Marketing your articles means creating and sharing articles for educational and promotional purposes. This can include promoting a business, website, product, or service. It can also help gain popularity for a business and promote positive word of mouth.
You can gain visibility in an industry by creating articles and publishing them on blogs, media outlets, or industry publications. If the article is informative and provides a good analysis and gives sound advice, the article will help meet the commercial objectives. This can improve visibility in search engines, enhance your brand, and help drive traffic.
Unlike display ads, article marketing focuses more on available content rather than a focused target. In article marketing, the content focuses on SEO and affiliate marketing with less expectation of immediate, focused sales.
Here is an example in a Sentence
“By practicing article marketing through industry publications and refining each article for high-intent search queries, our content team increased the company’s presence in the SaaS niche.”
Marketing Logic of Article Marketing
Marketing with articles is effective due to a synergistic combination of three of its structure. These include the content creation, strategic placement, and visibility leverage.
First, content is created for specific topics that will resonate with an audience. These topics could range from industry updates, categorization of products, answering the most searched questions, comparisons, and more. It pays to have the content as a standalone, useful piece of information to avoid losing the article’s potential for organic traction.
Second, content is spread to as many channels as possible to get maximum reach. The brand’s site, external publications, industry blogs, and article syndication services can all host the content. Different locations will offer different reach potential and target audience.
Third, content is designed to point the audience to a specific commercial goal. This can be done with accompanying commercial materials, interlinks, and biography sections of the authors. In the case of affiliate marketing, referral links are often included as a part of the content.
The efficiency of article marketing is a result of many factors, including how the article is indexed, how readers engage with the content, how referrals are tracked, and how well the content is distributed. Marketing articles is not like a paid advertisement, where instant traffic is generated with allocation of budget. Marketing articles is more effective for the long term as positions are built and content cuts authority.
Article Marketing and the Digital Ecosystem
Marketing articles does not happen randomly. It is part of a wider ecosystem that includes search engines, content hosting sites, affiliate marketing, analytics, and regulation compliance.
With regards to search engine optimization, article marketing assists with:
- Broadening the scope of keyword relevancy
- Enhancing the content quality of a webpage for a search query
- Building an internal linking structure
- Gaining external backlinks
From the standpoint of referrals, article marketing serves as a traffic acquisition channel. Articles hosted on top-tier websites are capable of channeling relevant traffic to a target website.
From an affiliate marketing standpoint, article marketing facilitates pre-selling strategies. Instead of driving traffic to an offer page, affiliates tend to use articles to provide information, create a rapport, and contextualize the product before revealing affiliate links.
From a regulatory perspective, article marketing must adhere to advertising transparency, intellectual property rights, and terms of use of the platform. Regulated industries like finance and healthcare have articles containing deceptive claims that are in violation of the regulations and are subject to penalties.
From a marketing perspective, article marketing generates both top of the funnel awareness and middle funnel consideration. It is infrequent used as a direct sales tool, instead, it works in conjunction with a more complex marketing funnel.
Business-Level Implications
From a business standpoint, article marketing has several structural functions.
It increases discoverability. Articles that are optimized for specific queries increase chances that their site will appear in search results for questions that have an informational intent. It builds credibility. Publishing content consistently that is in-depth increases credibility for that specific content area.
Diversification of traffic sources. Relying solely on a payed model increases cost volatility. Article marketing can provide a source of traffic that is less reliant on a bidding model. It builds long lasting digital assets. Ads are temporary, but articles are permanently indexed. Articles can produce traffic for years and revenue if they are maintained.
There are resources that are required for article marketing. High-quality content needs to be produced, and this will need an editorial plan, research on topics, legal review, and you need to track data on how articles are performing.
Often, article marketing is dependent on some performance driven metrics. Metrics include: organic sessions, time on page, conversions, and new and lost traffic.
The Role of SEO in Article Marketing
For article marketing to be effective, optimizing for search engines has to be a top priority.
When articles are written with special keywords, they increase the chance of articles being shown for search queries. Although, just using specific keywords is not enough to rank for search queries. Other important factors include how deeply written the article is, if the content is original, is semantically relevant, and if the search engine is analyzing user behavioral patterns.
Article marketing builds domain-level authority when other websites, known as external sources, reference the website as an original source. Back links are important for domain authority and relevance, positively impacting search engine results.
On the other hand, some websites use low integrity to create articles just to build links and have incurred search engine algorithm penalties. Using low quality, replicated articles and excessive links to low quality articles in syndicates have created low search trust.
Article marketing today is using an integrity and user help, rather than just creating articles for links.
Marketing Articles and Affiliate Programs
When article marketing is used in affiliate marketing, it is used to educate customers prior to their purchase.
Affiliates create comparison articles, product reviews and guides, how to guides, etc., that include affiliate links seamlessly. Instead of using direct advertising banners, they use affiliate links in the article.
This serves several functions:
- Warms consumer
- Perceived credibility
- Search engine ranking
- Users can create self perpetuating system
Some rules apply to article marketing. Not stating that an article is affiliate funded is advertising deception and can result in advertising transparency violations.
Also, aggressive or biased framing of articles can reduce trust from users. Readers see through an overly promotional tone that is disguised as informative.
Sustainable article affiliate marketing is the practice of keeping the reader informed, while also making money from the article.
Myths Surrounding Article Marketing
In the world of article marketing, there are numerous myths and misconceptions. Many people, for example, think that article marketing is a way to get “free traffic.” While it may not cost anything to publish content, the creation of the content, editing, and the content finishing and optimizing all cost money.
Another common misconception is the idea that if a business publishes more articles, then the business will get more “free traffic”. Publishing articles without having relevant and good content will not lead to an increase in the business’s traffic. Some people believe that marketing articles is a thing of the past. While poorly written content that is placed in a lot of article directories has become less popular, good content written by an author is still very important to the internet.
Many people confuse article marketing and blogging. While blogging is a function of article marketing, article marketing also includes other things such as guest blogging, placing articles with other people, and knowledge hubs in an organized manner.
Last, but certainly not least, there is a misconception that marketing articles is the same as advertising through direct approaches. Article marketing is more of a channel that is informational in nature and is focused on influencing a user’s journey indirectly.
Understanding of Risks and Practical Awareness
When engaging in article marketing, awareness of the structural risks is important. Imitation content may lead to the dilution of ranking potential. Republishing the same article on various domains is likely to decrease a site’s search trust.
Brand low-quality site placements could lead to a brand being associated with a poor-quality site. Search penalties caused by poor optimization, such as keyword stuffing, reduce the read ability of a piece.
In certain regulated industries, noncompliance may put a company’s legal exposure. To address these risks, article marketing incorporates control of content originality, compliance checks, performance audits, and editorial policies.
While article marketing is mainly about content, it has to be treated as an operational system rather than a single activity.
Components of a Good Strategy for Article Marketing
Components usually included in a good framework for article marketing include:
- Mapping audience intent clearly to help them find what they are trying to search or read
- Creating original content that is clear and thorough
- Placement on appropriate publications or platforms
- Providing contextual links to help navigate but not to overwhelm
- Places where there are commercial relations are expressed without hiding them
- Evergreen content is where analytics are used to track how well it performs
- Relevance is kept by periodic reviewing and updating of content
Each component adds a different layer to the ecosystem, from discoverability to compliance.
Differences Between Article Marketing and Other Strategies
Article marketing content strategy focuses on distribution more than other strategies, usually overlapping with other strategies. Article marketing content strategy focuses on the distribution of long-form content with the purpose of advertisement, and not on other forms, such as videos, podcasts, or posts on social media.
It is different from a press release because a press release is more of an event-driven announcement, and not an information guide. It is different from native advertising practices, which are more advertising placements that consumers can pay to have their articles or stories included in an advertising strategy.
Article marketing may incorporate aspects from all these practices, but in essence, it is informational publishing aligned with commercial goals.
Sustainability in the Future
With article marketing, search engines prefer to reward consistency than to reward the scattered publications from that strategy. It is a long-term strategy, and it provides the best results in that period of time. Continuing to write articles on a certain theme will develop topical depth, which means writing multiple articles that cover related subtopics within a niche. This builds semantic clusters that reinforce domain authority. However, relevance can diminish due to stagnation. Articles that become outdated could lose ranking positions if they aren’t updated.
This means that article marketing is, in fact, a process that has to be managed as a whole. Articles will need to be updated, refreshed, combined, or retired.
Publishing alone is not a goal. The goal is to sustain an organized ecosystem of knowledge.
Explanation for Dummies
Let’s say you have a small shop. Rather than shouting to people, you write a guide about a problem that people might appreciate. You put these guides in places where people will look for guides. Some people will read the guide, learn something useful, and trust your knowledge, and visit your shop.
That is article marketing.
It is not about ads. It is about publishing information and articles that people need, in a way that serves potential customers. Over time, articles created will act like business signposts and point toward your shop.
While there may not be immediate results, there will be an increase in visibility, credibility, and the incremental, positively structured, and sustainable growth potential.
To put it differently, article marketing can simply be described as using generic, useful written content, satisfying audience interest, and achieving business goals.
