Tips for article marketing

Article marketing has been getting some bad press lately. A number of industry blogs have highlighted article marketing as an annoying result of the spam culture online. We can’t disagree with this opinion, it is hardly unsurprising, when a simply search online will reveal the vast amount of terribly written articles there are online, claiming to be expert opinions on a whole range of subjects!

Here are some of our tips to help you keep your article marketing at the highest levels of quality. There is no point spending time writing an article if it causes your business damage rather than good.

First decide who is going to write the articles. We would always suggest you do this yourself however not everyone is a writer, so if you have never written articles before, it’s best to get some advice from a professional. One way to do this is to write your articles and have them professionally edited.

What we have found is that the majority of bad articles are written by people who claim to be content creators and freelance writers. Be very careful if you choose this path toward article marketing. Make sure you hire a qualified writer who is experienced writing in your native language. They also need to be able to demonstrate that they can fully understand and write about your business.

Plan a series of articles and research them well. In this way, you can make sure that you are not duplicating previous articles and that your material is up to date, relevant, unique, and adds something new to the information already available. If your article does not do this, there is little point in posting it as it won’t be widely read.

Depending upon the article and E-zine service you choose, there will be different format requirements to follow. Your writer or editor will be able to help you with this too.

Always add a link and boiler plate about your company at the end of your article. This identifies you are the author and gives the reader a link to find out more about you if they are interested.

Be very careful with keywords. Do not over-stuff your article with them. These tactics will back-fire on you. Instead, carefully use them once, in the body of the article and once in the boiler plate if you need to.  And they should be woven naturally into the text and not obviously added as an after-thought or blatant SEO device.

Finally, proof read! Make sure your articles are well written, error free and grammatically perfect. Errors and unprofessional writing will put off any reader, and if your writing does not look professional, why would a customer presume you are a professional? Even if you didn’t write the article, it represents your company and therefore has to be of the highest quality.