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Articulate: Article Marketing

Posted on 02. Jun, 2009 by admin in E-Marketing

Online mar­ket­ing forms the foun­da­tion of both Search Engine Mar­ket­ing and Search Engine Opti­miza­tion. And while online mar­ket­ing is only one sliver of an online pres­ence — it should be noted that there are other forms of online mar­ket­ing that can be quite effec­tive at rais­ing your pro­file and increas­ing your rep­u­ta­tion. One such undis­cov­ered gem is the prac­tice of arti­cle writ­ing which can be seen as arti­cle marketing.

Whether you do it your­self or press into ser­vice a col­league or an avail­able expert, it doesn’t mat­ter, what does mat­ter is that you pro­duce rel­e­vant mate­r­ial that will leave the reader with a sense of grat­i­tude and asso­ciate your name and brand with valu­able infor­ma­tion. Let’s look at it this way – your orga­ni­za­tion spe­cial­izes in XYZ, and while there are a num­ber of well-established firms offer­ing XYZ ser­vices, you want to rise above the rest because you’ve been doing XYZ since the begin­ning of time and you’re tired of being lost in the pack. If you were to start peck­ing away at the key­board and pour out your years of ser­vice to XYZ you might be sur­prised at the vol­ume of valu­able infor­ma­tion that will flow out of your ner­vous fingers.

But wait – I know what you are going to say – I have all this valu­able infor­ma­tion that I’ve spent a life­time acquir­ing and you want me to post it to the Web so my com­peti­tors can take it for noth­ing? Yes – and here’s why. Your com­peti­tors may take some infor­ma­tion, let them have it, but to the vast major­ity of online users, you will be asso­ci­at­ing your name, your company’s name, and your brand with the defin­i­tive body of knowl­edge on XYZ. Remem­ber, a body of knowl­edge that has rel­e­vance to the wider com­mu­nity is one very pow­er­ful method of build­ing trust with cus­tomers, and writ­ing arti­cles is one method that any­one can do to help build this body of knowl­edge. Even if you only post the mate­r­ial to your own web­site, if the mate­r­ial is sound, oth­ers will link to it and thereby drive tar­geted traf­fic to your site.

There are sev­eral ben­e­fits to arti­cle mar­ket­ing. Firstly, you build busi­ness cred­i­bil­ity by grow­ing your rep­u­ta­tion as an expert in your field. Your voice, and there­fore your brand, become asso­ci­ated with reli­able mate­r­ial that users find usable, and like I men­tioned ear­lier, you get inbound links that increase your reliance to search engines which ulti­mately nets you get bet­ter search engine positions.

If you wish to have your site opti­mized, the SEO firm should be able to pro­vide you with a report of your arti­cle activ­ity. You will be amazed at how far one col­lec­tion of words can travel. For a good overview of arti­cle mar­ket­ing, visit the good folks at Wikipedia.

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