Use Article Marketing To Increase Your Online Sales

What is the best way to increase your online sales? How can I promote my website for free? What are the benefits of article marketing? Does article marketing work? These are questions that I am asked on a regular basis and are questions that I will be answering in this article.

I am a businessman from the UK who has various websites to promote the services that I provide. I am involved in providing a powerful stuttering therapy service as well as with a company that sell affordable front doors. I have always been interested in trying to gain as many visitors to the websites as possible, through ethical means. Originally I entrusted the help of other people as I was not exactly an expert in web promotion or web marketing. As it turned out neither were they, despite their claims of being an SEO expert.

After some particularly bad experiences with these so called experts of the SEO industry and after wasting a great deal of money I decided to attempt to educate myself on the art of web promotion. This was about seven years ago and one of the first things I was to learn was about the power of article marketing. I started to write articles and was astonished with the results, I was gaining additional traffic that were coming directly from the articles and the websites were also obtaining higher search engine rankings.

Article marketing has stood the test of time and is still as beneficial today as it was seven years ago. Article marketing is a free form of web promotion which is a major benefit to the small businessman!

I aim to write an average of one article per day and have managed to do this for the last two and a half years, the results speak for themselves.

General guidelines for article marketing

As the very name suggests, article marketing relies on articles for the promotion of businesses. You have to create this web content by following quality standards and then distribute it. You can start by writing your materials, you can hire someone for the job or you can use Private Label Rights articles. Article marketing first focuses on keywords, as they represent the starting point for the writing process.

Make a list with the most relevant keywords for your domain, service or product. Web tools can make it easy for you to find the needed keywords. Single words or long tail phrases, these are the two variants of keywords that you can use.

Use just one keyword to write an article; this gives the topic to the material and makes information relevant. This is the article marketing element that makes content indexation simple and advantageous. If you used several keywords in a single article, search engines would have problems with content indexing. The topic of the article as it is given by the keyword has to be clear not only to Google but to readers too.

The length of the articles matters in article marketing. Most popular article directories accept content between 350 and 600 words, although 450-500 word length is considered optimum. Do not overlook this aspect when writing content. The article has to be long enough to provide plenty of information, but not too long so as not to bore the reader.

The keyword density also requires special mention. For the article length we’ve discussed before, 2-4% keyword density is more than enough. You may fail with article marketing if you repeatedly use your keywords more often than that, as you may be accused of search engine spamming and you won’t increase traffic to your website.

Other elements to be careful with are the title, the body article and the author box. Thus, the title needs to be enticing to stir the reader’s curiosity. The body of the article should include several paragraphs, making information easy to read. And last but not least, article marketing relies on the inclusion of links in the article content and in the info resource box.

If the reader goes through the entire material, he/she is likely to click on one of your links and be redirected to your home page. Backlinks result from the anchor text links or the simple URLs available with the article. Backlinks make the article marketing efforts effective. The popularity of a page is thus measured in the number of links referring back to it, which counts for the page rank given by  search engines.