Writing articles is a well known and highly effective marketing strategy. You hear people talking about having built entire businesses using article marketing. The are certainly one strategy that I often recommend when talking about ways small business owners can work together.
On the other hand one comment I hear really often when discussing article writing as an alliance strategy is “I’ve tried writing articles but they just don’t seem to work.”
In my experience there are four key reasons for this:
Are you writing about the right things?
Are you giving your target market the information they are looking for or are you writing about what you want to write about? Are there some questions you get asked frequently? That is a great start to a series of articles or short Blog posts. Another fantastic way to solve this problem is to ask. Try putting a poll on your BLOG or send out a survey. Find out exactly what it is your readers want you to write about. Don’t guess. Then give them what they asked for!
Are your target market finding your articles?
Are your articles being found and read and are they being found and read by the right people, YOUR target market?
Writing for other people’s magazines and websites is a well known strategy for getting your articles out there. However this can be ineffective if your target market is not well enough matched with the people reading the magazine or visiting the website. Do you have the right alliance partners? Make sure that you are submitting your articles to magazines and websites that are being read by YOUR exact target market at the time they are in need of YOUR products or services!
Are you telling your readers what to do and giving them a reason to do it?
In this busy and information packed world if you want your readers to take action you have to do two things
- Tell them EXACTLY what to do (and keep it simple)
- Give them a compelling reason to do what you told them.
If your target market are reading your articles, do you have a call to action or are you just leaving them feeling better informed that when they started? A common mistake small business owners make is to write articles and distribute them far and wide with no call to action or link back to a lead capture page or other lead capture process. If you don’t tell your readers to take action, guess what, they won’t. And furthermore if you don’t make it SUPER SIMPLE PLUS give them a compelling reason to act then they won’t do anything either.
Do your target market read articles?
Not everyone reads articles. There is not much use having an article marketing strategy in place if your target market would prefer some other media.
Have you thought of turning your articles into CDs or Videos?
If your target market are interested in How To problem solving would you serve them better by creating a series of demonstration videos?
The better you understand the people you are trying to communicate with the better a match you will be able to make your communication.
So before you write off articles as a potential alliance strategy for your business make sure you have answered those four questions. You will almost certainly open up the door to a whole host of new possibilities when you do.
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Great thoughts. It’s amazing whenever you write an article or a blog that what you thought was amazing may not be perceived the same way by readers.
Thanks for putting your thoughts down.
Thanks for the comment Andy.
The article was actually inspired by how many of my clients were telling me that article writing was’t working for them and when we talked about what was “not” happening these were the four key things that jumped out – usually different things for different people, but it all came together for me in a big ah ha moment.