Is adding an articles section to a commercial website, for the sole purpose of attracting some visitors who are browsing a similar niche to the product being sold, a good idea? Could it ever become counter-productive to have more visitors being attracted to a website for the free knowledge than visitors actually looking to purchase the product? What do you think?
I think it is a must. Example: if you are selling water purification systems... people are looking for informations about water quality on the internet... and if they find out on your site that water in their city should be purified... they will feel like they need to buy a water purification system. And you're selling what they are looking for.
As long as I run Adsense on my advice pages, I don't mind how many visitors I get looking for information. I still get plenty of work from the home page and services page (on which I don't really care to run ads). In fact, one landscape rock company and 3 tree and landscape companies also get some referral work from my website. So that's a full and partial supply for 5 companies.
I believe that too much traffic to your articles could never hurt or be counter productive for your comerce site. MAke sure, people can easily access your homepage from the articles page.
I agree this is a must, on my IT consulting site I have a ton of articles and how-tos that I wrote, I also try and blog 2-3x per week... I have tons of backlinks from other sites and blogs. Great way to get traffic and backlinks.
Definitely a good idea - then start a blog and post bits of the articles in your blog with a link back to the website, and then submit your blog's RSS feed to syndication sites.
This is never counter productive and like most others say yes this is a must-have! Great content always brings great traffic.. Make sure to mix in some high volume keywords.