts, it’s time to get to work! Follow these 8 steps for successful article marketing:
- Brainstorm Topics: Drill down on your target audience and think about their pain points. Figure out their biggest problems and explain how your product/service solves them. Find out any questions they have and answer them.
- Keyword Research: Once you have your topic, research the words people use to search for it. Don’t assume that potential customers refer to what you offer using industry-specific terms. Answer the Public is a great resource for this. It’s also a good idea to see which keywords your competitors are ranking for and use them.
- Write It: Keep in mind, the most important element in any online content is that it’s – first – written for humans. Search engines detect keyword stuffing and Google ranks sites for usability. Simply convey interesting, engaging, verified, complete information in the same tone and voice of your company blog.
- Optimize It: You’ve put in the work, now reap the reward! No matter how amazing the content, if it’s not searchable, no one is reading it. And since your website is well-optimized, just follow the same practices for your articles:
- Write an engaging headline with the main keyword
- Include the keyword in the URL
- Write a unique (human) meta description using the keyword
- Use proper Header tags
- Write robust content using keywords
- Use internal and external links
- Choose a featured image, use the main keyword in the title and alt tag
- Embed Media: Video and images not only make your article more interesting but also entice visitors into staying on your site longer. Plus, properly optimized media gives you additional ranking opportunities and drives more traffic to the site.
- Add Links: Backlinks are a major SEO ranking factor. Google (tries to) only directs users to trusted Trust is earned through backlinks from other sites directing authority to yours. Examples of content that earns backlinks include:
- Infographics, GIFS, and maps
- Online calculators and tools
- Rankings and awards
- Research and studies
- Tutorials and definitive guides
- Case studies and white papers
- Free templates
- Publish or Submit: There are two ways to go about getting your article published, uploading it to your own website, or submitting it to someone else’s with links back to yours. Both have merit and here’s how it’s done:
- Publish the article on your own website and share it to various platforms like:
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- Medium
- Quuu Promote
- YouTube
- Triberr
- AllTop
- Submit your content as a guest blogger on a website, to an online industry publication, or to reputable article directories, such as:
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- Sites.google.com
- Github.com
- Ezinearticles.com
- iSnare.com
- MyArticle.com
- Articlebiz.com
- Goarticles.info
- Storify.com
- Tumblr.com
- Quora.com
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- Publish the article on your own website and share it to various platforms like:
Now What?
You did it! It worked! You wrote quality content that’s relevant to your prospects, properly optimized it, shared it with the masses, and now…what do you do? Give the people what they want – your superb products and sensational services! But first, start by doing this:
- Reply to the comments on your article (even the negative ones within reason)
- Like and reply to comments on social media
- Like and comment on retweets and mentions on Twitter
- Retweet great Tweets about your article with a thank you comment
- Like potential clients’ business pages and follow them back
- Follow up with new subscribers to your newsletter
- Answer business-related DMs, messages, and chats on social media
- Return business calls and reply to emails
- Answer people who fill out your website contact form
For questions regarding your article marketing campaign, or for help growing your business, contact us today!
