Article marketing explained!

Article marketing is one of the most powerful and yet, most overlooked internet marketing strategies available. Marketing your site with articles has many benefits: free targeted traffic, fast results, increased search engine rankings and more.

If you are a beginning internet marketer you are probably interested in finding free methods of driving traffic to your website. Article marketing is one of the easiest ways to do this. In fact, even professional marketers that can afford to spend thousands in paid advertising, still use article marketing as one of the key parts of their overall marketing strategy.

Don’t worry if you haven’t used article marketing before. It’s actually very easy to get started. All you need to do is follow my simple 5-step formula.

Step 1) Focus in having the right mindset.

The most common mistake that people make when marketing their website with articles is trying to actually sell something with the articles. The goal of an article is NOT to sell. The goal of your articles is to pre-qualify and warm up the prospects.

As an article marketer you need to understand that people have a built-in BS-o-meter. If they catch you trying to sell anything to them, they’ll simply stop reading and move on to the next article. On the other hand, if your article provides the reader with good and relevant information, chances are he or she will want to hear more from you and feel compelled to visit your site.

Step 2) Research your keywords and keyphrases.

If you want your articles to be read, you need to help people find them. The way to do it is by knowing the exact words or phrases that they are using to search for information and weaving them into your articles. These are the steps you should follow:

Sign up for a free 7-day trial at WordTracker. Once you’re inside, use their keyword universe tool to find keywords and phrases that are related to your niche. This tool will tell you how frequently searched they are and offer a few suggestions on other phrases related to that particular search term. If you have a website, review your statistics and look at the keyword phrases people have used to find your website. Then type some of these phrases into WordTracker to find out how frequently searched they are.

For example, in one of my niches I noticed that someone found my website by typing “millionaire shopping list” in Google. When I type that in WordTracker nothing comes up. However, if I just type in the word “millionaire” I have a number of options to choose from.

Step 3) The article marketer’s “litmus test”.

Only look at the phrases that have fewer than 100 searches in WordTracker. Then search for each exact phrase in Google and see how much competition there is for it. To do this, you simply enter your search term in the Google home page using “quotes” around it.

If the phrase appears on fewer than 15,000 websites in Google, then it’s worth writing an article with that phrase. This is key, because you want to write articles that people are looking for, but still have a good chance at getting a good search engine position for it.

Keep typing various keywords into WordTracker until you have a list of ten or so phrases that are interesting to you and have fewer than 100 searches and 15,000 competition.

Step 4) Get those fingers moving!

The next step is to actually sit down and write an article based on each keyword or keyphrase in your list. Try to weave in the phrase 5 to 8 times throughout the entire article (once in the headline, once in the intro paragraph and the rest weaved into the body of the article). Don’t over-do it! Else, your article may be seen as search engine spam.

Articles should be around 500 words in length and the most important parts are the headline and the bio box (the box at the bottom with your contact information and a link to your website), so spend a fair amount of time working on those two areas and get them in tip-top shape.

If you don’t have much writing experience, go to EzineArticles.com and take a look at some of the articles there to get an idea for article structure. You may also want to check my formula for writing articles fast.

Step 5) Distribute your articles.

Once you have a few articles ready, it is time to un-leash them on the web. There are a LOT of different article directories that you can submit your writing to. However, if you’re just starting out, I’ll recommend that you stick to the “Big 3”: EzineArticles, GoArticles and ArticleCity.

Once you get a few articles approved, study your “article reports” on Ezinearticles to see how many people read your articles on click on the links in your bio box. This will help you learn what readers like to read and help you as you brainstorm ideas for new articles.

What next?

As you start to earn a decent income from your articles (through sales of affiliate products or your own products) you can use some of that money to hire freelancers to write the articles for you. This will speed up the process and let you focus in other areas of your website marketing.

If you decide to hire a ghost writer to create the articles for you, remember that you get what you pay for, however. A $1 article might seem like a good deal but in reality you will have to do extensive editing. But I guess this is a topic for a different blog post…