Increase Sales through Effective Article Writing

If someone asked you how your product or service could benefit them, could you tell them? If you were asked to speak a little about your industry, could you?

Writing articles is nothing more than putting down on paper the kinds of thoughts and sentences you use with clients every day. Over the next few minutes, I'm going to show you not only how to write an article, but how to use it to actually increase your sales.

1. Topic

First, you need to come up with a topic. This should be something that you find interesting, of course, as well as something you think a potential client would be interested in reading about. A perfect example is an explanation of how your services can be a crucial benefit to a customer.

The topic sentence itself should be interesting and compelling. You must give readers a reason to read your article.

2. Content

Your articles don't have to be long, but they should certainly be of sufficient length to adequately explain your topic. Try to write in a natural, easy to read manner, and be sure to check your article for spelling and grammatical errors. Remember, you are representing yourself and your business, so you want to appear professional at all times.

If you can, try to reference a page or two of your website and provide a direct link. For example, perhaps there's a particular service you've mentioned, so you can put in a link to the page of your site that provides more information on that service.

3. Keywords

Once you've written your article, go back through it again and make sure that you're using your top 3 - 5 keyword phrases at least a couple of times. These are the phrases that you've previously identified as being those most likely to be used by potential customers in a search engine. More on why this is critical in a moment.

4. Publication

Now that you've written and polished your article, it's time to unveil it to the world. There are a number of ways to do it, and I recommend doing as many as you're comfortable with.

First, you definitely need to keep a library of articles on your website. These will gradually, and dramatically, increase the content on your site that is scanned by search engines. If you've properly used your targeted keywords, search engines will give you higher and higher marks for those keywords with each new article. Plus, each new visitor to your site that reads your article can potentially gain a better appreciation of you and your business, and consider you more of an expert.

Second, you should consider emailing a copy of your article to your client email list. You do have a client email list, right?

Next, if you haven't already, you should create accounts for yourself on the major social networking sites and a few of the free blog sites and copy the article there. You can go to http://www.StadiaStudio.com/resources.htm to see a few examples.

Finally, I strongly recommend an article publication service. For a relatively inexpensive fee, you can have your article published to hundreds of online repositories of other articles in a variety of categories. If you've included links in your article as I've recommended, that will be hundreds of links back to your site.

Once you've gone through all these steps, you will have published your first article and will be on your way to utilizing one of the most effective marketing techniques available online. You will be adding content to your site regularly which will help with both search engines and actual visitors, and you will be marketing your site and business through the articles via emails, blogs and article distribution. When used consistently and effectively, this technique is sure to increase traffic and increase sales.

Michael is the lead web designer and owner at Stadia Studio, a web design firm in St. Louis, and has been helping businesses get online since the 1990's.