Let's start by discussing the purpose and effects of soft article marketing.
1. The purpose of soft article marketing is twofold: First, to enhance the visibility of the product, brand, or website being promoted within its industry through these articles. Second, these articles can also bring in actual users. For instance, if it’s a website being promoted, targeted user traffic can be driven to it.
2. The effect of soft article marketing is evident when, within a short period, a large number of related articles about the same product or website appear—be it on news information sites, industry information sites, or even well-known commentary blogs. This makes your product or website quickly gain public attention, especially from your target audience, which helps convert potential users into actual ones. If you integrate your website link into the article, it can effectively increase high-quality external links, thus improving search engine indexing and ranking opportunities.
Soft Article Writing Techniques
1. The article title must be sufficiently eye-catching. Titles play a significant role in the success or failure of an article. However, we don't advocate for the popular "clickbait" style seen online. The title is the first step in attracting netizens to click and read your article. In my previous experience promoting products at a company, I conducted an experiment where the same content was given two different titles and posted in two sections with roughly the same traffic. The difference in click-through rates was substantial (although such experiments aren’t entirely reliable since netizens’ preferences vary). Nonetheless, the title should still closely align with the main theme of the article. Don't just seek novelty for novelty's sake. Netizens aren't fools; they won't fall for the same trick twice.
2. Soft article writing should primarily ensure originality. While not every word has to be written solely by you, excessive copying should be avoided. A little borrowing of others' good ideas is acceptable, but ideally, it should be controlled to around ten percent. Original content benefits both readers and search engines. Regularly publishing original articles can increase the favorability of crawling spiders, possibly bringing them to your site more often and increasing the speed of content indexing. It can also increase your base of loyal users and provide more opportunities for your articles to be reprinted by other websites, indirectly providing free promotion for both yourself and the product you are promoting.
3. The content of the article must have distinct features and a clear theme. When writing, it's essential to understand why you're writing this article and what effect you want to achieve. To achieve this effect, you need to select appropriate thematic content and highlight certain features. For example, I published an article titled "The Forum Blog Marketing Behind the 'Chun Ge Zhuan' Online Comic" to increase the external links for A1 Forum Directory, and it was later reprinted by many websites, generating numerous external links. Additionally, incorporating images and authoritative data can make the article more vivid and effective.
4. Articles must keep up with social hotspots. When writing promotional soft articles, it's important to know what netizens are currently interested in. This can be checked on Baidu Storm Ranking, where one can clearly see some of the social hotspot events or figures that have occurred on a given day or in the past two days. Such hotspots tend to have high search volumes in search engines. If you write a few soft articles related to these topics, the effect should be good. Such articles have more chances of being reprinted and searched.
Now let's discuss some additional techniques for soft article promotion.