Article Marketing – Do You Know These 3 Keys To Social Marketing?
Tuesday, June 2, 2009 at 10:27PM ;)
By C Doug Mah
Article marketing, at its basics, is writing articles and submitting them to article directories, like EzineArticles, for distribution to website owners, ezines and newsletters, blog sites, editors and publishers. That’s great but why would we want to do that? This article will describe the benefits and whys of article marketing and hopefully you will see how it can benefit your internet marketing business or your internet marketing campaign.
What I am going to go over is basic stuff but you may have been told or heard many times that you need to do article marketing and you have thought, “Yeah, yeah, I’ll do some article marketing” without really knowing how it benefits you. Knowing the why is going to make you more effective in your social marketing efforts so you can tailor what you do to address your specific goals.
I am also going to be jumping around a bit as I feel that there are newbies out there that know bits and pieces of stuff but they feel lost and need some help in putting it all together. So stick with me and we should get through this fine.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The goal of your internet marketing activities is to get targeted people to your website or blog (I’ll just call it site from now on) so that they can opt-in to your lead capture page. Then you can begin the monetization process by using an email autoresponder to send them emails with valuable content and offers for products and services.
One way that people get to your site is through the search engines such as Google or Yahoo. People type in keywords into the search box and up pops a list of sites that are deemed by the search engines to be relevant to the keyword search term. This relevancy is what determines in Google’s eyes what your Page Rank is and how high you rank in the search engines. (Page Rank is a number system that Google uses to rank how your site in general ranks in Google search.)
Now this deeming is important. Let me talk about Google as Yahoo generally works the same way. For people to see your site in the search results, you are going to want your site to be in the top 10 of the search results displayed. That means your site will be on the first page of the Google search page. If your site is position 11 and below, your chances of people clicking to your site is greatly diminished as most searchers never go beyond the first page results. So it is important that Google deems your site as relevant to the search term.
So you want to be on page 1. To do that you are going to do some search engine optimization or SEO. There are two main categories of SEO, onsite and offsite. Onsite refers to what you do with your site for SEO. Here you would do things like have the keyword that you would like to SEO for be in your domain name, your webpage title tags, and sprinkled appropriately throughout your site content. Onsite SEO is a given and you’ve got to do it but it isn’t enough.
Offsite SEO is where you really start to build yourself in the search engines. One of the real keys to offsite SEO are incoming links to your site. This is a big factor to Google in determining the relevancy and Page Rank of your site. Incoming links are other sites on the internet that are linking to your site.
Google really likes incoming links as it tells Google that other sites think enough about your site that they would link to your site. Google also looks at the quality of the site that is linking to you. So if the site that is linking to you has a Page Rank of 1 (the smaller the number the better the Page Rank) Google sees that as an important and popular site giving you their good housekeeping seal of approval and uses this to determine how you rank in Google search. Think of incoming links as votes and the more votes you get and the more important votes you get (Google isn’t a democracy) the more popular and relevant Google sees you.
So what does article marketing have to do with incoming links? Now this is the very cool part. When you submit your articles to the article directories, you article will contain a resource box that you can put your short bio and links to your site. The major article directories like EzineArticles.com have high page rank so having your article on those sites will create high quality incoming links to your site. The more places you submit your article, the more incoming links you will get. But there’s more. When ezine publishers and other site owners pick up your article for their sites, they are required to retain your resource box. So if they post your article on their site, they have created another incoming link for you. And not to get carried away here but if your article were ever to go viral, your links would be everywhere pumping up your site.
Building Your Brand and Your Credibility
As you get your articles out there, you are building your brand, your name recognition. People will begin to see your name at the various article directories and featured at various sites around the web who have picked up your article. When people see you again and again, especially in a good light, they start to get the impression that you must be some kind of authority on the subjects you write about. Combine that with good valuable content and the picture is complete. You are the expert. Your credibility goes up and people will be receptive to what you are saying.
Your brand and credibility builds your attractiveness. I don’t mean that this means that you will automatically do better with the opposite sex (although it can’t hurt). What I mean is this works for you in attraction marketing. By providing value up front and doing it in a credible way, you open up your audience to what you have to say and you build a relationship and trust with them. And people buy (or opt-in) if they know, like and trust you. When people read your articles and see your face and name, they start to feel like they know you and if your content resonates with them, you will create that trust. Article marketing helps you to build that attractiveness, credibility and trust.
Widespread Distribution and Exposure
Another way that article marketing helps you in your social marketing is that it drives traffic to your site. When your articles are reprinted in ezines, emails, and other web sites your article can be distributed widely. For example, ezine publishers are always on the lookout for good content for their ezines and newsletters. If their subscriber list is 100,000, well now you have potentially 100,000 people reading your article and clicking on the link to send them to your site. And it is quite probable that the people you reach through the redistribution of your articles are people that you would have never reached through your own marketing efforts. You can see the power of article marketing as these individual marketing pieces (not necessarily overtly promotional) get spread out through the internet and email.
So to conclude, article marketing can be an important part of your social marketing program. Article marketing can help you with search engine optimization for your site, build your brand and credibility, and give you widespread distribution and exposure.
If your goal is to get into article marketing or video marketing, a great training ground is Renegade University. Mike Klingler's FREE membership site offers step-by-step, click-by-click, video tutorials on article marketing for network marketing.
About C Doug Mah
Doug is part of the “Super Guides” team with Renegade University and Renegade Professional, guiding and coaching in the area of internet attraction marketing.
Doug’s background is in finance and accounting in the corporate world. In the past 13 years, as a senior finance executive, he has helped grow and position 3 high-tech companies for acquisition. Having gone through the cycle of finding a new job, building a company, selling a company, integratng the company with the new company, and back to finding a job, and seeing what is happening in corporate America with the recent financial crisis and its fallout, Doug sees that future does not lie in corporate America. Developing your own business, You Inc., is the way to build your own economy of the future and secure you and your family financially.
For more tips and training see Doug at RenegadeTrainerOnline.
Reader Comments (8)
Hi Calvin,
Nice article - reminds me of the way I got started. . . I had no clue what I was doing or an approach. I was simply going to Ezine Articles, Hubpages and Squidoo and just publishing articles for the sake of it.
No themes, no keyword research, no linking strategy. But I learned these things by going through the training at Renegade Professional. Little by little, tutorial after tutorial, it came together for me.
Here's what I recommend when it comes to creating content: Pick a niche and decide on a few keywords - for example, "attraction marketing training" might be a good one. Use that keyword throughout your article headlines - be focused on that subject and be consistent across the various social media locations. This positions you as an expert (or growing authority on that subject).
Then comment on other articles that talk about the same thing. Network with those people, get to know them and the angles they take on the same subject.
This is one way - a good way - to get started with article marketing across the social media locations.
Eric Walker
Although I have not put a great deal of effort into Article Marketing (yet) it is defiantly in my marketing plan. Yes I have an actual marketing plan that I am working through. Creating these quality back links that are offered through article repository sites will help to give my site more credibility and higher ranking.
Article Marketing sites are starting to embrace social media as well. Ezine Articles offer their authors the ability to link their profile to Twitter and a few other social media sites. When they create a new article a Tweet with a link to the article is automatically made. This is a great way to start getting traffic to your article immediately.
Helpful Article Marketing Tips
Great job Doug,
Like Eric mentioned in his comments, I too pumped out articles without the basic understanding of keyword research and SEO as you helped explain in your article.
These helpful hints can made a big difference to those wanting to
get into article marketing as a way to build their brand and be seen as an expert in their particular niche.
Thanks for a good read.
Hi Doug,
Article marketing is a great way to get people to find you and your "stuff". SEO is the best way to get the search engines to find you. Using both is a great combination for success on the Internet.
I too was one who just wrote articles and hoped that the search engines as well as people would magically find them. I've started the process of going back to all of them and changing that.
Thanks for putting it in such a clear, concise article with so many helpful tips.
Michelle
Excellent article, Doug
Your article on article marketing explains what it is... It really gives the reader the insight needed to understand how article marketing works.
Thanks For Sharing,
Donna Wells
Doug, I find your articles so full of good value. I do come back to them for a reread.
That is accomplishing credibility and branding yourself for me as someone I am willing to spend the time to carefully digest your writing.
Article Marketing is the venue each marketer can demonstrate expertise. Your niche market will find you and your articles when you figure out how, where to post and back link to your website.
Great article, I love article marketing it is one of the best ways to get incoming links and start getting your site ranked in the search engines.
You've laid it all out here and reminded me of why article marketing is one of my passions.
Thanks!
The Plan
Calvin, thanks for laying out a truly great plan article marketing is arguably the best way to build a business online. Remember offline it's location, location , location.
Online it's content,content,content and with the correct seo and a complete social media marketing plan you're almost always guaranteed success.