subject: Make Article Marketing a Part of Your Website Marketing Strategy [print this page] Go ahead and call me biased if you want to but, in my opinion, no matter what your website marketing strategy is it needs to include article marketing. After all, why do most people come to the Internet to begin with? Yes, we all hope that they come here to buy something. But in the beginning they come here for information about what it is they want to buy. And where do they find that information? In articles. Articles posted in directories and articles posted on your blog or website. If you aren't including article marketing in your website marketing strategy you are seriously missing the boat.
Let's use the fact that you're reading this article as an example. Maybe you're not currently doing any type of article marketing but you've heard about it somewhere. You've heard how it can help increase your traffic and you know that more traffic equals better sales. And you realize that article marketing is going to cost you something - either time, writing and submitting the articles yourself, or money, to pay someone else to do it. So before you make that investment of time or money, what are you doing? You're looking for information to see if that investment will pay off. You're looking for information before you spend either time or money. And you're finding that information in an article.
Any effective website marketing strategy involves increasing your presence on the web so that more people can easily find your site. You build backlinks by bookmarking and submitting your site itself to the various online directories. You interact on the social networks and forums to get the word out. But all you're doing there is generating links to your site. Which is all well and good - the more paths you have leading back to your website, the easier it is for people to find you. But a link is just that - it's a path. And a lot of people won't follow a path unless they know where it's taking them. They want to know that the information they're looking for is going to be at the end of that path otherwise they're just going to look for an alternate path.
When you submit your article to a directory it gets it's own URL - it's own address on the web. Which means your article will now show up, with it's own address, in the search engine indexes. Over 80% of people who come to the internet looking for information use the search engines to find it. They don't go to bookmarking sites or social networks or forums. When they want specific information they type it into their search engine. And the index they get back is generally a listing of articles - not bookmarks and backlinks. So when a searcher sees your article there on the index, they know they're going to be able to find the information they want if they follow that path.
Of course you'd rather have the searcher come directly to your website but it's not always possible to compete for every single keyword just by posting articles to your blog or website. Your site may be too new or there may be sites ahead of you that have a much higher rank and authority. And you may never be able to compete for that top spot - on your own. But that's where article marketing really comes into play.
The better article directories have extremely high page ranks and carry a lot of authority with the search engines. Your blog may have zero page rank on it's own and it could take you months to get to even PR1 or PR2. But when you submit your article to a high ranking directory your article gets the benefit of the higher PR and moves up the index a lot faster than your blog will. While searchers may not see your site for months - or EVER - your article can be at the top of the index in a matter of days due to the benefit of the PR that it's getting from the directory.
Your article is also a much better path back to your website than a simple bookmark or Tweet because searchers see the valuable information you've included in it and know that if they follow the links in your resource box they'll find out even more. As internet marketing continues to evolve it becomes more and more important that you provide your visitors with quality, informative content. And if you don't, someone else will. If you want to compete in this growing arena, then you need to make article marketing a part of your website marketing strategy today.
