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Article marketing is the concept of writing short articles about subjects relating to a specific field of interest or industry. Articles are written and made available for free publication and distribution. Well-written articles can generate considerable web traffic and author credibility in his or her respective market. A resource or author bio box at the end of the article will introduce the reader to the author and give specific instructions on how to interact with the author beyond reading the article.
Articles are generally written with a slant towards search engine optimization. Specific keywords will generally be repeated in the title of the article and throughout the body of text. Articles are most often targeted at a specific audience with the goal of introducing or leading the reader to more information provided by the author. The authors call to action in the resource box will lead the reader beyond the article and potentially convert the reader into a buyer of products or service, opt-in to a newsletter or mailing list, or another activity benefiting the author and reader alike. Article marketing has proven to increase sales and opt-in rates.
The article author will provide links in the article and resource box leading the reader to other offerings provided by the author. These links back to the authors personal or business website will help in the search engine ranking process for the author. The links, which use targeted key words as anchor text, or the text in which the link is placed in the article, will key the search engines as to what the authors site is about and what keyword terms the search engines should rank the authors web site for. Essential items to include in an article research box include, author name, author title, website address, information about your business and website and a specific call to action aimed at the reader.
Articles can be manually submitted to article directories or the author can employ an auto submission service to distribute the articles amongst the article directories. The directories publish the articles and make them available to website and e-zine or newsletter publishers. Many of the top article directories receive millions of visits per month to their web sites and are favored by the major search engines in introducing new and unique content to the web.
RSS or Real Simple Syndication provides another means of getting the article into the hands of publishers and will improve article exposure rates. RSS is a format that allows readers with an RSS reader to subscribe to the author’s works. RSS also allows publishers to receive content via RSS feeds for the purpose of re-publishing.
Article marketing has proven effective in helping an author gain credibility within his niche, improve website traffic via internal links from articles, potentially improve search engine rankings for the authors website, increase opt-in rates to e-zines, newsletters and other mailing lists, and make sales of products and affiliate products the author represents. Article marketing enables an author to target a specific audience of interested readers.
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