Article marketing is one of the most common Internet marketing techniques discussed. The "guru's" say "market your site by writing articles & distributing them for free and you'll see a dramatic increase in site traffic". Skeptics say "I've tried that and it doesn't work". Here is what I say: The most common mistake I see in article marketing is a lack of focus. I see so many people trying to promote their sites by writing about things that are not related. To put it simply- that is not going to be effective. If you have an online pet supply shop, you cannot write articles about home tanning salons and expect that to bring in traffic. Sure, you might pick up a few backlinks which could increase your ranking in Google, but I am sure you want more for your business. Step 1 is to write about a subject that is related to your business. Step 2 is to make sure it's well-written, informative, and not a rehash of another article (stay away from the article scraping software) Step 3 is to not expect overnight results Step 4 save yourself time by outsourcing the distribution of the article I will be honest and say that article marketing does not work well for every business. For example, when I write about marketing and writing I see a surge in my site traffic and I always get contacted by several potential clients. In fact, most of my clients have read an article that I have published somewhere. However, I am involved in other endeavors and article marketing has not been beneficial at all. For one of my sites, I tried an aggressive article marketing campaign and I got a ton of backlinks in google but nothing else. I tried article marketing on another site of mine and it did absolutely nothing but fine-tune my writing skills. In summary, does article marketing work? Yes but it all depends. |
