Before you begin to write your first article, you should ask yourself why I would use articles to market my website, in opposition to other methods. Well first of all it’s free, and what is more desirable than a new fresh free way to promote your website for free. Article marketing will also help build your inbound links and bring in a good amount of traffic, when written and distributed correctly.

Well then how can you write them effectively? Though this depends on your target audience and your personal writing style. You may prefer to write them to be factual yet boring as hell, or you could try making it interesting with a deficiency of information. The key I found after testing is to use a bit of both. Don’t make it sound to boring, and doing rant about irrelevant topics that your audience finds interesting.

Before picking your article topic, expose your target audience. In this case my target audience is webmasters, which are typically teenagers like me. If you’re having trouble determining your target audience you could take a survey on your website that gives you some information about your visitors.

Picking your article topic is crucial to how responsive your readers are to your website. For example if I wrote an article about fishing my response may be around 5% of readers in comparison to if I wrote about website marketing or development my response may be much closer to 50%. If you are wondering what I mean when I say your readers response, I mean how many of your readers decide to click on your link in author box of your article.

Marketing With Content

Marketing with content, or free reprint articles, gives you an inexpensive way to get your message in front of a lot of people. It is one of most effective, free, advertising methods that I have found. All that it costs you is time it takes you to write an article and make it available to publishers. You may have already written an article that can be repurposed as a free reprint article, which will cut down on amount of time required dramatically.

What Content Works

The best content is valuable information. It doesn't need to be directly related to your product, service or website, but it does need to be useful. It's best to write about a topic you are familiar with and for which you can offer unique insight. For example, if you are trying to market your real estate website, you could write an article about preparing your home for sale. Or you can write an article about which home renovation projects will make a house more desirable on market.

Your article doesn't need to be overly long. Don't confuse quantity with quality. Keep your points as concise as possible. You don't want people to fall asleep before they get to bottom of article. After all, they need to get to bottom of your article to see your byline which is point of writing a free reprint article in first place.

One way to get most out of your free reprint articles is to write about a topic with staying power. I have 4 year old articles that are still being picked up by publishers to this day.

Your Byline

The payoff for providing publishers with free content is byline. You don't want an essay or multiple paragraphs, just a short description of yourself, your website, and your link. You can also post your email address and phone number for people to contact you. However, most important address is your web address. People who are online are much more likely to click on your link to find more information than they are to email or call you. Additionally, when you post your email address on internet, it can dramatically increase amount of spam you get at that address.

If you have an ezine that you want to encourage people to subscribe to, you can post your subscribe address, but make sure your list is double opt-in to prevent invalid subscribers. In my experience, 90% of subscribers added by single opt-in are invalid addresses.