Article Marketing Strategy: Write Articles To Claim The Top Spot In Your Niche
Filed under Internet Marketing
I started my first website (GirlShrink.com) back in 2003 when all I knew about the web was that I could do research for a paper or order on Amazon. It really started out as more of a hobby then anything else until I started writing articles. Suddenly I was getting clients willing to pay for counseling because they had read an article I had written that “spoke to them” and they wanted to pay me for more advice.
What I soon quickly realized was that when I started writing relationship articles on my site and began submitting them to other sites – that my website quickly began to gain relevance, importance, and most importantly – lots of fresh new traffic.
If you are just starting out on the web, or even if you have been online for a while and you haven’t yet claimed “authority” in your niche – writing the articles just may be the ticket for you. What started as an accidental turn of fortune for me, can be a deliberate cash cow for you.
Ready to learn? This is how you can get started right away becoming the authority in your niche…
1. Find relevant keywords in your niche. I like using keyword finder tools such as Wordtracker and the Google Keyword Tool.
2. Begin by writing one article on a bi-weekly or weekly basis. This is a pace most any solopreneur can maintain, but if you can write more – you should absolutely do it!
3. Write A 400-500 word article. If you have articles that are 1000 or 1500 words long, break them up into an article series or article set. Research shows that search engines love content that is at least 400 to 500 words long, and that readers love reading short chunks of info-packed articles.
4. Carefully place your keywords early in the title of your article, and in the first paragraph and somewhere in the latter body of your article. Don’t become a keyword stuffer or spammer, and stuff your article with keywords. The search engines are smarter than that and will penalize you for it. Plus your article will not read very unnaturally.
5. Don’t get caught up on the particular placement of your keywords. Just make sure that it is in your title and mentioned at least twice in your article like I stated above in #4. Some people can become paralyzed about where to place keywords and then never write anything at all.
6. Submit your article to relevant sites, especially ones that people in your marketplace like to visit. Also, movers and shakers in your niche will begin to learn your name and start to view you as an expert or authority in your marketplace, and may refer your articles to others via Twitter etc.
7. Ramp things up even more by promoting your articles via social marketing, press releases, etc. This will gain you wider exposure so that you can begin to reach people outside of your niche. This is all good because you never where that next “word-of-mouth” referral is going to come from.
8. Finally, be consistent. Try to create a “writing schedule” for yourself or your virtual assistant. Remember that it’s more important to write and publish 100 “good enough” articles on a consistent basis — then to write 10 perfect ones and then never write again!
