Why Article Marketing Should Be Part of Your Marketing Strategy

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If you’ve done any research of online marketing methods, I’m sure you’ve heard about article marketing. But have you considered why you should add it as a tool to your online marketing kit?

After all, writing articles can take a lot of time, and not just the writing or editing part. To do it properly, you need to do keyword research first and that in and of itself can be a time consuming task unless you have a specific tool for the job.

So why SHOULD you consider article marketing as part of your overall strategy?

In order to answer that question, a little bit must be said about why people buy. Generally speaking people do not buy because they love spending money. They buy something that will solve a specific problem. And they absolutely hate to be sold to, preferring it be their own idea to buy.

Your job then, is not to sell to them but to make it so they believe they are the ones that came up with the idea to buy from you. This is know as “attraction marketing.” Let’s say for instance, your potential customer needs to drill a hole. What you want to do is show them the best method to get the hole they want by positioning yourself as an expert on all things “hole-y.” If you can do this, then your customer will buy your drill. A far better method than trying to compete with other drill sellers on features or price. Remember, people want better, faster and don’t necessarily care about features. Give them tips, show them best practices and they will convince themselves to buy your drill.

So what does the above story have to do with article marketing? Simple. The purpose of article marketing is twofold: first, you are branding yourself as the expert in your field, by giving away solid useful information for free and second, you will generate long term traffic based on your keyword research. There are articles I’ve written years ago that still pull in traffic and sales.

Finally, article marketing is one of the cheapest forms of traffic available. Don’t have time to write? Outsource. There are many freelance sites with writers available to do the work.

The beauty of this method is the fact that once you’ve written your articles and submitted them to article directories such as GoArticles or Ezine Articles, they can be re-purposed into any number of different materials, from a blog, to a Squidoo lens, and you can social bookmark them to generate even more traffic. You can also use them as a basis for videos and upload your videos to Youtube. In short you can use the articles that you write for many different facets of your marketing plan. And of course you can (and should) post all your articles to an archive section of your site.

Article marketing is not and should not be a “once only” method of traffic generation. To truly see the benefits, it needs to be an ongoing, consistent practice. True, article marketing does take some effort, but the results you will see will make it worth your while.

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