Avid Technology

Articles as a marketing System

Articles are resourceful, they can be used to promote so many diverse things, but really they are only an opening to get traffic to one of your own domain pages. To receive the most benefit from the visitors your articles send you, you can then set up an email list, this typically means you can benefit from the traffic for years to come hopefully. The individual who had read your article before coming to your site has already read something of yours, so if your article was high quality then hopefully they will come to your site already familiar with you as an expert on the subject they are interested in and will be more inclined to buy from your site or your emails. Indeed articles increase traffic and promotes awareness.

Writing an Effective Article

Your article does not have to be a masterpiece. Most of us are just average folks, with ordinary writing skills. From my practical knowledge of writing articles i have discovered that you should let it be friendly and honest, it should communicate what you want it to. Write your articles just like you speak, don’t try hard at making it too professional and all grammatically flawless. Most people online normally want to read articles recognizing that it is from a human being. Obviously if you work in the journalism field and writing articles, then you have to make them as professional looking as possible. Your article needs to have an Introduction, a Body, and the Closing. Lets briefly look at these starting with the Introduction.

Introduction:- Here you grab the readers attention and get them excited. You have to let them know you are talking to them by ensuring that you address the title of the article in the first 2-3 lines. Make it engaging and interesting and let it lead into what you will be talking about or what you have to offer. Concentrate on their drawback and empathize with them so they know you are there to help.

Body:- This is the main part of the article where you give the reader all the information you promised them, keep the paragraphs short and straight to the point and split the content into different bits and sections. If you intend to provide ‘x’ amount of tips for the readers it is advisable to split them into sections or one paragraph per tip ensuring that each header is in bold.

Close:- Here you finish off the article and provide them with information how to move forward. You should reiterate the main points or what you’ve just told them, provide action steps that they can use to go and get the results they want.

Types of Articles

You can write two types of articles for submission to article submission sites. They are articles written for SEO purposes, and articles written for quick surges of traffic. The latter is called the leeching method.

When writing articles for SEO purposes you have to ensure the title of your article includes the main keyword(s) phrase you are targeting. This method establishes consistent prolonged traffic and allows your article to get positioned by the search engines. Ensure your keyword phrase is integrated in the article a couple of times so google will know your article is about that keyword, and will consider ranking it for that term. Your articles will increase traffic using this SEO method.

The leeching method mainly don’t utilize keyword phrases. The whole essence is to make your article magnetically attractive to people and clickable when it is featured in the ‘Recently Submitted’ list (as with the ezine articles site) based on its title. You have to make sure the title of your article entices the reader. Make it controversial, funny or use negative headlines as it’s known to do the trick quite well. You can have a headline such as:-

’5 reasons why your belly fat won’t go’

or

’5 main tips dietitians don’t tell you about losing belly fat’

As you can see these are completely different from the titles created for SEO purposes. The leeching methods only work for as long as your article remains in the ‘Recently Submitted’ list. You will agree with me that once you can get the techniques right that indeed Articles Increase Traffic.

Article Submission Sites

The following are some examples of sites you can submit your written articles to:

EzineArticles
GoArticles
Buzzle

One of the things that you can do with your articles after they’ve been written, you can then ‘spin’ it by rewriting using different words, and making it different from the original. Once this is done then you can submit the article(s) and its variation to these article sites. (The sites listed are not exhaustive)

Getting Traffic

In order to get your articles ranked, follow these 3 step process:
1. Research
2. Construction
3. Backlinks

Research:- Investigate the keywords you want to target by employing the google keywordtool to find how much traffic it is getting. By doing this you are guaranteed that your keyword will get lots of searches and your article will stand the chance of being located.

Construction:- Ensure the article has enough content and that you are not stretching things out. Normally an article should have about 400-500 words minimum. Also ensure that it is keyword dense, but putting into consideration that google might think a keyword applied several times in an article might be seen as spamming the search engines. Most people now only use 1 – 2 % of their content for their targeted keyword.

Backlinks:- Use various anchor tag texts in your articles to point to your sites. This is important as google likes to see different anchor tag text used for the same link. You can also use linking services to build your backlinks to your site. An example of a good linking service is “1WayLinks”.

In summary, articles are very good marketing tools and helps to direct traffic. Once the articles are written in the right manner using the suitable methods for generating traffic, your articles can then be submitted to various article submission sites and with different variations and spin.

Get to know more on how Articles Increase Traffic and get started today.

By: Brain Gibson