Article Marketing
The Scoop on Article Marketing: How and Why
Before we get into the How, let’s discuss the Why.
Article Marketing is one of many great examples of Attraction Marketing. Attraction Marketing can briefly be described as Expertise Marketing at its best. You will be giving away (yes for free)
information to your potential clients so they see that you are an expert in your field and thus should be consulted when they are in need of any future information, and then hired when they want to act on that information. Now most people who have never tried this are concerned they will be giving away their product/service and losing money. Wrong. You are not giving away nything.
You are gaining your client’s trust and are actually much further ahead than the competitor that says, “Hi, my name is John, how do you like me so far? Here’s my card…call me.” Would you call them? I wouldn’t…never have, and never will. Wouldn’t you be more inclined to call the person that has already given you the information you were looking for and left you with the feeling that they must have much more information for you. After all, nobody in business would give away all their information for free. They must have much more, and based on the free info, I would be more than willing to buy it from them. Keep this in mind, you are not giving away the farm…just a few bushels of the produce.
Writing a book can be very effective as well, and I can personally attest to that. For our purposes here, we will be discussing how to use Article Marketing to make the attraction come into play.
So what is Article Marketing and how do I do it?
Article Marketing is a means by which the business owner writes essays/articles on a topic of interest, with the main purpose of using it as a presentation to prospective clients showing off their expertise. Once written, this article can be distributed across the internet as links and/or postings on blogs, websites, e-zines and more. Sometimes you will pay for the privilege, but most often you will find this process can be done for free. How’s that for effective advertising? On top of that, keep in mind that this would be delivered to focused markets. This means your readers will be pre-qualified as well. Now the “how do I do it” part is mostly a matter of following a few basic rules:
- In order to prove you are an expert in your
field, you must deliver great content
to the reader. If you deliver a fluff
piece, with a request for them to contact you for more, the reader will assume
you will only provide them with more “fluff” when if they do contact you. Throw them more than one apple from your
farm. - Don’t, I repeat, don’t, sell them anything in
your content…except yourself. You can sell
them the orchard later when they are ready to buy. They are not ready yet. - Submit your article(s) to one or more of the
many Article Directories found online.
Content is king, keep that in mind when you are writing and resist the urge to say, “call me for more information”. If you do, you will turn off the reader. There are two reasons why people are
online. First, is to get information and answers to questions. The second is to buy. They usually end up buying from the site that provided the information, so provide good info, without a sales
pitch, and you will makes sales.
But I thought I was doing this to make sales.
Yes, that is the ultimate goal, but the articles are the path. Think of it this way, when a landscape designer lays out the paths, they are in a sense controlling the direction the walker takes. This will work the same way for you. The articles you write, will act like a path straight to your door. Just be ready at the door for your visitors.
Now, how do they get to your website/blog to make the sales? Easy, at the end of the articles, you will provide a Resource Section. Every Article Directory has a different way of handling this, but essentially they all work the same. They are links to your blog, website, book, etc…, that are the next step in both increasing you credibility as well as getting them closer to becoming a client of yours.
One of the goals is to get your article(s) published on more than one site/location. Most, if not all, publishers don’t want to pass out sales literature for you. If you put links to you in the body of the article, it will look as a sales piece and turn off most publishers, and leave your article in the directory…all dressed up and nowhere to go.
Article Marketing is about generating pre-qualified traffic, not making direct sales, so the more times you are republished at different locations, the more visible you are. Also, this will help your SEO.
