Even though article marketing had lost a bit of its effectiveness in 2013 and 2014, there is no denying of its marvelous power. As a marketing tool, writing and publishing articles still has many advantages over other methods of online promotion. Due to its nature, article marketing is still a relatively cheap and easy method to promote your business over the internet.
If you want to setup a fully working and efficient marketing campaign, you may consider some of the tips outlined below:
- The first step is to consider a topic related to your website's content. Let's say your website is tailored to basketball lovers. Discussing the advantages of practicing basketball, embedding feeds from authoritative sport websites or simply sell basketball related items on your website - all these are good starting points.
- Find out more information on your topic and try to write interesting facts. Original and engaging content that converts to clicks and shares is what on-page SEO actually means in 2014.
- Start promoting your website. Write an informative and original article on your topic (in our example, basketball). Let's say you discuss which are the advantages and disadvantages of practicing this sport over other sports like handball, football, tennis, etc… Your article must be at least 500 words but no longer than 1500. Keep it on topic. The more informative the article is, the more bookmarks, likes and shares it will get on social networks. As you already know social media signals are an important SEO ranking factor starting 2011.
If your time or writing skills are limited, you may consider hiring a freelance writer to do this job for you. Services like Iwriter are a good starting point. Make sure the article is well written so the price should only be secondary considered next to quality. - Include a link in the body or the signature of your article. In both cases, the link should look natural; avoid spammy patterns like: keyword stuffing (ex: play basketball NJ or basketball London buy basketball online) or exact keyword match (ex: basketball). The keyword must look natural let's say: John Smith is the owner of yourwebsite.com, a sport website tailored to basketball lovers. with the link from yourwebsite.com.
- Submit your article to an article directory on your choice. Please pay attention to the following aspects: the PR (pagerank), DA (domain authority) and Alexa traffic of the respective article directory. Never submit the same article to more than one directory. Starting 2007 Google penalizes duplicate content. If you want to submit to more than one, write another original and informative article and so on.
The advantages of submitting content to article directories.
- Article directories featuring original and informative content figure very well in SERPS. Writing a quality article and submitting it to your favorite directory (preferably a high DA and low Alexa) means your link will get exposure to thousand or hundreds of thousand users. Your reference is great for both natural traffic and SEO.
- Low cost or no cost. Article directories usually publish the articles for free as long as they are original and high quality. Some other charge a small review fee either your article is approved or rejected. Try to focus on free directories or paid directories that guarantee they publish your article upon paying the fee. Usually these directories have an editorial team that make any necessary changes to your article to make it SEO friendly.
- Pagerank. Even though the latest trend for both article directories and guest blogging sites is to add the rel="nofollow" tags to the links in your article, there are still many that allow passing pagerank. Having your article published on a high PR directory will later pass some of its PR power to your website via the outbound link in the body or in the signature of your article.
- If the article you submit is of high quality, it may get a good opportunity to be shared on social networks like Facebook, Google plus, Stumbleupon, etc… Due to their popularity, social networking websites can actually drive huge traffic to both your article and your website.
- Online reputation. Writing quality , information rich and original articles not only boost your ranking in SE but your online reputation too You become more popular. All you have to do is to promote your writings on social networking profiles or mention these profiles along with everything you write. For example, Google+ has a nice feature called rel=author you can use to add authorship to articles. For more details on how to use it, click here.
Conclusion
Write original and informative content and you'll succeed. Good luck!
Any suggestions? Please let us know in the comments section below.
