Attention! Are You Using Article Marketing The Wrong Way?

There are two basic benefits you get from article marketing – back links and traffic.

Some articles might bring you both but you need to consider which benefit you want most before you write the article.

If you are just going for back links, then you can write an article that is just informative.  It can be short (300 – 500 words) and you don’t really need to spend a lot of time on it. You can even hire this out for around $5 an article if you don’t want to write it yourself.

Now, I’m not saying that you should blast out a piece of crap, but you don’t need to write prize winning material if you are just going for back links.

On the other hand, if you want to attract traffic or customers to your offer, then you will need to put a little bit of thought into your article marketing campaign and really pay attention to what you write.

The goal of these traffic getting articles is to get the click at the bottom.

How do you do that?

By writing an interesting and thought provoking article that compels the reader to want to read more of what you have to say.  You need to use some persuasive skills to get the readers “head” to be where you want it so that your resource box draws him to your offer.

This takes some skill and a little bit of preselling.  You can’t just pound out a 6th grade level “book report” style article and expect to draw in a lot of traffic.  Sure, you’ll get some, but if you learn how to presell and write hypnotically, then you will get a much higher click through rate  (if you want to learn more about hypnotic writing, check out the book “Hypnotic Writing” by  Joe Vitale – once you read this, you will never look at article writing the same again!)

For most articles that you submit, you can get both back links and traffic but what a lot of people do in their article marketing campaign is make the mistake of only submitting to places that have “dofollow” links so that they can get the back link.  They ignore the power of their article to draw in traffic and think of it as just a link getting device.

But, if you start thinking about your articles as more of a vehicle to drive customers and less of a link building machine, then you can open up a lot of opportunities such as guest blogging and submitting your article to high profile bogs in your niche (most of which are probably “nofollow”).

This will do 2 things for you – start to brand you as an authority and decrease your dependence on search engine traffic.  This last bit is key – think of how great it would be to be immune from the inevitable ups and downs of the Google dance – that’s what you will have if you are getting a high percentage of your traffic from other authority blogs in your niche.

So, the next time you start an article marketing campaign, think about what your goals are – what types of articles you want to write and where you want to draw traffic from.  You just might be surprised at the results you get when you break away from the norm and put some “marketing” into your article marketing efforts!