Internet marketers have traditionally been very good at finding alternative ways to sell products. One of the simplest and most effective methods developed by internet marketers is that of article marketing.
Article marketing in its simplest form revolves around publishing quality articles to high traffic article directories, which link to product pages on the internet marketer’s website.
Article marketing is almost entirely free to begin implementing, and still remains an effective way of driving potential customers to a sales site to this day.
In this short article we will take a look at the basics of article marketing.
Articles Drive Traffic
The basic concept behind article marketing is that by publishing an article on a high traffic site, such as an article directory, it will receive more page views than had it been published on the internet marketers own site.
Each article published will contain one or more links to the article marketers own product pages.
The idea is, that any visitor reading the article, can be persuaded to click one of these embedded link, and be take straight to a sales page.
Articles will be written around one or more keywords or key phrases that relate to the product or service which the internet marketer is hoping to sell.
This combination of keyword focused content, published on high ranking sites, ensures that the article gets viewed, and by plenty of visitors.
This might sound like an odd idea; surely it is better to publish content that will directly attract visitors to a sales site?
Well, if all were equal when it comes to search rankings, then this would be true. However, an article will receive far more traffic if published on a well ranked site, than it would on an unranked one.
So we work on the premise that if 100 visitors view the article, a percentage will click through to the sales site from one of the embedded links.
Take a look at the screenshot below showing article views and clicks.
We see almost 20,000 views with 2,500 clicks, and that 13.64% of all readers did in fact click an embedded link. It would be hard to match this performance with self-hosted articles.
The real trick is publishing articles on only the most high traffic article directories. Although these change from time to time, there are a handful of article sites that have always been the top performers, and this list would include:
There are hundreds of more article directories available, but these four have always been rated in any top 10 list of article sites for the last several years, and make a good starting point for internet marketers who are new to article marketing.
Articles Can Convert
Although the primary goal of article marketing is to drive targeted traffic to a site which sells a product or service, the usefulness of the published article does not stop there.
A well written article can act as a pre-sell, priming the potential customer, to make them more likely to make a purchase.
This form of pre-sell requires an amount of direct sales copywriting skill, as we will want to convince the reader that they want to buy the product before they are even taken to the sales page.
A good indication of how well an article is written is the value given to it by readers. Most article directories allow readers to rate articles, the higher the rating, the more relevant and factually correct the article is, and the more likely it is to act as a good pre-sell.
Check out the screenshot below which shows this kind of article rating in effect.
Quality versus Quantity
This has been one of the most common debates in article marketing circles. Do you publish a low number of extremely high quality articles, or do you publish a high number of less well written articles?
Most successful article marketers will opt for the first option, as a well written article can also act as a pre-sell, as explained above.
Currently, most of the good article directories will check each submitted article before publishing it, and low quality articles will often be rejected.
Outsourcing Articles
Many people struggle to write a good article, and see this as a barrier to leveraging value from the power of article marketing.
Whilst this may be true for people with little or no marketing budget, it is not so for those who are willing to invest a little working capital into hiring a good article writer.
Outsourcing article writing can be a great way to acquire top quality articles, whilst freeing up your valuable time to concentrate on other aspects of your internet marketing business.
In Conclusion
Article marketing has been an incredibly powerful tool for internet marketers to exploit for several years.
Although article marketing is not as effective as it once was, it can still provide heaps of tightly targeted traffic, and thus sales, if done right.
Click here to learn how easy it is to get started with your own articles.
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