Top 5 Ways to Get Your Articles Found and Read Online

Writing online articles is a terrific way for nonfiction authors to showcase their expertise, drive traffic to their website, and promote their books. Authors can post articles on their own blog, provide articles to other blogs and websites read by their target audience, and submit articles to online article directories.

In a recent issue of The Savvy Book Marketer Newsletter, I discussed the changes that Google made to their search algorithims in February of 2011 and how that is affecting article marketing strategies. Although traffic to most article directory sites is down due to Google’s changes, articles are still an effective way to promote books.

Now it’s more important than ever to write high quality articles and to carefully follow the submission guidelines of any article directory that you use. But how can you increase the odds that your online articles will be found and read, wherever they are posted? Here are five strategies:

1. Determine what kind of information your readers want.

2. Produce high quality articles and make them easy to read.

3. Find the specific keyword phrases that people are searching for.

4.  Use keywords effectively in your headlines and articles.

5.  Promote your articles through social networks.

The first step in writing articles that are popular with readers is to figure out what your readers want. Which specific topics within your specialty are readers seeking information about? Are your readers looking for introductory material or advanced techniques? Do they value case studies and interviews? Are they looking for step-by-step instructions, news and resources, or personal accounts and insights?

One way to get feedback is to write a post on your blog asking what type of information would be most helpful to your readers. Also add a line to the bottom of some of your blog posts asking for suggestions for future posts.

Another way to find out what your readers want is to study your site’s analytics to see what search terms people who land are your website are using. I use both Google Analytics and StatCounter to track my site activity, and they both provide reports on keywords used to find my site.

You can also pose questions on social networks. Some examples:

• What are your biggest frustrations in promoting your book?

• What is your burning question about book marketing?

• What aspects of book publishing do you most need to learn about?

It can be valuable to do a survey using a service such as Survey Monkey. This gives you the opportunity to ask some demographic questions in addition to asking about topics for upcoming articles.

In future posts in this series, I’ll discuss the other four strategies for getting your articles found and read online.

Read the entire series here:

Part 1: Top 5 Ways to Get Your Articles Found and Read Online

Part 2: Produce High Quality Articles and Make Them Easy to Read

Part 3: How to Find Keywords for Book Promotion Articles

Part 4: The Secret to Using Keywords Effectively in Articles and Headlines

Part 5: 5 Easy Ways Promote Your Articles and Blog Posts Through Social Media

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Comments

[Brian Beecher]

My name is Brian Beecher, and I am new to this website. I self-published two books and am getting ready to do a third. I actually have five finished stories and am working on a sixth, and looking for ideas on how to do this with the least possible amount of expenditure. Am very wary of the some of the programs I see online as there are so many who seem to be out to take you for everything they can. And the Internet seems to be sending out a lot of confusing energy now.

[Dana Lynn Smith]

Brian, I urge you to learn everything you can about the publishing business before proceeding. There are some excellent reference books on this page:
http://bookmarketingmaven.typepad.com/resources/aspiring-authors-resources.html

Good luck with your books!
Dana

[Rohan Beata]

Indeed, using keywords on your article is important. It's great that you said the word effective - overloading your article with keywords would be very counterproductive. It will drag down the quality of your writing, among other things.

[Dana Lynn Smith]

Thanks Rohan. It is so obvious when writers try to stuff too many keywords into their articles!

[Lawrence Spring]

Social media is the most effective way to promote your article. There are lots of people who browse when they are idle. It's just a matter of making your article interesting for your target market.