It is a well-known fact that businesses need marketing to survive; no matter how good your product is or how excellent are your services or ideas, you need to reach out to masses in order to generate sales, otherwise you will get to nowhere.
As we all know that, products and services changes with demand and so do the marketing techniques. Previously print media, radio and television were considered the sources of marketing, but now with the advent of the internet, online marketing is flourishing day by day and has become the fastest and most inexpensive source of sharing information almost everywhere around the world.
As the internet has evolved as a social web site with interactive communication, internet marketing has gained popularity; various statistics reveal that online advertising has grown to be worth tens of billions of dollars annually, in just a few years.
According to a report published by Price Waterhouse Coopers (PWC), that as long ago as 2006, 16.5 billion US dollars was expected to be spent on online marketing in the United States alone; in the 12 years since that prediction, that figure has increased many fold to the gigantic market it is today.
Similarly, in the UK, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) reported that internet marketing has flourished in recent years becoming a multi-billion pounds industry, fueled by greatly increased use of more sophisticated broadband networks.
Companies are constantly adopting various successful internet marketing strategies in order to reach out to their target markets and an effective Article Marketing plan is one of the most effective of all.
This post is intended to provide you with a “starter pack” of information about Article Marketing strategies.
If you want to become a successful online marketer and want to stand out above your competitors, through incorporating effective article marketing tactics, then this article will help you explore the rudiments of the Article Marketing business, its importance, its scope and its benefits.
Further posts on how to create an effective article strategy and employ valuable article marketing tactics and much more, will be published in the near future.
But before getting into much depth, we first need an introduction about article marketing and how it is associated with viral marketing – another online marketing phenomenon.
Article marketing definition can be that it is a form of online marketing that companies employ to advertise products and services to their potential markets.
The term article marketing is not all that new to us, although its form has evolved considerably over time; back in the day, article marketing was processed through print medium, this being the only available medium of mass communication.
Businesses, in an effort to increase their customer bases, used to publish, free of charge, useful content in the form of an article in leading newspapers. Newspapers in turn published these articles and in return, prints the companies’ contact information with the article.
For example, visa consultants may have submitted an article on the latest visa regulations and newspapers might publish this article with the name and contact information of the visa consultants; hence it was a win-win situation for both parties.
Today with the internet revolution, this format has been largely replaced by internet article marketing. Companies today, in order to market their services and products to the customers and thus to create brand awareness, are engaging in article marketing
These activities are published via various online article directories like ezine and others; by posting their articles in various article directories and linking articles with pages of their own websites, companies can generate leads and enable their businesses to flourish.
Some online marketers maximize their online article marketing campaign results by submitting their articles to multiple article directories
As stated earlier, the internet has become by far the widest and most lucrative source of communication; this in itself is sufficient to justify the ever-growing importance of online article marketing.
Businesses today are widely launching article marketing campaigns to develop more and more leads for their business, but it is essential to be aware that article marketing success hugely depends on the strategies used by a marketer to develop and run an online article marketing campaign.
The internet has embraced the growth of more and more social media platforms: thus a structured Viral Marketing program is now essential for any type of online marketing campaign including article mark eting.
Marketers who want to market their products and service via creating and publishing articles online will ideally implement effective viral marketing campaign to enhance the effectiveness of their article marketing efforts.
Viral marketing techniques can be defined as word of mouth marketing that is generated through social media and other web-based platforms; it is essentially a marketing technique that uses pre-existing social networks like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter etc., to increase brand awareness, improve sales and to achieve other marketing objectives, through self-replicating viralprocesses.
Viral marketing is a targeted marketing strategy that can accumulate hundreds, or even thousands, of new subscribers without incurring huge costs; it is a highly successful marketing strategy that is characterized by the high “share” rate as it is being linked from one profile to the next.
So, due to its self-replicating nature, it facilitates and encourages people to share a marketing message more quickly and to a larger number of potential customers and, as the term implies, and the messages increase their audience through viral marketing, the message spreads as quickly as any other type of virus.
Viral Marketing is all about connections and developing links. The more quality connections a company can make the more business leads they can generate. The more business leads they create the higher the chances that the lead will end up to purchase a good or service.
Today many organizations are hiring Viral Marketing specialist services (I hesitate to use the acronym VMS as it has so many other meanings in a Google search) to seek their professional insight in advance internet technology and expertise in effective marketing strategies.
By incorporating a social profile gathering system, a specialist company will create interconnections with websites and social media groups, tailored specifically to their client’s target market; not only to the more well-known social media sites; the internet is home to thousands of social community web service providers, that have huge communities of active users.
Hence, by actively maintaining an extensive and thoroughly researched database of these connections, a specialist company can successfully link a business to its targeted customers in virtually any niche.
Most specialist offer free commercial information online, in the form of e-books, blogposts, articles etc to their subscribers; in such examples, the free material being provided should also be viral in nature, allowing the message to spread rapidly across the web.
Hence through incorporating viral marketing tools one can implement an effective marketing strategy and promote any kind of marketing
Viral marketing ideas have the potential to generate an aura about your business quickly; once your viral campaign is launched, its self-multiplying nature spreads the message to masses of prospects and also the viral nature makes it a low cost, low maintenance marketing campaign.
Additionally, it will rank as a highly trusted source, as your message or products are promoted by others, rather than just you as the initial marketer; hence it is generally more trusted by your prospects and it will build positive brand image, thus developing better prospects for your business.
With ever improving technology, the scope and success of viral marketing has also enhanced; statistics reveal that nearly 90% of the world’s Internet population now visits social media or blog post sites at worst weekly, in many cases, two or more times daily.
Further, Internet studies indicate that social networks are now the most popular source of information, with vast numbers of people forwarding news, events, and vendor specific information to people in their network.
In light of such statistics it is overwhelmingly obvious that companies, whether large or small, cannot ignore the massive significance of viral marketing and integration of viral marketing strategies are essential to ensure success of online marketing campaigns.
As with all of my posts on Internet marketing topics, this post seeks to offer some initial tips that would help you in your initial considerations and I would again reiterate that there are some excellent training programs on all aspects of marketing.
I would again strongly recommend that you research and sign up to a top-notch program to ensure you get the best training and advice, as a key component of embarking on this exciting aspect of your business development.
Here is a world-class training program, covering all aspects of Internet marketing for you to take advantage of.
I love to hear from my visitors so please leave a comment in the box or let me know if this post has been a help in your decision making
Thanx for your informative, well-written post Terry. I didn’t realize that article marketing was still a viable technique. I guess I’ve once again learned something new.
I am glad to know that those of us bloggers who are writing ‘articles’ can grow our brands and authority by way of getting our work out there.
I haven’t yet started using social media posting, since my site is still fairly new. Do you have your favourite social site(s) that you post to? Here’s hoping that somewhere down the road we’re both eventually able to experience ‘going viral’!
It appears that Article Marketing and Viral Marketing platforms and techniques are still alive and kicking and I, like you, can see the possibilities in the blogging niche.
I can completely agree with the Wealthy Affiliate platform It is unlike anything I have ever seen before. It is 100% set up for you to succeed and their is more knowledge within Wealthy Affiliate than I have ever seen in one place before.
I have spent years searching for the informational bits and pieces to try to put together an online marketing strategy and I had no idea it was all inside Wealthy Affiliate in one place, put into training that anyone can understand.
Article marketing works, and you do an amazing job of putting it into words that we can all understand.
Thank you Craig for your positive comments. I hope to post further articles on Viral Marketing and Articla Marketing in the near furure