Promotional Article Writing, Six Points You Must Know!

by Zachary Elwood

I’m sure most of you are aware of the marketing
power of a well-written promotional article about
your industry or business. A compelling and
educational article on your audience’s topic of
interest will drive traffic to your website and
increase customer confidence in your expertise.
Best of all, it requires no investment aside from
your time and effort.

But where do you start? The following quick tips
(presented in chronological order) should serve
you well in starting out upon this method of
online advertising. All of these points could be
several pages in themselves, but this should give
you a good overview of the process.

Think of an Article Topic
Write what you know about, first and foremost.
Brainstorm topics of which you have specific
knowledge. It doesn’t have to be something
obvious either. Write about a recent challenge
your company faced and how you overcame it. Write
about an interesting situation that you know is
a common problem in your industry but that is not
often addressed. Don’t be afraid to present
yourself or your company as imperfect, or as
facing challenges. You will come across as
genuine, conscientious and as a striver for
perfection in your field.

For instance, one of the articles I plan to
write in the next few weeks will be about our
video production company’s work on a forklift
training video. It was the first industrial
training video our company had done, and I plan
on laying out our specific challenges and what
we learned from the process. Of course I will
include the fact that the customer was very happy
with the finished product, but I will also express
the worries and difficulties we had along the way.
(Also make sure you get permission from your
clients if you plan to mention them specifically
in the article.)

Keyword Research
If you’ve done any work on doing search engine
optimization for your website, producing an
effective web article is quite similar. Because
you want your article to be relevant in searches,
you need to put a lot of focused keywords in your
content. First make a list of all the keywords
and phrases that you want your article to be
relevant for.

For instance, in preparing for this article, I
thought about who I wanted to read it. I did
internet searches to research what kind of
language was being used in the industry, and I
used a thesaurus to find similar terms. I came
up with a list of keyword phrases that included:
‘writing promotional articles’ ‘how to write
online articles’ ‘writing web articles’ ‘how to
write articles that advertise’ ‘tips for
promotional internet writing’, amongst many
others. Research will give you a good idea of
the kinds of search terms that are relevant,
and this will allow you to use these synonyms
and phrases in the body of your article.

Article Writing Strategies
Blatant self-promotion won’t often work in the
web article format. Your audience doesn’t want an
obvious advertisement; they want to be educated
and/or entertained, and that’s what you should be
striving to do.

Be concise. Use short paragraphs. If you find
yourself writing more than 1,000 words, think about
splitting your content into two articles. You’re
writing for an often impatient audience, used to
immediate gratification, so don’t get literary
or meander. Of course, this isn’t always the case;
if you’re writing for potential customers in your
industry and you know they like to read dense,
jargon-y content, you should cater to them.

Multiple Titles
Put specific effort into coming up with several good
titles for your article. They should be as
straightforward and as keyword-rich as you can make
them, as the title is the major thing that search
engines will be noticing, and because a good title
will make relevant potential customers want to click
on it. You will want to alternate these titles when
you post your article on different article
database sites.

For example, the first internet article I wrote I
titled ‘Tips for Effective Website Video’. Some
alternate titles I posted it under were ‘Producing
Effective Website Videos’, ‘Tips for Making Company
Website Video’, and ‘Pointers for Avoiding Bad Website
Video’. You get the idea; the more good titles you
give your article, the more likely it will come up for
these different combinations of keywords.

Posting Your Internet Article
Research good article-posting databases, particularly
ones that focus on your industry. No two sites are
formatted exactly the same. Some require you to break
your article into bullet-points with headings above
each paragraph. Some require you to know some basic
html code for putting in your website link or making
your title bold or in italics. Some will require you
to enter in a short synopsis of your article. Some
will require unformatted basic html code, so you
should save your article in a basic text format
as well.

I would advice you to post your article on as
many sites as you can; at least ten. Don’t
forget to alternate the titles you have chosen.
The more you post it, the more likely it is to
get read.

Article Resource Box
The resource box is the section, usually at the
bottom of the article, where you can put in a
short bio and a link to your company website
(the format varies from site to site.) Some of
the sites will require you to know a tiny bit
of html coding to put in your link manually.
You can find this easy enough by doing a search
for ‘basic html code’.

If your article has done its job pretty well, a
very small fraction of the people who read your
article will click on the link and check out
your website. A very small fraction of the
people that check out your website will think,
‘Hey, I’d like to do business with these guys’.
That’s if everything goes well. The first
article I wrote I posted on only six websites. I
did it mainly as an experiment, not expecting
anything much to happen. That article resulted
in two phone calls from companies asking about
our services, and one phone call from a
journalist wanting to interview me for a story
about online advertising she was writing.
Needless to say, I was very encouraged with the
potential of this medium.


About the Author
Zachary Elwood is a Producer/Writer for
Engaging Media, Inc. in Portland, Oregon