Successful Article Marketers Help Readers Solve Problems

Every week, I have the opportunity to speak with people about the
benefits and challenges of using article marketing to promote an
online business. Of course, article marketing is about getting
your sales message in front of potential customers and to get
links to your website, from the page where an article is posted
online.

Where most people get confused with article marketing is with the
idea that “it is a method to promote one’s website.” Many
interpret this to mean that an article should directly promote
the writer’s website within the article, but that approach is
wrong and will reduce one’s success using this methodology.

Understanding The Overall Article Marketing Strategy

Consider this. Television has been a successful advertising
medium for more than six decades, because TV stations understand
the importance of providing content to anchor the advertising. In
every television hour, there are 42 minutes of content to provide
an anchor for 18 minutes of advertising. People tune into the
content out of a desire to receive the content, and they accept
the advertising as a necessary price to pay in order to get the
content for free.

Article marketing works best when the writer emulates the
television-advertising model, by anchoring a sales message to
content that people want to consume.

The role of article marketing is to capture an audience for the
writer’s website advertisement, which should be presented in the
“resource box” / “about the author” information that appears
in the paragraph immediately following the actual article. But,
in order to capture that audience, an article needs to tell a
story that publishers and webmasters desire to share with their
readers.

How To Capture An Audience

When people ask me what they should write about in their
articles, I always ask them a set of three questions to help them
to define a successful strategy. Those three questions are as
follows:

1. What do you sell?

2. Who is most likely to buy what you are selling?

3. What types of problems are common to those people that you may
be able to answer?

Publishers and webmasters have a responsibility to their visitors
to provide the kind of content that people actually “want” to
read. I have heard publishers and webmasters state that if you
want to sell to their readers, buy advertising. But if you were
willing to teach something of value to their readers, then by all
means, they would be happy to give you an advertisement in the
“about the author” section at the end of your article, as
payment for allowing them to share your information with their
readers.

So, if you want an audience for your website’s sales message,
you should strive to give publishers the kind of information that
they would like to share with their readers. If you give readers
what they want, publishers will be willing to give you what you
want – a chance to share the story of your business with the
publishers’ readers and website visitors.

Give Readers What They Want

When people go to a search engine, a website, a newsletter or
blog, people are looking for information that will help them to
address a problem they face. In short, people go online to find
solutions for problems.

Since I desire to reach the people most likely to buy my products
or services, I want to write content that will appeal directly to
those people. When I sit down to write, I try to identify a
problem that many people might have, and then I strive to locate
and offer a solution to the problem.

When publishers and webmasters agree that the problem addressed
is real and my solution is sound, my articles find huge
audiences.

When my articles answer a reader’s problem, my “about the
author” information gets read. When my “about the author”
information appeals to the reader, my website gets a new visitor.
And for every new visitor my website gets, I have one more chance
to sell my products and services to another potential client.

In Closing

There are certain people online, whose articles you have seen
frequently on many websites and in some of your favorite
newsletters. If you read those articles with an analytical eye,
you will soon realize that what I tell you is true. Those people
who put the focus of their articles on helping others to solve
problems are the people whose articles are published most often
and in the largest range of newsletters and websites.

Article marketing works well for those of us who seek to help
readers solve problems.

For those who are looking to escape this tried-and-true method of
article marketing, I wish you well. But I stand firm in the
belief that if you put more focus on helping people solve more
problems, you will benefit from article marketing in ways that
other people can only dream.

Copyright (c) 2008-2012 Bill Platt
Writing Puzzle
http://WritingPuzzle.com/

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