How to Market Articles
Marketing articles online, like most online industries, is not a tested or tried science, but there is an accepted approach to marketing yourself and your work as a freelance writer. There are different ways to utilize this approach, and you will acquire your own version. Marketing your articles is primarily for exposure. Sometimes, in the beginning, you will be selling yourself short in order to gain business and be more profitable. To get more volume in your freelance career, you will need to learn how to market your articles.
The first thing to remember is that when you are a beginner, exposure is ten times more valuable than profitability. You may have to give a few articles away for nothing in the beginning for the experience. Especially if it is a new article, one of the best places to go is Hubpages, or to make it a Squidoo lens… or both. There are several places online to upload your articles, like EzineArticles.com. Just type something like “submit your articles” in any search engine. These articles find decent exposure and have a byline linking to you and/or your website. The websites that you upload your articles to distributes them to their affiliates, getting your piece more exposure, simultaneously linking to you and your business. Just make sure you only submit one article to each website as to not rip yourself off too much.
Another article marketing technique is proper article writing. If you write your title in a keyword rich, intriguing fashion, it pretty much markets itself. You will want to constantly be checking different keyword research tools for search engine optimization (SEO) words and phrases. Overture.com has a good keyword research tool that gives you the common search results from Yahoo and Google. Writing your article properly is equally as important. You do not want to write excessively long articles with overbearing HTML code. Use of bullets can also increase the readability of the article. Keyword SEO and writing for easy readability are natural article self-marketing techniques that have proven success over time.
To be successful, you need to understand that marketing your article is only half the battle. Your article also needs to market you. The articles that you submit to a website that is strictly a free article submission site will not only have a byline, but you will want to do your best to put a little “bio box” near the byline. It will bring you more exposure, more credibility in the business, and most importantly, more clients. This bio box should have a small “blurb” about your business and a link to your website.
Marketing your articles is all about writing articles for the purpose of business exposure. Pick some topics that are not sufficiently written about, study the topics, and just start writing. You can do virtually thousands of articles in a year and submit them to a large variety of websites. If you write your articles using SEO and simple writing techniques with quality and knowledge, you will find yourself with more business than you know what to do with, which is truly marketing your articles.
