Article Marketing is the publication of written content on websites other than your own. Sometimes these websites may have similar content or products as your business. Sound like helping your competition? Here’s the catch. Your article includes a backlink – a link that leads to your own website. Simply put, you provide an article on other people’s websites that ends with a link back to your own website. The idea is that for those sites using your article, they must include the link back to your site.

The quality of your article’s content is a deciding factor in how many people will publish it on their sites. This is why it is very important that your articles be well written, purposeful, and relevant to the subject. If you don’t or can’t write the articles yourself, you might want to consider paying for someone to write for you. In the long run it will be worth it.

Is Article Marketing Effective

Article Marketing has become extremely popular because of the way search engines do their searching. There was a time when the number of visitors to a site was a critical factor in its listings with search engines such as Google or Yahoo. Today, however, the key determinant is the number of backlinks: pointers from other sites to yours. To understand how the backlinks work in relevancy to your page listing, you must first understand the search engine process.

Your page’s popularity, known as the page rank, is judged by two factors: how many backlinks there are to your site; and the popularity of the sites that those backlinks are on. For example, let’s say you have two backlinks to your site listed on two different websites. One of those sites, say Microsoft, has a very high page rank. The other, BobsDoItYourselfComputerRepair, has a pretty low page rank. Your site will receive more notice from the search engines because of the link on the more popular site. So, backlinks on high-profile sites will inevitably raise your page ranking.

Creating and Submitting Articles

When creating your articles, remember that quality is of utmost importance. People are looking for information, and a well-written, relevant article will position you as someone who knows what they are talking about in a reader’s mind. If you don’t think you can write your own articles, there are many online outlets for finding writers.

Once the article is written, add a link to your site along with your by-line. This is called a resource box and can include a little bit about you and your business as well as the link to your website.

Next, you will need to get your article submitted to other sites. You don’t have to do this yourself. There are literally thousands of article marketing source sites on the Internet that can do it for you. However, the more popular ones are those that produce the most effective traffic. Among these are EzineArticles, ArticleDashboard, and GoArticles. Each of these will provide excellent sources for backlinks, but be prepared to submit only well-written articles, as they tend to be quite thorough in their screening process.

Check Your Article Marketing Campaign

Once you have submitted your article, give it a few weeks to make its way out onto the World Wide Web. Then, use one of the many backlink-checking tools available on the net. Most are free and can be found by doing a simple web search. Domain-Pop and IWebTool provide some of the more popular tools. The larger search engines (i.e. Google) provide backlink-checking tools also. These programs are usually easy to use and require no download. Simply go to the site, put the web address of your site into the appropriate space, and hit enter. In a few seconds you will be able to see how many backlinks your site has and, in most cases, exactly what sites those backlinks are listed on.

Article Marketing is not only one of the most effective techniques for building your page rank and popularity, but is also one of the most simple and most inexpensive, particularly if you have good writing skills of your own. Remember to keep your article content similar to the content of your site. People surfing for the information in your articles will only click on the link in your resource box if it is relevant to their own personal interests. Also remember that article marketing takes time and effort. It doesn’t happen overnight. With every article you put out onto the web, you are putting out another way for potential visitors to find you. Over time, this will increase the traffic to your website and will eventually increase your sales.

In these days of perpetual negative news about the economy and the stock market, one runs the risk of getting caught up in the bad news and foreseeing the same for your business. However, a declining business in a declining market is not a death knell if you do not let it become one. Now is the time to focus in on your customers. What you should focus on instead is in adding significant value to your goods and services.

What “value” you could add depends on who your customer is. For B2B companies, the value depends on whether your customers are public works entities or other government entities, large corporations, industrial installations, retail developers, property managers,… and the list goes on. Although these customers appreciate some of the same things, each of these customers have nuances for which certain activities or offerings would resonate more strongly with them than it would another customer in a different category. The key is to determine WHO your customers are, then determine WHAT your customers want.

Here are some recommendations for conducting that market research affordably:

1) Get back to basics. A lot of the most valuable market research comes directly from prospective customers, not from a 50-page industry research report. Identify who your target customers are, build a list of people or businesses to call, craft a questionnaire to get the answers you seek and dial for dollars. Enlist the help of employees, temporary staff, or use a virtual assistant if the list is lengthy.

2) Use websites to determine who the larger companies in your industry providing a similar good or service are. Many of those companies are public which means they must publish detailed quarterly (10-Q) and annual (10-K) financial reports. You will find these in the investor information section of the companies’ respective websites. These reports are filled with significant current industry and market information that is often directly applicable to your company.

3) Some of the best research involves competitors. Obviously, no direct competitors in your area of operation will freely share information with you but often direct and indirect competitors in completely different regions of the country will willingly answer questions that could help you assess the market, identify prospects, and avoid pitfalls. Find out who they are and call (preferred) or write.

In an economic or industry downturn, many times business as usual doesn’t work. So many industries – the construction industry, the automotive industry, the real estate industry, the heavy goods industry  -  are cyclical. During a down cycle those companies that focus on good fundamentals – which includes identifying and keying in on the most appropriate customers and ensuring your company has an excellent value proposition for them – continue to do well relative to their peers and ultimately position themselves to excel when the market shifts.