How articles can help to market your small business

One of the best ways to market your small business is through article writing and blogging. When you write articles that are based on topics you discuss with your customers, you are establishing your brand with your customers and this will help you stand out from your competition. Branding is difficult to do, but article marketing makes it pretty easy as you only need to write on topics that will benefit your customers and pretty soon people will start to look upon you as the company `in the know.'

How does article marketing work?
If you aren't quite sure what makes article marketing so powerful, take a look at a few sites that provides articles to their customers. Using powerful keywords and smart topics, you can easily drive new customers to your web site. As your customers read your articles, they get to know a little bit about your company along with the type of information you are providing.

Several companies have starting writing articles and publishing them on their own sites but you do have the option of posting them with other sites. Some sites will pay you to publish the articles but other sites will charge you to publish them so you need to be particular when you are trying to publish your work. Publishing the articles is how you are going to drive more traffic to your web site and to help build credible inbound links.

It's a good idea to list your articles with other directories since you are a small business owner. This is because they have directories of thousands, sometimes millions of people so you have a good chance of getting the exposure you need to brand your small business and establish yourself in the industry.

How to drive traffic with articles
Just writing articles is one thing but writing quality articles is a completely different thing. Spend some time thinking about the type of topics your target audience is interested in and then decide how you would like to write the article. Do you want to write it as an informational piece, scientific piece, or just a friendly advice column? Choosing the right format for your article comes down to your ability to spend time researching your target audience and finding a way to truly reach them.

Choosing a good topic and a nice title to go along with it will help you drive traffic to your web site. You also need to focus on adding a keyword in the title as this will make it easier for the search engines to find your articles and pull them up in the search engine results. If the title is not interesting, people will look over your article and move onto the next one that has an interesting title. Include a small write-up for the search engine crawlers that quickly explains what the article is so the reader can skim over it to decide if this is something they are interested in.

Once you have the title and a basic format for your article, think about a few common keywords people will use to search for the article. You want to try and keep some of these keywords in the article because the search engine crawlers will recognize them and give them a high priority in the search engine rankings as more and more people start to read the articles.

At the end of the article, always include a link to your web site along with some brief information about your company. This way you can advertise your site and you can provide new customers with some basic information about yourself or about the company.