Article marketing is part of life as an Internet marketer. It is a way to promote and ultimately make money. When embarking on an article writing campaign, it is helpful to understand why you are doing it. The three reasons for article marketing are:
1. Direct sellingrn2. Capturing Trafficrn3. Getting Back Links
If you are trying to monetize, the real purpose of article writing is getting word out there and putting a link out there for people to click on. This link will take them to a sales page or site where they can purchase products.
In the first case, you can use article marketing for promoting products directly. That is instead of providing a link to a site which you own, you use instead an affiliate link. the affiliate link goes directly to the sales page of the vendor. The purpose of the article is to captured the audience from the search engine. Then through effective writing, you convinced the visitor to click the link. If the visitor purchases the product from the vendor then you receive a commission.
The challenge with this approach is that most article directories will not allow direct affiliate links. Some will let you redirect through a top level domain to the vendor sales page, but most even do not do that. Then even if they do let you link to the vendor, they may not approve of the landing page.
If you can find a product with the right criteria, this can be an effective technique for generating revenue. The downside is that you have to constantly write articles to generate traffic.
An alternate, but similar approach is to direct the visitor to your own landing page. With your own landing page, you control the content and what you choose to sell. You are still using article writing to get the traffic, but you have control of the visitor when they click the article link.
When you direct traffic to a landing page, you have the opportunity to pre-sell them, capture their names for a mailing list or perhaps just subscribe to a blog. What you do with that traffic is completely up to you.
The final method is simply about collecting back links to help promote a page. You promote a page to help it improve in the search engine rankings for given keywords. In general, your listing will appear more relevant for certain keywords if the landing page has copy which is relevant to the keywords. Your search engine rankings for a page improve when you can get multiple links from different sites all over the internet.
You can do this with
article marketing. The articles have to relate to the theme of the page to which they are linking. And, the text in these article links must contain the keywords for which you are trying to rank. By submitting articles to multiple directories, the search engine rankings will improve.
So, when you are about to embark on an article writing campaign, you need to decide on the goal. Are you going to direct sell, drive traffic or improve your search engine rankings. Then write for that strategy.