Basic Guidelines For Using Article Directories

The cyber world has created concepts like article directories that prompted business people to think about article writing and online marketing in a different way. Writing used to be solely for the joy of writing and the rush a writer would feel when their content got published. Today, article marketing and syndicating content has become big business for a number of reasons.

Backlinks for your websites are necessary if you are bringing your real estate business online. Every day, people are closing deals from leads developed from their real estate websites. If your business does not have a highly visible presence online, then you will lose, because most of your competitors are already generating leads online.

Marketing Your Real Estate Biz...

Marketing yourself as an expert agent can be expensive. Most real estate businesses want to get a return on their investment as quickly as possible. This may take six months to maybe even years depending on how much capital investment you started with and your success. One way to get a handsome return on that investment is with article marketing.

Writing Articles For Article Directories

The objective is to establish yourself as an expert in real estate. This doesn't necessarily mean 'real estate' generally, but rather whatever area of real estate, your business is in. Areas such as residential, commercial or investment real estate are what I'm referring to here.

You see, this is all about spreading the word about your business and promoting your real estate services. Writing articles is a subtle way of letting people know about you, get interested in the information you are giving or writing about, then clicking on the link that you provide them within the resource box at the end of the article. Your popularity and perceived expertise will flourish through publishing articles.

Why Is It Important To Write Good Content?

You need to get readers' attention. And the only way to do that is by giving them what they want. Give them useful information that they would definitely like to know about.

For example, in your real estate market, you want to capture people who are keen gardeners. Your articles can refer to landscaping tips or how to container garden on a condo balcony. Those were just samples and are top of the head thoughts. The idea here is to know who you want to have listen to you and then make sure that they will.

NEVER directly promote your real estate services in your articles. You may get banned from the article directories if you do.

Conduct keyword research to know exactly what information people want.  Optimizing your content for the search engines (search engine optimization or seo) means including those keywords and phrases in the unique article you are writing.

If you write in an interesting conversational manner, you will hook readers on what you wrote for them; enough interest to click the link that you will provide in your author's bio box. That link will lead your probable prospects to your own website and there you can sing a different tune. You can then aim for the securing the prospect and a possible sale.

Why Bother To Write And Submit Articles to Directories?

Your real estate websites can be promoted rather effectively through articles. The link to the author's website contained in the author bio of each free article serves to: 
 
1. Bring more traffic and customers to your website through a compelling signature or author bio box at the bottom of your article.

2. Generate more backlinks to your websites from the article directory as well as the third party sites and email newsletter publishers that use the free articles you have written. More quality backlinks generally creates more authority for your site from Google.

Article directories allow editors, bloggers, website owners and newsletter publishers who need high quality content, to republish the online articles, provided they are not modified and the credit backlinks are kept intact. Some directories allow for printable articles as well.

Writers - Don't Tick Off Google!

Keep in mind that building backlinks is a slow and steady process. If you build too many backlinks too quickly, you may be seen as a spammer in the eyes of the search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing. 

Search engine spiders are finely tuned to spot spam in its many flavors and will likely penalize you if you decide to blast your articles to every directory on the world wide web. You're much better off to submit your article to five to ten of your favorite article directories and a couple of niche sites or blogs.

Establish Yourself As A Real Estate Expert

When you first start, you should write and submit at least 10 articles using keywords relevant to your website. Keyword research is the basis for which you pick which articles to create, as well as what content those articles ought to include. Be sure to include a link back to your site with the relevant anchor text. Submit and manage at least an article per week in order to continue building backlinks. This is an on going strategy that will build lots of backlinks over time.

Easy-To-Follow Hints and Tips For Article Submission

You'll actually discover a lot of free distribution sites once you start looking for them. There are specific criteria for each and every directory so be sure to use the article directory resources, tools and guidelines before submitting an article. However, here are some basics to help you get started on your articles.

1. Number Of Words
Use caution with this element of your article. Some distribution sites will reject your content simply because you didn't have enough words in your article. While some will permit 300 word count for any article content, most directories really want 500 words or more.

2. Do Not Spam
Pick a category that you think your articles will best fit into. Don't submit your articles into a variety of different categories in a directory. It's going to be considered as spamming, so the resource site will likely suspend you for such activity.

3. URL
Check out carefully what the site's specific guidelines are concerning posting your URLs. Some might allow your URL to be included in the body of your article. Other directories are likely to only allow URLs included in the writer's resource box.

4. Language
Basically, the article must be written in English.  If you use another language, and really want to broaden the reach for your articles, look for article directories catering to that language and market.
 
Sound professional with your article projects. Avoid grammatical errors, using obscene or slang language as this is generally taken as an off-putting commentary of you.