Promote Your Local Business With Articles

There are a number of ways to promote your local business online. Article marketing is one way. But to promote a local business with articles is slightly different than promoting a web business with articles. Your local business has a physical presence and you expect to get new business walking into your storefront. Well, how can articles help with that?

There are a few ways. Here are some ideas:

• Find other local websites and offer to write guest articles. When your articles appear on those sites you’ll get a short bio and a link back to your site from the other local site. Make sure that the link uses text that associates your business with a specific keyword and a geographic term. This will help you with your local optimization efforts.
• Write articles and mass distribute them through article directories online. You are not really concerned that these articles deliver more traffic to your website. You are concerned that the articles be top-notch quality and usable by others in your industry no matter where they are located. A website owned by a business 3,000 miles away could use your article because they know that you are not a direct competitor. But the link in your author resource box (bio) pointing back to your website will provide you with search engine marketing benefits. Again, use a keyword-rich anchor text that is locally and geographically targeted for maximum optimization.
• Guest write articles for other websites within your niche that are not in the same area as you. This method is a combination of the above. Since the other website is not in the same local area as you it likely will not deliver much new business to you, but you will get the inbound links from the other site, which helps you in your optimization. As always, use geographically matched terms along with the proper keywords in your link anchor text.
• Use blogs within your industry, both local and non-local, to build links by commenting on blog posts that you find interesting. This isn’t article marketing, but it does help you build links.
• Put up an article page on your website. If you publish your articles first before you mass distribute them then your website will appear first in search results for key phrases in those articles. You can then point links to those articles when you do any blog commenting. The best way to do that is to link to an article that is relevant to a post on the blog.
• Forum posting is another often overlooked marketing strategy by local businesses. You can network with others in your line of business in other geographic locations. Just like with blogs, you can link to your articles in forum posts. The danger is in being seen as a spammer, but if you do it right then you won’t be spamming the forums or blogs and you’ll get real value.
• Publish your articles on your Twitwall. If you use Twitter, and I recommend that you do, then you automatically have a Twitwall. You can publish your articles on your Twitwall and link them back to your website.

There are numerous ways to employ article marketing for local small businesses. Use your imagination and I’m sure you can come up with a way to market your business through articles.