Article marketing is one of the easiest, low cost ways to drive business, increase your exposure and increase your website traffic.

In essence, article marketing is simply a case of picking a topic and writing a 500 word or more article in a non salesy way. The idea is to provide the reader with information that they can use. If they like the way you write and like your style they can use you. This is the ultimate presell technique, give them something for nothing and let your article do the talking.

So, as an example you could write an article about saving money on your insurance premiums. Once written and spell checked (most important) you can then start the process of getting this article published. Online, you can simply visit loads of article sites that will list and publish your article for free.

But don’t fall into the trap of thinking more is better, there are services that will submit your article to 10,000 article sites. Now while this may seem like a good idea, it really is a waste of time and money. There is a list of the better article directories below and to be honest it is quick a small list.

Article directories offer you three main benefits:

1. They will attract direct traffic to them as the main ones are popular
2. They are used by other webmasters looking for site content and they could use one of your articles on their site and to do this they will have to give you a link back to your main website.
3. Some of these article sites are so popular they rank very highly in Google and your article could feature on search results page very quickly.

Article Directories

www.ezinearticles.com
www.articlealley.com
www.articledashboard.com
www.articlecity.com
www.goarticles.com

Here are a few more tips that we have used to really drive more people back to our website.

1. Write a useful article; don’t worry about making search engine friendly and worrying about number of keywords and all that. Make it useful and it will take of business for you.
2. You will be able to add a resource box on the article which is your chance to say who you are and what you do. A good way to drive traffic back to your site is if you have a long article, split it in two, post one part out the different places and tell people in your resource box that to get part two they have to visit your site.
3. Build your own Niche submission list. While we recommend the 5 site above, there could be other niche directories, websites or publications that accept article submissions. Try the publications that you receive each month. Do they accept submissions? Have a look in the news agents.
4. Be consistent – This is the tricky one as life and work usually kick in at some point. You need to try and establish a schedule to works. Will you send out one article per week, or one a month, whatever “your” schedule, try and stick with it.
5. Outsource – There are services which could prepare and submit articles on your behalf. You would just need to give them a list of topics each week or month and maybe even some quotes to drop into each one.

Article marketing is a good way for any business to drive leads, search rankings and traffic, mortgage and insurance brokers have a big advantage over the majority of current article writer in their space. They have experience, case studies and knowledge.

Look around the article marketing sites currently and most insurance articles are written by website owners, not brokers, looking to build leads and drive online sales to earn commissions. They use it, as it is low cost and works well for them.

Isn’t it about time you made the move to writing?  If you see the benefits of article marketing but just getting ther time to do it when why not drop us a line using our contact form.  We offer a wide range of web content and article marketing services.

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I am going to carrying out a series of case studies on pay per click advertising against various other forms of Internet Marketing. The first exercise will involve article marketing, which a service we offer to our clients with the main aim is being to drive them inbound links to their sites.

What we have found however, is that they have also driven substantial amounts of traffic in their own right. So we have analysed the data from a few of our clients with their permission and I want to share the results to see if you should be marketing online with articles.

If you are using PPC you may wish to consider switching some of that budget to article marketing as you will be surprised by the results.

Firstly, I would say that we use pay per click as part of our marketing strategy but in recent months we have found the quality both poor, and even worse, more expensive.

Client #1
We have a mortgage client who we provided a range of articles to during 2008*. On average each article generated 391 views and each article generated 33 click throughs to the client’s site. The cost of these clicks on a pay per click basis would be £66. (Average mortgage term cost with Google £2 per click) The article cost was £25.

Client #2
We have an insurance client who we provided a range of articles to during 2008*. On average each article generated 552 views and each article generated 92 click throughs to the client’s site. The cost of these clicks on a pay per click basis would be £230. (Average client term cost with Google would be £2.50 per click) The article cost was £25.

As you can see, the first client received 264% more value for money with their articles and the second client received a staggering 920% more value for money. They saved themselves £205. The figures used are from just a single article directory and what’s more, the stats are only provided up to the end of the year. The articles will continue to drive clicks as long as the site is live so the click volumes will now only ever increase.

Would you like to be receiving this kind of ROI on your spend. Why not talk to us about how we can help drive you traffic and boost your search engine rankings using Article Marketing.

* All statistics are taken from a single article directory. We currently submit to over 100 different sources.

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Content writing is still one of the major part of what we do and I am always surprised when new clients first get involved with us that we see a distinct lack of new content being added to their websites. Some of it hasn’t changed in years!

It is almost as if the activity stops when the site gets uploaded for the first time.  Now some of this is due to the age old “our web designers have gone and we can’t update the website ourselves” chestnut.  Other reasons include the fact that no one was told that fresh constantly updating content would be needed so no content management systems were needed.  Hey it keeps the costs down. But when you look at the responsibility of a corporate website, whose job is it to look at the content.

It normally falls to the SEO company that  goes in when the website owners start to realise that they are not getting any traffic or exposure.  The SEO company then says the immortal words , “well you need more site content”.  They then go on to say that they need a CMS to be able to manage and add content.

Oh if we had only known this before!  Well now you do.

Adding Content to a site is like adding another sales man to the sales team.  The more unique content you have on your site, the more chances or opportunities you have to get that page listed in the search engines.  Once done, you can then move on to the next piece of content, happy that the content you added yesterday will work for you as long as it is online.

Compared to PPC, Content marketing is a pay once, potentially drive traffic forever solution.  In fact, we are seeing this influx of new customers as they look to  build more lasting sources of traffic that offer a better ROI in the long term.  PPC is a great testing platform, or good in the finance and insurance space if you have deep pockets but for the average broker it can get quite expensive.

If you are finding it tough going at the moment with your ad spend, maybe divert some of it to adding more content to your site or even build a few targeted mini sites.  These are easy to do and using a platform such as Wordpress or Joomla, you can have a great functioning content management system with all the bells and whistles you need.  What’s more they are free open source solutions- so cost won’t be a factor!

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