Is Article Marketing Dead?

Since "Getting More Traffic to Your Website" has been the most viewed blog post of mine, I thought I'd add to the list of ways to accomplish that goal.

Article Marketing. No, it's not dead. Far from it. Article marketing is one of the best ways to accomplish a number of critical tasks:

1. Helps you establish yourself as an expert in your field.

2. Provides backlinks to your site from the many article directories that you submit the article to AND all of the websites that pick up your article to post on their site or blog.

3. Keeps you thinking about your market and up to date with their interests.

There are a few things to keep in mind that are important when distributing articles for marketing purposes.

1. Your article should have several slightly varied versions for distribution. This helps greatly in the area of testing titles, headlines, and content arrangement. Of course, the popularity of the article distribution site also will play into this.

2. Your article should be posted FIRST on your own website or blog and in the best format with the most information. The search engines "care" where the article is originally published. You are the author and creator of the article. Putting it on your own web property first will establish that the article "belongs" to you and that your site has the most thorough content.

3. Your "Resource box" at the end of your article should also be varied. Here's where you can tell people what you want them to know about you -- in brief. Also be sure to use anchor text in your links to your site. Meaning, use keywords, not simply the URL.

Article marketing is a great way to move up the search engine results as well as expose your message to a much larger audience. Use it and you'll see results.

Of course, using multiple avenues of marketing will give you greater results. Refer back to my blog post "Getting More Traffic to Your Website" for more ideas.

To Your Success!