You have a great website, nicely optimized, easy to navigate and you have conducted a good solid general link building campaign. Your page rank has increased and you are happy with the flow of visitors to your site. What is next? How can you maintain your online reputation and continue to build good quality incoming links over time? You might want to consider editorial link building via an Article Marketing campaign.
The first thing you need for a quality Article Marketing campaign is a selection of well-written, keyword-rich articles related to your niche industry. Depending on your time and budget constraints, either hire a freelance writer or have them written in-house. Each article will be published with a resource box at the bottom acknowledging the author and a link back to your web site.
Articles are more likely to be published if they are informative rather than promotional. For example, if you are the webmaster of a ‘tour guide’ travel site, a selection of well-written travel articles covering topics such as: travel experiences, vaccination suggestions, tourist attractions, architectural and religious history, do’s and don’ts for safe travel etc, will establish your company as an authority in your market niche and create consumer confidence in your service.
Imagine a potential customer daydreaming at work about a future trip to Italy. He hasn’t decided on the particulars of his journey yet. He enters the search query “Tourist Attractions in Italy” and your article appears in the search results. He reads the article which describes the history and various tourist attractions of an ancient Roman city in Italy. The article is informative, well written and by the time he finishes reading, he has decided he would like to go there. He clicks on your company’s link in the resource box and lands on your travel site. Not only has he landed on your site as a potential customer, he has arrived with a positive expectation, as “first contact” has already been made via your article.
Effective distribution is very important for the success of any article marketing campaign. Compiling a distribution list of niche article directories is time well spent on your campaign. For an extensive list of article directories visit: SearchEngineWiki Article Directories. Depending on whether you intend to distribute your article to dozens or hundreds of article directories, you may wish to consider using article submission software. Article submission software does not fully automate the process, but it can take the sting out of it. If you use submission software it is important to personally monitor that your article is submitted to relevant directories and published within relevant categories. In the case of hundreds of submissions, a good quality submission program can ensure the process takes a day or two, not a week or two. I can recommend Article Submitter by Submit Suite for this purpose.
As an ongoing strategy, article marketing can produce tremendous results for your company. Remember, article circulation and referencing within the web is potentially eternal. A good article can live forever and provide hundreds of back links to your site over time. If you are interested in learning more about how to effectively harness the potential of article marketing for your company, take our Article Marketing and Distribution course here at Search Engine College.
This is a great approach to article marketing. Many wonder where the benefits are and you certainly covered that!
Articles always leave a footprint in the ever increasing web universe .Article marketing is one of the primary tools for a long lasting online reputation management and can yield far fetching results over a period of time.
Article marketing is where you build your reputation for long term. You must give freely first before you can start to receive, it takes time but you will reap the benefits later.
[…] as Sarah Parker writes on the Ask Kelena search engine advice column, using news articles can vastly improve the number of backlinks a […]
Kalena, This is a very good discussion of the values of article writing.
I have submitted a few articles that have been accepted in article directories.
I have never thought about them as “reputation managers” until I read this
article and the comments from other readers. I think that I will view my article
submissions, now, more as a help in overall reputation rather than just a method
of acquiring back links. Also, I hope that people will find them useful-I am
always astonished when I do check on one of my articles in the cosmetic dentistry
area just how many people have looked at that article. I do enjoy reading your
information and looking for things that I can use to apply to my website.
@ Gil – thanks so much for your feedback on this post. But I can’t take any credit for it whatsoever – it was written by my very capable Virtual Assistant Sarah. She has been solely responsible for the syndication and marketing of my articles for the past few years
Yes, having a niche article directory list is definitely the way forward, although naturally I might be a little biased.
Anyway, here’s one to add to the list – ezineshopper.com – shopping and product reviews article directory
I’ve recently started a blog, the information you provide on this site has helped me tremendously. Thank you for all of your time
Submit articles to free article directory to get more backlinks to rank higher in search engines.
Kalena, its good to see someone that knows the power of articles. Articles are very powerful in themselves and in creating traffic and backlinks.
@MagicArticleRewriter – I didn’t write this article, but I’m glad you liked it. Shame that you promote a product that completely goes against everything we teach in the article. I’ve removed the link from your comment as we don’t want to teach people how to site scrape. The product you promote is not article marketing, it’s just spam.
Thanks for sharing this great insight into article writing as a way of link building, I totally agree I sometimes do searches on the internet and articles that have been written on a subject a while ago pop up, and the content within hasn’t aged and normally is still very relevant! LT
I am really happy that I found your website. I have been researching this topic for a couple of months, and your blog is the second place that I have found information that gives me alot of inspiration. Thanks for the great post.
Article market is a big resource for developing, and i am still struggle with it. I did post lots of post to ezine but have little result on this.
Articles are efficacious as far as they’re capable to target the prospect’s needs. Although there isn’t a great deal to state on a certain topic make it brief as well as helpful and try to keep away from happy talk.
Before passing out your articles to article banks publish them on your own website. Wait to have them indexed and afterward do your mass syndication.
great article, thank you for sharing.
I have found article marketing to be very effective for some of my other sites. This is why having a blog on your website is also useful because when said person searches “Tourist Attractions in Italy” they might find your post on your website.