What do press releases and article marketing have in common? 

For those not familiar – article marketing is  a term for using articles to drive traffic to a website, and hopefully, of course, sales. The way that you do this is to write short, informative articles and submit them to article directories like Ezinearticles.com and Goarticles.com and Associatedcontent.com.  The article directories allow you to include a "resource box" or "author bio", and in that resource box you include a link to your website. Most article directories do not pay you (Associated Content pays a small amount if they accept your articles – generally a few dollars per article).

However,  having your article appear on an article marketing directory is helpful in several ways. First of all, every article that is accepted represents a backlink from a high pagerank site. Secondly, when the article appears on the home page of the article directory, it sends traffic to your website from people browsing the article directory. And thirdly, the articles appear in the search engines, linking to your site, and the more articles that you have out there, the more chances are that people will find them, read them, and click through to your site.

These days, press releases can be used in a way very similar to article directories.

The difference: a press release is a news announcement of some sort. Launch of a new product, an upcoming webinar or teleseminar, a merger, winning of an award, etc. An article is a short informative piece, which conveys information that doesn’t necessarily have any news value. It’s used to showcase your expertise in a particular area. (For instance, if you are a dog trainer selling dog training products, or even promoting dog training affiliate products, you could write articles about how to housebreak a puppy or how to crate train a dog, and put them on article directories which link back to your site.)

The similarities: if you submit your press releases to online press release distribution sites, those press releases, like the articles, first send you an initial burst of traffic when they run on the site’s home page, and then they continue to send traffic because they stay in the search engine listings and people find them days, weeks, months, even years later.  Both press releases and articles are used to stake out your place on the internet, to grab more prime pieces of virtual real estate. Both give you credibility and visibility, as well as traffic and backlinks. 

So which should you use? Both, of course. The more articles and press releases that you have linking to your site, the more visible your site is in the search engines and the more people will be able to find you. 

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