MicroBusinessSpecialist

You want your web page to be ranked at the top of the search engines when your customer types in keywords relevant to your business.

While you can buy your way to the top using pay per click advertising, it’s more productive and quite feasible for you to move to the top of the various search engines if you apply the optimization tactics we’ve discussed over the past month.

Now some keywords will be harder than others, but if you are serving a local market, and use geographical keywords as I have suggested, it should be possible for most of you to get to the first page, if not the top listing.

The way to cement yourself into that top ranking is via back links, and while there are lots of ways to generate backlinks, the most powerful over the long haul is article marketing.

While you and I use the internet to market goods and services, most people use it to find information. And Google in particular caters to this need for information above your and my crass mercantile interests.  Article marketing helps us turn that on its ear.

A good article not only provides critical back links that will help boost us in the search engine results, it brands us as a resource to those who look for information online.  It conveys to us “expert” status and good will. This credibility will serve us well when we finally get the customers attention at a buying point.

Our first step is to cover a topic well in the form of multiple articles exploring all aspects of our product line.  Then we post these to the article directories where they can be picked up by bloggers and ezine editors.  While they are getting something free from us, when they republish our articles they are actually trolling for customers for us.

So while we advocate article marketing for the immense value we can derive from the back links it can generate, we also love the traffic it sends us. And not only do we get traffic, we get educated targeted traffic from prospective customers who already know that they want what we have.

That makes our sales job a breeze.

The value of article marketing is so great, that I have decided to start a new blog dedicated to the topic. It is called Article Marketing Hint. I hope you will take a moment to visit it and consider subscribing to the RSS Feed.

I already have a number of posts up, and have several more planned. I will of course discuss the topic here from time to time as well.  The url is http://ArticleMarketingHint.com

Blogging can be a rewarding passtime, but if you want to make money blogging you need some solid direction and advice. The best current resource I know of is Mike Paetzolds Profitable Blogging Steps which will take you step by step to profits.

Technorati Tags: Article Marketing, back links, traffic