Many small business owners are confounded by the following questions: “Why should I write marketing articles about my product? Why should I waste my time if no one is going to read them? Why should I pay money to submit articles to online directories?” Since the internet is so vast, it’s tempting to view each individual piece as a “waste,” as nothing more than a needle in a haystack. However, writing articles is the most important aspect of an online sales marketing campaign. As a small business professional, you simply cannot survive the competition without them.

First, we’ll talk about how the writing of articles can help your business. Ultimately, you want published articles to bring potential buyers to your site. The only way visitors can find your site (unless they’re specifically searching your name) is by typing a term into the search engine and checking the links on the first page of results. Statistics show if you’re not in the top results, you can forget about people ever finding you. A group of people called Search Engine Optimization experts spend their days analyzing what sort of terms people are typing into the search engines. They can even run diagnostic tests on your page that tell them where people are coming from to reach your site, what search terms delivered traffic, what search terms delivered sales, how long people stayed on your site, what pages sent people fleeing and where people went next. This research can greatly help your overall internet marketing campaigns.

Your website can be the best in the world, but what good is it if no one can see it? By writing articles to publish on your homepage, you will show search engines that you mean business. You’re not just another useless site out there; you have much to offer consumers. As the search engines crawl your page, they’ll look for numerous internal pages, freshly updated content, blocks of 500 words or more, keywords that are in high demand and the appropriate density of keywords. Well-written promotional articles can accomplish all of these things. If your rankings improve, then you will undeniably see more traffic coming to your site. Ideally, this increased awareness will bring more buyers and sales.

Another benefit of writing articles consistently is that each one creates another impression for web users. If a person sees your name once, he might soon forget it. If he sees it twice, he might remember it for a day or so, and then lose it from his mind. If he sees your name three, four, five times — his curiosity and attention may be piqued. Perhaps he’ll check out your site, read through some of your blogs and begin to form an opinion on you. He may have the immediate impression that you must be popular to come up so many times. Over time, article marketing not only attracts visitors to your site, but buyers too. You may even find newspaper reporters contacting you because they figure you are an “expert” in your field, since your articles come up so often.