There are lots of strategies for luring traffic to your site: An efficient one that very few accounting professionals are exploiting is article writing. Content submission is free, although you’ll need to use up time in the process. Be it time invested managing social media sites or money on search engine optimization or paid search ads on Google we all have to pay to promote our accounting websites in some way, but it’s certainly cheap and effective if you’re willing to stick with it.
It’s actually ridiculously easy to get started. The first step in becoming an article author is submitting articles to article directories. Identify a relevant subject to write about that your prospects might be interested in — and if your article gets published you’ll not only get traffic, you’ll also enjoy a benefit in the search engines.
One great trick is to write an article as if you’re writing a letter to a friend. Make it personal, informative, and/or amusing. If you don’t have the time to write articles yourself let somebody else do it for you. There are a number of freelance web sites where you can pay an eager aspiring author to write an article for you.
There are two important benefits to article distribution…
1. Position Yourself as an Expert
By publishing online articles you are visibly positioning yourself as an accounting “maven”, or expert.People are impressed when you get published, and over time they begin to look for you and think of you as an authority in your industry.
2. Back Links
Article sites give you something called a resource box. This a short section where you can put a by-line and short bio, as well as a link to your website and any other information you might want to include. Search engines use links to determine your websites importance and by extension your websites position in the search results when people do a search. In addition people sometimes click on these links to learn more about you so a “backlink” will also drive actual traffic to your website.
Your article doesn’t need to be brilliant. Nobody expects to see a Pulitzer prize winner every time they read a blog. What’s important is VALUE. This is what publishers look for. They want articles that their followers will find genuinely useful. They want meaningful ideas and information. As long as you run spell check and you’re saying something worth hearing most publishers will be happy to add your content to their site.
Take your time with this process. Don’t expect instant results. Write several articles and submit them to multiple article submission services to get started. It’s going to take some time for your work to trickle off the submission sites and work their way into real blogs.
Use Google Alerts to keep an eye out for publishers using your material, and use published articles to leverage relationships with the website owners that are using them. Once you make some friends in the business you’re positioned to move on to the next stage of article marketing. Friends won’t just look for your work on article submission sites, they’ll contact you and ASK for content. When this happens you’ll have become an invited guest blogger, and this will earn you respect with that blogger’s entire community of bloggers.
Yes, this is a great deal of work, and with no holds barred, there are no guarantees that you’ll get found by an Accounting Today beat reporter. But even if all you do is bring in a number of backlinks your accounting website will gain in the search engines, earn some guests, and at the end of the day bring new clients into the firm.
No related posts.
