Nigerian Entrepreneur

How To Use Articles as Online Marketing Tools

Wondering how to promote your website or product with a shoe string budget, then you need to read this article on  using articles as affordable internet marketing tools to the end. It is an established fact that content is King. However, where the content is residing is an important factor that determines whether it will be featured in SERP  (search engine report pages) or not. If your website is new or unknown to the search engine spiders, whatever you write and post on the website may not be discovered by online surfers. So, it is actually content that is of good quality and has been discovered by online users that get crowned king.

If you’ve observed, search engines tends to give preference to articles hosted by popular article directories such as Ezinearticles.com and GoArticles.com.  Often, if any of the highly rated article directories has an article for the searched item, it will most likely be displayed on the first page of the search engine report page. Guess what, you can use that to your advantage.

All you need to do is sit down and write a quality article that provides needed information about the product or need your website is focused on. After writing the article, take time to go through it and ensure that your keywords are evenly distributed within the content of the article while maintaining the natural communication tone. Note that some of the popular article directories moderate articles before publishing. If your article is considered as link bait because it has an overdose of particular keywords, it will be rejected and not published.

After writing the article, insert a link to your website in the resource box and give a little information about your website too. Some article directories will permit you to insert one or two links in the body of the article. In that case, I suggest you use your keyword phrase as anchor text to link back to a popular article on your website. This has several advantages which we will talk about later.

So, what is the catch? When keywords related to the articles you submitted are typed on search boxes of search engines, indexed websites containing articles with those keywords will be displayed. Since most of the popular article directories are already having a high pagerank with many of the search engines, you have a good chance of having your article turning up within the first and second page of the search engine report. (Note, this may not happen immediately, sometimes, it takes between three days or more before you start seeing the result.)

How to get your articles listed

Since you are not the only one submitting articles to the article directories, you need to understand that what turns up for a particular article directory will be the best the search engine feels that particular article directory has to offer. You can guess what happens, if there is a better article already submitted to the article directory on the same subject you wrote on, yours may not be presented.

Wondering how to tackle that? This is what I do. I simply search the article directory first before writing any article. When I’ve gotten the best article it has to offer on a particular topic, I take time to read the article and find out all the flaws I can get about the article. After all that I simply sit down and produce an article that is far superior in quality to the existing article on the directory.

After submission and the article is published, I go back and use social media like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit etc to promote the article. That way, it gets more focus within the article directory and is ranked higher than the existing articles.

When eventually the article turns up in the SERP, it will start generating traffic to your website in two ways. First, some readers will click the link in the resource box to visit your website. Also, some webmaster who are too busy to write articles for their site will post those articles on their website thereby giving you free link-back to your site.

What are the benefits of Using Articles As Internet Marketing Tools?

1. Articles are free promotional tools for internet marketing. The only possible cost you may incur is your time. Well, I took for granted that you already paid your Internet Service Provider. That’s it. All you need is your thoughts, your computer, and your hands. If you have those, nothing will stop you from typing words that will produce a high quality article for your internet marketing. Well, if you’re too busy or too lazy to write an article, then you may need to spend some cash by outsourcing to ghost writers who can do the job for you for some few dollars.

2. Articles are a sure way of making people know that your website exist. If you submit several articles of yours to article directories that get the most web traffic, you can be rest assured that in less than no time your website will get noticed by search engine visitors and visitors from the article directories.

your ranking on the SERP will go up..

3. Articles offers a free way of obtaining one way back links automatically. When you submit your articles to directories, surely, other websites will make use of your articles. If you have inserted links to your website in the resource box or the body of the article, you can be rest assured that this will cause your website to get higher ranking in the SERP thereby increasing search engine traffic to your website.

4. With Articles You Can Make Yourself an Expert In Your Niche. You can easily improve your online reputation by writing quality articles that presents you as an authority in your chosen field. As an Internet marketer, if you plainly display your products on your website, you will not gain much conversion rate. Conversion is when your traffic converts to sales. You have to show that you are knowledgeable on your field. People like listening and buying from people they consider experts. Articles have a way of showing you off as an expert in a chosen field. If your articles meet the need of the readers, they simply assume you know what you’re talking about. They won’t get to discover that you were only using materials freely available online to meet their need until you accept an interview with Oprah or Larry King. As long as you keep your profile low offline, nobody will discover that you were only recycling information.

Update: Don’t submit an article you have already published on your website to any article directory. Such action is counter productive, as you may get Penalized by some of the search engine for duplicate content.

Start Your Internet Marketing Campaign Now

There is no better time to start using articles for your online marketing campaign. Get into action now, make your creative juices flow as you start producing articles for your internet marketing campaign. I perceive you are already having some ideas popping into your heart as you read this, jot down those ideas quickly to jumpstart your article writing momentum. With those benefits listed above, I believe I’ve been able to motivate you to start using articles as your affordable internet marketing tools. I’ll love to hear your views in the comment section. Cheers.