In this day and age of increased competition and a decreasing profits, a small business has to take every advantage it can to stay in the fight. There is one area where a lot of small businesses are missing the mark when it comes to the Internet. That one area is website promotion. When your average small business person things of website promotion, they think about taking ads out on Yahoo or Google. While that is one form of website promotion, article marketing is just as, if not more, effective and a lot cheaper. In some cases it can be darn near free.
Article marketing consist of distributing articles pertaining to your business throughout the Internet. This accomplishes several very important things. Number one is that it helps tremendously in brand awareness. When you’re sending out articles to various websites, blogs and article directories across the Internet, you’re in effect putting information about your business in these areas. Kinda like leaving a 1 page sales brochure at every place in your local market.
Besides getting the message out about your company, article marketing also helps boost the ranking of your website in the search engines. This will in turn help potential customers find your company’s website when they go to a search engine like Google, Yahoo or MSN. This is one reason the Internet is considered the great equalizer when it comes to marketing. It’s not uncommon for smaller, well optimized websites to outrank the websites of larger, more well known companies.
And if that wasn’t enough incentive to get started, article marketing is really easy and inexpensive to get started. If you don’t like to write or if you just don’t have the time, you can hire article writing out and get most done for a few dollars up to 5 to 10 dollars per article. We’re not talking War & Peace here, we’re talking about 300 to 500 word articles that will highlight the benefits and features of your website.
There are places online like Rent-A-Coder and RentAFreelancer where you can put up the job you want done and freelance writers will give you bids to do your job. I typically get most of my articles written for around 5 bucks a piece. I have mine written in sets of 10 or 20 articles at a time. It’s cheaper this way and easier for me to keep track of them.
Now that you have articles written, what do you do with them? Well, you now submit them to someplace that will distribute them. I like using EzineArticles. You submit an article and if it’s accepted, it will be available for anyone to come along and use that article. When they use it, they have to leave your information in tact. This includes a resource box at the bottom where you tell the World about you and your company.
There are other article distribution sites on the Internet. You should be seeing by now how article marketing will help spread the word about your company, and do it quickly and efficiently.
