Can Your Business Profit with Article Marketing?

If a customer were to ask you a question about your product, I bet you would be more than happy to tell them what they want to know.

That’s especially true if that answer would help them better understand the value proposition your product or service offers to them. In the process, you get at least two side benefits. First, your customer sees you as an expert and as such your personal prestige and influence grows. Perhaps more important, your prospective customer has just received something of value from you and subconsciously may well feel a debt of gratitude with the resulting incremental increase in the likelihood that they will buy something from you. You have started to build a relationship with your prospect.

Not a bad outcome.

Every prospective customer approaches a purchase with spoken and unspoken questions about price, efficacy and value. If you’re an accomplished sales person, you know your customers most frequent objections and how to deal with them.

These objections are questions that you can answer, if they ask. But what if they don’t ask? You lose your opportunity to answer their questions and to build that valuable relationship. And that’s what marketing is all about. The goal of marketing is to get you in front of as many targeted prospects as possible. Why? So you can answer their questions in a meaningful way.

Now there are many marketing strategies out there. One that can be especially effective for many businesses is article marketing. As we have heard for several decades now, we are in the information age. And answering questions is nothing more than offering relevant information. One of the best strategies for doing is so is called Article Marketing. It is used a lot by internet marketers to promote ebooks, web courses and other down loadable content, but it can be as effective promoting hard goods and services, even for local based businesses serving a specific geography.

In its simplest form, article marketing consists of a single article written about a specific topic, which is then published to one of literally thousands of online article directories. It could be first or also published to your company blog or web page to good effect as well.

But the article directories help give your article some “legs.”

When you publish your article to one of these directories you are giving permission to anyone to republish it on their blog, website, or ezine. But to do so, they must include a resource box, which you design which includes links to you, your business or your website or all of the above.

Your goal is to write a well thought out article to provide real value that makes it worthwhile for others to republish. When they do, they are spreading your answer to many more prospective customers and giving them a link to get in contact with you.

The most likely people to republish your article, are people whose readers would be interested in your topic. That’s great, because that means they are targeted prospects that you might not have otherwise been aware of or able to reach.

There are many other significant benefits to article marketing. The fundamental value is being able to answer a question of someone you may not otherwise have ever encountered. You have established yourself as an expert, provided information designed to show your value proposition, and started a relationship without even knowing it. Until they contact you. When they do, they are already primed to trust you, because you have already done them the favor of sharing information with them.

I have recently revised a report called Article Power which is free to download. It offers additional insights and tips about article marketing.

[tags]

Article marketing, small business, small business marketing, viral marketing, main street marketing,[/tags]

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Filed under: Marketing

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