Information based marketing, writing articles and submitting them to directories, is one of the oldest and most effective techniques in getting targeted traffic to a website and converting the traffic in to sales.There are many tools available that makes it easier to submit articles to directories in order to maximize the exposure,but many people make mistakes that will cost them a lot in lost traffic and sales.
Lets look at 3 common mistakes people make when they submit articles to directories.
1.The reason to promote the articles vs. The reason to write articles
There are 3 key benefits of promoting articles: lead generation, branding and promotion it self. However, there is only 1 reason why you write an article and that reason is to inform your audience.
If the article is not focused on this primary and most important purpose, it will fail to achieve the three promotion benefits because no one will be interested in reading them.You need to figure out first how to get people to read what is in your article, then make them click on your resource box. You can achieve this by producing better contents.
2.The content does not help the readers
An article is meant to provide information that helps the reader to solve a problem.When you are writing articles, perhaps you are only thinking of the links you are getting back to your site, and not so much about what the content is all about.
The problem is that the article directories will not automatically accept your content.This also means you have to obey the standard guidelines, spell checks, researching on a good topic and even hiring a ghost writer to write good content on your behalf.Many people hire ghost writers to produce excellent content, everyone is not a talented writer, while others just hate writing.Submitting articles is so effective that people are willing to invest money in order to get the kind of content that other publishers would like to have in their publications.
Good and helpful articles get approved and other publishers will use them in their publications to their readers.If you want your article marketing to work for you, then you must write articles that publishers are looking for.
3.Promotional opportunities of article marketing
Many people fail to maximize the promotional opportunities of article marketing.Articles will help you generate links back to your site, but you can get a lot more visitors and much better search engine rankings from the same articles by mentioning keywords at strategic places.Start out with a plan and see to it that your article will serve the function that you intended it to have.
When it comes to article marketing, you are in charge! If you are looking for a little exposure from increased links back to your site quickly, or spending more time to make the article interesting by building it around one keyword for a chance of getting published to hundreds of thousands of people.
You may not be aware of the fact that an article submitted on directories is not meant to have the same level of exposure as highly-targeted content ones geared on a narrow group of people.Learn the difference between these two and it will surely help you know what kinds of articles to write and to submit.
What do you think? Leave a comment.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Linked to point 3 is that people forget that they can actually promote the articles which they write, through linking to it from other blogs, mentioning it in Yahoo Answers (when relevant) and promoting it on social media sites. This drives traffic to your article and more importantly builds links to the page, helping to increase its PageRank and subsequently the value of your backlink.