Article Marketing Background: Most companies today favor soft sell marketing. A lot of consumers also prefer this way of marketing because it creates a connection between seller and consumers. Businesses ensure products and services can improve the lives of the consumers or suit their wants rather than pressuring them to immediately buy. This more personal approach convinces the consumer that a much thought is placed on their personal needs rather than making a sale.
Article content marketing is a soft sell marketing method rapidly gaining dominance in Internet marketing today. As a marketing method, it predates the World Wide Web. It was used in print media before its Internet popularity grew. It is still being used in offline publications up to this day.
In online Article Marketing, particular attention is given to giving useful information regarding a topic. This topic usually caters to particular niches. The article also contains a bio box and a byline. These contain links pointing to other sites related to the article topic or pages with contact information of businesses operating in related industries. These articles are published by online article directories. Most (if not all) offline publications have online directories.
Publishing Articles Online: Article directories are websites that publish articles to do with a variety of topics and make them available to users looking for updated relevant information as well as to syndicated content publishers interested in publishing the articles on their sites. Apart from providing information on certain topics, articles also have the author\'s links pointing to sites with relevant information/advice, products or services. Most of these directories post the articles for free. The directories make their money from advertisements shown on published article content pages.
A well crafted article may have the opportunity to be published in many article directories. This means greater exposure and more clicks by target readers on the author\'s links. This then increases the chances of the author to make a sale.
One most likely difference of offline content marketing from online Article Marketing is the consideration of search engine optimization. Authors place keywords in articles targeting a particular marketing niche. The search engines then index these articles based on those keywords.
Effective keyword placement has a certain method to it. When too many keywords are present, article directories may not publish the article at all. They regard this as spam since the presence of too much keywords may turn the articles into unreadable overly keyword-stuffed content or its information could be less useful.
Readability and usefulness of information is important because this is what readers want. They will most likely read other articles of the same author or even share the articles to their friends and loved ones this way. This: (1) drives more targeted traffic to article directories; (2) increased chances of readers clicking ads and the author\'s links; (3) higher PR and search engine rankings of the author\'s linked pages for target keywords and (4) higher popularity which may lead to better sales margins.
Benefits of Article Marketing: Target readers benefit from article content marketing through added knowledge of relevant topics. They also get useful and updated relevant information or advice quickly.