Three Top Article Marketing Tips for Home Business Owners

Article marketing is a very effective way to promote yourself and your home business, but many marketers are falling into common traps that waste much of the effort they put into this.

The good news is, you can avoid these traps and set yourself far above the crowd!

Home business builders promoting affiliate products, network marketing opportunities, and other products or services have been using “article marketing” for years.

Article marketing is still a great option for online promotion, for a number of reasons.

• it works well if done right

• it doesn’t require a significant investment of money unless you hire someone to do it for you

• it can help establish you as an “expert” or authority in your home business niche

Given the exposure and publicity that article marketing can provide, some home business builders try to cut corners and mass produce their content in an effort to get results more quickly.

Here are three common mistakes that many business owners make when they start publishing articles. If your business involves creating your personal brand and establishing a solid reputation online, pay particular attention to these points.

Writing Articles for Search Engines Only

How many times have you seen articles that are basically incoherent and somewhat repetitive? Chances are, the person who wrote that article was writing for the search engines, not human readers. Some “experts” teach that the style and readability of an article isn’t that important – that the emphasis should be on constructing the article with keywords and related terms in a certain way to achieve better search engine rankings.

Using keywords and creating your articles with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind is quite acceptable. However, it is important to create respectable content that will appeal to human readers looking for the information you’re writing about. If you write and publish weird sounding articles just for search engine consumption, you might achieve some ranking boost – but in the overall long-term  picture, you’ll lose out.

Poor Article Spinning Practices

Spinning article content is very popular. There are quite a few tools and software applications to make this job as easy as possible.

Basically, article spinning means taking an article you write and substituting synonyms and alternate phrases that will be “spun” by the software to create variations of your article. Basic article spinning syntax looks like this:

{Network marketing|MLM|Multilevel Marketing} is a very {profitable|lucrative|rewarding} {business|home business|work from home business}.

When spun, the software will pick one random term between each set of curly brackets to create variations. The syntax above could produce a number of variations, including:

Network marketing is a very profitable home business.

MLM is a very rewarding work from home business.

Multilevel marketing is a very profitable business.

The idea of article spinning is based on the “duplicate content penalty” theory – that being, submitting exactly the same article to multiple distribution channels will result in only one instance of the article being  indexed in Google and other engines. In theory, good spinning creates variations of the article that are sufficiently different for the search engines to consider them reasonably unique. This should result in lots of articles (all created from the same seed article, all with links to your website) being indexed and available to searchers.

The problem is, even with sophisticated spinning software, the results are only as good as the effort put into it. Many people create articles that don’t make sense and look silly when spun. This is one reason you see so much low-quality and basically useless content on the Internet.

If you put smart, focused effort into spinning articles and understand how it works, and take into account potential readers who might find your articles, the technique can be effective. The problem is that most people neither really understand how it works nor put enough thought and time into it.

Submitting to Junk Article Directories

There are quite a few automated submitters (both software and services that charge monthly fees) on the market that will take your article and submit it to hundreds of article directories. The sales pitches look so good. The truth is, many of these submit to junk directories that accept anything that is sent their way.

Many of these article directories are there simply to make money through Google Adsense and other monetization strategies, and will accept just about any garbage content. The idea is getting as much content as possible to capture as many potential searchers as possible. As a professional marketer, you don’t want articles pointing to your key websites in these junk directories.

The key is submitting to article directories that have higher standards (ezinearticles.com is one example). A good strategy is to write good articles, publish them on your blog first, then submit to quality directories and selected social media sites.

The Bottom Line in Article Marketing

Article marketing is a fantastic way to get exposure for your brand and your business. If you’re a professional who is building your brand and reputation, post your best material on your blog, then post in social media and in quality directories like Ezine Articles. For social media site posts, you can write short variations on the same topic and link them back to your main article on your blog.

Think about your branding. Your online reputation. You don’t want articles out there that look bad linking back to your main blog or website, nor do you want your quality material published side by side with junk articles.