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Article Marketing and Your Business |
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Written by Jerry (Daryl) McCoy
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Article marketing is a great way to bring highly targeted visitors to your site but it isn’t for everyone. This article discusses why. Everyone that writes articles for article directories, ezines, websites or any other venue where their prospects might be is writing a sales page that isn’t a sales page. The goal of the article is to grab the reader’s attention, build their interest in what you are writing about, and create a desire in them to find out more then direct them to take action. Articles should be highly targeted informational pieces that trigger an emotional response within the reader. Before you begin writing your article, you need to know who you are targeting, what response you intend to get from the reader and the keyword phrase you will be using to reach your target audience. This keyword targeting is especially important when the articles you write will be available online and may be indexed by the search engines.
An article is only useful if it gets read. Submitting articles to article directories on keyword phrases that have a huge number of competing pages is a waste of time unless you have an established audience that reads everything you write.
The key to using article marketing is to find those keyword phrases within your niche that has at least 100 searches a day and no more than 40,000 competing pages. You may not find this target audience in every niche but that is a target to shoot for if you want search engines to deliver some of your readers. Once your article gets published, you want to start using some of the social bookmark services to create links to your article. You should also start making posts in forums that are on the topic you’ve written about and have a link to your article for additional information.
You should always make your articles and forum posts informative and they should provide useful tips but not give the whole story.
The idea is to make your audience satisfied they read your article but hungry enough for more information that they click thru for additional information.
I’m using this technique in one of my niches and almost 10 percent of the readers that find my articles are clicking through to my website where additional information is found. At the bottom of my articles on that website is a link for the reader to click thru to a sales page for the product I’m promoting. The click thru rate has been averaging 30 percent for me.
The trick to marketing with articles like this is to keep your copy focused and to gently guide your reader towards the action you desire. Next week I’ll cover the general tone I use to try to help you in your article marketing.
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