Learn the Basics of Effective Article Marketing

Article marketing is a free way to generate some traffic and links back to your site. It can be quite effective and being free, what have you to lose apart form the time for you to write it?

Now, a lot of people, myself included at the start, thought I can't write an article, I wouldn't know where to begin. Well, most articles should be about 400-500 words in length. Now, that is not too much and should be very doable.

Where do you start? Well, I would say, you need to start again by doing your keyword research. Yes, keyword research again! It's that important, that is why is was the very first lesson! (Lesson 1- Keyword Research).

You need to research and find high demand keywords with low competition. Low competition means less than 5000 pages on that keyword (using "quotes", see the keyword lesson if you have forgotten). This will usually mean that you need to find keyword phrases, phrases with 3 or more keywords. An example of a keyword phrase would be "home business opportunities" or "free home business opportunities". Software such as Ad Word Analyzer, can really make this job a lot quicker and easier.

This is a screenshot of a search I did as an example. The keyword was 'car stereo' You can see that a load of related keywords came up, with the number of searches (1,074) and the competition/results (895)!! This would be a great keyword to base an article on. If you wanted to go after this with PPC such as Google Adwords, then you can see that there are only 3 campaigns bidding on this specific keyword! This is a powerful piece of software. You can learn more about it here.

Please, realise that the software is not required, you have all the free tools to do the job as outlined in Lesson 1, but it will just take a bit more time.

Writing the Article

Once you have found some phrases that fit the criteria of low competition and high demand, then you then need to write an article around the keyword.

Make sure you put the keyword phrase is in the title and in the main text of the article. The phrase should appear in the first paragraph, in the middle of the text somewhere and around the last paragraph. Make these keyword phrases bold so they stand out.

Another thing about the title, make it appealing to the reader so that they will want to read it. It takes a bit of thinking to make your title sound great and also containing your keyword as well.

Tips work well as an article format and in your titles. For example, rather than write an article about "How to Improve your Online Business", you could have "Top 10 Tips to Online Business Success!". It sounds much more interesting and compelling.

It doesn't have to be the best article, I'm no great writer but I am improving all the time. Just make sure that the article is interesting and provides good information, that way you are more likely to be used by webmasters.

Submitting Your Article

Once you have written your article you will want to submit it to the directories so webmasters can find your article and use it. Directories basically house thousands of articles submitted by writers such as yourself. People who operate websites can search the directories for articles to use as content for their site. The condition is that the article is kept intact and the author biography is included at the bottom of the article.

So, when a webmaster publishes your article on their site, it will have your link details back to your own website from your author biography box! If you write a great article that is popular, you could have loads of webmasters adding your article to their site and you will instantly have lots of links pointing back to your website which helps with ranking and brings in visitors.

The true article directories tend to have strict submission guidelines that you must conform to. Some do not allow text links in the article text itself, some do, some require your article to be a certain length etc, etc. You need to read the terms or submission for each service.

There are several places you can submit your articles.

1) www.Squidoo.com
Squidoo is a social network where people can open a free account and write articles (squidoo call them 'lenses'). In fact, it is kind of between a blog entry and an article. It is very simple to use, it is free and is a growing network. This is a great place to start and squidoo is to article marketing what blogger.com is to blogs.

This is not a directory as such, because it is like a hybrid article directory and blog.

2) www.goarticles.com
This is an article directory and lists thousands of articles submitted by writers such as yourself. It is a bit easier to get your articles accepted here. The main advantage is that you can add links within the article text pointing to a website, and even an affiliate link.

3) www.ezinearticles.com
This is another popular article directory and it is slightly more difficult to get your article accepted here, though I have not had a problem with them. You cannot link directly from the text of your article but that is to affiliate links. Their terms said that you can link to your website root domain name (eg www.innerguru.co.uk is ok, but www.innerguru.co.uk/course/example.htm is not ok). This is another good reason to have your own domain name (Lesson 2 - Domain Names).

Make sure you read their submission rules to ensure that they have not changed their rules.

OK, so that is it in a nutshell. Article marketing is not a quick fix but if you keep producing articles every now and then and submit them. They will provide a good steady stream of visitors in time and also help with your website ranking.

Remember, you are not looking to write a best-seller, so just get writing, see it as an extension of blog writing!

A superb resource for article writing is by Travis Sago at http://www.bummarketingmethod.com. Definitely go to his site and sign up for his free guide!

TASK

1) Do your keyword research as per Lesson 1

2) Write an article or articles based on your keyword phrase.

3) Register with some article directories.

4) Ensure your articles meet the submission requirements.

4) Submit!

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