I am a huge fan of using content in the form of article writing as a lead generation strategy.  However, not all articles are created equal and not all article markting strategies are created equal.  Different article writing lead generation strategies will do very different things.

  1. Article Directories – This is a very common article marketing strategy.  Posting to article directories will increase links back to your website.  The disadvantage of this strategy is that your articles are typically duplicate content or it takes a long time to post them to all the resources.  This article marketing strategy will not typically generate leads by itself, but could increase search engine rankings and trafficto your main site, which could lead to better lead generation.
  2. Blog Networks – Much like article directories, joining a blog network where you can post articles to a network of blogs can increase your backlinks.  Because these networks often spin content as well, you may get less duplicate content pentalties and a bit better results.  The down side is that while article directories have a high page rank usually, many blogs in a blog network will have much lower page rank.
  3. Content For Your Site – In my opinion, the best article marketing, also called content marketing, strategy is to write a lot of keyword rich articles to your own WordPress Lead Generation site.  You can then use those other article marketing strategies to get more links to help your main content perform better, but you should never put more effort into building other article websites and content blogs over building your own.  A big base of client and keyword focused articles that are unique and posted on your website will be a great long term lead generation asset for your company.

If you are interested in using this strategy, you need to learn about the differences of these lead generation techniques and when to use what kind of article for maximum effect.