Article Marketing

When it comes to effective (both cost-wise and results-wise) marketing online, Article Marketing is very hard to beat. When I was first introduced to article marketing I was intimidated by it. Writing is not a strong suit of mine. The first article that I wrote and submitted online took me more than two weeks to write so that it made some degree of sense and could get accepted by the articles’ submission websites. Now, it takes me about 30 minutes to write a good article that attracts readers as well as the search engines.

The process is pretty straightforward. You write an article about a topic or subject that you are interested in or have some knowledge of. You then submit the article to an article website and wait for it to get listed. When you submit the article to these websites you are adopting their search engine ranking, which means that you can get listed on the first page of the results in amatter of days. Getting a page on your website that contains the same article content similarly listed could take months – even if the page is optimized. Article Marketing is free and is something that a website owner should be doing. Thousands of internet marketers are taking advantage of article writing as a free way to drive traffic to their websites and to the merchant websites they are affiliated with. Article writing is one of the best methods to use to obtain free search listings within Google, Yahoo and the other search engines.

If you write an article and submit it to a popular article website such as “ezinearticles.com,” your article will live on this domain and inherit the popularity of that entire website. This will give your article a head start by being listed in the top rank site.

Search Engine Optimization is something that internet marketers have been perfecting for years, but it can take an extremely long time to get your website displayed under the keywords that you want. With article marketing, you leverage the power of these large websites (ezinearticles.com, squidoo.com, usfreeads.com, etc.) to get top natural listings for your articles in a fraction of the time.

Article Length

Your articles should be about 300 – 500 words in length. This is the ideal length to get listed in the search engines and allows you enough text to promote or provide adequate information on the specific topic.

In terms of keyword density, or how many times your main keyword phrases should appear on any page, you should have between 3 – 7 occurrences. Any more than this will appear as content “spam” to the search engines, and any less will not be enough to get listed under those search terms. There are tools available that allow you to quickly analyze your pages and determine the keyword density.

Article Writing Checklist:

• Use the keywords you want to be listed under in the title of your article

• Use the keywords in a heading tag at the top of your page

• Use the keywords in your opening paragraph

• Use the keywords in your closing paragraph

• Have between 300 – 500 words in your article

• Try to use your main keyword phrases 3 – 7 times per article

Article marketing takes a lot of work. The advantages of article marketing are that you do not have to be a professional to write an article – and it’s free!

If you’re new to internet marketing and have a limited budget, writing articles is one of the best methods to familiarize yourself with important marketing fundamentals such as research, copywriting, and building pages. It will allow you to generate income that you can use to fund your advertising campaigns. Of course, with all of the constant changes that Google and other search engines are always making, article marketing is not “guaranteed.” Also, don’t rely on one article. Be consistent with your article writing

Profiting From Articles

A few of the methods of making money from article marketing:

1. Promote affiliate products directly
   Sending your website traffic directly to an affiliate website is one of the most commonly used techniques associated with article marketing. You simply write a review, testimonial, or story about a product and link to the affiliate website at the bottom of the article.

2. Send them to your own product website
   If you own your own product you will obviously want to create articles to drive additional traffic to your website. You could write an unbiased review, an article full of useful information, or an article on a particular subject relevant to your product.

3. Send them to a squeeze page
   If you have a squeeze page, you may want to drive your article traffic to it. You can do this by writing articles that would attract visitors who would be interested in your mailing list.

4. Send them to a review page
   In the same manner that you promote an affiliate product, you can write articles about particular products that you are comparing on your website and then send the visitors to your review website. By the time they get to your website they will be interested in one or several of the products and will be more likely to buy. If you have five products on your review website, you could write an article about each of them.

Without question, writing articles is one of the best traffic building methods available. It’s free and it’s effective. Learning how is very doable. It took me awhile, at first. But, looking back, it was more than worth it. I made it harder to do than I needed.

Once you understand the the basics of writing and submiting articles, it becomes much easier to automate your article marketing efforts when you can.