By Steve Wyrostek

As a small business owner, article marketing may be a good approach to establishing yourself as an expert and spreading the word about your business.

Whether you write the articles yourself or have them ghostwritten by a professional web writer, following are a few thoughts you might want to consider:

- Mechanics- Consider writing pieces between 400 and 700 words. That works for search engines as well as reading weary readers.

Write while roaming in the head of your prospect. What words do they use when they search for your product or service?

If you’re writing about exercise equipment does your prospect search for treadmills, weight machines, or exercise equipment? Is your business localized so that prospects search for Chicago treadmills?

Read article…

I’m regularly asked by readers whether they should use Article Marketing as a way to build their blogs traffic. My answer is always the same - ‘I’ve never done it, but I’ve heard that others have had some success with article marketing.’ So today when Andrew Hansen offered to write this guest post of his experience of article marketing I thought it’d make an interesting read.

Article marketing for traffic is by no means a new concept, but as old as it is there are still great misconceptions about the best way to use it as a tool in creating new targetted visitors to your blog.

I was inspired to make this post after I recently checked the traffic stats for an old niche blog that I hadn’t worked on for a number of months.

It was a blog that we launched almost solely on the back of article submissions and article traffic and now despite server changes, half the site getting lost, total reindexing and other drama, the traffic to this site from the search engines continues to flow, see below diagram:

And primarily from the search engines…

Not an enormous amount, but for a site that hasn’t been touched in months and survived all the mentioned havoc, it’s not bad.

The big benefit of article marketing is that it allows you to generate both quick traffic and traffic that lasts when done properly. Furthermore it allows you to generate traffic in 3 separate ways that I’ll illustrate in this post.

Before we begin, let me clarify that by article marketing, I mean the submission of articles to directories, blogs and websites in order to gain exposure to your website through your author biography links.

Article Marketing Traffic Generation Part 1:

Just by submitting your article to a directory, you give it the potential to be found by other people interested in your topic, who are searching through that directory.

It’s not a lot of traffic but it’s fast and it’s relatively targetted.

When we started this site we went on a steady article marketing campaign, submitting a few articles each day to some of the big article directories like ezinearticles.com.

I couldn’t get a screenshot for you, but in the first month or two of this site, ezinearticles.com was the number one source of traffic to the blog (where Google now is in the second shot above) pushing more than a thousand visitors a month to the blog, just from that single directory.

That’s one of the fast traffic elements. Again it’s not enormous traffic but is is fast and targetted. Just having your articles in the directories can bring you traffic. The point to note though is that this is not the MAIN source of traffic that article submissions can bring…

Article Marketing Traffic Part 2:

This next kind of traffic is the one that a lot of new blog and online marketers got stuck focusing solely on and that’s “bum marketing” - just another word for submitting an article to a popular directory and trying to have it rank for a long tail keyword.

Because article directories like ezinearticles.com are old, strong, authoritative domain names, the content you place on them can outrank content optimized for similar terms that you put up on your own (new) website. So when you submit an article that is keyword optimized for some long tail keyword, that article on the directory can get quickly ranked in the search engines, and the author link can be followed to your website.

But this traffic is also only temporary. For more reasons than there are time to list, these pages tend to rank well quickly but drop off quickly too, meaning you see an increase in traffic from the search engines, but it doesn’t last if that’s your only strategy.

This happened with the site above too. In the next couple of months we started to see our search traffic creep up to the same level of traffic the article directories were bringing in.

Most article marketers will stop there and wonder why their traffic dries up within a month or two. That’s part 2 of getting quick traffic from your article submissions but the 3rd and most important part is yet to come.

Article Marketing Traffic Part 3:

This is what ensured that I locked in traffic from Google, used article marketing to create an authoritative blog and claim traffic that won’t dry up even if I want it to.

From the beginning, with each article we submitted to a directory, we left two links in the author biography. One link was to a post of content on my blog that was related to the article but contained more detail than the article. So I submit an on “exercise balls for fitness” and put a link in the author bio to a post on my site at the URL: http://myblog.com/exercise-ball-workout-tips with the anchor text “exercise ball workout” or some keyword that I want to rank for with that post.

The other link in the author biography always went to my blog home page but with a different keyword as the anchor text with every submission. We followed the same submission frequency and guidelines for about 4 months and you can imagine what happened.

Our search engine traffic didn’t dry up, but continued to increase. The only thing to note is that it didn’t increase from the articles at ezinearticles.com that were getting found in the search engines, it increased from our own blog posts getting found in the search engines, in many cases outranking the ezinearticle.com submission we made on the very same keyword!

From there it took off. The extra search engine exposure caused other bloggers to find us and link to us, all that incoming link value made our domain more authoritative so that all the new content we added was getting indexed and ranked at light speed and pretty soon our traffic had tripled.

Another thing to note is that with enough work, our own site now became the big authoritative, strong domain. We didn’t need to submit as many articles to the article directories anymore because it could rank just as well being up on our site.

It’s these factors that ensured that we still see traffic despite all the drama that happened with this site and that keeps that traffic flowing today.

I hope this gives you an insight into the power of this kind of “triple whammy” article marketing and that it’ll inspire you to start an article marketing campaign of your own.

Andrew Hansen has helped thousands of bloggers and aspiring online business owners to discover profitable niche markets, drive quality traffic to their blogs, and turn their traffic streams into cash through his blog at AndrewHansen.name, and his blogging and traffic generation software Firepow. Subscribe to receive updates and learn more about how Andrew can help you make more money online.

I’m sure most of you are aware of the marketing power of a well-written promotional article about your industry or business. A compelling and educational article on your audience’s topic of interest will drive traffic to your website and increase customer confidence in your expertise. Best of all, it requires no investment aside from your time and effort.

But where do you start? The following quick tips (presented in chronological order) should serve you well in starting out upon this method of online advertising. All of these points could be several pages in themselves, but this should give you a good overview of the process.

Think of an Article Topic

Write what you know about, first and foremost. Brainstorm topics of which you have specific knowledge. It doesn’t have to be something obvious either. Write about a recent challenge your company faced and how you overcame it. Write about an interesting situation that you know is a common problem in your industry but that is not often addressed. Don’t be afraid to present yourself or your company as imperfect, or as facing challenges.

For instance, one of the articles I plan to write in the next few weeks will be about our video production company’s work on a forklift training video. It was the first industrial training video our company had done, and I plan on laying out our specific challenges and what we learned from the process. Of course I will include the fact that the customer was very happy with the finished product, but I will also express the worries and difficulties we had along the way. (Also make sure you get permission from your clients if you plan to mention them specifically in the article.)

Keyword Research

If you’ve done any work on doing search engine optimization for your website, producing an effective web article is quite similar. Because you want your article to be relevant in searches, you need to put a lot of focused keywords in your content. First make a list of all the keywords and phrases that you want your article to be relevant for.

For instance, in preparing for this article, I thought about who I wanted to read it. I did internet searches to research what kind of language was being used in the industry, and I used a thesaurus to find similar terms. I came up with a list of keyword phrases that included: ‘writing promotional articles’ ‘how to write online articles’ ‘writing web articles’ ‘how to write articles that advertise’ ‘tips for promotional internet writing’, amongst many others. Research will give you a good idea of the kinds of search terms that are relevant, and this will allow you to use these synonyms and phrases in the body of your article.

Winning Article Writing Strategies

Excessive self-promotion won’t often work in the web article format. Your audience doesn’t want an obvious advertisement; they want to be educated and/or entertained, and that’s what you should be striving to do.

Be concise and use short paragraphs. If you find yourself writing more than 1,000 words, think about splitting your content into two articles. You’re writing for an often impatient audience, used to immediate gratification, so don’t get literary or meander. Of course, this isn’t always the case; if you’re writing for potential customers in your industry and you know they like to read dense, jargon-y content, you should cater to them.

Multiple Titles

Put specific effort into coming up with several good titles for your article. They should be as straightforward and as keyword-rich as you can make them, as the title is the major thing that search engines will be noticing, and because a good title will make relevant potential customers want to click on it. You will want to alternate these titles when you post your article on different article database sites.

For example, the first internet article I wrote I titled ‘Tips for Effective Website Video’. Some alternate titles I posted it under were ‘Producing Effective Website Videos’, ‘Tips for Making Company Website Video’, and ‘Pointers for Avoiding Bad Website Video’. You get the idea; the more good titles you give your article, the more likely it will come up for these different combinations of keywords.

Posting Your Internet Article The Right Way

Research good article-posting databases, particularly ones that focus on your industry. No two sites are formatted exactly the same. Some require you to break your article into bullet-points with headings above each paragraph. Some require you to know some basic html code for putting in your website link or making your title bold or in italics. Some will require you to enter in a short synopsis of your article. Some will require unformated basic html code, so you should save your article in a basic text format as well.

The Article Resource Box

The resource box is the section, usually at the bottom of the article, where you can put in a short bio and a link to your company website (the format varies from site to site.) Some of the sites will require you to know a tiny bit of html coding to put in your link manually. You can find this easy enough by doing a search for basic html code.

Give on-line article writing a try, and let AddMe know how it has worked for you. We’d love to hear your stories about how it has increased business for your company.

This post provided by Zachary Elwood is a Producer/ Writer for Engaging Media, a video production company in Portland, Oregon.