Post by Rob Minton. Follow me on Twitter!
Over the last few months, I've added "article" marketing into my business. For those of you who do not know what "article" marketing is, I'll explain it for you. The basic idea is that you write, or hire others to write, special articles directed toward your target prospect. These articles are then submitted to various article directory websites with you as the author. Each article includes a "resource box" where you can promote yourself and your business.
One benefit of this strategy is that other business owners can use your article in their website or in their customer newsletters giving you free exposure to their customers and prospects. As an example, let's assume that you submitted an article to one of these websites about how to sell a home in 7 days flat. I'm an insurance salesman and need content for my monthly client newsletter. I want an article that gives value to my readers. So I find your article and include it in my newsletter. You now get exposure to my entire database for free. This is important because your "resource box" must be included in the article or I am unable to use it. I call this the "Free-Ride" strategy because you get a free ride into someones database. Nice!
The second benefit is that these articles give you expert positioning in the marketplace. When a prospect reads your article, they automatically think of you as an expert. The same positioning occurs if you were to write your own book. Expert positioning is very important for real estate agents and should be part of your overall marketing game plan. It helps attract prospects to you. It helps you control your schedule and set higher commission rates.
The third and probably most powerful benefit of article marketing is that you can dramatically increase your search engine position. Search engines rank websites with many incoming links higher than websites without many incoming links. This means that you need to get other people linking to your website in order to increase your search engine positioning. Top search engine positioning is extremely valuable and will generate free lead after free lead. A top Google search engine position generates 6 times the traffic of a sponsored link on the same page. For this strategy to work, you need thousands of incoming links. On the surface, this sounds like an impossible feat. It's not. I'll show you how to do it!
I recently wrote a blog post showing real estate agents how to follow the money in their market by studying recent home sale activity. I turned this blog post into an article and submitted it to a special service which posts the article on hundreds of websites. Remember, each article has a resource box with links back to my website. I was able to generate hundreds of links to my website just by submitting one article to this service. Below is a screen shot of a Google search for my article. You'll be able to see how this article is now listed on many websites:
At the top of this screen shot notice that this article now appears on 246 websites. Remember this is only in Google. The service I used also posts this article throughout Yahoo too. Here is a screen shot of the Yahoo search:
You can see that this one article was found in 75 websites from the yahoo search. Combine this with the 246 from Google and you'll see that I now have over 300 links back to my website from just one article. Very powerful!
Now, if I submit one article a week for a month, I'll have over 1,200 links back to my website. Sooner or later, I'll have top positioning in Google and Yahoo! This will be a very valuable lead generation strategy. If funds are tight because of the slow real estate market, I strongly suggest you add this strategy to your marketing plan. Here is why:
- Free traffic to your website.
- Free leads to your business.
- Instant expert positioning.
The service I used to submit one article to over 300 websites is: http://www.NewArticleSubmission.com
I simply turned a blog post into an article and will soon have free traffic and free leads. This is the best way to recycle your blog posts to help promote your business. Gotta run because I have to submit a new article today!
