Whether you have an online business or an offline business you need people to know that it exists. A great way to drive visitors to your website so that they can learn more about you and your products is to use article marketing. In its simplest form article marketing is just a clever name for writing articles and distributing them to online directories and newsletter publishers as well as newspapers and magazines.
The great thing about writing articles to promote your business is that it’s a low cost marketing method and a great way to drive targeted traffic. A well researched and well written article also goes a long way to establishing you as a credible expert in your chosen niche.
The actual process of article marketing is really simple. You write an article that solves a problem that people in your niche suffer from. You submit the article to the popular article directories like this one. The articles are indexed by the search engines and people come to read them. Hopefully they then find your article useful and they click through to your website to find out more about you and to potentially buy your product.
The key to an effective article is to solve a problem not try and make a sale. For example let’s say that you have created a piece of software that allows garages to keep track of their customers and to send them notifications when it’s time for their MOT or annual service on their car. Rather than writing an article selling your software you would instead write about how difficult it is for the garage owner to retain business, and how the solution might be to establish a contact plan for their customers. Aim for between 300 and 700 words in the article so that it’s long enough to deliver value but not so long they lose interest.
At the end of the article you then include your resource box and give the reader a compelling reason to click on your link. Here’s one way you could do it:
“If you are ready to implement a contact plan into your garage to help you retain business and become more profitable then visit www.garagecontactplan.com to find out more about my set-and-forget contact plan software. You’ll have your plan set up and reminding customers about their upcoming service in no time!”
So in your article you told them how they could solve their problem, and in your resource box you tell them how your product can automate the process so they can stop worrying about retaining customers and concentrate on servicing cars.
Once you are happy with your article check it for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors before you submit it to the article directories.
