Article marketing refers to the practice of writing articles about a website, affiliate product, or service and submitting these articles to article directories. Article marketing is a powerful technique used by internet marketers and promoters to procure backlinks. Before the internet became the marketplace that it is, business owners who had the budget used to commission articles in newspapers and magazines just to get the consumer’s attention.
Article marketing and submission can be considered one of the legitimate (white hat) techniques for SEM or search engine marketing. While just about anybody with a computer and internet connection can attempt to do article marketing, it takes a certain skill and inside knowledge to run an effective article marketing campaign.
The technique must comply with some requirements for those new to article marketing. First, your article (or post) length should generally be between 300 to 500 words to get listed in search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Certain article directories will have their own specifications, which you should find out prior to getting started.
For your article marketing to be significant, your articles must contain certain keywords or key phrases. Several tools, such as Google Ads, can be used to generate these keywords for you. You can also try generating keywords manually by thinking of various expressions people may use to search for the product or service you are marketing. To check the potential of a particular keyword or phrase, type it in the search engine bar enclosed in quotation marks: the result would indicate how many times it appears on the internet. You know you have hit on a good keyword if you get more than 500 results.
Try to develop at least ten keywords to start, and write at least three articles per keyword, making a total of about 30 articles. Admittedly, article marketing does take a lot of effort, especially if writing does not happen to be your strong suit. However, article marketing does result in direct traffic to your site and also builds backlinks, which improves your SERP (search engine page rank). Of course, since your competition will likely be employing SEM (Search engine marketing) campaigns of their own, it takes constant efforts to maintain your PR (page rank). If writing your own articles will take up too much of your time, you might be better off just hiring an SEM firm to handle your website and product promotion for you.
Your local SEM firm will be more effective in generating keywords and phrases, writing SEM-optimized articles, and submitting them to relevant article directories. Also, they could analyze your competition’s SEM strategies to develop an effective marketing strategy for your business.