What an article is (and isn’t)
You have a website. You want traffic. Therefore, you need articles.
If someone says the word “article” to you, you might think of stories in magazines and newspapers. Unless, of course, you’re a serial grammarian, in which case you may picture a series of short words: a, an, the, and so on.
In the interests of avoiding confusion (and assuaging the serial grammarians), all references to “articles” in this book should be assumed to mean this:
Article: A relatively short, informative piece of writing that conveys an idea or concept in a useful, interesting and/or entertaining manner.
Now, take a good look at that definition. There are several key words to help you determine what an article is. The word “informative” is perhaps the most important.
Good articles let the reader walk away (or click away, as the case may be) knowing something they didn’t know before. People read articles expecting to either learn something or be entertained—preferably both.
What about the term “relatively short”? Articles can vary in length, from a few paragraphs to several pages. The length of an article should depend on the information you’re trying to convey. For example, “How to Make a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich” would be relatively shorter than “The Basic Operating
Principles of Fission Reactors.”
The last part of the definition is to help you understand what an article isn’t. This is a crucial concept for anyone using articles to increase website traffic and sales, and it’s one many webmasters fail to grasp: articles are not advertisements.
No one wants to read a three-page ego-stroke about how great your product or book is, or why dozens of people in your hometown are raving about you.
These types of “articles” will not be circulated or read, and can actually decrease your website traffic when word starts spreading that your site is nothing but a bunch of advertising hype.
Though your ultimate goal in generating articles for your website is to increase sales, using articles to spell out your goal in plain English (buy my stuff!) is a good way to make sure you never reach it.
Believe it or not, subtlety still has a place in Internet marketing. By providing people with quality articles at no cost to them, you will reach a far greater audience—and convert more visitors to buyers.
Articles, Content, Visibility...Sales!
Now that you know what articles are, let’s talk about why you need them.
Ask any successful ‘netpreneur the secret to drumming up website traffic and earning repeat visitors, and you’re practically guaranteed to receive a one-word answer: content.
That’s CON-tent (the “meat” that gives substance to whatever is being referenced, whether it’s words on a website or cotton in a stuffed bear), not con-TENT (sublime happiness, often realized through sufficient quantities of money—though that’s not necessarily a bad thing, either).
Articles are content. They are the meat of your website; providing substance and value to both visitors and search engines. A website without articles is like a headline about alien babies on the cover of a tabloid magazine: easy to ignore.
There is nothing to interest visitors in staying or coming back, and nothing to appease the search engine spiders into indexing your pages somewhere above the millions rank.
Once your website has content, you’re on the road to visibility. By offering your visitors something of value, you not only increase the chance that they’ll come back, but also that they will tell friends about your site.
Also, search engines give more weight to websites with content as well as those that are frequently updated.
Face it: there are millions of websites out there in cyberspace. You need visibility to get visitors. And the more visitors you have, the more sales you’ll make.
Before you start loading up your website with articles and sit back to watch the money roll in, you should understand that there are right ways and wrong ways to generate and use website content.
This book will explain the do’s and don’ts of article marketing and help you make the most of this powerful internet tool.
