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.

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