subject: Did You Hear This Rumor About The Article Marketing Strategy? [print this page] A huge percentage of web site owners rely on their article marketing strategy to drive traffic and make sales. But recently, an increasing number of marketers who frequent business forums are convinced that article marketing is dead.
Why are they so convinced that this strategy is no longer working? What are they using to measure the potential success or failure of such a strategy?
It appears that they have determined that since it is not working for them, that is must be dead. On the other hand, they could be simply using this rumor as a marketing strategy of their own to drive away the competition.
If you think that using articles to promote your offers is a waste of time, here are some things to consider.
Any business strategy is only as good as the person implementing it. In other words, if you do not do an adequate job, you are sure to fail. Writing articles as a promotional tool involves a great deal of time and effort. You must be prepared to put in that effort or have the funds to hire someone to do it for you.
There are several elements to successful article marketing, among them:
1. keyword research 2. quality writing, unique content 3. maximize your work
Keyword Research
Many marketers do not get this part right and as a result, they do not get the results they expect from their marketing campaigns.
One mistake is to target main keywords, instead of long-tail keywords. These are keywords that are more than 3 words long. For instance, "weight loss" is an extremely broad and common keyword. "Safe weight loss tips" is more specific and less common. Find such keywords for your niche. Even if they do not have the searches of the common keywords, they will be more effective.
You will have less competition, which means when someone keys that phrase into the search engines, your article is more likely to appear at the top and get read.
Quality Writing, Unique Content
One reason articles are not as well read or accepted is that they are written poorly, either by people who cannot write or because they have come out of a spinner. Spun articles are terrible and easy to spot by the poor grammar and nonsense paragraphs.
Write proper articles on popular topics and provide valuable unique content that your readers will appreciate, especially if they answer a specific problem. This quality writing will be picked up by article directories more readily.
Maximize Your Work
It takes work to write an article, so make the most of it. Write your main article and get it out to the directories. But don't stop there. Break the article down into smaller bites and create a couple of blog posts. Use them as comments in other people's blogs in response to questions that your posts answer.
If you wonder if your article marketing strategy is going to die along with everyone else's, keep these points in mind. It's only dead when it is done incorrectly.
