Article Marketing: Competing For Readers

Once it occurs to you, article marketing is not just for getting back links, you’re suddenly faced with the fact there’s a great deal of competition going on behind the scene. Thousands of authors are daily competing for readers by submitting quality information. Are you one of them?

Millions of people visit the article directories every day to find information and recommendations, and with all the content pouring into these places, they can afford to be choosy about which articles they’ll read. Competing for readers then should be your top priority.

This means two things . . .

First, you need to submit your articles into the best possible category each directory has to offer.

Why?

Because readers visit article directories to find specific information, either to learn from or to find content for their sites. The more fine tuned your category choice is, the easier it’ll be to find your articles.

You see, when you submit articles into general or less specific categories, you put yourself up against the maximum number of competitors. So when readers visit the article directory, your articles are like a needle in a haystack and could be easily passed over. Then, because you didn’t submit them into a good sub-category, the readers will never see your articles because they won’t be there where they’re looking.

Make sense?

The second thing is all about quality of course, because frankly, quality content separates the men from the boys!

Good article writing starts at the title, ends with the call to action, and has an easy to follow flow in between. A high quality article isn’t about sophisticated, technical verbiage, or sensationalism either. It’s about being to the point, informative, and interesting.

The article title should be on point to what’s contained in the content. Be creative in your title selection, but never make it seem you’re offering more than the article does. An article title can be a major draw, or it can be a complete turn off if it doesn’t match the content of the article. If you stick to using your main article keyword in the title, you should do well and avoid deception.

The way you structure your article body is important too. Whether you use bullet points or not, your article should be a list of steps that take your readers from knowing nothing about the topic to understanding enough about it to see the reasonableness of the call to action at the end.

Each point should enforce the one prior so that you’re breaking down an argument to a logical conclusion. Jumping around your points will only confuse your readers and get them to give up. Writing an outline before you put your articles together will help you stay on point.

Finally, your call to action should be more about the psychology of sensibility rather than hypnotic motivation. If you’ve used logic in your article body, and presented your argument well, there should be no need whatsoever for hype at the end.

Your readers will be led to making their own conclusions based on the reasonable conditions you’ve set. And it’s a well known fact that when a person believes they’ve made a choice on their own, they’re much more likely to follow through on it.

Now this may all be contrary to what you’ve been led to believe article marketing is about, and we’re not saying back links aren’t an important element to why you’d submit articles. But the fact is, whether you’re submitting articles to your standard article directories, or if you’re selective in your submissions and only submitting to the special directories as a contributing author, you’re going to have competition.

Competing for readers first, above all other reasons for submitting articles, will still get you back links, but will also set you up as an expert author, eliminate the haystack effect of the vast number of articles being submitted, put you on track for maximum traffic to your site or offer, and give you a fighting chance in the search engine indexing war.