Teaching Your Way to the Top With Articles
One misconception many marketers who consider using article marketing make is, they see it as a product promotional tool only. While the idea might be viable, and to some extent successful, using articles just to promote a product can leave a lot of its potential on the back burner. This article is a continuation of the previous, entitled "Using Articles to Increase Your Level of Authority," and will get into how becoming a teacher can make all the difference in the world for your expert status.
The World View of You
It's been said many, many times . . .
In order to sell anything, you first have to sell you.
In other words, to be successful at selling products, regardless of what they are, you need to portray yourself as someone who can be trusted and respected first and foremost. Anything less than this will have you spinning your wheels and locked in at the bottom of the marketing chain with the rest of the bottom feeders.
Sorry to be so blunt, but it's the absolute truth. Without credibility, you're nothing and you'll never stand out with any sort of authority on any subject.
To be successful over the long term, you need to build a perception of authority for the rest of the world to see and make it stick. You can't scam your way to the top.
So how do you go about gaining this credibility?
By being perceived as a teacher rather than a marketer!
The "gurus" mentioned in the last article took some very old, tried and true marketing concepts and brought them forward into the online arena. This shed new light and made these almost ancient ideas look brand new.
That's the plain and simple truth! They really didn't come up with new ideas. They just took some old ideas and made them appear new by applying them to a new platform (the Internet).
However, by making the new application of these old ideas, they created a spotlight in which to bask themselves in. And so while everyone else was scratching their heads trying to figure out how to create a market online, these people opened the door and taught them how.
They became teachers!
When you think about it, anyone could have done the same thing with a little knowledge of real world marketing techniques. They just did it first and got the credit for it!
So they walk off with the credit for blazing a new trail and are heralded as the pioneers of online marketing. Instant guru status! Experts and authorities each and every one of them because the perception of themselves they broadcast were as teachers and not marketers, even though they were marketing their lessons and making big bucks at it.
As the appreciation for what they were teaching people grew, so did their profits. They were seen as experts and that status gave them the credibility to recommend any product, whether their own or a friends, and make sales from it.
Now again, the chance of anyone breaking into this huge market now and achieving that kind of status is remote at best. But the same principles can be applied to any market with the same success ratio using articles.
It's all about teaching, and using your articles to touch on issues and ideas not commonly known. One way to do this is to find some popular misconception about your topic and setting things straight. It doesn't have to be a new idea, just a better and more reasonable way of looking at things.
For example, most people who market with articles will tell you, you need to use unique content. Even some article directories state right in their terms of service that articles submitted to them have to be "original."
This created a whole new market of article spinners that manipulate articles by changing them around and inserting new keywords in them to make them appear to read differently. But is this what "unique" really means? Is an article, reconfigured with paragraph shuffling and changed keywords really "original'?
You'd be amazed at how many marketers think so. Yet, there's a unique and original, and yes factual way to look at this, which will be the topic for the next installment of this Article Marketing eCourse.
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Post a Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.