Deft Creative Articles

Writing articles. The most effective online marketing technique

November 6th, 2006

One of the most effective website promotion techniques is to write regular articles relevant to your industry. There are many websites online that serve as article banks, and so it is possible to have your work included in hundreds, possibly thousands of places online.

Benefits are fourfold…

Firstly, writing an article and submitting it to say 50 article sites will result in 50 links back to your own website which will bring in its own fair share of traffic.

Secondly, Google uses a system called PageRank (PR) (amongst other methods) to rank where websites appear in its search results. PR is calculated based on the number of incoming links to your website. The more one-way inbound links you have, the more likely your own websites PR value will increase, and Google will think more of you.

Thirdly, Google also favors sites that have new and fresh content added regularly and consistently, rather than those which get built and are left untouched for months or years.

Finally, writing articles will establish you as an expert in your field. It is not uncommon for potential customers to “Google” you or your company to find out more about you. Finding out that you have written a string of useful articles, carried on hundreds of websites can not be a bad thing for them to discover.

Therefore it is well worth investing some time in writing articles. This particular guide will show you how to get the most out of this effective marketing technique.

Step 1) What to write about

One of the most difficult things is trying to think of what to write about. Choose subjects that are relevant to your business, and that you naturally know a lot about. Consider; Who are your target audience?

Find relevant chat rooms and discussion forums where your target audience participates. Check what questions they are asking, what they are discussing and post messages yourself asking what they would like to know more about.

Write down everything you have done in your business over the last few weeks, or keep an ongoing diary. Have you leant anything new yourself, or have you overcome any particular problems that others may benefit from knowing about? This should inspire ideas for articles.

Visit your competitors FAQ pages (Frequently asked questions). This will show a whole list of questions that your target audience will have asked. To find these, type into Google “your-industry-keyword + faqs” e.g. “web design +faqs”.

Write down any of these questions that sound interesting, or that occur multiple times, and that you feel you will be able to write about.

You can also trawl the article directories for inspiration on what to write about, but make sure you are able to write better articles than those that already exist if you intend to cover the same subjects.

Step 2) Write your article

Assuming you are familiar with the subject you have chosen, writing should come fairly easily. Stick to the following format:

Write around 600 to 800 words per article
Use short paragraphs of only a few sentences each so it is easy to read.
Include a bit about you and a link to your website in the final paragraph.
Make people want to click on this link to find out more about you. This is your main source of traffic.

Step 3) Get it onto your own website

Name your article page “title-of-your-article-with-hyphen-seperated-words.html”
Include META description and keywords relevant to the articles content.
Link from other pages on your site and anyone else who is willing to link to you using the article name or relevant keywords in the link text.
Cross link between articles and other pages on your site, several times per article if possible. For example, if I were to mention flash website design in this article, I would link the words flash website design to my page about this particular service.

Get a hit counter onto your homepage (or whatever page is being linked from these external articles) so you can see how much traffic is brought to your site from the various article sites. This will save you a lot of time in the future as it will highlight the article sites that are worthwhile submitting to, and weed out the ones that have no value.

Step 4) Submit your Article

Manual submission
If you have not done so already, install the Google toolbar as it will display the PageRank of the article sites you are visiting. You want to get listed on as many high ranking sites as possible, as PageRank is passed from these sites back to yours through the link at the bottom of your articles.
Enter “your article keywords + articles” into Google. E.g. “web design + articles”

Find some articles that are on similar subjects to yours. Copy an extract (about 10 to 15 words” and paste it into Google in “quotes”. The results will show all the other article sites online that are carrying this article. There is no reason why they won’t take yours as well. To get organized, make a spreadsheet to include the submission URL, PageRank of the site, and a couple of extra columns to keep track of your submission process i.e. submission dates, which articles get included etc. This will become a very valuable resource and can then be reused for future articles. Remember, you are looking for sites that allow a hyperlink back to your site at the end of the article.

Visit those discussion forums again and post your article there, again use “keywords +” forums in Google to find more. As long as it is not worded as a blatant advert, the forum administrators won’t mind.

Search for “Creative Commons” in Google. This is a free service used not only to copyright your work, but to allow others to use it with your permission, so long as the credit and link to your website remains. This is another way of getting your article included in more websites around the Internet.

It would also be a good idea to review your site stats after perhaps 1 month and put on your spreadsheet how much traffic was brought in from each article site.

Automated submission

Whilst searching for article submission sites online you will undoubtedly come across many sites that promise to submit your article to hundreds and even thousands of article sites for a small fee. Be weary of some of these claims, and try to get a recommendation from someone that has used one of these services with success. Some will work, and others will not and might even do more harm than good. Nothing can beat your own custom made spreadsheet so it is worth investing some time in that method.

With a few good articles online you should start to see a significant increase in traffic to your website. Of course, all this is useless if your website is a mess, doesn’t engage visitors or fail to call them to action, so this must also be addressed in order to capitalize fully on all this extra traffic. Look out for an article on this too…

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Entry Filed under: Website Marketing