Online Branding Strategies - Article Marketing

Articles are the good source of information because most of the time articles are written by independent authors who provide fair and unbiased knowledge to their readers. Good articles can increase companies’ reputation and overall image.     

Article marketing is the important online branding strategy. Besides building reputation, it also helps a lot in increasing website traffic. When article marketing technique is used with the combination of SEO strategies then it works best. So following are the few important steps that marketers must keep in mind before doing article marketing.

• Hire an expert writer or contract with some independent authors who show interests in your business and have relative knowledge and written skills.
• Search for the good article sites related to your business and prioritize them according to their traffic rank and importance. About.com and Ezinearticles.com are two leading sources.
• Besides these online article resources develop your own corporate blog and online community for your users and publish useful articles there. This will help in building site traffic.
• Search for the appropriate keywords, select best ones and then place them in your articles for getting back links.
• Work on one keyword at a time and place it only two times in an article. Must keep in mind that your article is for information purpose only not for a sales copy.
• Publish at least three to four articles in a week. But update your corporate blog on daily basis.
• Track your all the content and make active responses to the comments that are posted by readers.
• Share your articles on social media websites; Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, Yahoo and Google Buzz. In this way you can attract more readers and increase the visibility of your articles.
• Don't forget to attach a brand copy; your brand name/logo, tag line and URL at the bottom line of the article. Use the same brand copy every time in order to position your brand effectively in the minds of customers. Customers and readers can able to recall or recognize your brand only if you deliver the same massage on all the media you use for marketing.

Talk about customer problems in your articles and provide relative solutions. You can categorize your articles according to the readers' demands as well. E.g. articles about latest products and features, talk about attributes and benefits, make comparison with other brands and in the last you can write about social issues.

No strategy works best if implemented poorly, must think.