Whether you run a business totally online, or you operate a bricks-and-mortar business and have a promotional website, you should consider “article marketing”. If you aren't marketing your business with articles, you're missing a huge chunk of the marketing pie. Let me give you a few reasons why.

Firstly, article marketing is low cost. Every business owner knows that advertising isn't cheap. Every newspaper or magazine ad you run costs you dearly. By spending just a little extra time writing and submitting several articles each month, you'll save quite a bit of money. And writers are often less costly than paying for a team of advertising “creatives”.

Branding your business
Article marketing also helps to brand your business. Have you ever wondered how some businesses seem to become so well known in such a short amount of time? They're getting their name out there. They're giving away something of value for free to their potential customers. Your articles will brand your business and make it a well-known name.

For this reason, article marketing makes you, or your key employees, an expert. If you write articles about the subjects you know well, you'll quickly become known as an expert in your field. Do you run a website on bird watching? Writing and submitting fifty articles on bird watching will show people that you know what you're talking about.

When you do submit articles, they create back links to your website. Without getting into the technical details of this, back links to your website are good and you'll want lots of them. Back links help boost your rankings in the search engines, thus gaining more exposure for your website.

Remember that article marketing isn't the cure-all answer to advertising your business; it's one piece of the pie. It requires persistence and patience. You should plan to spend a certain number of hours each week writing and submitting articles to promote your business. Pencil in this time faithfully and stick to it. Within a few months (maybe even a few short weeks!), you'll begin to see the results of your hard work pay off.

Making article writing easy
Many people I speak to equate article writing with onerous tasks such as writing school or university essays. The memories of the pain involved in this form of writing can take time to fade away. The good news is that after learning a few simple steps, writing your own articles isn't as hard as it appears.

Once you have decided on a general area, a good way to narrow the topic down is to focus on the problems that people have. Typically, people read articles because they want to be entertained or they want information. Writing entertaining articles is a particular and more difficult skill. However, writing informative articles can be as simple as sharing tips that you have learned.

You will probably already know the common problems that people have in your particular field, but if not, a good source of information is to look at related online forums and note the most common questions asked. If you don't have all the answers a small bit of research can assist. Often the answers are readily available with a Google search which the readers could do themselves. However, you are adding value and convenience by providing a range of answers in a single document.

Articles online can also be as short as 400 words long, so they aren’t as onerous as school or university essays. If you break the article into an introduction, a small number of sub-headings and a conclusion you may only have to write about 100 words in each section, making it even easier to write.

The first draft should be for your eyes only. Don't try to produce a final copy as you write. It tends to be much quicker to get your thoughts down and come back to edit later. The final step in the writing process is to proofread your article making sure that the writing flows and would be interesting to the reader. Ask yourself, 'does the article provide information the potential reader is looking for?’ It can also be helpful to have someone else proofread the article. This is also the time to remove spelling and grammatical errors.

Once you have written your article you should add it to your own web site, as well as submit it to article directories. Article submission can be a tedious process, but software and websites that can submit to multiple directories in one go exist to make the job much easier.

After writing your first few articles you will find it is not as daunting as it first appears. You never know, you may even want to offer your services as a freelance writer on the Internet as a way to make some extra income...!

Generating ideas for article
So just how do you come up with ideas for your next article? Here are several suggestions that may help...

Hang out in online forums. Watch what people are talking about. Look at the questions they are asking. The topics that are bringing the greatest number of visitors would make for an excellent article.

Watch TV. Take a look at what information is being broadcast on TV, radio, newspapers, and online. This information is usually a hot topic.

Read blogs. What are people posting about? What kind of comments are they leaving? What questions do they have? Blogs are the hot internet marketing medium right now and you can literally find them everywhere on any topic. This is an excellent source for your next article idea.

Take polls. Survey your current customers or website visitors. Ask them what kind of article they would like to see in your next ezine or published on your website.

Check bookstores online. What are the top sellers? This can be a good way to come up with an article that catches the attention of what people are reading.

Be seasonal. Write about what is going on that time of year. Holidays, festivals, sports, graduations, etc. all make for an article that someone will want to read.

Be fashionable. Write an article about a current fad. There is always something that is hot at the time and could make for interesting reading from you.

Take notes. Keep track of what your customers and prospects are asking you. If you get an email or phone call with a question this may make for a good article. Others may have the same question, but are afraid to ask it.

File things. Start a swipe file on what others are writing about. If it is of interest to you it will probably be of interest to others. Never plagiarise the work of others, but you can certainly get good ideas this way. The biggest benefit of a swipe file is having it handy to refer back to over and over whenever you are ready to write your article and are not sure what you want to write about.

Hopefully this will give you some ideas on how to come up with your next article. The online business that has interesting articles has a huge leg up on their competition. If you can master this strategy you will be amongst the top of your profession or industry.

Labels: marketing, web

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