When Is Article Marketing the Right Choice?

By Stephanie Foster

Article marketing has been promoted as one of the great ways to build an online business. You write and submit articles, building links to your website and building a reputation for yourself. It's a pretty nice deal.

But it is not always the right way to go about promoting something, especially on your own website. Your site should always be providing what the visitor wants, and if that's not information, you don't want to direct them toward information. They need to be directed toward the product they want.

The goal of article marketing is to build relevant links to selected pages in your site. This helps them to do better in the search engines.

When you do article marketing you need to think about what it is people want from you. If they're going to buy, a review article may be more appropriate on your website than one on how to use the product. The how to use article may be sufficient, however, for submitting to article websites for the links.

In many cases you want to take a different tactic to your article marketing than you do on your website. Your website should be geared toward getting visitors to make the purchase. Your article marketing should be geared toward getting people to your website and the items the article encourages them to want.

Many site owners take the sloppy route to article marketing. They hack out an article with scarcely a worry for spelling, grammar or useful information. They junk up many an article site, yet other website owners are highly unlikely to republish these articles due to the lack of quality.

One of the best parts about article marketing is the chance to be published on other websites. Such low quality articles miss out on this wonderful opportunity to get their links out in front of people really interested in what they have to offer.

If you're writing articles with only the search engines on your mind, you aren't doing article marketing for the right reason. Yes, a widely distributed article can give you tremendous SEO benefits. But poorly written articles make your site look bad, annoy potential visitors and make article marketing a less effective tool for all concerned.

Think before you write. While you can consider the search engines, think about how your writing will make you appear to potential customers. Both matter in the long run to your online business.

Stephanie Foster runs http://www.brightarticles.com/ for authors to submit their well written articles for use by others. Submit articles to her site to give your website more exposure.