There are several critical components to article marketing. Here is a general outline of what they are and what they should contain:

  • Title: This is the title of your article. This is very important as it is the first thing that people look at when they consider reading the article. If at all possible, this is good place to put some of your keywords in here. You want the title to be catchy to encourage your ideal client to read it.
  • Category: This is the category you article falls under. It should be pertinent to the topic of thee article and typically most of your articles will fall under only a few different categories.
  • Summary: This is a brief summary of your article. This should only be a couple of sentences. Try not to reuse sentences from your article. Instead provide a brief synopsis of the article’s content. It should sum up the article.
  • Body: This of course is the body of the article. It should not contain links if at all possible, especially self promoting links. Check the article for spelling and grammar. Nothing can ruin your credibility faster than spelling and grammar mistakes in your article, no matter how great the content is.
  • Resource or Bio Box: This is your bio that states who you are, what your company does and who your target market is. This is a very important part. Once people have read your article, if they are interested in the author, they are going to check out your bio. They may want to learn more about you and what your company offers.
  • Keywords: This is the SEO of your article. The keywords must be pertinent to your article, but you also want them to be related to you and what you offer for services. So choose them wisely.

Here are some of the suggested sites you can post to:

Ezinearticles.com

Selfgrowth.com

Goarticles.com

Articlesbase.com

Ideamarketers.com

Always try to pick topics that speak to your target market. This establishes you as a wealth of information to your potential clients. This can create what I referred to before as the know, like, trust factor. When potential clients are looking for a service provider they want to look at what that company knows. This is demonstrated through their social networking posts, blog posts and articles that they have written. Of course there is much more they can look at, but this is certainly a great start. It can help with your SEO, if done correctly.

There are nefarious ways of utilizing this form of marketing, but this is certainly not the type I am talking about. This is a very poor way of trying to manipulate the search engines and I absolutely don’t recommend that. This would be such things as purposefully putting in several links back to your website, repurposing the same content and just replacing the first and last paragraph, and using automated programs for submitting articles. Hard work from what I have listed above will provide quality and ethical results for your business.