Rebooting Your Article Marketing Strategy In 3 Steps

Have you had the intention of getting an article marketing strategy underway only to falter and give up after a few tries? If so, don't feel bad about it. It happens to the best of us!

It's natural to make a few tries before you actually get things going in earnest. Perhaps you've only dabbled in submitting articles, and you'd like to get serious and start doing it full throttle.

If so, here are 3 steps you can take to bring your article marketing campaign back to life (or bring it to life for the first time!):

1 - Make a plan. Determine what number of articles you will ideally submit each month, and then create a plan where you gradually work up to that number.

The reason for the gradual start is two fold:

First, if you have a brand new site that you haven't marketed yet, it is good to gradually start building links rather than to create a ton of them all at once. You see, if you were to suddenly generate a ton of links pointing back to your site overnight, it could look suspicious from a search engine's perspective.

But if you set out to gradually build links, then the pattern looks more natural to a search engine. It is important to build links to your site and to market it, but you want to do so in a way that goes along with what search engines are looking for.

The second reason for gradually working up to submitting a certain number of articles is personal--it's difficult for anyone to go from not writing any articles a month to suddenly producing 8 or so on a monthly basis.

It takes time to learn to write free reprint articles, so it will likely take you longer to produce the content when you're first starting out. By creating a plan where you gradually increase the number of articles you write each month, you're giving yourself a more gentle entry into a new field. With less pressure on you, you should be able to be more consistent about writing and submitting articles, which is absolutely essential to your article marketing success.

2 - Write for one person.

One of the most common challenges with article marketing is coming up with article ideas. When you first start, you may have a long list of article topics that you thought of yourself. When you get through your own list though, you can be at a loss as to what to write about. You can feel disconnected from your audience and just not sure what type of content to write.

I've heard rock stars say pretty much the same thing--they can be in front of a crowd of 100,000 screaming fans, and it's difficult to perform because the crowd is so big that it's hard to "make a connection".

They solve this problem by picking out one person in the audience to sing to. By focusing on just one person, the huge crowd becomes intimate, and it is easier to connect.

You can do the same things with your articles--write for one person instead of a nameless, faceless, generic "target market". You do that by addressing specific questions in your articles that people leave as comments on your blog, or by addressing concerns that potential customers share with you or that people in your "real life" ask you about your niche.

By writing for just one person, you can feel like your articles are making a difference and that they have purpose. That is the type of motivation that can keep you going with your writing.

3 - Execute your plan in baby steps.

Sometimes people make grand plans and then put pressure on themselves to start doing everything at once. Then when they stumble, they get discouraged and quit trying.

You know yourself and how you learn best--create a plan to start writing and submitting articles, and then break your plan down into baby steps. It helps not to focus on the long range plan all the time, but rather simply to do the next little thing.

Maybe the next little thing you need to do is simply write an article. Maybe it's editing an article or submitting it. If you take this approach consistently, you'll make progress and stick with it, and your efforts will make an impact over time.

It's pretty simple to reboot your article marketing campaign--just take each one of these steps and don't bite off too much at one time. Just keep plugging away each day and each month, and before you know it you will have developed a habit--the habit of writing and submitting articles to market your website.