Results-Focused Online Marketing Strategies

Article Marketing is getting a lot of press these days as a great way of marketing yourself or your company online. That said, you have to approach it in a certain manner if you want to succeed. With that in mind, let’s look at some secrets to success in this area.

Admittedly, these “secrets” should be fairly obvious, but based on what I’m seeing out there, this is definitely not the case.

1) Adopt Article Marketing as a philosophy, not as a tactic. If you simply see Article Marketing as a means to an end, it’s unlikely you’ll succeed. Instead, stop to consider whether you’re ready to fully embrace the idea of spending the time to deliver quality education to your market or your user base.

If the answer is “yes” then you are likely to succeed. If the answer is “no” then you probably shouldn’t bother as it’s almost certain you’ll quit your efforts long before the many benefits start to roll in.

Also, if you’re not truly committed to the educational element of this strategy, your articles will likely end up being too “salesy” to ring true and build credibility for yourself and your offering. Successful article marketing is almost 100% reliant on the trust and credibility you build, so never consider compromising your articles in hopes of making some quick sales.

2) Think from an SEO perspective. Submit quality articles to as many different sites as possible in order to maximize the benefit of inbound linking. As well, you never want to write for the search engines, but you should be aware of the critical keywords that you want to target so you can use them where appropriate.

Also, make sure the topics you choose to write about are related closely enough to your site and offering that there is a logical connection for your readers and good relevance for the search engines.

3) Commit to a minimum of 6 months to your program before you expect to see results. The results may happen faster but consider that it will definitely take time to identify good sites to write for, hit your stride with your writing, develop a following, build trust, drive traffic to your site and convert some of your traffic to new business.

Also, consider that a vast majority of your competitors will lose patience and quit or compromise their efforts well before this 6 month benchmark. Just remember, you want to be one of the very small group of smart marketers who see this through long enough to reap the rewards.

4) Keep your articles short and sweet. You are waaaay better off to write a larger number of short articles than a smaller number of longer articles. If you can communicate one clear idea per article you’ll keep your readers coming back for more. Also, by spending less time per article on more articles, you’ll be well positioned to write articles for a number of different sites or publications.

5) Think about conversion. In your articles it’s all about education, but once you get folks clicking through to your site from your articles, it’s all about conversion. Make sure the page you’re linking to is highly relevant, compelling, and contains a clear call to action.

Given the nature of your relationship with these readers you may want to consider a very strong call to action to get visitors to sign up for your newsletter (if you don’t have one then definitely consider starting one).

That’s it! If you have a good knowledge about the topics you’re writing on and follow the above “secrets” then you’re virtually guaranteed success as long as you stick at it long enough.

Want to learn more about Article Marketing? Sign up for our Online Marketing Insights newsletter as we’ll be providing an introduction to Article Marketing in November’s issue.