Article Marketing – Connecting with your Reader

Chris Knight, CEO at eZineArticles, put up a short post on FaceBook recently in which he said (and I’m paraphrasing), that you should write for one, not many. In other words, even though you want to get hundreds of reads for your articles, you should write as if you were talking one-on-one with the reader.

This makes good sense. A good article connects with the reader. You want the reader to feel as if they were talking to you from across the table, not preaching to them from a pulpit. Keeping it personal can be done by asking rhetorical type questions of the reader.

Ultimately, what it comes down to is getting individual readers to click on your resource box to go to your site. Even though you want a lot of readers to do this, the best way to accomplish this is to try to make a personal connection with each reader of your article. Build relationships with your readers one at a time and soon you’ll have established quality relationships with the masses.

There are basically two approaches to using articles to get traffic to your sites or opt-in pages. One school of thought is to simply blast the article directories with hundreds and hundreds of rather general articles in your niche and hope that some of them get lots of reads and clicks in the author resource box to get traffic to a site.

This “brute-force” method can work, but it takes a lot of articles and time to write them. The other way is to do a little research and fine tune your articles for specific searches. Using this approach you should decide on the keyword phrase your article is targeting. Make sure that phrase is in your title.

Make sure you use that phrase in your article a few times as well. eZineArticles may reject your article if you have phrases in excess of a 1% keyword density. This means that in a 400 word article you should keep your keyword phrase use to no more than four times. If you have studied latent semantic indexing, including semantically related terms to your keywords may help your article show better in Google listings.

My opinion is that it is easier to write fewer articles, but articles laser targeted to specific keywords you think people would be searching for online.