If you are using article marketing to promote yourself, your site or your product, there are three key elements you must understand before you hit the "submit" button. These are: branding, lead generation, and promotion.
1- Branding
In the days of the wild west, before people realized that good fences make good neighbors, cattle used to roam freely across the plains. To ensure that no one stole their cows, ranchers would brand them with the ranch's symbol, or logo. At certain times during the year, cowboys would go out and round up all the cattle for miles around. They could then be herded back to their home ranch and sold, eaten or mated.
Today, the internet is a bit like the wild west of days gone by. Thoughts, ideas, stories and news wander around, commingling freely with other bits of digital information. For anyone trying to make a living online, it is more important than ever to fix your brand on your own work. Why?
One of the obvious answers is that you don't want other people to steal your work. Another answer, though, is that you want your clients and potential clients to begin to know you (and your company, products, etc.) through your work.
What this means for article marketers is that every time you sit down to write, you need to make sure you are doing the best possible job you can. Put out drivel, and your "brand" will quickly become associated with drivel.
Think of it this way: If your goal in article marketing is to entice readers back to your own website, you have to give them a good reason to follow you home. Your articles are the teasers, the hint of what can be found at your own site.
Put out consistently good articles, rich with content that helps your readers, and your brand will be something you can be proud of.
2- Lead Generation
Of course, the main reason to employ article marketing is for lead generation. Readers who come across a quality article you've written are likely to follow your links back to your own site so they can read more. Hopefully, you've filled your own site with more quality content so that readers begin to recognize you as the leader in your niche and they return again and again.
Viewing your articles as a way to generate leads should encourage you to fill your writing with information your readers want and need. Don't hold back here. Give readers what they want. They, in turn, are then more likely to give you what you want - visitors to your site.
3- Promotion
Many writers think that putting out articles is the promotion they should be shooting for. After all, the more articles they put out, the more links back to their own site, right?
Right. But also short-sighted. Your real goal when article marketing should be to write such high-quality, content rich articles that they are picked up and redistributed by larger publishers with hundreds of thousands of readers.
When incorporating article marketing as a part of your overall promotion, you should look at the bigger picture. The quality of your articles will brand you in the eyes of your readers. Choose how you want them to see you (as an expert) and put out the content that will help them do so. Recognize that your articles are one the best possible forms of lead generation available to internet marketers and treat it with the seriousness that this aspect of your business deserves. Finally, don't view your articles as the end. Write them in such a way that they will encourage re-distribution and so that readers will benefit from them for years to come.
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