Article Marketing for your Handmade Business

Article marketing for your handmade business can be a low cost and effective way to bring traffic to your shop and/or blog. Just like malcolmread guest blogging offers back-links to your website , article marketing gives you the opportunity to include a link back to your shop or blog in the biography box.

What is Article Marketing?

It is the process of using short articles, usually between 400 – 700 words, for publication and distribution by other websites and off-line publishers, typically free of charge.

How Can Article Marketing Help Your Handmade Business?

1. Develops Your Expert Position – Article marketing can help you establish yourself as an expert in your field whether it be jewelry making, crocheting, or metal art. As you share your knowledge with your audience they will come to know you as the ‘go to’ person when they have a question.
2. Exposure – The more places your ideal market can find you, the more paths to your shop or blog, the higher your traffic will be. Each article you write creates a separate trail someone can follow back to you – and become your customer. Think of it as a spider web. Your shop is the heart of the web and the various paths to the center are your marketing efforts – article marketing being one.
3. Approval – When you publish your article on someones site this serves as validation or an introduction to that person’s audience, making them more receptive to your message.

Article Marketing Tips:

• Spell check your work. Even if you’ve read it forwards and backwards use the spell checker. After you do that, read your work once again and if possible get someone else to read your work.
• Be sure your article is between 400 – 700 words.
• Take time to do some keyword research before you write your article.
• Add a keyword to your title and in the first sentence or paragraph of your article.
• Check the sites terms on in-article links to see if links to your shop or blog are allowed.
• Use white-space. Reading online is different so short paragraphs with 2-3 sentences are ideal.
• Using numbered or bulleted lists makes it easier to skim the article.

Article Marketing Tools:

• Squidoo.com – an easy to use Web 2.0 article submission site. I’ve been using this platform since 2007 and the traffic to my blog from my articles is consistent. It is a fairly easy system to learn, using modules that you drag and drop into your page. It also has a very good community of authors and mentors. Last week they launched a new magazine called So Crafty where they highlight craft articles. Coming soon they will be offering artist spotlights where they highlight the art of a featured author.
• Hubpages.com – similar to the previous article submission site plus many who write on Squidoo write here as well. I’ve only submitted one article to this site but I’ve heard positive things about fellow writers article marketing efforts.
• Wizzley.com – this site was made by a number of authors who have used the previous two sites and so the platform is very similar. Their writing standards are superb and I highly respect the owners of the site. They are always willing to help new writers.

Article marketing is for any business owner who wants to drive more traffic to their site, establish themselves as experts, and gain access to new audiences. Your potential customers are out there looking for the next hot crafty skill; make sure you show up in the right place at the right time by creating great articles and sprinkling them throughout the web.

Sara Duggan is an avid blogger of all things crochet. She is known as Momwithahook on Squidoo where she shares her patterns,   book reviews, and other crafty knowledge. Visit her at http://momwithahook.blogspot.com or http://saraduggan.com sign up for her monthly newsletter and ask her how you can build your own Squidoo page for your small business or blog.

Tags: article marketing, artisan, craft, crafts, Creative Handmade Artisans, Handmade Harbor, handmade jewelry, marketing

Posted in Information