Article marketing is a form on online advertising. Basically, you write short articles about anything related to what you are trying to promote. After completing the piece, you have to make it available for distribution and publication in article directories, in the company website and even on someone else’s site.As a rule, each completed article contains a resource box which contains vital information like: the name of the author, a very brief background of the author, and contact information of the author, etc.

Essentials Of Article Marketing

1. Write Quality Articles

Quality content is still the best way to make article marketing work. You should remember that more than a million people log on to the Internet daily; and a good percentage of them post article after article about almost any topic.

When you write an article, try to incorporate all the information your potential reader may need or want. Internet users usually seek out valuable information like the ones that can help them solve their problems. If you can, write and post articles that have the same theme or subject of interest; and write as many articles as you can. This is a way of building up your reputation among your readers. Given time, (and if your articles are interesting enough,) you just may develop a following of readers who are interested in reading what you have to say.

2. Craft The Perfect Resource Box

As mentioned earlier, when you market your article, you should always have a resource box. Now, this is really important. This is the one place that can literally point your readers to your website. Here is how you should craft a perfect resource box:

The first thing that your readers should find in your resource box is your name and title, but more often than not, its just the name that people scout around for.

Do not forget to type in correctly your website address after your name.

After this, there is the compulsory USP or unique selling proposition: this is comprised of 1 to 3 brief and concise sentences as to what more you can possibly offer your readers.

Finally, you lead your readers into a call of action. This means that you are asking them to do one specific action: particularly asking them to visit your website.

3. Submit Your Articles

Obviously, submitting your article for publication is important, but where do you send them? The easiest choice is to send them to article directories or acquire article distribution services. Submission to article directories is mostly free, and these directories will allow you to add links to your website. Article distribution services have varying fees, but they allow your piece to be posted in more sites than article directories.

It’s no secret that article marketing really works to increase the amount of traffic to your website. Well, you can also use article marketing to get traffic to your squeeze pages to boost your opt-in list.

If you followed the instructions from the last post, you should now have your own squeeze page set up promoting the free software Squeeze Buzz. Now that you have this squeeze page set up, you can really use this to your advantage by promoting it through article marketing.

All you have to do is write an article dealing with squeeze pages, opt-in lists, email marketing, or anything that would make the reader want to download the free software from you. Catch the readers attention, then offer them the freebie software in your resource box. Works every time.

What works better is to submit your article using keywords so you can catch even more viewers and visitors from the search engines. Then… rinse and repeat with another article making sure to submit that article to anywhere and everywhere you can.

This process does work and it works each and every time.

Think about this…Submitting just one article to one major article directory may bring you a handful of opt-ins after the first few weeks but… that article will continue to bring people to your opt-in list forever! Just think what submitting 10…20…50…or even 100 articles to 40 different directories can do!

How many articles can you write?

The more places you can put those articles the more people you are going to get into your opt-in list.

Imagine if you will tens of thousands of people in your list! That would be like having your own personal atm machine that you can tap into anytime you need money. It’s possible, you just gotta work hard now and reep the benefits later.

Here are a few links to help you out…

Use an article distribution service to save you massive amounts of submission time – I’m currently running a limited deal here so get in while you still can…

http://tinyurl.com/6ke6kc

Manually submit to the top 20 article directories…

http://tinyurl.com/4k5rqv

Matt Helphrey

Things are going somewhat smoothly this week even though I have a cold that is definitely making me more tired than I normally am. We push on anyways because the work still needs to be done.

This week I am focusing mainly on finding a new niche and I have come across several that I am in the process of testing using the method I provided from the last Follow My Footsteps post. Once I have narrowed it down to two I will move on to document exactly what my next steps will be. I am being very cautious and picky about what niche to select realizing how important this step is. I am making sure I don’t just commit myself to an overall large niche but one that branches off a larger niche.

Today I want to talk about article marketing and how writing effective articles has been a crucial element in receiving traffic to my website. And article marketing works two fold. First, the articles themselves deliver targeted traffic from the article directories. Second, the back links you leave in the authors resource box add up and these back links will get you ranked higher in the search engines for your keywords.

That’s why selecting your keywords carefully when you write your articles is a crucial element of success for gaining organic free traffic to your website. Before you write an article, figure out what keywords you want to use, then incorporate those keywords in your article title and throughout the survey.

One thing to keep in mind though, and this is very important, your article has to be legible and a smooth read. Do not spam your keywords in your article so it doesn’t make sense. Doing so will actually hurt your chances of getting ranked rather than help. A good written article with the right amount of strategically placed keywords is the most effective way to market your articles. It will keep the reader interested and the search engines will not penalize your material.

To get the optimal results, you’ll want to write 3 or more different versions of the same article. This ensures that the search engines wont penalize you for submitting the spam. If the search bots see that the same article with your back link is in a number of different spots, they will not count all of the back links. The search bots love unique fresh content, so if you change some things up they will see the articles as completely different then one another and you will get more back links listed for that article.

I hope this makes sense. Too many of one thing is not good, variety is the spice of life on the internet as well. Take the time to rewrite each and every article and you will see a big difference in the amount of back links you get.

This process does not have to be hard either. When your article is ready for distribution you have a couple of different options and I have used both. You can manually submit your article versions to a list one by one. This way will take you a good amount of time, usually a full day to do if you are submitting to the places you should be. Submitting manually obviously wont cost you any money, but lets face it, time is money.

In my opinion a cheap distribution service is well worth the money. Not only will it automatically submit your articles to hundreds of different directories at the click of a few buttons, but the one I use allows you to use software to make different versions of your article as well. The service is through SubmitYourArticle and I would highly recommend it to anyone submitting articles. I can’t imagine I would have anywhere near the number of back links I have now if it were not for their services.

In my next post I will talk about and give you examples on how to increase the number of back links to your website. Article marketing is my #1 method but there are easier ways that I’ll be happy to share.

Stay tuned…

Matt Helphrey