Online advertising is what is driving profits for Google, Yahoo and Facebook. It can be very expensive for the small business owner who opts to pay per click or per phone call. Article Marketing may be an effective way to drive traffic to your website with little or no cost at all (especially if you like to write). If you can write articles about valuable information to your readers, you can drive home some web traffic for yourself and build your archives of customer giveaways. These should not be a hard sell but useful and current tips that just so happen to include some keywords that potential customers may be using to find your services/products.

How?

Articles should be 250 to 400 words long, and just mention the “keyword” or main topic a very few times. Your articles should focus on sub-topics that go hand in hand with your main keyword. This will give search engines like Google some great snacks for their spiders. That in mind do not cram your article with keywords and meaningless junk, it will not help your search engine rankings, in-fact they may hurt you more than not posting at all.

Many miss this very important part; make sure you include a resource box or bio at the end of each article. This is how you plug yourself, your product and provide a link to your website. It’s always a good idea to invite the reader to visit your website or blog for more information on your article topic and make sure you have a clickable link!

Now What?

You have completed the hardest part of this marketing strategy, you either wrote it or hired someone to ghost write for you. Now you need to submit it to various article directories. GoArticles.com, EzineArticles and Search Warp are some of the top directories that accept articles for free. You will find may pay to post directories, but we’ve never used them with so many legitimate free resources available. Some guru’s will tell you should submit to 100 or 200 directories for each article, but I have found that submitting to 5 to 10 directories per article is more effective. This will reduce any penalties for duplicate content – which would make all your efforts worthless.

You can keep it real simple and just make it your goal to post a new article to your blog every week.  Trading blogs with a few collegues does the trick too.

The fresher and more unique the content the more Google loves it – just remember, duplication and plagerism, just like in school is a big Google no– no.

So if you don’t write but see the value of article marketing, hire it out and watch the results you will get from even posting one new fresh article, once a week!

My Best,

Kathy Kane

Market Insights, LLC