Fundamentals of Article Marketing

Article marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate highly targeted traffic to your website.  It’s also great for accumulating one-way inbound links and improving your position on search engine result pages.  In fact, considering all the various facets of the online world, article marketing might be the single best thing you can do to promote your site.

Few people follow through with article marketing over an extended period of time because it’s a huge effort and it frequently just falls through the cracks.  This article is designed to give you the fundamentals of article marketing in a sequence that will make the whole process a lot easier.  Start at the beginning and follow along from there.  It will make your efforts more productive and improve your results at the same time.

First off, don’t just jump in and start typing.  I know you probably have a lot to say but you’ll end up shooting yourself in the foot because you’ll touch on multiple topics in a single article.  It’s easy to do.  When your typing without following a structure, your thoughts are much more fluid, getting intertwined between them and that will limit the number of articles you can write before you feel like you’ve run out of things to say.

Instead, write a huge outline with all the various articles you can write.  Jot down their titles one after another and put 3 or 4 bullet points under each one.  This will keep your thoughts structured and allow you to think of far more individual topics then you’d end up with if you just started typing.  Get your outline nailed down first and only start typing after that.

Second, don’t try writing big long articles.  Everyone on the internet is in a hurry and they generally don’t want to read a huge long article anyway.  Stay within 500 to 700 words.  Use the 3 or 4 bullet points in your outline as a guide.  If you wrote two paragraphs on each point along with an introduction and conclusion paragraph, your article would be done.

If you want to get your articles out to the maximum number of locations, I recommend using an article distribution service like iSnare.  For about $1, you can have them electronically distribute your article to literally thousands of different article directories and other online publishing locations.  You’ll be amazed where your articles start showing up.

Some people claim this strategy is flawed because Google punishes you for duplicate content.  So, if the same article is published in two different places, Google gives less credit to each location.  That’s a valid argument but the time necessary to rewrite your articles is prohibitive and I personally think the net effect is positive.

When you publish articles online, you are given a Resource Box where you can write a few words about yourself and include a link back to your website.  This is a great opportunity to include a call to action and encourage readers to click through to your website.  It’s also a great opportunity to put your link on keyword phrases you’re targeting.  In other words, rather than putting your link on the name of your website, put it on the anchor text you’re targeting for the search engines.  Google considers anchor text for inbound links so you can quickly improve your position by using this strategy.

Tactical Execution relies on article marketing for its primary online marketing strategy.  During our 100-day project, I’m publishing a new article every single day and you can find them all at the website.  You’ll also find lots of other tools are resources there and I hope you visit.