Article Marketing Your Pet Business

Article Marketing is an important tool for promoting your pet business online. Yet only a (regular) few of the pet businesses that we deal with make proper use of it. Every day this desk receives a dozen, sometimes dozens, of press releases and product news releases telling us about new developments within your companies. This is not Article Marketing.

Sometimes press releases are of interest. In particular, if they refer to a change of direction in a market sector or a truly new and substantial development within your company, a publisher looking for good content will be grateful for your well written copy. The better it is written the easier it is to publish.

However the majority of press releases we receive are really pet product news releases and these are usually viewed with much less favour, (except as in the case of this example, when they are paid-for advertorials!) At UKPets we get so many of these pseudo-press releases that we have created a new section of the site to accommodate them - see our Trade Press Section.

True Article Marketing happens when a business provides useful content to the publisher - at no cost. Because the publisher is always under pressure to turnover its website content on a limited budget, the arrangement benefits both parties. Grateful for the content the publisher will attribute the source, normally including a website link and additional contact information within or at the end of the article.

Article Marketing thrives where there is a surfeit of niche and specialist expertise - making the pet industry an almost prefect arena for this activity. The catch-all tag 'pet industry' can be applied to keeping a Praying Mantis or racing Sleddogs.. and to everything in-between.

Timely articles, and by timely I mean at the start of a season or in the run up to a major event - and so on, on such specialist topics, will always be gratefully received by your editor.

Article Marketing is also a form of viral marketing. The better online publications will have their news aggregated across scores of newsfeeds and other websites. A well written article will also get picked up by Blogs and Newsgroups (the old Usenet). Your specialist article will begin to appear on the computers of news subscribers around the world.

Finally, as a niche discipline your website is likely to reap the benefits of having a link from your article on the publisher's site - which will almost certainly have the higher search engine pagerank.

Too many people seem to think that Article Marketing is just about sending out press releases about themselves - this is wrong. As a hard-pressed editor myself, I look forward to a flood of new and interesting articles in 2008. And hopefully, we will all get something out of it.