Top 10 Reasons Submitting Articles Helps You Find
Clients Online
Making the decision to submit
articles to build my website traffic has been one of the smartest online
marketing decisions I've made recently. I've been publishing an email
newsletter since 2001, but only started exploring article submission as a way to
build website traffic a little over a year ago, and finally got serious about it
a few months ago.
My article-writing routine consists of setting aside time in my calendar (every
Wednesday from 9 AM - noon) to write my article, post it on my website, set up
my email newsletter to go out, and submit my article through a submission
service. Creating this routine for myself has now become habit, and I have at
my disposal a bank of 25 articles that I've written, along with another 35 or so
that I have yet to submit to the article banks.
Writing articles is a challenging task, and many of my clients cringe when I
mention it to them as a marketing strategy. However, I think it's one of the
smartest marketing strategies in your marketing arsenal. Why? The best articles
reflect the writer's character and voice, and contain valuable content gleaned
from the writer's personal experiences. Non-writers are encouraged to hire ghost
writers, but I think It's difficult for a ghost writer to make an article sound
like you -- enough so that someone feels as though you're sitting across the
table from them over a cup of coffee. After reading an article in one of my
newsletters, I've been repeatedly told by numerous readers who know me, "Oh,
that sounded just like you!" There is no higher compliment to my ears -- I know
that my authenticity is coming across to my readers. That's an important aspect
of article writing to me -- I want my readers to get to know, like, and trust me
so that at some point they feel comfortable doing business with me.
Here's how writing and submitting articles are helping me find clients online:
1. Establishes you as an
expert. I'm submitting 6-10 articles per month through an article
submission service. Anyone searching for articles that I've written in any of
the major article banks will probably find at least 10 that I've authored.
Today I Googled my name, and found 18,300 sites listing me. I would say that
about 98% of the listings actually refer to me, and that 98% of that number are
links to articles banks, blogs, ezines, etc. publishing my articles. Much to my
surprise, I recently discovered that I'm a SmartBiz Industry Expert at
http://www.smartbiz.com/industryexpert/445
2. Demonstrates your
credibility. The fact that I write the majority of my articles from my
personal experiences establishes my credibility in the eyes of my readers. In
fact, I've had some newsletter subscribers whom I've never met call me on the
phone and start a conversation with me, as though we're old friends. In their
minds, we are old friends, as they've been reading my material for some time,
I, on the other hand, have to run to catch up, because I don't know anything
about them. I take my time and put much effort and energy into my writing, and I
think it shows in the finished pieces. There is a great deal of junk being
submitted as articles to article banks, but I'm not willing to dash off a piece
of fluff with little value and attach my name to it.
3. Have articles published by
other publications. As I conduct online searches for my articles or set
up Yahoo alerts to track my article submissions, I continue to be amazed at
where some of my articles end up. I recently had one of my articles published by
SitePro News,
www.sitepronews.com, which brought a great deal of traffic to my website,
more subscribers to my ezine, and a number of sales of products for which I'm an
affiliate. You can read all about this experience
on my blog.
4. Encourages joint
ventures/strategic alliances with business owners in other industries pursuing
the same target market. I've been approached by a number of other
companies who are seeking strategic alliances, link exchanges and referrals
solely based on reading about me from one of my articles and liking what I had
to say. I've chosen to pursue some of these offers, and I would have never had
the opportunity without using article submissions as a way to get the word out
about my services and my company.
5. Enables you to be found in search engines on a variety of terms.
One of the strategies of article submission is to intersperse your primary
website keywords into your article so that your articles help boost your search
engine ranking on your search terms. I haven't yet gotten that sophisticated in
my website optimization. As I write from my heart in terms of what's happening
to me or my business in any given week, my articles, in many cases, have little
to do with the keywords I'm using to optimize my website. What I have
discovered, however, is that I'm getting organic traffic to my site on all kinds
of keywords, most of which would have never occurred to me as search terms.
However, these terms are present in one (or more) articles that I've written.
Now, my goal is to create a call to action on my individual article pages to
increase the number of subscribers to my newsletter, which is my primary call to
action on my website.
6. Increases inbound links to your site. Creating inbound links
(links from other sites to yours) seems to be one of the hottest SEO techniques
today. However, I've heard that article bank links are not considered viable
inbound links. I partially agree with that sentiment. Google apparently still
loves them, given the number of inbound links it shows to my website. The
strategy seems to be less popular for Yahoo and MSN.
7. Enhances your search engine ranking. If you have a
carefully-crafted SEO strategy and optimize your articles with the same keywords
you use to optimize your site, you can increase your organic ranking in search
engines (how your site shows up in the rankings without using any pay-per-click
services). Higher rankings ultimately result in higher page rank (greater
relevance) in Google, and better your traffic rank in Alexa. In the last month,
due to my article submissions, my Google page rank has gone from a 2 to a 4 (an
8 or 9 is considered great, so I have a way to go) and my Alexa traffic ranking
has made a phenomenal leap, from number 1,964,770 one month ago (the higher the
number, the poorer the rank) to 321,460, which means that Alexa considers the
relevance and usage of my website to have increased dramatically in the last
month.
8. Increases responses to your website's "call to action".
Typically, on your homepage, you should create one clear call to action that
you'd like your visitors to take. On my homepage, that call to action is
clear. Visitors get a free ebook and a subscription to my email newsletter if
they give me their name and primary email address. When someone reads your
article and decides to check out your website as a result, there is a greater
likelihood that the visitor will part with his/her contact information in your
call to action, as you have already established some credibility via the article
you wrote.
9. Creates free advertising and free publicity. Most article
banks give you space to publish a 1-3 sentence bio about yourself, your
services, and your website at the end of the article. This is commonly known as
a resource box. Your resource box should give a short, succinct, compelling
statement of who you are and what you do, and why someone would want to visit
your website. Once your article is published in blogs, ezines, websites, etc,
your "free advertising" increases exponentially. As many article banks now
offer RSS feeds of an author's articles, a website owner could choose to
syndicate your feed on his website, giving you wonderful publicity that would
normally cost a great deal of money.
10. Creates opportunities for speaking, training or consulting.
Publication of several articles on a particular topic can easily brand you as a
credible expert on this topic, which may lead to an invitation to speak at a
conference, or an opportunity to get paid for training or consulting time.
Several of my clients have gotten radio and television interviews and speaking
opportunities because an article that they wrote was published in a credible
trade magazine. Interviews and speaking gigs get you in front of many people at
once, which allows them to get to know you, get into your marketing funnel, and
eventually purchase your goods or services.
Are you spending too much money, time and energy in promoting your website and
having lackluster results? Submitting articles is a low-cost way to increase the
traffic to your website and enable you to find more clients online.
(c) 2009 Donna Gunter
WANT TO USE THIS ARTICLE IN YOUR EZINE OR WEB SITE? You
can, as long as you reprint the article in its entirety
and include this blurb with it:
Internet Marketing Automation
Coach Donna Gunter helps independent service professionals create prosperous
online businesses that make more profit in less time by teaching them how to
automate their businesses, leverage their expertise, and get found online.
Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get
results? Discover how to increase your visibility and get found online by
claiming your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, at ==>
http://www.TurbochargeYourOnlineMarketing.com.
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