Is Writing Articles Still An Effective Promotional Tool - It All Depends On Your Article Marketing S

by Kevin H. Internet Marketing

What type of article marketing strategies do you use? Many people, including new internet marketers are wondering if writing articles is still effective at promoting their sites. The answer is yes and no.

First, you need to understand that article marketing has been around longer then the internet. Newspapers have been using a form of article marketing for decades and you can still see evidence of this today, just pick up a local paper and read any one of the national or international stories. Take look at the bottom of each story and notice the source of the article. Newspapers syndicate their top stories with the hopes that other newspapers will pick it up and print it. Of course, just like article marketing, the source of the story must remain intact to give credit to the author or journalist.

Now, when article marketing began its run on the internet, it was not how you see it today. Article marketing started out like mini blog sites. One reference to them was article sites and today they are referred to as directories with huge archives full of articles from the past twenty years. These mini article sites were a great place for budding writers, novelists, dreamers and thinkers to upload some of their work and share with others who felt a passion in whatever topic they were writing about. It's pretty neat how these mini article sites evolved into the first web-logs or journals and eventually into the massive networking of blogs and social sharing sites of today.

When internet marketing entered the arena and took hold of using articles to promote businesses, a whole new concept of advertising was made available. Ten or fifteen years ago the amount of users online was nothing in comparison to that of today. There was no such thing as article marketing strategies; you didn't need one, simply because traffic was already being funneled there due to the popularity and viral nature of the article sites. You could easily say that article sites or directories were the only game in town.

Now, overtime the article directories started losing their so-called popularity, especially when people had other sources to display their material on such as, the online journals and the web-logs. However, this didn't stop the internet marketers from using articles as a free source of advertising and promotion. In fact, many of the top gurus that you see online today all used article marketing in one form or another to jump start their careers.

Today, it is a whole new ball game and if you don't have some kind of article marketing strategies in place, your articles are not going to be as effective as you think. Also, article marketing is only one aspect of affiliate marketing or internet marketing. Article marketing will not work or perform as well by itself. If you think of writing articles in terms of supporting an online business, that's great. But, it is not intended to substitute any other form of content marketing, advertising or promotion, especially with the increased competition on the internet today.

That doesn't mean that writing articles can't be an effective strategy to generate traffic, create awareness and build credibility with you and your business. Articles do have a way of attracting targeted visitors, so long as the content fills the need of your readers. Also, article marketing is not in anyway dead like many marketers think; it just needs to be done correctly in order to reap the benefits from it. Articles can still provide an efficient way to promote any page on the internet, as long as certain measures are incorporated.

Let's take a look at several article marketing tips that will help you outline some article marketing strategies for your own online business.

The content of your articles is probably the most important thing that you need to worry about. Some people believe that it is better to write their articles for the search engines and not the humans that will actually be reading them. Don't make this mistake, write your content for human eyes first and then optimize your articles accordingly by adding your primary keywords gently. Over stuffing your articles with useless keywords is considered spam. Concentrate on delivering content that will benefit your readers by providing them with content that is informative, useful and sometimes entertaining.

The next important issues are the titles of your articles. Many top writers agree that the best titles incorporate some kind of question such as, how to, why, where and so on. Make every effort to include your primary keyword in the title and this is an important article marketing tip: the longer the title the better.

The same primary keyword used in your title should be used in the first sentence of your article. If you want to worry about optimizing your articles, having your primary keyword in the title and in the first sentence of your article is extremely important.

The resource box is probably the area of any article marketing strategy that most marketers pay attention to. However, many writers still make mistakes with this when trying to increase their SEO by building backlinks. Some article directories will allow an author up to four links in the resource box and some marketers will direct all four links to the same page. Avoid doing this, especially if you use the same keywords in the anchor text. Why? It is considered spam by the search engines. The best way to do it is to use different keywords in your anchor text and point to different pages on your website or blog.

Never use the resource box to sell your products. There is a difference between selling and promoting. Also, never link to a product through an affiliate link from the resource box as this tactic is not very effective, at least not for you. If anyone gains from this it will be the merchant who will end up with another subscriber.

If you write additional articles with the same topic, take one primary article and have the other articles link to it from each of their resource boxes in the same directory. This will give the link in the primary article that points to your website more link juice.

Take one article that you have written and create a link to your site then post it on one of the top directories such as, ezinearticles, goarticles, articledashboard, article city, search warp or article base. These are just some good examples, but there are many more that you can choose from, just make sure that they have a page rank of 3 or higher. The reason for this is that the search engine spiders visit these directories often, which simply means that your article will get indexed faster. Goarticles does a good job with this. Once you publish your article it will be live and listed on your author page, but it will not show to the general public for at least a day. By then, especially with Google, your article will be indexed.

Next, take that same article and rewrite it several times and submit them to other directories and make a link to your primary article that you submitted above. This strengthens the backlink that you have in the primary article that points to your website.

Now, there is one more thing that you can do with the primary article you submitted above to help build a wave of traffic to it. This is an excellent article marketing strategy and one that many are not aware of. You can ping your primary article just like you do with your blog posts, just make sure that it is your primary article which is the original one. I use a free pinging service for this called pingler.

Okay, so now you have some further information for your own article marketing strategies that will make your articles a little more effective.