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What Is Article Directory Advertising?
Article directory advertising is essentially writing and
distributing short articles to a variety of outlets, including
article directories and article banks, forums, and newsletter
publishers. Article marketing is one of the most effective types
of marketing, it is also one of the least expensive ways
to market your business. In fact, it can even be free, costing
you nothing more than your time.
There are many
benefits to article writing. Because articles become viral,
your message literally travels far and wide, increasing traffic
to your website and increasing newsletter signups. Article
marketing is also used to make sales and to build credibility.
Anyone who wants to establish themselves as an expert in their
niche should take advantage of all that article marketing has to
offer.
Here is how it
works. You want to address a problem that the product can help
to solve in your article, without mentioning the product.
For instance, if you sell life insurance, you can write an
article about a certain type of life insurance, and the various
benefits it provides the client.. The article should be no more
than 900 words, and have a compelling title.
At the bottom of
your article, you include an author’s resource box. This is
basically a block of text, made up of one paragraph that is
anywhere from three to four lines long. In this paragraph, you
might say something like this:
John Big Money is
an insurance expert helping hundreds of clients plan for their
retirement. Find out more about his office and variety of
assistance he provides. A free informative guide is available
for the asking. Visit http://www.johnbigmoney.com
Once you have
written your article, ensured that you have made all of the
points that you wanted to make, and checked the article for
spelling and grammar mistakes, you are ready to distribute it.
Some do it themselves using software that automates the process.
You should note, however, that a large number of the best
article directories do not allow or approve articles that are
auto submitted – and they can tell when this is done. Manual
submissions are always best.
The article is
distributed to the free article directory sources. There are
lots of these in existence, and some are better than others. Do
not waste your time submitting your article to a directory that
does not have a category for it. Most free article directories
have a manual approval process, so it may take a week or more
before your article appears on their website.
Look for
directories only in your niche. The closer the category is to
your topic, the more readers you will have. Check each directory
to see if they currently accept articles. Load those article
submission email addresses into wordpad, and each time you write
a new article, send it to these publishers, asking them to
publish it. Finding a new directory is great, you have less
competing articles plus your article is not lost in 5 years of
archives, where it might take a reader 30 minutes to find your
info.
The Internet was
designed for the free and fast exchange of information. People
wrote articles on a variety of topics, for the purpose of
sharing information and educating others. At first, there really
weren’t any article directories. Newsletters, (ezines), started
long before article directories did. When you wanted to share an
article with the Internet community, you posted the article on
your website, or in your newsletter. Eventually, people started
allowing other ezine publishers to use their articles as well,
this was when the author’s resource box was born.
Because articles
had such an impact in each category, intelligent business people
saw the potential for writing and distributing articles in order
to promote their businesses. They started writing and
distributing articles on a regular basis. Wham, article
directory advertising was started. Today some large directory
sites charge you a fee for publishing and distributing your
articles.
Over time, people
learned that some measure of copywriting skills were needed for
article marketing, for the purpose of writing outstanding,
attention getting headlines, and in order to create an effective
author’s resource box. First you want readers, and then you want
these readers to visit you website.
THIS IS FREE WEBSITE TRAFFIC Just
one article might get you 2,000+ readers and up to 150 free
interested visitors to your website.
This is why you will find some prolific writers that will submit
200 articles a year. Paying $1.00 per click and 30,000
clicks equals $30,000 for so-so visitors by using pay-for-click
advertising. Using free article directories, and submitting
enough articles might also get 53,000 visitors to you website. However
they are likely to be more interested and FREE.
Writing and
distributing articles is turning out to be an effective and cost
effective way to market a business, the articles that were
written and distributed are of very high quality. Look for free
article directory advertising, that manually approves your
article. People bookmark these sites and keep coming back to
read more. Article marketing is also one of the few marketing
methods that have been able to stand the test of time,
regardless of changes that have been made to search engines, the
way people buy on the Internet or even laws that have changed,
such as the spamming laws.
In recent years,
automated submission software has come into the picture. This
worked for a while, greatly speeding up the submission process,
but most of the top article directories now block such software,
and reject articles that are auto submitted.
The
people who run the most authoritative article directories don’t
allow sales articles. Articles are still usually manually
viewed and approved before they are published on these sites.
Article theft,
where someone takes your article and removes your name, trying
to pass it off as their own work, has become a small problem.
But for the most part, the article is removed. The article
writing that you do today will still be benefiting you ten years
from now. When you take the time to write and distribute
an article, other people, such as web publishers, bloggers, and
ezine publishers, will use your articles on their websites, in
their newsletters, and on their blogs. While sending even more
free visitors to your web site.
It’s getting
harder to send email. It’s getting harder to get listed in the
search engines. It’s getting harder to use Pay-Per-Click search
engines. The rules are constantly changing – and they change so
incredibly fast that most marketers can’t keep up with all of
it.
If you are not
already using article marketing for your business, you are
missing out on sales and signups that could be garnered from
this time tested method of marketing a business online. Anyone
who isn’t already marketing their business with articles should
get started on it right away. Your article marketing efforts of
today will continue to pay off for years to come. You can’t say
that about any other type of marketing that exists. For the
future of your business, this is an area of marketing that you
need to learn – and you need to learn every aspect of it as soon
as possible.
Web content comes
from articles – whether they are articles that were written
specifically for that website, or articles that were found in
the free article directories.
Article marketing
is something that is hard to fail at. You become an expert
by writing articles.
If you have
already written an article, get maximum use of it. First copy it
to your WORD program. Now change the headline to something
exciting. Add a couple new lines to a new introduction
paragraph. Make sure you choose 3 or so key word phrases and
make sure you use each at least twice. Now take and add in 4 new
lines at the end or beginning of paragraphs. Now you have an
article to submit to another article directory featuring your
subject topic.
Do the same one more time. Now you have 3 different versions to
submit to 3 directories and triple exposure. If you are not
article marketing, you are leaving money on the table. It is as
simple as that. You can start article marketing today, and start
distributing it. All of that can be done now – TODAY.
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