Article marketing is a powerful tool that can help you drive tons of highly targeted traffic to your site. It is one of the oldest and most effective techniques in online promotion.
While submitting articles to article directories may seem like an easy task, lots of bloggers get it completely wrong, to the point where they waste lots of time and money working on marketing campaigns that are totally fruitless.
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They commit mistakes that can easily be avoided. These mistakes can mean the difference between no traffic and lots of traffic that converts. To get the most out of your article marketing campaign, be sure to avoid the following 3 mistakes:
1. Failing to inform the audience about the main subject
An article written for the sole purpose of getting free traffic to your site using article directories should be different from your average article. When you are writing articles for the sole purpose of submitting them to article directories, the focus should be on branding, lead generation and promotion.
At the same time, your article should be informative enough to convey to the reader that you are indeed an authority and an expert in your niche, making them want to click your links and visit your site to get more of that information.
Whether the subject of your article is a product or a service you are promoting, a specific problem you are addressing, or whatever else, it shouldn’t read like a sales pitch. It has to inform the audience about the main subject. It has to give something of a value to the readers. Failing to get that right will leave you with no results.
2. Not using the right keywords
One of the biggest reasons why so many bloggers use article marketing is building quality one way backlinks. Not only you get backlinks from directories where you submit your articles to, you will also gain backlinks from sites that republish articles from article directories.
That’s all good and gravy, but your main reason for article marketing should be traffic. Quality article directories receive tons of targeted traffic. By submitting articles to article sites you are trying to divert the traffic that comes to those directories to your own site.
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To do that, you need to somehow rank your articles in the search engines as well as within hose directories, so when people search for terms covered in your articles, you articles are the ones showing up first.
To do that, you need to use relevant keywords in your article, letting search engines know what your article is about. A good rule of thumb would be to use your main keyword in 3 different places:
- In the title of your article.
- In the middle of your article.
- In the last sentence of your article.
Of course, you can use the keywords in other places in your article as well. You should also use lots of related keywords.
3. Writing content that doesn’t help the reader
Unfortunately, there is a big misconception about article marketing amongst many bloggers, especially beginners. They think that for their article marketing campaign to be effective, all they have to do is produce as many articles as they can without worrying about the quality of these articles and submitting them to directories.
That is the absolute worst way to do article marketing. Article marketing works only if you can give enough information to the reader that convinces them you are in fact an expert, and that by visiting your site, they will find the answer and solution to their problem.
Think of these articles as flyers for your business. You want to make the right first impression. Otherwise, non of those people who see your flyers are going to come to you when they need something that you have.
By writing compelling articles that are useful and problem solving, you are giving a taste of what’s about to come. Readers will be engorged to click on your links to get more of that useful information. And that is the ultimate goal of article marketing – driving traffic to your site and hopefully converting that traffic to sales.
The choice is yours, you can do article marketing just to gain a few back links from article directories and call it a day.
Or…
you can take your time, write quality and informative articles that will entice the reader to click on your links and visit your site for more, where (hopefully) you have everything in place to convert them to loyal readers of your blog that will buy products and services you promote. That is how you can make article marketing work for you!