Monday, September 29, 2008

Avoiding the #1 Article Marketing Mistake

By Daniel Z. Kane

Almost all website owners who want to promote their sites use article marketing. That should come as no surprise.

For most websites, success will come if there is good content and good traffic. And, while advertising of various kinds can generate traffic, the best traffic will always be organic search engine traffic.

To begin with, although it takes time and energy to build and optimize a site which ranks well in the search engines, the traffic your site receives from the search engines is free. If you advertise, it may cost you $5 or more to generate a visitor to your site. And, research has clearly revealed that visitors who reach you because they found your site in a Google or Yahoo search are far more likely to be buyers than those who come to you as a result of advertising. Four times as likely, in some studies.

In other words, because these visitors have gone to the trouble of searching for information related to the websites on which they wind up, they are more likely to buy, donate, request further information, add themselves to a newsletter mailing list, etc.

That's why successful site owners do their best to maximize their search engine rankings, a process that should always include link building. And, article marketing is among the quickest, most effective ways to obtain links. It is not unusual to earn hundreds and even thousands of links by writing just one article.

For the most part, website owners write about topics closely related to their websites. And, for many reasons, that's a good idea.

The mistake they make all too often is that they do not write about anything else.

By writing on one topic or a very narrow range of topics, website owners limit their audience and the number of links their articles may produce. I write most often about education, the theme of my websites, so many education-related websites have published dozens of my articles, and I've reached their readers dozens of times. And, I've gotten thousands of links from my education articles, but not everybody is interested in articles about education. So, I write articles like this one on other topics to reach new audiences and earn links on additional websites.

I recently wrote an article on winning strategies for casual sports bettors. I have written about search engine optimization, teaching teens safe driving habits, helicopter parents, and dozens of other areas. My most published article was on great backyard hamburger grilling recipes. The very best tip I can give other writers is to write and submit periodic articles on at least 4-5 subjects in addition to the subject(s) of their websites. The rewards, in terms of links, are enormous.

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