“Article writing is dead!”
“You can’t get business that way anymore.”
“It doesn’t help you get visitors to your site.”
So say the heretics who still think of article writing as subbing pieces to places like EzineArticles.com etc. True, it might be a while since you’ve seen any articles pop up in a search that derive from EZA or other similar sites. Truth is though that when you know how to do it right, article writing is still a valid and valuable activity.
Back in the day (and sadly some still do this), some folks would write one article and pump it through an article spinner and produce a bunch of gobbledy-gook articles that meant nothing but links buried in text fodder. Yes, it was a relatively quick and easy way to try to push your website up the rankings. Thankfully, the search engines got wise and you rarely see such rubbish in search results today. That practice was punished and considered spam. These days you can still use articles to generate traffic and backlinks – you just have to be smart about it and do it way better.
Firstly, consider what you are trying to achieve. Normally, you want to make sales. Fundamentally, that’s the bottom line. To generate sales, you must have people being exposed to your sales messages (traffic),. Articles can help you get targeted traffic.
People hit the internet to look for information of some kind. They want to know something, find something. It’s up to you to be the provider of solid, reliable information on a particular topic or area (niche) – build your authority as a source of knowledge. Once you build some authority people come to trust you and we all know the maxim : people do business with those they know, like and trust.
How do you do that? Write articles!
Your content needs
- to be appealing to your target market,
- be friendly and in a tone that suits that group of people,
- explain things clearly and simply
- provide the information people are searching for
The more quality articles you have on the internet the more you increase your chances of someone finding you and buying from you.
The power of social proof
Don’t discount the value deriving from your articles. When people like/comment/share your Facebook posts (which link back to your article), your Google+, your tweets, and other social media properties they’re defacto recommending you to their circle.
Not only that but this social activity signals to the search engines that your site is worth taking a look at.
Think about how you can facilitate this activity. Finish an article by simply asking for people to share it. Run competitions where people who share your stuff can get kudos or win a prize.
The best thing you can do is write top, informative articles that really help people. If you can put it over in a way that appeals to your audience then they are more likely to say: “Hey, look at this!” to their social network.
Quantity or quality?
The more articles you have out there the better – but not if they are trite or boring or useless. First and foremost, make them good quality. Once you’ve established a ‘voice’ or tone of your writing then you can up the volume that you can populate on the internet. That way you build links back to your site.
Start by writing one good article a day or every second day. In three months you will have over 90 articles out there. Not all of them will be great, but all of them could drive traffic to your website. It takes around three months or more for a website to get properly established and your traffic will certainly be helped by all those articles.
Not a great writer?
Not all of us had a good education, enjoy writing or have English as our first language. No worries,. You can still write good articles. Two choices; get them written by others who do write well – go to job boards like freelancer.com. Or, use PLR (Private Label Rights). These are articles someone has written which they then sell to others to rebrand as their own. The good thing is you buy the rights to change the articles as well to suit whatever you want to do with them (just check the explicit rights terms provided).
This way you can use articles to promote your business, get targeted traffic and ultimately sales. So, get writing!