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Are There Downsides to Using Article Marketing?

June 24th, 2008 by vanessa

Article marketing is a great tool for online commerce fulfillment. It is not all peaches and cream, and sometimes it will make you scream in frustration. That’s okay. Article marketing is a very safe, secure, stable, and above all SLOW way to bring your website to the top layers of a web that is often chaotic and always changing. Article marketing requires an investment, of both time and money. It requires time. It requires patience. It requires time. It requires careful attention to your statistics and winnowing out of “weeds” — the things that don’t work.

Did I mention time? Yep, it requires a lot of time. Look at your article marketing endeavors as a form of farming. Farmers don’t expect a stalk of corn to spring, fully formed, from even the most fertile soil. They know it takes time and patience. They buy the seed, put in the hard work of sowing, sometimes have to use the expertise of others, and after a long period of hard work, they reap profit-rich harvests.

The farmer would be you. Let’s start with that seed: you need articles to market with. That means you need to either write them yourself, or you have to find someone to write brilliant, captivating prose that will bring customers beating down your door. Chances are, you don’t have the talent to write that beautiful prose, and even lower is the chance you know how to craft great prose for the special requirements of the Internet. Fortunately for you, there are a lot of professional writers of all levels roaming the vast spaces of the Internet, and you’ll find one of a level and price appropriate for you if you take your - time. Yep, that word again.

Next, you need to plant it. You can find a few article directories by yourself, and you may even be able to identify a few bloggers hungry for content who will happily post your linked-back article on their site. You may find, however, with the very competitive keywords that you need the services of a professional. You mat need someone who knows where all the hidden article directories are and who can register your articles so that they can be found. You may need someone who can mass-submit your articles to hundreds of different directories, saving you valuable time.

Now the last part: the harvest. Comparing your article marketing to a farmer isn’t perfectly accurate. It’s more like the owner of an orchard, with trees that, properly cared for, can bring you fruit season after season. Immediately after an article is posted, you will probably see a rush of new traffic as people intrigued by your article come to see your site.

Then the rush is over. To keep the wave going, you need to continue posting articles, week after week. The bonus you get is that rush at the beginning. The real payoff, however, is the gradually increasing position of your website in Google, and the growing body of work out online pointing back to your home page. It works rather like compound interest: your articles bring a trickle of interest to your website every month, each taken separately. A new article might bring a hundred or a thousand new viewers that first month, to be converted into buyers. But your older articles, each piling on top of the last, bring you in a steady ten or so each month. After a while, your older body of work is large enough to support your business by itself.

That is your goal: to have that well-developed orchard of work, consistently bearing you fruit in the form of targeted traffic trickling to your website. A hundred old articles put together over a year or so, can bring as much traffic ALL THE TIME as a new article’s best bump. Grow your farm wisely with this in mind.

To your article marketing success!

Interesting in learning more about this topic? Download my free ebook on internet marketing.

Bob Hamilton is an entrepreneur, author, writer, business consultant and trainer. http://www.OpeningADollarStore.com

Posted in Article Marketing |

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