5 Ways to Make Article Marketing Work For Your Local Small Business

Article Marketing provides a cost-effective means of broadening your exposure by using article submitted to websites, blogs and eZines at no cost. The return is increased rankings in the search engines that drive the internet such as Google, MSN and Yahoo (known as the big 3).

Article Marketing has emerged from a process known as Search Engine Optimization, a process for optimizing web pages using keywords to increase your ranking with the search engines.

Article Marketing provides you with a cost-free opportunity to establish yourself as an expert in your field, increase website traffic, lead generation and improve search engine rank. A Resource Box is used to provide your bio and a link back to your site and a good tip is not to be blatantly self-promotional as such tend not to be picked up or distributed.

Recent studies on consumer searches indicate a growing trend towards searches being localized. In other words potential customers are looking for local businesses to buy from after they have researched the market on the internet. It is thought that approximately 50% of searches by potential buyers are to research local suppliers and is a trend that is set to continue.

How this impacts small businesses is in relation to how many small businesses have concentrated on creating a "brochure style website" with the idea "that if you build they will come" -- rather than focusing on the essentials of internet marketing, avoiding search engine marketing and article marketing to their detriment.

If you are not obtaining a high enough ranking on the search engines, local customers looking to buy from you won't be able to find you!

So let's make article marketing work for your small business with these 5 tips:

1. Do your Research -- take some time to look up article marketing and search engine optimization before heading straight into an article marketing campaign. There are plenty of online resources to help you and your first decision will probably be whether or not to bring in an outside party to do the writing work for you;

2. Deal with the Big 3 First -- Yahoo, Google and MSN account for 70% of searches carried out - take some time to register your website and submissions with these first and then look for more specialist search sites dealing with your area as they also can prove useful;

3. Be Address Friendly -- add your business name and address in various parts of your article as when the search engines seek out a website as a result of a local search they will scan for local addresses;

4. Stay away from "link farms" - these are sites whose purpose is to create reciprocal links to you in order to fool the search engines into giving you a higher rank. This is likely to result in you being removed from a search altogether; and

5. Keep your articles simple, focused and balanced -- when you are writing select your subject and stay on target, avoid putting too many cross-linking references into your article as this will detract from you and don't brazenly self-promote yourself as this will turn readers and distributors off