Article Marketing Online - the basics for coaches

I often recommend using article marketing as a means of getting more targetted visitors to your coaching website. But how does it work? And what do you need to know to make the most of your article writing efforts?

The basic premise of article marketing is that there are many many publishers out there, both on and offline, who are actively looking for relevant, well-written articles for their publications. So if you provide them with relevant, well-written material for free, they can publish it and credit you as the author. It's a great way to raise awareness in your target market, as only the publishers who are targetting the same market as you will be interested in your articles in the first place.

If you are writing articles regularly for a newsletter, submitting them online means that you can keep them working for you long after the newsletter has gone out.

** Online article submission

Article marketing online isn't a quick fix and won't instantly provide a flood of new visitors to your website. But over time, it can be an extremely effective tool. How long do the articles need to be? Between 500 and 700 words is the usual recommended word count.

There are thousands of article directories on the internet. These are sites where you can submit your articles for publication online and publishers can pick them up and use them. To submit your articles to all of these directory sites individually simply isn't worth the effort. But there are some article submission services that will do the job for you. The one that I use is www.submityourarticle.com. I pay a monthly fee which allows me to submit each of my articles just once and for it then to be automatically distributed to thousands of directories and potential publishers around the world.

If you don't want to pay a subscription to begin with, the very best free article directory that I have used is www.ezinearticles.com. My articles still get more click-throughs from this particular website than any other.

** The all-important resource box

One of the rules for online article publishers is that every article must appear intact with its attached resource box. The resource box is the paragraph that states who you are, what you offer and provides a link to your website. This is your chance to get interested readers of your articles to click through to your website and find out more. You get to write your own resource box, so make sure you use it to full effect!

Resource boxes are best kept concise. The more compelling and enticing you can make it for readers to click on your website link the better. Remember to tell them exactly what to do: 'Click here to...' And if you have an on-the-spot offer on your website, mention it in your resource box: 'To claim your free xxx, click here'. It can be very tempting to go down the comfortable old route of describing what you do, but you'll get way more click-throughs if you make a strong offer and accompany it with a clear call to action.

Ready to give online article marketing a try? Now you have the basics, you can get started straight away!