Writing and marketing online articles is probably the most effective and cost-efficient way to publicise your website and promote your products and services online. The internet is a printing press with an insatiable appetite for expertly written articles. There are literally millions of websites and ezines begging for good articles. They want good articles submitted to them. They even scour websites on the internet for permission to use articles.
So how do you know which websites to choose?
In my years of experience and many conversations with the best internet marketers, you need to use a 3-step approach to article marketing to have the greatest impact:
1. the large article directories such as Ezinearticles.com, Goarticles.com, Ideamarketers.com and Articledashboard.com.
2. smaller niche directories that are related to your content.
3. niche ezine and website publishers who need and want high quality, related content that adds value to their website or email newsletter.
My consulting clients often ask me: "What's the best way to find the ezines and websites that are read the most so that my article gets the most attention?" This shouldn't be the first question you ask yourself. Yes, you want to find websites that are highly visited and ezines that are most read - but more importantly, you want to focus on finding websites and ezine publishers in your particular niche that have a strong emotional connection with their audience. Most likely, you already visit their websites or subscribe to their ezines. If you don't know who publishes a great ezine related to your niche, there are numerous ezine directories online such as bestezines.com that can help you.
Other strategies are:
- Research your competitors - where are articles published? - Carry out a Google search. Just type in your industry or article topic followed by the words article submission. This is how I got our client's book to #2 on the NY Times bestseller list. I typed "health article submissions", "medical article submissions" and "thyroid dysfunctions article submissions" into Google and discovered (among many other sites) the contact information of an editor from About.com - one of the top 50 sites on the web. After receiving the submission, the editor sent an email to her entire list with a book promotion that brought Mark Hyman MD 1500 additional opt-in subscribers and significantly higher sales in just one day.
- Think about which organisations your target audience might belong to. If you, like our client Mac McIntosh, are a sales enquiry expert, then the likelihood that your target audience belongs to an organisation like the American Marketing Association is very, very high. With more than 200,000 registered users and more than 2 million visits per year from a variety of influential decision makers, Mac McIntosh's upcoming article on the American Marketing Association's website is a great opportunity to connect with the marketing community.
- And don't forget to check the websites of magazines in your niche. More and more publications are looking for fresh, new content for their website to drive traffic and sell more print magazines in the long run. This constant updating of articles that can only be found on the website and not in their print publications means more opportunities for writers and experts. An article written by you and published on websites like Entrepreneur Magazine and Mothering Magazine will give your business the exposure and credibility it needs.
Follow these strategies and you will have a solid article marketing campaign.
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