Advertising and Promoting Using Articles
Marketing is a skill. And just like any other skill, it's tough to be good at something if you don't practice. One way to get better at marketing is through writing articles--and, of course, publishing those articles on blogs and websites to promote the article so they can reach their full potential. In this post, I'll go over some specific steps to take when writing articles to promote them.
The first thing you need to do is think of a catchy title for your article. This should be the name of your article in the same way that a book's title is the name of its book in print. You want people to find your article through a search engine, so you don't want it to be too long and wordy or too simple and short. The latter can trick people into giving up on your article (they might think "Oh, this is not going to have much content.") so they won't click on it and visit later. The former will make your title too long and wordy so people will not want to type in that long of a title every time they search for something.
Another thing you need to decide is how many paragraphs you want to have in your article. Obviously, the more, the better because then you can break up different points, but if you want people to get engaged enough to read your entire article, don't make it too long because then it will be discouraging for them. You'll want a good amount of tension between these two; if your article is too short, nobody will be interested in reading it, but if it is too long, nobody will be able to take the time out to read it.
You'll want to make sure that your headlines are enticing enough to get people to click on them, but also not so much that they will feel offended by the word "advertise." You don't want someone to write an email stating, "Oh my God this article is so annoying! It's advertising my website and how it promos products and services !" They just don't want to see your title; they want to actually read your article.
This is why I like using bold and underlined words. Since bolded words are more noticeable and underlined words can be clicked on if you're specifically looking for them, it will prompt people more (since they've already clicked on it) so that they can read the article.
A big tip when writing an article is to NEVER, EVER link to the actual product or service you're advertising; always link to another article. While that sounds obvious and straightforward, it's so easy to do it wrong, and I'm always afraid that I'll try to make too many links in one article. For example, in my 5-Step Guide To Facebook Marketing For E-Businesses , I did a step called "Share This Post To Facebook", but then didn't put a link on the top of the post. Instead, I just wrote something on the bottom of it. Since I didn't put a link in the beginning, nobody clicked on it to share it. So make sure you always link to something in your article when you're trying to show something--don't try to force people into doing what you want them to do.
I would also like to emphasize the importance of writing original content. It's very tempting to just copy and paste a few posts from other websites, but since there are so many tools that can check for duplicate content, if someone does find that you've copied and pasted some of your article from another website, then your post will be penalized for being spam-like or duplicate material. In addition, you want people to know that they're reading a legitimate article on your blog, despite it being from another website. So please, take the time out to write original content for your readers.
Finally is the importance of publishing your article on a blog or website that can do a good job at promoting it and keeping it updated so that your readers will get the most out of it. This means you need to set up links to keep track of where people are going if they visit your site (either by providing them with a link or just adding their email address in the comments so you don't have to.) If you do not have links on your site, then use Google's "Track" option. This way you'll know who your readers are. If they read your article and go to the website where you posted it, then you can count those as "clicks" and show off to your boss that you have many more visitors than he thinks.
Tips on promoting articles:
1. Don't use the "canned" promotion. The best way to promote an article is to also get people interested in doing what you're promoting through some of your own articles (which I already talked about earlier.)
2. Be concise, but don't be lazy about your article being short. Getting to the point of things like I talked about in my previous post about "How To Write Short Articles , but Not Lazy" is good, but don't be lazy about it. Writing a short article that's good takes just as much time and effort as writing a longer one--so you might as well go all out.
3. Send out emails, but make sure you have permission to do so. Some sites will allow email subscriptions for people that want to receive your emails--and others will not. Make sure it's okay with the site you want to send emails from if you're planning on sending an email promoting your article or blog post on their website.
Links:
1. How To Write Short Articles that Don't Sound Lazy by B.M. Ramada
2. The Link: How to Use Open Graph Tags to Promote Your Articles by Jon Wahl
3. The Three Steps to Writing a Great Article by Kristy McCarley
4. The 17 Tips to Writing Better Blog Posts by Simon Larnell
5. What is Open Graph? by Erik Möllerstedt
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Conclusion:
In conclusion, you need to make sure that your article is both appealing and appetizing to your readers. I bet if you made an article about cooking articles, then it would be very enticing and people would ask for the recipe. You'll want to try a little bit of everything (link within your posts so people will click on your website) and a little bit of something special (ways to do certain things.) If you can accomplish this, then I'm sure you'll have more readers than ever before!
I hope that this article was able to help you in some ways.