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Article Marketing: 3 Ways To Inspire Customer Confidence Through Your Articles

By Steve Shaw

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 14Jan2009 Word count: 754 Viewed: 563 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

Usually with article marketing the main attractions are the amazing SEO benefits--article marketing is a great way to drive traffic to a website by increasing your search engine ranking.

But one often overlooked perk is the ability to build credibility and trust with your potential customers through your articles.

Why would you want to build trust and inspire confidence in your customers?

That's an easy one--the more belief that a customer has that what you tell them is true and that you'll not let them down once they purchase your product, the more likely you are to make the sale.

Who a customer buys from is not solely determined by who is ranking #1 in Google--lots of times customers are found through personal referral, or someone shares one of your useful articles with them, and they find your website via your resource box.

If a person is interested in your product, they will likely do some additional research on you to try to get a feel for who you are. Can they trust you? Are you a reputable business person?

Your articles are a great way to break the ice in a trust building relationship, possibly the first step in showing a customer that you're a person of integrity who is knowledgeable in your topic.

Here are a few areas of opportunity to concentrate on if you'd like to build reader trust through your articles:

1) Write to meet the needs of your target market.

That may sound obvious, but many times an author will get so focused on the SEO benefits of article marketing that they will forget that there will be humans reading their article too!

You should make every article you write an educational article, one that is more about enlightening the people in your target market than it is about promoting your own business.

Your article should not talk about your own business, website or products--that makes the article look like a sales letter and like you're trying to get something from your audience (which only makes them put up their guard).

Don't write to make a sale--write to offer valuable information on a topic that would benefit your readers.

The appropriate place to talk about your own business and website is in your resource box, which is the author bio area that sits beneath your article.

2) Don't stuff your article with keywords.

As far as keywords go--if you write in a natural way about the topic of your website, your keywords will naturally pop up throughout your article without seeming contrived.

There is no need to try to outwit Google--believe it or not, an article that would appeal to your target marketing is one that would also appeal to Google.

When a search engine evaluates a website's value, they are doing so because they want to most appropriately rank the web pages that appear in their results listings.

Google's main desire is to have a search customer type in their search terms (which are hopefully your keywords) and to then be greeted by a list of results where the web pages at the top of the list are most likely to meet their needs.

So, Google and your potential customers both want the same thing--they both want to meet the needs of a human target market. By writing articles with your potential customers in mind, you will consequently please Google too.

3) Go the extra mile with the information you offer in your article.

A good rule of thumb with this is to aim for 700-800 words of quality content in your article. Yes, it's true that a lot of publishers will accept 400 words or less, but why not exceed expectations?

Why not put forth more effort than is required?

When your article doesn't skimp on the value it provides, that sends a message to the reader that you are the type of person who goes above and beyond expectations, and that reflects well on your business.

There are lots of ways to build credibility through your articles (be sure to put your name in your resource box, submit articles consistently over time, etc), but these are the 3 biggies.

If you'll focus on being a teacher to your potential customers rather than a salesperson, write for your human audience rather than the search engines, and provide information that goes beyond what is expected, you'll be well on your way to establishing healthy customer relationships filled with trust.

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