• Just get started, and
• Make sure that your articles are always high quality.

Getting Your Article Marketing Strategy Started

So … you know you need an article marketing strategy, but you don’t know where to start? The good news is it’s not as hard as you might think. The most important part of any article marketing strategy is that you just begin to do it in the first place, then make it a consistent habit to write and publish your articles on a regular basis.

So many business owners know that they need to be doing article marketing to grow their business online, but something else always seems to take priority.

The second most important thing about your article marketing strategy (besides just doing it at all ) it to be certain that you do it well. Many people go through all the difficulty of building a great article marketing strategy, planning all the different directories that they’re going to submit to and how frequently they’re going to submit, and so on and so on . And then, when they actually submit their articles, their articles are too short, poorly written, and full of spelling and grammatical errors.

By not taking care to put well-crafted content in your articles, and then checking them to make sure that they’re free of spelling and grammatical errors, you’ve just wasted all of the time and effort that you spent putting together your article marketing strategy. If your article is bad, it will not get approved, and your article marketing strategy will have failed before it actually had an opportunity to get off the ground.

Once you have added solid content to your articles then you can start to work on the logistics of your article marketing strategy. And truly, the best strategy, if you’re just starting out, is to find someone who is able to say what they are doing and has found tactics (and built tools) to make executing your article marketing strategy much easier and less time consuming for you.

So, now you have great content for your article and you have found a way to get your articles out there that’s faster than having to do it all by hand. Now, you’re ready for the next step of your article marketing strategy: getting your articles out there.

There are several article directories that you can submit your articles to; one of the largest and most popular article directories is Ezine Articles. You may also want to search for specific niche directories and social networking sites that you can submit your articles to; it all depends on the nature of what you are marketing. For example, if you promote green products or sustainable technologies, then an online community like EarthHuddle.com can offer your business an ideal platform for article distribution. EarthHuddle.com is free to join and allows members to post articles on their blog, which then gets syndicated to various other green sites online and puts your content in front of people searching for information about sustainable living, green living, and organic products and services.

All websites need great content to attract and retain visitors. To achieve this, many webmasters look to content syndication avenues like article directories and RSS feeds for sourcing content that is relevant to their sites and blogs.  The more educational and informative your articles are, therefore, the more chance it has of being syndicated throughout other sites and blogs. This creates links back to your site, which increases the “authority” of your site, giving you better search engine ranking and creating more exposure for your business online. Best of all, over time, this process creates an ongoing and FREE source of traffic for your website or blog.

So now you know the 2 things you want to get started with a basic article marketing strategy – write good quality articles and make a habit of submitting them on a regular basis.

How To Get Results Quickly With Article Marketing

You can speed up the article marketing process and grow your business faster using automation and leverage. And you can do this very inexpensively too.

To do this, I recommend using the following strategy outline below:

1) Start a blog - A blog is an ideal platform for getting your articles published quickly and for ensuring that you have complete control over your content. With the right automation system in place, your articles not only get published fast, but they will also be picked up by search engines like Google and shared around social media sites like Twitter the moment your articles are published. For step-by-step tutorials on how to set up a professional business blog with all of the automation systems in place quickly, go here: How To Set Up A Blog

2) Use a proven article marketing system – You can do things the slow way (write articles and manually post them around). Or, you can set up an article marketing system, where you take your articles and then use specific article marketing strategies and tools that automate the execution of your strategy and syndicate your content to a whole bunch of topic-relevant sites in a few minutes with only a few clicks of the mouse. If you are looking for step-by-step training that walks you through how to do your article marketing strategy properly then provides you with all the tools you need to get lots of high quality backlinks, increase your traffic dramatically and improve your Google ranking, check out Web2Mayhem.

I hope you have found the above information useful and I wish you great success with your article marketing strategy.

1) Write About Your Business
2) Check Your Results (And Use These To Improve Your Business)

Writing About Your Business – The Importance Of Writing Compelling Posts and Articles

Writing compelling blog posts and articles is one of the most important aspects of business blogging and online business marketing, if not THE most important.

It doesn’t matter how well you market your business and drive traffic to your site, if the content of your site doesn’t capture the attention of your audience it’s going to get you nowhere.

The good news is that you can learn how to write compelling blog posts and articles that will really draw the attention of your target audience.

There are a few different kinds of posts you might want to create. So, let’s begin by exploring some of these options below.

First, let’s make a list of the kinds of articles and posts you will want to write about and add to your site.

Here are just some ideas for things you can write about your business:

• News about your own business
• News about your industry
• News about your suppliers
• Product / Service tips (how to spot quality, how to avoid paying too much or being ripped off, etc ..)
• Product / Service benefits
• Product / Service features
• Product service reviews and comparisons
• Information your customers would find useful, educational, informative, entertaining, etc.
• Product training information
• FAQs
• “How-To” tutorials (in written form, audio recordings, podcasts, videos, or a combination of all of these. How to solve problems, save money, save time, etc …
• Customer stories and testimonials (e.g. how your product, service, business or staff member helped someone solve a problem).
• Profiling customers
• Profiling members of your team
• Special offers, competitions, prizes and giveaways
• New product releases, new range of products, etc …
• New things coming soon to your business
• Product recalls
• Customer service information (e.g. how to ship product back, refund policies, etc.)
• Links to useful resources and information
• Top 10 lists
• 7 Things You Should Know About Buying [insert your product here]
• 3 Things To Beware Of When Buying [insert your product here]
• etc …

As you can see, there’s no shortage of information to write about when it comes to promoting your business.

Useful Tips:

• Ideally, try to write articles between 500 -700 words. That’s only about 4 to 5 short paragraphs.
• Keep a notepad handy and jot ideas for content down whenever an idea pops into your head. You will soon unleash an unstoppable flood of great new ideas for new content.
• Remember this: Writing about your business is working ON your business. It will not only help you leverage your time and effort in the long run, but it will also help you grow your business in many different ways.

In summary:

• You can publish a well-written pure content post that contains incredibly helpful information to your customers.
• Another option is to look at the news results for your niche in Google news. Capitalize on current business trends by posting high quality opinion pieces on what’s being reported.
• Yet another option is to write product or service reviews to help people make buying decisions when they visit your site.

All of the above have a place on your blog. Writing about these areas will not only help to leverage your time as stated earlier, but they are all things that your visitors are looking for. It’s important to know the differences between these three types of web content, but it’s also important to understand how they are all the same.

It comes down to the A.I.D.A formula.

The AIDA Formula For Writing Compelling Articles And Posts

Attention

The first thing you need to pay attention to in your blog posts is how the reader’s attention will be captured right off the bat. You can do this with a great headline and a great first few sentences that really draw the reader in.

Interest

You really only have 10 seconds to keep someone’s attention going as they read through your post. Remember, people are very busy these days and they’ve got a million other blogs and sites to read and things competing for their attention and interest. Keep your article interesting and focused on the aim of the post (informational, newsworthy, review, etc.). Make sure your writing isn’t dry! The simplest way to do this is to just write in your own conversational voice – as if you were talking one on one with a potential customer, or face-to-face with someone who is interested in your business, products or services.

Desire

Now, this section changes depending on your goal. If you are writing a review article for one of your products or services, you’re going to want to create a really strong desire for the product or service. If you’re writing an article that is purely informational you can still use this principle, just in a different way. You still want to stir people’s emotions and get them to think.

Action

This last component is extremely important. There is always something that you want people to do on your site. You either want them to buy something, comment, sign up for your list, request more information, etc … You don’t want them to just go away! Make sure you include a call to action that is related to the post or article you’ve just created. This fits best when you’re selling a product or writing a review, but it certainly works with any post you make on your blog. A huge part of being a successful business marketer is getting people to “stick around” and take some kind of action.

There are many different ways to write compelling blog posts, but the AIDA principle is something they all have in common. People move quickly on the web, so you need to write something that will call out to them, keep them interested while addressing an underlying need or problem, then direct them to a specific action you want them to take.

I hope you have found this article useful and I wish you great success writing compelling articles.

If you would like your own self-managed site or business blog to start growing your business online, we offer two types of solutions designed to help you get started in 48 hours or less – we can either build your site for you, or you can purchase our DIY “step-by-step” video training tutorials.

For complete details about these services and products, please click here to visit our main site: Business Website Solutions