Digital Marketing Training Week 13 Steps to Article Marketing

Share your article content on your Company’s social media pages like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn.

Task 13: 3 Steps to Article Marketing This week, spend a few hours to create a successful article marketing strategy for your web business.

Why is this important? ▪ It is an effective, inexpensive way of brand and link building. ▪ It builds fresh content for your site that helps you rank higher in search engine results. ▪ Articles create an additional informational resource for your site visitors. ▪ Other sites can link to your content thus bringing in a unique and natural link profile to your website.

Step #1: Publish Content on Your Site Ask your web developer to include a blog page on your site. ▪ This must be hosted on your main website and not on a separate one. ▪ Have a link to your blog page on your home page or provide a preview of the recent article topics in a corner of your home page. Research trending keywords that relate to your products, services or industry concepts in Google Trends. ▪ The keywords should be long-tail (more than two words) as these bring in targeted web visitors. ▪ Hyperlink the keywords in your content to the related pages on your website. For example, if you write an article on 10 Quick Ways to Tone Your Abs, link it to your page that sells ab workout products rather than the home page. Build good content. ▪ Write on service or product related queries, just like an FAQ. ▪ Build content on recent trends in your industry. ▪ Build content with informational resources such as tips, how-to’s, checklists, lists of useful tools and so on. ▪ Add relevant images, screenshots, infographics or videos to your content. ▪ Ideal length should be between 600-1000 words. Here is an example of a website that displays a blog feed on the home page:

Example of a Website that has the Latest Blogs Displayed on the Home Page

Step #2: Get your Content Indexed ▪ Share your article content on your Company’s social media pages like Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. ▪ Bookmark your content on social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Redditand Delicious. It takes up to 24 hours for your content to be indexed by search engines. Check this by searching for the title of your content. If it shows up it means your content has been indexed.

Step #3: Publish your Content on Article Sites Start with Ezinearticles and publish your content ‘as is’ on their site. After your content is published on Ezinearticles submit it to the following sites: * Squidoo * HubPages * Technorati * GoArticles * Buzzle * Suite101 * BrightHub * Gather * IdeaMarketers * InfoBarrel * Find some more sites here. NOTE: If sites do not accept your content as it is, try changing the first paragraph a little bit then submit again. Refrain from using content spinning software that automatically spins words to publish seemingly unique content to each article site. Rephrase a bit of your original content manually so that it always makes perfect sense. Then submit the slightly different articles to different sites. You may not get published by all the sites you submit to but aim for at least ten.

Points to Remember: ▪ Your aim with article marketing must be gaining online exposure to your content rather than just link building. Most of these popular article sites have an audience base of their own. Your content has a higher chance of web exposure if published on these sites. ▪ Article marketing is a time consuming process. Writing unique content for each article site can take a while, however, this technique reaps a lot of SEO benefits as well as brand building advantages which display your expertise in your niche. ▪ Identify marketing personnel that can write consistently on topics of consumer interest. You can hire freelance writers from sites like Guru, Freelancer or many other sites listed here. Content marketing is the most happening SEO strategy, so investing a bit of your time and money will be absolutely worth it. ▪ Never make your content sound promotional. ▪ Submit your content to the correct category on the article sites ▪ You can send the content to your email subscribers with a link to the original article. ▪ Make sure to add social share buttons to your content. ▪ If your blog becomes well known, content scrapers may syndicate your articles. If you find these syndicators via a simple Google search of your article title and see that they have not credited your content with a link back to your site, send a polite email asking them to do so. ▪ Link your Google+ profile to the article/blog page on your website.

Resources for Further Learning: Blog Article: A Step-By-Step Guide to Effective Article Marketing Blog Article: 5 Simple Steps to Dominate Article Marketing Video: Is Article Marketing Dead?