An Articles Marketing Strategy For Business Success

This is a RED Alert – anyone who tells you that an articles marketing strategy needs to be complicated, hard to execute, or difficult to implement is lying to you.

Maybe they are selling some sort of articles marketing strategy “solution” or perhaps they tried driving qualified pre-sorted traffic to their web site using articles and it didn’t work.

And rather than admit that they could not execute a very simple strategy – they told you it was too hard. These people are like the folks selling “the earth is flat” story just because they did not understand how it was possible for the earth to be round.

I remember the first time I heard the expression, “we’re making good time, but we’re heading in the wrong direction” as if speed was an excuse for accuracy. Before the Internet, discovering exactly who was interested in what you were selling was, for those of us with limited budgets, very difficult – really hit or miss. Unless, that is, you were an analytical person who would invest the time to do the market research.

For most entrepreneurs and small business owners this was unlikely to happen because momentum is in their blood. Many of us feel comfortable only when we are in motion. If we’re going the wrong way we always think we can make the adjustments and get back on track more easily than if we are sitting there trying to figure out the right way to go.

Research. Today we can do our market research in minutes using tools that never existed, or at least were not affordable for us, until now. The Internet marketers call it keyword research because people identify what they are looking for based on the keyword phrases they use – those words we plug into the search engines every day.

The experts say that 90% of the information that is retrieved from the Internet comes from search engine results. So, if we know exactly who we are looking for and what keyword phrases they will be using when they are searching for what we are selling – then all we have to do is be right there on the first page of Google for those results.

Keyword research may tell you that your niche is not big enough or the people are not searching on the words and phrases you thought they’d be using. Your web site might be number one based on a completely irrelevant search phrase that no one – but you – thinks is the right one. Or your research did not point out that the sites that are ranking for the broad match search you have chosen are sites like Amazon.com or ESPN – sites you will never ever be able to rank well against.

If you have done an excellent job of researching the keywords that people use when looking for what you are selling – you can write articles of value around that keyword phrase and post those articles on web sites with more traffic than you’ll ever have. Every article everybody writes and posts on a web site like EzineArtilces becomes like a little magnet for you – attracting people to your web site. Write your articles to attract the right people for the right reasons.

Execution: On the Internet content is king bla bla bla. We’ve heard this so many times some people actually believe it. Content, original content is what it’s all about. If your articles marketing strategy is composed of public domain junk, other people’s content, or the worthless articles you can buy by the train load – your articles marketing strategy will fail and you and your company will be diminished in the process.

There are so many tools around – article templates to help you create articles that follow consistent patterns and article writing services to name only two – there is no excuse for putting up junk with your name on it. Writing a nice article may take a little longer but it will be around forever. If your mother called and said that her best friend came across one of your articles, would you be proud or embarrassed? That is the test isn’t it?

Distribution. For an articles marketing strategy to have the results you’re looking for – results that make the investment worthwhile, the articles have to be read by as many of the right people as possible for as long as possible in as many places as possible. Doing the keyword and market research is critical – because it will help you focus your articles in the right direction. Creating, or getting someone to create, well reasoned original content will make your mother proud and will provide the search engines something worthwhile to serve when the keyword searches happen.

And jump starting the process by having each article posted on literally hundreds of web sites with thousands of readers and subscribers who tell their friends and colleagues about your story – maybe they send them the link, etc. A single article can be on a thousand web sites, a dozen articles can be on several thousand web sites and a hundred articles can be … you get the idea.

When I finish this article I will submit it to two very large article distribution services, announce it to a dozen or so social media sites, and add it on my blog – which posts it to a few more social media sites. And all of that promotion takes less than a half hour.

Your articles marketing strategy can be up and running in no time and if you do the keyword market research you’ll  not only be attracting visitors to your web site – you will be inviting the right visitors, buyers ready and willing to spend money with you.