Inbound Marketing: The Art of the Viral Article

Inbound Marketing

Do you have a website but having a hard time generating traffic? Don’t you wish you could just sit back and let someone else do the promoting for you?Well you can! And they’ll do it for you for FREE. That’s right, we’re not talking about paid advertising here. What I’m talking about is inbound marketing.  It works better than paid advertising and doesn’t cost you a thing–article submissions.

Submitting an article to an article directory is a great way of generating traffic for your website, whether you’re just starting out or just trying to increase the traffic to your site. All you have to do is write an article that would be useful to your prospects, and put a resource box at the end of the article with a link to your website. A resource box is just a small statement about yourself with a link to your site for them to find out more information. Then you submit it to a few article directories. That’s it. Other people take over from this point.  That’s the basis of an article going viral through good inbound marketing practice. 

So what exactly happens when you post articles on an article directory? Well your article gets posted on their website. A lot of other website owners check these article directories for articles they can use as content for their website or newsletter. But when they use your article, they agree to not change the article and to leave YOUR resource box on it.  With inbound marketing, you’re not paying for advertisement; others advertise your website for you! You don’t have to do anything.

I can hear you now, this all sounds great but I’m not that great at writing. Well you don’t have to be! You’re not trying to sell a novel here. All you are doing is writing something that you think would be useful for someone else to know. As long as it is helpful I’m sure there will be plenty of people who WANT to read it. And the more you write, the better your writing is going to get. So don’t sit around procrastinating because you don’t feel you can write good enough. Just start writing. You’ll get better.

Is inbound marketing really better than paid advertising? I would say yes and there are several reasons for this. First of all it is FREE. Second, it’s viral. Take a look at this scenario. If you post an article on a couple article directories and only 10 people decide to use it in their newsletter. Each of these people has 2,000 people on their list. This advertises your site to 20,000 people. Now imagine if 100 people used your article or if they had 20,000 people each on their list. This stuff is powerful. Third, it establishes you as an expert in that field. People will trust you more and will be more willing to by your product if you’ve already given them useful information. Forth, after you’ve written a lot of article you can compile them into your own ebook and give it away for free (with links to your site of course) or sell it. Paid advertising doesn’t even compare to this.