Shortly before I discovered the wonders of marketing online with well-written articles, I read a book written by well-known branding expert Al Ries and his daughter Laura Ries, titled 11 Immutable Laws of Internet Branding. Immutable law number 6 was The law of Advertising. It dealt at length with why conventional advertising does not quite work online and why we should expect to see a revolution with this revolutionary new medium and not just a replay of the past.
That book helped me a great deal to become immune to the massive quantity of very convincing hype selling banner ads online. It also helped me understand early on why traditional advertising was not working on the net (it has a lot to do with the World Wide Web being interactive.) Most of all it prepared me to quickly grasp the potential of articles as an online marketing tool.
Still when I wrote my first promotional article and posted it to only one high-traffic articles directory that had been highly recommended, it had some very important key online marketing elements missing.
Firstly it was not a keyword-rich article and secondly it did not direct traffic to any site. The resource box simply talked about my online business and the service I was offering and mentioned an email address where I could be reached. Later I had the good sense to introduce an email course on article marketing designed to trap email addresses. But that was later and another story for another day.
Until then I had found it very difficult to attract any traffic to any of the websites I owned. Basically folks needed to spend a small fortune on some advertising to attract a handful of not exactly-targeted-but-mostly-curious-traffic to their sites. So you can imagine the excitement I felt when I checked on the site a few days later and noted that the article had already received a double-digit number in terms of hits. And I knew that this was very highly-targeted traffic.
A few weeks later, the results started trickling in.
Admittedly I had still not made my first sale, but I was still receiving the odd inquiry or two. However a couple more weeks down the road, I had signed on my first regular client and a couple of other one-off jobs. Total revenue from that single article to date is about $10,000 and still counting.
This, to me, is pure magic and illustrates the power of article marketing rather effectively. Remember that it all started happening with one article. It means that if one were to just get a handful of articles written, use the right keywords, powerful headlines and aggressively use all your articles for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your site or sites, there is no limit to what you can achieve.
And one does not even need to be a writer to make use of what is bound to end up being the most powerful marketing tool ever used by man. Anybody can simply hire an online writer either directly or through some increasingly innovative sites where quality writers can bid for your writing work. And the rates are really dirt-cheap, especially when you consider the fact that your promotional article will last forever, working very hard to drive massive traffic in the direction of your website.
Christopher Kyalo is a successful internet entrepreneur and online writer who uses articles as his only marketing tool. Read more useful articles on this subject by subscribing to his free ezine (send a blank email NOW to [email protected] to subscribe). Also find lots of useful information at his blog on Articles Marketing.
