When it comes to marketing your website, article marketing still holds a prominent and powerful place in the grand scheme of drawing online traffic. It is a valuable tool and here are some first steps you can take to get it working for you.
What is it about writing that makes some people cringe? First of all, it can seem like writing term papers in school. Relax. Writing articles is not as stressful as all that. Besides – with the length of most term papers, you can crank out 15 or 20 articles.
Here are some tips for writing those articles.
* Write what you know – The articles need to be relevant to your online business. You wouldn’t write about gardening to promote a chocolate gift basket website, for example. Because you are creating a business that you know something about, the articles are merely an extension of that.
* Do keyword research – People use certain keywords when they are looking for information on the Web. You can use free or paid keyword tools to find out the most searchable words in your niche. Use those words as the topics for your articles. Search engines do crawl website content so keep your keyword density (the number of times it appears in the article) at about 1% to 4%. Keyword stuffing is not going to net you any extra traffic.
* Get to writing – An appropriate article for a website needs to be around 400 words in length. You want to give your readers valuable information without droning on and boring them. Depending on what you are writing about, it may be a couple hundred words longer to explain complicated procedures or recipes.
* Create relevant content – To determine that, ask yourself a question: What do your readers want to hear about? Use that as your guide to choose topics that will be read.
* Submit articles to article directories – These sites post your articles. There are free and paid sites. Both will review your submissions to see if they are relevant and comply with their guidelines. Most will give you a bio box to place a link to your site and information about you, the writer. If you are not sure what is out there, take a look at some articles on your subject in article directories. You don’t want to repeat the same old stale content.
People love to read articles. It contains information that they need. As long as you are providing it, you will have an audience. If readers know that certain sites can be relied upon to provide quality content, they will go there and search through their articles. You want them to find you there.
One click on your link in the bio box and they can be at your website reading more helpful content. These are just a few steps to get you going in the right direction with your article marketing efforts.
