WHAT IS ARTICLE MARKETING? part 1

WHAT IS ARTICLE MARKETING? part 1

Article marketing is not just the art of writing articles and submitting them to
the article directories.
Let’s not forget that these directories hold thousands upon thousands of
articles on all kinds of subjects. With that in mind, it’s not enough to simply
write an article and submit it all over the place.
What you need to do is to write great articles that will attract attention. You
will of course get a link back to your site from every submission you make
(more about backlinks in a moment) but you still need to get as many
eyeballs on your article as possible. This is because you want to turn readers
into visitors.
So let’s go through the most important steps you need to follow every time
you put a new article together. If you become familiar with these and follow
them without fail, you’ll soon find that article marketing really can be easy.


UNDERSTANDING BACKLINKS


Okay, let’s start with those backlinks. What are they exactly?
Well each article you write will include a resource box at the end, and every
one will include a link to your website. This could be to a particular and more
relevant page of your site, or simply to the home page. It depends on what
the article is about and where you want your visitor to go to straightaway.
But backlinks will get you noticed by the big search engines – the very same
search engines that enable you to rank higher in the search results and be
seen by more and more people.
Now some people have said that you can no longer submit exactly the same
article to more than one article directory. If you do, Google will ignore all but
one of them and you will have wasted your time in submitting your articles all
over the place.
This is true in a sense, because those other articles will not get positioned in
the search results. But you will also find that if you submit the same article
ten times, you will still get ten backlinks to your site. And the more backlinks
you have, the more they can help your site ranking.
And once you learn how to add rewriting skills into your article marketing
strategy, you’ll be appearing all over the place in Google anyway! Read on to
find out more about this later on in the report.


WHY DO YOU NEED A GREAT RESOURCE BOX?


Your resource box is your link to your website. Think of it like a small
classified ad. You only have a certain amount of space to get your message
across. If it is boring or dull or even just straightforward, you aren’t likely to
get much of a response – even if your article is a really good one.
It needs to speak to the reader – so reach out and grab them. Think about
the resource boxes you have read that have attracted your attention. One of
the best things to say in a resource box is that you have a freebie to give
them which the reader can get by going to your website.

If you are going to do this you should link directly to the page which has
more information about it. Don’t make the mistake of linking to the home
page and then leaving your reader to figure out where they need to go. That
is one sure fire way to lose someone for life. They’ll get annoyed and
frustrated and probably wonder why you haven’t been more helpful.
Not exactly the best way to convert an interested reader into an eager
customer is it?
Make sure you don’t waste words either. Make your spiel short and snappy,
and experiment with attracting attention in a different way by starting out
with a question. Something like this, perhaps:
“Would you like to earn double what you do now?”
“Are you getting all the information you need about internet
marketing?”
“How can you find a second income online?”
And so on. You get the picture. Draw them in and then give them a link that
will lead them to the information they want and need.
The one thing you shouldn’t do is to try and sell something from your
resource box. Once you have written it, read it through and make sure there
are no prices mentioned anywhere. The only thing you can mention in terms
of what something might cost is one word – FREE.
Everyone likes getting something for nothing, and since a free report or
eBook is easy to make available with no actual cost to you, it’s a no brainer
to include one of these as an offer in your resource box.
The other thing to make sure you do is to make the link to your website
clickable. This does take a little more work, but it is worth doing because you
are making more work for people if you don’t do this.
Think about it for a moment, because understanding this tiny aspect really
does make article marketing so much easier for you. If you write something
like this – “visit my website, your link now and grab your free
report!” – people will have to copy and paste the address into their address
bar.
Now I know that only takes a moment and it’s not exactly difficult to do, but
it will put some people off doing it. You will actually lose out on visitors
simply because you haven’t made that address clickable.


Some websites will have their own ways of entering a clickable address so be
sure to read the terms, conditions and guidelines for each and every article
directory you use to be sure you are doing it right for each one. Don’t
assume it is always done in the same way.
But this is what you want to have:
“Visit my website, yout link , to grab your free report now!”
Notice the blue clickable link? It may show up slightly differently online but it
has exactly the same function. You will usually find it has blue lettering but
the line underneath doesn’t show up. The main thing is that people can see
it and click on it to be taken to your website. No copying and pasting
required – perfect.
And here is how you do it. The red words will form the clickable part of the
link, so to get the above example here is what you would do:
“Visit my website, put your lik to grab your
free report now!”
Now it can be made so much better too, because we can make the red words
(the clickable part) into something other than the address. It will still be
clickable, but it will be a clickable part of the whole sentence, rather than
being the address itself.
Notice how the red words change:
“Visit put your link to grab your
free report now!”
This gives you the following sentence – “visit my website to grab your free
report now!” – which is far smoother, cleaner and still very much clickable
and easy to use by the reader.
And that is exactly what you want to have at the bottom of every article you
write. All you need to do is reword it as desired to make it perfect for your
own specific needs.