Think Big With Article Marketing

The times they are a-changing.

Well, more accurately, they’ve been a-changing for a while now. What it takes to have an influential voice in your niche has changed over time, but we’re slowly starting to understand the numbers.

Early on, say 10 years ago, a dozen or two dozen articles in your niche could make a big difference in the traffic you’d get back to your website or blog. Submitting those articles was enough to put you in the company of some of the top authors in most niches, and your articles were likely to appear high in search engine results because there were a lot less websites back then.

Fast forward ten years to today and we’ve seen an explosion in the number of live websites competing on search engines. The number of people using the internet and search engines daily has also exploded. As more web content producers enter the market and more consumers are looking for information, it takes more articles to get the same amount of attention you were getting in the past.

In 2011, you need more like 200-500 articles to begin to get that same return you used to be able to get with a couple dozen articles. This can seem like a daunting task, but it’s not so bad if you start “thinking bigger” with your article writing and marketing strategy. In this video, I’ll show you a few steps that’ll get you to scale up your article marketing efforts and start thinking big.

Downloadable Versions:
               

Four takeaways from the video:

• Create a Goal – If you don’t have a goal, you’ll never know how successful you’ve been. At first, try to think about goals in terms of production. Maybe that means getting your first 100 articles available for distribution. If you already have 100, set your goal for 500 or 1,000 articles. Don’t stress over the results you see right away. Article marketing takes time, so hold off on setting results-based goals for at least a couple of months.
   
• Big Picture and Long Term – The average article generates about 25-250 views per year. If you have 10 articles on your account, you can expect about 250-2,500 views and about 7-75 clicks through to your website (assuming an average CTR of about 3%). If you scale that up to 100 articles, the average views go up to 2,500-25,000 and about 70-750 direct clicks to your website. The point of this example is get you to use a long term approach to thinking of the big picture. The cumulative effects of your efforts show over time.
   
• Think “Small” – As a writer, taking on an entire niche is a monumental task. What you need to do is break up the niche into subtopics. By getting small with your focus, your content becomes more specialized and focused on detailed information. As you drill down and write more detailed information, you’ll be competing with less content producers. You’ll also be able to connect with highly-interested prospects that you can create a business relationship with.
   
• Role of Evergreen Articles – Think big by writing evergreen content. Share information that’s relevant today AND years into the future. An article that stays accurate as time passes holds its value and will typically outperform articles that cover more trendy topics. Evergreen articles generate traffic for you for years to come and that’s what thinking big is all about.

Use these “thinking big” strategies as you write and submit more quality articles now and in the future.

How do you think big with your article writing and marketing? Leave a comment to share your thoughts.