What You Must Know About Article Marketing
It's not surprising that nearly everyone who wants to increase visitors to his/her website is heavily involved in article marketing.
There are two essential facets, and two essential facets only, to a successful website …content and lots of visitors. And, while traffic can come from many sources, the best traffic comes from organic listings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Although there is no getting around it… it takes substantial time and effort to develop and optimize a website which ranks well in the big three search engines, the traffic your site gets from the search engines is free. If you advertise, it may cost you $10 or more to produce a visitor to your site. And, research has clearly demonstrated that people who reach you because they found your site in a Google or Yahoo query are far likelier to be ready to buy than those who reach you as a result of advertising. Four times as likely, in some marketing studies.
If you think about it, it's not surprising. The person who visits reaches your website after clicking on a link of some kind or getting an email message may have some level of curiosity about what is on your site. The person who conducted a search to find pages like yours is a far more likely prospect to purchase your product or service .
That is why smart website owners devote significant time and energy striving to achieve high search engine rankings. And, because obtaining links is essential to achieving such rankings, they are all engaged in a link building effort of some kind. In most cases, article marketing is a part of their campaigns because few other activities can be counted on to generate as many links in as short a time. In fact, a popular article can produce dozens of links almost immediately and hundreds of links within a few weeks.
For the most part, website owners write about topics closely related to their websites. Overall, that's a sound strategy.
But, the greatest single mistake website owners make, and they do it all the time, is to limit themselves to writing and submitting articles only about topics closely related to the content of their sites.
By writing on a limited range of topics, they also severely limit the websites, blogs, and article directories which are interested in using their articles. And, by doing that, they significantly reduce the number of potential links their writing efforts will get them. For example, I own a number of education sites, so my articles are most often related to college selection, scholarships, online education, and similar topics. I've obtained thousands of links with these articles, but there are thousands of article directories and websites that have no interest at all in those subjects. Therefore, by writing 100-200 articles a year, like this one, on other topics, I can reach a whole new audience, and obtain a far greater number of links.
I recently wrote an article on winning strategies for casual sports bettors. I have also written about search engine optimization, teaching teens safe driving, helicopter parents, and dozens of other areas. Would you have guessed that my most frequently published article was on great backyard hamburger grilling recipes? The very best tip I can offer fellow article marketers is to produce and submit periodic articles on at least ten or fifteen different, unrelated subject areas in addition to the subject(s) of their websites. The links they will get as a result of such a strategy can help boost their websites to the top of the search engine rankings and ensure them success.
Manny Diaz is an independent college counselor who advises adults on accredited online degree programs and online education options.